the observation conforms to popular opinion or not.
Despite the deal with the Japanese they’ve secured, Harris seldom considers his business affairs during the journey. His thoughts centre mostly on the threat of discovery by the steamer’s crew, and on the rare birds he wants to show Feeney, and the hidden places he wants them to escape to upon their return.
Still, Harris is no fool. He knows exactly what awaits them in Vancouver. Unlike the anonymous movie theatre, people will be watching at home. Baumgartner, who was even more ill-tempered than usual during the trip, and who’d had the gall to insist that Harris take two suites at the Imperial Hotel, might already suspect something. If word ever got out, both Harris and the company he built could be destroyed.
But who more than Harris is prepared for the ruthlessness of the world’s judgment? And who knows better that some force will eventually snatch away this sweet gift he’s been given so late in life, just as his sight was taken from him on the cusp of manhood by a pitiless disease, just as his brother was taken from him by his own selfishness and stupidity?
Even so, Harris is not afraid. The blind, by their very nature, already operate as outcasts. And ever since he was a boy, he’s excelled at both concealment and self-preservation. As orphans, he and Everett managed to protect themselves by building that crooked log cabin on Mrs. Craig’s woodlot, and Harris’s arrangement with Feeney will be no different. If life has taught him anything, it’s that you must be more secretive, more protective, and more pitiless than the next man. Either that or everything you are, everything you’ve built, and everyone you love, can be trampled in an instant.
THE SALT RHEUM
SICKNESS COMES TO their hay-packed boxcar as they fly westward out of the black heart of Ontario. Each time the baby slips into sleep, she fails to draw air through her rheum-clogged nose and snorts herself awake. This is followed by a series of hacks that loll out her tongue—an impossibly tiny thing that recalls to Everett a tinned oyster. He keeps her head tipped back to drain her airway, which does little good, and the whole ordeal is repeated endlessly. At last he gives up and they sit awake, her eyes slick with mucus and flashing in the dark like gemstones, as they clickety-clack past pole-straight evergreens interspersed with inky lakes, the child clutching pitifully at his shirt as though he’s fixing to drop her.
Everett has given her a temporary name: Pod. He avoided doing so thus far, the way a farmer leaves the pigs bound for his smokehouse anonymous. But Pod is still just a placeholder. A road name, a hobo moniker—something to be sloughed off the moment she settles into her real life, wherever that may be. He knows that trees often use birds and squirrels to spread their seeds, along with various flying contraptions like whirlers or cottony fluff that can blow great distances. Much of creation works this way: living things send versions of themselves out into the great puzzle of the future. And like a seed, this girl is in dire need of a hospitable place to land. And it’s his job to find it.
At sunup the next day the salt rheum has mostly dried up, though Pod still hums with a low fever, her skin unnaturally shiny. She refuses the biscuits he’s brought, even after he soaks them in water, and when she does sleep at last, she wakes to a thick green crust sealing her eyelids, which provokes a thrashing yowl. Everett holds his wetted shirtsleeve to her grimacing face until her eyelashes come unglued. By the afternoon her cough has worsened, and she burns to the touch and stops taking water. Everett turns down her sweaty creeper to cool her, and when she still refuses to drink, he plugs her nose, pries open her jaw, and pours water down her gullet as she gurgles and screams.
Fearing the hay dust is aggravating her condition, he climbs out of the boxcar and over to a lumber gondola so they can ride out in open air. They tuck in beneath the woollen blanket as Pod tracks the landscape’s scroll with woozy interest. They roar past frizzy fields, slow-winding rivers, fall-down barns, grown-over paddocks, chicken pens, and groves of every tree imaginable. When dark falls, Pod’s eyes brim with starlight, and the moon, white as a sliced radish, floods the whipping forest.