The Friends of Meager Fortune (20 page)

So this is the offer he made to lowly Tomkins in a very understated manner, with an indication that he would be well taken care of. And his father—the scaler who was fired just at the start of the season—would be paid for this year.

Sonny smiled, and waited for an answer.

“My dad will be paid?”

“Of course—he was determined to scale off Buckler’s mountain—so I will pay him.”

This subterfuge would not save Estabrook’s entire year—but if the wood got to the water with his stamp, and then into the big communal boom where it was sorted, it was his wood, and therefore he would or might break even.

He took out an envelope with $350 and lay it on the table. Tomkins had his head down, his new tie, his new shiny boots, his hat in his hand.

After Christmas, the town itself shrank from winter, ice across the sidewalks like the backs of shells, and wind blowing the great oak trees, the sun a spot far away. Each day came darker and colder, the houses tighter and meaner unto themselves.

January appeared with a gale that blotted land and river in white; small sheds and shacks bravely looked out over the river upon a desert of snow.

Owen was forced to accept that he was here now, and even if his intention had been honorable, he was looked upon very differently. He saw Camellia infrequently, for he felt the town’s scrutiny and realized that her position was compromised by him. She did not know this or care—she still told people, and the paper (a journalist came to speak to her on December 31, 1946), that Owen was her best friend. While before it had sounded innocent to him, now it was looked upon as much more insidious. Not a thing had changed, but, as Shakespeare warned, thinking makes it so. Still, he could not stay away, and twice walked by her house. The gaiety, warmth, and humor the people knew her for was now looked upon as wiles. Though more than a few supported her, the idea that she was uncommonly cruel was a by-product of the mystery.

So Owen, who wanted to keep her safe, and perhaps himself, tried his best not to succumb to an impulse to see her, and looked agitated when her name was mentioned. However, people knew he was agitated when her name was mentioned.

Therefore, many people thought that he and Camellia would turn on each other like guilty parties often do. That is, people had decided already on the sin, and on the retribution to come, without any compelling evidence to warrant either. That this was embellished in the small barbershop of Mr. Solomon Hickey should not be considered entirely Mr. Hickey’s fault.

Still, what Owen was experiencing now—after his brief moment in the spotlight, in the warmth and adulation of people—was a turning against him, which is a common, almost universal occurrence.

Mackey, the coroner who had wanted to have dinner with him, now refused to look in his direction; Estabrook, who had phoned him to congratulate him, now shrank from him.

To offset this, they said it wasn’t and couldn’t be thought of as envy—for look how much they had admired Will, and how they cared for Reggie Glidden.

All were caught up in this scandal, all believed in the new position they had placed Owen and Camellia, as much as they had believed in him being a World War hero three months before.

Even Brower believed partly for himself and partly for Lula that he had always cared for Will, that he had tried his best with Reggie—but he said: “I have changed my opinion about Owen. I thought he was more like Will and Reggie, but I have been sorely mistaken.”

Still, the idea that Owen had been Lula’s betrothed gave Angus Brower certain feelings of perverse pleasure.

“Yes—I knew he would do this—” he told his friends at the courthouse. For their part, they were appalled that a man would so turn from a woman because she had so suffered.

PART IV

ONE

On the sixtieth day of the cut, Owen went to the camp to make sure of the provisions and the men.

None were ill, though some had not done as well as others.

Tomkins was stamping on the lower end of the skid road, so Owen thanked him for this, saying he knew Tomkins had come in as teamster and he was appreciative of that fact. He was thankful and reminded him of when they were children together.

Then he checked the stamp for his mark.

The stamp was simply a peavey with the company’s indent or mark on the bottom to be stamped into the wood, and all looked a lot alike except for the mark itself.

With Jameson it was WJ, with Sloan it was an S, and with Estabrook it was an E in the shape of a bird in flight.

So Tomkins took the stamp after Owen inspected it and went down the road to do his job.

As far as the haul went, it did not get any easier now.

