The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  How now to see her fallen.

  Walking back from the water he saw a dozen men still staring at him.

  “Do you have something to tell me?” he asked them.

  They immediately turned their backs and left. As always, Owen was much more of a match than his physical appearance would indicate.

  Owen walked with a cane—it was either walk with a cane or not walk. He was, in the dreary afternoon of pointed snow, somewhat of a caricature. Major Owen Jameson.

  He bore little resemblance to his father, or his famous brother, but to someone of Mary’s ancestry on another continent in another time, in fact a man who walked Ireland 134 years before.

  Crossman hadn’t liked Owen’s famous brother, for he took too much for granted. Too many fights, and not enough prosecutions. Nor had the prosecutor Brower liked these people. It seemed now that events might come together so others would not like them either. However, Crossman for all his suspicion and gruffness did like Camellia.

  Certain people came to talk to Owen, even if it was only about the rumor of death.

  “God almighty—would he jump off at this time a year?” The idea being that if one were going to kill themselves they would at least do it when the weather was pleasant. Owen looked up in a heartbeat for the short, hard woman whose eyes had bore into him. He no longer saw her.

  “I figure it murder,” Sterling’s young drinking companion said.

  “We’ll be back when the body comes up,” Sterling added.

  And soon all dissipated in fading sounds along the graying, snowy lanes.

  FIVE

  Camellia talked to Crossman when they went to the jail, for he wanted a missing person report filed.

  Five-foot-ten with red hair, 160 pounds, last seen in Saint John, New Brunswick, wearing the coat now found. She asked for the coat back. Of course not. Crossman spoke to Estabrook by phone briefly, and kept the letter.

  “It seems he was going to go work for Estabrook,” Crossman said. “Perhaps you should have told us that.”

  Owen listened to this—listened with what eagerness Camellia tried to say the right things—understood the way Crossman spoke to her, and became himself more aware of a noose tightening for no apparent reason. He could distance himself from her now, with one word. He still had the power to do so. But he must be very quick if he was to do it. He knew he couldn’t. It would be deplorable.

  He sat near the secretary, in the blank, cold outer room where she had her desk, and came in three times a week.

  The secretary took an interest in Owen, just when he wanted to be unresponsive, and began asking him questions. He became aware of the unsettling propensity in her, too, for assumption, and understood that people assumed it their right to assume something between Camellia and he. That the sin was already monstrous and dark. To say that he was only trying to help Camellia seemed utterly ridiculous given what was perceived.

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t a been there the other night—you might have saved him all over again,” the secretary said, smiling quickly. She had no idea that this was a witty thing to say until she said it.

  It was after six at night when they left the old jail and made their way through the winter dark, past certain dirty brick buildings, over to the center of town. The buildings hung in fog, the docks looked pitiless and silent. The old Miramichi Hotel, its lights gleaming in a shroud, winked out at them, saying: “We have overcome tyranny.”

  Other lights cast through curtains in back kitchens, where now and again a squalid shout erupted amid the cry of a town full of children, the age of baby boomers now beginning, being born—who would look back upon this age of their infancy as quaintly innocent, hybrid of hope and money.

  But for these two there was a moment of startling awareness of the most innocuous shadow or movement or glance.

  She nervously clutched her hands and tried to smile.

  “I lost the letter,” she said, looking through her pockets.

  “What letter?” (For a moment he thought it was the one from Estabrook to Reggie.)

  “I was supposed to give you a letter from Lula—I can’t find it now. I just remembered it—was in this pocket—or maybe my dress pocket—if it were in my dress pocket, that means I washed it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. But he knew that everything mattered now, and thought of how Brower was so abrupt with him on the phone.

  Camellia’s idea was that if she did the right things, sooner or later everyone would see her to be worthy despite the love she held for a murderer, her own father, and for her uncle, who took much of the salary she earned at Mary Jameson’s and who Reggie had once threatened in order to protect her. So, having forgotten about and then losing the letter was a greater matter to her than to others. She looked like an outcast. Her hands were red with cold and chapped from scrubbing floors, her stockings wrinkled and torn over the knees, and she kept blowing on her fingers and looking about. He was dressed in a warm long winter coat.

  Then she looked at him a very brief moment, as she blew on her hands, and saw themselves in the eye of a storm.

  Owen said: “Maybe he came back and for some reason doesn’t want to be seen right away.”

  He knew that sounded patently absurd.

  She was shivering with cold and he took his coat off and put it over her, not minding her protest or the stares of those down the street.

  They turned in the direction of her house.

  “What in God’s name was the point of saving my husband in the war—only to see him destroy himself a year later because of you—if that is what he did?”

  It is what many were asking, and it was not God they were accusing.

  The next day Camellia put an appeal in the paper asking for information concerning the whereabouts of Reginald McDonald Glidden, veteran, missing since December 13, 1946, five-foot-ten, 160–165 pounds, hazel eyes, twenty-nine years old, last seen in port of Saint John, December 12, 3:30 in the afternoon.

