The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  “I did not think the town capable of this,” she retorted in French, the one thing from her father she had not lost, that for the sake of his memory and her mother’s she had held on to throughout the difficult and lowly years.

  They kept her another ten minutes, but she said nothing else.

  The coroner covered the body, and she was led away. Once beyond the door, Mackey confronted her.

  “Tell us why we should believe you,” he said, “when Mr. Brower don’t.”

  “I long ago knew truth was not dependent on Mr. Brower,” she said. It was the harshest statement she had ever made against him, and caught them by surprise. But there once was a night when Mr. Brower had made a pass at a sixteen-year-old girl, which she never mentioned.

  “He brought you up,” Mackey said, astounded—wanting more than anything to show that he was a part of her contrite accusers.

  She said, “I am aware of that. And I know Reggie is not like that—he is not—circumcised. And you could see where Reggie’s left arm had mended—because he broke it baling hay—and his forearms were bigger—and his right arm damaged because they threw pulp sticks at him. His head, too, is bigger. I have said it is not Reggie—you wanted to display this poor man’s body to me—for some reason—to shock me into a confession—but it is not him.”

  “Do you even know what circumcision means?” Mackey asked sharply.

  “I know Reggie was not,” she said.

  “Is Owen circumcised?” Mackey asked. Brand new to the town, he had to instill in others the fact that he was on their side. Never had anyone done this more slavishly.

  She turned away from him and looked at Crossman, as if decency should prevail.

  “That’s enough,” Crossman said.

  Mackey did not say anything else.

  “I want to go home,” she said in French.

  But there was one other thing that night.

  As she left she fainted, and had to be brought to her feet. She had never fainted before in her life. Of course, she had never been pregnant before either.

  FIVE

  On the second day after the body was found, Brower was in a bind.

  He had an as yet unidentified body. The body, he believed, proved murder—the hit over the head had caused unconsciousness (the timbers beneath the wharf or something else had disfigured the face so identification was impossible)—whereas having the entire body might only establish suicide.

  It was better, in fact, for the upcoming trial, to have a body without a face. The town was so outraged, it would be an easy victory. Brower knew this, and like a crocodile to the temperature became morbidly self-righteous. He did not mean to, but he could not fight it. He ate his lunch at his desk out of a brown paper bag. He drank water out of the small fountain down the hall.

  The impression the town had was of a betrayal of all he himself had taught this child Dupuis: to be kind, good, and generous to others.

  “What’s worse,” they said, “is he’ll have to prosecute her now.”

  What was more proof was this: The body had no coat, which accommodated the coat, with the blood-stained sleeve, left on the wharf. It had no boots either, but that was a small enough matter.

  Then, for a while, Brower was silent. And he said to his assistant: “As for the case with Solomon Hickey, I might be in a bind—”

  As for the case with Solomon Hickey; over the last week he discovered two witnesses, a Clinton Dulse and a Maufat McDurmot, on their way home from the hockey rink had passed the barbershop at the very moment. They had both rushed in and tried to stop the dispute, and grabbed Owen when no one else would go near him. Brower was very happy to gain from these men, but he was ultimately disappointed by what they said.

  Both said that Solomon Hickey had jabbed a sharp object against Owen Jameson’s side (they thought it was the scissors, not the comb) when Owen was about to leave the shop, and you could see how much pain registered on his face.

  “He just reacted—just like any one of us would do,” Maufat McDurmot said. “And I don’t think he meant to hurt nobody.”

  This is what Owen had already explained to Crossman.

  Then there was something else that the prosecutor must think about.

  The defense would bring up this wound Owen had suffered in battle as a cause for his outrage.

  By the seventy-fourth day of the cut (that is, before Matheson had located a body), Brower was ready to drop all charges. He told Lula that in the morning.

  “Thank God—for Solomon’s sake—I mean I felt it must have been an accident. A terrible thing that is all.”

  She smiled, one side of her face cruelly unable to.

  Brower went to work with a heavy heart, until the body was found.

  He telephoned his daughter that afternoon.

  “I think it is far worse than even we had thought,” he said.

  The town, Lula especially, was suffering through a kind of horror. She decided she should go and see Camellia and offer her help.

  But her father forbid her to.

  “Not on your life,” he said. “She flaunted herself in front of that man. She betrayed you as if you were a fly. She’ll never be spoken of again in this house—so leave her to her own designs.”

  In fact, like Owen, and the rest of the town, Brower was now caught up in the same rumors, spread by the same people, exacting the same price. The rumors had covered him in the same net as it had everyone else, and he was struggling with them just the same as everyone else.

  SIX

  Owen refused to see anyone—even his lawyer, the bright young Mr. Pillar, recently come to town from Halifax.

  “Oh, he’d get someone from Halifax—he is too good fer us,” someone said. Yet no one here would take the case.

  Pillar came each day at noon, once to show Owen his infant daughter Vera, dressed in a winter rabbit coat—the first birth on the Miramichi in 1947—but Owen did not wish to see him.

