The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  “You will never see Milly again,” the letter stated, referring to his daughter.

  So he came to work for Jameson on Good Friday.

  “You are too old to go up there,” someone said. He had only shrugged.

  He had with him a bowl, a cup, and a spoon that he had used since 1915. He did not know this would be his last year to need them.

  Richardson had a picture on the wall. It was him as a young man, taken just the day before he lost his left arm. Though people said his right arm was as strong as two, and did the work of two, it was filled with pain now—his muscles torn and his elbow ruined from hitting the timbers when he lashed the whip forward. He had come in for one reason, to take the largest load down the hill and prove what he could do, though for the last four months he had had visions of his own death.

  Nolan had a picture of his Belgians in gold harness at a show and a ribbon on their bridles, to say he had hauled the largest load ever hauled on the river. But that was years ago, in 1933. Now almost no one would hire him. Only Jameson on Good Friday.

  Curtis had a map pinned where no picture stood. At twenty-two he was seemingly too young for pictures. He wanted to go down to California. He thought of stagecoach riding in the movies. He thought of himself and Clark Gable drinking in a bar.

  “What could you say to Clark Gable?” Tomkins derided him.

  “I’d like to know what Mr. Gable could ever say to me,” Curtis replied.

  The highest load here this year—one taken by Trethewey atop the Percherons—was about 260 logs, almost the same amount you would put on a skid near the river. It took the men six hours to load it well, and Trethewey went down over the hill almost at dark, and traveled the eight miles alone and then back, not coming to supper until long after lights out and the stove cold.

  “You look like a white feller,” they laughed. And he did—even his chest seemed white.

  Richardson wanted to do better by fifty logs. He would do so just because he had one arm, and had been teased because of it. That was his single motivation now.

  A one-armed rider with the largest load ever drawn across a cut, larger than Nolan’s in 1933. That might make the papers. That might make him forget.

  He was going to do it for the McCord girl, who had left him within a day of his losing his arm.

  “Don’t you understand—” Nolan said. “You don’t need to haul down any fuckin’ load to prove bravery to her—”

  Richardson shrugged and spit his plug.

  “No matter.”

  If Richardson succeeded, many would hear nothing about it—if he failed, they would only hear that he was dead.

  And within ten years every tool they used with such pride would be obsolete, scattered in a forgotten forest, traces and tack and treats for horses, lost forever underfoot. Become the object of ruthless historians like myself.

  The next day Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins stayed out on the flats stamping the timber. His job was ostensibly to mark the timber as Jameson.

  The days were lasting a bit longer and the men were working longer hours, and the teamsters were traveling farther. They would come back up the frozen mount, the two sleds white and ghostly with hoarfrost.

  Tomkins stayed out until after dark stamping logs. Then he went back to the hovel, feeling quickly for his money and looking suspiciously about. He had money with him, for as a spy for Estabrook he would tell how far ahead or behind they were—how good the wood was, and when they would get it to the mill. He had been paid $350 extra to play Judas by stamping as many rods of cedar as he could with an E. He hid this stamp down on the flat, and traded the Jameson stamp for it when he got there. Each night walked back to the camp with the Jameson stamp—nothing more than a peavey with the company’s name on the bottom. Each piece of wood he stamped would go to Estabrook’s boom in the spring. But Tomkins was anxious about this—for if anyone caught him, he would be beaten to a pulp. It was perhaps the most deceitful thing to do.

  “How would they ever know?” Estabrook had told him smiling, over Christmas holidays when he had invited Tomkins to his house with the caribou racks and the sensation of an old lumber baron’s world having seen better times.

  “Don’t worry—just think of yourself as a teamster they treated poorly. And think of yer mom and dad—they should have something as well—”

  “Of course,” Tomkins said, “of course.”

  After supper he went about his business, looking at no one and thinking of his future. Three hundred and fifty extra dollars was a good amount; two hundred extra promised for his father and a promise in writing of being a teamster for the Estabrook cut next year.

