The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  The young boys lined up to try it, while Meager was smiling from ear to ear, when one of the cutters who had drunkenly fallen over Meager’s bunk felt under the gray army-issue blanket, hidden well and tucked away, the godawful stamp.

  At first he said nothing—but the portent of the disaster was everywhere he looked. All those children lining up to hear Big Ben, and all those men who would bleed to death for their families, in a second, now to be at the last leg of their journey, going home. What did it mean? It could mean that they had only part of the wood they had cut. But the cutter didn’t know—so he called in Claire Mutterly and showed it him. They were in the dark near the side of the cabin where they had fermented their beer, and boys were still lining up for cups to drink the dregs. Already a fist fight had been stopped, over one boy telling another in dire confession that though he had seen the other’s girlfriend’s snatch twice, he had had the fortune to feel it but once. That being taken care of still left the air raw, at this part of the cabin, when Claire Mutterly saw this stamp.

  He called Fortune over. But Meager said nothing. He would not say how he had found the stamp or where he had got it from. The argument spread, so that men, laughing and grinning with the celebration going on, slowly stopped, as if some moving current made them struggle. They turned to listen, their silhouettes against the heated wooden walls and their expressions changing to consternation, which in men who have faced death can be terrifying.

  “WHERE!” was heard now above the din of men in Humphreys and dark checked shirts, boots with cork and lining, and socks three months worn on feet that had danced on a scaler’s pitch against the snowbound ridges.

  “Where,” was said by others more slowly and with temperate consideration, their smiles now gone, it seemed, forever. The information was spectacular, dazzling, and deadly. Someone had tried to steal their work for Estabrook—and it was of all people little Meager Fortune. And little Meager Fortune sat in a room, surrounded by men, some twice his size, who he had cared about and fed, and walked miles a day to keep alive, and he cautiously smiled kindly, for there was nothing else at the moment he could do.

  Tomkins heard the guffaws change to anger while he was outside. Above him the sky was clear and the night was cool. The moon had softened the grand treetops about the cabin, so all seemed tranquil and bathed in light.

  He had gone in to see the animals, and had spoken to Pitman about next year, and how he wouldn’t be back for a Jameson but would go with Estabrook after twenty-three years.

  “Estabrook is the best man,” Tomkins said with a sugary smile, “because he knows who I am and what I have done.” And this smile then seemed to expand over those trees, and become a part of the light clouds as he spoke. It was poor Tomkins’ last smile for a long while.

  As he was turning about he heard the arguing—a kind of primitive, hellish thing that his daddy had always protected him from. He walked from the hovel, over the hundred thousand wood chips treaded into the snow, and heard it increase. He did not know what it was about until he had entered the door, with its colorful beer caps and its drawing of a mermaid, and walked into the inner sanctum of men. Here was Pitman’s place, he who had cut out trees that would build the house of a millionaire in Europe. Pitman would never see this house. There was Fraser’s bold, small place, he who had done the same and would live another forty-four years after this night and die in Hamilton after telling his grandchildren tales of Good Friday.

  “The greatest cut in the history of New Brunswick—and four books written, and I’m in one.”

  Here was Bartlett whose 171 finest trees would construct a church where two presidents would hear the offering from God, though neither listened to it. Yet he too would die alone, after seeking for years to have his memoirs published.

  Tomkins turned to his left along the smoky corridor between the rows of bunks and saw, as if in his worst nightmare, the handle of the Estabrook stamp, which he was sure he had left in the woods near Arron Brook. It was the smoothest, most benign handle one might ever see in one’s life, and yet nothing is wrong but thinking makes it so. Thinking had turned this benign object into the one telling point of all disaster.

  Meager looked up at Tomkins and said nothing. He simply stared at him. His nose was bloodied and his left arm hung down, because they had hit it with the very peavey stamp they now accused him of using, trying to extract some kind of confession. Tomkins, a man like ourselves, could not believe it—Meager Fortune had not spoken, had not said a word about Stretch’s involvement.

