The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  Owen stupidly trailed along behind them. Lula spoke about her uncle, Professor Stoppard: “The smartest man I’ve ever met, writes poems as fresh as daisies.”

  Owen decided to ask her what it was like to have a professor as an uncle, but was interrupted by: “Solomon, you know him, don’t you? You met him at my house.”

  Solomon Hickey, the only male member of the Steadfast Few.

  Will was prosecuted twice, twice he received thirty days.

  Twice the displeasure of the town came down upon his head. Twice police had him in court. And his bedroom, where his bed remained unslept in, cast a shadow over the lives of those in the house.

  After each exhibition, each stint in jail, came terrible remorse, and he would sit in the barn, alone on a three-legged stool. The men who came at him, as Owen saw, were never man enough to be sober, never brave enough to be alone. Reggie Glidden was Will’s only confidant and source of strength.

  “You have to get back to the woods—we have a drive you know I need you in—not in jail—we have landings on three shores, and a loss of six drivers.”

  But he left it to Reggie and when he himself showed up at camp he seemed restless and changed.

  One night he asked his mother about his father, who starting out was known to be tough.

  “What about killing a man?” Will asked.

  “He never done so,” Mary said, “and except for shaking a man or two he never acted out.” She stared at him, hoping it would register.

  She did not realize that of all conversations with the boy this was the definitive moment, the one question and answer the boy needed—that in all the hard living, the miles of woods and swamp, their love for each other, this was the one answer with which she failed her oldest child, who had sent Dan Auger out, not on her bequest but on her behalf. The answer, in a secret way, left him broken. He remained so for a year and a half.

  In May of 1939, Will, sober for a month, took to the spring drive. They had cut the winter logs free of their block and chains into the water, and after a good day’s run, found they had a jam at the fork of one of the great turns in the river where the water is swift. It happened in the night when they decided to run the landings (last year’s logs left on the bank) down into a river already full, and this crammed the logs together at the turn.

  There was much cursing and blame, and the turn was blocked solid by morning. A few of Jameson’s men were out on the jam trying to pry the timber, with a man in a scow to rescue them if those timbers gave. They decided by ten a.m. that if a charge was laid, the four timbers holding back the logs behind would split and allow the drive to continue.

  “Who can set a charge?” Will asked his friend Reggie Glidden.

  “The best one is not here,” Reggie said.

  “Who is the best one?” Will asked, inspecting the great timbers like mixed and matched toothpicks, and jumping surely from one log to the other like a flea.

  “Dan Auger.”

  Dan Auger was the best. And there was no one else to lay a charge. Will’s father would have done it, but he was gone. So Will reasoned he must replace Dan Auger and his father as well. He reasoned it was his duty.

  “We can get Harold Dunn to come over,” Reggie Glidden said, “or I could do it easy enough—”

  “It’s not a problem, Reg—and Dunn is angry at me, so bring the charges forward and I will do it meself,” Will said.

  The dynamite was brought forward after one o’clock on a 1918 Pope L-18 motorcycle, a V twin with crank case cast from aluminum alloy.

  “There ya go, me young lad—she’s all yours now,” a toothless, grinning fellow said, tapping the box behind him.

  The occupants in the houses upon the far bank were informed. And Reggie Glidden went with his friend to set the charges—on the three main logs to bust through the one hunkered underneath.

  “Take the cedar and the princess pine, and unnerneath will move,” Glidden said, looking into the black, frothing, bark-filled water.

  “And the whole world will be one great stick,” Will answered, looking behind him into the gray wall of wood.

  They set the dynamite almost at water level on the three logs, taped them secure and twined the fuses together, then hopped back to the shore with the long wick. Reggie, with a look of professional aloofness, lighted the fuse with a Player’s cigarette, and the men watched it wind its way above the stalled timbers, like trying to follow a scattering snake. For a second the fuse disappeared. Then, without warning, it blew and the three cedars bogging down the run flew into the air, a great groan and foam threw itself into the rainbow the parting water made. Then logs started inching forward to the cheers of wood-hardened men. And then everything went still. There seemed to be a slight sideways canter to the whole drive—and everything stopped.

