A guilty knot cinches in Jake’s gut. She couldn’t feel any lower than she does right now if she slithered under a rock. “Okay,” she says, chastened, “you have five minutes before we need to head back.”
Silas draws a thick paper index card from his pocket. “Harris Greenwood, the West Coast timber tycoon,” he reads, “bought this island in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression—from John D. Rockefeller Jr., no less, who had purchased it from the English, who’d seized it from the Spanish, who’d stolen it from the Haida and Penelakut people following European contact. Harris Greenwood named the island after himself, naturally, though he left it to his daughter, Willow Greenwood, the radical hippie conservationist. She thanked him by donating it—along with the entire Greenwood fortune—to an environmental non-profit, thus dooming her son, Liam Greenwood, to a life of blue-collar toil, and his estranged daughter, Jacinda Greenwood, to the shackles of student debt and tree resort servitude. Over time, however, the non-profit morphed into a green energy company, which faltered in the 2008 crash, and was forced to sell the island for a song to Holtcorp to shore up its losses. Holtcorp then sat on it until the Great Withering, at which time the company recognized an opportunity in monetizing its spiritual appeal—and voila, here we are.” He takes a little bow, then offers the index card to Jake. “This was prepared by two of my sharpest researchers. Every bit of it verifiable on the public record. It’s yours. A gift.”
Jake stands speechless as the blue-green crowns of the giant firs rustle hundreds of feet above. Slowly, she reaches out and grasps the card. The paper is real, crisp, and luxuriously thick between her fingers. She scans the bullet-pointed text printed upon it. Willow Greenwood. She can’t remember Meena ever mentioning Liam’s mother. And there was no trace of her to be found in his cardboard box of useless relics. Yet that doesn’t mean she didn’t exist. Jake feels dizzy, though strangely elated. After a lifetime of knowing virtually nothing about her family, it’s like this unexpected burst of names and history has knocked her clean out of her body. But of course there are layers of life that came before her own, the way trees are held up by the concentric bands of their former selves, rings built up over rings, year by year. How had she never thought to ask questions about her ancestors before? The answer, she realizes, is that there had never been anyone to ask.
“Even if this island is named after my great-grandfather,” Jake says, fighting to return herself to reality, “Holtcorp owns it now. And if you think we’re going to take it from them, then the dust must be affecting your brain. So thanks for the information, Silas, but I’ve got five more tours to do today, so we should probably get moving.”
“But what if I told you that Harris Greenwood isn’t in fact your blood relative?” he announces with a crafty, self-satisfied expression she had always found grating. “And suppose we can prove that you do have a claim to Greenwood Island. Including this impossibly rare and endangered forest that I know you love. Not because you’re a Greenwood, but because you’re a descendant of the original founder of Holtcorp, R.J. Holt.”
Then I’d tell you that if you don’t leave me the hell alone to figure out what’s ailing these trees, Jake considers saying, by this time next year Greenwood Island might be a barren rock, and it won’t matter who owns it. Instead she watches him unsling his hiking pack and remove from it a thin, hard-backed paperbook.
“This once belonged to your grandmother,” Silas says, holding it delicately with his fingertips. “We considered mailing it to you, until I told my colleagues what a skeptic you are, and volunteered to deliver it personally. Not only is it good to see you again—and believe me, it is—I also hoped that you might still trust me.”
Jake takes the paperbook in her hands as a fizzy enchantment spreads through her chest. She parts its hardbound covers, which have a slightly gamey odour and are cracked in places and stained with purple splotches. Bits of dried grass and a fine dust tumble from the soot-blackened pages as she turns them, revealing neatly penned paragraphs of cursive—what must be undated diary entries. The paper itself is the colour of roasted almonds, but has a sturdiness to it, born of a time when trees were an inexhaustible resource, limitless in number. A time when a person soaked up a spill with a whole roll of paper towels, or printed her entire thesis one-sided (as she had) on a fat stack of snow-white loose-leaf.
“I’m leaving tonight,” Silas says. “But I’ve been cleared to entrust this with you until I return. So you don’t need to make any decisions about whether to proceed with your claim now—in fact I’d rather you didn’t. I want you to read it, mull it over, get used to what it feels like to have a history. Just promise me that you’ll take exceptionally good care of it. This is an artifact of tremendous value. Most of all to you.”
“I’ve got a bunch of these on my bedside table already,” Jake jokes, attempting to mask her ravenous desire to read the paperbook as she presses it along with the index card against her stomach, “but I’ll try to get to it.”
Silas shakes his head and grins. “We’re currently in negotiations to acquire another critical piece of this puzzle, one that would greatly strengthen your claim. And when we do, I’ll be back.” He draws close and grasps her elbows. “I looked into your debt situation, Jake, and I know things are dire. But this could fix everything. And I don’t just mean the money. You never had much of a story to tell. I always sensed that it hurt you, whether you’d admit it or not. Now all that can change.”
Later that evening, Jake returns to her staff cabin, pours herself a hefty bourbon, and curls into the loveseat with the paperbook spread in her lap. After five more tours shepherding Pilgrims through the Cathedral, her eyes are sludgy and unprepared for parsing the book’s tricky cursive script. (She hasn’t seen anyone write in this antiquated fashion for years, and never learned the technique in her Delhi elementary school.) Just two pages in, Jake’s chin begins to dip, thereby unravelling the few narrative fibres that she’d managed to weave together.
It was silly to get your hopes up, she tells herself, rising to place the paperbook in her father’s old cardboard box, filing it away with all her other meaningless family heirlooms. Though she understands this journal is something that ought to have great bearing on her life, unfortunately for Silas and his scheme, Jake has always mistrusted the expression “knowing your roots.” As though roots by their very definition are knowable. Any dendrologist can tell you that the roots of a mature Douglas fir forest spread for miles. That they’re dark and intertwining, tangled and twisted, and impossible to map. That they often fuse together, and even communicate, secretly sharing nutrients and chemical weapons among themselves. So the truth is that there exists no clear distinction between one tree and another. And their roots are anything but knowable.
Jake snaps back her drink and retrieves the paperbook from the box, flipping to the inside front cover, where she finds facing the first page a splash of crudely pencilled words, scrawled in a child’s block print:
PROPORTEE OF WILLO GREENWUD
Despite her reservations about Silas’s true motivations, and her general bafflement with the book’s cryptic entries, Jake’s heart takes a little skip at the sight of her grandmother’s name, however misspelled it may be. And while drinking herself toward a welcome oblivion throughout the evening, she wonders about Willow Greenwood, about who she was and what impelled her to give her fortune away. She wonders about her father and if he also drank, and whether that’s what made him “troubled.” If he did, Jake already forgives him. Maybe she drinks because of his genes. Or because of his absence. Or maybe his genes created his absence, which created her drinking. Or maybe he felt just as unwelcome in the world as she does now, and drinking was the only thing that allowed him any reprieve. Or maybe her roots are all too tangled, and there’s no single story to be told about any of it.