  Stretch turned and fled, back through the smoky room with clothes stinking and ragged and hanging over poles to dry, and back into the serene night where a moment before the whole world had seemed joyful to him. His body shrunk as he walked, and his long legs wobbled, as if in fear of being hit. He sat on a spruce stump looking down over the valley of snow and sweet moonlight. His shoulders thinned and his body shrunk down like a mushroom as he tried to escape the thought of what he must do.

  Of course, he did not think, What must I do? He thought only, How must I act to extricate myself from all of this? How much time before I could reach the depot at talons? Or anyplace else, if I could last in the woods long enough to do so? Who would ever be the one person to lead me there—the one person? Well, the only person would be little Meager Fortune, who was now being tormented by a group of furious men.

  “Woe is me,” Tomkins said, thinking now of his own life of short duration, “woe is me.”

  He huddled into himself, corked down lower and lower on the stump as the moon became higher and higher and bathed his ignominious body in more and more benign light. Yes, if only he were as small as Meager Fortune, he could run away. However, little Meager Fortune did not run away from anything or anyone—would not, even if he could.

  Only now was Stretch understanding what a horrible part he had played, and who he had sided with in order to play it. And what in fact all his proud vainglory had gained him—nothing at all, not a cent.

  This was a breach most serious. It involved Claire Mutterly’s report of eight million board feet. That meant Mutterly would never be allowed to scale again. It meant that Bartlett and the five axmen who had stayed, the teamsters and the cook, the apprentice boys so happy go lucky, and the tend teams too, would have worked half the year in this frozen hell for nothing at all. Pittance even less than what they would have. All of this had been fine for Tomkins until he began to realize it. Now that he did, he wanted to hide. He must hide. He had to. He wanted the moon to go away, but it wouldn’t. He wanted to take back the stamp and say to Estabrook, How dare you ask me to steal from these men—these men of all men, their trees, the stunted strong who I have laughed at? But he couldn’t bring himself to speak, and when Bartlett passed to say do you know what is going on with little Fortune, Stretch squeaked and sat up straight and then shrunk again to a lump.

  He himself, his long spidery legs shaking now in his big ridiculous Humphrey pants, wanted to change places with Meager Fortune, but Tomkins’ own ill fortune at being a coward prevented him.

  “I have to make it right.” And he stood up and walked about in a circle and sat on the stump again. “I have to make it right,” he said, and he stood up and walked about in a circle in the opposite direction, and sat on the stump again.

  Meanwhile, Meager was not saying anything of value.

  “Simply because you found it in me bunk, boys, don’t mean she’s mine—just like someone else’s woman, I suppose, if I suppose I ever would be that lucky.”

  He would look from one to another with curious compassion given the circumstances. They would hit him and he would flinch but he would not yell, and when on a few occasions he got a chance he would throw out a punch that when it connected would send his tormentor back.

  “The Germans are better at this,” he said, having been in a POW camp for four months in 1945. “Better all around—in fact, if I was gonna be snapped on the head, it’d be by a German—or,” he said lazily, to a
cutter he knew to be from Denmark, “or a Dane. They spent most of the war hidden up Hitler’s arse. Hey,” he said to a French boy, “ya think I could sue fer peace?”

  They could get nothing out of him, and the moon came down through the one ragged little window. And once Meager looked, his eye black and his nose broken, and saw Stretch Tomkins looking in at him. He winked.

  Beyond that window, out in the shine, without knowing what was happening in the cabin, were teamsters and loaders, making the last loads of the year secure on those old two sleds, their runners buckled by exhaustion. And as high as Richardson’s load was, he wanted more—so, therefore, did Nolan, and Trethewey and Curtis wanted theirs to match his. All of them had decided in the hubris of the moment to “snatch” the load.

  “I’ll snatch yours by ten,” Curtis said—and this had now been going on all day and far into the night, with the moonbeams palavering down among them, against the sweet hillocks of snow that still stretched away high and soft through the trees.

