to have gotten a proper hold of, they look likely to survive, which is a consolation, even if Everett will never return to see them.
Over the ensuing weeks, Temple and Gertie sleep in the basement of the Knox Presbyterian Church. Temple spends her days haggling in the offices of insurance companies—a battle she’ll eventually lose, when the most senior adjuster finally concludes: “We covered you for a farm, not a halfway house, Miss Van Horne.”
With no money to rebuild and nowhere to go, Temple falls into despair, and momentarily considers selling her land and taking a vacant position as a schoolteacher in Estevan. But when word gets out on the railway lines and among the hobo jungles that her farm was destroyed and she’s been left destitute, bedraggled men and women set out in the dark from all across the continent. Convicts, criminals, the unemployed: they come nightly from the direction of the tracks, and each leaves a shoebox on the back steps of the Knox Presbyterian Church. Every morning, Temple carries the shoeboxes into the basement and finds them stuffed with stolen watches, or silver cutlery, or old gold jewellery, or bloodstained bills, or mere handfuls of filthy nickels. Upon these shoeboxes is always scrawled the same words:
FOR THE LADY WITH THE TABLE ON HER PORCH
THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER
AS LOMAX TURNS the journal in his hands, it’s as though the planets have been marshalled back into their rightful orbits, as though he’s smoked the purest opium ever to be extracted from a poppy by humankind, as though the lightning in his long-tortured spine has been cured and the Crash has ended and his family is back home in their little bungalow and the fog of sadness that’s trailed him since he was a boy has at long last been dispelled.
Let the Greenwoods have the damned thing, Lomax had thought the second Everett offered him that big wad of cash along with Euphemia’s journal in exchange for the child. Harris has the means to support it. And Everett obviously cares for the baby more than Mr. Holt ever would. All he ever wanted it for was to serve as a trophy in the display cabinet of his legacy. So when Lomax returns to Saint John, he’ll simply tell Mr. Holt that Everett Greenwood wasn’t the right man after all, and that the baby was sickly and had died while in the custody of a different drifter who’d found it. But through my own cunning, sir, Lomax imagines himself saying, I still managed to recover Euphemia’s journal, which I’ve got right here…
Of course, Mr. Holt will again grieve the loss of his child. But he said it himself: If at any point you are faced with the choice of which to recover, the child or the book, choose the book. And returning the journal to Mr. Holt will go a long way toward setting things right with his former employer, which Lomax needs to do if he ever expects to reside anywhere on the Eastern seaboard in peace.
And the Greenwoods’ money will be more than enough for him to reclaim his house from the bank. No more mortgage. No more debt collection. And rather than wasting his energies shaking down deadbeats and tending Mr. Holt’s stable of girls, Lomax plans to seek training in a useful job, something productive, perhaps as a builder or tradesman.
After striking his lucrative deal with the Greenwoods, Lomax left skid row for a fine suite with a view of the snow-topped mountains and Vancouver’s dazzling harbour, and now sits leafing the journal’s pages, which teem with Euphemia’s graceful penmanship. He flips to the back of the book, to what must be her final entry, likely written the day he last saw her, after he returned to the estate to check on her condition, just hours before she fled into the woods with her child. Yet surprisingly, he finds nothing but poetic observations about the weather and how stunning the leaves of the oak tree are. To his relief, and despite what that liar Blank had told him, Lomax finds no mention of either himself or Mr. Holt whatsoever. In fact, if he weren’t so pleased to have secured the book and solved all his financial woes in one brilliant stroke, Lomax would almost be disappointed that Euphemia never thought to write about him at all.
His suite has grown damp, so Lomax proceeds to light a fire. And since he already