The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  “I’ll give you money—here—money for finding me,” Tomkins said.

  “I don’t want your money—and don’t parade money, or they will get you into a card game sure as hell.”

  “They will—who will?”

  “Them boys who are the ones to play,” Meager said.

  So Tomkins stuffed his money away again.

  Now Meager had to force him to walk, and so told him of all the times he had been sick, just to keep him moving. Of once when he fell down a shoot into a dam of water, with his parka on. They had to lift him out by crane, a line hooked to his back. And when he was cranked out he was frozen stiff, like an abominable snowman. But, he told Tomkins, not only did he not get sick, but his cigarettes didn’t even get wet. Why? Well, because all of his outer clothes had frozen solid and left him snug as a bug inside the ice, and the only thing he could move as they took him to a stove to thaw open his zippers was his eyes.

  But that wasn’t all, he said.

  Why, he lived in a house where the space between the boards allowed you to see the traffic going by on the street, so he could tell who had new cars.

  “Try that on for size if you don’t think it’s cold,” he said. And besides that, he had to wake every morning and shovel snow out of his bedroom window, because every night he would have a drift come in. Besides that, the rats would run over his bed, in twos and threes, and he would play a game where he would grab them by the tail and toss them out the window.

  “But then again, try an outhouse in January—well, of course, you have tried that—I know—I’ve seen you in the outhouse many times. Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Tomkins, it’s just our humanity.”

  Then he told Tomkins about his family—his little boy, Duncan, and his wife, Evelyn. And he told him the secret he had told no one else except Missy and Butch—that is, that Evelyn and his little boy Duncan had died in a fire when he was in Europe. They had died on June 5, 1944.

  “I miss them,” he said, and he coughed. “Isn’t then that a nice name—Evelyn? I think it’s the finest name in the world. I was in Europe, it was June 6—I had not heard they had died—we were pinned down just off the beach, the Germans throwing those fuckin’ potato mashers on us. And I get caught—a potato masher gets caught in my jacket—honest! And there I am thinking I’m done for—even more than the time I froze solid—yet out of the blue this lad comes takes the masher and throws it in the air and jumps on me. So I’m saved, Mr. Tomkins, and I said to the lad: ‘What’s yer name, son?’ And he looked at me with the finest eyes and kindest smile I ever knew and said, ‘Sir, my name is Evelyn.’ And I had never seen him before or after.

  “Here—I almost forgot—have some soup—I made it myself—I’m becomin’ nothin’ if not sort of a half-arsed cook—”

  Tomkins drank the soup and kept saying, “Thank you, thank you,” whenever Meager told another story.

  Meager kept talking, and kept saying: “Come, Mr. Tomkins, come, come.”

  “I only want my daddy to be proud of me—he was so tough I never measured up,” Stretch said.

  “Well, what nonsense,” Meager answered. “I know your father—you just keep walking and we’ll get there and your dad will be proud of you. You don’t think he is—well, I will tell you—yes, yes, yes—he always says he is when you aren’t there.”

  They hobbled disjointedly down the road, one voice of humanity to another, both making echoes into the void.

  When they came up finally to the last long hill toward the camp, Meager holding Tomkins under the arm, Stretch was a witness to the strangest sight in the world.

  Lanterns had been placed at every turn on that long hill down the ravine, burning like glow-worms on the frozen, scattered sled path slick with ice, and up on the two sled—with 175 logs piled high—was Richardson. He was ready to start the first load down at night. That is why Nolan, long ago, wanted space near the foot of the hill, and Gravellier called him crazy.

  Tomkins passed the sled by and looked up toward Richardson’s scarfed face, the fine horses with black harness as black as bolt air, while scuds of snow blew up against the two sled’s long runners and through the harsh and piled timbers, and the little dog Nancy whined waiting for a handout.

  Richardson made no sign to Tomkins, but catching him in the corner of his eye, dropped his colored scarf, spit his plug, and whipped the animals down into the void Stretch Tomkins had just escaped.