  They waited a minute in the silence.

  “It didn’t go,” Will said.

  “Bring the Clydesdales—and attach them on the other bank,” Reg said. That seemed to be the best idea—the Clydesdales could put the jammed logs right. That might work. But the Clydes were seven miles upriver, and would take a good two hours to get here. Nor was there another team, except at Brennan’s farm. All they had to do was ask. But Brennan had the jaw that Will’s temperament broke. And so he could not go ask for those horses, even if Reggie pleaded.

  “No boy—I take no source from a Brennan.”

  “So what to do,” Reggie said.

  Will thought a moment. At nineteen, all eyes were on him. Thinking it his responsibility, without hesitating, he started out to the jam once more.

  Reggie Glidden started after him, but Will ordered him back.

  “I am just going to look,” he said. “I thought I placed the sticks right on—I have to try it again.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “No.”

  “Well let me bring up the scow—and wait on you—”

  “If the jam goes, the scow goes—you’re a sittin’ duck—

  “ Will turned and, looking back at his friend longingly—as if there was a gulf between them the latter could not imagine—suddenly asked: “Do you remember that song my father taught us—when we were young?”

  “Which one?”

  And Will answered slowly:

  No mortal on earth is as happy as we

  Ah me dearie dearie, hey dearie down

  Give the shanty boys whiskey and nothin’ goes wrong!

  He laughed, and with that turned away. He walked out to the logs and stood looking down in some pose, questioning the universe, as if he in his youthful pride and boast had never questioned the universe before. Then he looked behind him. Before another sound came, the log he had placed the largest charge upon gave way, and in that second the logs behind, the thousands of tons of wood, moved toward him like an avalanche. As they moved Will jumped backward and turned to the shore. He was sure-footed and had never fallen from a log his feet planted on.

  “He’ll be scamperin’ now,” someone said.

  He jumped one log to the next with this wall at his back. And as he moved the logs themselves grew up over him. But even then, his brother heard later, he managed to dodge the first volley of logs that fell almost on him. He made a giant Hail Mary leap, when the logs as loud as a crack in the center of the earth swallowed him whole.

  There was silence; after a minute or two everything settled, and then it seemed peaceful—the air alive with the smell of fresh wood.

  Reggie, even before the logs settled, ran toward him. And was the first to him. Reggie found him jammed down under a massive timber, with his left arm twisted sideways, his right arm missing, and his back crushed. There was a smell of spring smoke, and a little boy far down the shore trying to fish eels.

  When they moved Will they found his backbone exposed. Yet he lived for a while.

  He was taken to Dan Auger’s camp—it being closer—and in a life that seemed to have so much promise, he died that evening, amid the smell of earliest spring and spring
chickadees, within the sight of swinging lanterns, the shadows of muscled and muted men, agitated as men are in the presence of death, and the enclosed forest in which he and they had lived. The doctor fetched by Simon Terri came too late, and could have done nothing anyway. His own mother did not get to him before he died.

  The mother had lost her oldest—and wept for days; Reggie, who loved him more, did not cry, but brought back the shirt the boy was wearing, torn and bloodied, and lay it across a table for the three days of the wake. The boy was waked in the house, the town and the province’s forestry men coming out in support of a great family grieving, to mourn and act as pallbearers.

  Owen, looking on from the back of the room in crumpled suit, knew his place was not at the front of the mourners. Will’s best friend, Reginald Glidden, came over to Owen, in parting held Owen’s hand with the power of a vice.

  “Thank you for coming—Will would be honored.”

  “You get some meat on yer bones, boy—yer momma needs you now,” Reggie said.

