Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he’s built. And there is something to that. It’s not enough. But it’s what he’ll take with him.
Through the ensuing dim and delirious hours, he consoles himself with hazy imaginings of people sitting with their coffees at his counters to talk and complain about those they love. People leaning against his bars to drink beer after beer, confiding desperately into one another’s ears. A little black-haired girl with thick lashes sitting at one of his tables, eating a piece of carrot cake as her mother looks on, the girl’s muddy shoes swinging beneath her as she talks about trees.
PROPORTEE OF WILLO GREENWUD
ON THIS FOGGY Monday morning, Jake’s group of Pilgrims consists of a Dubai-based solar panel tycoon, a celebrity chef hailing from what remains of Las Vegas, two teenage girls from China, thin as sheaves of grass, and the entire Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. Jake is already halfway through her tour, but they have yet to ask a single question, and their eyes have been glued to their phones with greater fixation than usual. Jake doesn’t blame them: even she can tell that her speeches so far have been flat and uninspiring, perhaps because she stayed up late again last night. But if she doesn’t turn things around, and quickly, the Pilgrims will give her poor ratings, and if her average dips below three leaves out of five, Davidoff will have no choice but to fire her.
“You’re currently standing among the highest concentration of biomass anywhere on the planet,” Jake says with renewed enthusiasm, desperate to win them back. “Each tree is its own symphony of cellular perfection, one of the most magnificent and elegant creatures that has ever graced the biosphere. Deserving of all the mythology and the faerie tales and the holy buildings. Not to mention all that godawful poetry,” she says, relieved to see her joke momentarily pry their eyes from their phones. A few of them even smile. “Over time,” she goes on, “the lateral roots of these Douglas firs fuse together. And this is how these trees share resources and chemical weapons among their neighbours. There are no individuals in a forest. In fact, it behaves more like a family.”
That last bit about family appears to genuinely move them (particularly the hockey players). Eager to keep the momentum going, Jake leads the group into a nearby riparian area, while carefully avoiding the boundary where the true old-growth ends and the lesser trees of the once-burned half of the island begins. Here she expounds upon the importance of water to all life, which invites a few questions that Jake answers easily. When the celebrity chef claims he’s hypoglycemic and needs to eat or he’ll pass out, Jake coaxes the Pilgrims to the picnic area where their catered lunches await. As they dig into their handmade clay bowls of artisanal pork and beans, Jake wolfs down a granola bar and uses the lull in activity to pull the paperbook from her pack. She is calmed instantly by the familiar purple-stained cracks in its cover and the fine dust that continues to shake from its binding, even after weeks of her constant handling.
Though the journal’s cursive script was initially difficult for Jake to decipher, she finally made her way through to the end after two weeks of trying. And once she got the hang of the looping hand and the antiquated punctuation, Jake’s immediate second and third readings required mere days each. And now, after her tenth time through, she can read it with such fluency that it’s almost as if she’d written it herself.
Contrary to what the misspelled inscription suggests, the journal’s entries weren’t written by her grandmother Willow Greenwood, but by an unnamed pregnant woman during the Great Depression. The woman was being kept by a rich man she refers to only as “RJ,” who had agreed to adopt her baby once it was born. Though she wrote mostly about simple things—the walks that she took among the snowy maples, the fine meals that the cook prepared for her—woven into her descriptions are moving observations on many subjects, mostly concerning her fears. Her fear that the economy will never recover from the Crash, and that people are too short-sighted and selfish to survive. Her fear that the Dust Bowl will make its way to where she is, and harm her baby once it’s born. Her fear of RJ and how he’ll ruin her life if she somehow displeases him. Her fear of wasting her intellectual gifts at a meaningless, underpaid janitorial job. But despite all her fears, Jake hears hopeful whispers in the spaces between her words. Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.
Like the author of the journal, Jake knows what it means to struggle and to be afraid: she fears her ever-ballooning student debt, her plummeting Forest Guide approval rating, and the fact that her period is late. Her stomach has been cramping lately, even though she’s been careful to avoid dairy—especially the dining yurt’s infamous Creamy Potato Stew. Yesterday, she asked one of the younger female Forest Guides what she knew about the Cathedral-supplied IUDs, only to learn that they stop emitting hormones around year four: the exact vintage of Jake’s. So she should probably admit that her night with Corbyn Gallant was more consequential than intended and add an unwanted pregnancy to her heap of worries. Except she can’t risk getting tested by the Holtcorp doctor, because a positive result will mean her temporary banishment from the island, at least until she has her child. Then she’ll have to somehow scrounge up the money to pay someone to care for her baby when she returns to work, which will set her debt-repayment plan back years. And that’s assuming they’ll hold her job for her and not give it to the next eager Forest Guide recruit waiting in line.
Her last remaining hope is that Silas is right, and she is legally entitled to lay claim to Greenwood Island. But whether his scheme works or not, at least she’s had the chance to read the journal, along with the index card outlining her family history that Silas’s researchers prepared. She keeps both of these in the cardboard box of her father’s inexplicable heirlooms, along with his unlabelled poetry records, his woodworking tools, and his work gloves. Prior to Silas’s visit, the idea of studying one’s family history always seemed to Jake like the favoured pastime of narcissists, people seeking to either establish or shore up their own self-perceived greatness. She’d grown so accustomed to living with no family wisdom to consult, no stories to recount, no memories to share, no legacy to carry on. She’d spent an entire life in this drifting state, floating as a seed does. But only now is she starting to understand how good it can feel to be rooted.
“What about those trees over there?” says one of the hockey players as Jake leads them past the old-growth after lunch. “They look huge.”