The Friends of Meager Fortune (19 page)

But this was a world unto itself and therefore the world, and people, hid envy and spite only so long. But envy and spite were there even among friends, like Curtis and Nolan, or Nolan and Richardson, and had to be tempered with wisdom.

This conflagration was normal for Stretch Tomkins to be involved in. Never was there a camp where he did not try to receive the tributes given others or take immeasurable credit for the slightest thing he himself did. After a time he became vociferous in his disrespect of Richardson—telling Gravellier that Richardson was formally Richard—French—and he had hidden his ancestry for shame. So Richardson would come on the cut and Gravellier would not speak to him.

“You’d not be in a union of mine,” Gravellier would say.

“Who the fuck would ever want to?” Richardson would answer.

“I should take you down a peg or two of that load.”

“Don’t let fear stop you,” Richardson answered.

It was told to me that Tomcat Tomkins (a man like ourselves) took to mimicking the way Richardson’s empty shirt sleeve was looped in his belt as he hauled back on the reins, to get others to laugh. That is, Colson, and Choyce and Lloyd. Encouraged by this, Tomkins took to teasing the teamster at supper.

Like most targets, Richardson at first did not know he was one. Then he took to ignoring it. He prayed more with his bible at night. He prayed about what he should do. In any case, the torment Richardson was going through was visible to those who liked him.

“What are you praying for?” Tomkins said one day. “That’ll not get you out of here alive.”

Richardson looked down at his tormentor from the top of a load, its chains frozen across the backs of 108 logs, his eyes watering because of the vicious wind, his one strong hand black on the reins:

“No—no one gets out of here alive,” Richardson said.

Tomkins turned and walked away, hauling up his Humphreys. He did not know, as he broke wind and took his chaffing pail, that he had made a fundamental mistake. To Richardson, he had challenged his right to exist.

Four days before Owen returned to camp, Richardson without any provocation picked up his hatchet from the side of his load, where he always stuck it, and threw it into a tree a foot over Tomkins’ head as he was pulling up his Humphreys coming from the outhouse. Then he jumped from his logs, a good fifteen feet down, nonchalantly walked over and took the hatchet back.

“Don’t be botherin’ me no more, you lanky puke,” he said.

“Right arm seems okay,” Nolan said, shrugging.

The teasing was ended, but Richardson would not leave it even though men in his own crew told him to.

“Leave him be—you’ve proved yourself out.”

“He’ll get his now,” he said, “even if I am fired.”

He moved toward Tomkins whenever he saw him, once literally chasing him around the hovel.

“Go way—go way,” Tomkins yelled.

Tomkins would not come back up from the skid roads until well after dark, and he would move not up the main bank but in through the trees, and come out behind the outhouse, and then make a dash for supper. Doing this he hurt his big toe and had to have it wrapped.

Tomkins sat alone and ate alone, and men on his crew, who had laughed with him as he teased the one-armed man, now left him to his own devices.

“Help me,” Tomkins asked Choyce.

“Take care of yerself, boy,” Choyce said, putting a pile of beans on his spoon with a slice of homemade crust. “You were man enough to tease a cripple, take care of yerself.”

“Yous all laughed a’ him yerselves.”

“Nope—never did—” Choyce said defensively.

“What will I have to do?”

“Knowing what I know about Richardson—kill him.”

“What have I done to you?” Tomkins asked one evening, smiling a plaintive, hopeful smile. “We have to live here together, don’t we?”

“Not if I kill you, Stretch,” Richardson reasoned. “I’ll get you down on the flat someday—there is lots and lots of time—three more months—we’ll just bide our time.”

Why was Stretch there in the first place? One of the reasons was his father was scaler for Jameson. But that year his father was fired by Buckler for poor rods—saying it had been going on now for five years. Buckler was right.

However, there was no thanks for a scaler’s job—he must measure how many board feet the camp was getting before it was cut into board feet. If he told the mill to make ready for seven million board feet he’d better not be shy. But the teamsters and cutters always said the scaler was “gypping” their load, for the scaler would rather be under the estimate given to the mill than over. However, because of his son, Mr. Tomkins had given Gravellier’s crew too many “full counts” and Buckler was finally fed up with planning and paying for wood that did not come to the boom.