  He heard the sled go down and heard the horses whinny. He watched starkly, shivering, as the back of the sled disappeared beyond snowdrifts toward the bottom turn.

  “Is he really doing that, Meager?” Tomkins said, his mouth split open by the cold, and trying to catch his breath.

  “Yes, he is,” Fortune said. “Trethewey, Nolan, and Curtis will do it too.”

  They had rebuilt the camp from the battered timber and hung tents about it like sealskin. But at times the wind caught it mournfully, and people would say it was the ghost of Will Jameson watching them.

  When Tomkins got into camp, the first thing he did was take off his wet boots and parka—and when he did, the money he had gathered up fell in a hump on the floor. He stroked it up quickly and went to his cot to count it, while a ten-dollar bill fell behind him, and then another. Bartlett picked these up and brought them over, laying them beside Tomkins. The men looked at each other cautiously.

  Tomkins looked at them all, and turning away continued to count.

  “One hundred, one-twenty, one-forty,” he said aloud. And then realizing they were listening, took off his hat, put it on a nail, and began counting again, his lips feverish and the lantern above him glowing on his bald head.

  The men went back to eating their stew—saying nothing when Tomkins came to the table.

  “Some cold—we had to walk a fair piece tonight—hey Nolan—you shoulda held up for me,” Tomkins said, rubbing his hands together and looking at them. “Pass down the stew—will ya—that’s the ticket. Meager tells me his house is so old you can see right though the walls—boys, it must be a pretty cold place to take a piece off your wife there, Meager. Her old twat must be cold when you grab at it.”

  Meager looked at him, his small face looking hurt, but then nodded.

  “You’re right at that, Mr. Tomkins—you got me a peg.”

  PART VI

  ONE

  I was asked if work in the woods ground to a halt because of the trial. It did come to a halt, but it might not have had anything to do with the trial. For instance, at Sloan’s on the Tabusintac the buzz saws froze, the chains became embedded in the cedar trees, a man lost his leg by a saw jump, and no real axmen had been hired, for Sloan used inexperienced men to buzz saw to save money. In fact he had fired the best men he had that year, Simon Terri and Daniel Ward. Then the snows came, as deep as any since 1908. It was the same storm that caught the Prince family out in the open, and froze a couple starting out on their honeymoon from the Church of the Great Nativity.

  Sloan came to a halt sometime in February and could not start up again until late April, when the roads opened enough to allow the trucks he had hired to get in. He was a visionary who had lost his gamble this year. He cursed and swore everyone up and down, under a spell of depression, and sent men to report to him about the progress on Good Friday, for everyone was interested now in the great cash of wood that had been found there.

  Estabrook was at a halt because his entire cut was poor. They had not allowed a scaler near, and the men were worried about working for nothing. The worst of them had taken to going on forays to try and steal other cutters’ wood. The Push tried his best to keep their spirits up but finally told them to leave. Estabrook, knowing this to be the case, felt he would be the laughingstock of the province the first year he took over the reins of business from his father.

  That is, Sonny Estabrook was the first to realize what became in the next twenty years common opinion, and what I have researched to a stalemate in the last fifteen months. That he, in cruising the large tract
of immature Jameson timber after Will’s death, was the most likely to have carried the very blight on his boots, into the stand he would challenge the Jamesons for. With the first reports now coming to him, he was just beginning to realize this great irony as the trial began.

  “It musta come in on a ship about ten years ago—for it has been seen in Europe and New England,” the biologist told him a week before the trial started. “It ruins the cedar, and kills the rest.”

  At first this did not register in a significant way at all, but then, in a sudden flash, Sonny realized it was none but himself who had carried it in. That is, he and his father had visited the ship Jensen, which had been carrying the New England timber, to propose an offer that long ago May. His father did not want to bother with this new proposal before they checked the Jameson tract—but he himself insisted. He thought back over the years to that moment, his smile when his father gave in to him, as fresh as falling blood: “We should see the holds of Jensen tomorrow—before we check the tract,” Sonny had said. (He had said this because there was a case of Jamaica rum for the first boss who visited.)

