Greenwood

Harris is buried at the Mountain View Ceremony. Everett approaches Willow and introduces Temple Van Horne. Everett informs her that the book he was searching for was lost in a cyclone. He also reveals that Harris reached out to him at the farm, allowing them to reconcile. Willow introduces Everett to her newborn son. She makes Everett carry him despite his reluctance to do so.

Willow reminisces about Harris in his old office. She is interrupted by a visit from the Irishman who spoke at the end of the memorial. He introduces himself as Harris’s former describer. Willow recognizes his voice as that of the poetry reader from Harris’s cherished record collection.

The Irishman suggests that Harris’s life was difficult, which is at odds with Willow’s perception of him. The Irishman tells her to appreciate the sacrifices Harris made to give her a good life. He reveals that many years ago, he was the one to bring Willow to Harris after she was placed in the supply box. Harris’s commitment to raising Willow was a sign of his love.

Willow attends the reading of Harris’s will, where she is surprised to learn that despite their estranged relationship, Harris has bequeathed his assets and estate to her. The will also includes provisions for Everett and a man named Liam Feeney, whom Willow realizes is the Irishman. When the lawyers suggest disputing Feeney’s claim to the inheritance, Willow realizes the true nature of his relationship with Harris. She asks the lawyers to bequeath Feeney his portion of the estate.

Grateful for Feeney’s role in her father’s life, Willow decides to name her son “Liam” and discards the boy’s surname in favor of something more hopeful: “New Dawn.” As she prepares to move to Greenwood Island to live a peaceful, isolated life with Liam, she realizes that it would betray her deepest principles to abandon her environmental advocacy. She instead decides to give up her inheritance to live a life of direct action on the road.

Liam Greenwood compares his spine to a tree after realizing it broke in his fall.

Liam flits in and out of consciousness in his van throughout the night. He fears the implications that having a disability will have on his life. He crawls back into the house and becomes conscious of its flaws. He relates them to his own mistakes, allowing himself to remember them all.

When Willow receives a prison sentence for destruction of property, she brings Liam to Estevan to live with his great-uncle, Everett, and great-aunt, Temple. Willow cautions Liam to be careful around Everett at first but later recants her statement when she clears things up with Temple.

Liam enjoys his summer on the farm, adoring its regularity and predictability. He becomes friends with a boy who tells him that Everett was previously incarcerated for killing a baby. Liam is skeptical about this claim and spends time with Everett to ascertain the truth. At Willow’s request, Everett is forbidden from teaching Liam how to use the woodshop tools. Liam rebelliously tries them anyway and hurts himself. Liam also tries to learn more about Everett and Temple’s early lives, but Temple refuses to provide him with any details.

At the end of her prison sentence, Willow returns to the farm to collect Liam. Early the following morning, Liam tries to sabotage Willow’s van with Everett’s hammers. Everett comes out and reveals that Temple died of kidney failure. Willow and Liam promise to stay for the funeral. One morning, Everett wakes Liam up to accompany him. Everett cuts down three of the maple trees and then teaches Liam how to use the woodshop tools. They build a coffin.

Liam supposes that people enjoy being close to unblemished wood because it deludes them into thinking that their lives are unblemished.

Believing he may soon die, Liam crawls around the house to put all his tools back in order. He remembers once visiting Vancouver before Willow died, driving around in the van she used as a home. When he learned that Willow was camping outside the hospital for her chemotherapy treatments, Liam chose to remain in Vancouver for three weeks to accompany her. At night, she would play records of an Irishman reading poetry.

The novel presents a grocery list: grains and medication.

During Liam’s final weeks with Willow, Willow explains that her approach to raising him was meant to teach him “[t]o look upon Nature with reverence” (447). They reconcile over his work as a carpenter, and Willow validates the beauty of his craft. She makes him promise to visit Everett, stressing that people are always trying to save one another in ways the other usually doesn’t understand. She dies the following morning.

Liam remains on the house floor for another night. He remembers visiting Everett to fulfill his promise to Willow and to collect reclaimed wood for his carpentry jobs. Everett reveals that he will bequeath the farm to Willow, which means that Liam will eventually inherit it. Everett is unaware that Willow is already dead, so Liam pretends that she is doing fine. They build a picnic table together. Three months later, Everett dies, and Liam inherits the farm. Everett is buried near Temple by the maple tree line.

Remembering the coffin they built for Temple, Liam reflects on the beautiful things he’s made in his life: Meena’s violin and their daughter. He realizes he must make things right with Jacinda.

Over the last three years, Liam has ignored Meena’s attempts to make him acknowledge Jacinda Greenwood’s existence. Regretting this failure, he carves his will into the floor, bequeathing his possessions to Jacinda. He thinks about the things he’ll never get to do again and then acknowledges that he cannot undo or redeem his past. His last thoughts are of Jacinda and Meena eating at a table he’s built, discussing trees.

