The Friends of Meager Fortune
Page 14
“Do not presume to tell me what befits a fucking boss,” Owen Jameson said, rubbing his face in exasperation. And Tomkins was silent.
However, Owen considered and said he would give Tomkins an extra day’s wage.
Before dark the next night, after Richardson put Butch over to the tend team and was trying to straighten a harness with his one arm, Owen called to him. Richardson said he would turn over his team if Owen wanted. (His team and two others were owned by Jameson—one Tomkins thought should be his team.)
“It might be better all around if I went out,” Richardson said. “I don’t like Mr. Tomkins.”
Richardson was ill tempered and did not take to slights. Still, Owen said no, that Richardson was for him on Good Friday.
“Go back to your team,” he said, “and keep your fuckin’ temper to yourself.”
Richardson pondered, and said he would not throw his hatchet again.
As night came, Owen thought it was settled. Tomkins went over to his bunk and hauled the blankets up about him.
The next morning bright and early Tomkins was awake. And suddenly, as if inspired, he looked over at little Meager Fortune, who had lighted the fire and was now helping the cook.
“Meager,” Tomkins said, winking and smiling at all the others, “how many kids have you given yer wife now?”
“Only one,” Meager answered. “Duncan—he is a little boy—a lot like others, mischievous and full of fun—and he and I someday will take a trip—as I told him—”
“Ah well, she must have had all the others by me,” Tomkins interrupted, and then guffawed at his own joke.
EIGHT
The next night, with Meager Fortune staying in with the horses and little camp scrounger Nancy, the men started out for Christmas all hearing of the great excitement now being talked about in town. But as far as Christmas Eve, it was quiet. There was a report of the search that Owen and Camellia had taken of all the haunts on the river trying to find poor Reggie Glidden.
They were followed by her uncle Sterling, who then informed the police.
One other bit of information was that she had gone to the doctor.
“Whadya think of that there,” Sterling said, sniffing down a head of snot.
Yet on Christmas morning in 1946 a pivotal incident happened that would shape the events on Good Friday Mountain.
Tomkins met Sonny Estabrook at their church service about or shortly after eleven a.m. This was seen and later reported by their minister.
Although Estabrook rarely spoke to this man, seeing a chance at the side door he asked him how he was.
“How you’d expect, being up there,” Stretch said and cast a cold eye in the snow. “They fired me daddy.”
“I know that, boy,” Sonny said, “a disgrace.”
Sonny, in spontaneous enthusiasm, took Tomkins by the arm and led him to his car, asked him back to the house that afternoon for a drink. Stretch Tomkins looked baffled, his lips opened, and he tried to say something in reply—but even after the car drove off, he stood in the snow and bleating wind, astounded.
He was told, however, not to mention this to anyone. And he did not.
That afternoon as Tomkins sat in dignified embarrassment in the room that had entertained lords and ladies from bygone Britain, with its maps and giant woodland caribou rack on the walls, Sonny spoke of a great change coming to the woodlots. Tomkins, dressed even better than he had for church, looked dignified and humbled by turn—doing all he could to react the way he thought the great Sonny Estabrook would want him to. Finally, after Sonny spoke to him about golf—a game poor Tomkins had never before witnessed—he came to the point.
“What I need is a man up there to see if everyone is treated well—” Sonny said. As always, he said things sadly, as if he refused to believe in the duplicity of others. “He is not a good man, that lad—I liked his brother Will, and his dad was a champ—but he’s now foolin’ around with that woman—well, you knew Reggie?”
“Yes,” Tomkins said, nodding his head, “yes—I knew Reggie—very best of a man.”
“A champ,” Sonny said. “He was going to come work for me—well, the police know—so that’s the way it goes—a champ.”
“Oh, a champ—work for you—good for him,” Tomkins said. “A champ.” He spied the enormous chandelier in the far room, cold and diligent and dead in the frozen epoch of afternoon, and looked quickly back in fearful timidity—wondering how he could act to make an impression.
He crossed his legs and then uncrossed them, he sat forward and then sat back. He picked up his hat and then put it down.
“But I feel—I mean, are you okay?” Sonny asked.
“I’m okay—but they—well, someone up there tried to kill me,” Tomkins said, his face reddening and looking out at his host in sudden hysteria.
“Goddamn!” Sonny said. He was so outraged by this. As Tomkins knew anyone should be. He looked at his drink and said nothing more. He just shook his head.
However, Sonny had a proposition for him. It would allow bonus—more money than he would see in a year—if he did it. Sonny was taking a gamble here—and he was taking it simply because of the new situation Owen had found himself in with this woman. He felt he could rely upon the town to turn against his adversary.
And so he told Tomkins what he wanted.
Tomkins was a stamper on the skid road. That is, he marked the yarded timber after it was scaled with the Jameson stamp to separate it from all the other wood on the river.
Estabrook wanted Tomkins to mark Jameson’s wood with an Estabrook stamp.
Tomkins stared at him, unable to breathe. He loosened his tie, which he had tied with such joy just a few hours before.
Sonny did not take his eyes off him. His face turned warm and compassionate. He reached out and touched Tomkins’ knee. “They make you do the stamping, don’t they?” he asked.
