“What’s his problem?” Owen asked, puzzled. (It was true he had no idea.)
“You—or that day, or what they say about him—they have tormented him an awful lot. Well, some of the men—and he is too proud to act—I mean he doesn’t fight back but takes it on himself to damage himself instead.”
“That day could have easily gone the other way. Twice he ordered me to leave him—but I had more rank, and refused. That is twice he would have given his life for me,” Owen said.
But Reggie’s reaction somehow bothered him. He was saddened by it. He knew the reaction had come because of who he was. The smaller, supposedly inept brother was not supposed to save Reggie Glidden.
“He does not think I loved him when I married him—when he heard you were coming back—” she said rapidly.
“I see—”
They were silent. Owen again was confused by this. He felt it was a discredit to what he himself had managed to do, if the man was just going to destroy himself. Then she took his hand in hers as easily as she would a boyfriend and said: “Reggie is older and looks upon himself as your protector—because of Will—” (Here she paused.) “However, he believes he lost that quality in the war.”
“Well then, you and I will get him back,” he said, laughing suddenly.
“We—we will—”
“Of course.”
“Oh thank you—sir—” She stumbled over the word, grabbing his hand with both of hers.
“Don’t be silly—and it’s Owen, not sir—”
Between them was only the flat, gray darkness of upstairs, where sheets covered the chairs Will had once sat on, tying flies or laboring over some algebraic problem he had no interest in solving. On those long ago nights everything in the world seemed possible, even happiness in the drudgery of high school arithmetic. Or perhaps giving more elation was the thought of what might have come after it. Which means the end of school and summer free to do what one wanted. Then, of course, he was pulled from school too soon, his father dead just before greatness claimed him, and Will dead just as greatness went away.
Thinking this, he blurted: “I will ask Mom to make him a better offer. We’ll pay him more than the Push at Estabrook or Sloan—tell him that. He knows the woods, and every tree ever cut on an axman’s pay.”
“But—I don’t know if—”
“So you tell him that—” he said, interrupting her, feeling suddenly that he was trying to sound like Will. But at any rate, he was himself again.
She jumped and started down the hall, turned, ran back, and in front of the old woman, kissed him. It was a strange kiss—for what would be forever between them alone—he tasted the inside of her lips. At that moment, without Reggie, she would love him and he her. Yet it was Reggie brought them together.
“My, my—haven’t we expressed ourselves,” the old lady said.
“Oh I’m sorry,” Camellia said, laughing. “I always do—I mean I have before—” and here she ran downstairs laughing aloud again. “I’m phoning Reggie tonight!” she yelled.
At this moment he knew that if he was ever to be in love, it would be with her. Strangely it was the war that had taught him this. And he cursed again for not having recognized this before, and looked up guiltily at the maid.
TEN
At the same time, on the west side of Saint John, in an old house built before the middle of the nineteenth century that teetered on pillars overlooking the harbor, Reggie Glidden pondered his future. It was now to him a prospectless place of self-recrimination where an act he had no control over was a cedar he could not dislodge in a stream. He had become indebted to a man he once pitied. That was something he could not overcome. He had lied about that man’s deed in order to save face with a cynical town. He could lie because he had once thought so little of Owen, and too much of himself.
Reggie tried to fathom where his downfall had started. It had not started in the war or in the trench or with the jammed rifle, or even in Owen’s rushing with an extra clip of ammunition to the hole Reggie had dug. It had started when he had once tried to determine whether Owen was manly, and took him across the river to meet the drinking boys. This was a flaw not in Owen’s character, but in Reggie’s. Everything seemed to come from that.
Reggie’s hope had rested on the well-known fact that Owen was off to dentistry if he lived through the war. The rather strange desire not to have Owen live through the war that had come to Reggie Glidden the closer the end of the war came was a silent problem Reggie could never speak about, for he was deathly guilty of this feeling, and thought of it as remarkably unnatural and unmanly. Yet if Owen had not lived through the war, Reggie could honor his memory and in some way control what was remembered. He could make the saving of his life more fantastic, and still seem a hero himself. But now Owen had come home. His thoughts were torn between feeling desperately grateful and terribly angry about the same circumstance.
He went to Saint John so he would not have to talk about it, and worked this past week loading ships on the dock. In his pocket he had an offer from Estabrook.
He told his cousin, whose house he was staying at, of his fears. He told him about Camellia one night when he was drinking. He thought he might find sympathy with a man he had known, and protected, as a child.
“She is working at the house Owen lives,” he said. “Owen is a hero to everyone and, well, you know how impressionable young girls are! I married her perhaps in haste, but I do love her with all my heart—she is so like a child—and that I suppose is a bad thing—when you consider it—”
The cousin listened to him, felt privy to knowledge that was a silent cancer in Reggie’s heart.
“Well,” he said, as he held a cigarette in front of his face and smiled corruptly through the smoke, “any man who saves your life might have a go banging your wife and take it as good payment. Hell, she probably thinks that too. For sometimes women act innocent just to get men between the sheets. Just once or twice.”
He was no longer that shy child Reggie had cared about but just another man motivated by his own wounds to wound as well.
