The Friends of Meager Fortune (5 page)

He knew Estabrook, in a very friendly way, would try over the next few years to put his family out of business. What would happen to Mary’s holdings if Estabrook had the best bids? It was what Will had concerned himself over, what he had worried about on his dead father’s behalf. That was Will’s life: obedient and loyal to the death. Loyalty to his own dead father made him send Dan Auger out. Will was a young prince doomed with his family under siege.

Owen, realizing this, seeing his brother suddenly in a new light, as this young prince struggling, loved him until a cry came from his throat.

So he would offer what he had to his family: himself. He could do this for he had other traits, and one of these traits—the kind that never minded those who laughed—was a certainty in his own genius. Tonight, for the first time, he saw them all, that is all those men he had once admired, as having been plied like children, made whole by being men and women of parts who scrambled to put parts together and act out sentiment like others.

Though he had waited ironically and terribly in his room one whole day for impressionable Lula to show up and offer her hand in sympathy, she had not. She seemed in the larger part of town, getting ready for her own bright-as-a-glitter future, wearing the clothes of a young coed and having her faithful Solomon Hickey drive her to the train for a visit to her uncle Stoppard. Once when there was a knock on the door he, certain it must be her, rushed down the stairs and
into the hall, only to see it was men bringing in Will Jameson’s trunk from camp.

They put it away in Will’s room, and left it unopened.

The meeting between the mother and the younger son happened the day after the funeral. The friends from town and from the forestry industry across the province had now left, and the parlor except for some cups and china had returned to solitude and a rather traditional naked emptiness. The light from the sun told all. The family was left with this “other” boy, who was nothing like Will. The family was left with this second lad, the one Will’s godmother—the Micmac woman—said would play havoc with the business.

They sat at opposite sides of the study, an empty leather couch (the place Will often slept when he was home) between them, and a picture of Will on the wall, holding a salmon taken from Grey Rock pool. What struck Owen was his own attitude to his older brother, which he now knew was one of intellectual snobbery. And Will, up nights worrying on behalf of his family, always making sure Owen had spending money and school supplies, did not deserve this.

Owen told his mom he would be willing to do something else with his life.

“Willing to what?”

“Help,” Owen said, “and become more like Will.”

Mary smiled at such a ludicrous idea and then nodded, for the sentiment was noble. She also admired that Owen spoke directly, as had her husband and oldest.

Owen in fact had gotten into more trouble than Will—but it was always something you couldn’t put your finger on. It was always very opened. But it was indirect. When his
mind took to something, he did it. Like getting drunk before his provincial matrics and making eighties. Or once protecting the young girl who lived at the Browers from teasing. Or bringing a boy home that was being beaten by his father, a LeBlanc man who lived in Injun town. It was long ago—an almost forgotten incident—but it did spell something. It meant that he would do something unexpected, and it would be startling.

“You will not hit me as you hit your boy,” Owen had said to this man. Mary and Will heard about it. Mary embarrassed and Will condemned it, saying: “Sometimes a cuff is a proper thing—especially for a LeBlanc.”

Yet Owen did not ask their opinion. Nor would he when he brought in
Ulysses
. Owen, with his blond curly hair and shiny eyes; his shirt buttons askew, just a little; his pants baggy, just a tad; his fingernails dirty, just a pinch; his hair oily, just a touch—and in all of this was a character, an extreme character—but of what? Not a fellow who was spoiled, like most in town thought, but a child who had been left alone, because of the death of his father. Will had, without knowing it, deserted this boy, and Owen had protected a beaten child because he would never desert him.

Mary said she did not want wood for her younger son. Nor any part of wood, any measure or drift of wood or the complex commitment of it, or of the men who made their living in the pitiless world associated with it. For it was a pitiless world—for animals, horses, men, it was every bit as pitiless as the sea.

She told him of their troubles when young—of the heroics of her dead husband, who had seen his fine draft horses fall through the ice and teamsters with tears frozen on their faces trying to get the doomed horses up.

She told her boy that it was not for him. And she said Owen
should study and become the man books wanted him to be. Here she smiled as if delighted at herself.

“There will be no one like Will,” Mary said.

“That’s true,” Owen corrected himself. “He would have been a great man—I’m afraid God does not intend man to be that great, and let him die too soon.”

“Well then no matter—men are what they are.”

Owen sitting in his suit was the extension of, the personification of, the family pain, which was suffering through something it did not quite understand. A suit, worn as prop for tragedy, can show the lack of knowledge explicitly about that very tragedy, the unknown sadness with which we as men and women are forced to live and breathe.

Men now said the Jamesons were unlucky. And now, so suddenly it scalded her, people were turning away, leaving them devoid of friendship and alone. Would she sell her mill? Well, perhaps she would. But not at the moment, and not to Estabrook or Sloan.

She looked at Owen in a new and terrible light, but just for a second. In this terrible light she decided that this boy was no weakling, and his understanding came from sadness. That is, by neglect unintended, perhaps Mary herself was the main instigator of a prophecy she now fought against, at the same time as she reeled in the philosophical certainty of its apparent absurdity. That is, perhaps for argument’s sake, prophecy given in storm to all, all form prophecy against themselves—this thought transfigured her, made her face wise and troubled.

