The grand old redwood had not been ten minutes felled when Janice almost stepped on its seedling. Nearly ended the whole thing right there without even noticing, a shift on the left leg, a glance directed a few centimeters to the side, a mind wandering a little farther.
But Janice saw it by her bootheel, quivering a little with each thunderous HOCK of the chain-cleaver on its foremother’s flesh, and it was so small, so small even for a bare sprig, and she thought a few things with the speed and ease of an old hand in the redwoods.
First, that to harvest, harbour, or hand-raise any form of redwood unsupervised was prohibited under the long list of company regulations.
Second, that almost every company regulation existed because the alternative was losing a preposterous amount of money, and occasionally also because someone had died.
Third, that most of the people violating those regulations either did it because they were too young and stupid to know they existed or too old and complacent to think they applied to them.
Fourth, she’d turned forty-eight two weeks ago and could still taste the hangover in the back of her spine.
So what the hell.
***
For the first three months, she kept it in plain sight: a pot among the pre-potted thyme, the chives, and the garlic on her windowsill. Nobody caught on except for Marco when he stopped by for Friday poker, who just barely had the discipline to yell “what the shit” in a politely restrained indoor voice when he went to blow smoke outdoors.
“God bless you?” asked Albrecht, and Marco, bless him, made eye contact with Janice across seven feet of murky, sweaty inebriation and read her loud and clear.
“Stubbed my toe in the dark. Jan, how do you live like this?”
“I’m not paying for a new bulb to fix the problem of your old glasses,” said Janice, and everything was fine and everyone moved on until Marco was the last one out the door and she could snake a friendly arm around his neck and mutter “stay quiet” in his ear. And it was still pretty fine and friendly after that, because he didn’t scream for help and he turned and spoke real quiet when he said “fuck you playing at?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not NOTHING, that’s-”
“Even less than that. Shush.”
“You-”
If she were younger and stupider, she’d have threatened him. But instead she said “spot you a smoke?”
“Fuck the smokes, I just HAD a smoke, a smoke is what started this.”
“Homerolled.”
His eyebrows pinched and she knew she’d already won. “Bullshit.”
“Truth. Ash passed on the last of her crop before she got busted. Take one.”
“It’ll be dried up by now.”
“It won’t.”
“It will. And fuck the smokes, what are you DOING? That thing’s already big enough to eat a finger!”
“I’m not doing anything and I’ll put it back next week. And the smokes are good.”
“You’re so full of it your hair’s turning brown again.”
“Marco. Look me in the eye and tell me I would lie to you about this shit.”
He looked and saw the truth: she absolutely would and he would never ever in a million years be able to call her on it. Thus shackled by common courtesy and history, the night came to an end.
And so did the seedling’s days in the little pot. Runt or not, it had just about bulged over the sides – its stem stood too proud; its leaves bloomed too ruddy to be permitted in even the periphery of the public eye. And Janice didn’t ever let her friends into her bedroom these days anyhow, and she couldn’t remember the last time she actually used that old wastebasket, so in the end the only sacrifice she had to make for the relocation was the necessity of keeping her windows open in the daytime to let the slow-thick-stench of a growing redwood leak away and drown in the muggy vapours of Westplank afternoons.
***
The food became an issue.
It was turning into a proper sapling now, that runty seed. It slowly filled up Janice’s old wastebasket and grew straight and strong. And to grow strong, it needed fuel.
Cannibalism was of no concern to redwoods – the thousand thousand seeds spread out by an adult had just enough packaged energy to get them to sprout, and following that the bulk of their first meals would be an unfortunate just-a-little-smaller-or-slower sibling, strangled inexpertly with their fresh roots, ripped open, and drained down.
So it was perfectly natural and usual and normal that Janice was bringing home pieces of work with her, raw and dripping in her deepest pockets. Shaved bark, meat chips, even small limb segments made their way into her hands and vanished when nobody was looking – plucked from the very jaws of the mill. Once when she was on driver duty she uprooted a whole sapling, walked it off to the woodchipper, and stashed it in the cabin. She had no idea how nobody caught on to that, but it lasted her and the sapling combined a good few weeks.
It just wasn’t enough. Your shift got paid by weight of harvest, and you got paid just enough to keep the company store stock flowing, and anything taking chunks out of that meant not enough to live on, which meant worse work performance, which meant lower weight of harvest, which meant a long, slow, spiralling slide down into the metaphorical toilet bowl that was Westplank. Plenty of time to know what was happening to you, plenty of opportunity to try everything you could to escape, plenty of time to claw your nails bloody to no use at all.
So when the first week came that Janice had to stock low on toilet paper, she knew the writing was on the wall, and she looked into alternative sources.
Buying more groceries would be a different path to the same destination – the meat the company fed them was rehabilitated offworld slush, but it wasn’t cheap.
Pirate-logging redwoods would be a good way to get herself noticed – the company might not have cared if they lived or died, but they cared if they costed them money, and that meant consequences that could make starving to death seem kind and fast.
