The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  “Look how Lula always tried to help her,” Miss Donnehy said. And they hurried on into the dark, tottering over the slippery ice.

  “We must stop the rumor,” another said, “for Lula’s sake.” This being the rumor that Camellia was well knocked up by Owen Jameson that all of them had started a month before, for Lula’s sake.

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Lula had been kept in the dark for a long time about these rumors, too. She, they said, was too sensitive to know, and it would break her heart to know, for she loved Owen Jameson so much. And as they all said: “We thought he liked books—well, this just goes to show!”

  Just as they had told her that Owen was coming back to marry her—just as they had said this was a certainty, now they let it slip over the next few days to this woman that Camellia was pregnant with Owen’s child.

  “Then if it is Owen’s, I feel sorry for them,” Lula said.

  “Just never you mind, dear,” the one who visited her said.

  None tormented Lula more than those who were trying to protect her.

  “Marriage to her is nothin’—not even a blessed sacrament—more like a snot rag, I figure,” Sterling said about his niece, blowing his big red nose in the middle of the street and running to the priest. Ah, the priest caught shit over this later, but the priest must comfort those who call—and though there are bad priests, the best ones always have, even poor Sterling who now had the support of the entire town.

  Camellia knew the rumor, and knew the rumor wasn’t true. Yet for her to go to confession and not confess adultery would be seen as sacrilege. So she did not go, and did not confess, and was seen by old nuns and old parishioners not to have gone, and not to have confessed.

  But on the seventy-seventh day of the haul, Camellia went to see Owen.

  An old man, a neighbor who liked her, the grandfather of the Foley girl, told her she shouldn’t visit if she wanted to keep perception of innocence. But she could not do this to Owen Jameson.

  “Then go, girl,” he said, “and never mind them.”

  Even before she got to Jail Street, a crowd spotted her.

  “His lovebird has come—so hang her too—fer Reggie’s sake,” a woman shouted.

  “She’s got the devil right in her guts—” another yelled.

  “Hang ‘em back to back—the whore,” one of the men said.

  Crossman stood as soon as she came in, and walked toward her—quickly, as if to frighten her. But then he calmed himself; though the very look of her enraged others now, he was suddenly sorry for her. And so he smiled in spite of himself and asked how she was, asked if she was feeding herself for she looked sick—said he remembered she played the piano so well, did she play it now? Now, she said, she had no piano to play, but she could play and did play the spoons, at night by herself in her room. Then she laughed at this absurdity.

  He looked at her old coat, her small hat, her ratty boots run down on the heels, and smiled again.

  He was the one who had arrested her father, Les Dupuis, after he had killed his wife. It was a very strange day, that day seventeen years ago—how it clouded the town and the entire river. Dupuis had come home from work, gone to the cave and caught his wife waiting for someone. There in Winch’s cave he pulled his knife and she was dead in a second. Not having wanted to kill her, seeing her plain drab face, worn down over the years by work, her small hands she held up to prevent him, he took the knife and stabbed himself. He bled on the stones but did not die.

  Camellia was at home, waiting for them to come back, and bore the terrible knowledge of death at an early age. In school she was teased viciously by a few who wanted to lash out at the world.

  “Who could make anything of such a disaster?” one reporter for the Halifax paper wrote at the time.

  Well, in a certain way, Crossman knew, many people—even the reporter from the Halifax paper. Looking at her in her small hat and half-scared eyes, he realized this. That is, everyone involved had taken whatever they could from Camellia, to further their own ambition. He remembered her alone in a gale of wind, at the crossroads waiting to hear the sentence against her father. Everyone left the court jubilant at his death sentence. When she saw their jubilation, she thought he had been declared innocent and became jubilant too. This very picture of her was used against her father’s appeal. YOUNG CAMELLIA, ORPHANED BY MURDER, REJOICES.

  Before he was hanged Les Dupuis made an appeal to the town for someone to take in his daughter. Everyone at every juncture hesitated, and it seemed as if she would follow the road down to the orphanage of the Sisters of Charity. But Brower made the humane gesture, which was written about across the country. He who had sent Dupuis to his death would now care for the girl. It was a kind and noble thing he did.

  Once they heard of Owen’s greatness in battle, Brower completely changed his opinion about the boy, longed to see him again, and convinced Lula they were engaged because of that small brooch. Lula clutched this brooch like a drowning girl. There was, however, Camellia—who was not engaged, who was beautiful, and who had written Owen during the war.

  “So get her married,” Crossman said glibly.

  “How?” Brower asked.

  Crossman thought a moment.

  “Well, I have a man in my cell. Reggie Glidden. Glidden always liked her—it might straighten them both out.”

  The idea that it would straighten them both out was appealing.

  Brower told Camellia about Glidden that afternoon.

  “Oh I know him, he’s Owen’s friend—just let him out of jail and tell him to come and see me,” she said excitedly, thinking they wanted her to help a friend of Owen, for the interest Owen had shown in saving him.

  Crossman let the man out. Brower bought him a suit. Glidden came to the house. He and Camellia sat together, and Glidden came back, and again came. Within a month everyone considered them betrothed. For certain, Brower did.

