The Friends of Meager Fortune (30 page)

“It musta come in on a ship about ten years ago—for it has been seen in Europe and New England,” the biologist told him a week before the trial started. “It ruins the cedar, and kills the rest.”

At first this did not register in a significant way at all, but then, in a sudden flash, Sonny realized it was none but himself who had carried it in. That is, he and his father had visited the ship
Jensen
, which had been carrying the New England timber, to propose an offer that long ago May. His father did not want to bother with this new proposal before they checked the Jameson tract—but he himself insisted. He thought back over the years to that moment, his smile when his father gave in to him, as fresh as falling blood: “We should see the holds of
Jensen
tomorrow—before we check the tract,” Sonny had said. (He had said this because there was a case of Jamaica rum for the first boss who visited.)

He had begun to realize earlier this fall, when the
Jensen
had been to port, a huge diesel-running schooner that had left here just before the snow flew with its weight in dealed
up board and its ropes glistening with dangerous ice. He had had a few of the sailors over and they all got drunk. The captain, along with the first mate Conner and the able body Dressler. He made a night of it, with flaming rum pudding at the end.

But now this
Jensen Otter
, long past her prime, convinced him it must have been he himself who had done this deed ten years before. That is, he and his father had walked into the tract of wood with death on their boots.

This time the
Jensen Otter
left at night, sailing out into the Strait on diesel, heading south to the coast of Carolina with board, just before the ice came.

“How could God be so cruel?” Sonny said now, rubbing his hands together in pathetic panic. Not thinking that if he had just let Will’s tract go, ten years before at the death and funeral of his friend and adversary, if he had decided that it was a Jameson tract, nothing would have ever happened—no poor wood that a scaler couldn’t see, no men out of cut for the year, no under-the-table payment in a ludicrous attempt to get another’s wood stamped as his own, no using the scandal as his justification—just as other notaries now did. And yet at this moment, none of this did he see. Only that Owen was a murderer and shouldn’t be cutting so far up on Good Friday Mount, because the men were in danger.

But that was not the only point. Somewhere inside him, in his self-justification, was the idea that this would not be a design against him, if he worked hard and took action. And so now he had men like Stretch Tomkins doing what they were doing in order to prove to himself that a moment of unprovable metaphysics was not a source of concern or a slight against him.

Still, as those two camps slowly shut down, more and more men showed up at the trial. That these for the most part
were not Jameson’s men didn’t seem to matter. Jameson’s men would not have looked much better. But of course there were Jameson’s men out—Lloyd and Colson and Gravellier.

“Men come forward in solidarity,” the editorial stated, as if the trial was the reason they were out. And this is the idea that took hold because the papers said so.

This was brought to a pitch by the curly headed woman Owen had seen at the water, who had followed him home after the incident at the barbershop. Cora Auger.

“This has all come because of lack of union—and what kind of man would refuse union to these men? This is what this trial is about, ladies and gentleman. It is about a man named Reginald McDonald Glidden who, if nothing else, supported his men. We are sorry for the Jamesons, that so much has been thrust on the shoulders of inexperience. It may be his revolt against Good Friday that caused Glidden this tragedy.”

This editorial was part of the false wholesomeness that so many embraced after such a traumatic experience. Lloyd and Colson now became committee members for the Friends of Solomon Hickey. They held a memorial and pressed for an investigation into why charges weren’t laid.

There was a strange turnabout—a sudden registering of the rehabilitation of Will Jameson’s memory—and now, in death, that of his best friend and Push Reggie Glidden. “They were real men, who would do whatever they asked their men to, and do it before, not like the lot of owners we have now,” the editorial stated.

Sloan and Estabrook were the first to agree—so as to distance themselves from the “owners of today.” They talked liberally about the better conditions they were seeking, one of which was the battery-operated radio so the men could listen to
Hockey Night in Canada
.

“I will have the battery-operated radio next year,” Sloan said.

“I will have it before this year is out,” Estabrook countered.

It was now a case of union and Dan Auger’s daughter.

Now, everything Cora had faced, Owen and Camellia would also have to face. If someone told her that by stopping her intractable vendetta a miracle would take place, and she would save someone’s very life, she would deny it. For she must now grasp the only thing in life she had longed for—to have the Jamesons suffer as she had when her father Dan Auger had died. And why was this unreasonable?

On a cold day in early February, Sonny Estabrook himself came to see her, telling her that the men needed union and she as Dan Auger’s daughter was the voice for it. She knew that Estabrook gave her a donation to say: “Focus on Jameson and not on me.”

There was, however, one other thing Cora Auger knew. It had been known by her in the early days of November, because of her position within the hierarchy. It had been kept silent as requested—and so hardly a man of hers knew. Union was coming in 1948 by order of the Forestry Minister himself, for they could not handle a major strike in the woods next year. Demands would be met and pay would be increased.

Therefore, whether she was or was not involved in Jameson’s downfall it would not matter a bit to the union. But she still paraded before the courthouse her tribe of derelict men, with signs saying:
JUSTICE NOW, NEW TERMS FOR AXMEN
. To insinuate her struggle with that of the prosecutor’s struggle. And the prosecutor admired this and prepared to mention it in his opening statement.

