The Friends of Meager Fortune

by David Adams Richards

  “Or a good woman,” another answered.

  “Ah, a good woman,” he said.

  The men were silent after.

  Reggie kicked at one log, pried at another, and said: “It would be the day I quit drinking.”

  “You quit drinking?”

  “Yes,” he smiled, “I will die a free man now.”

  He found the cedar—and how the limb had braced it against a rock.

  “Ah, this is easy now,” he said. “I have the problem solved, me dunces—” And he moved about as the rope tangled above him.

  “Don’t go over any farther,” Matheson cautioned, “or it’ll be a hard pull to get you back.”

  But Reggie could only solve it from the far side, down near the bottom of the falls.

  So he paid no attention to the warning. He jabbed his pole down, and with every bit of strength in his tired muscled body he felt the cedar move.

  “Watch it now—here she blows!” he roared.

  Just then the logs began to come.

  Some say his rope was too fast by a tangle, when they tried to haul him up, and he was too far from their cliff.

  One man, the diver who had looked for him, Harrison Matheson, risked his life reaching down to grab him. But it was no use at all.

  Little Meager Fortune came to the door that night to tell us.

  “They was all my friends,” he said, tears running freely down his face, his coat opened to the wind, his chest half bare.

  So they had become equals once again: Reggie, Will, and Owen.

  SEVEN

  My mother knew she had broken Reggie’s heart. And this time he left for good to set her free. She had never told him she loved him. Until after he died. Then tears burning in her eyes, she said it almost every day, sometimes looking out onto an empty street.

  We say no so often to those who admire us too much.

  I heard a Shaver song not too long ago, and I thought of Reggie and my mother:

  You’re going to want to hold me

  Just like I always told you—

  You’re going to miss me when I’m gone

  How often had he reached out for her only to have her turn away? Afterward, at night, I often saw her looking toward the door for him to come home just once more, to call his name.

  The town, too, was sorry. The funeral was large. People speculated Camellia would marry someone very rich.

  Reggie’s statue was placed on Good Friday Mountain along with the teamsters.

  He had gone back to the fold the only way he knew how.

  “I like the sea,” he told me on the day of my birthday, when he drove me about town in his old truck before he left for the drive, “but I belong to the woods.”

  That is all he said. Except, “Would you like a chocolate bar?”

  It was the only thing I remember that he bought me. He patted my head. My eyes half blind, I looked up at him. I believe it was the only time he ever touched me.

  “If you think that is good—I got something good,” I said, trembling all over as I sat there.

  “Ya, what?”

  “I love you,” I said.

  I don’t remember what he answered. I never saw him again.

  He was the last Push for Jameson. They sold out the next year, parts cannibalized and their holdings restructured. Some said they went bankrupt. One night I saw Sterling rushing past us with a truckload of pilfered wood, a smile on his face.

  After a time, on long ago summer nights, my mom would go to the Pines dances, and sit alone, and listen to the music of Harold Savage and the Savage Boys, as they fiddled and stomped out the last of an age that was ending. She loved music. She was solitary, mostly alone. Sometimes I would see her walking along our lane, coming home alone with a small present for me in her pocket, once a mouth organ that I learned to play, or bits of colored glass she carried to give the girls who played hopscotch.

  We lived on a military pension. She could be talked into buying anything—always saying she would pay for it later. But of course she never had enough money.

  At times I remember when collectors were at the door, men vastly experienced at scrounging. We would hide upstairs so we wouldn’t have to pay, her arm about me and holding her nose, trying not to giggle. A child to the end.

  She bought me a record player so I could listen to Gene Vincent: “Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby.”

  When I was nine she came home from the Pines with a man I had never seen before. He was sitting at the kitchen table and spoke like a woodsman for Sloan. He had in his time hated and fought both Reggie and Will. My mom did not know this.

  I remember seeing the tip of his cigarette as he flicked the ashes into the cuffs of his green pants.

  It was May, and I could smell fresh mud and grass. I was alone for a time, awake in my bed. He had a loud voice, serious and cross. She was trying to explain something. But I could hardly see because of my eyes.

  “I love May nights,” she said. And, “I never finished school—someday I’d like to.”

  I listened to this melancholy enthusiasm and drifted in and out of sleep.

  Then the lower hallway light came on. There was a song on the radio. I think it was Hank. I think it was “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

  I cannot hear that song now without breaking a radio. Strange, how much I love Hank Williams.

  She was so fragile. After a while he was cursing and then called her something and slammed the door.

  I got out of bed. She was lying in the living room, vomit in her hair, her skirt pushed up. Her underwear torn off. The man whoever he was, had gone. There were photos on the table. Most were of she and me and dad, she had been showing him.

  “I’ll help,” I said.

  I ran to the only person I knew—far away. Lula opened the door.

  Time had changed her as well. The suffering had changed us all.

  “A man beat her up,” I said.

  Lula left with me in her black sedan.

  It was as if Lula was now of a different world and time, and we were in a past that had already ended. She had married Peabody, the high school principal, after her father had died. Peabody, they said, married her for the money. I will never know.

