The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  The court was adjourned for an hour. People stood near the door, wanting to get back in as soon as possible. “He’s out of his goddamn mind,” they said.

  Just after one o’clock in the afternoon the trial resumed.

  Angus Brower, of the farming Browers, his blondish-red hair over his reddish face, his bow tie just slightly askew, walked to the stand, and then turned his back on Owen before he asked his first question. He spoke very softly. It increased the weight of what he had to say. “Let you go—yes, you would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course—and I’d be able to help you solve this.”

  “Of course you would, and we would all be so grateful to you again—just as we were during the war. You love gratitude, don’t you?”

  Owen said nothing.

  “What you are actually feeling is guilt, isn’t it, sir?”

  “I suppose I am a little.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—well, because of Camellia and Reggie—who should have been left alone to solve their problems like any married couple.”

  “But you were willing to go to Montreal with her.”

  “No, I wasn’t—”

  “But you gave her money?”

  “Yes—”

  “You didn’t mind compromising her with phone calls and money?”

  There was silence for almost a minute.

  Chairs squeaked. The prosecutor turned and faced the stand again. He looked nonplused, continued: “Did you like kissing Camellia?”

  Pause.

  “Did you like kissing her?”

  “Well—of course, who wouldn’t—but I didn’t know who she was.”

  Loud laughter.

  “And you liked putting the VC on her breast, didn’t you—that must have been for her husband’s benefit, and you told her you would marry her.”

  “That was a joke—I didn’t know who she was—I mean, already married.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t think it a joke?”

  “I only wanted to help Reggie.”

  “Ahhh—helping Reggie—yes, men have been using that ploy for three thousand years, I am sure—and women have been anticipating it—?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Now your lawyer wants to blame it on her.”

  “I do not wish to.”

  “No, you know where the guilt lies.”

  Objection.

  “That’s why you want to save everyone now—it is your guilt at having destroyed everything one man had and was.”

  Objection.

  “No further questions.”

  That night, in the dark, upon George Street, Brower walked. The lights were out in the house. Usually most of the lights would be on and supper made. It was physiotherapy day, and usually Lula was more optimistic on these days.

  On the veranda he felt something—an anticipation in the cold. The light was out in the hall. But to his surprise he saw his daughter sitting in their living room alone, darkness coming down upon her, the books she so enjoyed as a girl behind her on shelves. These were not the books of Owen Jameson, these were the books of proud young ladies accomplished at winning spelling bees, which their stern daddies had always equated with genius. She knew this now—the books a reprimand not only to her but to him. There was no Ulysses here, no Conrad or Hardy, no Brontë either. There were excerpts of tedious novels from the Ladies’ Home Journal. There was Picks of 1936, which never did include Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald. A book by Steinbeck had made it to the third shelf. There was no George Orwell; there was Pearl S. Buck.

  This is who Owen Jameson had thought would be a kindred soul when he was fifteen.

  “Can you hear the wind?” she said when he entered. “I have been hearing it—well, all my life now. I should have been prepared for this—you never know when or how ‘this’ will happen,” she said, and she waved her hand toward her face. “Both of us, I suppose, should have been,” she smiled. “We would have gotten along much better, I think—without the obligatory search for a husband.”

  He did not turn on the light. She knew why—he would have to stare straight at her.

  She was silent for a moment. Then looking away from him, she asked, or told: “We paraded her about—this is what came of it—I made up stories about her so she wouldn’t be liked as well as I was. All your time was given to her—remember that, too, was in the paper. And then there was that night—you think I don’t remember—when you tried to go upstairs to her room. She had enough spunk to stop you—well, anyway, this is a continuation. Now we’ve gone on toward the coup de grâce.”

  He stood almost petrified, sideways to her, his head turned in her direction.

  “What is a continuation of what?” he asked.

  “Her destruction. She is innocent and so is he—I know it—she would never ever do anything like this. She couldn’t even comprehend it! Just as she couldn’t comprehend you going to her room.”

  “Preposterous,” he said, “I went that night to talk to her about her future.”

  “Well, we gave her one,” Lula said.

  “You were supposed to be married by now; the woman’s a slut—”

  And he left her sitting there and went through to the kitchen, cold and dark.

  NINE

  The next morning the summations began at 9:30.

  Owen’s lawyer tried every available angle to say the trial was a miscarriage of justice based on completely circumstantial evidence—but Pillar knew that as a young defense lawyer this was the worst case to cut his teeth on, and he had made many mistakes. The first mistake he had made concerning this case was taking it. He hadn’t realized the amount of blood that people were after, thinking that Owen, being a war hero, would allow a good deal of sympathy. Now he realized that he was in the middle of some aged blood feud, and had no way out for his client.

  The VC was countered by the prevailing tendency, as stated in an editorial, that there was a “necessary evil” in war time that if transferred home became evil. Pillar himself now believed Owen was guilty through an act of hubris so dangerous it inflamed the town. The courageous act he had done was forgotten in light of people now assumed he had. But young Pillar put on a brave front: “If there were mistakes, they are my mistakes” he said, “they are not Owen Jameson’s. Any man can go to his own warehouse and any man has a right to defend himself against injury—in fact, any man has a right to make a mistake concerning infatuation—this is all Owen Jameson has done. Why would he come home to this murder—what possible reason could he have? What had he done with this man before? He saved this man who had frozen under fire.”

