The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  He tried to put out his left arm, which no longer existed, to grab the bit of pole at the back of the load, and stumbled. As he fell, his right hand grabbed a cedar, and he strained to lift himself up. But the sled bounced and he fell under Miss Maggie Wade and was spit out behind the sled, laying on his side, his colored jacket like a bit of fall foliage, his body crushed.

  Tomkins had no idea Richardson had given his life to try to stop the runaway. He was bouncing two feet off the cedars and falling to and fro as the sled came to the last turn. There, his eyes frantic, he saw Meager Fortune, who had been down on the flats helping with the last chaff, waving the horses to turn. It was useless. The whip had opened up a sore on Butch’s back, had half-blinded old half-blind Missy, and Stretch’s heaviness on the reins caused Butch to bolt.

  Nothing would stop Butch from trying to escape the load that had taken three days to pile. All Butch’s memories, whatever they were—to do too much and do it well, of coming from the devil’s mount to the sled, of working beyond exhaustion through the horror of this mountain—came to a moment in April when he may very well have decided to do exactly what he wanted—to kill the bastard who had whipped him across the back.

  Meager had to jump out of the way as the load started to spill to the left, which meant that Miss Maggie Wade was the first horse to be crushed. A great sickening snap was heard, and Tomkins jumped the load while the horses ran straight past the turn and into the dammed brook that would have been let loose in two days. Huge thousand-pound timbers bounced in the air thirty feet, and the animals were gone into the water.

  There was almost eight feet of water, and Missy and Butch stumbled into it headfirst. Behind them, Nolan was obliterated by their dropping load, his chest crushed; he tried to keep breathing, and did for a few moments. Behind him, Curtis fell under the feet of Duff Almighty—at twenty-two years old, carrying 320 logs, he died in a second.

  Then Curtis’s load, snapping its chains, went straight backward like battering rams when the bindings broke, and killed the Percheron Cole Younger, and almost decapitated Mr. Trethewey.

  All of this was over in a moment, so those men at the top of the run who had been laughing and jousting with these men a few minutes ago, now looked down in muted astonishment, and then cold horror. Logs like straw strewn down the half mile of hill—men running toward the destruction hoping to help. Of the two animals in the water, Butch was drowning while Missy kept her brown nose above the ice. Looking down at Butch, Meager could see his eyes staring back up out of the water, out of the furious and uncompromising spring blackness. Yet each time he tried to lift himself up, he sank down and struggled into the black soup like darkness. There his life, great and bold and wondrous, trembled away from him.

  “Ah boy,” Meager said crying, “ah my boy.”

  Missy, however, was still breathing.

  Meager called for a pole and two men and Gibbs and Bartlett came. Meager, grabbing the pole from Bartlett, jumped through the ice. He thrust the pole under Missy’s front legs and yelled at Gibbs to cut the animal away from Butch, already dead, and help him lift the pole up. He stood on drowned Butch’s back to get this done.

  With this done, the animal’s head came up a bit. Meager told Bartlett to jump on the lower end of Missy’s rump and for Gibbs to hold her nose closed. The animal became frantic and, with pressure hauling up on her front legs and someone standing on her back so her back legs could feet the muck, she found her way ahead, breaking the ice, all the way to the shallow end, where she thrust onto the bank causing Gibbs, who had her bindings, a shattered arm. She ran off into the thicket kicking the broken two sled, with its new runner dragging behind it.

  Missy was the only animal to survive that day.

  Then this man, they assumed the photographer, ran up the bank as others still came down, trying to help who he could. But there was no one to help. The four teamsters were dead. Certain of the horses tried to raze themselves up, as if felled by cannon.

  Down on the flat, Stretch Tomkins, who had suffered a sprained finger, his hat off and his bald head shining in the early morning, almost as slick as the shine Fraser and Pitman had made through the wood, looked back amazed at what he was witnessing. Then he sauntered back, strangely relieved that the idea of the stamp was forgotten.

