The Friends of Meager Fortune (16 page)

It was the first time that Camellia looked at the very house as an indictment against her. This old place of Eric Glidden’s—a place that had been contested at his death by others from Injun town, her uncle Sterling being one, and claimed by Reggie as the only thing he had to give her. Now empty of him, it shot her through the heart.

THREE

Owen took Camellia in his Jeep, and traveled to his father’s old mill. What a dreary nineteenth-century place, at the foot of Injun town—it was only used now to store dealed up board in the spring. The poles jutting out were the last leftover monument of Will Jameson’s greatness. A greatness ended before he was twenty. Again Owen thought he was not the man for
this—that some huge joke was being played upon him, and that for some reason Camellia was part of the con against him, even if she did not know.

Some of Reggie’s former friends now feared Glidden dead, and the acts of ridicule against him after the war were heavy upon them. They knew these acts of ridicule and torment had gone exceedingly well against this man, and they had done so just to see how far they could go, and to fill up their own famine. That, in essence, is why they threw pulp sticks at his chained-up body.

They were, as they said later, “caught up in it.” They even had bets on how long Camellia would stay faithful.

Now, all of this was creeping under their skin, in a kind of self-accusation.

Their attention turned to Owen, and all the terrible things they had said about Reggie dissipated among themselves and were blamed, or at least readjusted, upon he who they now focused on.

“I think there’s somethin’ up,” Sterling said, shaking his head, as if he was telling a confidence that he didn’t want to break.

Then the person he told this to would overhear Sterling ten minutes later saying to someone else: “I think there’s some-thin’ up.”

By this time there was across town a sudden speculation that Owen and Camellia would leave soon and not be back.

This came from someone’s doorway at ten o’clock that morning. It was the principal opening in a gambit to make them both liable. Those who said it felt it to be true, and so told others in their circle. That is, as with so much rumor, one promotes the sin more than the blame.

It drifted back, this sin, over the gray afternoon toward the dock.

“What are you doing here?” Sterling asked Cora Auger. “This ain’t no place for you, dear!”

“Just waiting,” she said, “just waiting—union will come, and he will go.” And she smiled, nodding toward Owen, her two front teeth just slightly rotted, and then frowned and looked back toward the water.

Cora wanted them (that is the constabulary) to know that she was here not for herself but for justice. She had a toff of fuzzy brown hair above her forehead that made her ears naked and small, plump legs and wore a tattered scarf. She was one of Camellia’s enemies in school, for Camellia had been terrified of her and Cora had prided herself on having a murderer’s daughter frightened.

She was also an enemy of the Jamesons. Why wouldn’t she be? She was Dan Auger’s daughter.

The police had this idea too, that Owen would try to spirit Camellia away, and decided to watch them. They had not leaned toward flight until others speculated, but managed to make it their own observation.

Yet where would they go?

They would take a ferry across the river and head down the coast of the United States to Florida. That this rumor had also started in the house on George Street more than a week before was lost at this moment.

So where this idea had come from no one knew, but it went from Pond to Pleasant to King George Highway in a matter of minutes.

Lula was informed by Solomon Hickey that this is what would happen.

“Be prepared for it,” he said.

She cast her eyes downward, and said nothing at all.

People were informing everyone now, across the town.

All in the name of love.

“Of sex, you mean,” an old woman blurted, laughing and sniffing. “Of dirty, stinkin’, rotten, no good, humpin’ sex—”

And a neighbor roared and laughed over the back fence, because she was such a wag.

FOUR

Camellia and Owen did not know they were off to Florida, and did not particularly want to go there. Nor had they ever been to the cave since they were boy and girl and had met there one day when swimming. Camellia was so outgoing and Owen was so shy that finally he ran up the cliff and hid in the grass.

Both remembered this, and neither spoke of it now.

In fact, there was a slight feeling Owen had, besides all the work and worry of Good Friday, of being put upon suddenly by Camellia. He did not want to react like this—it was selfish, he knew. There must be others to take care of her, Owen suddenly thought. That is, no matter how he was viewed, he still viewed himself as somewhat of an outsider in this episode, and thought, ironically, that the police would do the same. But how did his detached reaction come across?

With the men, it seemed quite natural—for they decided Owen had had her already in bed—and as men know with
women they do not love, once had, fast gone. That is why he was aloof.

Sterling pointed this out to Cora Auger.

“Be like eternity staying with the skimpy bitch afterward—He’s got hisself in a pot.”

In fact, Owen discovered on this long, painful day that he was the only one on Camellia’s side.

It dawned on him as he caught in the very corner of his eye that woman, who he did not know was Cora Auger, looking at him with a curious, distant stare.

This made no terrible or immediate impression upon him, but sometime later—before it all came crashing down—it would. Her look was intense, self-promoting, and hilarious, as if she had discovered in Camellia the large flaw she had always sought against the Jamesons themselves.

People stared at the poles, the river, the black pebbles glazed with ice and snow beneath their feet, and everywhere white snow that made the wet world dismal, that blocked out the view of the sun.

When Chief Crossman showed Camellia the coat, she burst out crying.

