The Friends of Meager Fortune (31 page)

Buckler turned away, a frail old man who had done the Jameson bidding all his life. Who had honorably worked in a world now changing and could not change with it—and who would be dead in six years.

“But you can do me a favor,” Owen said.

His uncle turned and looked at his nephew through the iron bars.

“You can see in the papers in the last three or four months—I don’t know—maybe only two months—if someone is missing.”

“Who?”

“I don’t have a particular clue,” Owen said irritably, his leg suddenly paining once more. “I am just saying—someone else must be missing from somewhere—and you have to help me discover who it is. For it is not Reggie Glidden.”

Outside he saw Cora Auger walking home in silence, against the great graying snow. It was only now did he discover who she was.

“Why didn’t I just go to Montreal,” he said.

TWO

The idea that this was not Reggie Glidden’s body was absolutely hilarious to the town. That Camellia did not claim it was to some ghoulish, and made people more reticent than ever to trust anything she or Jameson said. Women were the most disparaging, and catcalled at her.

“Yer man will hang now and yer bastard child will end up like you, you evil bitch,” women would yell in her direction—after dark, of course. She was alone. She still managed to bake squares for the children, and would wait for them to come down the trails from school on those gusting, furious days. So often they had stopped at the little house, on their way home. But now most of them just passed by, hugging hard to the dry-docked boats like the
Murray One
so as not to step on her property.

“Rachel, it’s me—your friend Camellia,” she would say.

“Momma tells us all the squares is full of blood.” Rachel would start to run, and the children behind her run too.

Buckler did start to look through the newspapers, to search for an article on some missing person. He was so numb with worry and grief he found it hard to turn the pages. He could find no article. So he asked himself, why would a missing man not be reported missing? Why would he have no coat and a coat be found on shore—unless it was Reggie?

“Look what a kiss has done,” was all he could say to Miss McCalistar. “Look what a kiss has done—if he didn’t kiss her—say, if he didn’t see her when he came home and put the big smooch onto her—nothing would have happened. And it was
I who told her to go upstairs and get his bed ready—me, I, I was the one—and then there she was on the stairs, and so the kiss—can you imagine?—I can’t imagine.”

It seemed so crazy as to be plausible. But then again a kiss had caused much in the world before this. Some kisses were even famous. A kiss, yes—we all need one now and again.

There was no disappearing body, no worried relative in those papers. Buckler enlisted Dr. Hennessey’s support and they put up posters of Reggie, and sent appeals to newspapers along with his picture, asking if anyone in the Maritimes had a loved one missing. They waited and waited.

No answer came.

THREE

The Crown wanted to use Camellia as their witness—and interviewed her, telling her that if she complied all charges they might have against her would be dropped, and she could live her life out in peace. That, or her child would be born in prison.

But they decided she was a hostile witness and best to cross-examine, when certain things could come into evidence, because they could not get her to say one thing disparaging about Owen.

Hearing the prosecution was interested in what Camellia had to say, Old Mary was afraid that “that woman” would turn on her son. “She’ll ground her boot into his face—that’s the kind she is—one heap of a nasty bitch.”

Women who wanted to be included in the scandal phoned Mary now, offering support and advice. The advice was to get rid of that “Delilah” who had come into her life. Mary grasped at this like straw, and said: “Yes—why didn’t I see her for what she was!” That is, after a lifetime of independent thought she now believed that the way to find freedom for her son was to listen to a dozen women who had themselves never done an independent thing and hugged every word of the scandal in misplaced eroticism. Mary herself did not understand that any prophecy against her sons would use her to its advantage. And so she spiraled into chronic and constant accusation. She forgot that the prophecy would “seem ordinary,” just as she had forgotten that everything she had done from the moment he was born—in fact, from the moment her fortune was read—had propelled her forward to this moment. She did not know that others were being propelled forward as well—that Dan Auger’s daughter was propelled by her father’s death, that Sonny Estabrook was propelled by fear of failure on the massive cut he had taken over.

As far as Owen’s trial was concerned, there were many attitudes the defense had to face. The first was the outcry from the press, which constituted a majority opinion now, at seeing so many battered men out of camp in midwinter. And so the press intervened in moral outrage as only the press is able to do.

The second problem for the defense was revenge.

Revenge was needed to expurgate an emotion of disgust, and Brower’s basic blinding fundamentalism seemed the right and triumphant course, for he hated adultery almost more than murder.

Brower received the same applause as Owen had just a short few months ago, and felt this adulation in the same way. That it was justified, and his to hold.

“He won’t let Camellia off with nothin’,” people now said, especially the boys in Jameson’s lumberyard who spent half the year in drinking and talk about what it would be like to bed her. “Not after this.”

