The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  He set the lantern down and smiled without a tooth in his head.

  Butch’s right hind leg had been scraped raw by a loose piece of hemlock he had dragged to the yard, before he was harnessed on the two sled to haul over the bank and to the river skids. Which meant he and two of the Belgians were used all day long working either down in the cut or on the two sled. It just meant that his great heart would give out a year or two sooner, and he wouldn’t stop working until it did. As soon as he felt the log on the devil’s mount Butch would begin his ferocious stride up over the hill, cutting a swath through stumps and fallen wood that broke under his great strength but took each day more strength from him, as if he was saying to the man handling the reins behind his back: “You want me to do this—hook it on and watch how I alone will work my way to death.”

  Once, before the war, when the men were teasing a horse who would not work, Meager had tried to stop it. They had pushed him down, and he had fallen on his back. He looked up and saw Gravellier taking an ax to the horse’s head.

  Meager remembered the horse gave a sad grunt like a human being and fell down. “That’ll teach ya, ya bald-arsed son of a whore,” Gravellier said as blood spotted his heavy, angry face and the peak of his cap.

  “No,” Meager had pleaded.

  But it did not matter if or when or how much he said no.

  So he went away and sat by himself in the woods.

  Meager Fortune knew there were many stories against Will Jameson—but he also knew who was kind to him, and who would not take an ax to a horse.

  “Poor old Butch,” Fortune said.

  However, the teamsters were afraid of Butch.

  Sometimes Butch would work so hard the teamsters could not back him up or stop him, and they would to a man marvel at his crazy lunges up the hill, or fear him.

  “Get up out of that, you crazy Jameson son of a whore,” Nolan would yell when Butch took it in his mind to do something on his own.

  And all that wood, Meager thought. Where did it go? He had asked his wife Evelyn one night, and they had sat up late worrying about it. Neither of them were sure. So they went and asked her father, Ned, and he wasn’t sure either.

  “Goes down the river, don’t it? Can’t expect to know much more than that.”

  Maybe it built houses, or maybe it went to offices and buildings in cities he would never see. Some said the cedar hauled last year was used to make a sauna for a mob boss in New York. But wherever this great wood went, it came from these men. Meager knew that much.

  Gibbs had not tended to Butch’s cut right, so Meager found a way to poultice the animal using balm out of the old tack box at the end of the hovel and some mud mixed with straw. Butch stood in docile acceptance while Meager worked, sure that his own great and towering strength—given to him by the great horse Byron’s Law and his mother, Missy—had sealed his fate to run those logs up the hundreds of yards through the stump-laden, snow-scowled cut and then down over the morbidly freezing mountain, slabs of ice that looked in the shimmer of distance like pale rock.

  Knowing this, Meager whispered: “You take them down the slope, Butch. No one can do it but you—you have to do it, boy.”

  Butch once more stood furious and rigid, as if his plan, caught in the sinew of his blood and brain, was to kill a man before he took himself. Of course, that was giving human emotion to a beast, and Meager knew them so well as not to.

  Then Missy dropped her head to the feed box, her breathing scattering a few cold oats before her. And this allowed little Meager a profound realization, that her years of work, years of being fed too much or too little, run too hard, brought to her feet with laudanum, had made her now forget him.

  No longer was she the filly with the big clown shoes. Her massive strength had made her into something else entirely—an animal of such magnificent power she looked upon the universe of man with indifference. Her existence now was one of brutal work or death, and in the end both.

  He patted her and smiled.

  But now she stared into nothing.

  It was strange, he thought, but didn’t reflect on it too much—the peavey stamp Tomkins was using was sitting up against the side wall at the back of the hovel. But he was sure Tomkins had left his peavey stamp down on the skid road late today. He reflected upon this and thought he himself must be mistaken, and wasn’t Tomkins a good lad anyway.

  TWO

  The men were still yelling in the camp, drinking and laughing—at the whore that had taken up with the boss. Meager had never partaken in talk like this. So he sat outside on a stump and whistled.