  She went to meetings where they spoke of “preserving our natural heritage.”

  She wore her hair back, which made her forehead broad and white. Sometimes she and Peabody went to Florida at Christmas to visit his brother.

  So the fiddle music of Harold Savage and the Savage Boys had all but stopped.

  Lula told her to go to the police. But Mommy couldn’t. Who among them would believe her? It was to her the most terrible thing she had ever done, asking someone to come into her house.

  She tried to put the pictures away, but her hands were shaking.

  She asked Lula to forgive her.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Lula said.

  And then at the door, Lula, once the most self-serving of girls, kissed my mother’s cheek and whispered: “He loved you—he always did—and you loved him.”

  It may sound absurd but which one, Reggie or Owen, did my mother have to be reassured about?

  Someone phoned my mother to ask her what she was doing, and who she thought she was, and don’t think she hadn’t heard about her shenanigans years ago and her bastard crippled kid. Well, as if they didn’t know!

  Then men started to phone her.

  The phone would ring—late at night.

  She never went again to listen to music.

  Sometimes I stood in the hallway all by myself as dark was coming on, saying, “Oh boy,” because she cried and I didn’t know what to do.

  She was sure that she had a disease.

  In 1968 I found out the man was Huey Gravellier. I took my father’s 303 and went searching for him. I walked right to the wharf with it over my shoulder. Before I got there, I was tackled, charged by police and the weapon taken from me.

  “Yer gonna end up like yer fuggin’ granddaddy,” Monroe said.


  Meager Fortune died in 1970—on a sunny afternoon in April. He was in his barn painting a small skiff he used to ride the rapids in.

  He is buried beside Duncan and Evelyn.

  Stretch Tomkins is still alive, and as far as I know has written a first-hand account of Good Friday Mountain. “I blame the bosses,” he wrote.

  He and Cora Auger are pals and go out to bingo and cards together—now almost in their eighties, they are figures in our town.

  There is a monument to those teamsters now, looking out over Good Friday Mountain. It is visible from all the roads built near it over the last fifty years. And I am now fifty and go to one of a half-dozen places to see this monument—usually in the fall, when the light from the sky is just right. Statues of Reggie and Will and Owen have been placed there too. It is such a little tribute to them, really.

  The woods are muted and stilled and broken and bulldozed away, by machinery none of these men could have foreseen. Nor could they have foreseen our great skyscraper mills that turn our logs into soft toilet paper for softer arses. Our companies owned by other countries.

  They could not have foreseen that this monument to tenacity and courage and goodness would be the cause of such disruptive anger over the years. That some mining company would claim this tract and want to take the monuments down, while in the 1980s certain frivolous young men would joke about these men and their horses while drinking in a bar. Or that hunting parties would fire out shots against the granite hides of Missy and Butch.

  So these men who died, faithful to Buckler’s mountain, over time became again part of a scandal. Another scandal started because of our famine. To fill up our souls with the trinkets of life, instead of with life itself.

  On the roads at times, almost at dark, I meet the tractor trailers bringing the logs out—those great trucks carrying twenty times the wood of those sleds that were once so cared for by Curtis and Richardson. What in the world would they think? Their sled wouldn’t be as high as one of the tires of those trucks I meet along the myriad roads. Yet they had given their life for it all.

  When she got sick later that winter, Camellia begged me not to tell people—for she didn’t want them to know she had a disease. She told me to go get her ginger ale. So for days and days I came home from school in the dark afternoon, with icy fog over our river and men across the street at the oil tanks and girls walking home with bookbags across their backs, all stretching toward the sunless future in our lives.

  I would sometimes sit into the night at the table listening to the heater glumly, like a sick animal, turn on and off. Her fall had half crippled me, and left me blind in an eye. I suppose at that time I couldn’t conceive of life without her. My poor mother—I was the only stigmata she ever had.

  I would stand in abject desolation wanting to know if she wanted soup. For hours I would stand silently in the dark.

  She was left alone with me, their living proof—in a way, I was her worst enemy. And she cared for me to the end.

  I sought oblivion in the dark and left the lights out as I walked in our little house, so street lights flared across the windows and lighted walls like an omen.

  Sometimes I would stare blankly at the TV, which we had bought and which had been taken away and brought back twice in the last year—still owing fourteen dollars. Or I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and look up. So when she rose to her feet, in the scattered hope of children I would believe she was fine.

  But one day I came home, the light falling under the old oaks in the park and Antonio’s barbershop being torn away, and found she wasn’t all right. I ran to Foran’s and asked for a taxi.

  I got her to the hospital and sat in the waiting room, without a coat, in big black boots, with snow whispering across the solid golden-tinged field where Owen made his way into the woods that night in 1947.

  For a while she had a room with three other people, and then two, and then she was alone at the back of the hospital.

  So I was nine when my mother went away from me. But it was no terrible disgrace she died of. It was cancer.