  Camellia’s kindness had done her in.

  Mary Jameson then hired her—because she was betrothed to Reggie.

  “I have a job,” Camellia said, “can you imagine? I finally can earn some money—and won’t be such a bother anymore!”

  “You see how everything works out?” Lula smiled.

  Secretly Camellia knew they wanted her gone. Her beauty too stark a reminder.

  She went to her wedding night—a white dress second-hand, and a small complement of people she hardly knew. Brower giving her away with the stiff formality of a preacher.

  A rainstorm came and made the ground murky. The reception was held in a little hall Mary Jameson had rented for them, where the lights over the center table had been burnt out. Reggie got drunk and was too frightened to make a speech. When he fell down, people started to titter.

  “Off on the right foot!” someone yelled.

  “Now she’s settled,” one of the Steadfast Few said to Lula, squeezing her hand in sudden conspiracy. “Thank God for that.”

  This idea that Camellia was at risk with men was an easy one to maintain. Think of her mother.

  The one thing Lula and her father were silent about was the fact that they had heard from the colonel who wasn’t in the field that heroic day that Owen Jameson was coming home. They heard it two weeks before the marriage.

  Crossman remembered Camellia’s white blouse with the small cross on her neck, three days before her marriage. Seeing this same blouse and cross tonight, he knew they all had betrayed her.

  But that did not stop him from believing she was guilty.

  TWO

  Owen looked tragically small in the cell—his broad forehead, his head prematurely balding. He was like the high school student she once remembered, the outcast, all over again. He had returned to his former place without even much of a whimper. Bail had been refused because of the train ticket they had found him with.

  It would seem that those schoolmarms who had so refuted the books he once read had been proven right. All that mocking of those diligent teachers proved
to them their own worth now.

  As always, you learn more about the subject you have killed within the hours following his death. Buckler had told him all he had found out: Solomon had been preparing to buy the barbershop and propose to Lula, who lived in a reclusive shell at the back of the house. Each week with his pay in a brown envelope he would head to the bank and meticulously make out his deposit slip in the pedestrian certainty of a happy life. But her father had put an end to that as soon as they heard Owen might be coming home.

  “My daughter is not marrying a barber—I’ll stake my life on that,” he said.

  Another fact was that Solomon Hickey had had an abscessed tooth since Christmas, and his pain may have propelled him to stick the comb in Owen.

  Owen was sorry, said he would never have opened the barbershop door if he had known, but there was little or nothing he could do now.

  It was already growing dark, and the streetlights made the snow glitter—like a frozen engine, the outside had ground to a halt.

  Owen was happy to see Camellia, of course. But she had come to tell him something. Something else had just happened today, the seventy-seventh of the haul. This is why the crowd had gathered outside.

  “What more could?” he smiled. “The main camp has been burned and four teamsters have run away—only Buckler’s old standbys remain.”

  So she told him.

  They needed her help in identifying a body that had been found by Matheson the day before.

  “Where was it found?” Owen asked.

  “A mile or two down from the cave, washed up on shore,” she said. “By Mr. Matheson—but I guess it is all wrecked and they need someone to say who it is.”

  “It cannot be Reg,” Owen said whispering, almost in horror. “It could be anyone—maybe a logger caught up in last years run—or— Who knows, Camellia—but it has to be someone else—”

  “I don’t know—” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.

  “Why can’t they tell? It’s all for show!” he said, suddenly enraged at how everything was turning.

  “I don’t know—I have to go down to the morgue—where is it?”

  “In—the hospital somewhere, I think.”

  “Everything is spiraling out of control—why is that?” she asked with sudden calmness. “Even your mother thinks I’m a bad woman now. I married Reggie because he was Will’s best friend—and now—they are the first to accuse me of not loving him!”

  He thought of what she had just said and realized what an outcast she must have been.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Her small dark hat pressed down on her head, a show of that compulsion to understand through ornament something about our own relationship with the deadly world, and inspired him to reach through the bars and lightly touch her cheek.

  Yet given any other circumstance he might think just like the town. This puzzled and frightened him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  They were silent.

  “Then take this back,” she said, handing him Saint Jude’s medal.

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?” he whispered in the dim, small corridor, so the sound seemed to echo off the chipped paint and exposed cement. “I’m not a religious man, and I certainly am not a Catholic.”

  She sat for a moment, not making any motion, looking as if someone had failed her. Seeing this, he put his hands through the bar and took the medal and chain from her hands.

  “There—so what do I pray for now?”

  “Pray it is not Reggie—as impossible as it seems, pray that Reggie is still alive.”

  For an hour after she left he had the Saint Jude medal in his hand. When Monroe came back in, he told him of the body. It was amazing that Matheson had found what he had in that current.

  “Its like God wanted it so,” Monroe said, sniffing as if he suddenly had an open line to God, and sniffed in his likeness.

