The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

Owen smelled heavy cigarette smoke, hair lotion and shaving cream, and the warm scent of cut hair that had fallen like some deposed bandits to the floor.

  Solomon Hickey had been watching Owen for the last five minutes, and did not know why he was anxiously standing outside or now coming in to ask about Sterling. He shrugged.

  He, of course, had spread rumors, especially the one most damning—the one about the cave, and the letter found there. Still and all, they were just the rumors everyone else was spreading—they had circled about him too, and once started there was no starting point. In fact, by that point a rumor takes on validation. You could not blame Solomon Hickey more than anyone else in the world.

  Owen heard the fizzle of the candy cane light go off. For some reason he never understood, this sound caused a terrible pain to sweep over him—it sounded like the beginning of a night before battle, with flares over the sky, and he found himself bathed in the half-dark light from the street, as if traces of flares were once again in the air over his head.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that Sterling won’t mind his own business,” he said. He knew in a kind of daze that this was who he really wanted to speak to—Sterling.

  Then, for some reason, he could hear himself apologizing. But it is not unusual to have very brave men apologize to very foolish ones.

  He told Solomon he was leaving town (even though he was certain he would not), and if there were any hard feelings between them, he was sorry. He wished Lula only the best. If Solomon Hickey or Sterling or anyone thought there was anything between him and Camellia, they had the wrong impression. He then asked Solomon to help Camellia, a woman he knew from his time at Lula’s all those years ago. Help him to help Camellia regain her reputation. Turn the tables in the barbershop.

  “We have to help her,” he said, and his lips trembled slightly. This caught Hickey by surprise. He seemed delighted.

  Owen then said he was willing to clear her of any wrong impression, and apologized for this impression. Camellia loved Reggie and they were both trying to find him.

  “And what about Lula—should we help her,” Solomon Hickey asked, “or just leave her die in her room? She’s had a stroke, you know—did you hear that?—and she has no one now—did you hear that?—no one but me!” Again he seemed delighted by this.

  “Of course—well, yes,” Owen said, “but—well, that was a long time ago—I mean, when I liked her.”

  “Yes, before her stroke,” Solomon said. There were small scissors in one of his pockets and a heavy comb in the other, and his shoes were solid black, and hair spread on the white floor as he lay the broom aside. He looked piqued by Owen’s gall.

  “I didn’t know the great Owen Jameson would want to apologize—and run away, my, my,” he said as if speaking to someone else.

  “It’s not that—I just want to clear it up,” Owen said.

  His leg was paining. Why couldn’t he think? Perhaps he had drunk too much. He decided to go home, turned to go, and then—though hearing Will’s voice in his subconscious telling him to leave immediately—he turned and faced his accuser again. “Just tell me who it was spread these goddamn lies about us—that’s all I want to know—was it you or Sterling?” he said, trying to be calm and taking out a cigarette to light. But his hands shook now from pain and drink.

  Solomon thought he had gotten rid of his tormentor with a minimum of trouble. But now he had to readjust in the dark with certain night lights coming on. “No, it wasn’t me,” he said, averting his small dark eyes. “Why would it be me? Your filth has nothing to do with me—you have hurt a lot of people.” He smiled in spite of what he said. “You hurt the Browers—after all that waiting for you that she done.”

  The room was in semi-darkness. And Owen remembered the seventeen-year-old boy he had killed in battle. Well, there was not a day when he didn’t. He had come up to the German position—the day before the incident with Reggie—and seen the boy, helmet off, his blond hair tossing in the wind, heart blown away, freckles on his face.

  Hickey opened the closet, closed it, and turning around to place the heavy comb on the counter, seemed surprised Owen was still there.

  “I thought you were gone,” he said. Suddenly he was ready to put the man out. “If you want to know who talks about you—everyone does. Everyone that comes in here does, every day—you’re killing men up on Good Friday you are, and we know it. But that is not my fault. And everyone talks about Camellia, because she let you make her into used goods—but that’s none of my fault.”

