The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  “The men—” he thought suddenly, “the men will kill him if I tell he has tried to steal our work. Tomkins has tried to steal our work!”

  These great logs—thousands of them now scaled and stamped with a wrong stamp—would simply be pushed into the river without anyone noticing what stamp they had, until they went into the great communal circular boom to be sorted by stamp for each mill.

  If he, Meager, did not himself stop it. And if he did stop it—if he did, it would mean—well, it would be the death of Stretch Tomkins.

  He held the Thermos of soup that he had made especially for his friend, and tears dazzled his eyes. Betrayal is such a vicious sin, worse than the cauldron Dante put his sinners in.

  TWELVE

  Holy Thursday, 1947.

  The jail on a side street, not hampered by light—and an alley in behind. Darkness was coming and Owen was in pain. Still, the idea of being in pain was one he had gotten used to. But he found by about four that afternoon, he was in great discomfort. He lay on his bunk and listened to children playing on the side street. The men who were building the gallows had left. There was supper to be brought and he waited for it. It got darker, the corridor wall flared once in sunshine, then turned gray and dark. Outside, on the roof, there was a shifting of snow.

  “Ahh,” he thought, “spring will be here.”

  Finally Monroe came shuffling in with Owen’s mashed potatoes, peas and smelts, and weak half-cold tea. He opened the door carefully and went to push it in.

  “I have to see Hennessey,” Owen said. “Call him.”

  “Not tonight—I’m goin’ home—Clive is out—he comes back, I’ll tell him to come look at you—”

  “You can’t go home while the jailer is out.”

  “I don’t need to babysit you—that was yer problem—babysit too much.”

  “What if there was a fire—I’d never get out of the cell.”

  “There was never a fire here—”

  “Sure there was.”

  “Ya, when?”

  “October 1825—”

  This was the date of the great fire, which burned eight thousand square miles in ten hours. It took, among two hundred others, the life of a woman in jail for having killed her infant.

  Monroe looked at him. Owen was sweating, now, though it was not hot. “It’ll take too long for Hennessey to get here anyway—I don’t know,” Monroe said.

  “He will come—you phone him.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then take me up to the hospital—”

  “Oh, you’re nothing but a baby.”

  So Monroe went back into the office grumbling. But he made the call. Hennessey said he would come down after he finished with a patient.

  Lula came out of her house that very night, and was seen in town. She walked slowly and painfully into the dark. Exactly why may never be known. Waiting until her father left to go to the curling club at five for the end-of-the-year supper and dance—something she always received an invitation to but could never attend—she had finally decided she did not believe what was being said, for everyone pretended to be saying it on her behalf. And she must hear it from Camellia herself. She would even pay her—bribe Camellia to tell her the truth. That is all Lula Brower wanted in her life. For people to finally tell her what was true, and what was not.

  She made her way down the long, sanded street in the gloom. None of the Steadfast Few attended her now. In fact, it took her a half-hour to walk down the stairs in the shadow of fading afternoon and then wait on the porch until certain her father had gone. As Camellia’s priest had told her, if a rumor has destroyed others, it has destroyed you—you must correct the rumor to put your soul at ease.

  But each step was painful, and every carpeted stair held a memory of childhood temper.

  She knew the porch steps were slippery going down, and she knew that it was not a matter of if, but when, she fell, for poor Solomon Hickey who had always loved her was no longer here to take her arm. There were many houses with small dark porches and quiet lights—a cold ground fog had settled, and people passed her, some didn’t even know her name.

  The reports of Lula’s journey have varied over time, and left us with a still scene when all the building fronts and businesses had signs of people you grew up with, and the loitering gray filtered across the plain, unhurried streets among us—she standing for long moments at every pole, to rest, her face in semi-darkness. One of my friends painted this scene, and it hangs in the courthouse as a reminder of that time. It took Lula an hour to make it almost down to Pleasant Street. It was close to 6:30. The shops were closed, and young women who worked in those shops hurried home—it seemed without a care—to lives that would come to fruition in the 1950s. Women who with care and love would raise children who would rebel against everything they held dear or knew. The way of the world.