  Later, after everyone had gone, and the trees tapped against the house, Owen felt pity for the memory of Will’s boyish, intemperate laughter. Will’s great matter-of-fact principles did not matter; everything the family held on to had been solid while now it was transported to the netherworld of prayer and the elusive shadow of metaphysics, even in the white mold of the dead boy’s face, that like all the dead held a warning and a meaning not comprehended by living man. Owen was angered by himself—for the first time, he saw his brother. All that morning while Will, only nineteen, was trying to open a jam he had been writing matrics and looking like a proper student, a “fuggin’ lord.” And why?—because Lula’s friends told him she wanted a man who worked in a suit.

  His mother sat in a stupor in the kitchen, talking aloud to her dead husband.

  That night, all having left and being alone with the dead Owen told himself that he would offer what he had. He would put his plans “down” to become a dentist or a businessman, and remain at home. His plans, in the remote agony of youth, had been to please a girl.

  He stood and opened up the coffin to say goodbye. Strange his whole life had taken a back seat to this boy with the parlor light shining on his puffed and white face. Owen shivered slightly, closed the coffin lid, and in the faint dreary smell of flowers switched off the parlor light. He walked up to the third floor and there, amid his two hundred books, wondered what to do. Even now the town was dismissing them. He hated to see his family in this plight.

  He knew Estabrook, in a very friendly way, would try over the next few years to put his family out of business. What would happen to Mary’s holdings if Estabrook had the best bids? It was what Will had concerned himself over, what he had worried about on his dead father’s behalf. That was Will’s life: obedient and loyal to the death. Loyalty to his own dead father made him send Dan Auger out. Will was a young prince doomed with his family under siege.

  Owen, realizing this, seeing his brother suddenly in a new light, as this young prince struggling, loved him until a cry came from his throat.

  So he would offer what he had to his family: himself. He could do this for he had other traits, and one of these traits—the kind that never minded those who laughed—was a certainty in his own genius. Tonight, for the first time, he saw them all, that is all those men he had once admired, as having been plied like children, made whole by being men and women of parts who scrambled to put parts together and act out sentiment like others.

  Though he had waited ironically and terribly in his room one whole day for impressionable Lula to show up and offer her hand in sympathy, she had not. She seemed in the larger part of town, getting ready for her own bright-as-a-glitter future, wearing the clothes of a young coed and having her faithful Solomon Hickey drive her to the train for a visit to her uncle Stoppard. Once when there was a knock on the door he, certain it must be her, rushed down the stairs and into the hall, only to see it was men bringing in Will Jameson’s trunk from camp.

  They put it away in Will’s room, and left it unopened.

  The meeting between the mother and the younger son happened the day after the funeral. The friends from town and from the forestry industry across the province had now left, and the parlor except for some cups and china had returned to solitude and a rather traditional naked emptiness. The light from the sun told all. The family was left with this “other” boy, who was nothing like Will. The family was left with this second lad, the one Will’s godmother—the Micmac woman—said would play havoc with the business.

  They sat at opposite sides of the study, an empty leather couch (the place Will often slept when he was home) between them, and a picture of Will on the wall, holding a salmon taken from Grey Rock pool. What struck Owen was his own attitude to his older brother, which he now knew was one of intellectual snobbery. And Will, up nights worrying on behalf of his family, always making sure Owen had spending money and school supplies, did not deserve this.

  Owen told his mom he would be willing to do something else with his life.

  “Willing to what?”

  “Help,” Owen said, “and become more like Will.”

  Mary smiled at such a ludicrous idea and then nodded, for the sentiment was noble. She also admired that Owen spoke directly, as had her husband and oldest.

  Owen in fact had gotten into more trouble than Will—but it was always something you couldn’t put your finger on. It was always very opened. But it was indirect. When his mind took to something, he did it. Like getting drunk before his provincial matrics and making eighties. Or once protecting the young girl who lived at the Browers from teasing. Or bringing a boy home that was being beaten by his father, a LeBlanc man who lived in Injun town. It was long ago—an almost forgotten incident—but it did spell something. It meant that he would do something unexpected, and it would be startling.

