The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  Nolan made the bottom and the sharp turn and galloped the horses across the narrow makeshift bridge they had constructed with a loud clatter, all the timbers straining and squeaking, and the sled runners making the green floor buckle.

  There was silence as the horses came to a sudden halt on the far side of the bridge.

  The sled had carried the first load, November 19, 1946.

  The teamsters said nothing, just looked at each other. Then a loud “Hey, my lads!” from Nolan. “She’s quite the little scamper right there now, boys—but don’t let fear stop ya—fer coming down will save us twenty-four hours!”

  The teamsters all roared with laughter.

  “Too steep, Mr. Gravellier?” Owen asked, picking up the black switch again.

  “Well—it is very steep.”

  “Yes—but is it too steep? Tell me now one way or the other.”

  “Going around might be safer—certainly it is a bit longer,” Gravellier said. “So I guess we will put it over here.”

  “Good, good,” Owen said, holding onto a gnarled spruce tree as he looked over the precipice with darkness falling and the smell of frozen spruce gum on his blackened leather mittens.

  “It’ll save the horses too,” he said, as if to accommodate the man’s bad temper. Gravellier stared straight ahead, chewing his plug in the black, furious night.

  TWO

  The whole camp was made in the roughest fashion of spruce and pine, small and low and cramped, with bunks on either side against the rough-hewn walls, but the food was good. The men were mostly half-illiterate, beggars of fortune in any other place. But with the whiff of smoke trailing against the trees, the smell of horses and tack, they were among their own, and could act accordingly.

  There were men who worked and lived and died here who had never seen a provincial capital or knew an MP who claimed to work on their behalf, but who cut the wood that fashioned that man’s oak desk, and the cedar that had made his sauna at Sugar Loaf Resort. Men who worked here would be laughed at with such ignorance by people in Toronto, one would sometimes wonder who was actually primitive. For those who believed that acquisition of things made you understand the world would always mistake these men as less than themselves until the time they had to rely upon them, either in kindness or in battle.

  Just after dark Owen walked out to the side skids to set up oil lanterns that would, before dawn, guide the teamsters getting their first loads in the morning. The timber was ready along the side of the skid road—it had been piled up in the last five weeks, cut and hauled out to here by the men his uncle had first sent in. They were already down into the shine on both sides of the mountain, which simply meant the horses had to haul the loads up on a contraption called the devil’s mount (which lifted the front of the log off the ground a foot) a few logs at a time to the rough skid road, where these logs were to be piled upon the two sled, and then driven over the hill, and over time for miles and miles along Arron Stream to Arron Brook, and to the great Bartibog River that Will at eighteen had made his own.

  Owen wondered if his main faller might be able to drop the main trees in the new section tomorrow. The main faller Bartlett and his other axmen had divided the cut into twenty-two sections of woods. They were now at section four. A long winter.

  Owen was hoping that six teams could work tomorrow, and since they did not have a long haul right away—because they were counting on a spring runoff from a dam they had built—they might each get three loads yarded.

  Trethewey’s team of large black Percherons, two hands taller than Owen’s Clydes, Missy and Butch, would be in soon. So, six teams until the Percherons, he decided. In future days each haul would get longer. And Mr. Curtis, who was considered at twenty-two to be the best young teamster on the river and who they had just managed to hire, would be in toward Christmastime. Which would make eight teams. Owen had done his hiring relentlessly and ruthlessly, relying on his name and his new-found fame.

  “Well, can I ask ya one thing?” Curtis said. “You be the VCer?”

  “ ‘Fraid so,” Owen said.

  “Then I’m for you on Good Friday,” Curtis answered.

  Mary knew he traded upon this, and did not wish him to. But, for his family, he would. Still, she thought it would bring bad luck. For everything in the woods was deemed lucky or unlucky.

  This new thing between him and Reggie was certainly unlucky—so unlucky Owen did not speak about it. He had offered. He cared a lot for Reggie and knew he was a great man. The trouble was, Glidden had forgotten his greatness.

