The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  He went to see Practical Mary—ostensibly to take her a receipt for the saws but more importantly to speak to her about whatever it was that was being said.

  But Mary was in no mood. She had a difficult time not believing something had happened, and she didn’t know Camellia would “act like that.”

  “Like what?” Owen said, surprised that supposition had infiltrated his own house.

  “I don’t know—I don’t know,” Mary said, “Everyone is saying poor Lula, and Camellia stole you away from her after her father gave her just about everything under the sun—and—”

  “NONSENSE!” Owen shouted.

  “Well, that’s what I told them, but I’m an old woman—you know I’m sick—I’m running a temperature—my heart thumps, I have weak spells. But you were kissing her—and my friends have been telling me that. Why oh why would you go to Winch’s cave—”

  He left her, and walked back toward the front of the house. In the great darkness that invaded it this time of year, he had once spent his happiest hours, knowing that snowfall cut them off from everyone except themselves.

  “Phantoms,” he said.

  There were two startling “past events,” and some say that both of these events—or discoveries of past events—sent Owen to the bottle that had been prepared for him by the prophecy.

  These silent notes from the past were laid away in Will’s room in the old chest that had been brought from the camp at Talons. The trunk that had come on the day he had run downstairs to see if it was Lula paying a visit.

  The night after he came home from Nova Scotia, he walked into Will’s room to see if he could find the company book on board feet and saw this trunk, just where it had been for years, and opened it with the key that lay on the old china plate on the windowsill.

  In it he found a full bottle of Scotch unopened and a letter addressed to him, sitting on top of a red blanket beside this bottle. There with a hunting knife and a Remington pistol, a compass and a map of the Jameson tract.

  He opened the letter slowly, and went under the light to read.

  In this letter to Owen was fifteen hundred dollars tucked away—in fact, Will had put it there the night before he left for his last run, and no one had entered Will’s room until Owen had returned from overseas.

  “For your university,” the letter said. “Take hold of the world, boy, and do better than me.”

  The letter was dated the day before Will had died.

  Owen studied the letter for an hour, the handwriting, trying to determine where Will had been when he wrote this. He lay the letter down and picked up the copper-plated compass, looking at it for a long moment before noticing that the top of the red blanket had been pulled away. He took the bottle and set it beside him. Then he turned the blanket back.

  Here Owen discovered something else none would ever have suspected: books. At first he thought they were his, mixed in with everything. But silently he became aware. They had been Will’s—all purchased after the death of Dan Auger.

  Owen picked these books out of this old trunk one at a time and brought them to the desk with Will’s name whittled upon it, his face passive, his hands trembling.

  Crime and Punishment.

  Leaves of Grass.

  Jude the Obscure.

  Lord Jim.

  Wuthering Heights.

  And finally, and inevitably, Ulysses by James Joyce.

  Each book had been read—whole passages of Lord Jim and Jude the Obscure underlined and referenced.

  Owen took everything back to his own room and stayed there the next day, drinking from the bottle Will had left, staring at this letter—and these books.

  The books, it was said, sent him to the bottle; the bottle sent him to prison. A simple enough prophecy any writer would understand.

  Owen was required to go to the doctor for his hip but hadn’t since he had come home. Now he fell into a fitful sleep, and woke up startled and thirsty just as it was growing dark. He was sure in his half-conscious state that Will was calling out to him from the doorway.

  “You stay in here until I set things straight with Reggie,” he heard him say.

  He woke.

  He had been out of uniform for a year and yet he had four letters from the army—two from Ottawa. He left them unopened.

  He went downstairs seeing the light fade across the heavy carpets, lingering coldly on the brown windowsills of too many windows, and felt the heaviness one does after sleeping in the afternoon. Camellia was still at the house, cleaning a room off to the side of the living room that almost no one went in. Strangely, he saw her dusting the statuette of Rodin’s The Kiss that Will, without knowing what mythology it spoke of, had brought home once upon a time.

  And he noticed something else for the first time. A small wedding ring on her finger. He was dazzled by his understanding of how he had avoided her when he was young, just because others had, even though he could not take his eyes off her whenever she appeared. She turned and looked at him, and brushed a piece of hair back from her forehead. When it fell down again, she gave a quick smile and winked.

  FIVE

  Although she told him not to, Owen had been drinking and insisted he walk Camellia to her house. As they passed Solomon’s barbershop he insisted she take his arm: “It is slippery, so be safe.”

  She took his arm knowing there was no safety in it.

  On his way back home, passing Solomon’s barbershop again, he saw the barber look out at him. It was nothing unusual, a momentary glance by a small, deft man who had always been on the right side when they were boys.

  Then he thought of the rumor about the cave. Only a person from Newcastle would understand why he was so angry at the suggestion he had taken Camellia Dupuis there.

  Solomon, he decided, had started it.

  At home, as he drank one Scotch and then another, he knew why he was so bothered—but he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

  He had gotten used to being admired—even if it was just a little—and now he had returned from Windsor to the town’s contempt. He put the glass down and sunk into contempt himself. He had killed twelve men in the war—one a boy of seventeen.