Knowing of this, Gravellier, who had brought Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins with him as a teamster to placate the father who scaled, now did not need the man. And ignored him. Tomkins had no one left to fight for him.

When Owen arrived this time, Tomkins reported to him that a great crime had been committed, an attempted murder, and vowed to revenge this, even if he had to go to the sheriff. Owen did not want the sheriff knowing anything about this. So Tomkins became certain he had a good case.

In the end, Tomkins was talked out of this action by the other men who told him the crime started with the tormenting, and it would be difficult to live down if it was mentioned that he himself had baited a one-armed man, and then had pissed himself when the hatchet was thrown.

Tomkins demanded Richardson be taken from the team, and that team be given to him. For he was a teamster without a team, although he had been promised one.

Owen could not. Then Tomkins lessened his request. He demanded an apology and an extra day’s wage.

Owen considered this but decided he would have done the same as Richardson, and could not ask him to apologize.

“If he can’t take a teasing, he is not a man.”

“I am sure he has taken many,” Owen said, “for there are those who forget they are men.”

Tomkins was more angry at this quip than at the attempted murder. So he petitioned Owen later that night. He waited in the dark, until half the men were asleep. Owen was reading, sitting on his bunk.

“You’re the only one I can talk to—so, anyways, he tried to kill me—” he said, his voice frozen stiff in the air.

“If a man of Richardson’s temperament decided to kill you, you would now be dead,” Owen said turning a page and not looking up.

Then Tomkins brought up what he had always depended on to demean those he felt were targets. “He’s a runt—just like Meager and some of the rest of them—as far as I’m concerned.”

Owen paused and looked at him perplexed, for it was not in his own nature to think this way, or to question men’s nature by their size, and he asked: “So how tall are you?”

“Six-foot-two,” Tomkins said.

“That is what I guessed—some of the smallest men I ever met are over six feet tall.”

Tomkins was furious with this as well. But Owen said this because he was not a large man himself, and knew the measure of Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins.

The wind blew and moaned against the tin and timbers.

“It does not befit a boss,” Tomkins began, over the sound of the wind.

“Do not presume to tell me what befits a fucking boss,”
Owen Jameson said, rubbing his face in exasperation. And Tomkins was silent.

However, Owen considered and said he would give Tomkins an extra day’s wage.

Before dark the next night, after Richardson put Butch over to the tend team and was trying to straighten a harness with his one arm, Owen called to him. Richardson said he would turn over his team if Owen wanted. (His team and two others were owned by Jameson—one Tomkins thought should be his team.)

“It might be better all around if I went out,” Richardson said. “I don’t like Mr. Tomkins.”

Richardson was ill tempered and did not take to slights. Still, Owen said no, that Richardson was for him on Good Friday.

“Go back to your team,” he said, “and keep your fuckin’ temper to yourself.”

Richardson pondered, and said he would not throw his hatchet again.

As night came, Owen thought it was settled. Tomkins went over to his bunk and hauled the blankets up about him.

The next morning bright and early Tomkins was awake. And suddenly, as if inspired, he looked over at little Meager Fortune, who had lighted the fire and was now helping the cook.

“Meager,” Tomkins said, winking and smiling at all the others, “how many kids have you given yer wife now?”

“Only one,” Meager answered. “Duncan—he is a little boy—a lot like others, mischievous and full of fun—and he and I someday will take a trip—as I told him—”

“Ah well, she must have had all the others by me,” Tomkins interrupted, and then guffawed at his own joke.

EIGHT

The next night, with Meager Fortune staying in with the horses and little camp scrounger Nancy, the men started out for Christmas all hearing of the great excitement now being talked about in town. But as far as Christmas Eve, it was quiet. There was a report of the search that Owen and Camellia had taken of all the haunts on the river trying to find poor Reggie Glidden.

They were followed by her uncle Sterling, who then informed the police.

One other bit of information was that she had gone to the doctor.

“Whadya think of that there,” Sterling said, sniffing down a head of snot.

Yet on Christmas morning in 1946 a pivotal incident happened that would shape the events on Good Friday Mountain.