She decided she would put the second boy far away from the woods, and have no cause to worry about him again. She would not allow him near the camps, near the saws, or in any way on a cut.

“No—you must have another life,” Mary said to Owen.
“You’re better off away from this—if I can’t allow one son to have a life easier than my own husband’s, then I have done nothing good at all.”

Both sons had.

Reggie Glidden took the second boy under his wing, for a great loneliness swept over him that came and went like a draft of wind in a cold barn. He did this not only for himself, but because Mary asked him to. He was now main Push for Jameson, overseer of the properties of his friend. He was wild, cumbersome, and happy-go-lucky—all traits that brought men to him, and ensured Mary men to work her drives. For without a good Push the bosses were done. And Reggie was known to prance draft horses across lake ice when ice was going, to find the felled logs left on a far shore, or to take men and cut across the wilderness in the middle of a January storm.

“Worry only kills you faster,” he would tell his sometimes frightened charges. “I learned that from the greatest man I ever knew—young Will Jameson hisself.”

But Owen was not the same type of person as Will Jameson. There was, as Reggie said, “no funny bone in him.” Not the carefree laughter at danger which youth always seek and Will had in abundance. Or at least this is what was said, and Reggie as an ordinary man believed much of what was said. That is, he accepted what the town said about its citizens, and had long ago realized the town did not wish greatness from its citizens. It secretly wished mediocrity.

Reggie knew very well this was how the animosity toward Will grew. Will took over the reins of a business at sixteen and the town had not wanted greatness for him.

Reggie understood this and though he did not approve of envy, he did nothing to deride it. It was part of the world. The resentment toward Will was always just under the surface, and Will was strong enough to hold it under and keep it there. But a man like Reggie wouldn’t be that strong. His likes and dislikes must be known to be ordinary, for although he was as brave a man, he had no inner strength to fight scandal or speculation.

So Reggie, conscious of including Owen, was also conscious of trying to discover any quality that matched this older brother, who already had become a towering mythic figure among the province’s woodsmen. There seemed to be none at all.

It was, in fact, a study of the younger boy—as a scientist would study a specimen. And this is how most looked at it. How do you study a specimen? Put him outside his environment and see then how he might react, how he might “get on” in the great world. And this is what Reggie did, and Owen reacted to this by being compliant. So, soon people were laughing at “Reggie’s pet” as Reggie hauled him from dance to dance, drinking episode to drinking episode.

“I’m tryin’ to teach you the great world,” Reggie said one night.

Yet Reggie’s great world Owen found was limited to these episodes in nondescript New Brunswick settings, and small dances where prideful boys stood drinking around buckboards and the dusty hoods of cars.

And Owen, standing with them, drinking also, let them think what they would about him. Hell, perhaps then he thought it too.

Yet one night they met Lula and Camellia downtown, and as luck would have it both Reggie and Owen were drunk.

“You see, Camellia—didn’t Solomon and I tell you so—we told you this is how he would behave,” Lula said, for she had all the manufactured clarity of the modern girl.

TWO

When the Second World War started, his mother never tried to keep Owen out of service.

Still, there were those in town who believed the old woman had tried and failed to keep the boy near her.

Mary did go to Owen and say that if he stayed home, no one would think the worse.

“Of course they will,” Owen smiled, while looking through his shelf of books.

She might have been asking this, because she had worried that a desire to prove prophecy wrong might propel her to ask him to join a battalion and have his ears blown off. This was her worry in the fading light that seemed to slowly disintegrate against the shelves and curtains in his room.

So she used reverse psychology on her own desire and managed to want him home.

But Owen Jameson was resolute. Life had never been so good as to be addicted to, and gossip against him was nothing new. He sought out only one person to speak with—of his hopes and fears, one person to tell what might happen to him—and how he had cared for her since he was a boy. How he loved to walk up the lane just because she lived on it. How he applauded her knowledge of books, and secretly hoped to write one someday. Just like her uncle.

Lula was sitting on her veranda, on a swing that squeaked in the middle of a hot sultry afternoon, with fresh pavement on the street and the smell of impending rain.

She was a very small-town girl, at the very apex of her popularity now. What, then, could Owen ever offer her—when a greater woodsman family, the Estabrooks, had been over to see her, and the boy Sonny had asked her to a dance? The one lumbering family that her father had approved of.

Owen stumbled over what he had to say.

He said that he didn’t know if he would live—but if he did, and he came back, and she wasn’t yet betrothed, could she then see her way, possibly, and he did not want to impose, but if there was a chance she might marry him then—well, he had a brooch to give her and—here he handed her the brooch.

But just then Sonny Estabrook came up in a Ford car in the doomed heat of afternoon, the sultry moment just when Owen’s present was being offered, and marriage being asked, in seemingly the poorest timing of Owen’s life. She waved the car on, to circle the block again.

“Oh, it’s Sonny,” she said.

And turning to him said in the same magnificent breath: “I’m sorry so many of the boys have to go—I just pray everyone will be okay.”