  The last great trees pulled up out of our great bedeviled mountains.

  “The beavers made these trees up here,” Old Trethewey said, “and I hear it was Will Jameson hisself brought in the beaver.”

  “Stole them from Estabrook,” Nolan said, spitting his black-as-arse plug.

  “So in a way, gave this land to his brother,” Curtis said. “And I heard the other land is rotted.”

  The loads now were almost secure, and it was after ten, and boys were up on the top, putting the last tie-down chains across each one, and checking the great runners underneath.

  They would hitch the horses up in the morning and roar downhill, one behind the other, to shouts of enormous freedom, and perhaps a photographer, coming to take a picture to show Miss McCord who she missed out on when she laughed at Richardson for having only one arm.

  Poor Richardson did not know that no matter what kind of picture was taken, Miss McCord, who had taught a primary grade, would not see it. She had died three years before.

  Richardson’s sternness might have come because of this load. But he was in no mood to be trifled with tonight. Not when tomorrow, one load higher than all the others would go down that hill. He could only think now of all the ghosts in the past who had done this, and his name would be just perhaps matched to theirs.

  But then Gibbs, his favorite tend team and a boy of not yet seventeen, came over to him and whispered about the trial going on.

  “You mean Owen Jameson’s trial, therefore?” Richardson asked.

  Gibbs explained that it was not Owen’s trial he was speaking about—but a makeshift one against Meager Fortune where some of the men said they would hang him because of an Estabrook stamp. An Estabrook stamp. The teamsters looked at each other, and made their way to the cabin by 10:30 that night.

  “They already have a rope secured over a beam,” Gibbs said, walking behind them. Richardson was the first to arrive, Trethewey behind him. They came in through the crowd, and the crowd parted for them.

  “What’s this?” Curtis, who came in also, asked.

  “He stamped our logs with Estabrook,” Claire Mutterly said, “and he’ll pay for it, I’ll tell you that.”

  “He was the boy who kept us alive most of the winter,” Richardson said. “Why in fuck would he do this?”

  “Kept us alive to work for Estabrook,” one of the axmen, a Duffy, said.

  “Well, if that is true, he’ll be cut down when he gets out—we’ll take him to court.”

  “Well, do it tonight,” Duffy said.

  “Then you come against me and we’ll do it tonight,” Trethewey said, at which the lad shrunk.

  In fact, the teamsters formed a wall about Fortune, who sat there looking from one to the other in bemused isolation.

  “Did you stamp?” Richardson asked.

  “No sir,” Fortune said.

  “Who stamped here?” Richardson asked.

  He looked about at all the faces, bleak and dirty—and because of the very dirt, somehow serene—and missed one. He looked through the window, past the old thermometer, and saw sitting on the stump of that great cedar Good Friday Mountain had been named for, our Stretch Tomkins “shrunked down,” as Bartlett reported in his somewhat overindulgent memoir. Shrunk down and worried, as if on a storm-tossed sea.

  “You will not touch our Meager Fortune again,” Trethewey said, staring out at the same man. “For it is easy for charlatans to take what little fortune we have.”

  And they took the rope down.

  FOURTEEN

  On this same night the ice had broken out of the bay, and the sea was high. The heavy schooner Jensen, coming in on diesel with the main sail up and four yards against the wind, was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the far northwest side of Prince Edward Island. There were men in the lower berths, and under heavy seas with ice collecting across its ropes, making about nine knots in a gale. The captain had before him two reports, each now requiring a change in his plans and wanting him to come into the strait and bay as early as possible. Or so he had decided that night.

  One was a Halifax newspaper sent on request from Newcastle to the ship as it traded along Nova Scotia, which he initially thought nothing about; the other was a picture of a man given to him earlier in the week by his first mate Conner, who had gone in off Prince Edward Island for a chart.

  Now, putting these two things together, the captain exclaimed that could they, this old bulking Jensen, fitted out with sail and diesel, past her prime by twenty years, be the missing piece in this strange mystery puzzle?