  An argument was going on now in behind the walls of such a dreary place. He could hear them.

  It seemed Gravellier wanted to force the young tend team Gibbs to go down into the shine and find a bit of tack that he said was missing.

  Gibbs, as Gravellier and others well knew, was terribly frightened to be by himself in the woods. And this is why Gravellier had demanded it.

  “Go now,” he said, “and find that fuggin’ tie-on, boy—”

  “I can do it tomorrow—it is jus’ an old piece of leather—”

  “An ol’ piece of leather to you—necessary to me to take down me load over that piece of mountain—” (This wasn’t true, but to Gravellier—now in hysterics—it didn’t matter.)

  “Well then why did you take it off?” Gibbs said.

  “Because I didn’t think you’d be so foolish as to leave it behind—” Gravellier said, standing over the boy. “Go up out and get it now.”

  “He don’t wanta get it,” Trethewey said, “so leave him be.”

  “Are you gonna get it?” Gravellier said.

  “No,” Trethewey smiled, “I am not goin’ down there to get nothing.”

  The problem was, Gibbs was Gravellier’s tend team—though he worked Missy and Butch. And in fact this was the reason Gravellier wanted to show his authority.

  “You go now—” he said.

  The men listened to this wearily; Gibbs, though, could lose his job over this. And no one would say much.

  Young Gibbs was staring up at Gravellier from his bed, his blankets up about him, as if being in bed would be enough to protect him from this unreasonable demand.

  “Come on—go get it—and place it in the hovel where it’s suppose to be,” Gravellier said.

  Young Gibbs reluctantly got out of bed and pulled on his Humphreys. “It’s some black out, ain’t it?” he asked.

  No one answered.

  “Anyone wants to come fer a walk?”

  No one said a thing.

  “Where is it?” he said, half smiling, hopefully. “Can anyone tell me?”

  “Watch out fer the panthers,” Tomkins said, grinning and hauling the blankets over himself, and laughing so much that those blankets shook.

  But Gibbs reluctantly put on his hat, tied it about his chin like a child so that his cheeks suddenly became fatter.

  “Can someone come with me?” he asked politely as he tied his hat on, and then hauled on his mittens. “I could get up early tomorrow,” he said.

  No one said a thing. The men were in for the night, and they decided it was his problem. Even if it was a harsh one.

  “Take a lantern,” Richardson said, “and you’ll be okay. Its down by the last yard—that’s where you lay it on that stump—it’s a measly bit of leather that wouldn’t fit over a gnat’s twat—but Huey wants it. He could get it tomorrow on his load—but Huey wants it. He is the first to send you out and the last man to know the woods—but Huey wants it. He keeps talking about the Indians and how he knows how to live like them although he wouldn’t last a day on his own on this here mountain—but then again, my little Gibbs, Huey wants it.”

  Gravellier ignored this challenge.

  “It’s on the goddamn stump!” someone else roared to shut Richardson up.

  “Ah yes—that stump—well, that ain’t so far, cold though,” Gibbs said. “What’s the reading?”

  They could tell th
e reading through the window, for the thermometer was hooked to a branch just outside. And there was a cold moon over the camp.

  Colson tried to read it through the ice and dark.

  “I don’ know—minus thirty-six, seems to say—Christ, could be minus forty-six fer all I can see—just go get it done.”

  Gibbs put on his boots as they turned down the lanterns in the camp. But he waited about five minutes, sitting on the edge of his bed, hoping Gravellier would go to sleep so he wouldn’t have to leave.

  “Yer takin’ yer fuggin’ time to leave,” Gravellier grunted, as he rolled over and coughed.

  Gibbs stood, buttoned his coat, and started toward the door about a foot at a time, slowly, as if he didn’t want to disturb what his reluctance to do had already disturbed.

  Now everyone was awake, watching him.

  “Go go go—fer fuck sake go,” they all said.

