The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  The Jensen Otter came in to Will Jameson’s wharf, and over time a great load of wood was taken, three-quarters of the money from that year given over to the widows and the families of the men. It essentially broke the back of Jameson industry.

  The body was exhumed, double-checked, found out easily—by the marks on his bare feet from climbing the yards, and the clothing from England—to be the able-bodied seaman Dressler, and given to the captain of the Jensen and buried at sea.

  He was a man who had climbed the yards when drunk, was knocked by a pulley when trying to scamper down, and fell. From his picture later published, people could see he was almost the same age and size as our Reggie. Therefore, the paper said in its editorial of half-apology, it was a mitigation.

  Mary Jameson and Buckler bought a new 1947 Chevrolet and drove about town every day. Though their hearts were not in it. It was the last car they would ever buy.

  Mary’s friends all came back to the great kitchen, saying something should be done against those who perpetrated all of this. For days there was talk of Estabrook and Bots, Sloan and others—how they had all conspired. How they would all end badly—how they used false public opinion to further their own ambition.

  This was true—but I suppose no worse than the untruths said about Owen or Camellia.

  Owen’s Victoria Cross was returned to Mary.

  Meeting Reggie Glidden on a windy day in May, when seagulls were full in the sky, little Cora Auger, her plump legs in heavy jeans, turned and said from a distance, while backing into the future she no longer held dear: “I gave her my blood.”

  Yet over time there was the idea that this had been done by Reggie on purpose, to hang Jameson because of what was suspected to have been an illicit romance. Because he himself was impotent, and my mother had a proof of crime in her belly.

  I was the stumbling block to reason. I was in an incubator for weeks and half-blind until I was ten. I had a crippled left hand, and all of this pointed to some secret liaison. My life was set at the moment of her fall to be something other than what she had ever planned. In a way, I was proof of her infidelity—like some wounded bastard in the back end of a Shakespeare play, the one they pointed to as divination.

  There wasn’t much I could say about it.

  The idea grew that Reggie knew, being impotent, she had had me by Owen.

  This rumor began to spread against Reggie, sometime that June. It lingered over the wavy lilacs and the red-winged blackbirds on the cliffs. In part, I think it was understandable. He had tricked them all by not giving them the right to defame him in public. He had left on a ship to start his life anew.

  He had come back, however, to save his friend.

  The conflagration once again spread out willy-nilly to houses of people who hardly knew the participants and yet wanted scandal for themselves, to fill up the famine in their lives.

  The idea of Reggie’s elaborate memorial at the union hall was most distressing now. Yet he said nothing, and did his best to protect his wife and me from any defaming that might arise.

  Amid speculation of a call to be debarred, Brower resigned on July 5. Coming from the bank, the first person he saw was Mary Jameson, arriving with a certified check for the lumber, ready to take out cash and give bonus. There were tears in her eyes. She had lost so much.

  He tried to smile, but his great dignity came unhinged. People now said he was an outsider, not one of ours. How dare he try a man who had won the Victoria Cross? They remembered him dancing too close with Mrs. Mackey as her little husband tittered in the corner.

  Unfortunately, the one who fared the worst was Lula. Scathing things were said; she was called whore and worse as she walked our streets, and was seen but rarely.

  To everyone she had started the rumors that had killed Solomon Hickey. And that itself had killed the greatest man who ever came from town, Owen Jameson.

  There was even a group formed, called The Friends of Owen.

  On July 10, in the midst of summer heat, Lula was seen out at the restaurant with her father to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday. Her hair was blond and lay flat upon her head. Her face and skin were deathly white now. She walked in with her cane and on her father’s arm. The celebration had been planned for a long while. Now it had whittled down through the bric-a-brac of shifting loyalties, and a ten-place setting on that hot evening was reduced to two.

  There was bravery shown by both Browers because of this, or in spite of it all.

  They were alone, sitting at a table with the silverware glittering under the light. No one came to wait upon them. She looked shallow and small in her new dress with Owen’s small brooch pinned on her breast. She smiled at nothing as she looked about.

  They tried to signal the waitress, but no one came. Finally, old Buckler, tottering and half-drunk, who had dined in a room by himself as he’d done once a week for years, saw their predicament and insisted they be treated with respect. He insisted and stayed until they were.

  He left without them knowing that he had done so.

  In late August, Tomkins went to Estabrook asking him for bonus, telling him of the trouble they were in. For the investigation of the stamp was in full bloom. He was disheveled, he had lost weight, his eyes were downcast, and he trembled as he spoke.

  “Everything is blowing up on us,” he said.

  But Estabrook knew this by now. He knew he must get rid of his witness, his confidant, his partner. He, in fact, told Tomkins to go away for good.

  Tomkins was given money and left on the very train they believed Jameson had wanted to take, to the very same place, Montreal, where Tomkins had a sister who worked in an office on Ste-Catherine Street.

  The police were waiting for him when he got there, with his new hat and coat and a letter of recommendation.

  But except for a fine, Bots and Estabrook were considered men above reproach.

