The lumbermen take turns shovelling soil black as cake over her father’s coffin, while Willow half expects the ground to spit him back out. If it’s true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary violence, she muses while watching them work, then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip out the Earth’s most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheap to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again—that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.
With the burial done, her head is churning with a mix of grief, bewilderment, and relief when Terrance Milner approaches to console her. And once the floodgates open, hand after conciliatory hand wags in her direction. It seems they all want to touch her—on the shoulder, the elbow, the back. They want to taste her sadness, to pity her baby, to ask how she’s “holding up,” as though the bereaved are poorly constructed buildings facing a windstorm. Already she’s frantic to escape them, to break into a run and fly across the cemetery to the limousine—then to her Westfalia and on to a remote forest where none of these people could ever find her. That is, until a figure limps in her direction from the very end of the line.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, this time with his back held straight and with no difficulty meeting her eyes. “It took the accountant’s letter some time to find me on the farm. But I came right away when I heard.”
He’s grown a beard that hits his chest—also an intermixed black and grey, the same as his hair—though his lined face is still recognizable beneath it. There’s a woman at his side with shoulder-length, steel-coloured hair, and the weather-burnished skin of someone who’s spent more days outside than in.
“May I introduce Temple Van Horne,” Everett says. “My personal driver.”
Temple whacks Everett’s shoulder lightly with the back of her wrist while shaking her head. She holds out her hand to Willow. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she says, squeezing Willow’s fingers gently. Then Temple turns her attention to the sleeping baby in Willow’s arms. “That’s a fine child you’ve got there. A boy?”
“He is,” Willow says, shooting a quick glance at Everett, who has yet to acknowledge her son, probably because men of that generation never much concerned themselves with babies.
“I’m going to take a walk and let you two catch up,” Temple says after they exchange a few more pleasantries about the funeral service and the improved weather.
“That must be who you were in such a hurry to get to,” Willow says, as they both watch Temple work her way down the cemetery path, pausing occasionally to examine half-rotten flowers or to read gravestone inscriptions.
“We’re still figuring it out,” Everett says. “But I had my probation transferred to Saskatchewan. And she’s letting me stay at her place while I help out with farm work, for now anyway.” He grins nervously. “Unfortunately,” he goes on, “the book I was hoping to recover for you. The one I mentioned? It seems that a cyclone intervened.”
“It’s fine, Everett. I’ve got plenty to read. Still, I’m happy to know that you found yourself a new life after losing so much time. And how was your first airplane ride?”
“I didn’t care for it much,” he says. “I made it, though. Faster than the train, too, which was nice. I’m lucky Temple was kind enough to drive me all the way back here.” He removes his hat and holds it in his hands. “And I’m real sorry for your loss, Willow.”
“It’s your loss, too,” she says, touching his shoulder. “Harris would be happy to know you came, even if he couldn’t say it. Now I have my own confession to make: he paid me a quarter for every letter I sent you while you were in prison. I always thought it was because he was too self-absorbed to write you himself. Yet lately I’ve been thinking that it was very important to him for us to know one another.”
“He telephoned me at the farm a few months ago,” Everett says, fidgeting with his hat. “He didn’t say he was dying, but I think he knew. We didn’t talk about much. Just some things from our childhood. The wood we chopped together. The old log cabin we built. I appreciated it, though. I knew how hard it was for him.” Everett casts his gaze across the treed cemetery. “And before we hung up, I told him I forgave him. He didn’t say anything back, but I know he heard me. He did some selfish things in his time, that’s for sure, but he redeemed himself and then some by taking such proper care of you, Willow. And I’m very sorry he’s gone.”
It’s the way he says it—an unvarnished expression of sorrow, with no agenda or requirement for her to perform grief in any particular way—that impels her to fall into his arms, pressing her child against his beard and his shabby sports coat. Half-smothered, her nameless baby lets out an anguished cry and Willow draws back.
“Who do we have here?” Everett asks.
Willow wipes at her eyes with her sleeve. “He’s a month old today,” she says, unhitching her son from the wraparound carrier. “He doesn’t have a name quite yet.”
“You should ask Temple. She’s read a whole bunch of books and she’s really good with names,” he says. “You know, if you ever want to visit, you two are always welcome at her place. Just show up anytime and we’ll be happy to have you.”
“That’s generous of you,” Willow says, then holds her baby out by his armpits, gravity stretching his wriggling body much longer than you’d expect, like a cat. “Do you want to meet him?”
“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Everett says, smoothing his cheap work pants with his palms. “I think he’s better off with you.”
Perhaps it’s because her father never had the opportunity to hold her child, or because she wants to atone for how she berated Everett in her Westfalia when he innocently called her Pod, or because she wants to prove to her uncle that everyone deserves forgiveness in this world—but it’s suddenly unspeakably important to her for Everett to hold her son.
“Please,” Willow says. “I’ve been carrying him all day. And I’m dying for a cigarette.”
“I’m sure we could find someone else—”
“I’m going to drop him…” she says with teasing menace, while pretending to loosen her grip on his drool-soggy creeper.
Everett’s eyes widen and he reaches out and grasps the baby’s armpits, then draws his small body awkwardly against his chest. Willow lights a menthol and watches her son squirm in her uncle’s arms. Against the forest of his beard, the baby looks like an impossibly tiny organism, barely anything at all. And when he begins to fuss and grunt a little, Everett commences a jiggling bounce on his toes.
“It’s been a while,” he says.
After a few seconds spent scowling defiantly up at Everett’s bushy eyebrows and his brambly, bearded face, the baby finally settles, if begrudgingly.
“Don’t worry,” Willow says. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
THE READER