  “It weren’t my fault,” he said to the man he thought must be the photographer.

  “Why wasn’t it your fault?” the man asked deathly quietly.

  It was Owen Jameson. He was wearing the old math teacher’s coat and boots.

  Tomkins shuddered, his lips quivered, and he smiled.

  Meager kept going from one to the other, trying to hold people in his arms, but there was no sense in it. Even after an hour, when the sensibilities of the men became reasoned enough to know a great godawful tragedy had occurred, Fortune was still sitting beside Curtis holding his hand, even as one of the men came down from the camp and shot Duff Almighty.

  Tomkins stood in mute and civil anguish while what had happened was reported to Owen. Owen said nothing. Looking back at Nolan, laying under ten tons of logs, one arm still outstretched, there was nothing in the world to say.

  “These were to be the last loads,” Bartlett said.

  Owen told Gibbs to find men and punch out to the depot, to report this to police and the hospital, and find five more stamps and come in and stamp the logs back again, to Jameson on the great Bartibog.

  “What do you want done with Tomkins?” young Gibbs asked. The men were ready to kill him. The strange fact was that Owen being there prevented this.

  “Let him go,” Owen said to the men holding him, “he can be found later.”

  As soon as that was said, Stretch Tomkins, a man like ourselves, began to run away.

  Owen could not be worried about that now. He had all the men try to free those battered bodies from the lumber that had enslaved them. Moving a ton of cedar to see the head of Miss Maggie Wade; moving another to see the back hooves of Mr. Stewart caught in the traces, bound by the decisions of men they had never understood.

  It was as a loving gesture that Nolan’s arm was reaching out to help his horses, that Richardson had jumped over the precipice in a final effort to save the Clydes, and that at the last moment Trethewey tried to turn his animals to safety rather than jumping to freedom himself, the letter from the wife who had disowned him still in the pocket of his coat. Curtis lay near Duff Almighty, the reins wrapped about his gloved hand, as they had been all winter long.

  The greatest teamster in the world at twenty-two, who had wanted to go to Hollywood and be in a picture show.

  Owen would not stop working even though the men told him to rest. He forced some of the younger cutters away so they would not see it, and took over the job of clearing the lanes. He had torn muscles in both arms, and his left leg had swelled already to almost twice its size.

  The wood was strewn down half a mile and gouged deep into the cold earth. It would be lumber still used someday to build houses of meek, disgruntled men, those already spoiled and coming into a new age who would in my class in 1973 dismiss these men as nothing.

  Three men to a log, and peaveys rolled this wood to the side, to see the sad, astonished, and private agony of once great lives.

  FOUR

  In the hospital my heart stopped four times as those peaveys were rolling those logs. People said it would be much better if I died, being as I was the love child of a disgusting union. Camellia needed a transfusion and people were so upset with her (thinking she’d orchestrated Owen’s escape) they milled about but did not give it. Until Hennessey himself walked into the crowd, stopped a woman who he knew had the same blood type as my mother, and took her inside.

  “You don’t mind doing this, do you, dear?” he said, grabbing her by the arm and leading her up the long stairs in his powerful grip. “She is a human being after all.”

  The transfusion was given or my mother would have been dead in ten minutes. And the woman’s name—Cora Auger
. She had found her way to the hospital, secretly hoping for my mother’s death. So it was help unencumbered by joy.

  “No matter,” my mother said, “it was Saint Jude who was helping us that day.”

  It wasn’t until later that Hennessey heard of the tragedy. He left for the mountain with Buckler. There they saw Owen Jameson. As soon as Hennessey looked his way he said, “Get him to the cabin and get his pants cut open.”

  And as soon as Owen heard this he said, “I will kill the first man who touches me—Dr. Hennessey, sir, you know that to be true.”

  And no one touched him. He told them he was staying under his own care until the run was over—then, if they wanted, they could take him in again.