  “I will cope,” Owen told Mary on the day he left.

  But Mary feared the unknown. She could not help it, with her pockets of money, her ability to handle thirty men, and her grade three education—which, as she said, she never felt compelled to brag about.

  Most of the men were doing the only work they knew. Outside of this forest, these confines of somewhat brutal timber, they were no one and even nothing—in here, where death met life and stared it in the face every moment on a run down hill, they were some of the finest men who ever lived. Illiterate, unkempt, harsh on themselves and unforgiving of weakness in order to survive. Owen had known men who had stitched their own wounds in a hurry in order to save someone else.

  In spite of the cold and the foul humanity he slept with, shared his life with, it was still a world of greatness. He did not say greatness easily—he did not say it about himself. He was silent with his men, most of the time. And most of the time they were wary to say anything to him. This was Owen Jameson—the second son, the one they didn’t know. Even his bravery seemed different than the bravery of his brother. There was for some reason less fun to it. It was, in fact, more British uniform than fuggin’ Irish whiskey.

  “I don’t like him,” Tomkins whispered, seeing some kind of an advantage in not liking him. This would become more insistent as time went by, and as the days of winter came meaner and shorter.

  “No one do,” Gravellier answered, “but the fucker ain’t paying us to like him—and he does much with one leg.”

  THREE

  It was night when Owen decided who would be lead teamster for the morning, and a scowl of wind had come up over the black head tip of the trees and made him think, if he did think of God, which in honor of Will he had refused to, that God had acknowledged his problem. For this was a political decision as well. It would be either Nolan or Gravellier. He leaned toward Nolan, but Gravellier had assumed he would be the lead, and had been stung by their first argument—and he was far more political. Politics had swum in his blood all his life. Now he was for union, but when his daddy owned ground he wasn’t. Still, Owen had to accommodate him, even if he didn’t like to admit it.

  So it would be Gravellier for now, which he knew would put Nolan out, for Nolan took the first load when none else would. He was trading on this, hoping Nolan would understand, for Nolan was less political and a better teamster.

  Owen knew what Tolstoy said to be true—the more you did, the more was asked of you. And, Owen could add, the less you were thanked. Still, he knew Gravellier would give up the lead when times became tense.

  So he was asking Nolan and Richardson at this moment to take a back seat to Gravellier and his men, even though Nolan and Richardson had done far more and complained far less.

  Nor did he like it here—this mountain—already Owen felt a heavy hatred for it, and for those who worked upon it and who had whipped his horse and killed those bear. At this moment, too, came hatred for himself—for when Will burned Ulysses and bragged he would earn a million and never read a book, Owen bragged he would read a million books and never cut a tree.

  And now the very wind caused his guts to ache.

  But this was the sunless and stunted woods, and he was in it now. He had longed not to see it again. It was as if a nightmare had reappeared after a length of time, and he now must deal with it again.

  Before they woke, Owen would be up. The black oil lanterns were now dimly lit�
�or as the men said, “dimmy”—to show the teamsters where their sleds would be loaded on the long, torturous skid road. They glowed and made the snow like fairy dust just in front of their oil bowls—like some impenetrable fairyland lost to modern man a century before. The winged earth was all about, and Owen tried to think of this winged earth, this bowl of green land incomprehensible to those in cities who without wood and quarry were fed by it. Still in the glowing light of lanterns of old traditions, Owen remembered his brother Will, and the great man beside him, Reggie Glidden, as they took him on a moose hunt in 1934—up beyond this place by nineteen miles. Yes, he remembered it now—and the moose a thirty-four-point bull, a picture of it still in Will’s bedroom on a shelf. Where was this place—could he find it again, he wondered.

  But the bowls of oil were for the morning. The tradition came from his father Byron and was simply a formality, for most of them knew where to go—and more importantly, half the horses knew exactly where to go, having hauled the wood up those hills in the last month. The wood, bark hanging like toffs of deadened skin, was enough in the end to make the horses mad. But a formality was very important here.