  “We have done nothing at all,” Owen said.

  Solomon decided not to answer. He just stood still with his black coat on, waiting silently for the man to leave. Twice he sniffed, and softly touched his cheek because of a paining tooth.

  Owen went toward the door thinking only that he would find Sterling and settle it with him. When he turned Solomon followed, motioning with his right hand, holding the heavy lead comb.

  “Go,” he kept saying, “you get on.”

  Owen thought he remembered this later, but was never sure if it was an actual memory.

  At any rate, at that second, seven minutes after nine o’clock on a cold January night in 1947, came a heedless act. Solomon Hickey did something he had never in his life done before. Why, one might ask onward to doomsday, would he do it now?

  Why Solomon Hickey jabbed the pointed end of the heavy lead comb hastily into Owen’s side, when Owen had started to open the door, no one will ever know.

  The point hit in the very spot where Owen had been shot, and where part of a German bullet was lodged against a nerve in his leg. Owen felt immense pain. And then this: He turned and swung his right elbow hard into Solomon’s throat—the way he had done in action two years before. The little man crumpled without a sound, one leg twisted behind him. Others rushed in, and the cold entered as well. All was in semi-darkness, and all the men entered like detectives.

  Owen did not know what had happened. After he went outside the small, immaculately kept barbershop, he made his way home in a daze, but someone (the same woman he had seen for an instant at the wharf on the day he and Camellia were there) followed him at a distance to make sure he did not run away.

  When he got to the steps of his house, she turned back toward town, hurrying along on her short plump legs in rubber boots—the action of her walk invigorated by what she had to tell. Her name was Cora Auger. All of this would help one thing—the lumbermen’s union.

  Owen had lost his gloves and scarf. He went back to look for them along the sidewalk, then realized he had set them down in the barbershop. He returned home, sat in the kitchen, and took a drink of beer. Then he went to his room and poured from the same bottle of Scotch a glass three-quarters full and drank it. The bottle was now empty, but he found another pint.

  After about an hour, Camellia came into the house calling him. She came upstairs to ask him what had happened, walking straight into his room. He did not answer immediately. Then looked up at her in a stupor. She wore a white blouse and an old ragged coat of Reggie’s and some high boots that didn’t fit her—which meant she was in bed when someone had told her the news. (Sterling had gone to her door banging on it and calling her.)

  “Why why?” she said, taking his face in her hands, as if she were his sister.

  “Who spread the rumor about you and I?” he asked. “Who—so that’s why—who did it—I wanted to find Sterling and tell him off—and found Hickey instead, that’s why.” It was as if he were blaming her.

  “Oh my God, this for a stupid rumor—who knows how a rumor is started, or spread. I told you it would be—just as it happened—you have to go,” she said, rushing about, trying to find him clothes. “You must go! Get on the train, please, I can’t go through this again—”

  “There is nowhere in the world to go,” he said.

  Then he snapped something from his neck and handed it to her. It was his Saint Jude medal.

  It was 12:07 in the morning when they heard a knock on
the door. The two women stood in the small hallway between the kitchen and the pantry, waiting as Buckler answered.

  Three men were at the door. They had come for Owen Jameson. Here to arrest him for the murder of Solomon Hickey.

  SEVEN

  It was easy to capture a mad criminal like Owen Jameson—for that criminal simply went home to sit on the bed and stare at the wall.

  The crime was witnessed by various people, and by the time the news got about many who didn’t witness it said they had. Buckler hurried on his arthritic legs about the town trying to discover what had happened.

  At home, Mary, beside herself with worry and recrimination, was now certain of the prophecy. “Perhaps it is like original sin—perhaps it is what I was born with,” she told Buckler. However, old Buckler was far more “politic.” Prophecies and such had too much of the religious evangelist for this practical Protestant. So did things foretold.

  “I was foretold,” Practical Mary said, sitting in a stupor, “I was foretold, I was foretold.”