The men would check the two sleds, and make sure of the harnesses—then as the days got colder and more tedious, they wouldn’t get back to the camp until almost midnight. They would fall into bed exhausted in their clothes, preparing to be up in five hours. They watched each other in wind and whiteout conditions, and often the bone-chilling fog. They
were like specters on that hill, the snow coming off their backs in spray as they made their lunge—snow across their scarfs and faces so until you saw the horses, you could not tell one from the other. One lantern light to show that mankind still existed on this mountain. One beacon to call out that humanity in all its self-recriminations, falsity, and self-imposed foils was taking wood down to build houses in Europe and New York, Fredericton and Halifax. Even though they, these men, would never be welcome in any of those places, nor conceive of ever being so.

On their right was a shale drop to the water that descended from a height of 223 feet at a slant of about thirty-eight degrees. The turn at the bottom had to be made quickly or a teamster chanced running his load into the dammed and frozen pond in front of him.

Even the heaviest sled and the bravest horses were scuttled sideways because of the slickness of the ice, where no sand or chaff would hold, though the sand pails were kept heated at night under those desperate lanterns.

The bridge was small, and the runners on the sleds had just enough space to make the crossing. All of this with the teamster’s hands frozen stiff, and his back aching. One slip and you were over the bank or, not turning quickly enough, into the dammed brook. The harder you worked, the harder it got.

But the men had reasoned it could be no other way down, and they could not construct the bridge anywhere else. Once these things were reasoned and done, and once the men began their harsh and frozen task, and once it was decided that the horses must do this and to hear the horses grunt out in agony had to be, no one was going to change.

Missy was designated to lead. And since the other horses only seemed to feel safe when in sight of the Clydes, they came
off the hill very close behind. That is, they mimicked each other just as humans did.

This was a fantastic gamble, for the Belgians came behind her so close into the turn that one snout was almost up against the rear pole. When the snow blew thickest, it was a gamble just to see over the trackless slope, with tuffs of forlorn alders and hard clots of dung, windswept as any plain on earth.

Then, at night, they looked at each other, saying: “Don’t you fuggin’ fail me up in front,” or “You keep her steady on my fuckin’ tail.”

Things were okay though—they roared and laughed, threw objects at each other’s heads, and were silent only at dinner.

On the sixty-fourth night of the haul Owen was not in camp, and so the men were free to talk, for it had echoed up from the town that something was happening. These rumors came with the portager and were fed by the mail.

Tonight there was some talk of union, but most was talk about Reggie’s wayward wife.

“The husband’s not even known to be alive or dead,” Gravellier said, holding up a letter from his wife. He read, holding his cigarette out and flicking the ashes into his turned-up cuff. “Fine piece of work this will be!” he said.

Then he would look down at the letter and shake his head. “They are looking for a body,” he said, and he shook his head again, “I’ll body her if she ever wiggles her bum at me,” he said, looking up and winking, so Tomkins and others laughed.

Many said they were sorry for Reggie, that he was a brave man. That is, their idea of who Reggie Glidden was had changed completely again.

“Well that’s what a woman can do to ya,” Colson said.

Meager Fortune asked them to “give it time” and see if everything didn’t “just work out.” For he had known what rumor could do.

Then, after a while, Meager made his way to the hovel to be alone.

The snow whispered against the opened front, and hit him at the midsection.

It was his birthday—he was now twenty-seven years old. He remembered his funny ill-fitting suit with a missing shirt button on the day he was married. He had not told anyone, for he kept those recipes in his boots to take home, that his wife and child had died in a house fire sometime on June 5, 1944, and he could still not speak of them as gone.

Still, to celebrate this mischief called a birthday he had come to see the horses.

He placed his hands up on Missy’s back, and listened to the wind whistle down though the wood, thinking and digesting all he had heard tonight about Camellia and Owen. His dark, rough hands were cut and chapped from the cold, his face almost as tough as leather and still as childlike as innocence itself.

He could be cut and bleed without knowing, and had been many times. He could stand cold that would kill many, and had been once caught up under the ice with a draft horse and survived.