Reggie said nothing to this blunt, provocative statement.
“I have no loyalty to the Jamesons except for Will,” he said, feeling the note in his pocket that Sonny Estabrook had sent him.
That very night (the same night she spoke to Owen), Reggie received a long-distance phone call from Camellia. She sounded so joyous, it was as if he had suspected another person, in another world.
It was also a luxury to phone Saint John, and she cherished the moment.
She told him to come home. She told him Owen Jameson needed him back, never to mind the townspeople or what they said. It would all be good again.
“You will be foreman.”
“I will be foreman anywhere, it’s my job,” Reggie said.
“Well, Mr. Jameson says he needs you with him—for Buckler is old and his mom is—well, a little dizzy,” Camellia said. He could hear her voice hesitate because she wanted so much to convince him. He could tell she thought this much greater news than he himself did.
“Please come home,” she whispered.
There was a long and desperate pause over the line. He wanted her to say, “Because I love you.” But for some reason she did not.
“So you saw Owen—is he still there and you still working there?”
“Of course, but—well, that’s why I’m phoning.”
“And Owen—will Owen be staying?” he said.
“Yes.”
He sat silent in the chair. For he knew something about himself now. He was frightened. He was not the same man he had been, and that was simply because people no longer respected him as they once had. And he already knew that Jameson was forced to cut on Good Friday Mountain—the one place more than any in the province he and Will feared. This was where they wanted him to be foreman, and he didn’t know if he could do it.
When he hung up, his face had turned ashen, his lips looked bloodless.
&n
bsp; “Bad news, eh?” His frivolous young cousin smiled, hearing only Reggie’s questions about Owen.
“Eh?” he answered, deep in thought. “No—good news all around.”
ELEVEN
The next night Mary Jameson and her brother Buckler showed Owen the letter they had kept from him.
It was the final decision on the stumpage bid on the thousands of acres they had wanted to cut, discovered by Will all those years ago.
The letter told them what they had known for three months. The Jameson bid had not been accepted. The reason was simple. The initial bid had been delayed, until another bid had come in and made it moot.
Why the bid had been delayed until moot was ancient history. But it had taken this long for the timber Will had scouted to mature.
Now that the time had come, now that Buckler had ordered new saws, the government had accepted another bid. This letter told Mary and her brother it was no longer their timber.
This decision cut their board feet down by two-thirds. The men had built camp and hovel and store, and for what? They were by this letter soon to cross into an illegitimate cut. That is, it was now Sonny Estabrook’s cut. They could have what wood they had yarded, but they must leave now. Mary left most of this up to the men she hired, and some were unscrupulously taking advantage of her—some were stealing her wood and selling it over to Estabrook, who pretended he did not know where it had come from. Buckler himself tried to figure this out but could never catch them. Their mill was in desperate shape.
The section that Will had found in the middle of Northumberland and claimed when juvenile would reap a great harvest of wood for the great Estabrook mill now.
Mary Jameson felt that she had been cheated out of this timber that the family felt always belonged to Will.
She had told Camellia about this just before they heard Owen was coming home.
That was one reason why Camellia asked the men to bring Owen from the train. This, in fact, was how those wheels had stopped. She wanted Owen back to save the mill, to save her husband, and her husband to save the wood.
She did not know Reggie would leave.
Owen also realized this year was life or death. How ordinary that was: life and death in a man’s life’s work. No one seemed to mind when it wasn’t their own life. He would have to go into the woods himself and leave Buckler in charge of the mill—new saws had to be bought, and the wood already in the yard had to been sawed. The landings would have to be collected in a half-dozen places. He would do it for Will; he owed that much.
Yet the government decision meant Owen would have to have his men go further up river, past where anyone had gone before, and cut out of the wilderness once again his batch houses and his horse hovels, make his claim for the timber. So Owen decided the only chance to save the mill was going to cut on Good Friday Mountain, called Buckler’s Mountain by some. None had gone there before. He would go there now. He did not know that Buckler had decided the same a month before.
Buckler believed it was his fault they had lost the holdings Will had struggled so hard to bid on. All that lumber that Will had mapped out—perhaps forty-five million board feet at maturity—what he thought of as Will’s greatest legacy would be turned over to other mills.
“Tell me why that is,” Owen said.
It was very simple to understand once Owen saw the date that bid had opened. It was years ago. The day after Will was killed. In the hidden fury that is grief, no one reminded Mary to make the bid that day. Buckler now blamed himself. He said that he had failed Mary’s husband, failed Mary’s son, and now failed Mary.
“Don’t be silly,” Owen said. “How could you have known?”
By the time they realized this oversight, Will’s intention had been discovered by Estabrook and contested. Now that the wood had matured, the government had changed and all bids were reopened. Europe needed to rebuild.
Now that the stand was ready, it was no longer theirs.
If Will had not died that day, the bid would have been made the very next evening. The first evening of the wake.
But how had Estabrook found out about this? It took Buckler a while to understand how simply fate had played out its hand against them. Estabrook Sr. and Jr. were, along with knowledgeable timber men from the government, pallbearers at Will’s funeral.
