The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  He coughed, took the tattered coat and his hat off, and said: “This is a danger here—so you lads be on guard.”

  “Why is that?” Richardson asked. He had just come in from laying down his skid load and putting the horses away. His face was haunted, as were those of the other men because they had driven themselves beyond exhaustion now. In this smoky camp they looked every bit like explorers cut away from the herd. Blind Andre had some tea.

  “There is a man here sent to steal half your work,” Blind Andre said, saluting them as he stirred the sugar in.

  “How?” Trethewey said.

  Blind Andre said he did not know.

  “Who is the man here?” Curtis said.

  Blind Andre looked about, passed Tomkins’ face with no more than a glance, and said that he didn’t know. He said it was a rumor that he took seriously. He said no one could have foreseen what would be happening in the woodlots in this age. That this year 1947 would be a watershed year for the men, and that in ten years—Blind Andre would predict that in ten years not one of these men would be working the way they were today, and many wouldn’t have jobs at all.

  “So it don’t matter what it is we say, do, or don’t do—we is up against her—and the world will change for us—forever.”

  Sloans on the Tabusintac, Andre told them, had a thing called a buzz saw that cut out trees faster then Bartlett, pared trees down faster then Pitman. That in a year or so, these buzz saws would get better and better and faster and faster, and put scores of men out of work, and great roads would be built for trucks and heavy claws that would do the work a hundred men could. The horses would become piddling and meaningless, and the mountains they were on would be bulldozed to nothing—the water table would dry—all they saw would be changed. This great mountain would be nothing in the coming years. The beavers that had made this great stand of cedar would be trapped out of existence, and the world would become one of factories and smoke.

  The men sat mute and careful in the way they moved and spoke, as if asking for details carefully would relieve them of the burden of the knowledge being entrusted.

  “They’ll always need horses,” Curtis blurted.

  “No they won’t, son,” Blind Andre said. Though things had frozen up this year, and oil in the trucks had solidified, new years were coming—and no one would look back. Their history would be forgotten. Their smiles in pictures, holding the halters or pots and pans or axes in the shine, would be seen only in museums by men who could not last a day working with them.

  The little spruce books they made for their children forgotten.

  The songs they wrote about men like Will Jameson and Peter Emberly—now as popular with the men as the Grand Ole Opry—forgotten.

  The crazy wheel forgotten.

  The two sled rotten and left to wither along roads that would be overgrown, near rivers no longer traveled so arrogant historians would believe they could track the measure of these men by finding a rotted jab pole in the sun.

  Curtis, at twenty-two a professional teamster and perhaps the best young teamster in the world, would not be needed. His hands, which bore the traces and marks of the reins, would no longer be needed. His ability to defy death would be considered nothing at all. Not when a truck could do ten times the work in an eighth of the time.

  They sat stultified at the possibility that what they did, and why they lived, would no longer be required.

  “Why do you think union is coming?” Blind Andre said. “The barons themselves are to be forgotten—all of you together will drown in the new world, and companies will come in to make these trees soft arsewipe for pretty girls. That’s why union is coming—in ten years they will have sold out to large companies and made themselves new empires.”

  They were silent for almost an hour, drinking from a bottle of Captain Morgan rum.

  And then, finally, someone spoke.

  “We promised to get the wood below—and we will,” Richardson said.

  “And since the old world is changing so fast—we are all damned anyway. If nothing we do matters, let’s make a stand here,” Nolan said.

  “We will stay and work,” Trethewey said.

  The other teamsters agreed.

  Tomkins said nothing. It seemed his die was cast. And he was playing Judas. But he had to, for Solomon Hickey had been his only friend.

  The next day the men could not work. Tomkins stayed in his bunk. By afternoon, when he woke, he discovered Blind Andre had gone, with Meager leading him out to the top of little Hackett Brook.

  The drifts were now as high as the roof, the hovels buried. The only thing he could see from the near hovel was Duff Almighty’s tail, and some wet horseshit in the snow.