  Buckler, however, thought it was simple mechanics.

  He had warned Owen, and now he was angry with himself for not recognizing Owen’s emotional state, or worse, the physical pain working for them had exacerbated. He was not a woodsman like Will. In fact, the very woods would take a harrowing toll on Owen—though he understood it well enough.

  “He cannot go nineteen hours a day like Will,” Buckler said. “He cannot jump-start a fire in a minute, nor do he explode with happiness in snow.”

  But Mary, sitting in a stupor, told him that the old woman reading her fortune seemed like a second ago. So then the prophecy was just a second past as well.

  “The earth is just a second past,” Buckler said. “Everything in it and about it is just a second past.”

  “I can remember Joanna’s eyes looking at me as she spoke—” Mary said.

  Her major concern was Owen.

  “What will they do with Owen,” she whispered, “what will they do?”

  The next day, the police finding the ticket to Montreal, hearing of Owen giving money to Camellia, refused him bail.

  The two hundred dollars he had given Camellia was increased exponentially by gossip to twenty-four hundred by late afternoon. The kiss in Camellia’s house was all that was spoken about, and never spoken about as just a kiss.

  That night, Mary went to the jail where they had taken her son.

  There Owen, in front of the old jailer, admitted striking the man.

  “I must have,” he said without emotion.

  “But you didn’t mean to kill him,” Mary said.

  “No—” Owen responded, “of course not.”

  It was not in Owen’s nature to be disposed to easy violence. And if he had wanted to, there would have been a hundred ways to deal with Solomon Hickey—alone, so no one would trace it back. That is, if he had wanted to. However, people decided he had gone there to get the man who had spread rumors against him and Camellia. Once that idea became established, it was difficult to see any other motive. It also meant that the rumors were true. They were as true now for Cora Auger as they were for Camellia’s uncle Sterling. The gossip had gone through a metamorphosis, from stage to stage, until it flowered into something—unrelenting, from the top of the town to the bottom.

  “The scandal now has broke wide open—everywhere—across the province,” Mary piped up. “They are searching the shore for Reggie Glidden—near the cave where you two met and planned it.”

  “Mom, we didn’t plan it—and didn’t meet in the cave.”

  But she simply shrugged. She looked at her son, and with her kind eyes on him asked: “You didn’t have anything to do with Reggie, did you? You didn’t bust him over the head too? I mean, kill one, kill two is what they are saying—it’s kind of revved them all up.”

  Owen looked at her and smiled. “No,” he said.

  She left him discouraged at asking this, aware of her great duty to protect her family, and how Camellia’s encouragement to take her son from the train had caused it all.

  Mary now realized the prophecy was not neat and orderly, but was like sin, circuitous and involved, and in the end, deadly. It was a misshapen kind of animal that had attached itself to them all, a strange parasite that traveled on the breath from the mouth of gossip. Nothing could be done now to prove the prophecy real—it was mundanely and sufficiently incognito.

  And all held together by some incalculable chance meeting last evening, which had caused what the old First Nations lady had said years before. It had caused “rashness by the second boy.” This rashness was to turn and strike a man whose neck was soft. The strike was meant, without knowing how soft the neck was. The prophecy made before either was born. Still and all, it was rash, and took a life. The body went limp beside the strands of hair he had recently cut from the head of Billy Pebbles, who walked back into the store at that moment to retrieve his cigarette lighter, left on the barber chair.

  Owen had looked at the body quickly—and then had made an enormously rash statement: “If you say anything, the same will happen to you.”

  Owen was later to state to his lawyer that he did not know Solomon was dead, and he was not telling Mr. Pebbles to not report it to the police—he was simply saying that Billy Pebbles should not make any statements about Camellia Glidden’s virtue.

  Owen was not silent about why this had happened. He told his mother that the comb’s point—which was the prophecy refined to its finest insistency—must have driven into his side on the very wound that caused his nerves to burn and made it hard to walk. When this happened, he must have lost sight of any rationale. (Dr. Hennessey verified this a few days later, although Owen did not really remember it.)