  “Is the doctor coming?” Owen asked at about the same time. There was no sound at all. Monroe, hungry and not wanting jail fare, had gone home for supper as he had threatened to do. The jailer was not yet back. Owen would have been able to make out the light in his apartment if he was. He sat in front of his plate of cold smelts and waited. It was ten minutes later that Hennessey came in. Owen could hear him walking about the desk to get the key from the far side. He heard him come down the three steps, fumble while finding the key to open the heavy door, and come into the cells. Owen was simply sitting there, watching.

  “Where is everyone?” Hennessey asked.

  “They all of them went someplace,” Owen answered.

  “Well, you shouldn’t be left alone,” Hennessey said.

  Hennessey did not want to talk about an appeal but he did say he had spoken to the captains of four ships, to see if any sailor was missing.

  “Are there?” Owen asked hopefully.

  “There is one more we are trying to contact,” Hennessey answered.

  Owen nodded and said nothing. He stood, winced, and looked at the top of the gallows and shrugged. When Hennessey opened the cell door he just walked in with his bag, as he had done on another occasion. The door was left opened. Monroe, and the jailer too, were out.

  It almost had to be spur of the moment, a kind of instantaneous decision that once started couldn’t be stopped. Owen watched until the cell door was opened and his friend came in. He told Owen to take his trousers off, so he could look at the leg.

  “Snap on the cell light—Monroe forgot,” Owen said. Hennessey went back into the corridor to do so, and turned to see Owen running past him. Hennessey tried to stop him—for the sake of the leg—but Owen pushed Hennessey aside and ran, and was gone even before Lula made it to Pleasant Street.

  I believe Hennessey glad to see him go, would have been happier had he been able to check the leg and put the man in hospital—and if that had happened, nothing that followed would have.

  But Owen could not be reined. He didn’t know, nor could anyone foresee or tell him, that as each hour passed his freedom became more certain, if only he had stayed where he was.

  Hennessey, it was said, sat on the bunk and had a cigarette and read a bit of Yeats before Monroe came back and reported him gone.

  In later years, Monroe said he went home to supper to allow Owen to escape. It was said with hindsight because of who Owen had become. It also allowed him to deflect the idea that any prisoner had escaped on his watch. “Ahh—I knew he was innocent.”

  But we know that Monroe was one of Jameson’s worst enemies, and sounded the alarm sometime after 7:30.

  At any rate, the fact that Lula Brower was walking the streets at that moment became the most significant event in my life.

  Practical Mary had been a home child, sent over the waters to Canada by a British government that found a way to dispose of and make children as meaningless as wood chips on the sea. She was bought by a farmer down river, and lived there ten years.

  Byron, her husband, rescued her from a life of penury and abuse by riding a pure white gelding into the
house while the farmer waited for his pudding, and she jumped on the horse’s back, yelling, “Fly, Byron, fly,” her skirts trailing in the wind and her strong legs across Byron’s thighs.

  It was said Byron was a greater man than Will Jameson himself, and they took off north along an old dirt road, under an autumn moon, the horse ridden almost to ground before they got away. She found out her brother Buckler had been sent here before her, and had searched for her, for years.

  Byron the one who brought them together.

  “I know civilization will never, never treat children as disposable again,” Byron said, uniting them.

  So now that rebellious union tempered by love had come to this. Their empire dying; money in socks, their son to the gallows, and an old lady willing to fight to the death.

  Buckler and Mary had talked mutiny for days, one following the other through the great corridors of their ruined house.

  “I will die before I let them kill him—gallows being made with our own wood—as barbaric as communism—” Mary said.

