The woman came outside, closed the briny half-wrecked door, and coughing in the dark, cold air said: “Yer fuckin’ him, arncha?” In such a hilarious anointing of blame that Camellia laughed.
Camellia was finally hit with the realization of how her own grace was treated by others.
“Tell yer child to come over anytime,” she said, still managing a smile. “We get along so well—you see I’m not much more than a big kid myself.”
There was a statuette at the house, bought by Will, of The Kiss by Rodin. It was from Dante’s Inferno; adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, kissing at the gates of hell. Though Will had not known what the statuette actually represented, Owen did. And he knew that he and Camellia were branded by a kiss.
It was a silly moment, his frivolous kiss.
From this kiss a liberty had been taken, not by them but by certain people in town who by December of 1946 wanted or needed them for scandal. It was such a lively thing after the war.
That Owen bore men up to the Good Friday without his Push Reggie Glidden, was all the town needed to feel rumor warranted.
That Reggie had married Camellia was looked upon as a crudity marrying a child. It was in fact hilarious, and showed the Browers for who they were.
Looking back, one might say who better than Camellia, who more than anyone else had tried to maintain her equilibrium despite her father and her mother. Who had tried to keep her uncle Sterling out of jail, and who had married Reggie hoping for a happy life, or at least a life without trouble.
Now people were turning their gaze upon her.
Almost every night that fall, Uncle Sterling would be waiting for money. She told him that Owen was her friend—and that Reggie would come home because she prayed for him to do so.
“Do you really pray?” Sterling would ask, “or do you just go up to church for show because of Les and Trudy?” (her father and mother).
“Oh yes—I tell you, I go to church—and I do pray—I say an Our Father and multiple Hail Marys—for I want my man back home safe.”
“Ahhh—your man at home,” Sterling would say, raising his eyes in false and cunning intrigue.
Over the dim, longing, guttered candles she prayed, as her great-grandmother had done in the same spot a century before, her head bowed, her hands folded like a child at confirmation, as the night crept silently on.
But after a while, she realized she couldn’t say anything to Sterling because he was taking it wrong and telling people everything she said.
She became sickly looking and had weak spells after this. Her whole idea of what was happening changed.
So she tried then not to speak to Owen. But by mid-December things were bound in one direction.
The cave, one of Lula’s Steadfast Few wrote her in a Christmas card. It happened at the cave—you know certain women go there to wait for lovers—that is why her mother was killed, because of Byron Jameson—well, like mother like daughter. A certain soldier went there to wait for a woman—that that woman was your best friend and that you were betrothed to the soldier makes it all the more mean. And makes us all so angry.
Every sentiment recorded in this letter was a lie, even the idea that Lula’s friends, who no longer visited her, were angry. Yet Lula had nothing else to hold on to. And she believed it entirely at least for the moment, even though she herself had started it.
TWO
The day after Reggie in secret ran the top of those poles, a day overcast with sudden apprehensive squalls of snow, and the big tree being lighted in the square, there was a phone call to the house—the thirty-third day of the haul.
Camellia had arrived on this cold day, having walked up the hill in the soundlessness of early morning.
It had been almost three weeks since she had heard a word from him.
“He’s probably run off,” Sterling had said. “Run off why?” she had replied.
“Oh, you know—he’s probably heard all about it,” Sterling had said, winking.
The phone call then concerned what she most feared in her life: Reggie’s disappearance. No one knew where he was. He had been missing some while—four or five days now.
“Is he home?” his cousin from Saint John asked.
“No—he wouldn’t come home—I have been waiting to hear from him.”
“But he said he was going home,” his cousin stated. “He said you wanted him to come home—he was going home to see you and be Push.”
“But he said he wouldn’t come—” Camellia said.
The cousin, Billy Monk, was silent for a moment, then added in a sterner voice: “Something is not right here, Camellia—I mean, why would he tell me you needed him home if he wasn’t going there—?”
Before she could answer or even think of a possibility he had hung up.
A Detective Gaugin of the Saint John department then phoned Camellia, first to ask if Reggie was at home, and then to tell her her husband, if not at home, was missing—unless he was on his way home.
There was no dispute on the dock, so then was there a domestic dispute? He asked all of this as if he was offering a prize for the correct answer—and he already knew all about her, this Mr. Gaugin. (For he had heard much from Billy Monk that he would not argue—first that she was the daughter of the “violent criminal” Les Dupuis who had killed his philandering wife in a domestic dispute.)
“There was no domestic dispute,” Camellia said. It was the second time in her life she had heard the phrase “domestic dispute.” Like the word adultery, another word she had not heard in many years, it would become more and more common to her as time passed. It would become almost riveted in her brain, like a teamster would rivet a runner to a birch pole.
“Then what was he doing in Saint John?”
Camellia did not answer. Not for her sake, but for Reggie’s.
“Did you argue the last time you spoke to him?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, and though not wanting to, she started to cry.
“Well—try to remember,” Detective Gaugin stated. “And try to stop blubbering,” he cautioned.