  And it was put behind them.

  I was asked when they first met afterward, Camellia and Reggie.

  They met at the hospital, where I was. It was said that seeing her husband, she fainted. And poor Reggie took this as a sign that I was not his child, not as a sign that she believed a miracle had occurred. She believed, and always did, that her prayers had kept him alive. Her sanctity during the trial, her lighting candles beneath the porcelain Virgin Mary.

  “You see,” she kept telling people, “you see?”

  She was as hysterical as a child over this, and loved everyone. She kissed nurses and doctors and anyone who came to see her.

  Until she found out that Owen Jameson had died.

  SIX

  When I was little, Reggie, working as Push for Jameson, was consistently gone. He would keep the legend alive, no matter if it destroyed who he was.

  For he felt the bullet had killed the man who had saved his life. If only he had gone in as Push when they wanted him to, if only he could have realized what a selfish thing he had done to the man who had carried him to safety. But he had not realized. And therefore he suffered. He would take the suffering of both greatness and scandal onto himself. And as he did so, he transformed into the truly great man he became.

  He left us at times during his summer layoff, and would go on terrible drunks. So we were never rich. But he did his best to keep the Jameson business going, and was always sober by fall. Farther and farther from any safety net, he would cruise the great north counties with a compass and a horse. He never listened to those who told him a new age had come, that it was now hopeless. He found the great northern county barren and filled with newer and newer machines.

  “No,” he would say, “there are trees to cut and men to cut them and that’s all we need.”

  He had few to be Push for now. But he was the one old Buckler and Mary relied on. Still, they were worried about him disappearing for a month at a time in the woods, appearing as a shadow against some pile of cold railing logs near their house on an October evening, spreading his map against the flare of the porch light, with S
aturn visible in the northern sky.

  “How many men do you think I can get?” he would say.

  But they wouldn’t know—for the men had drifted away, and other companies had come along.

  “Never you mind—I will get the men,” he would say.

  But the men told Mary he drove them too hard, and complained of his consistently doing something dangerous. So the men became fewer—and fewer still.

  And yet he worked.

  “If they have tractors, I have horses; if they have trucks, I have sleds; if they have buzz saw, I have ax—if they have jimmies, I have peaveys—I need no more,” he told my mother.

  Even when they were being shoved off track and could not find ground to cruise. He did it not only for Owen Jameson, or Will, but for us as well.

  “I want you to be proud of me,” he said, “even if no one else ain’t.”

  I was proud of him. I never knew if that was enough.

  Still, there was one thing he did not reconcile.

  She begged him to realize I was his son even if others would not.

  He only smiled and nodded at her.

  Then after a run of time, like wind scattering leaves in a dooryard, came the long agony of Mary and Buckler—to fire a man they loved to keep him from killing himself. Yet Camellia went to Buckler often, and petitioned Reggie be hired on again in the fall. She did this without him knowing. She would stand in the muted hallway of the house where Owen and she had met, pleading with the dignity she never lost.

  Sometimes old Mary’s and her eyes didn’t even meet as they spoke.

  They did not want to hire Reggie, because he was destroying his great body, the asset men who have so little so often give.

  “He will die on his job and I can’t have that,” Mary would say each time Camellia came begging, many times with me by the hand. But the job was given. What could they do? They would be out of business without him—and secretly kept it going past its time, just for him.

  Other companies finding a thousand acres to tear from our soil. Reggie finding a hundred.

  What a figure of laughter he made himself, coming out into the dazzling sunshine on those winter days with Ronald’s Young on sled, while huge trucks passed him by going to lands he no longer could reach. Ronald’s Young brave hearted and not diminished by the truck splashing mud against its proud, buckled harness.

  They said Reggie was so strong he once carried a man on snowshoes seven miles to get to Dr. Hennessey in a storm. No one, however, managed to carry his burden.

  One day he came home with a picture of a cottage he said he was going to buy us.

  Another day he came home with a picture of Camellia he had found at Bartibog near Toomey’s Quarry. Where Owen had died.

  It had lasted all this time under some moss. When Reggie had sat down for tea, he’d seen something and lifted it up from an inch under the dirt.

  He’d stared at it in quiet, serene wonderment for an hour. How beautiful she really was. Then brought the men to their feet, and said, “Me boys we have a long way to go.”

  Reggie never said a thing about the picture after. He only brought it home and gave it back to Camellia.

  So Reggie worked as a walking boss and a landings supervisor and main Push in the camp up at Rolfe’s turn where they cut for the next two years, the world increasingly crowding them—new implements of cutting pushing their small stakes further and further away.

  Then one night in the cold February wind, Buckler appeared at our door. I think my mother by now was ashamed of where she lived and began trying to clean up. There was the idea that you entered into the past when you entered our house—but other houses on the river carried this stigma too, holding too long to something they needed, that the world in all its furious entitlement had long let go.

  He came with a reprimand. He told her Reggie was taking too many chances on the ice. He had not done this before.

  “It is hard on the men, and dangerous to the horses,” Buckler said. He looked at me a moment and did not smile.

