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Authors: David Adams Richards

Tags: #Sagas, #General, #Lumber trade, #New Brunswick, #Fiction

The Friends of Meager Fortune (6 page)

BOOK: The Friends of Meager Fortune
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Owen nodded.

She smiled at this false emotion, as she always smiled at false emotion, and continued.

“You’ll be okay,” she said with sudden calculation. “Your family is important enough Old Mary will have you somewhere safe—or have Reggie Glidden to protect you day and night—just like he does when you’re drinking downtown—but I am sorry for how I treated others who will have to fight all our battles for us.” Her eyes welled with tears. “Do you think I am AWFUL—?”

She looked at his present, looked up at him and smiled, as the great Ford car came around again, with Sonny Estabrook’s fine white skin and slicked back hair. She nodded out at him, in the joyous, dismissive selectiveness youth have for those around them.

It was fortuitous, this last look of hers, for Owen in a millisecond understood what he hadn’t for so long. Her face was suddenly egotistical, shallow and vain. Owen’s face went blank, and a sudden fear came over her—for the first time she recognized that he caught something of which she herself was unaware.

“I am not that fond of Sonny Estabrook,” he said, “and someday the world will know why.”

She was startled by this, and startled more that he left so suddenly, so soon, and didn’t look back at the end of the yard.

Owen joined the North Shore, trained, decided to be killed in action, and left for Europe in 1941.

THREE

At first there was no word from him, nor indication that the ship carrying him off to war had managed to dock anyplace close to the fray. Buckler, his mother’s brother, an old man who kept the mill going, tried to make inquiries but could not “get hold of him for love or money,” as he told Owen’s distraught mother.

Often Mary, losing the reins of the business, when keeping the reins meant so much, had to bail her men out of
jail in order to get them into the woods. Trethewey often went with her, to roust out the men and get them to camp. Still, there was ennui and disinterest among her employees, which her brother and she tried to address with appeals that left the workers unmoved. There were also many fights between the teamsters of the various mills, and dances were often brawls.

Her brother tried to do what Will had done so successfully: move the men to action. But more than half were in Europe and he remained incapable of inspiring the others; and there were so many landings and unyarded fells from the Jameson crews that people said two new mills could be kept busy.

The cutters who cut the trees went in September, the teamsters who drove the horses that hauled those trees went in winter, and the drivers—those who worked the drives down the river—went in spring. Mostly it was commissioned military work, for Spitfires now—for much less pay—but it was Estabrook who handled most, Sloan who handled some.

And to keep any of her men sober was a challenge—especially with her husband and Will gone, and Buckler incompetent, and at certain points all these men were in the woods together—cutters, teamsters, and drivers all working, gambling. When they came out in May they spent their money, got drunk and locked up.

Mary often received calls to go and bail them out. Coming from that dark house on the hill, it seemed that all she knew and had ever known was men and horses, drives, saws, and axes. She looked like a little old lady with a toughened, sunburned face, and a gruff laugh, being as she was with men most of her life, and yet knowing only one.

Then, unexpectedly, on November 3, 1943, something tragic and peculiar happened. The young woman Lula Brower, just turned twenty-two, suffered a stroke in her home. Her condition filled the town for days. The young woman Brower had brought up, Camellia Dupuis, stayed at her side in the great gray hospital down in Saint John.

They said she would die, and her life it was said hung in the balance.

She recovered in Saint John, and learned to walk, but her face had suffered a paralysis on the right side. It took her looks away. Why had this happened? She didn’t know. Nor did anyone else.

She was bitter and resentful. She told Camellia not to play the piano, she told her not to play the spoons. She told her not to dust her room because it made her cough. And when Camellia came in with a letter she was sending off to Owen Jameson overseas, Lula was too angry to sign it.

“Go away,” she said, “I can’t have you near me today—besides, he’s probably dead already.”

Lula wrote letters for war bonds, and did her best to overcome this affliction. But she realized soon, who could and could not be cruel.

The fact that her suitors had left was an unfortunate by-product not only of the war but of her injuries. The man in the Ford, the boy her father so approved of, Sonny Estabrook, did not hesitate to call her a crippled goat.

Solomon Hickey was at this time a constant figure in the background of her world, and so too Camellia, even though at her angriest moments Lula would make allusions to fathers who murdered mothers. Then, sorry for this, she would say, embittered: “I thought I had more friends.”

The Steadfast Few, eager to know about the extent of her infirmities, visited her together and all at once, and then
slowly drifted off, taking with them the well-defined tidbits and gossip about her private anguish. In this way they were able to show great solidarity with her to those townspeople greedy for information, while at the same time leaving Lula deserted. And the favorite line of the Steadfast Few, expostulated at times with tears?

“You just can’t imagine how we feel.”

FOUR

Still it was the war and there came news of death. Reggie, Owen, and the other boys had been in a terrible fray.

