When they return that night, Everett and Temple leave unmentioned the swollen yellow bruises on Liam’s face—his jaw will click for weeks afterward—and following supper they all sit on the porch to watch the wide prairie horizon churn with skyborne vapour and light. Temple reads from the Odyssey as they sip their drinks: Everett a seltzer, Temple a white wine mixed with Sprite, and Liam the root beer they brought back from town.
While Temple is constantly reading aloud from her many books, never does she tell Liam any of her own stories. Forever unmentioned is the cyclone that he knows destroyed the farm around the time Willow was born. Or why exactly Everett went to prison (Liam has found letters tucked away in his woodshop that Willow had written to him there as a girl). Or anything concerning Liam’s grandfather, Harris Greenwood, and his fallen timber empire or the inheritance he’d left them. Throughout that summer, whenever Liam questions her about these omissions, Temple’s stock reply is to select a new book from her shelves and say: “How about this one?” And it’s from her, perhaps, that Liam first learns the necessary power of willed forgetting.
When his mother returns in early September, she’s speaking a mile a minute and overflowing with so much pent-up energy after her three-month incarceration that she scarcely notices Liam at all.
“Miss me?” she says while distractedly ruffling his hair as they all sit down to the great meal that Everett has set out on the porch to mark her return.
“Not really,” Liam murmurs, too quietly for her to hear.
“To Liam,” Temple says, raising her glass when the meal is assembled. “Who’s been an invigorating presence for two old crustaceans over these past three months. And who might be the best worker this farm has ever seen.” Liam raises his glass and feels his chest bulge with pride. And for a moment he’s able to forget the brutal, unalterable fact that, like a prisoner slated for execution, he’s leaving the farm behind tomorrow.
Early the next morning, while Willow is packing up their things for the drive back to British Columbia, Liam sneaks into the woodshop and steals one of Everett’s ballpeen hammers. He goes out to the driveway and whacks a deep dent in the Westfalia’s side panel, then knocks an even bigger one in the hood of Temple’s weathered pickup truck. When Everett emerges in his long underwear from the house with a shocked look, Liam is certain that after what he’s done, they will never let him come back. In truth, he’d rather they didn’t. Already he knows that leaving this place once will crush something inside him forever, and he couldn’t possibly survive a repetition. Or maybe he’ll get off easy and Orin’s rumours will be true, and his grizzled uncle will kill Liam right where he stands.
With an ashen, slack expression, Everett limps over to Liam, who is fixed in place with fright, and rests his big, callused hands on both of Liam’s shoulders.
His great-uncle shakes his head. “I don’t care about the truck, son,” he says. Then he lifts his gaze to the impossibly wide prairie sky, which is a tepid blue, laced with just hints of cloud. He sniffs a few times, then clears his throat, as though he’s trying to free up the tangled words. “Temple didn’t manage to wake up this morning.”
Liam feels the ballpeen hammer slip from his fingers. He lets Everett’s heavy hands weigh him down to the swirling dust and comes to rest on his knees beside the tire of Temple’s truck, his mind blank, his ears ringing. Eventually, Everett turns away, his wizened face a stone mask, and limps off to his woodshop, latching the door behind him.
Some time later, Willow emerges from the house with reddened eyes and the back of her wrist pressed to her lips. When she tries to approach Liam, he leaps up and runs into the barn, where he furiously begins slopping the pigs and feeding the chickens and goats.
He’s still working when his mother comes to him a while later. “It was kidney failure,” she says from the rail of the pen. “She’s been sick with it for a while, Liam. She told me the night we first arrived here. But it was good you had this summer together.”
“You should’ve told me,” he says, then bangs a gate shut and begins forking straw into the trough.
“Look,” she says, her tone sharp. “That was her choice, not mine. She didn’t want to worry you. You’re not entitled to every scrap of information around here. That’s not how it works. So you can quit this rebellious teenager crap right now, because I need you back on my team. Because now that I’m out it’s just you and me again, whether you like it or not.” She pauses for her point to sink in, as if he doesn’t know it. “We’ll stick around until the funeral,” she adds. “Then we’re gone. If we don’t get some chanterelles picked this fall, we’ll be Dumpster diving all winter.”
After lunch, some neighbouring farmers come and carry Temple’s body down into the storm cellar so it will stay cool in the September heat. Everett stays in his workshop all that day. In the evening Liam hears him in the kitchen, quietly phoning up a man in Estevan, who delivers a case of rye whiskey to the house a few hours later.
In all the time Liam has been on the farm, he has never once seen his great-uncle drink, but in the days after Temple’s death, it’s all Everett does. It doesn’t make him unpredictable and loopy like it does Willow; instead, it seems to seal his lips and amplify his weariness. When he’s drunk, it’s as though his very structural integrity has been removed. He stoops and his limp worsens. He starts drinking when he wakes and doesn’t quit until he pisses himself and passes out on a bedroll laid on the floor of his woodshop.
Occasionally Liam eavesdrops from beneath the porch while Willow sits with Everett as they drink rye and smoke her weed late into the night. But they speak little, and when they do, it’s only about the lack of rain, or the coming of rain, or how the few trees on the property are doing—never about Temple or anything of importance, which is, he’s come to learn, perhaps their most distinguishing family trait.
“Get up, son,” Everett says to Liam early one morning after a week has passed. “There’s something I need to do, and I can’t do it myself.”
He coaxes Liam out to the shed, where they fetch some axes and a two-man bucksaw, and then they load them into Temple’s dented truck. Clumsily, the old man drives, further denting it by clipping fence posts and running aground in drainage ditches, out to where a long line of mature maples were planted to provide shelter on the edge of the wheat field.
“Temple and I put these in together,” he says, tossing the saws from the truck to the foot of the first tree. “She never let me put taps in them. She worried it might do them harm. She wasn’t sentimental about many things. Except these trees.”
Over the next few hours, the two swing their axes and bring down three of the stoutest maples. Then they buck the trunks into long segments which they load into the truck. Everett spends the entire afternoon chainsawing the maple segments into crude boards. And for the first time, he ignores Willow’s wishes and teaches Liam how to properly operate the woodshop’s tools. All day Everett and Liam saw and dress the boards until they are the finest, clearest, and straightest maple planks that Liam has ever seen.
It isn’t until his great-uncle is putting on the final touches—hand-carving a delicate wreath of leaves and ornate blossoms into the lid—that Liam realizes what they’ve built.