  So they sat up then planning, writing every detail down, the last great feat of their lives. Buckler had the gelding Ronald’s Young, which they were going to hitch to the window bars and tear off. Buckler was going to walk it right through town, Mary carrying the hitch and chains coming behind. They figured the dark would hide all of this. They had Ronald’s Young fed so many oats he would kick a whale to death, and in the dooryard that very night.

  Owen escaped before their reputations were jeopardized and their sanity questioned in public.

  Owen’s escape caused panic in those who had arrested, charged, and convicted him. They believed he was hiding behind every bush. Fences skirted many houses in our town, and the little byways and alleys that led to other places sat in a sheen of temporal half-dark, bordered by dense wood.

  Monroe was the first out looking for him, sounding the alarm and blaming the escape on the old jailer who’d not come back.

  Owen could hear the shouts even while still in town.

  People said that he went to Camellia and kissed her, and asked her to come away with him, for I was his child. But that was a story improvised from the one of how Owen’s parents, Byron and Mary, met some forty years previous.

  Most felt Owen would flee by train to Montreal and become lost in the multitudinous city, or take a tramp to Europe and wander those old places he loved. People were now quite fearful, and called him a desperate murderer, and wanted him gone, dead or alive.

  “Hangin’s too good,” Sterling said, picking up his 32 Winchester.

  “You be careful,” Monroe said, “not to shoot someone else.”

  By midnight, twenty-five men had staked out the tracks, alerted the towns of Bathurst and Campbellton, and waved lanterns at trains in and out of the gloom, walking on sleepers cut out by Jameson men over the last twenty-five years.

  Many thought Owen must be off to someplace exotic. Men carried skinning knives and rifles, and assured each other Owen wouldn’t live to see dawn.

  “I’ll get him myself,” Sterling said.

  But they didn’t consider he was a Jameson, and knew the woods well enough. More than that, he remembered how both his father Byron and his brother Will had traveled in it. Oh, they were far greater woodsmen than he, but if he stuck to the same course, made the same turns on roads that even then were no longer evident, he would find himself on the opposite side of the bulkhead of wood left on Arron Stream. That is, a stone’s throw from where Meager Fortune had found the Estabrook stamp.

  He was headed into the dark night toward Good Friday Mountain. Some brooks were just starting to run, and the great salmon that stayed up under the ice were now backing out to the sea, the coming of winter gone, and each drip of melting ice brought the promise of new lives of short duration.

  Owen felt Monroe would kill him if he caught him. They couldn’t let Owen find his way back among them. Why? Because of the very prophecy he himself did not believe. He now and again heard Monroe shouting out to the men, not to abandon the direction they were going in, to press on over the snow, to keep their barrels pointed away from each other.

  Owen had nothing, not even a coat, and it was early April. Each time he stopped to rest he heard men behind him. Some of these men were men he once ordered into battle. They were the ones he most worried about, they who had been professional soldiers.

  His shirt was torn, and the wind was cold on his chest. It was useless now to talk of the pain in his hip.

  He heard shots firing in the wind. He stopped just on the outskirts of town and listened, deciding it was not a trained man but perhaps Sterling. He moved through the wood, his shadow cast out along the snow like some monster of Mary Shelley, and found himself in the back pig stall of the math teacher’s house in Morrison Lane. The graveyard, with its white monuments, lay to the south, bathed in a gentle breeze, which meant it was only minus two or so. It would warm up tomorrow, and he would be with his men on the last day of the haul. Surely they would be safe now, surely it was too late to have anything go against them.

  He thought of them not at work, but in their repose. That was where strong men could be seen.

  What would happen then, to these men? They had come through a winter of great hardship, unattended by him or by the greatest Push ever seen in his company, Reggie Glidden. And for much of the winter, through the paralyzing snows, they had been kept alive by little Meager Fortune.

  Owen watched the house, and waited for a time to enter. There was no sound, just the small creak of a board.

  How had this happened? Why had his great love for this earth—and yes, for the people upon it—been turned to this? What was in man’s nature, or his own, to allow it?

  “It happened because I loved her,” he thought, “and I always will.”