  But just then Meager Fortune came in, and in his hand he held the leather in question.

  “Look what I found down in that shine,” he said, winking at Gibbs. “You get this into the hovel, boy, and get yerself ta bed.”

  Meager took off his boots, shook them out, and put them near the stove. Then he lay down and prayed as he did every night. He prayed for little Gibbs, and for Mr. Richardson with the one arm, and for old Trethewey and Mr. Tomkins who had no love. He prayed for Nolan who didn’t believe, and Curtis who did.

  It was his birthday and he thought of his little boy, Duncan.

  The wind picked up so there was a smell of smoke backed up inside the camp. He pretended that’s why the tears were in his eyes.

  THREE

  On the sixty-fifth day of the haul, Owen went by train to buy saws in Nova Scotia. He was ill. The wound in his leg by now periodically became inflamed, and he should have rested or seen a doctor. He had done neither. He had no time to rest and as with some men, even some very brave men, he had a childish fear of doctors.

  He could not afford to leave the cut, though it infuriated him to have to deal with it and most of the men. The men had complaints—a steady complaint about the wind, and another petition by Tomkins to have his own team so, as he said, “I won’t be marker—it would work out better for you.”

  It was at this point that Owen considered giving Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins a team. He went into the barns of two men he knew to ask them about it. But really there were no teams to spare. Many people nowadays relying on half-told reports say he never once made an attempt. He did but he couldn’t, for no one would give up a team to Good Friday. He wrote to Tomkins and pleaded with him to be patient.

  But all the men complained secretly about each other. These secret petitions were in the “fun box” at the depot—and were given to Buckler every week or two. Everything from: “Colson don’t smell the best when you are sleeping side by side—”

  To: “I am not the man for fish stew—I will take a salmon and smelt and now and again a cod—but not a stew—I don’t like the way it runs—”

  To: “Gibbs don’t smell at all human no more.”

  To: “Richardson don’t know a horse from a bucksaw.”

  To: “Nolan thinks Gibbs grooms his horses—Nolan don’t know his horses—you think he knows horses—neither do Gibbs. Why there ain’t one man there who knows a horse—not a bit.” Signed, I know horses.

  To: “There ain’t no pickles that I like.”

  To: “There is someone trying to touch my privates as I sleep—is gonna come missing his hand if he do it again.” (This was serious, and Owen had a letter sent to post on a pole at the back of the camp.)

  The train ride was an agony because of all this, because of his paining leg and the insipid nonchalant conversations of men he did not know.

  In Nova Scotia they did not know Owen either. That is, they didn’t know he was the same man so talked about now. Not this frail man with the wide eyes.

  While there he heard the story of he and Camellia. It had misshapenly surfaced in this doleful little town. While names were not known, the circumstances were revived in giddy pathos.

  It was now rumored, the men said, acknowledging each other, that the two had killed Reggie after luring him back to Newcastle because he was going to expose their affair and work for Estabrook. They had stuffed the body in a trunk in a cave where they had their rendezvous, but it was about to be found by her uncle who suspected them, so they had thrown it off the Morrissey Bridge.

  He stayed at a rooming house on King Street, and heard from a salesman who had been up to the Miramichi all of these goings-on as well. In the turbulent battered hat of the salesman, in his conical shaped face and rather pointed ears, he gave the impression of some hard backwoodsman escaped his heritage to try another, traveling on the rural road seeking an ambivalent destiny.

  “The old woman caught them together—” the salesman said. “The younger son—he I heard killed the older boy in a barroom fight over her years before—when she was about sixteen. Her father was that wife killer there. I seen her myself—big buxom blonde—and I said to her, ‘Hey, why are you doing this?’ You know she looked at me with a sly smile and said: ‘Get whatever I want—I got a million-dollar ass, so I may as well.’ Cross my heart it’s what she said. I coulda had her myself, I do suppose.”

  That’s how you cheated someone: you changed their basic nature. So, to everyone she had become sadistic.

  The clock ticked on.