  Pillar picked up the Victoria Cross and, without saying a thing, simply held it. This was his pièce de résistance—and he felt it would sway the town.

  “What has this man done—but bring honor here?”

  He looked at Owen, nodded, and sat down.

  The prosecution answered for the whole river, and in a certain way for other winners of the Victoria Cross who were following this case. Angus Brower began: “Who is Owen Jameson—let us begin by asking this. A gentleman; Reggie was not. Educated; Reggie was not. Well spoken; Reggie was not. Well to do; Reggie was not.

  “A murderer (here his voice became a whisper); Reggie was not.

  “Reggie must have looked up to him, too. That is why he came back to see him. He must have felt he owed this man his life, and he might have decided to come home and go to work. All autumn long Reggie’s men were going into the woods—a Trethewey and a Nolan, a Curtis and a Richardson—Reggie knew them, and they respected him. So back he came, (here he whispered) to meet Owen Jameson because he owed him his life.

  “What happens as soon as Owen Jameson comes home a hero? Let me tell you what he does. Can I inform you what he does? He cashes in, doesn’t he? The Victoria Cross—(here he lifted it up and showed it to the jury, with its purple flag and lion and paws) this—flippantly given to his mistress when he saw her. This was his instant gratification and motiva
tion.”

  There was a long pause. Angus, visibly moved, had a taste of water and looked out at the dismal sky for a long time through the long churchlike window, holding the glass of water nonchalantly in his hand. Then he turned to the jury again.

  “So what about our hero? The defense wants it both ways. They want him to be a hero, and then they say, Well, he is an average man, and has infatuations.

  “I will not say that. But I will tell you that something started in deceit never ends well—I will tell you that this ‘infatuation’ is ever shameful.

  “I will tell you it is deceit at the worst.

  “They killed a man coming home for Christmas; and why? I will tell you why—she was pregnant and they knew it even then. Pregnant on October 17—the first night he got home. They had to do what they did—the tickets to leave on the train, the money given to her, all a willful disregard of a promise to God at the altar—but there was one brave man who knew, found out, and was watching. This brave man was our God-fearing barber, Solomon Hickey. He tried to put a stop to this error. It cost him too—he too owed a life.”

  The prosecutor stopped speaking. He stared for a good minute at no one. Until the whole court was uneasy. He then placed the VC down on the table, carefully; was seen to rub his fingers across his robe.

  In the jail Owen was suffering from a fever. But this did not dissuade him from realizing that he must escape. Death here was certain. But there was also death coming on the mountain. How this would be done, Owen did not know. But he was now as insane as his mother, thinking that life had a design meant for him.

  That night Owen thought of the prophecy. He drifted in and out of sleep, and saw moments that had long tortured him. The idea of Christ on the cross had always troubled him, and how he had made light of it as a youngster with his brother Will. Now it pained him to think back to what he, in frivolity, had said. The idea of blasphemy doesn’t start with what you say, but why you say it. Owen said it initially to shock and amuse, but after time it became more than this. It became the common way to mimic others he desired to be like as a young man. The idea of pandering to a certain cynicism he did not feel was justified.

  However, the design of the world was far greater than he could ever have imagined. Even in this terrible miscarriage of justice that he would fight to the end, did he see a design in all the faces of all the men and women now deciding his fate. As if any of them could. That is, even he knew they could not begin to decide his fate. And even he had a belief that everything would turn out.

  Of course, he now thought, nothing was foretold, you made your own design—and yet this design he had made, to cast his lot out into the world, had brought him home, not because he had failed in the world but because he had succeeded. Is that what the Indian woman had seen thirty-five years ago?

  So what would have happened had he failed?

  If he had failed in the world, where people wanted and expected him to, then everything would have been fine. He might have come home in an entirely different way—perhaps he would have been a schoolteacher for Peabody. Yes, if he had done so, nothing much would have happened, he might have been the self-contented smirking teacher at a school, hitching his wagon to the star who would become vice-principal.

  Or he might have gone on to be a dentist, like Will had wanted him to. He might have extracted that very tooth that had been bothering Solomon Hickey, and been looked at with that whimsical superiority self-deluded Hickey had.

  But he had decided to be great—in fact, he had not decided it at all—others had assumed greatness on his part. He had gone to get a man whose rifle froze in the moment of fire, and brought him back to safety—and so they assumed greatness.

  Their assumption allowed their adulation, adulation allowed envy, envy spite, spite misery, misery accusation, and accusation guilt. But toward the man he had saved, the emotions ran symmetrically in an opposite direction. Glidden’s guilt led back through a maze of stages until adulation came again. Now Glidden was once more the hero he had been in 1938.