Fred Bots, an underling in the forestry department, had let it be known to the Estabrooks that the timber was found but the bid not made, because Will had died.
Estabrook Jr. (called Sonny) realized their chance and translated non-bid as non-desire: “The family probably doesn’t want to bid on it after this,” Sonny told his father. “Most of it’s not going to be prime for ten years anyways—let’s you and I go take a look ourselves—we have to go over to the Jensen” (this was a Norwegian ship that had come up from New England, and they had been asked aboard by the captain—they wanted to do business with his employer) “and then we can take a jaunt to see it—take the captain with us, to show him—how’s that?”
“Ah—perhaps—Freddy, see what you can do to get us in a bid,” Old Estabrook said.
Freddy Bots realized he had betrayed a man at his funeral out of stupidity, and a longing to impress. He was, however, too afraid of Old Estabrook to do much about it.
Buckler discovered this shortly after, but did not have the qualities that made Owen’s father and brother so feared. He could do nothing.
It was using Will’s death that mattered most to Owen. A stand that was no longer theirs, because of human grief and death. He also realized that Estabrook Jr. could easily have paid Bots a kickback for this lot. Of course, nothing like that could be proven.
It was in this moment that Owen decided he could not leave, for the memory of Will demanded that he stay.
“I’m staying here until you get straightened about—and that’s an end to it,” Owen said. “Tell the men to go up on Good Friday.”
“I already have,” Mary said.
Now Owen coming home was a great blessing. Buckler grabbed his hand and shook it, tears in his eyes. And it was on the tip of his tongue to call Owen, Will—but he stopped himself before that.
TWELVE
The woods are much changed, and how a good man lived then would try the best men now.
The next day Owen went out on the Tote Road with a team, packing in canned peaches and flour, pork and beef, and a barrel of doughnuts, to the camp far up on Good Friday Mountain. It took hours to get there, and so he slept the first night under the moon. By the time he reached higher ground, snow had fallen.
The next morning, in the crisp snow-filled air, he saw Good Friday Mount, and knew the teamsters would be hard pressed to get down a load. And on every foot up that mountain, he saw in his mind’s eye the horses stumble, and the loads come down upon their backs.
“Poor fuckin’ horses,” he thought, for unlike Will he had always thought a little more of horses than men—which even he considered a weakness. And Will would consider unforgivable.
Any qualms or weakness here would soon be known by men who cherished strength.
He reviewed his site—knew which teams of horses would come in, the men, the cutting they had done at the top of the hill where they would start in a week or so to haul it by horse to the riverbank, to block and chain it up until the spring drive. He needed dams built so the runoff would be great enough to carry the timber, and that very morning he ordered his men down to do it. He also ordered a road straight down over an embankment—the only place on the face of the mountain where one could possibly do it—and to have a bridge constructed at the bottom. They did what he said.
Still, even the loyal ones knew it was a harsh place.
“I know it is a harsh place,” Jameson said, “so go now if you need to.”
None did.
It was widely thought in the last week or two that Jameson would give over their holdings and sell out to Estabrook. And that Owen had come home as a war hero to get the best price.
Owen
made it clear that this was not the case.
They would continue to cut upon Good Friday, and they would bring the wood to the mill in the spring.
Later that day he walked down into the shine and told the fellers that he knew it was a hard place—but they had been in hard spots before, hadn’t they. The way they would fashion the run down to Arron Brook would be the most dangerous run in the province. He told them this point blank.
One of the teamsters who had come in early, Gravellier, said there might be another way around. He asked Owen if he knew that.
“Yes I do,” Owen, who had looked at a map of the area, said, “but there is no time to trim another road so far away.”
They asked Owen if he had run out a team.
“Yes I have,” he said, “once or twice. I won’t lie, I am not a great teamster—but I will rely upon great teamsters here!”
They stood about him in the year’s first snow, with axes, draft horses, and chains, the “shine” they had cut looking like a tunnel into the future, bright with the bark-scalped trees and dark with the shadow of trees ready to be felled, some of the men like ghosts scattered here and there, wearing thick woolen shirts, Humphrey pants, and old coats, their beards scrapped with tree chips, ice, and snot, they breathed in the dense wood, the only world they knew—while the world at that moment in Toronto, New York, or London knew nothing or cared little for the millions of board feet these men had cut, skewered out of the earth for the benefit of those cities and city dwellers, who would think of them, if at all, as savages.
Owen sat that night in the smoky camp—where things were not much different than what he had seen as a boy. He saw the socks and woolen underwear sacked up to dry on poles above the stove, the arms and muscled backs of men making ready for the night in the sweet acrid smell of burning wood. He understood it was the last of the lumber baron years, and of his family’s operation (although he pretended not to). New companies as far away as the States would come in and create a new market, for tissue and toilet paper, for boxes to put trifles in. For commodities they did not even now know existed. They would haul by truck and not horse, they would cut by chainsaw and not ax, they would load by harvester and not hand—they would rid the world of the very woods they depended on. Owen could glimpse this future more than some others here, but it was an erstwhile glimpse, a glimpse he himself did not fully understand.
The Friends of Meager Fortune Page 6