  He remembered visiting Brower’s as a boy and seeing Camellia playing the piano—she had just “picked it up” without any lessons. She bounced all over the piano seat as she played, her face beaming in rays of childlike wonder, picking songs out of the air while Lula sat with her music sheet on her lap patiently waiting to play Mozart.

  Why didn’t he recognize how much he loved her then? Why, if he had, it might have been a different life—a life without famine in the soul. Were the angels she so believed in watching then? And if they were, why did they not do something about it then?

  He arrived home on a freezing afternoon. First he went to the old warehouse to check something—and coming away from that, looking depressed and anxious and giving some money to Sterling who had caught up to him to ask, he went back to the mill, to check the wiring. He spoke to Buckler and they decided to ask Maufat McDurmot to rewire the mill along with Clinton Dulse, if he was sober.

  But Owen blurted out what he had heard in Windsor about himself. He laughed as Will used to when men said they would destroy him. And Owen had stayed here, if for nothing else, for Will.

  Buckler told him that it was assumed they had gotten rid of Reggie in some terrible way. This was because of Winch’s cave, and the rendezvous that he and Camellia supposedly had had.

  “What rendezvous?”

  Buckler told him this was the rumor spread.

  “From where was it spread?”

  “From the barbershop,” Buckler said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they stop talking when I go in.”

  “Who would have heard this rumor there—someone I might know?”

  “Hutchings.”

  “Why in hell would Camellia phone Reggie and ask him to come if that’s the case?”

  “That’s why they are saying Camellia is treacherous—like Delilah. She convinced Reggie to come and protect her from your advances, and when he came—you dealt with him.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I don’t care what I hear about me, but if I hear of them laughing or taunting her—if I do—God help them,” Owen said to Buckler. “She has had too tough a life—put on display before she was seven.”

  It was a cold day, with bright sunshine and the snow spraying in the wind. Children played hockey across the river on a homemade rink.

  Owen wanted some lighter horses in to work the wood toward the skids where the Belgians and Percherons and Clydes could load. That would save Butch and Cole Younger for the longer, more demanding task on the two sled.

  He went to di
scuss this with the horse trader Hutchings, who just by his evasion confirmed the rumors now in town that were known to almost everyone else. That is, looking at Hutchings’ smile, and his nod, Owen realized that the rumors against someone are never told to them.

  He felt strangely enraged by this obvious truth.

  FOUR

  That evening, with the lowering sun yellow across the back field of snow and alders, Owen went into the family barn to see the two-year-old Belgian, Ronald’s Young. He walked quietly into the adjacent stall and patted it. White snow swept in at the main doors, and doleful rope twisted in the breeze.

  Then he saw the stool Will used to sit on, and his heart was stirred. He looked toward the great old house, and thought of his life here.

  Coming back to the house he asked Camellia, who for the first time in her life had not smiled and laughed that day, about these rumors and was annoyed when she turned eagerly and said, while backing away from him, almost like a specter toward the dimmer alcove at the back: “Wear your Saint Jude and never mind rumor—and we will see Reggie—he will come back and clear this all up.”

  “All of what up?” he said. “There is nothing in the world that is happening—what in Christ is happening?”

  “All of whatever it is—never mind them—I am used to it.”

  She closed the door, to prevent him from saying anything else. He saw her look quickly away in the fading light. She had been called a bad girl downtown and she wanted to prevent people from saying this again. Closing the door was the only way she knew how.

  And he sat in an old leather chair in the corner of the hall. He hadn’t sat here since he was sixteen.

  He decided that was the real problem—her being used to it. He remembered at school and other places, how she was treated. That is, she was treated very well by most people—but as always in every situation there was an element at the school who saw her as vulnerable, and treated her mercilessly. Perhaps that is why he didn’t or wouldn’t initiate anything with her when he was young. That and the story, fabricated by the Steadfast Few, that Byron had been her mother’s lover. But if that was the case then everything that had happened to her since was in a way his doing.