  She had treatment, primitive in the 1950s—and they took a breast and then another. Some nights late, I could see her searching for the card that a friend had sent.

  Sometimes, not often, she would talk about when she was a little girl. One Christmas her father and mother bought her nail polish in a small jar. She kept it always.

  I told a friend I had once, a man from university with his ponytail and beads, about the fingernail polish. But he had trained himself to be curiously unmoved. I am sure he thought it was all sentimental. He was of the same opinion as Graham Greene, that cruel men cry in theaters. That is true. But crueler men don’t.

  I buried the polish with her. I didn’t tell anyone I had. I tried to be the man my father was.

  In the hospital I found out something I have never mentioned to anyone until now. I was listening in almost dumb despair at the door of the waiting room. I had brought my bookbag from school because the teacher, Miss Gilks, had told me to.

  I sat in a chair as nurses spoke in the dying light of afternoon.

  The doctor, one nurse told the other, had found this tumor in her when she was pregnant with me. He suggested she remove it.

  “And what will happen to my baby if I do?” she had said.

  “It will die.”

  “Then I will not do it—never.”

  The bustling nurses so filled with energy on the last day of my mother’s life, smelling of the faint iodine that covered up smaller wounds.

  “Though she come now and again, they couldn’t do nothing about it—after that.”

  “And look what she got,” another nurse said, “a cripple no good fer nothing at all.”

  I looked at my bookbag a long time, until it was dark and there was a whistle from the mill, and I could no longer see my name written on the bookbag strap, and the chocolate given to me by the orderly had melted away in my mitten.

  Some days I take a backpack and walk all the way to Good Friday, imagining those sleds and the horses—the tack and harness, the boldness of the loads—seeing Pitman, Fraser, and Gibbs, seeing Bartlett, Nolan, and Curtis, Trethewey and Richardson, and Meager Fortune, all in their prime once more. They are hilarious at supper, or playing cards about a stove.

  Once I found a peavey stamp in the snow. It was a Jameson stamp left behind when the wood was remarked over to Buckler, when all the timbers were unleashed.

  Bullets fired from boyish hunters far away have littered Butch’s flanks, and the carved-out two sled is covered with curses, and down in the dark toward the stream there is nothing anymore, and no logs wait.

  The mountain has long ago been bulldozed back by the mining company looking for ore. There, in its silent tractor ruts, I found the buckle from Nolan’s harness. And on the far slope, the remains of the devil’s mount sticking out of the snow, like a top-heavy mushroom.

  I sketched them all one night. Butch with his head half turned on the downhill run, and the Percheron, Cole Younger. I was going to keep it forever—but I was only fourteen then and, like Owen with Camellia’s picture, I cannot find now where I set it down.

  There are still those places in our life, swallows in the air and brooks sounding like children when darkness is coming, filled with the memories of young women far up on rivers picking out berries in the trembling grasses.

  But the world has moved on, and they are unknown.

  Over time, I discovered Owen Jameson was right. Those who someday would tell the story would no longer be ourselves.

  I was treated very well by Lula—I was like her own child, so in the end I called her my mother. But she died many years ago. Still, people didn’t know where to place me or what to say or who the hell I was. So I never spoke to anyone about who I was. Not since the day Camellia died.

  I bore the physical injury so many of these real men who mocked me on the street have run from most of their lives. Camellia had given it to me in that fall. It was my
bonus given on the very day those men died. My heritage I bore for them.

  I bore it fifty years.

  Often, though, I just wandered from one place to the other, all across our river, drinking Jameson whiskey down until at forty-five the doctor told me he wondered how I was still alive. No liver could take it, he said.

  “Well, we’ll have to wait and see,” I answered.

  He told me that alcoholics didn’t know they were ill.

  “They and everyone else,” I said.

  I live in my mother’s house at Strawberry Marsh. I have a dog named Jeb Stuart. I was given every one of Owen Jameson’s books.

  When DNA testing became common, a doctor asked if I wanted to find out who I was.

  “Come close and I’ll whisper,” I said, “I already know.”

  Unlike poor Reggie, I had no choice in the matter. I could never be in the middle of the pack.

  Now, whenever I look out my upstairs windows, I can see the new generation traveling on their skateboards off those old pipes at the side of the mill Will Jameson once owned. They teeter and move like princes in the wind, their shirts behind them, and maneuver across the cold railings in this desolate broken lot, thirty feet above the ground. They are the out-of-work children of out-of-work fathers whose grandfathers worked in the long ago. They are as tough as stone and as kind as a day is long.

  Their names are Underhill and Nolan and Curtis and Curry and MacLeod. And they move like their forefathers before them, as if in their primitive hearts a fortune was at stake.

  Meager fortune, to be sure.

  Just before I turned fifty, I was sent Owen Jameson’s Victoria Cross.

  Someone felt I should have it before they settled the estate.

  As I told you at the beginning of this story, I walked up to see the great Jameson house once more before it was torn down, the huge lot sold off for smaller prefab houses manufactured in Germany.

  Too many pictures of men and streams and wood, and too many failed memories.