That is, he knew and had for two months who would be stamper of much of the wood at the lower end. Tomkins was so filled with awe he could not speak. He only wondered why Sonny would want him to do this.
“For the men,” Sonny said, blaspheming without a trace of embarrassment, “for the union really—”
“I—see,” Tomkins said, who didn’t see a thing.
The truth, as always, was somewhere else. Sonny had discovered something terrible from his people. He had discovered that the wood he had fought the Jamesons for, for the last seven years, was no good. That did not mean an acre was bad, it meant the whole damn tract was not fit to put a scale to. For the last week he had been beside himself wondering how to save his year. He had phoned Bots in Fredericton and begged him to force Jameson to trade cuts. He would cut the great cedar trees on Good Friday.
Bots not only could not do this, he burst out laughing. It was the first time anyone had ever laughed at an Estabrook.
Why hadn’t this been known before? The only thing he could think is that he had been made a dupe, the first year at the head of his family enterprise.
So this is the offer he made to lowly Tomkins in a very understated manner, with an indication that he would be well taken care of. And his father—the scaler who was fired just at the start of the season—would be paid for this year.
Sonny smiled, and waited for an answer.
“My dad will be paid?”
“Of course—he was determined to scale off Buckler’s mountain—so I will pay him.”
This subterfuge would not save Estabrook’s entire year—but if the wood got to the water with his stamp, and then into the big communal boom where it was sorted, it was his wood, and therefore he would or might break even.
He took out an envelope with $350 and lay it on the table. Tomkins had his head down, his new tie, his new shiny boots, his hat in his hand.
After Christmas, the town itself shrank from winter, ice across the sidewalks like the backs of shells, and wind blowing the great oak trees, the sun a spot far away. Each day came darker and colder, the houses tighter and
meaner unto themselves.
January appeared with a gale that blotted land and river in white; small sheds and shacks bravely looked out over the river upon a desert of snow.
Owen was forced to accept that he was here now, and even if his intention had been honorable, he was looked upon very differently. He saw Camellia infrequently, for he felt the town’s scrutiny and realized that her position was compromised by him. She did not know this or care—she still told people, and the paper (a journalist came to speak to her on December 31, 1946), that Owen was her best friend. While before it had sounded innocent to him, now it was looked upon as much more insidious. Not a thing had changed, but, as Shakespeare warned, thinking makes it so. Still, he could not stay away, and twice walked by her house. The gaiety, warmth, and humor the people knew her for was now looked upon as wiles. Though more than a few supported her, the idea that she was uncommonly cruel was a by-product of the mystery.
So Owen, who wanted to keep her safe, and perhaps himself, tried his best not to succumb to an impulse to see her, and looked agitated when her name was mentioned. However, people knew he was agitated when her name was mentioned.
Therefore, many people thought that he and Camellia would turn on each other like guilty parties often do. That is, people had decided already on the sin, and on the retribution to come, without any compelling evidence to warrant either. That this was embellished in the small barbershop of Mr. Solomon Hickey should not be considered entirely Mr. Hickey’s fault.
Still, what Owen was experiencing now—after his brief moment in the spotlight, in the warmth and adulation of people—was a turning against him, which is a common, almost universal occurrence.
Mackey, the coroner who had wanted to have dinner with him, now refused to look in his direction; Estabrook, who had phoned him to congratulate him, now shrank from him.
To offset this, they said it wasn’t and couldn’t be thought of as envy—for look how much they had admired Will, and how they cared for Reggie Glidden.
All were caught up in this scandal, all believed in the new position they had placed Owen and Camellia, as much as they had believed in him being a World War hero three months before.
Even Brower believed partly for himself and partly for Lula that he had always cared for Will, that he had tried his best with Reggie—but he said: “I have changed my opinion about Owen. I thought he was more like Will and Reggie, but I have been sorely mistaken.”
Still, the idea that Owen had been Lula’s betrothed gave Angus Brower certain feelings of perverse pleasure.
“Yes—I knew he would do this—” he told his friends at the courthouse. For their part, they were appalled that a man would so turn from a woman because she had so suffered.
PART IV
ONE
On the sixtieth day of the cut, Owen went to the camp to make sure of the provisions and the men.
None were ill, though some had not done as well as others.
Tomkins was stamping on the lower end of the skid road, so Owen thanked him for this, saying he knew Tomkins had come in as teamster and he was appreciative of that fact. He was thankful and reminded him of when they were children together.
Then he checked the stamp for his mark.
The stamp was simply a peavey with the company’s indent or mark on the bottom to be stamped into the wood, and all looked a lot alike except for the mark itself.
With Jameson it was WJ, with Sloan it was an S, and with Estabrook it was an E in the shape of a bird in flight.
So Tomkins took the stamp after Owen inspected it and went down the road to do his job.
As far as the haul went, it did not get any easier now.