  “Will we die here?” Tomkins said to Meager after he got back that night.

  “No,” Meager whispered, “I promise for your dad’s sake, I will keep you alive here.” He said this, and Tomkins shuddered. “You have a fever,” he said, “but I will get you tea—and I will put an herb in it to stop your runs.”

  Each man was down to two cups a day. This would be Stretch Tomkins’ fourth. And he had snuck four of the last dozen donuts that had so happily come in a barrel a few months ago.

  Tomkins turned his face to the wall and prayed, even though he was an atheist.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Tomkins,” Meager answered, bringing him over a cup of tea. “Only three more weeks now, and we’ll be off cut and home to cause mischief—won’t that be a fucker’s fun?”

  “Well,” Tomkins said peevishly, his face to the wall, “how can we be happy on Good Friday?”

  Meager smiled, nodded, and patted his shoulder: “Well, sometimes in this old world we only have benefits the boundaries of which are established by my name.”

  ELEVEN

  The storm blew itself out, and the cold hovered and stayed, and then slowly dissipated and the wind died, and the cedar along the ridges was once again being pulled up by rope, horse, and men, their muscles strained and bleeding. The horses once again went into the cut with wild eyes, Butch and Missy and Duff Almighty, and the great Percherons, and each teamster felt as if they had been given a reprieve—or more than this, as if they had been sanctioned by some divinity to recreate the greatest haul of lumber in the world. Recreate because they felt it had been done already in olden time.

  They worked more furious because they knew the other mills were down. They worked because they knew their lives as teamsters were coming to a close. They cut with bucksaw for the same reason—Pitman and Fraser were on the mountain, and so was Nolan and Trethewey—all for the same purpose. The purpose; well, in five years they would no longer need to use double ax or bucksaw or hitch horse.

  The great moon allowed them now to work late into the night, so at times a lonely two sled would be seen way down on the flat after 11 p.m.—not coming back with a load but leaving with one—while the moon bathed down on huge glowing craters of soundless, glittering ice.

  Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins, all six-feet-two of him—so you had to dress him twice to keep him alive once, as the men said—went back to chaffing on the downhill, and Meager went back to cooking, and Gibbs treated the horses to sweets he had hidden, and Bartlett wisely determined which great section would be the last he ever cut.

  A fine wind came too, but not too harsh, and lingered in the breath of the men. It was now April 1947—the very last of their world—and yes, forty thousand horses this year in the woods doing the same harsh work as Missy and Butch.

  With the white moon on Monday and a bright sky, even the fellers worked after dark, and even the horses themselves believed they would survive. The snow felt warm, and undulated through the glens and valleys of the spruce, and hung on boughs all the way out to Toomey’s Quarry. So the men began to sing again the praises of their world.

  A’s for the axes as youse well know

  B’s for the boys that can chop ’em down

  C’s for the cutting about to begin

  And D’s for th
e danger that we live in

  And there are none so happy as we

  No mortal on earth is as happy as we

  Hi me hi deary deary hi deary down

  Give the shanty boys whiskey and nothing goes wrong

  Tuesday morning the portager came in with a store of provisions, and new socks and boots, and told them that they might not know that Owen Jameson was found guilty but that his order was to get in on the first clear day and bring the men boots.

  Innis said this as the first trickle of water ran over the first frozen rock, and the very first scent of earth broke free in a smell of fir bough and spruce. And the great cedar in the shape of a cross that was the inspiration for Good Friday’s name, and that was born the very year of the prophecy, was killed by Bartlett’s ax.

  Innis spoke about the look of the jury—Hamilton, and Urquart, and Butler, Peterson, McLean, McGregor—all honorable men who had a duty to perform and performed it to the best of their ability. All honorable men who had done what people expected them to. Nothing more, nothing less.

  “Oh, there were handshakes but not so many—and there were some smiles and jokes, but none too much.”