  She started going to mass each morning, and then made her way toward the great old Jameson house. After work, she took various routes home to her house on Pond Street because, though she never told anyone, some teenaged boys had begun to tease her. Boys she had played softball with in the back lots of town, now thinking she would be a better partner somewhere else.

  Unfortunately the children she had loved no longer visited, even though she still stopped at the bakery to buy them squares.

  Every night Sterling was waiting for her—trying to engage her in conversation. She did not know he was being paid by the police a dollar for each bit of information, and he took to his obligation with gusto. Because he was protecting his family name.

  “Are you sure,” Sterling would say, “that you didn’t see him? God almighty, girl, he couldn’t a just up and disappeared. You think the police have any information—what do you think they’d have to know in order to solve it? You know Owen was always a spoiled-up brat, that one—and the coat was found with a heap of blood spots—what d’ya think?”

  She gave him money, as if a bribe, she had no idea what else to do. Then he would run to the police, understandably excited that he was involved, a conscientious member of our town, and tell the police that she was bribing him.

  “I almost didn’t take it,” he said.

  After supper once again she would brave the dark and cold, and walk up the long torturous lanes, visit the holy Catholic church, sit in the pew and stare at the gaudy brass crucifix, light a candle for five cents.

  It was during these visits to the church that her home was entered almost at will by Sterling—though never ordered, he felt he had the sanction of the police to find out what he could. On one occasion he made away with coins and other things out of an old dress pocket. He stuffed them away, and with great ego walked about the house he took as his own.

  He spent these coins—172 cents—on a bottle of loganberry wine. He looked at the colored glass from the dress pocket, not knowing it was her hops
cotch glass, and threw it away.

  He went to the cave and drank half of the wine by himself, blowing his nose and tossing what he took to be Kleenex from the dress, behind him, deeper into the cave.

  Two days later, going back with a woman—High Bank Hilda—to lie down and drink the rest of the wine, he discovered the stained and torn letter from Lula Brower to Owen.

  Insensible as to how it got there, it became Sterling’s major find. It made him a hero in our town.

  He took it to Mr. Brower himself, and shaking and sniffing handed it over, saying: “If I ever thought she’d act like that there—but to make a heap of fun of that fine crippled girl just turns me mean!”

  That it was found in the cave was the most damning indictment of all.

  For Lula, who had started this rumor, it made her realize that Sterling was a liar and almost none of the story was true.

  SIX

  Mary sat in the bedroom on her pale green rocker, staring through the white window at the snow falling and blotting up the roads and the white houses in the distance. It was a terrible world. On clear, cold days she could see down over the rails to where Will was buried with a massive tombstone—she had spared no expense and had his bust carved in the marble stone.

  Here lies Will Conner Jameson. A great man.

  He was, and yet she thought the very things the old Indian woman had spoken about in her soft, lilting accent were now coming true. What must she do to stop them?

  After Owen came home that night from vainly searching for Reggie, she looked at him in apology. She was almost ready to tell him that it might be better if he left, and did go to Montreal, when he said: “I have to get the Percherons up the mountain—I’ll have to see Trethewey—the world doesn’t stop because Reggie fell off.”

  Mary followed him, on heavy slippers and tired legs, into the large, uncomfortable, and manly office once occupied by her husband and then by her oldest son. At one time she refused to come in here. Nothing, not a thing had changed since the moment of Will’s death.

  There was a picture taking up three-quarters of the far wall. It was almost surreal in its application of the unseen truth of the world—therefore a myth, therefore nothing at all. Owen looked at it, and Mary stood behind him.

  It was a modern print of the painting, illustrating the great legend of the devil and the woodsmen; Will had picked it up when he was on the Penobscot in 1932, and had brought home to study. He ignored it for some time, until Dan Auger’s death, and then he studied it for hours.

  The story the painting told was this: Once upon a time a canoe filled with woodsmen out to see their children New Year’s Day was transported through the night on the devil’s back. Satan knew the world, and had appeared to a camp of lonely men, deep in some forlorn, lost wood, in the middle of the previous century. Knowing what they would give for the comfort of a look, he offered this proposition: They could see their loved ones if they would give up their simple, pedestrian souls.

  So these woodsmen had to trick the devil in order to see their loved ones again and not be damned.

  They did this at the last moment by touching the cross on top of the church steeple as the devil rode them to their houses.

  Looking at Satan’s smokelike form underneath the large canoe, the dark earth below, Owen remembered an old priest once telling him that the devil’s greatest feat was to convince millions of men and women he did not exist.

  He thought of this and shuddered at the predicament now forming like smoke about him.

  And there was something he had not told Mary when he first went into the crowded camp a month ago. How startled he was, because of something he and Will had done as a joke when they were children.

  On a summer day long ago in the 1920s they had stolen four of Estabrook’s live beaver and had run away with them, when he was visiting their father at the old camp at Arron Brook. They were going to kill the beavers, but neither had the heart. Then they realized the trouble they would be in with their father if they got caught.