  So by three o’clock the bodies were freed, pronounced dead, taken to the shelter of the camp, and placed on bunks and wrapped in blankets.

  It was then that Owen did for them the same as was done for Will; a great vigil took place within that smoky, desolate room, with sky birds singing again. There was a reading from the bible, a psalm of David: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

  There was silence otherwise. A complete soundlessness as men stood about, not even whispering.

  Little things amazed people. Richardson’s picture that he had of himself with two arms, thought lost in the fire in January, was sitting on the floor near his bunk. There was no way to know how it came to be there.

  Curtis’s cup, which people were sure had been empty, was full of hot tea when they got back to the room, as if he had just poured it.

  No one would say he hadn’t.

  At six o’clock Saturday night, with lanterns showing the way in the evening light, the bodies were brought out to the sled of Gordon and Ronald’s Young and, with the Belgians dressed with plumes, taken away. By now it seemed as if the whole world was alive with their deaths.

  By the next morning, still in spring rain, the rivers had swollen and broken free.

  “It will be an early drive this year after such a winter, I do suppose,” Pitman said.

  It came in an instant then, spring.

  The logs were restamped by Fortune, by Bartlett and Gibbs, with Owen Jameson not sleeping and overseeing it all. Why, for the money had to go to the widows or families of these men, even if his business was doomed. This is what he pronounced.

  So men from the other camps came over the next few days to help the run down. They cut the logs free of their chains, and rode them out along the rapids, dark swells of high tormented water, across the Arron Brook talons, where to fall was to die, and into the great river. Men like MacLeod and Curry stepped on those logs, cursed at them, and at anyone who would take a freshet from their piles, on timbers so fast and slick you would think they must all have God on their shoulders—all these men: Underhill, MacLeod, Curry, and Curtis’s brother. All the way down the river, from streams flowing against the budding trees, the snow still six feet deep in places in the woods and the raw birds singing, to Arron Brook with its danger, and on to Bartibog, where his brother died—none did a better job on the river, they said, than Owen Jameson. He was up day and night, went back to help the men get the stragglers and landings, made sure the food was hot on those cold days. All the while his lungs filled with fluid from the wound he had taken in the war that had turned septic by the punch of the comb. He unwrapped it on the third night to look—took a hot piece of stove wood and tried to lance it. But he did not sleep. He took out Camellia’s picture, which he had taken from his house, and stared at it most of the night. He had loved her as a child, and had not known. Someone once told me if Hennessey had not had to get back to make sure I lived, he would have stayed to make sure Owen did. It is not an easy thing to force a man to live with.

  “There will be no rest until tomorrow,” was all Owen said.

  On the fourth day he worked too hard, and stood on a hemlock in the bracing river. But then his fever hit. And he came in and lay down on the spot he and Will had stayed the day they stole the beaver. No one said a thing. Once again he had Camellia’s picture in his hand.

  His leg was gangrenous, and raw poison was spreading into his chest.

  He looked strangely angered by his incapacity—as if people had played some enormous trick on him. They gathered about him staring in strange, almost affixed wonder.

  He was, after all, only twenty-six years old. He had, he thought, survived the war.

  “Just the age of Keats,” he smiled at Simon Terri.

  Unfortunately, most of the men didn’t understand. Some of them thought he was a murderer, but even those now had sympathy fill their hearts.

  They made a place for him below Toomey’s Quarry. That is, half a mile from where Will had broken the cedar free.

  “I must get up,” he said.

  “No no,” MacLeod said, “you never mind that now, boy.”

  Meager Fortune tried to give him rum-laced broth. Owen was going away from them and they knew it. He, the most solitary of men, tried to clutch someone’s hand.

  They decided to keep his death a secret until the run was over. Half the province was still looking for him.

  Little Meager Fortune said he would bring him out, planted on the center of one of Richardson’s fullest cedars. Fortune rode it down, with Owen before him clothed in white linen from Brennan’s farmhouse, Fortune speaking at certain intervals to his son and his wife.