The men would check the two sleds, and make sure of the harnesses—then as the days got colder and more tedious, they wouldn’t get back to the camp until almost midnight. They would fall into bed exhausted in their clothes, preparing to be up in five hours. They watched each other in wind and whiteout conditions, and often the bone-chilling fog. They were like specters on that hill, the snow coming off their backs in spray as they made their lunge—snow across their scarfs and faces so until you saw the horses, you could not tell one from the other. One lantern light to show that mankind still existed on this mountain. One beacon to call out that humanity in all its self-recriminations, falsity, and self-imposed foils was taking wood down to build houses in Europe and New York, Fredericton and Halifax. Even though they, these men, would never be welcome in any of those places, nor conceive of ever being so.
On their right was a shale drop to the water that descended from a height of 223 feet at a slant of about thirty-eight degrees. The turn at the bottom had to be made quickly or a teamster chanced running his load into the dammed and frozen pond in front of him.
Even the heaviest sled and the bravest horses were scuttled sideways because of the slickness of the ice, where no sand or chaff would hold, though the sand pails were kept heated at night under those desperate lanterns.
The bridge was small, and the runners on the sleds had just enough space to make the crossing. All of this with the teamster’s hands frozen stiff, and his back aching. One slip and you were over the bank or, not turning quickly enough, into the dammed brook. The harder you worked, the harder it got.
But the men had reasoned it could be no other way down, and they could not construct the bridge anywhere else. Once these things were reasoned and done, and once the men began their harsh and frozen task, and once it was decided that the horses must do this and to hear the horses grunt out in agony had to be, no one was going to change.
Missy was designated to lead. And since the other horses only seemed to feel safe when in sight of the Clydes, they came off the hill very close behind. That is, they mimicked each other just as humans did.
This was a fantastic gamble, for the Belgians came behind her so close into the turn that one snout was almost up against the rear pole. When the snow blew thickest, it was a gamble just to see over the trackless slope, with tuffs of forlorn alders and hard clots of dung, windswept as any plain on earth.
Then, at night, they looked at each other, saying: “Don’t you fuggin’ fail me up in front,” or “You keep her steady on my fuckin’ tail.”
Things were okay though—they roared and laughed, threw objects at each other’s heads, and were silent only at dinner.
On the sixty-fourth night of the haul Owen was not in camp, and so the men were free to talk, for it had echoed up from the town that something was happening. These rumors came with the portager and were fed by the mail.
Tonight there was some talk of union, but most was talk about Reggie’s wayward wife.
“The husband’s not even known to be alive or dead,” Gravellier said, holding up a letter from his wife. He read, holding his cigarette out and flicking the ashes into his turned-up cuff. “Fine piece of work this will be!” he said.
Then he would look down at the letter and shake his head. “They are looking for a body,” he said, and he shook his head again, “I’ll body her if she ever wiggles her bum at me,” he said, looking up and winking, so Tomkins and others laughed.
Many said they were sorry for Reggie, that he was a brave man. That is, their idea of who Reggie Glidden was had changed completely again.
“Well that’s what a woman can do to ya,” Colson said.
Meager Fortune asked them to “give it time” and see if everything didn’t “just work out.” For he had known what rumor could do.
Then, after a while, Meager made his way to the hovel to be alone.
The snow whispered against the opened front, and hit him at the midsection.
It was his birthday—he was now twenty-seven years old. He remembered his funny ill-fitting suit with a missing shirt button on the day he was married. He had not told anyone, for he kept those recipes in his boots to take home, that his wife and child had died in a house fire sometime on June 5, 1944, and he could still not speak of them as gone.
Still, to celeb
rate this mischief called a birthday he had come to see the horses.
He placed his hands up on Missy’s back, and listened to the wind whistle down though the wood, thinking and digesting all he had heard tonight about Camellia and Owen. His dark, rough hands were cut and chapped from the cold, his face almost as tough as leather and still as childlike as innocence itself.
He could be cut and bleed without knowing, and had been many times. He could stand cold that would kill many, and had been once caught up under the ice with a draft horse and survived.
And he would, like his father, have arthritis in ten years, be dead in twenty. That is what the world offered him. He knew no other life, and in fact was frightened of it. This other life, where men did not sweat or suffer the cold to half-frozen bodies. He had seen men prancing and preening at dances, in a world he did not belong to, where they all somehow looked and moved in the way of women. He cringed to think it might actually be that way in cities and places he would never go.
His life, then, was nothing. But he must stay and take care of the men. He was too kind to gossip and he didn’t like them talking about the boss—so he came out here.
He was a tiny man, yet a man who could lift three hundred pounds on his back day in and day out. He looked at his leather gloves, his woolen jacket and thick woolen pants, and even here felt ashamed that he knew so little. If he had known enough to read and write—or enough to take a job on the railway—his wife would have lived. This is what he thought. He, through his splendid ignorance, had killed the woman he loved. Though no one else would ever think this.
He had cared for Missy as a filly. Now he moved the lantern forward and lighted it just enough to check her caramel-colored head and chestnut eyes. There were little flecks of hair missing along her back, small spots that the world had taken away from her.
“Hello, lady—it’s me—Meager Fortune. I knew Will—the great Will Jameson—and arm-twisted him to a draw—way up at his camp on the Tabusintac. I also saved a mule in the war.”