Sterling, Camellia’s uncle, saw in Brower the brave defense of his daughter. “That’s what he’s up to—he’s gonna protect Lula and I don’t blame him—after all she’s been through—can’t you imagine what it must be like—can’t you imagine having had that stroke and her playboy fiancé off diddlin’ a trollop!”

But as February wore on, with no letup in the gales, Lula remained in her room, in her “little desert” as she called it, or spent her happiest days in the hallway listening to records on the giant record player. For the first time she suspected that her father had Camellia married as a sacrifice to her. Perhaps it wasn’t even intentional, but her father had always been so protective of her. So Camellia was out of the house. And then Owen came home. In fact, when thinking of it clearly, Lula too must have known this.

So in a way it was all a lie—a fabrication that she, Lula, had willfully partaken in, pretending she did not know.

Lula saw it before her on a bright canvas, like one you see painted in the fall. It was a Botticelli that she could never own, yet created herself. Sometimes our greatest masterpieces are seen by no one but ourselves.
By February 26 Sterling found himself at the police station being questioned about his own niece. He remembered much about her now during those weeks leading up to this. “Oh ya,” he said, “I feel terrible I didn’t see it before for you guys—but I just loved her so much I coounn believe it—I cooonnt believe she was that much of a tramp and a slut and a bitch and a whore—”

“That’s all right, Sterling,” Monroe said, “it’s a hard, hard thing to believe.”

Sterling found out something that day, which he began to spread throughout the town. A bonus for the prosecution. The fantastic revelation that Reggie’s suitcase, left in the old warehouse, had Mrs. Jameson’s fingerprints on it. For Monroe the trainee spent rumor like lottery winnings, like dust falling from a dry windowsill in an old room. He wanted to impress Sterling with this, to show that he himself was essential to this investigation.

“I knew it, eh,” Sterling said. “I knew it—they is all in it and always was all in it, if you ask my opinion—fuckin’ rich bastard cunts.”

“Don’t talk like that in here,” Monroe said, using uniform as propriety.

FOUR

The revelation of the fingerprint was standard knowledge by March 1.

Owen had panicked after the murder, gone and told his mother—a momma’s boy as he was. Coddled as he was. Sterling
was at the apex of his power, with the police having a broad panacea concerning his condition. That is, the police had given him money and would need him to testify—and though he didn’t play snitch, this was about a Jameson. And don’t you think Cora Auger wouldn’t be grateful to him? And Estabrook—why he might hire him—as a consultant. And the more fantastic all of this seemed, the more he bedeviled himself with his importance. And the more he told others, and the more they drank, and the more they said, “She’ll get hers,” and the more they forgot how they had delighted in Reggie Glidden’s shame.

Practical Mary denied that Owen had told her anything about Reggie’s suitcase. That is, it was not Owen who had told her—it was old Buckler. It was, in fact, Mary herself who panicked and rushed to the warehouse after dark, to hide what she thought would be compelling evidence of her son’s involvement with that terrible “she-devil.” So she hid the suitcase in order to fight back.

On March 2, Cora Auger began to petition to have her friend Reggie Glidden buried. Upon hearing this, Mary Jameson phoned Cora and told her she would pay for the funeral.

“We did not take a cent for Daddy,” Cora said imperially, “and we will not take a cent for Reggie.”

And what Camellia did, made it worse. She upped the offer of a reward to $125 and put a prayer to Saint Jude in the local paper. “I offer prayers to Saint Jude, the saint of impossible causes, to bring my husband safely home.”

“Every scoundrel in the world petitions Saint Jude,” the editor who took her request said with a predatory smile.

Camellia did not care. She plodded on, certain of all she believed.

A memorial, quick and certain, in the blustering wind, was held in the small union hall that had been the semi-official place of opposition against the lumber barons for twenty-three years. From here men went out to work, and to stop work, to show bravery and disregard for themselves and to help others—to long for a time when the measure of their bravery would be a testament to justice on their behalf. This year the lumber barons had come to the table—and next year union would come. But this did not stop them from gathering and honoring one of theirs.

Looking about—each one of these men had made mockery of Reggie and his wedding, and his fall from grace. Each one of them had tormented him as best they could, to stave off the famine in their own selves. Most of them had thrown the pulp sticks that had battered his arm, furious that he could quell their own great strength while being chained to a pole.

“He was as brave as twenty-seven Owen Jamesons,” Sterling said now, “or maybe even twenty-eight. What I told Camellia—brave as twenty-eight Owen Jamesons—and all youse men distrusted him. I use ta say to myself many times, why is everyone around here distrustin’ the likes of Reggie Glidden—best man we had here, will tell ya that!”

They all, sitting in dark shirts and Humphrey pants, old twisted boots and leather mitts, agreed as Sterling glared at them, their leader of the epoch. He spoke of his mother. He cried. He spoke of union. He cried.

Yet what did the union coming mean for these men?