  The men decided to work until the end of their contracts. They were down five teamsters and behind thirty loads, and knew they’d be hauling on gravel soon.

  On this day Richardson turned his big Clydes and, starting with that large cedar Bartlett had just cut as his first base, went down into the yards and waited upon what would become his championship load. (They needed championship loads now to catch up on their wood.)

  These were the largest trees seen here since 1850, when the Cunard line was at its prime, before it was sold to those in England who forged the Titanic. And everyone on the river had heard of this great wood—and someone said there would be a photographer here, to show Richardson coming down.

  “Take yer time, boys,” he said, biting into a cold apple, “this mountain’s not going anywhere—and we go downhill fast enough.”

  The horses stood still in petrified silence, just as the air was blue silent at minus ten, as the two sled was loaded painfully by men who had been loading sled for years. They would take a log on a chain hoist and roll it up on the other logs forming the base, men under it to help the three men above on the sled. If the hoist gave way and the men who strained on the sled couldn’t hold the giant timber, it would roll back on the men underneath. Peter Emberly was killed this way, a boy of seventeen. And so too was Curtis’s uncle.

  As they worked, other horses were channeled around them on the sides of the hill, and hauled their ragged two sleds to other yards, where the same work took place. The smell of horsehide in the wind, the bedeviled smell of human sweat and hair, of snow and the sweet earthen smell of piss.

  On Richardson’s load, when they had no logs left but tiny ones, Butch was unharnessed and brought down into the shine, to be chained to the devil’s mount, bringing the hardiest logs ahead for the two sled. The logs down below were cedar, and heavy and wide. This is what Richardson had dreamed of. The biggest load on a sled hauled since

  So far down in the valley Butch went that Pitman, standing upon a branch of a hemlock he was cutting (for you often had to climb the hemlock to get above the rot), could only see the tips of his seared black ears.

  Each log was marked and scaled in the shine before it was brought up, and every log was huge—the diameter of two or three men.

  The scaler would be in now until the logs busted free in the water, so sure of his millions of board feet and his bonus of four hundred dollars for the extra time he spent.

  The scaler said he had never seen trees this fine in thirty-two years.

  “Take yer time, boys,” Richardson said, chewing another apple, “I will find better logs and take it down when I have 330. I will not rush my last load—we will be out of here next week and home on a budget of wine and fucking.”

  Here he grabbed Gibbs, for he had found a broken birch runner and they tore it off, remounted the sled track, and reattached it by heating steel strips and bending them over and along the birch, so it would run smooth along the ice track.

  But little Gibbs was unsure about the job—not that it wasn’t done well, but that the weight of this load might cause a sled to bound.

  Meanwhile Butch, gelding from Missy off Byron’s Law, grunted under the weight of each log, so saving Missy they brought Duff Almighty to hook up with another mount, which caused his teamster, Curtis, to say he would give the horse over for a day, as long as Richardson did the same for him, for they were coming to the end of the year and Richardson would be done his haul.

  These horses fearlessly strode uphill, disregarding the men guiding them until Butch’s huge feet broke the ice at the top of the skid and he came up in a roar of steam and pain, surrounded by glitters of ice and four twigs stuck in his tail.

  All this while Richardson sat chewing an apple, and though it was still minus ten, waving his old civil war–shaped hat as if chasing away flies.

  “Ya think ya’ll live?” Pitman asked.

  “No matter,” Richardson said, lighting Fraser’s well-rolled smoke and thinking of everything he had lost in his entire life, “no matter ever no more.” For the McCord girl he had once loved and had not seen in years was no longer his, no matter what.

  Far down across the ice flat, almost to Arron Brook proper, Tomkins stamped logs with the illegal and counterfeit stamp. Once in the water with thousands upon thousands of other logs, they would be recognized not as what they were—the fruit of Buckler’s mountain—but would be thought of as Estabrook’s prize. Tomkins, a man like ourselves, did this because he had not been given a team, because no one had treated him well, and because he had taken a bonus from Sonny to do what he was doing now.