  But this love was also damned—and that was the secret part of its element. Its very nature, in fact, was for them to be locked in separate cells.

  And in a moment of destitution, he knew this.

  After a time the moon was white above the clouds, the snow gently rolled between the spacious spruce trees, and he moved through the dark yard, seeing the weathercock point south at the top of the house. It was to him, if not to most in the world, springlike weather, and he could smell in the snow the scent of warm days ahead. He saw golden pine needles lying aground under the first disappearing snow, and it gladdened his heart. It was true he felt alive for the first time since battle. He had heard how men he knew and had fought beside had walked across the ice of the Miramichi in mid-March, water bursting up about their boots, to go to dances, looking in wild and gracious torment for women and fights and oblivion in drink.

  He understood why.

  Going in the side door now, he searched for a coat.

  There was none, and he opened up the kitchen door and searched here, in the black with his hand. Then he snapped on the light with that same hand, maneuvering in wider and wider concentric circles about the wall.

  Unfortunately, he was by the very timing of his decision not alone.

  The math teacher was awake, figuring some broad geographical locations in his head by the very light of the white moon that peered down into the grubby window of his little house, a solitary house for a solitary man, thinking perhaps of all those elocutions he had heard as a boy in the dusty rooms of McGill when suddenly, with some strange deliberation, a hand came inside and moved about the wall. He watched it with peculiar, fascinated uncertainty as it roamed about, its fingers finding a switch and snapping it on. Then the hand moved again, farther along toward the coat hangers. Then a head poked in, and they stared at each other eye to eye.

  “My God, who are you?” the math teacher asked in a kind of wondrous agitation.

  “Why, I’m the lad who knows Pythagoras,” Owen said.

  “Then by my conjecture you will not live another three days.”

  THIRTEEN

  Up in the snowbound cabin, where the men had hauled now for 136 days, a gr
eat crisis had just erupted. Meager Fortune had been found with an illicit stamp. Worse, it was Estabrook’s stamp. To the men here, Estabrook with his vast holdings, who had put them off the initial cut, was widely viewed as the devil. By his greed, he and he alone had sent them off to purgatory.

  The purgatory was this high mountain of logs, where the wind whistled as if off a dock in hell, day and night, so that some of the young boys who were being apprenticed held their hands over their ears half the day. At times, even the experienced men would kick something and yell.

  “Let the wind beg off, for fuck sake!”

  The great horses sometimes kicked the stalls in the same hope—that the wind would beg off.

  But it did not.

  This purgatory was made up also of small items the men had brought from their homes, only to make it all the more solitary—a picture or two, or a cup, or a brush that once belonged to a daughter, a plate that had once fed a son—fashioned over the long winter as instruments of slow torture. And torture, in this place, did not let up.

  Nor did the sheets of ice or the cold, so the men had fashioned a new wisdom about hell and its great environs. It was a long stretch of ice and snow between the talons of Arron Brook and the upper end of the north branch of Arron Stream. This, they discovered, was where hell was exactly, and had marked it so, on a map, with a circle of red ink and one word in the center: HELL.

  Almost no one in the world would be able to find it—it had been, however, discovered by this crew of untamable, hard-living, and generous men.

  And now, more hellish, a rogue stamp.

  The stamp was found in the most terrible moment, a moment of drink and celebration. Meager Fortune was letting the younger boys hear what Big Ben sounded like. In the midst of this drink and hootenanny on the last night before the last day of the haul—they were drinking raisin beer they had made after Christmas and had stored in a lock underground, so that the youngest boy, a Childs from Millerton, swaggered drunk from wall to bunk and was put to bed by Gibbs at ten—Meager had fashioned a great bell out of a coat hanger and string. Then he instructed the boys thus: “You tie a piece of string on each end of a hanger, wrap the strings about each index finger, put your fingers in your ears, and rock the hanger until it hits against a wooden wall—and there you have it, my pal: Big Ben.”