And he would, like his father, have arthritis in ten years, be dead in twenty. That is what the world offered him. He knew no other life, and in fact was frightened of it. This other life, where men did not sweat or suffer the cold to half-frozen bodies. He had seen men prancing and preening at dances, in a world he did not belong to, where they all somehow looked and moved in the way of women. He cringed to think it might actually be that way in cities and places he would never go.

His life, then, was nothing. But he must stay and take care of the men. He was too kind to gossip and he didn’t like them talking about the boss—so he came out here.

He was a tiny man, yet a man who could lift three hundred pounds on his back day in and day out. He looked at his leather gloves, his woolen jacket and thick woolen pants, and even here felt ashamed that he knew so little. If he had known enough to read and write—or enough to take a job on the railway—his wife would have lived. This is what he thought. He, through his splendid ignorance, had killed the woman he loved. Though no one else would ever think this.

He had cared for Missy as a filly. Now he moved the lantern forward and lighted it just enough to check her caramel-colored head and chestnut eyes. There were little flecks of hair missing along her back, small spots that the world had taken away from her.

“Hello, lady—it’s me—Meager Fortune. I knew Will—the great Will Jameson—and arm-twisted him to a draw—way up at his camp on the Tabusintac. I also saved a mule in the war.”

He set the lantern down and smiled without a tooth in his head.

Butch’s right hind leg had been scraped raw by a loose piece of hemlock he had dragged to the yard, before he was harnessed on the two sled to haul over the bank and to the river skids. Which meant he and two of the Belgians were used all day long working either down in the cut or on the two sled. It just meant that his great heart would give out a year or two sooner, and he wouldn’t stop working until it did. As soon as he felt the log on the devil’s mount Butch would begin his ferocious stride up over the hill, cutting a swath through stumps and fallen wood that broke under his great strength but took each day more strength from him, as if he was saying to the man handling the reins behind his back: “You want me to do this—hook it on and watch how I alone will work my way to death.”

Once, before the war, when the men were teasing a horse who would not work, Meager had tried to stop it. They had pushed him down, and he had fallen on his back. He looked up and saw Gravellier taking an ax to the horse’s head.

Meager remembered the horse gave a sad grunt like a human being and fell down. “That’ll teach ya, ya bald-arsed son of a whore,” Gravellier said as blood spotted his heavy, angry face and the peak of his cap.

“No,” Meager had pleaded.

But it did not matter if or when or how much he said no.

So he went away and sat by himself in the woods.

Meager Fortune knew there were many stories against Will Jameson—but he also knew who was kind to him, and who would not take an ax to a horse.

“Poor old Butch,” Fortune said.

However, the teamsters were afraid of Butch.

Sometimes Butch would work so hard the teamsters could not back him up or stop him, and they would to a man marvel at his crazy lunges up the hill, or fear him.

“Get up out of that, you crazy Jameson son of a whore,” Nolan would yell when Butch took it in his mind to do something on his own.

And all that wood, Meager thought. Where did it go? He had asked his wife Evelyn one night, and they had sat up late worrying about it. Neither of them were sure. So they went and asked her father, Ned, and he wasn’t sure either.

“Goes down the river, don’t it? Can’t expect to know much more than that.”

Maybe it built houses, or maybe it went to offices and buildings in cities he would never see. Some said the cedar hauled last year was used to make a sauna for a mob boss in New York. But wherever this great wood went, it came from these men. Meager knew that much.

Gibbs had not tended to Butch’s cut right, so Meager found a way to poultice the animal using balm out of the old tack box at the end of the hovel and some mud mixed with straw. Butch stood in docile acceptance while Meager worked, sure that his own great and towering strength—given to him by the great horse Byron’s Law and his mother, Missy—had sealed his fate to run those logs up the hundreds of yards through the stump-laden, snow-scowled cut and then down over the morbidly freezing mountain, slabs of ice that looked in the shimmer of distance like pale rock.