The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  So, thinking of her marriage to Owen in jeopardy, she had to stop the rumor.

  She knew Solomon wouldn’t keep it to himself, and to have told him was a very grave error. His loyalty to her would make him spread it—his anger make him embellish it.

  She telephoned and asked him to forget it—she was mistaken. That Owen was going to see her. She sounded like a lonely, frightened child.

  “I have nothing to say about Owen Jameson,” he said. “You can be nice to him if you want—and if you are going to see him, maybe you shouldn’t see me!”

  She knew by his tone she was too late.

  Three days later her father came home agitated and wouldn’t speak. Finally, using the very falsehood of her association with Owen that Mr. Brower himself had so promoted, Lula told him she had a right to know Owen’s whereabouts, for Owen was her betrothed.

  “Well, you will not be seeing him over Christmas—I know you planned to, and he invited you. But it’s all show. So damn him,” he said, unable to keep it from her any longer. “I thought she would have brains enough to honor her marriage and not go screwing on a cot.” He had the sudden hysterical rage of a child.

  “My God,” she said. “Where did you hear?”

  “It’s all about town—never mind him—never mind that now—in the very cave her mother was murdered—that’s the kind of woman she is,” he said.

  Lula had never seen him so furious on her behalf. To him, this upstanding Protestant man, it was an absolute betrayal of his life.

  There was a phone call to her house later that afternoon from Owen himself—but her father said she was asleep.

  “I don’t think she wants to be hurt by you anymore,” she heard her father say.

  Lula now was trapped.

  She must go listen to her records. She must do her exercises the physiotherapist gave her. She would listen to the snow fall down on the roof. Evening snow always brought such peace.

  SEVEN

  Reggie had left Saint John without telling anyone where he was going. And without notifying his wife.

  Camellia had phoned to tell him the Jamesons needed him, but he knew unless he regained confidence he would have no chance up on Good Friday Mountain. That is, since the war Reggie had been worried that he wouldn’t be able to do a dangerous job—and Good Friday Mountain was the most dangerous. That was the reason he hesitated in reporting to Owen Jameson. For if he could not be an asset, he did not want to be there. Men who used to respect him ignored him now, and he felt that this had happened because of Owen. So he must prove himself again in some way before he signed on. That is, he had every intention to go home to his bride, but he must be himself in order for her to have a happy life.

  Still and all, he had to overcome certain things. He was a man who had never been laughed at before. That he blamed it on Owen wasn’t fair, and yet he couldn’t do anything else. He blamed it on his wife as well—why did she think he should be back doing this? That caused him pain. But anyone could see she did not look upon people with the same degree of mild intrigue that protected you. Her openness damaged her reputation, because she never thought in an underhanded or coercive way herself. Knowing this, he was still jealous and believed what men had said. That a woman as beautiful as she could not stay faithful.

  When he came back to the Miramichi he stayed at Jameson’s empty warehouse looking out over the dilapidated wharf poles of an abandoned mill (old Byron Jameson’s first mill). He was only four blocks from the little house he and his wife shared, the small stone house he had grown up in. He had one suitcase, with two coats, and some cigarettes—a few dollars from the dock and not much more.

  The first afternoon there, cloudy and swept with mild snowfall, he decided he would walk those poles, to see if he could keep his feet. And he would do this without anyone knowing. That meant he would have to do it at night. If he could keep to his feet, which he had easily been able to do as a young man, then he would be of help and a credit to the cut up on Good Friday. If not, he would take a job somewhere else. He still had the letter from Estabrook with his calculated offer.

  But Reggie would challenge himself, and then see Owen after he did. He would survive this challenge and be better able to cope. He would apologize to Owen for having spread a falsehood in anger (this was still the most troublesome part) and he would be a credit to his dead father, who he felt had been ashamed of him.

  Thinking this, he was calm, until the second development. Like so many things in life, happy or disastrous, it came unsolicited and without warning. It came in the morning, after he got to the river. It came in the guise of two men, one a young man his age and the other Camellia’s reprobate uncle Sterling. They were drinking some muted Christmas cheer outside the warehouse doors. Sitting on old tarred pilings, her inebriated uncle spoke to the other, younger man about Gravellier seeing “first-hand” Owen kissing Camellia. But that wasn’t all—Sterling said he himself saw them making love in a cave—last week. This came from the very rumor Lula had started, and was now trying to dampen out.

  “He’ll be havin’ her now, because the husband’s gone,” Sterling giggled, and said he would go to her and get money. “She’ll have money now,” he said, and he spoke to the other about this money and how they would be “set fer a while.”

  “I knew what she was like years ago—she knew the money she could find between her legs. You saw yerself how she is always hangin’ off people—grabbin’ them, giggling and such. That’s the sign, boy—that’s the sign. The first time she saw Owen she was giggling and grabbin’ him—all fer her husband, eh!”

  The young man wanted to know what she looked like, in the cave; if Sterling saw “it” all—or any of it, or what part—or which, and how long—and what way did they do it—

  “A nice-looking cunt on her, I bet,” the young lad said.