Camellia ran to the large old office to see Owen, who was preparing to meet with Mr. Trethewey, the owner of the big black Percherons. He was coming north to help them even though he was an old man now. It was to be his last hurrah— Good Friday Mountain.
“Something has happened to my Reggie,” was all Camellia said. Her face was frightened in a kind of surprised and reflective attitude, as if she expected Owen to tell her what was happening, that everything was a surprise for Christmas. She was ready to smile at this delusion if he allowed it. Again she looked like that child of seven who was left waiting for her father.
Owen phoned Saint John but got no answer at Reggie’s cousin. Now Camellia was frantic—and it was the frantic, guilty state others were to notice and reflect upon her today.
“She’s worried now,” the older maid said, thinking this was unusual unless someone was unusually guilty. “All her kissing has done her in!”
Now the entire household was caught up in this event. It was the start of something that would last for months, seeping through the carpet and furniture like the smell of horses.
Sometime later a call came from the town police.
They had found Reggie Glidden’s jacket at the conical poles near Jameson’s old family warehouse, and Chief Crossman wondered what he had been doing there, and why Owen hadn’t told them he was in town. Here Owen made his first mistake, angered by this disruption, worried for Camellia’s sake, and feeling the pain in his leg he snapped: “I didn’t know I had to inform you of him.” Realizing this was not the best response, he added, “Besides, I don’t know why he was there. Are you sure it is his jacket?”
“Yes—”
“How?”
“Well, it has his name stitched into it—maybe by Camellia herself,” Crossman said, as if this act of domesticity was part of the proof of culpability. “But even so, she might come to identify it—and there is some
thing else we found we might just talk to you about.”
“Where is it again?” Owen asked, trying to fathom what was being said.
“Well it was on your property,” Crossman stated, as if, since this was a revelation to him, it should in some way frighten Owen Jameson.
Owen made perhaps another fundamental mistake. He simply hung up.
“He might have gone to your place,” Owen said. “Let’s go there.”
“But I have to wax the hallway floor here,” she said.
The old maid smiled, taking this as a ruse.
“Not now,” Owen answered angrily. This frightened her even more.
They went to Camellia and Reggie’s small house. Clothes hung over the side grate, a piece of toast was half eaten that morning, but it was not Reggie’s.
It was the first time that Camellia looked at the very house as an indictment against her. This old place of Eric Glidden’s—a place that had been contested at his death by others from Injun town, her uncle Sterling being one, and claimed by Reggie as the only thing he had to give her. Now empty of him, it shot her through the heart.
THREE
Owen took Camellia in his Jeep, and traveled to his father’s old mill. What a dreary nineteenth-century place, at the foot of Injun town—it was only used now to store dealed up board in the spring. The poles jutting out were the last leftover monument of Will Jameson’s greatness. A greatness ended before he was twenty. Again Owen thought he was not the man for this—that some huge joke was being played upon him, and that for some reason Camellia was part of the con against him, even if she did not know.
Some of Reggie’s former friends now feared Glidden dead, and the acts of ridicule against him after the war were heavy upon them. They knew these acts of ridicule and torment had gone exceedingly well against this man, and they had done so just to see how far they could go, and to fill up their own famine. That, in essence, is why they threw pulp sticks at his chained-up body.
They were, as they said later, “caught up in it.” They even had bets on how long Camellia would stay faithful.
Now, all of this was creeping under their skin, in a kind of self-accusation.
Their attention turned to Owen, and all the terrible things they had said about Reggie dissipated among themselves and were blamed, or at least readjusted, upon he who they now focused on.
“I think there’s somethin’ up,” Sterling said, shaking his head, as if he was telling a confidence that he didn’t want to break.
Then the person he told this to would overhear Sterling ten minutes later saying to someone else: “I think there’s some-thin’ up.”
By this time there was across town a sudden speculation that Owen and Camellia would leave soon and not be back.
This came from someone’s doorway at ten o’clock that morning. It was the principal opening in a gambit to make them both liable. Those who said it felt it to be true, and so told others in their circle. That is, as with so much rumor, one promotes the sin more than the blame.
It drifted back, this sin, over the gray afternoon toward the dock.
“What are you doing here?” Sterling asked Cora Auger. “This ain’t no place for you, dear!”
“Just waiting,” she said, “just waiting—union will come, and he will go.” And she smiled, nodding toward Owen, her two front teeth just slightly rotted, and then frowned and looked back toward the water.
Cora wanted them (that is the constabulary) to know that she was here not for herself but for justice. She had a toff of fuzzy brown hair above her forehead that made her ears naked and small, plump legs and wore a tattered scarf. She was one of Camellia’s enemies in school, for Camellia had been terrified of her and Cora had prided herself on having a murderer’s daughter frightened.
She was also an enemy of the Jamesons. Why wouldn’t she be? She was Dan Auger’s daughter.
The police had this idea too, that Owen would try to spirit Camellia away, and decided to watch them. They had not leaned toward flight until others speculated, but managed to make it their own observation.
Yet where would they go?
