I picked up the intercom and asked my secretary to get me the file. ‘It’s very unusual,’ I said, ‘something as personal as that incorporated into a land deed.’
He nodded, his eyes fastening on the papers as soon as she brought them in, his expression intent, almost avid. I don’t think it was greed, more the excitement of getting to grips with something he wanted to be involved in.
There were three documents altogether, an original purchase of Indian land, a conveyance of that land to a logging company and a further conveyance from the company to Joshua Francis Halliday. The curse was appended to the last page of this final document. Below all the signatures and government seals, a slip of paper of a different shade and consistency had been gummed on. Even on the flat surface of the photocopy it showed as something added later. ‘I’ll read it out to you,’ I said, and he nodded, sitting hunched forward, his eyes fixed on the page I had opened out and laid flat on the desk before me. ‘It’s side-headed — To all who come after me and inherit or in any other way acquire this land: Know ye’ — his choice of words indicated his intention of making it as solemn a declaration as possible — ‘Know ye that when I bought this land, which I call Cascades, the logging company who sold it to me had ripped out all the big timber in the valley bottom alongside the Snakeskin River, above the gorge and beside the lake expansions in the flats, everything that could be got out easily. They said it was big stuff, western red cedar mainly and Douglas, like the Macmillan outfit keeps preserved close west of here on the Port Alberni road …’ I glanced across at Brian Halliday. ‘Where was he living when he wrote this?’
‘Vancouver Island probably. That’s where he died anyway. Near a place called Duncan just north of Victoria.’ His eyes gleamed brightly for a moment. ‘Nice country, good forest land. And he had a fishing boat.’ And he added almost dreamily, ‘I went there once, just to look at where he’d lived, and then I went on out to the west coast, a hell of a road, more of a trail really. Cathedral Grove.’ He nodded, as though confirming the name to himself. ‘That’s what the Macmillan Bloedel logging people call it. There’s trees there four, six hundred years old. Thuja plicata — that’s western red cedar — standing two hundred feet and more, one of the last remaining stands of primeval coastal forest, some of them with a bottom bole circumference of anything up to thirty feet or so. Cathedral Grove.’ He smiled, an almost dreamy expression. ‘I wonder what the Cascades trees run to now. Does it say when he planted them? Does it give a date? They’ll be getting quite a spectacle now, something worth seeing.’
I glanced back through the conveyance. But I could only find the date he had bought the land, and I twisted the deeds round so that he could see.
‘That’s over seventy years ago. They could be a hundred and fifty feet now. More maybe.’ He turned back to that last page, reading on, his lips moving. ‘You see, he says it here — he planted it all himself. Had Indians in, cleaned off the scrub, had seedlings brought up from Duncan and planted it up, the whole area that had been devastated by the loggers.’ He sat back, looking straight at me, eyes wide under the lank black hair. ‘One man marking out the future, ensuring a lasting monument to his life on earth.’ And he added, ‘My God! What a Herculean task — more than eight hundred acres, he reckons. That’s over three hundred hectares. A plantation like that, it must be unique. No wonder he put a curse on anyone daring to take a chainsaw to any of his trees.’ He suddenly laughed. ‘No, of course, it must have been back around the First World War. He wouldn’t have had an inkling then that thirty, forty years on chainsaws would make it possible for one man to fell a three-hundred-foot Redwood giant that had been growing five centuries and more in a matter of hours. But hours, days — it doesn’t matter. He saw the threat and did the only thing he thought might deter a future owner greedy for money …’ He was silent for a moment, his lips moving as he read. Then he sat back. ‘Have you read it? The curse, I mean.’ And when I shook my head, he passed the deed back to me. ‘I think,’ he murmured, ‘if I had read that and was thinking of felling High Stand, compartment by compartment, I think I’d have second thoughts. Either that or …’ He paused, shaking his head again and muttering something to himself.
I read the rest of it then: ‘However long I live there will come a time’ — this was the final paragraph — ‘when my physical presence will no longer be there to guarantee the safety of my trees. But you who read this Declaration be warned — I am the man who planted them, they are my family, and my spirit. As his ancestor is to the Indian, so will I be to my trees. They are my Totem. Let any man fell even one of them, other than in the interests of sound forestry, then with the first cut of the saw or swing of the axe my curse will be upon him? Finally, as if pointing an accusatory finger, he switched from the third to the first person: ‘Do that and I will never leave you, day or night, till your nerves are screaming and you are dead by your own hand, dead and damned for ever to rot in Hell? And it finished with these words: ‘This curse stands for all time, to be renewed with my last breath, and may the Good Lord help me to my purpose.’ No date was given.
‘He doesn’t rule out thinning, you see, or scrub clearance, or anything that will encourage the trees to achieve maximum growth. In the interests of sound forestry. That’s modern terminology, which shows how involved he was in the business of forestry.’
‘When did he die, do you know?’
He moved his head, a dismissive gesture, as though I had interrupted a train of thought. ‘Not certain. I think’ — He frowned. ‘It must have been 1947.I know he was seventy-four when he died and I seem to remember being told he was born in 1873, so I guess that’s when the curse begins to operate.’ He looked across at me, his eyes still blank, his brow furrowed. ‘I was just wondering — about Tom, what’s happened to him. You see, I found some sales agreements in his desk. They go back almost seven years. Clear fell agreements that provide for extraction and haulage down to a booming ground on the Halliday Arm. Also bills for towing. He was marketing the Cascades timber. Not High Stand, but the poorer, scrubbier stuff on the slopes above. That is, until the last of those agreements…’ He shook his head. ‘The amounts had been dwindling all the time, until this last one. It was for two hectares of western red cedar, and it gave the grid reference.’
He paused there, looking straight at me, waiting for it to sink in. ‘It may not sound all that important to you. Not very real, I mean, here in Sussex, in a solicitor’s office. But out there, so much of the west raped of its best timber — do you know anything about trees?’
I shook my head.
‘Let me just say one thing then: but for trees you and I wouldn’t be alive.’ He was leaning forward, a strange intensity in his manner and in his voice. ‘It was the trees, through their infinite numbers of leaves and needles, that converted our atmosphere from deadly carbon dioxide into the oxygen we breathe. Does that help you to understand? The curse, I mean — and Tom’s reaction to it when he realized what he’d done.’