  At first Reggie did not know they were speaking about his wife. It was said so profanely and with such cynical amusement that it took time to come as true revelation in the winter air about someone he loved, said by someone he thought loved her as well.

  He was ready to burst through the doors and hit them, but something prevented him. They were both men who had once worked with Dan Auger, and at that time Auger had kept them straight.

  That is, they were both men from the woods who’d become useless now.

  And this is what the town did, it put the men from the woods to disgrace. They often wandered the streets in woods clothes like lost children, sanctified only by alcohol, teetering remnants of a world disappearing under their feet. What might have become of them if the great Dan Auger had lived? And how many times did Reggie try to help them find work?

  He crept to the warehouse door and listened. They spoke for a while about his wife and Owen, and how his wife was out for money and Reggie was a stepping stone. And that Camellia had married Reggie but she was really in love with Jameson long ago.

  “Who wrote him during the war? They had her marry Reggie to save the cripple bitch up the hill for Owen—who don’t know that?—even the best of our town know that.”

  “Love finds a way,” the young man giggled.

  All of this as dismal as it was, Reggie believed in his own heart, so he could not refute it. He thought of Camellia and Owen when they were youngsters—and it suddenly came to him that all of this was true, and that he had looked at the world only in shadow until now. The world of shadows had disappeared. They had been in a cave together and he pictured them there. Then the terrible thought of her mother being murdered in that same place filled him with dread.

  He listened in agony, and made no motion at all.

  They stopped speaking.

  For more than fifteen minutes Reggie waited for her uncle, a thin-chested man who had once worked for Owen’s father before drink took over his life, to speak again. But he did not.

  The younger man stood and pissed, wiped his mouth with the back of his woolen coat, the sleeve singed badly by a fire he had lighted the night b
efore to keep warm.

  Then he turned, pulled up his zipper, and asked if there was a chance at another bottle of wine.

  The old man said there might be, down at the pilings (where old dealed up boards were piled in the lumberyard), and they could steal it if they were smart and old Ned McGowan was not nearby. Then they spoke about stealing being a justified “element” in their lives, because everyone had stolen from them, and not just a little, but a whole enormous amount.

  “I’d have a million now if someone give me a break,” the younger man said.

  “Yes, yes,” Sterling said, “they’d be fuggin’ stealin’ from us.”

  Then they talked about the jobs they had been offered and turned down, and how much money they could have made but were no one’s slaves.

  The idea of being no one’s slaves seemed to prop them up, as they weaved in silence for a moment like two half-rotted hemlocks ready to go down.

  There was that kind of hushed chink of a bottle in the snow, and both men tottered off, toward the little gray lumberyard, jostling one another and in the end almost coming to blows.

  And Reggie thought: “Is this what will happen to me if I stay?”

  EIGHT

  That night Reggie walked through the numb, frozen yard, past the small intertwined houses of those who had come here on ships from Ireland more than a century before, to the house he and Camellia owned. Before they left Ireland, their respective families would gather to have a wake for them, for it was as if they were dying. Now, at this moment, Glidden wished his great-grandfather had died, so he wouldn’t have to face what it was he had to face. He wouldn’t suffer the pain of being human, of being only human and nothing more.

  He moved round to the back—and saw Camellia sitting in front of the little Foley girl whose hair she was braiding. Reggie remembered her doing this even as a young girl with other children she sought out—out of kindness or loneliness. Or both. And she too told Reggie she wanted a child.

  She had her housecoat on—the one he had bought her—and she took up a heavy lead comb and began to comb the child’s hair to braid.

  Then she jumped up and said: “Oh Vicki—your chocolate.”

  And he had to duck down.

  But if she had wanted a child, she so often had backed away from his embrace, he thought. She had married him to escape Lula’s father, he thought. (He had heard there had been an advance from Lula’s father toward her one night.)

  Reggie knew as well why she wanted a child. To make up for her own lost childhood—to be kind to children, for so few adults had been kind to her.

  That this was exactly the way Owen saw his own childhood did not register.

  But why then had they made love only five times?

  This trumped all other reason, and with this, as if he was hit in the mouth with the fist of clarity, the clarity of rumor or scandal and the cave, he knew he must have another life.

  “Leave her to herself, no matter,” he thought. He was quite convinced now that she used men to gain her way, and that he was just one along the path of her destiny.

  His one desire was to tell her off. To tell her to go to Owen when he was gone. But he knew at this moment he would not be able to be calm with her. And he had struck her once. So he decided to leave. It would be better—and he suspected more worrisome for her. That is, he wanted to cause her pain. If people thought he was dead for a little while, that might cause her the pain he desired.

  He slipped back to the warehouse and spent the night. Twice remembering battles, he sat straight up swinging.

  The next afternoon Reggie packed his cardboard suitcase and took the ferry across the river to a hotel on Water Street. There he stayed for a day under the name of his mother’s brother, Antoine Savoir.