There weren’t many restaurants in town, and there were fewer that didn’t keep their dumpsters under lock and key, and fewer still that she’d be able to scrape more than tendon and bone out of. Westplank didn’t cater to the non-desperate.
But there was an aid site. A big, busy company aid site. And it was full to the brim every week with some new disaster. Someone young that tried to do a stupid trick with a chaincleaver. Someone old that didn’t look when they heard TIMBER because they knew what was happening and so didn’t feel the need to look. Someone who got drunk and dropped their phone in a chipper and tried to catch it and missed.
There were a lot of ways to get hurt out in the redwood forests. A lot of them were permanent, and a lot of those permanent consequences left debris. A severed arm; a crushed leg; a mangled hand… it was amazing what the company would throw away while fitting you with your almost-shiny new prosthetic (pay in installments).
And unlike the restaurants, nobody kept a close eye on the bio waste bins. Janice didn’t even need to pick the lock: someone had left it open the first time she looked.
She did it anyways, just to be sure she could if it mattered. She could.
It never came up.
***
Autumn came, and the storms locked everyone inside away from the power tools and the redwoods for a solid month.
That was when Janice learned the morgue’s lock was only a little harder.
Even if people weren’t losing as many limbs they were still drinking too much, or saying things they shouldn’t to people they shouldn’t have, or just walking outside to watch the lightning from not quite far enough away.
It was learning to crack the bones – first for the marrow, then further, down into tiny pebbles it could gnaw away at inside its trunk. The grinding soothed her at night, like childhood memories of listening to a dishwasher in the restaurant downstairs. The teeth were harder – it worked on them for whole days at a time even, like chewtoys.
Then the winter parch settled in, and everyone was back in the fields, but well, it was so much more effective this way, wasn’t it? Why scrounge for fingers when you could heft a bodybag? And it wasn’t as if it was more noticeable. Bodies were waste product. Expensive to get rid of. If anyone noticed what was going on, it was because it was making their life easier. You didn’t question that.
***
The sapling was growing faster than ever. It had practically filled Janice’s room by then; it clawed at the windows in slow soft ripples; it spilled from the wastebasket to sink tendrils into the ragged carpet; it brushed its buds against the ceiling to leave sticky red marks and reached out to cradle her bed in its still-spindly limbs. It was cramping, creeping, crawling for space, and she had no more left to give it.
So, late on a moonless Friday night Janice cancelled poker for the fourth week running, put on her heavy logging gear and mask, gloved every part of her exposed body, and slowly and carefully began to uproot a redwood without killing it for the first time in her life.
It was sticky, it was slow, and it was surreal. The vesicles gripped and gummed at her gloves like nursing kittens as she tucked them into loose sacking filled with ripened offal; the roots tried to crawl into her boots while she heaved it into her arms; the trunk leaned into her warmth and made the soft pulsation it did that was neither hunger or fear or anything else Janice could identify.
She made it down the hall. She made it out of the building. She was just getting into the cab of her truck when she heard a very, very familiar “what the shit” and looked up and oh, Marco. So considerate to check in on her after she cancelled poker four weeks in a row. Or so worried he might have permanently lost the chance to take Albrecht and Beatrice’s spare change. Or both.
“Shush,” she said, setting down her burden. It clutched at her heel, recoiling up and away from the cracked pavement.
“This is – fuck, this is, this is bigger than a windowsill, this is life sentence territory-”
If she was younger and stupider, she’d have thought of threatening him. “It’s okay, listen. I got a plan.”
“A PLAN? A plan for what, to-”
Janice was faster than she looked, and she was less drunk than a Friday demanded, and Marco had a soft skull. And there was space in the cab enough, if she wedged him half over her lap.
The sapling wriggled in its casing, trying to get at him.
“No,” she told the thing without auditory organs. And also herself.
A witness was dangerous, a missing acquaintance was a little suspicious, but a disgruntled and unwilling accomplice? That was just a friend with more words.
***
The uncleared tracts were temporary and doomed. The cleared tracts had been chopped down to the epidermal layer. The fallow tracts were a hypothetical investment in some sort of future, and therefore nobody thought of them or looked at them, and it was there that Janice crept, and dug, and chopped, and planted, and finally ensconced her sapling in a little dell that would hide the vascular plume of its canopy from casual observation, in the riot of churning rot and fast-burn fungals and eczemal undergrowths that still dominated the landscape. Poor but ample fare, and plenty of room to grow, and a long head start. She’d done everything she could to set it up for success.
Janice hadn’t thought about it in years, but she did vaguely recall wanting kids at least once. She guessed that was what this was like. You were meant to give them everything, right? You were meant to do anything for them, right?
What were you meant to say when you were done?
‘Bye’? ‘Love you bunches’? ‘Good luck’? ‘Don’t forget to write’?
So instead she hugged it awkwardly, and it found where her mask had slipped a bit and took a little piece of it with her.
And that was also what it was like.