She explained the phone calls much differently than Reggie’s cousin Billy, who said that Camellia was asking for a divorce (a very extreme thing in 1946), but Crossman, gruff and knowledgeable, inspecting the poles as she spoke, had some reservations about her story.

Crossman was absorbed in the idea of a man killing himself, and it seemed odd he would do so because someone offered him a job as foreman.

“So when you offered him this job,” Crossman said, “did he seem confused or angry or somepun?”

“No, he did not sound confused,” Camellia replied. Crossman shrugged, told her the poles were glazed with ice
and no man would ever be able to walk them.

“Reggie would—he can waltz on a varr skid,” Owen said (which meant he could waltz on a slick log in the middle of the river). But saying this brought no comfort to Owen, who was using one of Will’s expressions. Men nearby knew this, and Owen, suddenly embarrassed, knew they did.

Then Crossman showed him the letter from Estabrook that was found in the coat pocket.

“Did you know anything about this?”

Owen was stunned and looked hurt. But this look might have come just as much because he was guilty.

He didn’t answer, simply stared at Crossman and asked if a diver had been down.

“For fifteen minutes in a bell, but the current is too strong here—” Crossman said without looking his way, suddenly catching the mood of the crowd and being politic enough to use it.

Men crowded about Owen, looking at him as a curiosity, and his leg became inflamed. He felt pain shoot out, and grimaced. These men, some or many who for years drank near this warehouse, fought and squabbled, men who had been gassed in the first war, or psychologically destroyed, now simpered and smirked at him, as if they had caught him at something even more than they themselves had ever been caught at.

This was the most dreaded aspect of the crowd—their easy adjustment to vengeance and the blame of others.

He thought for the first of many times of Oscar Wilde led from court into the city street.

“This is what being a suspect will do,” Owen said.

Crossman glanced up at him, and put Estabrook’s letter away before it became too much of a curiosity.

Owen walked to the water. He stared down at the ice. He, too, saw some small spots of blood.

The idea that there was blood on the sleeve of the coat, as if Reggie had tried to defend himself, was a notable thing, though many there had thrown pulp sticks against that very same arm.

“Poor bastard,” the young man drinking with Sterling said.

Owen turned away from them. He would have to get a diver. He saw Camellia standing hunched up along the side of the old warehouse. He remembered her father. He had been twelve at the time. It had seemed like a great adventure to hang someone then. He remembered a picture of her in the paper, standing with a bottle of nail polish (what her parents had gotten her that Christmas) on a side street smiling—as if it was an adventure for her as well. That picture was an enormous weight upon her. Kids made fun of her then for that little bottle. Yes—he himself if he wanted to admit it. So, she had startled them all and had risen a beauty.

How now to see her fallen.

Walking back from the water he saw a dozen men still staring at him.

“Do you have something to tell me?” he asked them.

They immediately turned their backs and left. As always, Owen was much more of a match than his physical appearance would indicate.

Owen walked with a cane—it was either walk with a cane or not walk. He was, in the dreary afternoon of pointed snow, somewhat of a caricature. Major Owen Jameson.

He bore little resemblance to his father, or his famous brother, but to someone of Mary’s ancestry on another continent in another time, in fact a man who walked Ireland 134 years before.

Crossman hadn’t liked Owen’s famous brother, for he took too much for granted. Too many fights, and not enough prosecutions. Nor had the prosecutor Brower liked these people. It seemed now that events might come together so others would not like them either. However, Crossman for all his suspicion and gruffness did like Camellia.

Certain people came to talk to Owen, even if it was only about the rumor of death.

“God almighty—would he jump off at this time a year?” The idea being that if one were going to kill themselves they would at least do it when the weather was pleasant. Owen looked up in a heartbeat for the short, hard woman whose eyes had bore into him. He no longer saw her.

“I figure it murder,” Sterling’s young drinking companion said.

“We’ll be back when the body comes up,” Sterling added.

And soon all dissipated in fading sounds along the graying, snowy lanes.

FIVE

Camellia talked to Crossman when they went to the jail, for he wanted a missing person report filed.

Five-foot-ten with red hair, 160 pounds, last seen in Saint John, New Brunswick, wearing the coat now found. She asked for the coat back. Of course not. Crossman spoke to Estabrook by phone briefly, and kept the letter.

“It seems he was going to go work for Estabrook,” Crossman
said. “Perhaps you should have told us that.”

Owen listened to this—listened with what eagerness Camellia tried to say the right things—understood the way Crossman spoke to her, and became himself more aware of a noose tightening for no apparent reason. He could distance himself from her now, with one word. He still had the power to do so. But he must be very quick if he was to do it. He knew he couldn’t. It would be deplorable.

He sat near the secretary, in the blank, cold outer room where she had her desk, and came in three times a week.

The secretary took an interest in Owen, just when he wanted to be unresponsive, and began asking him questions. He became aware of the unsettling propensity in her, too, for assumption, and understood that people assumed it their right to assume something between Camellia and he. That the sin was already monstrous and dark. To say that he was only trying to help Camellia seemed utterly ridiculous given what was perceived.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t a been there the other night—you might have saved him all over again,” the secretary said, smiling quickly. She had no idea that this was a witty thing to say until she said it.