  It was pitch black, except for those lanterns hung against poles, when Owen started back to camp. And it was snowing now, hitting him full in the face, with the grating trees making the sound: Holdfast.

  He could not see the trees even four feet away—could only follow the path because it was the most open track. These were the gnarled and toughened trees. Like the men, they came to root in tough soil and could not be easily defeated. In fact, they were much like the men who cut them. They seemed benighted, but were magnificent, and made great wood.

  The snow hurled down as if the world was in torment, and as if the torment was saying that this taking of trees was a wicked thing.

  He had seen much death. He had also seen so much of the prophecy on Will’s broken body that he still cried aloud. Would his body fill the glad maw of prophecy too? Even as an atheist, and somewhat of a modern calculated man, he still believed in—what? Well, whatever it was, he spoke to it every day.

  Far away one lantern gleamed in the horse hovel where the young tend team Gibbs—a tend team was a boy hired to feed and keep the horses—was working with the Clydesdales and the Belgian teams. Finally seeing this small glimmer, Owen followed it in, half-blinded as he was by snow. But now he had first-hand knowledge of how easy it was to be lost.

  He was freezing, his face and his arms, his wounded leg almost unable to move the last two hundred yards. He would not let the fuckers know this. For as always, not being Will, he was wary of these men. If they knew he was in pain, the weak ones would want to go around rather than down, and the weaker ones would try to challenge him in some way.

  He came in, and the men looked at him silently. The teamsters nodded politely, and he nodded back, in taciturn accord and no more, as the profound jumbled-up wind blew and called.

  He took a book to the bunk. Being one of the few men in the camp considered educated, this was looked upon as strange and spectacular, and not quite “manly” by the men moving around him, disjointed in their evening talk, muted because the new boss was in. In the days to come he would only be here periodically—for he had work to do at the mill. That’s why having the right Push was so important. And he couldn’t be here, he knew, for the woods would get to him—unlike his brother he didn’t have the “feel” for it. But once this year was done, and with Reggie Glidden and perhaps next year Simon Terri in charge (Simon who had gone to get the doctor at Will’s death, a man this year hired to Sloan with his Micmac friend Daniel Ward), he would propel himself into another life. Away from the torment of his past—for it did torment him—and away too from Camellia, who was a horrible temptress even if she did not know it. No wonder so many worried on her behalf.

  “She has the bastard French,” he heard the Scot maid say.

  Tonight the men brought him a treat—to show they knew his stature—a white cloth napkin to wipe his face after he ate a piece of hot apple pie and drank a scalding cup of tea.

  It was a lonely world, and this showed its loneliness, down deep. Small implements from home made it lonelier still. Great burly men became mothering to young swampers in their charge, and overcame embarrassment in doing so. Later, meeting on the roads in summer, they might not even acknowledge each other.

  To the men, he looked peculiar—a small replica of the Jameson clan, yet an unknown quantity in their lives, a strange anomaly of substance they could not easily fathom. A ladies’ man, some said—too cute by half to lay into Glidden’s wife.

  He was a bookworm and had made the rank of major. He had been wounded, and yet didn’t look like he could fight. They were silent in front of him, and as yet did not talk so much about him behind his back. They did not want to swear, though they had already heard him swear like a trooper.

  The book he read was Lear, the play he had often returned to, trying at one time to fathom his brother’s moods and whimsy and his mother’s curious worry. It was an old tattered edition bought in London during the Blitz—a curious shopkeeper reminding him that bombs breaking overhead might mean more to an interpretation, and he answering that yes, and “so too my son our share of landings off a boom.”

  To which the shopkeeper replied: “You come from a land I have no knowledge of—what is it called?”

  “Home,” Owen said.