  It bothered him now more than at any other time.

  Later he went for a walk to see if the drugstore was open, to get something for the pain he was in (though the Scotch helped, his leg still burned).

  The wind over flat, stark fields and the beautifully built two- and three-story houses as he approached the town seemed ambivalent to his crisis. The silence accompanying that clean cold of night seemed ambivalent as well. And in his heart was the idea that he might very easily have driven a man to his death.

  He passed people who just two months ago had lifted him on their shoulders.

  Owen nodded and people looked away. He smiled and spoke, but could not decide what was wrong. What was wrong was that the investigation, ongoing by the local police, was scientific. They had taken his and Camellia’s fingerprints, and his mother’s. They had given these fingerprints because they had done nothing wrong. But this science added to general suspicion. It had posed fruitful questions about him and Camellia and had already come to a conclusion based on what people conjectured was an obvious truth. The police themselves were mainly gossips, and told their families, who told others. Camellia especially, more and more as time went on, became sadistic and cruel in people’s imagination—especially when she started to buy liver at the store.

  The old mathematician who had risen to say, “There’s the man who knows Pythagoras,” did not shout his way now, but hurried down another laneway.

  A feeling of disgust strengthened in Owen as he passed the barbershop where Solomon Hickey worked. Solomon, cutting Billy Pebble’s hair, did not turn to look, but his mouth, as always, worked constantly.

  “I will never mind it,” he thought.

  He thought of Camellia, and suddenly recognized how much he had to protect her from this scandal.

  He wanted to board a t
rain and go away. But, secretly, he wanted to leave with her. Then he thought again, if he had shown interest in her before the war—none of this would be happening now.

  So why couldn’t he change it for the better?

  He turned the corner at Hanover Street and slipped on the ice. A shot of pain went through his leg and into his side. He grimaced and turned to make his way home, along the same avenues.

  Owen was aware of the poor timing that now seemed insurmountable. Poor timing was everything—the moment when he turned on the landing and saw her—in another moment she would have been across the landing to the linen closet and upstairs bath. But he had stopped and kissed her—it had been pure braggart on his part—and some would say not because she was Camellia, but because she was a maid.

  When people at the house had smiled knowingly at him the next morning, why hadn’t he taken that for exactly what it was, the smile of gossips, and done something about it then?

  Only Owen could tell you why—he had enjoyed the notoriety. He had enjoyed people assuming the worst. For in all of it, there was the idea that he had impressed other men who had once worked for his brother.

  Now that he wanted the rumor to stop, it was no longer in his power to do so. For he as a participant in the scandal could twist and turn, but not so much as lessen it by a molecule. Denying fed it. He was as caught up in it as Camellia, and it must run its course.

  He knew this now. It struck him like cold in his face—a bluster of sudden wind and snow. Now as he realized he cared for her deeply, he also realized what he himself had allowed to be thought. He and others had taken advantage because she was still childlike. To say that about a woman was to evoke all kinds of responses. But men like Meager Fortune he knew to be in this unconscious state as well.

  He remembered Lula’s tenth birthday party, the last one he and Will were invited to.

  “A birthday party hurrah,” Camellia had said. And everyone had laughed at her. But Will had not laughed. Thinking of this, Owen was sorry he had not seen her grace before.

  No, he must take responsibility. He had used her fall from public grace to enliven himself, at first mischievously and without malice—but look what had become of it!

  “If I allow for Nolan to be Push—and Buckler to oversee the mountain—then I can go away. In fact, I will leave tonight,” he thought.

  And he thought of something else, important but fleeting. What if it was not Buckler’s kind or Nolan’s kind or Trethewey’s kind that came through in the end of things—what if it was much less than that? Solomon Hickey’s kind of man, or Tomcat Tomkins’, or Gravellier’s? What if their kind would be the type to judge those men on the mountain who worked now on behalf of legions of houses, railways, and docks not yet built?

  What if they were the ones who spoke out against him?

  “Then their judgment won’t matter,” he thought. But he did not completely believe this.

  There was a train at midnight, and he turned to the station. There in the dimly lit high-ceilinged building with its cement floor and its photo of a train going through the Rocky Mountains, he bought his ticket. The lone ticket, the teller told him, on the midnight train.

  He nodded, put it in his overcoat pocket, and decided this: “I am not needed—when I go, Camellia will be better off—everything will die down—Reggie will see I am gone and come back to her.”

  Yet instead of going home, telling his mother, packing, or doing any of these things, he immediately turned toward the bottom row of houses, to let Camellia know. And all the way there he knew he wanted to see her more than anyone else in the world—and the strangest sensation overcame him. Camellia was free to go with him. Or to come later. That, in fact, is why he had bought the ticket.

  He was plagued by this thought, as some are by thoughts they hate, and he shook his head, pulled his overcoat tighter, and made it to her street. Once there, he realized his thoughts about her were fleeting and not serious. Strangely, they would have been serious had he been sixteen and not twenty-six.