  It was his intention now to leave forever. He was afraid if he did not he might injure himself or someone else. Owen especially. And that was the problem—that was the one person he couldn’t harm. That and his feeling that to work for anyone else here would only exacerbate the feelings rising against him now.

  When he went out on Friday evening along another part of the river, he stuck close to the buildings, his hat hiding his face. He noticed the strange looks of certain people who caught a glimpse of him. He believed they had all heard about his failures and all knew who he was, and why he was slouching against the dark gray buildings.

  He did not know, Reggie Glidden, who had knowledge of so much, but not how to fight disgrace, that his disgrace was nothing to others beset by problems of their own, and that those who saw him this night had not much thought about him, not knowing who he was or caring what he had done, or that he was the soldier Owen Jameson had saved. That in so many ways each one of them wrestled in the vague, undetermined universe against their own fears.

  He slipped out beyond the lights and houses and made his way silently across the river in the dark, to the poles lying above the old mill. They were the silent, great teetering of a structure never finished. Fifteen poles three feet apart and jousting eighteen feet above water that had just frozen, they stood like cannons, still and impotent, until the mind made of them what the mind would. They were put there by Will Jameson with the intent of constructing a great wharf for heavy ships, but had stayed mute and impotent since his death. They were part of Will Jameson’s great soul.

  Reggie decided to walk these poles or not live. To prove to himself that he was still what he once was.

  There was silence from the streets above, and amid the winter gales he stood alone—blasted in the furnace of snow, seeming far removed and isolated from other people—even from humanity itself. He wore a black coat and his heavy bent workboots, his shirt opened and his chest hair damp with snow and sweat.

  “They’ll be slippery,” he said, looking up at the pulsing sky.

  Just as Owen had once decided he would not go home, Reggie decided if his task succeeded he would forever leave the river and its people. That their tormenting had destroyed what he had loved here. You cannot love the soil where your soul was mocked by lesser men. So he was here and now saying goodbye to Camellia Dupuis, that lively, kind-hearted girl who had married him almost without thinking on that gray day six months before, but who had warred for him because of it.

  Still, how many times had they made love in their entire marriage? Five times, the last two nights before he went away.

  Was he insane to think then of leaving her to others? Or to risk his life on the rod of logs above his head?

  Perhaps, but good men are often their best when not hobbled by sanity. He looked up high.

  He caught a glimmer of what was in store for him now. If he went back to work, no man would say a thing to him, and no man would forget what was said about him or his wife.

  In a practical way, he must challenge the gods in order to have his humanity returned. He did not know great men wrestled the gods at all times, under all circumstances. That Will had as a boy of eighteen, and Owen had as a man running across a burned-over field.

  He only knew two things. One was that he cared for Owen, and could not harm him. The other was that he was actually quite brave in the war. Even as brave as Owen. That he could have, if he had just enough reason to do so, told people he had been brave.

  But he was ashamed of so much else.

  He was alone, and no one could help him. Always men stood in the middle so as to have support. His support now gone, he remembered the dismissal of men who had once sought his advice. Smiling tauntingly at him. Before, and proudly, he had contempt for all of them. Perhaps humility is what God sought from us, perhaps it was the only thing required.

  He walked down to the poles at midnight. He took off his heavy coat. It had bore the brunt of his fist against the wall, and had spots of blood upon it.

  He braced himself in the pelting snow, to prove who he was, if only to himself.

  He had promised he would take care of Owen in the war. And he had not. He did not at this moment think that a million people had hope
d to take care of theirs in the war, mothers and fathers helpless and desperate, and had not been able to.

  Taking a breath he walked straight up the tarred, blackened pole looking out over the great, dark river. If, as Will once said of him, he was a “prince of the forest,” then he was a lost one, just as in those pages of Lear that Owen carried onto Good Friday. Or as Macbeth had heard, the forest would come to him, as it had so abruptly to Will. But having never heard of William Shakespeare, what did that matter?

  He hated the logs that jutted into the open. He knew them too well. He, of course, had placed them there, fitted them when he was twenty. He walked right up to the tip of the first one, some twenty feet above the river ice. It swayed and teetered back and forth, he remembered now on what arc it swung.

  “I’m for the fuckers now, Will,” he said.

  Here, into the black, sad sky, he jumped.

  PART III

  ONE

  Owen Jameson and Camellia Dupuis would never know when this “energy,” this “force” that alienated them from the town, started. Nor were they entirely sure at first that they both were targeted. Camellia had found a friend in Owen—and, since orphaned at seven, it was the first friend she had ever had. Still, she was too carefree to see that it was dangerous to have a male friend—a rich one, too, and one she could easily be seen to love.

  She did not recognize this as others did, or even consider it as others did. Not with the man who had saved her husband.

  Her character was such that if she didn’t think disgrace, why should they?

  Only a little later did she realize the much more volatile truth. She found this out when she went to ask a woman on her street why she forbade her child to see Camellia after school.