  “Why do you want me to stay here,” he said, tears in his eyes, “this old world. Why can’t I go home to you?”

  By the evening of the fourth day of the run, a thousand logs were seen by women watching for their men, a thousand more—and then ten thousand after that. It was incomprehensible that four teamsters had done so much, they thought of them now as spirits, they thought of them now, and forever, as ghosts.

  Men who became legends in spite of all that was held against them while they did what they now were legends for doing. They were spoken about in whispers.

  “I remember when he lost his arm,” one said about Richardson. “ ‘I don’t need ‘er,’ he said; he said, ‘I do as much with one arm as any a you boys do with two.’ ”

  Until that moment, none remembered Richardson ever having said that. Now a man would take his life in his hands to refute it.

  Trethewey had knocked ten men out in one fight. His wife, they said, had come home, and was here for the funeral. They always loved each other—you could tell by her letters.

  Nolan, a man they had dismissed for being washed up, old and silly, they now said was overall the greatest of the teamsters. All of them had done what they could. All of them had stayed with their horses.

  They would go and build a monument to them on Good Friday Mountain.

  FIVE

  The news spread of Owen’s death. It seemed a chapter was over. The sordid business, as Sterling called it, was done.

  And then, quite shamelessly, a man walked in from the old Curry Wharf, at about nine in the morning of the fifth day after the deaths.

  He stopped at Flynn’s store to buy cigarettes. The woman shook as she waited on him. He looked into the corner by the old pot-bellied stove with its two extra homemade reflectors and smiled at Old Flynn, brother of the mathematics teacher, but Flynn was staring at the floor shaking. The man said, “Good day,” and went across the street and along the old dirt road in behind Strawberry Marsh. Sometimes he stopped people, asking questions as innocently as a child, and then, cigarette in his mouth, kept moving.

  “My good God,” men and women said, looking out the windows of their houses into the great April wind.

  They believed he was Lazarus. In fact, at first they didn’t believe it was him at all.

  It was this man they had mocked when alive and made monolithic when dead. Reggie McDonald Glidden.

  Finally they gathered about him near the post office, and what was unusual became usual, what was unheard of became commonplace. He had come home.

  He was told in spitting gestures from o
utraged people, all of what had happened in the last five months.

  Some wanted to touch him—some wanted to know if he was real, wanted to see the wound on his head, for they couldn’t believe he was alive.

  “I am completely in the dark,” he said, “about all you are saying now.”

  By four that afternoon all charges against Owen Jameson were dropped. Mary Jameson was at the station to pick up his books.

  “Things fall apart—the center cannot hold,” was written on the back of a page. For the rest of her life Mary would tell her friends Owen had written it.

  Crossman turned toward the filing cabinet as she left, and stayed in that position for an hour or more, looking out at Owen’s friends as they dismantled the gallows.

  At first, few seemed to care that this had happened. It was simply a mistake, and people should get over it and get on with their lives, for there was much work to do.

  Owen died from the wound in the war. That was not unusual.

  Yet over the next week, the knowledge of the miscarriage of justice spread, so that ten papers covered the story and people became flabbergasted at it all across our country. And then from Cora Auger to Gravellier to those on the jury, people literally ran away and hid. Suddenly they couldn’t stand to look each other’s way. They blamed Crossman for not taking care of Jameson’s wound.

  “How dare he not take care of the wound of a VC winner?”

  Recriminations started against Judge Fyfe, and Butler, McLean, Urquart, Hamilton, and others. Mackey the coroner was sent packing back to London. Sterling stood at the crossroads near Camellia’s house, guarding it, he said, for her.

  “God, I hear it was nothin’ but a big jessless lark,” he said. He kept walking about town trying to shake people’s hands.

  For days the streets of our town were empty. For the next two weeks, no local paper was printed. The truth itself had vanished.

  Everyone was speechless, as if their souls had suffered when the sustenance they had taken for their famine disappeared.