  “You will not hit me as you hit your boy,” Owen had said to this man. Mary and Will heard about it. Mary embarrassed and Will condemned it, saying: “Sometimes a cuff is a proper thing—especially for a LeBlanc.”

  Yet Owen did not ask their opinion. Nor would he when he brought in Ulysses. Owen, with his blond curly hair and shiny eyes; his shirt buttons askew, just a little; his pants baggy, just a tad; his fingernails dirty, just a pinch; his hair oily, just a touch—and in all of this was a character, an extreme character—but of what? Not a fellow who was spoiled, like most in town thought, but a child who had been left alone, because of the death of his father. Will had, without knowing it, deserted this boy, and Owen had protected a beaten child because he would never desert him.

  Mary said she did not want wood for her younger son. Nor any part of wood, any measure or drift of wood or the complex commitment of it, or of the men who made their living in the pitiless world associated with it. For it was a pitiless world—for animals, horses, men, it was every bit as pitiless as the sea.

  She told him of their troubles when young—of the heroics of her dead husband, who had seen his fine draft horses fall through the ice and teamsters with tears frozen on their faces trying to get the doomed horses up.

  She told her boy that it was not for him. And she said Owen should study and become the man books wanted him to be. Here she smiled as if delighted at herself.

  “There will be no one like Will,” Mary said.

  “That’s true,” Owen corrected himself. “He would have been a great man—I’m afraid God does not intend man to be that great, and let him die too soon.”

  “Well then no matter—men are what they are.”

  Owen sitting in his suit was the extension of, the personification of, the family pain, which was suffering through something it did not quite understand. A suit, worn as prop for tragedy, can show the lack of knowledge explicitly about that very tragedy, the unknown sadness with which we as men and women are forced to live and breathe.

  Men now said the Jamesons were unlucky. And now, so suddenly it scalded her, people were turning away, leaving the
m devoid of friendship and alone. Would she sell her mill? Well, perhaps she would. But not at the moment, and not to Estabrook or Sloan.

  She looked at Owen in a new and terrible light, but just for a second. In this terrible light she decided that this boy was no weakling, and his understanding came from sadness. That is, by neglect unintended, perhaps Mary herself was the main instigator of a prophecy she now fought against, at the same time as she reeled in the philosophical certainty of its apparent absurdity. That is, perhaps for argument’s sake, prophecy given in storm to all, all form prophecy against themselves—this thought transfigured her, made her face wise and troubled.

  She decided she would put the second boy far away from the woods, and have no cause to worry about him again. She would not allow him near the camps, near the saws, or in any way on a cut.

  “No—you must have another life,” Mary said to Owen. “You’re better off away from this—if I can’t allow one son to have a life easier than my own husband’s, then I have done nothing good at all.”

  Both sons had.

  Reggie Glidden took the second boy under his wing, for a great loneliness swept over him that came and went like a draft of wind in a cold barn. He did this not only for himself, but because Mary asked him to. He was now main Push for Jameson, overseer of the properties of his friend. He was wild, cumbersome, and happy-go-lucky—all traits that brought men to him, and ensured Mary men to work her drives. For without a good Push the bosses were done. And Reggie was known to prance draft horses across lake ice when ice was going, to find the felled logs left on a far shore, or to take men and cut across the wilderness in the middle of a January storm.

  “Worry only kills you faster,” he would tell his sometimes frightened charges. “I learned that from the greatest man I ever knew—young Will Jameson hisself.”

  But Owen was not the same type of person as Will Jameson. There was, as Reggie said, “no funny bone in him.” Not the carefree laughter at danger which youth always seek and Will had in abundance. Or at least this is what was said, and Reggie as an ordinary man believed much of what was said. That is, he accepted what the town said about its citizens, and had long ago realized the town did not wish greatness from its citizens. It secretly wished mediocrity.