The Friends of Meager Fortune (4 page)

After a while it died away.

Yet no one saw the signs of change in Will that Owen saw. Owen tried for the first time to protect his older brother from needless exhibition. And so did Glidden.

There were men waiting for him on every corner. Owen was skinny and woebegone and not quite five-eight. Will was five-eleven and strong as a young bull. It was somehow incongruous to see the younger brother try to protect the older. But the older boy could not be protected. His fights at dances became legendary within nine months, and he sat in jail many a weekend.

“Your brother’s in jail again,” Lula once said to Owen, who had run to catch up with her after school. “What will your family do, being ruined by your awful brother—that’s what my father asks—so we pray.”

Such was her mode of fairness. To explain the failings of others to themselves.

Solomon Hickey, the thin, dark-haired barber’s son, looked at him with sadness, the kind seen so often in university.

Owen stupidly trailed along behind them. Lula spoke about her uncle, Professor Stoppard: “The smartest man I’ve ever met, writes poems as fresh as daisies.”

Owen decided to ask her what it was like to have a professor as an uncle, but was interrupted by: “Solomon, you know him, don’t you? You met him at my house.”

Solomon Hickey, the only male member of the Steadfast Few.

Will was prosecuted twice, twice he received thirty days.

Twice the displeasure of the town came down upon his head. Twice police had him in court. And his bedroom, where his bed remained unslept in, cast a shadow over the lives of those in the house.

After each exhibition, each stint in jail, came terrible remorse, and he would sit in the barn, alone on a three-legged stool. The men who came at him, as Owen saw, were never man enough to be sober, never brave enough to be alone. Reggie Glidden was Will’s only confidant and source of strength.

“You have to get back to the woods—we have a drive you know I need you in—not in jail—we have landings on three shores, and a loss of six drivers.”

But he left it to Reggie and when he himself showed up at camp he seemed restless and changed.

One night he asked his mother about his father, who starting out was known to be tough.

“What about killing a man?” Will asked.

“He never done so,” Mary said, “and except for shaking a man or two he never acted out.” She stared at him, hoping it would register.

She did not realize that of all conversations with the boy this was the definitive moment, the one question and answer the boy needed—that in all the hard living, the miles of woods and swamp, their love for each other, this was the one answer with which she failed her oldest child, who had sent Dan Auger out, not on her bequest but on her behalf. The answer, in a secret way, left him broken. He remained so for a year and a half.

In May of 1939, Will, sober for a month, took to the spring drive. They had cut the winter logs free of their block and
chains into the water, and after a good day’s run, found they had a jam at the fork of one of the great turns in the river where the water is swift. It happened in the night when they decided to run the landings (last year’s logs left on the bank) down into a river already full, and this crammed the logs together at the turn.

There was much cursing and blame, and the turn was blocked solid by morning. A few of Jameson’s men were out on the jam trying to pry the timber, with a man in a scow to rescue them if those timbers gave. They decided by ten a.m. that if a charge was laid, the four timbers holding back the logs behind would split and allow the drive to continue.

“Who can set a charge?” Will asked his friend Reggie Glidden.

“The best one is not here,” Reggie said.

“Who is the best one?” Will asked, inspecting the great timbers like mixed and matched toothpicks, and jumping surely from one log to the other like a flea.

“Dan Auger.”

Dan Auger was the best. And there was no one else to lay a charge. Will’s father would have done it, but he was gone. So Will reasoned he must replace Dan Auger and his father as well. He reasoned it was his duty.

“We can get Harold Dunn to come over,” Reggie Glidden said, “or I could do it easy enough—”

“It’s not a problem, Reg—and Dunn is angry at me, so bring the charges forward and I will do it meself,” Will said.

The dynamite was brought forward after one o’clock on a 1918 Pope L-18 motorcycle, a V twin with crank case cast from aluminum alloy.

“There ya go, me young lad—she’s all yours now,” a toothless, grinning fellow said, tapping the box behind him.

The occupants in the houses upon the far bank were
informed. And Reggie Glidden went with his friend to set the charges—on the three main logs to bust through the one hunkered underneath.

“Take the cedar and the princess pine, and unnerneath will move,” Glidden said, looking into the black, frothing, bark-filled water.

“And the whole world will be one great stick,” Will answered, looking behind him into the gray wall of wood.

They set the dynamite almost at water level on the three logs, taped them secure and twined the fuses together, then hopped back to the shore with the long wick. Reggie, with a look of professional aloofness, lighted the fuse with a Player’s cigarette, and the men watched it wind its way above the stalled timbers, like trying to follow a scattering snake. For a second the fuse disappeared. Then, without warning, it blew and the three cedars bogging down the run flew into the air, a great groan and foam threw itself into the rainbow the parting water made. Then logs started inching forward to the cheers of wood-hardened men. And then everything went still. There seemed to be a slight sideways canter to the whole drive—and everything stopped.