  His face was drawn; he was very, very thin, almost bony. None in town said a word against the Jamesons now. Buckler was the uncle of the great Owen Jameson. Greater, they said, than Will himself.

  “He will not put the men in danger,” Camellia said.

  “Not intentionally, no—but you must realize he puts himself in danger—he strode Auger’s hole with Ronald’s Young.”

  This was where Dan Auger had fallen in the shifting ice—it was perhaps the most dangerous place to trek out a horse.

  Camellia did not answer for a long moment. Then she said: “Let him have his danger please, just one more year.”

  I remember Reggie now as he looked, his great broad face covered in graying beard and his hair tousled, his thumbs as big as some men’s wrists he sat in the chair by himself smiling at everyone.

  It was 1952 and I was five years old. He had come out for my birthday, though there had been terrible weather.

  He went back into the camp the next morning, for he said he had a job to do. I believe it was my birthday that made him drink for the first time, on the job. Or that the illness of my mother, which I always remember as vague and indeterminate, had reoccurred—and he in his big, stumbling, childlike manner did not know what to do.

  He was solitary, strong as a bull, and thirty-five years of age. He never mentioned me to my mother and never spoke of her or Owen except in kindness.

  “He was a great lad, that Owen Jameson,” he once said to me.

  “How was he so great?” I asked.

  “Read books,” he said.

  He knew his position in life had given him the most difficult task toward courage. For my mother and I, he struggled toward the light.

  He was my father.

  At the door before he left, she patted his shoulder, as she would pat a schoolboy in the morning. Then reprimanded him for not having his leather mittens.

  “Go on now,” she said when she turned her cheek to brush away his kiss, “or you’ll be late for the drive.”

  He winked at me.

  The reports are scattered in the testimony of men long since gone.

  At Arron’s Falls that spring below the talons. From Rolfe’s turn the logs were harder to manage, and the drive was trouble. The fact that old Buckler himself had to come in and tell his Push not to drive the men straight down but take two days or more, and be easy on the water, told of everyone’s unease.

  “I can’t keep you working yourself to death just because of my feelings for—”

  But he did not go on. The men were solemn. Reggie only shrugged. “I will do it to cause them the least amount of pain,” he said. Not knowing he had just quoted Keats at almost the very place Owen had mentioned the poet five years before.

  He smiled and went out, looked at the sour sky pelting rain, and the wood already in the little Hackett Brook, as he tucked his shirt into his pants.

  “We will do it today, boys, and please our boss,” he said, “and please the God my wife still believes in.”

  And the men started to slip the dark, peeled yards into the water.

  “A’s fer the axes,” Reggie said, “B’s for the boys—”

  For some reason he felt the logs beneath him slippery and easily submerged, while those behind him seemed to rise in the swells. The last time he remembered this was at Will Jameson’s death, the jam on the great river.

  It was only seven miles to the falls, but you came to the falls not straight like you did from Arron Brook but at a right angle, 230 yards above—it would be hard to keep them from jamming going over. That is why men had petitioned Reggie for a road above, to bring in the trucks at that point. But Reggie Glidden was stubbornly against this modernization. He felt it would put many drivers out of work.

  It could have happened just as it was stated. None has ever found out.

  The first of the run was fine—with the extra chute of water from sluices the men had built on Arron Brook and from the snow runoff
they had dammed, the logs plummeted over and kept going with the help of peaveys.

  Until about two that afternoon, on a cold windy day, when a huge cedar, a limb still upon it, came into the turn sideways and went over the falls before they could turn it right. There it stayed, and the logs piled upon it.

  “A road would have been the thing,” one of the men said to Reggie.

  “Never mind that now,” Reggie said. “It is not a big problem. See if the peaveys will work on it—take your crew and go to the other side and try to loosen the jam above.”

  But the peaveys did not work, though the men gave it their all, calling on each other to “push and be damned.”

  The logs were not cleared, and now backed up all the way to the turn.

  Reggie studied the water, could see deeper into it than most.

  “If I jump-start that fucker there,” he said, pointing down over the falls to the submerged cedar, “we will have out by suppertime.”

  It was twenty feet down over this cliff. Wet and cold, a shorebird had come up this far to nest, and kept its place even as the men worked around it. On the shale side were the letters BJ—for Byron Jameson, who had lived out here one winter on his own, cutting with one horse and a double-bitted ax.

  Reggie, of course, knew all of this, knew all about bravery except how to answer when people said he didn’t have it.

  He asked for rope, and with a rope about his chest was lowered down with a peavey, to pry the main log loose and let the rest come down the falls. He did this for honor, though a road would have been better, and for loyalty to the Jameson name.

  The trouble with doing this is once the logs start, you have to be pulled to safety in a second by men atop the cliff, in a vital pull to keep you out of the way of those logs coming down over your neck.

  The men, a Matheson and a Curry and a Joyce, held on to this rope and teased Reggie a bit as he moved over these logs.

  “She’s all as wet as a varr skid,” he said.