  The men played cards and sang—and listened to the horrible wind—until well after nine o’clock. Then slowly, their bodies aching, their entire lives dependent on those bodies, they struggled into bed, and the main lanterns were turned down.

  Tomkins thought of porridge with dark brown sugar sprinkling down from the roof as he drifted off to sleep. He thought of his father always angry because he didn’t measure up.

  “Porridge,” he thought, “porridge tomorrow morning!”

  The trouble with porridge and brown sugar drifting you off to sleep, is sometimes, on occasion, it isn’t brown sugar but flak from the ceiling, and a flue fire has caught in the eves because of the scowling northwest wind, sending those little pieces of flak down upon you. Then you are up and scrambling out the door into the cold arctic air, while men are trying to put out blue flames licking across the ceiling.

  “Come, Mr. Tomkins, come,” Meager Fortune was saying. He woke to the sound of hell all about him. Smoke and flame shot out of the bunk above him, and smoke billowed nearby.

  Tomkins grabbed at his heavy coat, and lost half his money in the flames. (He had carried it all on him into camp like a child wanting to hide it from and impress the others.)

  “My God,” he said, “I have to go back.”

  “Never mind that now—what you lose isn’t worth you life,” Nolan said, giving him a cuff.

  “How dare you?” Tomkins yelled. “How dare you—I don’t need to take that.”

  Once outside he saw Fraser and Gibbs up on the roof kicking at the burning timbers, and Pitman hauling these timbers down into the snow. He sat by himself and watched the men kick and scramble to try to keep their lives intact.

  Before twelve that night all of them were outside salvaging what they could, throwing water on the north side of the camp, hollering to bring the horses away from the hovel nearest them because of smoke. Two of the Belgians were blinded and frantic, but the Percherons were brought out without lead and simply ran down along the shine to the gully where they would be brought back at dawn. The other horses were fine, away to the north, and it was there the men took shelter. But Butch stood at the front of the hovel, his back smoldering, and the smell of burning horse hair powerful. The tend team Gibbs jumped from the cabin roof, ran through the snow with a bucket, and jumped aside a two sled in order to reach his back. The horse grunted when the ice-frozen water splashed over it, and reared, tossing the boy backward and knocking him cold—but the smoldering was done.

  Trethewey rushed in to grab the picture of his daughter, and came out with his white hair singed and his huge black chest dotted with sparks that went out in the wind, like stars going out in the sky. Richardson had lost the only picture he had of himself with two good arms.

  Tomkins sat on the ground in his bare feet, socks in hand, each foot almost entirely covered in snow, cursing and shivering, and worried.

  They had managed to stop the fire—and had enough provisions in the storeroom to continue.

  Besides, Innis the portager was supposed to be in with staples and mail this week.

  The main thing was the boots—two of the cutters had lost theirs, and Tomkins had been sure his were gone as well, except Meager Fortune rescued them for him. They were singed and looked odd, but they fit.

  “Did you get my money,” he whispered, “did you get my
money?”

  “I didn’t see any money.”

  Tomkins searched the snow with his bare hands, looking at Meager and saying, “You stole my money.”

  “No one stole your money,” Trethewey said.

  But Tomkins kept moving the snow back and forth, looking to see if it had made it out, his lips wet, his face frantic.

  “Half of it’s gone,” he said, “I’m down by half.”

  And he looked at them all with a curious and weak kind of confiding, nodding first to one and then the other.

  “Where would you get all that money?” Curtis asked.

  The fire caused the four in Gravellier’s crew to decide this was a sign of providence to go out. They spoke of ghosts and messages, and warnings and signs. They spoke of the death of Dan Auger and how it would haunt them.

  “No man should work for Jameson after Auger,” Gravellier said.

  Colson, the spokesman for Gravellier’s crew, said he had no reason to stay on a mountain without a place to sleep to bring heavy wood down a hill that would break the back of the horse that stumbled.