They waited a minute in the silence.

“It didn’t go,” Will said.

“Bring the Clydesdales—and attach them on the other bank,” Reg said. That seemed to be the best idea—the Clydesdales could put the jammed logs right. That might work. But the Clydes were seven miles upriver, and would take a good two hours to get here. Nor was there another team, except at Brennan’s farm. All they had to do was ask. But Brennan had the jaw that Will’s temperament broke. And so he could not go ask for those horses, even if Reggie pleaded.

“No boy—I take no source from a Brennan.”

“So what to do,” Reggie said.

Will thought a moment. At nineteen, all eyes were on him. Thinking it his responsibility, without hesitating, he started out to the jam once more.

Reggie Glidden started after him, but Will ordered him back.

“I am just going to look,” he said. “I thought I placed the sticks right on—I have to try it again.”

“I want to go with you.”

“No.”

“Well let me bring up the scow—and wait on you—”

“If the jam goes, the scow goes—you’re a sittin’ duck—

“ Will turned and, looking back at his friend longingly—as if there was a gulf between them the latter could not imagine—suddenly asked: “Do you remember that song my father taught us—when we were young?”

“Which one?”

And Will answered slowly:

No mortal on earth is as happy as we
Ah me dearie dearie, hey dearie down
Give the shanty boys whiskey and nothin’ goes wrong!

He laughed, and with that turned away. He walked out to the logs and stood looking down in some pose, questioning the universe, as if he in his youthful pride and boast had never questioned the universe before. Then he looked behind him. Before another sound came, the log he had placed the largest charge upon gave way, and in that second the logs behind, the thousands of tons of wood, moved toward him like an avalanche. As they moved Will jumped backward and turned to the shore. He was sure-footed and had never fallen from a log his feet planted on.

“He’ll be scamperin’ now,” someone said.

He jumped one log to the next with this wall at his back. And as he moved the logs themselves grew up over him. But even then, his brother heard later, he managed to dodge the first volley of logs that fell almost on him. He made a giant Hail Mary leap, when the logs as loud as a crack in the center of the earth swallowed him whole.

There was silence; after a minute or two everything settled, and then it seemed peaceful—the air alive with the smell of fresh wood.

Reggie, even before the logs settled, ran toward him. And was the first to him. Reggie found him jammed down under a massive timber, with his left arm twisted sideways, his right arm missing, and his back crushed. There was a smell of spring smoke, and a little boy far down the shore trying to fish eels.

When they moved Will they found his backbone exposed. Yet he lived for a while.

He was taken to Dan Auger’s camp—it being closer—and in a life that seemed to have so much promise, he died that evening, amid the smell of earliest spring and spring chickadees, within the sight of swinging lanterns, the shadows of muscled and muted men, agitated as men are in the presence of death, and the enclosed forest in which he and they had lived. The doctor fetched by Simon Terri came too late, and could have done nothing anyway. His own mother did not get to him before he died.

The mother had lost her oldest—and wept for days; Reggie, who loved him more, did not cry, but brought back the shirt the boy was wearing, torn and bloodied, and lay it across a table for the three days of the wake. The boy was waked in the house, the town and the province’s forestry men coming
out in support of a great family grieving, to mourn and act as pallbearers.

Owen, looking on from the back of the room in crumpled suit, knew his place was not at the front of the mourners. Will’s best friend, Reginald Glidden, came over to Owen, in parting held Owen’s hand with the power of a vice.

“Thank you for coming—Will would be honored.”

“You get some meat on yer bones, boy—yer momma needs you now,” Reggie said.

Later, after everyone had gone, and the trees tapped against the house, Owen felt pity for the memory of Will’s boyish, intemperate laughter. Will’s great matter-of-fact principles did not matter; everything the family held on to had been solid while now it was transported to the netherworld of prayer and the elusive shadow of metaphysics, even in the white mold of the dead boy’s face, that like all the dead held a warning and a meaning not comprehended by living man. Owen was angered by himself—for the first time, he saw his brother. All that morning while Will, only nineteen, was trying to open a jam he had been writing matrics and looking like a proper student, a “fuggin’ lord.” And why?—because Lula’s friends told him she wanted a man who worked in a suit.

His mother sat in a stupor in the kitchen, talking aloud to her dead husband.

That night, all having left and being alone with the dead Owen told himself that he would offer what he had. He would put his plans “down” to become a dentist or a businessman, and remain at home. His plans, in the remote agony of youth, had been to please a girl.

He stood and opened up the coffin to say goodbye. Strange his whole life had taken a back seat to this boy with the parlor
light shining on his puffed and white face. Owen shivered slightly, closed the coffin lid, and in the faint dreary smell of flowers switched off the parlor light. He walked up to the third floor and there, amid his two hundred books, wondered what to do. Even now the town was dismissing them. He hated to see his family in this plight.