  He had begun to realize earlier this fall, when the Jensen had been to port, a huge diesel-running schooner that had left here just before the snow flew with its weight in dealed up board and its ropes glistening with dangerous ice. He had had a few of the sailors over and they all got drunk. The captain, along with the first mate Conner and the able body Dressler. He made a night of it, with flaming rum pudding at the end.

  But now this Jensen Otter, long past her prime, convinced him it must have been he himself who had done this deed ten years before. That is, he and his father had walked into the tract of wood with death on their boots.

  This time the Jensen Otter left at night, sailing out into the Strait on diesel, heading south to the coast of Carolina with board, just before the ice came.

  “How could God be so cruel?” Sonny said now, rubbing his hands together in pathetic panic. Not thinking that if he had just let Will’s tract go, ten years before at the death and funeral of his friend and adversary, if he had decided that it was a Jameson tract, nothing would have ever happened—no poor wood that a scaler couldn’t see, no men out of cut for the year, no under-the-table payment in a ludicrous attempt to get another’s wood stamped as his own, no using the scandal as his justification—just as other notaries now did. And yet at this moment, none of this did he see. Only that Owen was a murderer and shouldn’t be cutting so far up on Good Friday Mount, because the men were in danger.

  But that was not the only point. Somewhere inside him, in his self-justification, was the idea that this would not be a design against him, if he worked hard and took action. And so now he had men like Stretch Tomkins doing what they were doing in order to prove to himself that a moment of unprovable metaphysics was not a source of concern or a slight against him.

  Still, as those two camps slowly shut down, more and more men showed up at the trial. That these for the most part were not Jameson’s men didn’t seem to matter. Jameson’s men would not have looked much better. But of course there were Jameson’s men out—Lloyd and Colson and Gravellier.

  “Men come forward in solidarity,” the editorial stated, as if the trial was the reason they were out. And this is the idea that took hold because the papers said so.

  This was brought to a pitch by the curly headed woman Owen had seen at the water, who had followed him home after the incident at the barbershop. Cora Auger.

  “This has all come because of lack of union—and what kind of man would refuse union to these men? This is what this trial is about, ladies and gentleman. It is about a man named Reginald McDonald Glidden who, if nothing else, supported his men. We are sorry for the Jamesons, that so much has been thrust on the shoulders of inexperience. It may be his revolt against Good Friday that caused Glidden this tragedy.”

  This editorial was part of the false wholesomeness that so many embraced after such a traumatic experience. Lloyd and Colson now became committee members for the Friends of Solomon Hickey. They held a memorial and pressed for an investigation into why charges weren’t laid.

  There was a strange turnabout—a sudden registering of the rehabilitation of Will Jameson’s memory—and now, in death, that of his best friend and Push Reggie Glidden. “They were real men, who would do whatever they asked their men to, and do it before, not like the lot of owners we have now,” the editorial stated.

  Sloan and Estabrook were the first to agree—so as to distance themselves from the “owners of today.” They talked liberally about the better conditions they were seeking, one of which was the battery-operated radio so the men could listen to Hockey Night in Canada.

  “I will have the battery-operated radio next year,” Sloan said.

  “I will have it before this year is out,” Estabrook countered.

  It was now a case of union and Dan Auger’s daughter.

  Now, everything Cora had faced, Owen and Camellia would also have to face. If someone told her that by stopping her intractable vendetta a miracle would take place, and she would save someone’s very life, she would deny it. For she must now grasp the only thing in life she had longed for—to have the Jamesons suffer as she had when her father Dan Auger had died. And why was this unreasonable?

  On a cold day in early February, Sonny Estabrook himself came to see her, telling her that the men needed union and she as Dan Auger’s daughter was the voice for it. She knew that Estabrook gave her a donation to say: “Focus on Jameson and not on me.”