  And so he worked. He worked along this old skid road stamping the logs, far away from camp, as dutiful as a squirrel in fall, and did not notice Meager Fortune walking toward him with a Thermos of soup he had made. Meager had made it and decided to bring it to Tomkins because no one else would. And Tomkins was a muncher.

  Tomkins had the ability to attract kindness to himself, though he himself never was kind.

  “And anyway, he is not a bad lad,” Meager thought that morning, neglecting to think of all the things Tomkins had deliberately done to him.

  Meager, having been in the woods all his life, thought others were like him. That is, he did not know and never considered that Tomkins wouldn’t know he was approaching. Even though he was as silent as a cat, even though he walked half hidden against the side of Arron Brook so you would see him one moment and then not see him for fifteen minutes, he simply thought no one would fail to detect him moving in and out of the old sprag trees and iced-over boulders in April of 1947. As he walked, he was thinking of Duncan and his wife Evelyn and how he loved them. Yes, they were fine people. And if what he had heard was true, that poor Evelyn had loved someone else when he was away, it didn’t matter now. He only felt sadness and love when he thought of her.

  “Life is hard enough, anyway—and so many of us make mistakes—why, I have made a bunch myself and so why should I say nay to her?” Then he spoke to Evelyn; he said, “If you think you have to wait a long time for me, I believe you will be surprised. I think this world has just about done with old Meager Fortune—for as you know, the new world is here and by the 1950s there will be real fortunes to be made.”

  He walked up toward Tomkins, smiling and almost ready—almost ready to wave—when he stopped and looked down at a large spruce, with its ragged beeled-back bark and its lumps where the branches came off, and he thought: “This is very strange.”

  And then thought, “What is Estabrook’s timber doing up on Arron Brook side—did he take so much from his cut, he piles it in the freshets next to ours?”

  Then he thought: “We have got down all the way to the old Jameson cut.” But then looking ahead in the sunlight, seeing the nodding mesmerized head of Tomkins—his elongated shadow seeming to make
three people—Meager began to realize something very wrong. Then he thought of what Blind Andre had said. It was suddenly as if he was staring at someone alien with a small nodding head and stiff goatee.

  “My God, what has he done to us?” he whispered. “If he is the one to claim our legitimacy, what in God’s name will happen?”

  Meager turned and walked at an angle down through the yarded trees along a rut road, toward Arron Brook, and sat among some popals and talked to the birds that came around him, sitting at his feet like they had with Saint Francis some years before. If his feeling was right, what was he to do? Meager Fortune, who had caused nothing to befall anyone, really, in his life—whom God had played a great trick on, taking his wife and child away while he was running about killing Germans—this Meager Fortune now had to tell on someone. He had never told on anyone before. What was he to do?

  The moose birds flew about him, softly about his knees and arms, and he took out bits of bread to throw at them. He did this for well over an hour. The sun began to disappear behind the wood, slowly and ominously, and he heard the two sled picking up Tomkins and heading back to camp, just as the sun was above some old sprag popals by the river. He got up and, walking up the pathway toward the skid road, seeing his old boot marks, realizing how happy he had been but a brief time ago, he said: “Evelyn, Evelyn, what am I to do—tell me what to say?”

  The ground, slightly broken free of winter, was turning hard and cold again. And he turned down Arron Brook in the direction of the last logs Tomkins had stamped. Here he was, our Meager Fortune, wearing dark woolen pants and big heavy-toed boots three sizes too big, with huge buttons up his chest, walking about in the middle of nothing but a channel of wood and rock and ice, looking for a sign of betrayal.

  It wasn’t hard for Meager to find the Estabrook stamp hidden under long logs right near where Tomkins had done his latest business.

  It wasn’t difficult either for him to know what a crisis this was now.