  “Mom,” he called as she left.

  “Yes.”

  “You wouldn’t have a train you could carry me back out on, do you?”

  He was in the same cell Camellia’s father had been in seventeen years before.

  People suddenly rejoiced at Owen’s downfall.

  “Yer son will hang, Mary—just like the whore’s own dad,” she heard as she walked through the town. She turned just in time to see an upstairs window closing over a grocery store.

  Why had this woman come into their lives, Mary now thought. If she was smart even now, she would put her out into the street. She remembered when she first came, a tiny girl with an innocent smile. She tried so hard to please everyone, did her duty always, just in order to belong. Mary remembered being at the wedding. How tiny Camellia had looked beside Reggie. They said she did not really want to get married and was under unspoken, unseen pressure.

  “If she didn’t want to, she should have said no—it’s that simple,” Mary said, exonerating herself as people tend to do as soon as a crisis arrives.

  A woman did as a woman did, or a “woman had her ways,” and Mary knew this. “Women don’t fool me,” she said.

  So, as she went home she thought of this. The idea that Camellia was playing games suddenly obsessed her. After all this time, how could she think this? Well, she thought it because others did, because she was in a bind, because Camellia had smiled and clapped her hands when she heard the train was to be stopped, and because it had been foretold.

  Camellia had come to the family and Mary had taken her in. Her father was a murderer—now it had happened again! Camellia was a walking enticement to have sex and commit murder.

  These were Mary’s thoughts as she climbed the steps, and when she saw Camellia at the door waiting, twisting a Kleenex and looking as if in shock, she reacted:

  “Please, you have done more than enough—bamboozling my son—please, please go away.”

  Camellia stepped back as if hit. She staggered a little.

  “Mary I would never—I didn’t,” she said in her sad voice that still sounded like a child. This too, this voice like a child, was trickery—and her praying to the Virgin! What nonsense was that!

  “You don’t know what you would or would not do—
” Mary said. “You don’t know. You’re the one I’ve always worried about,” Mary continued, smiling a little self-consciously. “You’re the carrier of the seed of destruction!”

  Camellia went home. Every few steps she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk that was plowed down to ice and stone, and would stand petrified for minutes at a time. Then, as if wounded, she would take another few steps. But even at this most vulnerable moment she was seen by her uncle and looked upon as a charlatan—because he himself had always been one.

  Sterling was standing alongside a huge snowdrift under a light, smoking.

  “Oh,” she said, “Uncle Sterling—can you help me?”

  He, her uncle so used to taking from her, was only silent now, as if she had severely disappointed him. Sterling looked at his cigarette ash and commented, “Oh, have no fear—we’ll figure it all out, girl—you just wait and see.”

  As for Mr. Brower, he was informed what the betrayal of his daughter had led to.

  “Yes,” he said, “I knew it would.”

  EIGHT

  The men in the camp—on a mountain forty-five miles away—had hired on for one thing only this year. They were men, none of whom would be hired by Estabrook or Sloan. They had only one boss; they worked for Will Jameson—and now his brother, out of respect. They were themselves forsaken by others. They themselves did not know of the events happening in town.

  Each day they did a job that would make most men turn pale. Each day each of them did what was expected without complaint. The morning Owen was taken to jail, the temperature on their hill had fallen to minus thirty-eight.

  Trethewey, Richardson, Nolan, and Curtis were each up an hour before dawn.

  Trethewey was a gray-haired black man who had come here from Nova Scotia. He had a picture on the wall of his daughter, whom he had not seen in years, drink or mischief had caused his white wife to flee back to Nova Scotia, so he stayed alone with his great Percherons up at a camp near the Dungarvan. He had by chance received a letter from his wife, a retired teacher at a normal school in Windsor, Nova Scotia. He opened it in excitement only to discover how she cursed him, accused him of terrible things.