  There was, however, one other thing Cora Auger knew. It had been known by her in the early days of November, because of her position within the hierarchy. It had been kept silent as requested—and so hardly a man of hers knew. Union was coming in 1948 by order of the Forestry Minister himself, for they could not handle a major strike in the woods next year. Demands would be met and pay would be increased.

  Therefore, whether she was or was not involved in Jameson’s downfall it would not matter a bit to the union. But she still paraded before the courthouse her tribe of derelict men, with signs saying: JUSTICE NOW, NEW TERMS FOR AXMEN. To insinuate her struggle with that of the prosecutor’s struggle. And the prosecutor admired this and prepared to mention it in his opening statement.

  This made its way across the province, and Cora Auger’s name became synonymous with justice for a little.

  The idea that Jameson was on trial as much for union as murder was a by-product of the moment. It became in some people’s mind a political killing. The idea that rumor could not go in this direction is a ridiculous assumption. It is like saying rumor’s main intent was not to misshape events in order to create the most out of scandal, and to quench a thirst and satiate famine. Reggie Glidden, who didn’t even care for politics, became in many minds a political martyr by February 5 of that year.

  The Jameson cut, which became the most documented cut in New Brunswick history, was snowbound, and the main camp had been burned by a flue fire. Though the men still managed to live there, very few things lifted their spirits.

  Five teamsters had gone out, and so had three axmen and a tend team. The pup, Nancy, was sick, and was said to have bleeding paws. They made booties for her paws and kept her well, for the dog was a town whelp and could be nothing more.

  The supply depot was snowbound, with the portage road having up to eight-foot drifts on major passes and only four teamsters—Nolan, Richardson, Trethewey, and Curtis—who became the most famous in the province that year worked.

  The snow started the night after Stretch Tomkins (a man like ourselves) was rescued, and it did not stop in any significant way for three weeks. But for upward of two weeks beyond that—that is, all during the trial—there was no getting out, and no getting in. A huge block of ice now sat solid in front of them, gray or deep blue it ran ragged for miles. Some angrier than others lashed their horses, put the big animals to the twitch, as if their beasts had not suffered enough and must suffer more just because their ow
ners did. They talked of eating their horses—to the horses themselves. “Ya’d better watch yerselfs or y’all be steak by supper.”

  The camp was essentially forgotten. Everyone in town thought only of the trial, which the men suffering as great a trial did not know was taking place.

  Meager Fortune ran here and there, helping to harness horses with young Gibbs. Bringing the Belgians and Clydes out each morning, he would stand upon a stool to harness them, careful of old Butch’s raw back. He would cook meals, wash dishes, clear snow, chaff or water when he was asked, and bundled up like a little beaver would check the lanterns down the run at midnight or make sure the sand was heated when thrown on the ice. Late he would get in from far down on the ice flat, and later still would he get to bed, mumbling his prayers alone in the dark.

  Twice he set out to the portager’s for word on supplies, only to come back by late night, exhausted, unable to get halfway, driven back by gale-force wind and snow. He felt humbled by this—for he had lived his life in the wilderness and had not been beaten by it. Still, he refused to relent. The men would tease him, of course, about cruelty—even Nolan.

  “Don’t eat the horses yet—I will find food!”

  If the storm would kill them, he would keep them alive. In February he was out in the day with the old rifle Owen had left, to seek game. He brought down a small buck deer, and salted some of the bear meat the axmen had killed. Since the cook himself was ill—and the men didn’t want to become such—Meager became their chief provider. He took it upon himself to ration everything, even tea—because, as he said, he was “your own meager fortune.”

  In fact it can be said that this small, childlike man was Push by February 17. He got up at dawn and went far down the slope looking for signs of moose, and could see for miles snowbound lakes and rivers and passes. Still, he felt that they could not get out forty miles to the river now—and that these men and boys had to be fed. And he decided to feed them because the portager could not get in.