  The other three with him said the same. Gravellier stood in the center of the black yard as if something or someone had just displeased him.

  “I toldum,” he said, “I toldum.”

  Then they all went back to the original argument: The road should have gone around. Any true teamster would have known this, and have been safe. It was as if they argued that not going around had caused the flue fire.

  Well, the camp was built in a place that caused the flue fire because of the horror of constant wind. They should never have been on the mountain—or at least taken time to construct a safer camp.

  Even as they spoke now, the wind blew their clothes and scattered burnt embers upward in a gale, like specters shooting upward out of a circle of hell.

  Tomkins did not know what to do, whether to stay or go—though he knew he must stay, for he had taken money, and promised Estabrook he would stay.

  He stood in the dark, alone, watching those about him, when a man yelled “yahoo” to them out of the gloom.

  It was the portager, Mr. Innis, in on two roans in the dark with letters and provisions. The first they had seen in well over two weeks. Innis had not waited until tomorrow, but had left earlier in the day, for he must tell them of the trouble their boss was in.

  As he approached from the long flat, he had seen the flames.

  They stood under the tight flare of lantern light and listened to him, while some opened their mail, the horses that hauled him panting and drenched.

  He was tall as a ghost with a bent back, and his hands swollen and blackened by years of holding on to the reins. He spoke in his stutter about a death, a murder—and for what—

  “A piece of tail,” Innis said.

  “Who is with us now?” Colson hollered, feeling very much vindicated. Colson, a small man with a wizened face, always deferred to others about what might be right or wrong, and acted only when others were on his side.

  Innis looked at the camp and shook his head. He had seen the flames and thought he might have to bring out some bodies.

  “We are not dead yet,” Trethewey said. “We will tie up tents to the cedar here” (he pointed to the old cedar shaped like a cross) “and bring the tarps across to the front of the camp, and work to get it back in order—we’ll be cozy enough.”

  “I’m here to warn you,” Innis advised, “I just heard it. You will have a bad blow up here—storm is coming in off St. Lawrence. It will close you down on this here mountain like never before—you might not get off it, and no one will be able to get in for you.”

  “No, we will stay,” Nolan said, “we have worked in snow before.”

  “But if four are going out, how will you get half the wood yarded?” Innis asked—for he was hoping not to have to make this terrible trip again.

  But Nolan’s four had decided they would stay.

  So the axmen and the tend teams decided as much, and the cook brought out soup and they had it by two a.m., while the four going out—and two besides—made themselves a shelter near the storeroom, and shared the soup as well. Behind them, three cedar trees rose high up in a circumference of stumps and thrashed roots, logs and limbs, for miles.

  Bartlett, being a practical and punctilious man, was already deciding how to fell the trees in the huge dark lot behind these—for this was the major cedar vale that would lead them down the far side of the mountain.

  In this cedar vale stood Richardson after going to fetch Curtis’s horses, which he had seen rush down. Here he was alone, staring at those huge trees that rose up from beneath him. He was thinking of 310 logs; 310 would be a championship load. Then the woman he had lost in Strathadam, the McCord woman who left him, would know his feat.

  Innis had told them the rumor was that Estabrook’s wood was no good. The cedar was filled with sand, hemlock tottering and rotted up to the branches, and worms in the spruce. No one knew how it was ruined, but Estabrook, happy to get it, never much decided to inspect it.

  “It’s as if a plague came to it the day Will died,” Innis said. For ghosts and hyperbole went together in the dark.

  Here it was much better. It was in fact the largest and best wood seen on this river since the great Miramichi fire.

  Jameson’s scaler had been in. The cedar had no sand, hemlock no rot—at least not too far up, and so if they stayed all would be well.

  “It is bona fide,” Nolan said, smiling.

  Tomkins now knew why Estabrook, who could have had any lease he wanted, had Tomkins doing what he did.