They would take a ferry across the river and head down the coast of the United States to Florida. That this rumor had also started in the house on George Street more than a week before was lost at this moment.
So where this idea had come from no one knew, but it went from Pond to Pleasant to King George Highway in a matter of minutes.
Lula was informed by Solomon Hickey that this is what would happen.
“Be prepared for it,” he said.
She cast her eyes downward, and said nothing at all.
People were informing everyone now, across the town.
All in the name of love.
“Of sex, you mean,” an old woman blurted, laughing and sniffing. “Of dirty, stinkin’, rotten, no good, humpin’ sex—”
And a neighbor roared and laughed over the back fence, because she was such a wag.
FOUR
Camellia and Owen did not know they were off to Florida, and did not particularly want to go there. Nor had they ever been to the cave since they were boy and girl and had met there one day when swimming. Camellia was so outgoing and Owen was so shy that finally he ran up the cliff and hid in the grass.
Both remembered this, and neither spoke of it now.
In fact, there was a slight feeling Owen had, besides all the work and worry of Good Friday, of being put upon suddenly by Camellia. He did not want to react like this—it was selfish, he knew. There must be others to take care of her, Owen suddenly thought. That is, no matter how he was viewed, he still viewed himself as somewhat of an outsider in this episode, and thought, ironically, that the police would do the same. But how did his detached reaction come across?
With the men, it seemed quite natural—for they decided Owen had had her already in bed—and as men know with women they do not love, once had, fast gone. That is why he was aloof.
Sterling pointed this out to Cora Auger.
“Be like eternity staying with the skimpy bitch afterward—He’s got hisself in a pot.”
In fact, Owen discovered on this long, painful day that he was the only one on Camellia’s side.
It dawned on him as he caught in the very corner of his eye that woman, who he did not know was Cora Auger, looking at him with a curious, distant stare.
This made no terrible or immediate impression upon him, but sometime later—before it all came crashing down—it would. Her look was intense, self-promoting, and hilarious, as if she had discovered in Camellia the large flaw she had always sought against the Jamesons themselves.
People stared at the poles, the river, the black pebbles glazed with ice and snow beneath their feet, and everywhere white snow that made the wet world dismal, that blocked out the view of the sun.
When Chief Crossman showed Camellia the coat, she burst out crying.
She explained the phone calls much differently than Reggie’s cousin Billy, who said that Camellia was asking for a divorce (a very extreme thing in 1946), but Crossman, gruff and knowledgeable, inspecting the poles as she spoke, had some reservations about her story.
Crossman was absorbed in the idea of a man killing himself, and it seemed odd he would do so because someone offered him a job as foreman.
“So when you offered him this job,” Crossman said, “did he seem confused or angry or somepun?”
“No, he did not sound confused,” Camellia replied. Crossman shrugged, told her the poles were glazed with ice and no man would ever be able to walk them.
“Reggie would—he can waltz on a varr skid,” Owen said (which meant he could waltz on a slick log in the middle of the river). But saying this brought no comfort to Owen, who was using one of Will’s expressions. Men nearby knew this, and Owen, suddenly embarrassed, knew they did.
Then Crossman showed him the letter from Estabrook that was found in the coat pocket.
“Did you know anything about this?”
&nb
sp; Owen was stunned and looked hurt. But this look might have come just as much because he was guilty.
He didn’t answer, simply stared at Crossman and asked if a diver had been down.
“For fifteen minutes in a bell, but the current is too strong here—” Crossman said without looking his way, suddenly catching the mood of the crowd and being politic enough to use it.
Men crowded about Owen, looking at him as a curiosity, and his leg became inflamed. He felt pain shoot out, and grimaced. These men, some or many who for years drank near this warehouse, fought and squabbled, men who had been gassed in the first war, or psychologically destroyed, now simpered and smirked at him, as if they had caught him at something even more than they themselves had ever been caught at.
This was the most dreaded aspect of the crowd—their easy adjustment to vengeance and the blame of others.
He thought for the first of many times of Oscar Wilde led from court into the city street.
“This is what being a suspect will do,” Owen said.
Crossman glanced up at him, and put Estabrook’s letter away before it became too much of a curiosity.
Owen walked to the water. He stared down at the ice. He, too, saw some small spots of blood.
The idea that there was blood on the sleeve of the coat, as if Reggie had tried to defend himself, was a notable thing, though many there had thrown pulp sticks against that very same arm.
“Poor bastard,” the young man drinking with Sterling said.
Owen turned away from them. He would have to get a diver. He saw Camellia standing hunched up along the side of the old warehouse. He remembered her father. He had been twelve at the time. It had seemed like a great adventure to hang someone then. He remembered a picture of her in the paper, standing with a bottle of nail polish (what her parents had gotten her that Christmas) on a side street smiling—as if it was an adventure for her as well. That picture was an enormous weight upon her. Kids made fun of her then for that little bottle. Yes—he himself if he wanted to admit it. So, she had startled them all and had risen a beauty.
The Friends of Meager Fortune Page 11