The Friends of Meager Fortune (32 page)

For many it would mean very little—little raise in comfort or pay, where in ten years most of them would be replaced by machinery they could not at this moment envision.

For Cora, union meant everything.

For Cora, it meant that her father would be exonerated. In the name of her famous father she had worked tirelessly to bring union to the woodland, and to bring Jameson’s to justice. Now everything was at hand. If it was justice, none would mention Will Jameson in the same breath as the great Dan Auger! And Camellia, who had gotten all the attention when she was a girl! Look what was happening to her now!

FIVE

The body was finally to be discharged to a resting place in the public graveyard. And Cora Auger was paying for the burial out of union money. But it so happened that Dr. Hennessey visited the mill and read in the paper what was now happening in town. (Hennessey never bought a paper; he simply read Buckler’s once or twice a week.)

“I think many things are wrong with this, don’t you?” Hennessey asked.

“Then what can we do?” Buckler replied.

“I have no idea—”

“Just, what if Owen Jameson is not a lunatic and Camellia is right—what if it is another body and Reggie is alive—what if Owen isn’t bedding down with her, and what if her child is Reggie’s—I know it sounds far-fetched—”

Hennessey put his cold pipe in his mouth, blew on it, and said: “Well, let’s go and see this body.”

Grudgingly, he was given opportunity.

This put a stop to Cora Auger’s kind motion, on the very day the body was to be committed to the ground.

Hennessey came to the morgue with something to eat—a grand plan to be out of there in ten minutes, with a design that the body was Reggie Glidden but it was suicide, that the suicide in the end could not be blamed on one unless on all.

The corpse was brought to the table on a pushcart.

Hennessey bit into his sandwich and looked at the body. It had turned more black and sad, and it said to him, almost from its grave: “Why has this been done?”

And he did not know and could not answer.

It might have been murder—or as he said, it may have happened some time after the fight—that is, a fall from the wharf or somewhere else. Water in the lungs attested to this.

Hennessey looked at the hands and at the bottom ribs, where the blood had thickened and congealed to stone. He pushed the skin back slightly on the side of the skull.

“Ahh—this is where he was hit,” he said.

Mackey said nothing.

Hennessey took his fingers and rubbed them over the skull, then looked at them again.

“What boots was he wearin’?”

“I don’t know—I never found them—”

“You never found his boots—”

Mackey shook his head.

Hennessey thought, and then said: “He was hit with a hard instrument but probably not by anyone who wanted to kill him. There was water in his lungs, so he drowned—he might have fallen into the water after he had been accidentally hit.”

“He was hit so he would drown,” Mackey said.

“Near a boom or a pulpyard—having a drink—so a fight among friends over a bottle, perhaps—it is not Glidden—”

“How in hell is it not Glidden?” Mackey asked.

Hennessey looked at him and chomped on his sandwich again, chewing it slowly. He decided to leave, was out the door into the main basement hallway near the laundry room when he decided to return.

“You said it wasn’t Reggie Glidden?” Mackey asked.

“No—it isn’t Reggie—I think it is someone who has gone missing and isn’t missed yet—although he is about the same size and age as Glidden. The hair is red but lighter, isn’t it—oh right, you never knew Glidden. In fact, you know nothing about anyone here. Why isn’t he missed—that’s the peculiarity of the case—he should be missed—or if he is missed we do not know that he is missed. So maybe someone not from here?”

Mackey answered that it was self-evident why he wasn’t missed. Because he was found and it was Glidden.

And this statement from the coroner would allow the death penalty case to continue: “Even Hennessey says it is the same size as Glidden, the same height as Glidden, the same weight—and maybe a woodsman too. It is who it is, and that is Reggie Glidden. Nothing in the world can change that.”

But Hennessey tried one more thing. He got in touch with the river pilot and asked what ships had gone out in the fall. When he was told, he said: “Perhaps if we can get some information to those ships, something just might come of it.”