  The next morning Innis and the four teamsters left just after dawn. Meager Fortune had made them breakfast. The men staying were already working, and the tents they had in the storehouse were already set up, stretched down from that big cedar cross, comfortable enough but not a camp. Those staying reminded Meager of a dispatch of bedraggled soldiers. The one in the worst mood was Tomkins, who threw the cup of tea Meager had handed him.

  But another cup was passed to Tomkins. He knew now that he could not escape. He had already taken $350—a fortune for him, though counting it up he had lost more than a hundred in the fire. He had been promised more if he stayed the course.

  A glaze of frost sat on each two sled three inches thick, and pools of frozen black water had collected in all those places the men had danced the hootenanny two nights before, drinking off the last bottled beer.

  Seeing Mr. Innis’s portage sled teetering along on the flat, hauled by his skinny roans, made it seem to some of the youngsters too proud to say they wanted to go home as if humanity was leaving them in the figure of that tall, aloof, somewhat prurient man. They watched this man until his body became speck and then speck disappeared.

  The wind called out hilariously at their expense, saying through the treetops: “It will snow.”

  Tomcat Tomkins, more than any, wanted to be gone too.

  PART V

  ONE

  Long before Owen had gone to the barbershop, long before he had seen this as anything troubling, long before that, friends had already warned Camellia not to “act up.” At least a few, though generous themselves, had gotten caught up in it all themselves and needed for their own sake to come to her rescue. They needed once again, even though some were as stunned as doorknobs, to show her the way.

  So the Steadfast Few, as Lula had dubbed them in happier days, led by the one who wrote Lula the letter about Owen and Camellia’s affair, went to Camellia’s house and knocked on the door. They had a long meeting at Susan Gladstone’s house before they did this. And decided, all holding hands, that if one went down to that place near the docks then by God all of them would. So, all of them stood together on the doormat in the coming dark and knocked while Camellia, sick for days, felt now like a trapped animal.

  “She is in danger of slipping back into that world,” one said as they had walked in single file along the snow-filled pathway, teetering this way and that and holding t
heir hats. What world were they referring to? Who knows, for they themselves did not.

  They were as pained by her poor surroundings as by what they eventually had to say. They looked only to one another for comfort—doing this for her stepfamily, those illusively proud Browers.

  “You’re a married woman,” one said, suddenly smiling corruptly. “And you know how we care for you. You have to try to behave yourself before people begin to talk.”

  “Who cares for me?” Camellia asked.

  “Why, dear, all of us—yes—don’t we, girls! And we were the ones who did so much for you when you were getting married—”

  The idea that outrage comes with moral certitude and without self-interest is in itself the harbinger of self-interest.

  “Go,” she whispered.

  “Pardon us, dear?”

  “I said go—” Camellia said, going to the door. “Go the hell away. Goodbye—you are SUCH FRIENDS—Will Jameson was right—schoolmarms for schoolmarms, he said, and he was goddamn right!”

  So the Steadfast Few went away waiting for the hammer to fall, and knowing happily it wouldn’t fall on them. And three of them were in fact teachers, and schoolmarms well enough. They traipsed back up that narrow path toward the center of town in single file, holding on to their hats, tch-tching that woman and that desperate world.

  But though Camellia would break out laughing in the night as one does at people’s terrible suppositions about them, and how wrong supposition could be, she was still broken-hearted.

  Yet now that it had happened, now that all this had occurred, her few acquaintances could take up the rod against her. Which is exactly what the scandal was for in the first place. And her laughing at them was even more disastrous for her. So why shouldn’t they condemn her now—they saw very quickly it was to their advantage to do so.

  Besides, anyone who did not join in their condemnation was now suspect of having no feeling toward Lula Brower, the jilted fiancée of Owen Jameson. And this was the main issue—their own feelings of disloyalty toward their friend Lula over the last few years. Camellia was a way to make it up.