  Why? Because they themselves felt desperately guilty for having treated Glidden badly, a man who was worth ten of any of them. And so now they had to leave behind the scandal of Reggie Glidden and attach themselves to the scandal of Owen Jameson, all of it for their own protection. Owen was fifteen all over again, and they had no choice. They had to accuse him. His guilt over Hickey allowed it. Lula’s illness allowed it—and allowed her father, so long a fixture in our town, to finally make his own case for a happy life.

  In what way was Owen Jameson guilty?

  He was guilty of his fame, in a very genuine way. This came because he saw how they reacted to him when he arrived on that platform on that gray October afternoon. They got him drunk and he reveled in their gratitude. After years of scorn, no voice sounded against him. He made the common mistake of thinking that this attitude was the ultimate one, that it could not be changed. Now that he had redefined himself, so had they. Everything would be well. An inner voice that told him something was wrong went unheeded. That is, he did not know that Hickey had a diamond in his pocket for Lula Brower that very moment. When people once again redefined him, Owen could not go back to the way he had been looked upon. As many foolish men do, he demanded respect. He saw this now clearly from his jail cell. Therefore he did the most foolish thing in his life. He opened the barbershop door. If he had not, Solomon Hickey—earning $1500 a year and wanting to marry Lula—would still be alive. This, then, was the sin. It was a very great sin. It was a great godawful sin of pride.

  So whether he did or didn’t believe, he surely knew what deadly sins were, and what they could become. And so had Saint Jude understood. This was one tangible element in the human psyche they held in common. If he had not been great—or if he had stayed on the train—Lula would not have insisted he honor something she herself didn’t want honored when he had left. He saw this now. Both knew this, and both from different sides of the mirror needed to vie for a position neither had held four years earlier, insisting the other see their point of view. When on that cold October night she wore the brooch he bought her on leaving, he knew she was making a frantic pitch not only to him but to and for the town. She was saying: “We must do this—all of them think you belong to me.”

  She had no one left but her father.

  Still, her father could do nothing against him as long as Owen did nothing.

  But then Owen’s descent began, so very soon. And had he propelled it himself?

  All of this he thought about in minute detail. Of course, what was done against him was done in revenge. And he could say now that some women were even worse than the men in wanting him disposed of. He remembered Cora Auger’s eyes and shuddered.

  And what about Camellia?

  The last thought he would have would be of kissing her. But why—what madness must prevent him from not having who he so longed to have?

  Both of them knew this and were tragic because of it.

  So then if any of this was part of the prophecy, it was a microcosm of man’s brief state of inner hell. Could he have married Lula if not for Camellia? At this moment, even he could not say. The jury, however, could. And it was made up of men he went to school with, whom he had played in the fields with—whom he had shunned when they began to shun his family. Now they sat in serious judgment—Butler, Peterson, McGregor, Urquart, Hamilton, and McLean. Their youth already gone, their faces looking placid and sad, they retired to the inner room knowing they needed no inner room to retire to. That at their will the inner room could be conjured up in a glance, a posture against the reclining sun. From Owen’s youth came his dereliction, and their minds being made up, was of course the eagerness of the town to say: “We have put up with the Jamesons enough—we will not put up with this.”

  It was now the second last week of the cut. And in his pocket Owen had a “reasonable assumption” from the scaler that all things were well with him—a kind of ludicrous greeting to a man about to be hanged,
but perfectly compatible with his position as head of Jameson Works. The letter made it to Owen during the storm.

  “We have a long draw of wood,” the scaler, Claire Mutterly, wrote, “and I have no doubt that I assure you at least eight million board feet—what I have already figured, a prime quality especially in the cedar, hemlock plenty, and good running spruce for sleepers and tracks. It is the men’s ability to cut in spite of difficulty that I am proud of. And here they are only nine or ten good men left—but I graciously tell you they are the best of the good men. The weather is still crisp, with a minus fifteen registered today, but the men are in good spirits. I do not know how this wood was not cut out before you came home, I can only tell you I have not witnessed a raw stick bad. Signed, Claire Mutterly, talons of Arron Forks depot, March 15, 1947.”

  Owen had read that letter over and over. The scaler was taking a chance in his pride and his principal authority to elaborate on the board feet. But Mutterly was a certain man.

  TEN

  Things continued in the deep woods, with the teams left in.

  But then another man made his way to Jameson’s camp one night out of the dark on the last day of the trial—that is, about the last week of March 1947. There was a window of respite from the weather, and he managed to get in and out.

  They thought it was Innis, but it wasn’t. Innis had decided he could not or would not get in from his depot at the talons—a place where four streams into Arron Brook joined. It was a man from Sloan, Blind Andre, who had been fired from his cut after everything halted.

  He had walked all the way from the Tabusintac cut in the storm, wearing as many men did then, a Russian fur hat and fur-lined boots. He was disheveled at five-foot-six with a black, full beard and forearms almost twice the size of his biceps. He sat in squat fashion in the corner, his gray coat missing three buttons and tied together with twine, and among every other patchwork of clothing, a silk scarf given to him by his girl who conceived a child every year he was away.