  “I think we have a good solid case, Mr. Jameson—and I think the prosecution’s case is in real jeopardy. I think we have a fair number of witnesses about Solomon, and they have no proof really about Reggie Glidden.” Mr. Pillar said all of this as if he assumed that Owen was guilty but it was his job to find some way to get him off. This was the sensation he presented as he spoke. But this sensation itself wasn’t entirely truthful—it was a way for the fresh young lawyer to play-act, to pretend that he was dealing with a dangerous murderer. This was the undercurrent of his subtle performance.

  “Fine, Tommie—let me know how it goes,” Owen said.

  Owen refused to see Mary except to ask why she had put Camellia out of the house.

  “For you—for you—you were caught up with her—she is a bad girl—and when they see you aren’t caught up with her—say, if I give some money to charity and they see you are no longer caught up with her, they will let you go.”

  He refused to see her also. That is, Camellia. She was pregnant, and the rumor was with his love child. That they had done it in the cave, laughing and reading the letter Lula had written.

  This became the paramount reason for the idea of guilt or murder and of their fleeing. Then there was the letter—not the letter Lula had written Owen but the other letter, even more indicative of their plans. The letter Reggie had from Estabrook, trying to hire him away. This was all Estabrook’s doing—a way to steal away the best Push in camp. But it was looked upon from a different angle—a different Pythagorean law. The offer of the job must have been because of the concern Reggie naturally had over his men working Good Friday—Estabrook, knowing of this concern, had tried to help a good man out.

  “And look what happens—”

  Then a sudden inexplicable realization came to Owen, while eating his half-cold plate of stew, while white snow fell one late afternoon and watching a rat squeeze into his cell, hop sideways and disappear into a corner.

  It was this: Some part of him was suspicious of Camellia also.

  He tried not to be. Bu
t they had separated them and were now working on both. His mother had told him that he might be able to strike a deal if he would just give Camellia up, say it was her doing. He suspected this is what they were saying to her as well. In fact, for the last three weeks this is exactly what Sterling was telling her. “Do you want to have that kid in prison?” he would say.

  Owen and Camellia were exactly what the town wanted them to be, and Owen had fallen into his role without even so much as a grimace.

  He went into the exercise yard only because the jailer needed him to chop wood. The snow fell with dreary regularity. He showered in a separate room, with the nozzle frozen and a small window looking out at the bleak river.

  After six at night he was left in darkness, with only one small light over the door. Now and then in the pitch dark someone would come in and throw cold water on him. Then rush out laughing hysterically. He knew by the footsteps it was Monroe.

  He sat on his hard bunk soaking until dawn, worrying about the men on the mountain, worrying about the wood, about the new saws arriving at the mill, about the wiring job they needed done.

  And now and again he thought about his life—the moment or series of moments which changed it. The folly of stepping down from the train was the worst act of random excess that had ever occurred to his feeble brain.

  “Don’t let his feet touch the ground!” he remembered them saying. How ironic, now, that this was a comment on hanging.

  Had he ever been happy?

  Well, of course.

  He was happiest when an October sun lingered a moment on his glasses as he walked in an old London Fog coat through the back streets of some European city. He realized that in his loneliness he was at his happiest. Happiness was the moment of acceptance, of all the things said and to be said against your humanity by others not of your stripe; stupefied by you, or envious, or angered, or ashamed—whatever their moment for you, there was a moment in you that would accept it as it was, and come to terms with the universe. It was in the end, joy. If he had strength of character at all.

  He knew this when he was sixteen and alone on the steps of the pantry stairs on a still hot June night in 1936 weaving in and out of trancelike melancholy, knowing that Lula did not love him.

  He knew it when drunk among the gymnasium boys and girls he swung through his algebraic jungle, and left to the sound of squeaking shoes an hour before the rest.

  And when he traveled after the war, the Victoria Cross with its lion and purple ribbon stuck deep within a pocket of his overcoat, rain trumpeting down upon the slate roofs of some city in the north of England, where fog lingered on the cobbles and lights flared and guttered in pubs filled with rough-hewn working girls and men home from war. That is when a moment came, spellbinding, blazing in its joy, the feeling replaced quickly by the dreary pattern of a rain-swept street, and then later that very night the fleeting memory of a childhood love who had not responded to him, and how he had become by one look she gave indifferent to her small tragedies.

  When he found himself back among them, among she who had laughed or ignored him, he wanted—envy from her. A childish tit-for-tat, meaningless as the ragtag of human emotions felt by so many for others. Why was that necessary? It was—and he waited for the applause. For a moment then, people wanting to see him replaced the joy of being solitary—and more important, it replaced the joy of being truthful.

  Still, in kindness he had set about helping Camellia. He could not do enough for her. She was Reggie’s wife. Was that all he felt? No—but he felt it his business and no one else’s.

  When the gossip fell to her, he fell into the rage against slight that so many proud men have to guard against.

  He had decided to live a solitary life. In part it was to prove the prophecy wrong. That is why he had been headed to Montreal on the train. Yet for some godforsaken reason the train was stopped. How silly to stop the train.