  Owen looked at him without comment but Monroe smiled as he walked quickly by, staring in as he went, his hands lightly touching the bars and speaking more rapidly than he had ever done with almost a wild grin on his face. He was exuberant, carefree, and pent-up emotion now spilled out: “We got old footprints and fingerprints and hair samples, and everything. You should see what we gone and got, Owen. Well—there you have it. You betrayed your family name and killed two men. After the whole town took you in their arms. All this,” he said, as he moved rapidly away, “for a piece of French twat—a common cunt from the gutter is all she is.”

  And then he disappeared and the light went out.

  The trouble with having the overhead light out is that in this darkness, three or four rats made their way into his cell each night.

  THREE

  There is a picture of Camellia Dupuis on the arm of officer-in-training Constable Monroe that same evening. The constable is slightly ahead of her, impeccably groomed, his free arm bent at the elbow to keep the curious back, and she is looking at the camera, wearing that black coat with the fur collar turned up. Though a torn, old coat, it looks new in the picture. That is, the picture makes her look like someone she never was, nor ever attempted to be.

  Her dark hair is wavy, her eyes are cast up toward us. The closest you might come to it is the picture of the Black Dahlia—the woman in Los Angeles murdered about the same time. Both are striking women, both have a look of seductive charm, both are walking into a dark they cannot comprehend. This was the picture, then, that would be published alongside the seventeen-year-old picture of herself as a child, during the story of her father. The articles would state—from the Canadian wire service to the BBC—the strange coincidences, and how her adoptive father, who had once thought of becoming a minister, would now have to prosecute her. And because he was a religious man, he did not hesitate or fear the death penalty.

  The story was heightened by acknowledging that Owen had been Lula’s sweetheart before the war.

  GOOD SAMARITAN VICTIM OF LOVE TRIANGLE? the question posed now.

  Constable Monroe knew the seriousness of these allegations—that is, that Owen and she had somehow committed a perfect crime, a theory promoted for over a month by Reggie’s cousin, who had been added to the list of prosecution witnesses and had come to town on government expense to view the body as well. Monk’s theory was the one to take hold—Reggie would be the last person to commit suicide. He must have been lured to his death by Camellia. He had come home to protect her, and had fallen victim to her snare. There was the idea that they had tried to put him in a trunk, and finally threw him into the water alone and still alive.

  “Yes, that’s it,” people said, as if suddenly becoming wise. “Yessir, I can see it now.”

  The provincial paper ran the picture of Camellia on Monroe’s arm and the headline stated: CAMELLIA ON WAY TO VIEW HUSBAND’S BODY—HAVING LEFT THE CELL OF ACCUSED MURDERER OWEN JAMESON.

  She had become a single name to the province, and Owen’s lover. The headline already indicting both.

  This had become a thriller of the town’s own making, each person playing a prescribed part. To continue to the end the thriller could not end. It had to continue in its relentless gravity. Monroe kept this picture and showed it around for the rest of his life.

  “I’m still your friend,” one young woman she knew as a convent girl shouted, and waved slightly her thin hand into the vacant lot, while her boyfriend told her to shut her mouth.

  FOUR

  The morgue was a room beneath the hospital where the coroner and medical examiner had small glass-partitioned rooms with typewriters and charts and blotters. They were used to it, but it was all new and dreadful to Camellia Dupuis.

  There was water on the cement hallway floor, collecting about a plugged drain. Overhead light bulbs were incased in wire mesh. The morgue proper was off to the left, through a heavy leaded door with a huge latch.

  Despite steeling herself for this, Camellia needed to be held up by Monroe. The body was on the table in this small cement room that smelled of blood an
d antiseptic. A sheet covered it. The coroner—Mackey, a transparent and fussy man with fuzzy blond hair and weakened milky eyes—stood beside it, looking at her. Behind him was a large white basin. To one side of that a calendar from May 1939, the month Will Jameson had died. There were other deaths, of course—but the two recent ones were the first murders in town since Mrs. Dupuis.

  And it seemed absolutely obvious to them that Camellia, the murderer’s daughter, would be caught up in it. All the signs had been there from the time she was a girl—passed over then with reservation to be appraised now. Her peals of laughter at the convent, sitting in detention four hours a week—all the signs never thought about until something like this was done.

  Each of these men wondered how she would react. This was a typical point of pride with them. There was no way she could act that wouldn’t be deemed culpable if they themselves decided such.

  “Well, are we here,” Mackey said.

  She looked straight ahead as the sheet was taken off.

  “You see why we need you here.”

  She glanced at the body, understood and nodded. It was a man whose face was battered and partially missing. It lay with blackened fingers turned toward her. The silence in the room was profound.

  “Can you tell?”

  She nodded.

  “You can tell it’s Reggie Glidden?”

  “It is not my Reggie,” she whispered.

  “Your Reggie. Mr. Monk, his closest relative, said today it is Reggie’s body,” the coroner said.

  “It is not Reggie,” she said breathing quickly through her nose, a terrible scent of antiseptic decay.

  “It is not Reggie’s—I mean, you would still say it wasn’t Reggie’s—maybe you didn’t even know he was going to do it—perhaps—” Crossman said, hoping for an admission where he could snare her and yet still have compassion for the memory of her as an innocent child, “perhaps you did not think he was capable of this?”