  When she spoke to him on those walks to her house from his, she often spoke of Reggie. “A big kid,” she said.

  Owen saw them quite differently than anyone else in town. He saw them—Reggie especially—completely vulnerable and lost together in that little house, where they had tried to make a home, frightened of the world outside. Though he was angry at her for praying, he could at least understand why. Once, asking her what she wanted to do, offering to help in any way, she asked if someday he could see his way to write her a recommendation so she might get a job—a good job, at the five-and-ten.

  SIX

  At the front of Camellia’s lane botched with snow gone blue in the night, Sterling—a kind of colossus in the town, his figure always apparent—stood watching the house. Owen went by him and knocked on her door.

  “Come in,” she said, and hurried him inside.

  “What?” she said, turning and out of breath. “Have you seen my Reggie?”

  He paused, secretly disappointed by her question. “No—what I want to know is—do you think you are in trouble?”

  “No,” she smiled, “people always say silly things—”

  “Are you sure?” he said angrily.

  “Yes,” she said, taken aback, looking at him curiously.

  “I’m leaving then. It is best I go—the boys on the mountain will be okay—they have done work like this all their lives—”

  “Leaving?” A cloud came over her face. It was as if he could see her heart beating. She turned the radio down. As she did, she said softly: “Don’t go yet—you’re my only friend and we are going to find Reggie—and—”

  He wanted to make her understand that he wasn’t running away, but how could he after she said this?

  “If I go tonight, I think everything might be okay—Reggie might come back—but if I don’t, Camellia, what will happen—?”

  “I’m not sure—” Camellia said, smiling slightly.

  “If I go the rumors will stop.”

  “Yes,” she nodded, “of course—yes. Would you like a sandwich—I have—I was—I mean I don’t want you to go—” And then taking a breath as if steeling herself to hear information she didn’t know, she sat down on the couch and stared at the corner of the room. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Because she said this he suddenly took two hundred dollars and placed it in her hand.

  “What is this for?” she asked. She stood, half-scared, dropping the money but looking beyond him.

  “Just in case,” he said, as confused by what he had done as she was. He bent, his body trembling, and picked the money up. As he stood up he kissed her. Suddenly, so she couldn’t protest. She backed away as if he had burned her face.

  “No,” she said, tears in her eyes, “no, Owen.” But she was staring beyond him now in panic.

  He turned, and saw in the lower kitchen window Sterling looking in on them—his face almost beatific in its self-absorption. Owen ran outside, falling and picking himself up. But Sterling was gone, along the back lane and across a snowplowed track and over a crooked fence.

  He went back to the house, where he calmed himself, leaning against the door.

  “You keep the money—you must keep it.”

  After saying goodbye, but promising himself never again to touch her, he moved quickly back up the dreary snow-filled street.

  This final kiss—the third—had actually determined everything. He could not go. He knew this as he walked. The kiss would be in every house, exaggerated. It hadn’t been her doing. It had been his. Going wouldn’t do anything but jeopardize her.

  He determined not to speak to anyone. To ignore them and make his way home, and to get to the mountain as soon as possible. He now knew what he had been remembering when he had dreamed of Will at the door, saying: “Wait until I set things straight with Reggie.”

  It was a conversation he had had years ago after he had told Will how much he cared for Lula.

  “Why?” Will
had asked.

  “I don’t know—her uncle is a professor, she likes books—so do I, so you know—”

  “That’s nonsense—fool’s gold. Camellia is the one who loves you,” Will had said.

  “Camellia,” he said surprised.

  “Reggie likes her—but wait until I set things straight with Reggie and you take her out. She’s got no friends either very much—she would be safe with someone like you.”

  “Safe?” he had laughed.

  “Yes,” Will had said, “from all those who think of her as less than themselves. How you stood up for the LeBlanc boy proves it.”

  This had been Will at his best wisdom, and Owen hadn’t seen it.

  The very next day he had brought Ulysses over to Lula—ran to her with it, thinking she would be impressed.

  He turned and followed his footsteps again, about the square.

  And then, with some confusion, he realized what part of town he was in.

  Solomon Hickey’s barbershop was open on a Friday night, snow drifting down over the candy cane–colored sign, the victory over tyranny allowing this evening, the smell of fresh aftershave faint in the cold night air. The barbershop—called Antonio’s after Solomon’s boss, who was now retired—sat in a little nook on the street, pleasant and well looked after.

  Owen paused for a long moment.

  “Go home now,” a voice told him.

  But he had been drinking Scotch all day, and that voice was fleeting, in among the boys and girls coming down from the hockey game or over from the Grand Theatre. He must stop these rumors for her sake. (He might not have thought this if he hadn’t been so foolish as to kiss her. Still and all, he had caused it.)

  So he put his hand on the doorknob, took a deep breath, and walked inside, a bell tinkling.

  “Did Sterling run in here?” he asked.

  Solomon stopped sweeping and looked at him.