  Even then, when the men came onto the train to get him, he had believed they were there for someone else. Even when he was being slapped on the back and called a hero, he knew in the flimsy autumn air, the cold storm clouds over his head, it could not last. It could not, yet he himself had run with it as long as it allowed. One would think he was clairvoyant to see it. Not at all—in every look from every person on that platform there was amid the wondrous joy a look of slight recrimination and warning—saying why hadn’t this greatness been thrust upon someone they expected it to be—someone more like themselves—

  Well, he couldn’t say and so here he was.

  Now the jailer told him that a huge storm was coming in.

  Owen turned his back and stared out the window. The day was pulpy and warm. Finally he sat down on his bunk. He lighted a cigarette and thought. If only he knew what was happening to his men, now that the cutting was more than half through.

  “I wish I was there to watch them,” Owen said, so the jailer looked up from his magazine.

  SEVEN

  The sky was low, and all day a breeze warmed Tomkins’ face, making him open his coat and stretch into the sun. He stayed out almost an hour after the last of the two sleds went back up the hill, stamping logs with Estabrook’s stamp.

  There was a smell of tin in the air, prevalent close to the night, and the dreary sound of the wind against his parka, like snow scattering on tarpaper. It was at about four when the wind started to turn a little cold. Tomkins hid the peavey with the wrong stamp, picked up the other one, and started toward the camp.

  He was hungry and lonely and heading toward home along the skid road.

  The sky had darkened and Tomkins was miles from anywhere, in a sad empty space unknown by ninety-nine percent of humanity. The cold now seeped through his jacket lining, where he kept the rest of his money.

  He had been going to pick up a ride with the last two sled, but the two sled roared by in a whiff of winter horse and a clot of snow while he was doing his business in the woods. He had run out to call them but had tripped—and the old horses were gone. There would be another two sled along—Curtis’s—but not for two or three hours—well after dark Curtis would make his way back, with a lantern light up near his horses fore shoulders, dangling on a peculiar makeshift rod. It was a way to tell Curtis from all the others. But Tomkins, looking behind him into the desolate emptying of the day, saw nothing. He worried about panthers. For they were still here, in these great lost woods.

  His boots were soaking, his fingers raw.

  He turned and began to walk on boots almost frozen toward the camp miles away.

  He zippered his coat as tight as he could and pulled his hat down tighter upon his bald head.

  He remembered all the stings against him, many given by his father, and tried his best to forget them. That is why Stretch always made fun of others whom he deemed inadequate, because his father had made so much fun of him. That is why he called them little men and pipsqueaks, for he himself felt so little in his soul.

  As he walked along the brook road, he realized he had never been in the dark before without someone to show him the way.

  After a while worry crowded his senses and he began to think he was no longer on the path. He might be in the middle of the field of Jack pine, going in the other direction. If that was the case he might stumble over the second cliff that ran down from Good Friday into the back of Arron Brook. He would be lost in the maze of Jack pine in a second.

  He lighted a match to look, but the match went out in the wind, and at any rate showed only his fingers. It was now pitch dark.

  He began to call, and stumble forward: “Daddy—”

  When he stopped, his voice echoed about him, above him, behind him, and then the wind again began to moan in the trees.

  He felt he couldn’t make it back to the camp. With this in mind he began clawing the snow with his gloved hands, to burrow a tunnel away from the wind. For now all he wanted was to get down out of the wind. He dug over two feet of dry hard snow, and slipped down under it, looking up at the sky.


  He then searched for something to burn. But there was nothing. Only what was left of his bonus, in his pocket. He sat with his knees up, shivering. In a while there was only deathly silence. The wind had stopped, except for the occasional bluster from across the field. Tomkins knew by the taste of the air that the temperature was about to drop below minus thirty, or minus thirty-five. It had been so warm that day that he had sweated, and he had enjoyed the sweat on his back. Now his body felt like ice. He would be dead within two hours.

  He could not burn his bonus. Burning his bonus would be worse than death.

  Why had he come up here?

  He put his money in a little pile in the snow, picked out his last match and looked at it. The snow burned his hands it was so cold, when he piled the money up. Here, surrounded by a billion tons of wood, Stretch Tomkins was about to burn his money, his wide face and wider mouth in a kind of a carpish, elastic grin. But then: “Mr. Tomkins!” he heard. “Mr. Tomkins—for Jameson—Tomkins!”

  He paused, and heard it again. Far, far away, but coming closer. He waited, and then it was unmistakable. Like an angel—though Tomkins did not believe in angels.

  “I’m here—I’m here!” he roared, grabbing his money. “I’m here—please—good God, I’m here!” He stuffed his money into his pockets with fingers so numb he could not feel them.

  Who was here to search for him? Who would it be—who would have come for him—if anyone? He waited ten, fifteen minutes.

  And then, walking out of the dark, he saw the tiny, eager, smiling face of Meager Fortune.

  When Tomkins had not arrived in the two sled, Meager said they had set out searching.

  “Who—”

  “Half the camp.”

  “Really—for me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  This was not true—most of them simply believed a man should take care of himself. Meager was the one who had worried.