This made its way across the province, and Cora Auger’s name became synonymous with justice for a little.

The idea that Jameson was on trial as much for union as murder was a by-product of the moment. It became in some people’s mind a political killing. The idea that rumor could
not go in this direction is a ridiculous assumption. It is like saying rumor’s main intent was not to misshape events in order to create the most out of scandal, and to quench a thirst and satiate famine. Reggie Glidden, who didn’t even care for politics, became in many minds a political martyr by February 5 of that year.

The Jameson cut, which became the most documented cut in New Brunswick history, was snowbound, and the main camp had been burned by a flue fire. Though the men still managed to live there, very few things lifted their spirits.

Five teamsters had gone out, and so had three axmen and a tend team. The pup, Nancy, was sick, and was said to have bleeding paws. They made booties for her paws and kept her well, for the dog was a town whelp and could be nothing more.

The supply depot was snowbound, with the portage road having up to eight-foot drifts on major passes and only four teamsters—Nolan, Richardson, Trethewey, and Curtis—who became the most famous in the province that year worked.

The snow started the night after Stretch Tomkins (a man like ourselves) was rescued, and it did not stop in any significant way for three weeks. But for upward of two weeks beyond that—that is, all during the trial—there was no getting out, and no getting in. A huge block of ice now sat solid in front of them, gray or deep blue it ran ragged for miles. Some angrier than others lashed their horses, put the big animals to the twitch, as if their beasts had not suffered enough and must suffer more just because their owners did. They talked of eating their horses—to the horses themselves. “Ya’d better watch yerselfs or y’all be steak by supper.”

The camp was essentially forgotten. Everyone in town thought only of the trial, which the men suffering as great a trial did not know was taking place.

Meager Fortune ran here and there, helping to harness horses with young Gibbs. Bringing the Belgians and Clydes out each morning, he would stand upon a stool to harness them, careful of old Butch’s raw back. He would cook meals, wash dishes, clear snow, chaff or water when he was asked, and bundled up like a little beaver would check the lanterns down the run at midnight or make sure the sand was heated when thrown on the ice. Late he would get in from far down on the ice flat, and later still would he get to bed, mumbling his prayers alone in the dark.

Twice he set out to the portager’s for word on supplies, only to come back by late night, exhausted, unable to get halfway, driven back by gale-force wind and snow. He felt humbled by this—for he had lived his life in the wilderness and had not been beaten by it. Still, he refused to relent. The men would tease him, of course, about cruelty—even Nolan.

“Don’t eat the horses yet—I will find food!”

If the storm would kill them, he would keep them alive. In February he was out in the day with the old rifle Owen had left, to seek game. He brought down a small buck deer, and salted some of the bear meat the axmen had killed. Since the cook himself was ill—and the men didn’t want to become such—Meager became their chief provider. He took it upon himself to ration everything, even tea—because, as he said, he was “your own meager fortune.”

In fact it can be said that this small, childlike man was Push by February 17. He got up at dawn and went far down the slope looking for signs of moose, and could see for miles snowbound lakes and rivers and passes. Still, he felt that they could not get out forty miles to the river now—and that these men
and boys had to be fed. And he decided to feed them because the portager could not get in.

As for the workers themselves, the skid roads were clogged by high storms and steady gale-force winds off the cliffs, and as the two sleds became heavier the horses came to the morning air strained and sick, sometimes coming through on a downhill up to their haunches in new snow and not able to detect danger in the drifts. Sooner or later a horse would go over. The sleds often turned sideways after the downhill was shoveled, and each teamster had a plan to jump. The sleds themselves, with old iron rails knocked into birch runners, came loose, and had to be adjusted each day with metal and leather bindings. For if a rail came off on that downhill slope, it was death to everyone.

Yet even so, and in spite of all else, Butch and Missy went down the hill in the lead, snow or cold. They were dying, and their teamsters knew it yet could not rest them and prove able for Jameson. In spite of these heroic animals, it was a camp that was doomed, as their master was on trial for his life. The dark smoke puffing up in the middle of the wilderness down to green cuts was a sign. A sign of darkness and a light despair.

All of this plagued Owen Jameson, who could not be there with them. He knew of the storm from the sound of the wind that plagued him day and night in the small jail, open to the wind on three sides, and covered the windows in chinks of frost.

It plagued old Buckler as well, who visited Owen early on the morning of February 24. “The trial is going well,” he said.

“So much so, I can see me hang,” Owen said.

“I’m up and thinkin’,” Buckler said, tears already in his eyes for fear he had brought his own nephew to ruin. “And here is what I am thinkin’,” he said. “I am thinkin’ I can take Ronald’s Young and Gordon and go up myself.”

Ronald’s Young and Gordon were a team of raw two-year-old Belgians.

“When’s the last time you had a team on sled?” Owen asked.

“While go.”

“How long?”

“Nineteen twenty-eight,” Buckler said.

“But it’s my mountain.”

“No—” Owen answered. “Thank you, but no goddamn way—I’d worry, and I have enough to concentrate on. Besides, if the portager can’t get in—no one can.”