since the Crash. No new licenses. Even fewer birth certificates. The future’s only going to be dust and scarcity from here on out, and don’t people know it. I’ve no idea why anyone would procreate during times like these, no offence.”
“None taken,” Everett says.
“And who can blame them? See those banks over there? Empty. Every one. Not an ounce of bullion to be found. No sir, I bury my money. Got a fine spot for it. You’ll bury yours, too, if you’re smart.”
When the day is through, Monahan returns Everett to Mrs. Papadopoulos and the baby doesn’t cry when he takes her up. During her bath in the washbasin later, he checks her milky body for chigger bites or bruises and finds neither. After supper, with the money he earned he buys himself a work shirt and some copper-riveted trousers, as well as a new creeper in blue, because pink will soil too easily, and two more flannels so he doesn’t have to wash daily. After working with Monahan for a week, Everett purchases some horsehide gloves and a suitcase that he keeps packed in case the Mounties come knocking and they need to skip town in a hurry.
Each day, Monahan’s jobs grow more and more obviously illegal. They cut a crude tap into a city gas line, then hook it up to the cookstove of an old drunk with a lacework of busted capillaries in his nose. They wire around the electricity meter for a Negro family of ten, all with grey teeth that look like things pulled from a fire, the little girls in flour-sack dresses, their shack so small they must sleep in shifts because there isn’t floor enough for all of them to lie down at once.
In the park after quitting time, and after the baby’s had its goat’s milk and Everett eats his ham sandwich and his apple, he heeds Monahan’s advice and wraps both his savings and the journal up in an oilcloth and buries them at the root of a wide-spreading magnolia. Back at the rooming house, other lodgers have noticed the child but keep it to themselves, given that she never cries or fusses. After she’s asleep, Everett scrubs her flannels in the sink and hangs them to dry from a line over the alley before lying down beside her, the bed surprisingly warmed, the baby like a fresh loaf of bread that never cools.
Though the child has grown on him, he doubts he can maintain this caretaking much longer, and his new plan is to sock away enough money to pay Mrs. Papadopoulos to accept her outright. After he works a little more, he’ll purchase new spiles and buckets, then go hunt out another sugarbush somewhere on the city’s outskirts and start over. If there’s anything that the Dominion of Canada has, it’s an endless supply of trees that nobody’s using—that is, if his brother doesn’t cut them all down first.
Everett works another week until Monahan gives him Sunday off while his carthorse is being shod. He considers taking the baby to a moving picture, then worries the phantasmal screen will frighten her. Instead he cuts over to a duck pond in a nearby park, where he tears some of the last blossoms from a cherry tree and brushes them along her cheek. Her eyes track the swallows darting through the canopy, and she points at the ducks that patrol the pond and squeals.
Who knows, once she’s living with Mrs. Papadopoulos and he’s established his new sugarbush, there might even be some money left over for her education. He could be her benefactor of sorts. Like in some old story. Money was never much use to Everett anyway. And since she seems to like natural things so much, perhaps he’ll visit occasionally and take her to this park to smell the blossoms and chase around the ducks. She may even grow into a person of value, of refinement and intelligence and dignity. Just the kind he isn’t.
THE LEAST OF WHAT YOU’LL LOSE
LOMAX CIRCUMNAVIGATES HIS room, bedevilled by a restless agitation, the muscles in his back tugging like a ship’s rigging in a storm, as the breakers of a headache crash against the shore of his skull. He’s been checking in with the Mountie who eats his lunch at the same counter each day, and, thankfully, the vagrant with the baby has yet to be captured. But in yesterday’s cable, Mr. Holt remarked upon Lomax’s mounting hotel bill, suggesting he move to