Tomkins met Sonny Estabrook at their church service about or shortly after eleven a.m. This was seen and later reported by their minister.

Although Estabrook rarely spoke to this man, seeing a chance at the side door he asked him how he was.

“How you’d expect, being up there,” Stretch said and cast a cold eye in the snow. “They fired me daddy.”

“I know that, boy,” Sonny said, “a disgrace.”

Sonny, in spontaneous enthusiasm, took Tomkins by the arm and led him to his car, asked him back to the house that afternoon for a drink. Stretch Tomkins looked baffled, his lips opened, and he tried to say something in reply—but even after the car drove off, he stood in the snow and bleating wind, astounded.

He was told, however, not to mention this to anyone. And he did not.

That afternoon as Tomkins sat in dignified embarrassment in the room that had entertained lords and ladies from bygone Britain, with its maps and giant woodland caribou rack on the walls, Sonny spoke of a great change coming to the woodlots. Tomkins, dressed even better than he had for church, looked dignified and humbled by turn—doing all he could to react the way he thought the great Sonny Estabrook would want him to. Finally, after Sonny spoke to him about golf—a game poor Tomkins had never before witnessed—he came to the point.

“What I need is a man up there to see if everyone is treated well—” Sonny said. As always, he said things sadly, as if he refused to believe in the duplicity of others. “He is not a good man, that lad—I liked his brother Will, and his dad was a champ—but he’s now foolin’ around with that woman—well, you knew Reggie?”

“Yes,” Tomkins said, nodding his head, “yes—I knew Reggie—very best of a man.”

“A champ,” Sonny said. “He was going to come work for me—well, the police know—so that’s the way it goes—a champ.”

“Oh, a champ—work for you—good for him,” Tomkins said. “A champ.” He spied the enormous chandelier in the far room, cold and diligent and dead in the frozen epoch of afternoon, and looked quickly back in fearful timidity—wondering how he could act to make an impression.

He crossed his legs and then uncrossed them, he sat forward and then sat back. He picked up his hat and then put it down.

“But I feel—I mean, are you okay?” Sonny asked.

“I’m okay—but they—well, someone up there tried to kill me,” Tomkins said, his face reddening and looking out at his host in sudden hysteria.

“Goddamn!” Sonny said. He was so outraged by this. As Tomkins knew anyone should be. He looked at his drink and said nothing more. He just shook his head.

However, Sonny had a proposition for him. It would allow bonus—more money than he would see in a year—if he did it. Sonny was taking a gamble here—and he was taking it simply because of the new situation Owen had found himself in with this woman. He felt he could rely upon the town to turn against his adversary.

And so he told Tomkins what he wanted.

Tomkins was a stamper on the skid road. That is, he marked the yarded timber after it was scaled with the Jameson stamp to separate it from all the other wood on the river.

Estabrook wanted Tomkins to mark Jameson’s wood with an Estabrook stamp.

Tomkins stared at him, unable to breathe. He loosened his tie, which he had tied with such joy just a few hours before.

Sonny did not take his eyes off him. His face turned warm and compassionate. He reached out and touched Tomkins’ knee. “They make you do the stamping, don’t they?” he asked.

That is, he knew and had for two months who would be stamper of much of the wood at the lower end. Tomkins was so filled with awe he could not speak. He only wondered why Sonny would want him to do this.

“For the men,” Sonny said, blaspheming without a trace of embarrassment, “for the union really—”

“I—see,” Tomkins said, who didn’t see a thing.

The truth, as always, was somewhere else. Sonny had discovered something terrible from his people. He had discovered that the wood he had fought the Jamesons for, for the last seven years, was no good. That did not mean an acre was bad, it meant the whole damn tract was not fit to put a scale to. For the last week he had been beside himself wondering how to
save his year. He had phoned Bots in Fredericton and begged him to force Jameson to trade cuts. He would cut the great cedar trees on Good Friday.

Bots not only could not do this, he burst out laughing. It was the first time anyone had ever laughed at an Estabrook.

Why hadn’t this been known before? The only thing he could think is that he had been made a dupe, the first year at the head of his family enterprise.