Jake leads a new group of Pilgrims through her tour of Greenwood Island but feels that her performance is off. She steps it up with a whimsical speech about forest trees being part of a family. During lunch, she reads the diary, which she has done repeatedly ever since she received it from Silas. She discerns that it tells the story of a woman who became pregnant during the Great Depression. The woman fears many things about the world, including a man named R.J., who will adopt the woman’s baby after the woman gives birth. Reading the diary allays Jake’s anxieties about her life in the world. Among those worries is the possibility that she has become pregnant after her night with Corbyn Gallant. She quietly hopes that Silas’s claim of her inheritance is true.

Jake takes the tour group to God’s Middle Finger, where she finds evidence that the tree infection is spreading, though none of this is evident to the Pilgrims.

Jake discovers an aggressive fungus in the cell samples she’s collected from God’s Middle Finger. She shares her findings with Knut, who determines that their only course of action is to cut down the sick trees. Jake worries about losing her job, so she suggests waiting it out until they can get corporate approval. Knut understands and then leaves to steal a chainsaw by himself. He antagonizes the Cathedral and the Rangers, who haul him away. Davidoff promptly expels him from the island. The following week, Jake finds a note from Knut in her locker, calling her the trees’ equal.

Silas invites Jake to his Villa, which is a remodeled version of the cabin Harris built for Feeney. Jake expresses her doubts about the diary’s authenticity, so Silas explains that it was found by a farmer in North Dakota. Many years later, Silas’s firm acquired the diary and connected it to the Greenwood family. The firm then procured the diary slipcase from Lomax’s grandson, who found the artifact in Vancouver. Corroborating the details of Euphemia Baxter’s pregnancy with the official histories surrounding the birth of R.J. Holt’s and Harris Greenwood’s daughters, they were able to establish grounds for their theory of Jake’s lineage.

Silas explains the process for establishing Jake’s blood relationship with R.J. Holt. If her claim is successful, then she will gain control of Holtcorp, allowing her to do whatever she wishes with Greenwood Island. Jake asks for time to consider his offer. She insists on holding onto the journal and slipcase to make her decision.

Davidoff admonishes Jake for fraternizing with a client and for letting her Pilgrim approval ratings dip. She first tries to explain that her thoughts have been preoccupied with family, but when Davidoff refuses to believe this, she confesses her concern about the trees getting sick. She shares Knut’s suggestion to cut down the sick trees. Davidoff believes this will only lead to bad publicity and denies her request. He cannot afford to lose his job because his salary barely covers the treatments for his daughters’ asthma.

On her day off, Jake takes a chainsaw to cut God’s Middle Finger down without authorization. After it falls, she inspects the rings in its stump and traces its history to the year when Willow was born. It barely covers the radius of the stump. She relates her lineage and her ancestors’ legacy to the way the dead parts of the tree hold up the living parts. She goes to cut down the next sick tree, but not before replanting a newly grown fir sapling in the gap left by God’s Middle Finger.

Jake rushes to Silas’s Villa after cutting down the last sick tree. She knows that the Rangers will soon come for her, so she asks Silas to reaffirm how likely it is that her claim to Holtcorp will succeed. She challenges him with the possibility that she might be the descendant of Lomax, not Holt, after carefully intuiting the nature of both men’s relationships to Euphemia from the diary. Silas explains that ancestry can be established based on plausibility, which the diary supports.

Silas asks for the diary back, but Jake claims that she destroyed it and the slipcase. Silas is upset but remembers they have digital scans of the documents. Jake emphasizes that the diary really belongs to her, not to the firm.

The Rangers apprehend Jake in the forest and immediately move to expel her from the island. She is about to collect her personal belongings, including her father’s inherited belongings, but the Rangers claim it as property of the Cathedral. They allow her to keep her jacket for the barge ride. Leaving the island, Jake spots pollen in the air and the water, suggesting that the forest has begun to reproduce at a massive scale. Jake weeps with hope.

Riding the waste barge back to Vancouver, Jake checks on the diary in its slipcase and reviews the final entry about Euphemia’s decision to keep her baby.

Docking into Vancouver, the barge captain asks Jake to help with unloading their waste cargo. She agrees to help and watches as the captain bleaches the garbage to prevent scavengers from collecting it. Nevertheless, Jake rescues two empty wine bottles to give to one of the children waiting to scavenge nearby so that they can earn from recycling them. When Jake asks if the child has any family, the child points to the other scavengers. Jake imagines caring for the child. Even if she continues to struggle through life in debt, adopting the child would allow her to pass her love for trees and the story of her family to someone else. Jake realizes that as a concept, a family is less like a tree and more like a forest, sharing their individual resources to protect one another.

The novel ends with Euphemia Baxter’s final diary entry, which details the sighting of a man tapping sap from the maple trees. Euphemia wants to be a writer, and though Lomax supports her aspirations, she is unsure how she will survive the Great Depression. The birth of her daughter has given her hope in the world, however, and she resolves to keep the baby instead of giving her to Holt. She endeavors to stitch together a blanket for her baby and prepares to flee with her baby into the forest.