  FOUR

  The wind blew snow all night up against the outside walls, and far up against the trunks of trees they were to cut. Higher than the head of a man by dawn the snow had piled, the world outside frozen solid—with “an extra mountain of ice” on the mountain they were on. Each tree the fallers would cut today was boughed down with snow, and each tree trunk had to be freed from snow to be felled, and each felled tree had to be cut in two or three, and each section had to be hauled by grunting, overworked men and horses—both seeming to enlist each other’s pain—leaning on and mocking it at the same time.

  The world inside the camps was filled with the smell of smoke and meat and rank sweat. It was built in a hurry and was half a foot too low for many men. It was dark for the most part—and certain of the men feared theft from others. There were no rifles allowed in camp, though any man here could use a knife and throw an ax or hatchet well. One turn at forty feet and stick into a cedar tree. But a rifle was brought in by Owen himself and given to the cook, just in case.

  “You might need this come sometime,” was all he said.

  Owen was up long before dawn. The first thing he had to do this morning was dig himself out of the camp, because the door never was free of the nightly drifts. The air was arctic and split his lip, so he tasted his blood a second before it froze. The trees stood in blackness and weighed down boughs, for miles, like muted solitary soldiers.

  Meager Fortune coming through the door, snow falling down the back of his underwear, shook himself bare, picked up an ax, and cut some firewood for breakfast, the ax blade coming close to the fingers that held the birch chunk. He had been up in the night stoking, but the fire had gone down.

  Owen had traveled with Meager in the war, and had hired him as a general camp keeper. He was up at 4:30 mending seven pairs of socks for the axmen and the teamsters, his little face having a childlike gaze when Owen awoke, Lear over his chest. Meager was considered simple-minded, but had fought all the way to Antwerp. He had been saved by a minister of the Lower Rapids in 1934 and baptized in the “full” dress—and he set an example because of it.

  He was learning to cook, and learning to write, and had recipes hidden in his boots that he had copied from the cook to take home, as he told everyone, to his wife and little boy, Duncan. He called everyone sir and was looked upon by most, Tomkins especially, as a simpleton. Tomkins had already taken to teasing him, but Meager Fortune didn’t seem to pay much attention to it.

  Slightly ten minutes later, the acrid smell of burning birch and then hard rock maple drifted out over the camp’s tin roof towar
d the sky that was just beginning to be shaded by gray. Along the sides of the hovel, where the horses started to clomp, the outline of boards and old sled parts loomed as the day dawned.

  Gibbs, the number one tend team, was shaken awake, and came out in his Humphreys and long underwear to feed the horses oats.

  The teamsters were the next to wake, an hour before the rest.

  In the frozen snow, Gravellier and Nolan came out. A few of the two sleds were already loaded, a few weren’t.

  Owen helped harness the Clydesdales for Nolan. It took five men to dig his two sled free from a hard night’s crust of snow and get it turned. The two sled weighed almost twelve hundred pounds before it was loaded, and it ran on slick runners with a great timber and block and chains in the middle. One of those chains could be wrapped about the crazy wheel, a contraption welded to a tree that would stop the sled on the downhill run if anything went wrong. Some of Gravellier’s men used the crazy wheel. Nolan’s men did not—but on the devil’s back there was nothing to attach a wheel to.

  “Who is lead teamster?” Gravellier said, throwing the question back over his shoulder, into the dark smelling now of back bacon and tea.

  “You will be, if you don’t mind,” Owen said.

  Nolan looked at his boss. His happy-go-lucky expression never wavered, though his eyes showed less mirth. Nolan was certain of his position and did not like being challenged. This was as true with his friends as his enemies—for anyone to tell him that his best friends Richardson and Trethewey were better teamsters was enough to make him mute for two days.

  Owen was aware, and so were they, that any of these men could die, and that to haul for four to five months from this position, over a mountain, it was almost a certainty someone would be injured. And that further to this thought, they were already predicting calamity in town. So the bottles he had found last night in the bear hides he left to the designs of those who put them there, the beer hidden from him in the storeroom too.