Eric Glidden, Reggie’s father, heard of it first, and on an August day in 1944 walked from the prip-prop leanings to the
Leader
newspaper and said that he had been informed that his son Reggie had tried his best to save the young Jameson boy, and could not, in a fight outside of a French town. This made news across the province, in two columns on the first page:
OWEN JAMES ON KILLED IN ACTION—SECOND JAMESON SON TO DIE TRAGICALLY
.
SOME SAY JAMESON NAME DOOMED
.

Eric was called to the Jameson house. He came into the front parlor, with its expensive vases showing scenes of wild horses and Arabian nights, and its crocheted rugs that displayed Mary’s attempts at a domesticity no one had taught her. A scent of horse prevailed upon it, and scenes in gray pictures of men in heavy coats and cork boots.

“Tell me about me boy now,” Mary asked, her hands shaking just slightly as she held a dishcloth—as if it could support her. Buckler stood behind his sister stoically, out of place.

“Reg did his bes— They got trapped in a field—it’s that colonel always staying behind the lines and sending men out to their doom.”

“You mean our Owen is dead?” Buckler asked.

“From what I hear, sir.”

Eric went back to his house feeling he had accomplished some grave duty. He frowned at his grave duty. Now, instead of being a hanger-on with the Jamesons he had a position, and as he said to his cronies, “ran things over there.”

The house turned inward in mourning all over again. The woman waited in silence for three more weeks, certain both boys were now gone.

Still, knowing that things had been left out of Eric Glidden’s story—no one bothered to come to the Jameson house from the Department of War, and there had been no letter either—Buckler himself started to investigate the rumor. After almost a month, he discovered something. Owen was alive. The colonel who had reported the death had gotten the story completely backward, because he himself had not been in the field.

Within four weeks of Buckler’s inquiries Owen’s exploits became, as they say here, “half-assed legendary.”

Owen turned out to be as tough as a night in jail and twice as mean. He fought with the Canadian First Army on the left flank of Monty for ten months. There were four occasions where he showed true bravery, though he himself rarely spoke of it. In August of 1944 he won the Victoria Cross for a series of actions and counteroffenses. The last of which, Owen carried to safety, through enemy fire he consistently returned, one man from his own platoon and his town— Reggie Glidden.

The local paper’s front page:

ONCE GIVEN UP FOR DEAD
,
OWEN JAMESON RECOMMENDED FOR VC
.
REGGIE GLIDDEN FREEZES UNDER FIRE
,
CARRIED TO SAFETY BY WOUNDED JAMESON
.

The story went on to report how in the fog of war mistakes happen, and mistakes in stories happen.

He was, after all, what Mary saw: a prize.

After the war the soldiers drifted back in smaller company than which they left, on trains boarded in Halifax. The town expanded by their presence and many went back to working the woods or mills or small fishing villages. Or others drifted south into the cacophony of Saint John to labor for Irving in that industrial city. Lula was unhappy, and so too was Brower. They were unhappy that the men, when they called, did not call on Lula anymore.

It was during this time, in a stark moment, that Camellia realized Brower and Lula wanted her gone. That they had wanted her gone since the stroke had come, and had without her realizing it been pressuring her to go. That old Brower was bothered by a comparison that no one desired, yet no one could refrain from. Now she caught the anger in his eyes.

So Camellia consented to marry. To everyone who knew her, the man she picked was a rash pick—a man once considered brave, the town now ridiculed mercilessly. She married Reggie Glidden in late June of 1946. Some said this act alone saved him from suicide.

After this she went to work in the house of Mary Jameson, who it was said felt sorry for the two newlyweds.

FIVE

Alive or not, Owen Jameson did not come readily back to Canada after the war. He stayed away until October of 1946. He wanted the town and his mother to forget him.

He went to the museums, art galleries, and plays. He stayed in London, took a job at the Canadian barracks until that was closed. He became a nondescript citizen of the world, wearing a second-hand London Fog coat and reading George Orwell’s essays. He drank dark bitter and had an affair or two of the heart.

No one seeing him would think his family had a million. So many millionaire Canadians did not affect a million. He disappeared into the great mystery of London fog, with little to keep body and soul.

He planned to write a book. He planned for a second or two to remain abroad like Hemingway, or claim British citizenship, but did not. There were a few months when he lived on the street. He took to drink, and liked it a lot. He went to Paris, and then to Marseilles. The book came to nothing—he found that though filled with ideas and events witnessed, he himself could not write. He was kind, he was good, but he had made no friends in the army, had little or none now.

Finally Europe bored him in the way only Europe can do—its history, even after a war, stifled, its art in excess, boasting of great people its own institutions had starved to death. So he turned his eyes toward Canada. The land of numbing promise which would come to nothing, he supposed, or be worse than Europe in the end.

When he came back in 1946 on a train going west he had no intention of stopping in town. He had built up a resentment
toward his town in a way that was natural for a man who had proven himself so well, who felt he had been belittled or treated with a lesser hand then deserved.

He wired his mother from Halifax that he would continue on, and to post money to Montreal. No, he would not be a dentist, as Will had decided once. For him it was the university in Montreal and the study of law.

BOOK: The Friends of Meager Fortune
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