  This ship, this strange missing link, was now chugging toward the Miramichi to be born.

  Conner, a great young sailor, told him of how things now happening on the Miramichi might have become imbued with a scandal out of all proportion to the cause. The newspaper report asking for information about any missing relative or friend made things urgent, especially with the picture that Conner had handed him as well.

  The newspaper asked if anyone was missing a relative or friend—that a body had been found in its bare feet.

  And the picture? The picture was of the very man who had signed on with this ship to work, going out off the strait in December, and who had come back with it, and was resting below.

  Things were puzzling until the captain reasoned that the man actually missing—the notice that old Buckler in frantic hope had put in all the Maritime papers—might be a man off his ship now unheard of for more than four months.

  “If he was up on the sails he would likely have been barefooted and without a coat, even on that night,” Conner stated.

  The man they now had with them, Conner told him, was this other fellow, the disappeared one, the one the police had probably mistaken their own man, Dressler, for. “Dressler could have fell from the riggin’—that very night we were going out.”

  That Dressler was not accounted for in the log was a scandal within the ship itself. But no one wanted to admit this, for most of them, captain included, had been drunk coming from Mr. Estabrook’s.

  The other man, however, was the completely alive and hardworking and common enough seaman Reggie McDonald Glidden, who had taken to the sea well and kept his guts and was fine on the ropes.

  So it was in fact nothing more than a simple case of mistaken identity. Glidden had been hired on late at their turn out toward the gulf, because Dressler was gone. And they had taken board down the coast to South Carolina and had come back with cotton bails and electrical fans. This cargo was headed toward Montreal, but a turn would have to be made in the interest of justice.

  The captain went below and woke Glidden, and told him what was going on, and asked him to bear with him please, and if he could bear too with the whims of the sea.

  “If ice is gone, we can make it to the outside of Sheldrake Island in three days—there Conner will take you in on a skiff, and you will have good enough opportunity to clear this strange matter up.”

  “Tomorrow we will have good enough opportunity to
clear this matter up,” Trethewey said. And no beating would be allowed of any man caught. They would take him out to the depot at the talons and hand him to the rangers, and not a hair on his head would be harmed.

  “For we are to be civilized men,” Curtis said.

  It was easy enough to know. Tomkins was the prime stamper—therefore, if his stamp was legitimate as he said it was, then the other stamp, the false one, would have had to be stamped over the Jameson stamp. That would be easy enough to see and would have ruined the subterfuge anyway.

  “If we see that, then we know it is not Tomkins who used the false stamp,” Richardson said.

  “There you go,” Tomkins said, clapping his pipe on his knee and laughing almost hysterically, “there you go.” And he kept nodding his head and spitting, “There you go, there you go—I knew it,” and he glared or tried to glare at every one of them.

  Then he took his hat off and decided he would hit Meager over the head with it.

  “I’ll have an apology for this,” he kept saying, “I’ll have an apology for this—”

  Meager simply sat there taking all the hits on the head.

  But they stopped Stretch and took his hat away. He kept rubbing his hand across the top of his bald head under the lantern light, looking at each in turn with pursed lips, hoping against hope there was some way to extricate himself and run away.

  The idea that Owen would come and get my mother and take off was stirring feelings across the lanes and alleyways. It had been since the evening.

  Cora Auger was sure the temptress had something to do with it all. She remembered when Camellia’s mother died, and her father was hanged—how that had given Camellia more sympathy than Cora ever had later on. How her picture was in the paper more than Cora herself got. She had never been able to understand the fame such scandal generated. Though the scandal around her had given something, it was not enough. And she had loved and honored her father for years. Secretly, she blamed the Jamesons for this lack of scandal. They were able to snuff it out like a wick in church. She had been alone, apprenticed to a seamstress in 1935. She had fought for union on her own, and bled for it too, until Camellia’s scandal caught her up. Now, after all these years, the chance to reclaim something for her father was at hand. They would all know Dan Auger had been the greatest woodsman in the world.