SIX

In the camp the worry over who the body was or was not meant nothing. It was not heard about. And no one had heard
of the men. The wind had not let go in three weeks. Only twenty-two loads had gone down. On certain days between February 26 and March 11, men stayed inside and the food was scarce, for the portager could not get in and did not want to chance it.

Meager was out each morning, sometimes with young Gibbs trailing behind with a set of wire snares. They would bring in pine needles for tea and soup. Meager dug out blocks of ice and took brook trout from the pools. He made the men eat the brook trout raw, heads and all. He felt this would keep the men healthy. At twilight on March 4 he shot a young moose while alone—four miles from camp. He gutted it open, and cut stakes to cool it—though the weather was cold enough, and warm blood soon froze to his fingers so much he had a hard time prying them apart. He put the bloody liver in a bag, and into his sack. Then with his rope he tied the back legs and managed to lift its hindquarters off the ground enough to start the process of taking the hide off from the back hooves forward to the rump, and then little by little hauling the hide down each side with one hand while slicing it away from the heavy white fat with the other. The starkness of the landscape and the sky, the gray naked branches of a thousand hard trees, stated the emptiness of the world, the utter feeling of desolation and coldness that surrounded him. Yet to Meager the world was not only not empty, but filled with possibilities. Trout in the brooks, rabbit in a snare, and a moose down.

The sunlight seemed to dissolve his shadow on the snow as more of the hide was taken down and the animal became whiter, showing its muscled flanks and white insulation fat over solid lengths of red muscle. He cut the head and hide off with an ax, and cut it down the middle in the same fashion, for he did not have a saw. With the carcass now halved it was easier to hang, and he managed this in a big spruce, with
blood frozen to the hide and the carcass and his fingers and his face. He now cut a quarter from the first half, and putting it on his back little Meager Fortune, who had been doing this in the deep woods of New Brunswick since he was twelve, made his way back to the camp in the dark, followed by curious moose birds hopping from limb to limb. The wind was pitiless, and it was hard to move—many times he staggered, and once or twice went down to the ground.

He walked under his burden as if carrying a cross, in order to keep men alive and himself go back home to Story town in the spring. He still told people about little Duncan and his wife Evelyn as if they were alive and well and waiting for him to come home.

“Oh yes, I will go back and see them, and hug them,” he said. “Duncan will run to me as he always does, his pants high on his ankles and his sneakers untied, and I will lift him up and hug him, oh like a mother loves a child.”

This was Meager Fortune, five feet, four inches tall. This was Meager Fortune, who had managed now for a month to keep his men fed and entertained.

When he got to the camp that night, he could hear men coughing long before he reached the door. Our poor Tomkins (a man like ourselves), his long legs as thin as sticks so that the snow seemed to stick more to his pants, was in the corner bunk with his face to the wall, curled up with his legs under him and his bald head half covered. Meager knew a disturbance had taken place.

In fact, Stretch had lost his bonus at poker that afternoon, for the wind was so high on Good Friday that the men had not gone out, and except for the loads they had piled the night before, no sled moved. The air was frozen and the piled sleds dark and foreboding at the top of the skid road, looking down into the night.

Stretch had bet a pair of queens against an ace high, and waited for his one chance to make the money back that he had lost in the fire. But Pitman’s final draw included an ace, and our Stretch lost it all. He went outside and kicked the door.

Later he went back to the table and gambled his fine parka, and had now traded it over for a coat with string for button and the smell of spruce and sweat. Meager asked him how he was.

“I got me a sore toe,” he complained. The men began to laugh so hilariously at his expense that Stretch started to cry silently.

Meager cooked the moose liver in onions and gave the biggest portion to our Mr. Stretch Tomkins.

And then Tomkins said, quickly, something which he later regretted. “I know something,” he smiled. “Meager has a secret—his wife and son are dead—no one knew that, did they—he talks about them just as if they are alive, but he told me, he told me. He has no one in the world to go home to. That’s why he stayed here over Christmas—that’s why!”

Later he put his face to the wall and wouldn’t speak. The cold came again, so his cares remained.

SEVEN

By the second week of the storm on the mountain the trial was in its most important stage.