  So they decided to put them somewhere they would never be found.

  They trekked all day and late into that evening, and let the beavers go on a ledge up Good Friday. At that time, if Owen remembered, though the stand went long up the mountain, it was dry and hardly a tree was growing well. The place was called Good Friday because one cedar grew there in the shape of a cross higher than all the others.

  That night they slept half inside a log, near the forks of Arron Brook by the south talons. The next day they told their frantic father they’d gotten lost.

  “Did you see me beaver?” Old Estabrook asked.

  “I saw them in the back of yer truck yesterday, sir,” Will said, which was not a lie at all.

  “Well, I am out the pelts, boy,” Estabrook said, for some reason staring at Owen.

  “All we can do is help you look,” Will said, and he offered to go up toward Hackett Brook, which was in the opposite direction whence they came.

  What Owen realized was this: the real possibility that the beaver they had released had by their own industry created the flood plain that nourished the very trees he was now harvesting.

  If this was the case, Will himself was responsible for this abundance, which would save the industry he had died for.

  This was startling destiny—but only if he believed it. Believing it allowed all kinds of silly notions, like Saint Jude. Or Hamlet’s assertion: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Owen had believed Hamlet’s assertion from the time he was fifteen, but had always equated the “more” as science. That is, he had thought of himself as Hamlet, not Horatio. Camellia, standing in his mind’s eye, was telling him something vastly different with her silly Saint Jude medal. Something that went beyond every assertion he had made since he was a boy of fifteen, when he had first heard of Joyce and Hemingway and others.

  And he did not like it one little bit. This new and terrible feeling that entered the room with Camellia. He had in fact wandered the world to rid himself of it. How could he be back here now, imbued by it? By superstition. By woodsmen and superstition. As if superstition was here alone, and not in every university his friends attended.

  He turned to his mother and said emphatically that he would see this through. “For Will, and Buckler—and for you.”

  Still, what Practical Mary knew was this: she and Buckler had had an offer to sell to Sloan—and why hadn’t they? They hadn’t because of Owen. As strange as that was, it was true. And it was Camellia who had encouraged them, by convincing the men to stop the train so the Jamesons could keep their mill. She had been both happy and pleading, optimistic and sincere—all the things she was now suspect because of. It had been her great coup, this Camellia Dupuis.

  “If Owen comes home he might get everything turned in the right direction,” Camellia had said. Why had Mary trusted this vengeful and unstable daughter of Les Dupuis? The daughter of a murderer, killer, and sadist.

  “She is a liar that one, for sure,” Mary thought. She didn’t like to think this, but her toughness allowed mistakes in her character, and one was rashness of temperament.

  Everyone now was phoning Mary with advice, and she was trying to take this advice.

  “Make damn sure the blood is not on his hands,” they were telling her.

  “The blood better not be,” she said.

  She began at almost every moment of the day to look at his hands.

  Tonight, not seeing blood, she asked Owen did he regret having stopped.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  She asked him if he regretted having been put to work on Good Friday Mountain.

  “Well, I regret that more,” he smiled.

  Early the next morning Owen hired a diver, Matheson, a man he had known in the service, who came immediately and went down for thirty minutes in the river, under the ice. There was nothing to report when he came out. It was a useless and fruitless exercise,
looked upon as theater by the two or three loud drunks now watching.

  Matheson, too, thought it useless. He kept an eye on Camellia, wondering what she was like. He had been told that morning that she had thrown her husband over for this man. That she had planned it all along. That in fact she had convinced her husband to take a job in Saint John, and then had convinced Mary Jameson to stop the train. Reggie had come home and they’d had to get rid of him.

  He had been told this by his neighbor, the older maid at the Jameson house.

  “They’ll come to no good,” she said. “Like Will, like Owen—it will be done. She’s a whore—knew it the first time she waggled her arse when she was sixteen. Puttin’ on airs in front of us, you should see her hiking her skirt up to her bum when she does the floor!”

  (He would like to, he thought.)

  The rumor had a center and its apex was somewhere in Camellia’s past, with her disgraced and hanged father, who was also a wife killer. A brutal sadist, and if you looked closely you could see it in Camellia—if, as the maid said, you looked at her closely.

  The truth being that a good, decent family had taken her in as a child. A pedestrian, careful family, and look what had happened. She had mocked them now and had stolen that girl’s man.

  “She has Practical Mary bamboozled too,” the old maid said. “Mary never had a girl and was all gushy when she come to the house—I said, I said to Mary—get rid of her, get rid of her now—what I said—”

  Perhaps that is why Camellia was drawn and ill looking. What she had done was finally catching up to her. Matheson remembered her too as being utterly happy-go-lucky, and always having to be reined in by adults whenever she was out.

  That, he knew, would work against her now.

  “A body might be pulled out to the bay—” he told Owen.

  Owen nodded and turned away. The difficulty for him was unmistakable—to save a man only to have him kill himself because in some way you made him think he was unworthy.