There was one witness everyone was waiting for. She was called on March 8 as a defense witness. She wore a gray coat
and a black dress with white cuffs, a kind of girlish idea of a homemaker—or what was prevalent in this age, the idea of society’s homemaker—where the times specified that even the most senior office women were called girls, and thought of as juvenile. She wore a small round hat that turned up at the front, and made her look even more like a girl. Her hands shook when she drank water. She did not look at Owen. She had heard that Owen had betrayed her—and said terrible things about what she wanted from him. She might not believe it, but her own lawyer Miss Fish told her not to have any contact with him now. (That she had hired Miss Fish, the only female lawyer in the province, showed, they believed, her lowly estate.)

Camellia, however, believed she was a witness for the defense. She believed they would ask her what she had already been asked—about her relationship with Owen, how he had helped her, how she had phoned Reggie and told him about the job. How Reggie had said he would come back. All of this to her was so innocent that they would know she and Owen were innocent.

But things had changed. The defense was now scrambling to keep their client alive. Billy Monk had testified that Camellia had demanded Reggie come home or she would divorce him, and that Owen wanted him to change his mind about Estabrook. It was very possible that Monk could have heard the one-sided conversation exactly as he stated.

Therefore Pillar, unbeknown to Owen but known in some fashion by Buckler, treated her like a hostile witness. This had been his plan from the midpoint of the prosecution’s case. He had decided to deflect guilt from his own client by accusing the person all thought more guilty or most guilty.

He was after the murderer as well. Camellia had become the principal target of the Jameson family now.

He asked her about growing up. Was it hard, who had taken care of her? What were her cares? What were her ambitions? Were she and Reggie happy?

“Yes,” she said.

“Oh—you were happy?”

“Well, he was so kind to me many times.”

“And at times he wasn’t at all, was he?”

No answer.

“Answer the question,” Judge Fyfe instructed.

“Sometimes he was not so kind because he was in pain—”

“Is that why you wanted to kill him?”

“I’m afraid he wanted to kill himself—”

“So you say suicide.”

“I say no such thing—he is still alive—”

Owen was staring at the floor; he couldn’t look up. It seemed obvious to everyone that he had planned this ambush against her.

Then Pillar came to a point of contention that he knew would alienate everyone, including or especially the prosecution. But he had to ask it—for he had had information about it. It spoke to her motive. He asked her why she had married Reggie.

“I don’t understand the question,” she said.

“Did you marry him because Mr. Brower asked you—wanted you to be settled?”

“In a small way.”

“You had come of age. There was worry about you—because of other things—and people here wanted you settled.”

The way outsiders like Pillar and Mackey could take on discussions about the intricacies of a town they did not know, as if they had a unique perception, is one of the grander forms of famine.

But Camellia did answer. “There were many men around and Mr. Brower was worried on my behalf.”

“On your behalf or theirs?” someone yelled.

Laughter and sniggering, then the gavel.

“I see—and you decided this was a good thing to do?”

“It was one thing to do,” Camellia said. “I married Reggie—and I was proud to. I am married to him, and he will come back and tell you so.”

Pause.

“When he treated you badly—did you decide on revenge. For women are often vindictive.”

She did not answer this. He turned to another question: Where did her father work before her mother died?

“He worked for Mr. Jameson’s father,” she said in a whisper.

“By Mr. Jameson, you mean Owen.”

“Yes, I do,” she said and smiled, “but I am not used to calling him Owen—I always think of him as Mr. Jameson.”

“I see—I see— And your father was fired from that job, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was—”

“Yes, for stealing from the company—did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t—but I don’t think he did.”

“Did you know what happened that day—?”

“I am not sure—I—?”

“He went home early and found your mother gone out—did you know?”

“No,” she whispered.

“And he knew where she had gone—to Winch’s cave—and he killed your mother that day, didn’t he?”

“I—I—don’t remember.”

“You knew this when you went to work for Mary Jameson—your father, who was hanged, was fired that very day and sent home. That caused a death in your house, two deaths, and you knew this about Winch’s cave.”