The Friends of Meager Fortune (8 page)

However, Lula was wearing the brooch he had given her. One of the Steadfast Few who had been at the house, had run and pinned it on.

“You’ve always been a greater charmer than Camellia, dear,” she had said.

The air was cold, the trees were baring, and the ground was hard as frozen turnip at dawn. She sniffed as she spoke, her red woolen glove rubbing her face; there was a slight impediment, or slur, in her speech.

“Well—I’ve gotten hold of you—being a hero must take up your time—” she said. She found it difficult to look at him, as if guilty of something. He knew this and tried to put her at ease.

“Don’t be silly, of course not—and I am not,” he said.

“I wore your pin,” she said. She smiled, a small red crease on her throat that followed up her right cheek. He was silent.

“Are ya staying?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Ah well, the world is yours, I guess,” she said. “Did you get the letter?”

“What—no—what letter? In the war, you mean—overseas?”

“No—I wrote you one the other day. I asked—anyway, never mind it—I just wanted to—I mean, Daddy and I, to congratulate you.”

He looked at her now, could think of nothing to say except ask her if she was seeing a doctor.

She acted puzzled at his overall silence, lingered awhile to talk of the war dead, like Bennie and Bill and Donald and Sam, then quickly offered him a kiss, and left in the same shadows that held her cheek and hair, the elusive quality of both desire and despair.

The world was terrible, he thought. Terrible for her, and terrible for her father, and terrible for everyone else. He could see old Brower in this move—as in every move the poor woman made. That house he had once longed to enter a shapeless prison and nothing more.

Solomon Hickey was waiting at the edge of the property. Hickey looked back over his shoulder and nodded at something she said. Hickey, the little boy who was her confidant, little boy still.

She too looked back over her shoulder, which showed her paralyzed cheek captured in a desperate moment, as her perfume was caught in the flimsy late October night. Then Solomon took her arm.

If Owen had loved her once, that was gone. Her affliction
made it impossible for him to tell her this. He thought he wouldn’t have to, for he would simply disappear again into some city where among the cacophony of engines and machines he could be alone.

NINE

The next night, going over certain papers about board feet and men, and equipment left inland after the spring run, he discovered there had been sabotage of a two sled, and a depot had burned the previous year. They suspected Cora Auger’s fifteen men, brave and true—but no charges had been filed by the prosecutor.

“Where in fuck was Reggie?” he said angrily. He had pictured, perhaps a little too vainly, Reggie being completely loyal to his family now.

The thought of his mother and his well-meaning uncle trying to run things alone complicated matters.

“Tell me tomorrow what is going on here,” he said to his mother.

“Oh—of course—I mean I thought I
had
been telling you.”

He went to the third floor and lighted a cigarette in the drowsy, stilled air.

The hallway was dark, and portraits of Will and of his father and mother in a horse-drawn carriage on their wedding day hung on the wall. They sat mute and solid in the moment taken—forever in that split second of daylight and meaning no longer evident anywhere else.

It was then that he saw Camellia at the far end of the hall—for the first time in two days. Actually, he had avoided her.

But it was as if she was oblivious to the tensions already beginning to swirl about her and him. And two things enabled this. Her childlike faith, and her belief that Owen could help her and Reggie.

Even now there was something carefree about her—that didn’t sit well with two other women, both part-time employees at the house.

The other women, who had babysat Owen as a boy—and who both disliked him, for he was not the man Will was—told her to come downstairs, and looked over at Owen as they said this in artificial obsequious deference.

“I want to speak to Mr. Jameson,” she said. “I’ll be down later, thank you.”

“Mr. Jameson is far too busy a man—” one woman, a load of sheets in her arms, said.

Owen replied: “Don’t be silly—I am not too busy for Mrs. Glidden.”

There was a particular tightness when he said
Mrs
.

The woman nodded with some parental concern and left with the superiority a servant can have, talking to herself as she descended the steps.

“Come here and sit with me a while,” Camellia said once they were alone, without the least worry, “and we will decide what to do about Reggie.”

They sat in the dark on the third floor. The purpose of this clandestine meeting—her purpose, with the vague darkness between them and the sweetness of her perfume that seemed to wisp in her breath—was to ask a delightful favor—for Reggie. Reggie at this moment seemed her only concern. In a way she wanted to hotheadedly prove to Lula Brower, and to the Steadfast Few, and to the world at large, that Reggie
was still a great man. So now she spoke, and he listened in silence as this new Reggie was revealed.

Reggie was not whole. And she needed him home. She, however, wanted him to be whole when he came home. He had married her when she had no one. And now she would help him.

“What’s his problem?” Owen asked, puzzled. (It was true he had no idea.)

“You—or that day, or what they say about him—they have tormented him an awful lot. Well, some of the men—and he is too proud to act—I mean he doesn’t fight back but takes it on himself to damage himself instead.”

“That day could have easily gone the other way. Twice he ordered me to leave him—but I had more rank, and refused. That is twice he would have given his life for me,” Owen said.

But Reggie’s reaction somehow bothered him. He was saddened by it. He knew the reaction had come because of who he was. The smaller, supposedly inept brother was not supposed to save Reggie Glidden.

“He does not think I loved him when I married him—when he heard you were coming back—” she said rapidly.

“I see—”

They were silent. Owen again was confused by this. He felt it was a discredit to what he himself had managed to do, if the man was just going to destroy himself. Then she took his hand in hers as easily as she would a boyfriend and said: “Reggie is older and looks upon himself as your protector—because of Will—” (Here she paused.) “However, he believes he lost that quality in the war.”

“Well then, you and I will get him back,” he said, laughing suddenly.

“We—we will—”

“Of course.”

“Oh thank you—sir—” She stumbled over the word, grabbing his hand with both of hers.

“Don’t be silly—and it’s Owen, not sir—”

Between them was only the flat, gray darkness of upstairs, where sheets covered the chairs Will had once sat on, tying flies or laboring over some algebraic problem he had no interest in solving. On those long ago nights everything in the world seemed possible, even happiness in the drudgery of high school arithmetic. Or perhaps giving more elation was the thought of what might have come after it. Which means the end of school and summer free to do what one wanted. Then, of course, he was pulled from school too soon, his father dead just before greatness claimed him, and Will dead just as greatness went away.

Thinking this, he blurted: “I will ask Mom to make him a better offer. We’ll pay him more than the Push at Estabrook or Sloan—tell him that. He knows the woods, and every tree ever cut on an axman’s pay.”

“But—I don’t know if—”

“So you tell him that—” he said, interrupting her, feeling suddenly that he was trying to sound like Will. But at any rate, he was himself again.

She jumped and started down the hall, turned, ran back, and in front of the old woman, kissed him. It was a strange kiss—for what would be forever between them alone—he tasted the inside of her lips. At that moment, without Reggie, she would love him and he her. Yet it was Reggie brought them together.

“My, my—haven’t we expressed ourselves,” the old lady said.

“Oh I’m sorry,” Camellia said, laughing. “I always do—I mean I have before—” and here she ran downstairs laughing aloud again. “I’m phoning Reggie tonight!” she yelled.

At this moment he knew that if he was ever to be in love, it would be with her. Strangely it was the war that had taught him this. And he cursed again for not having recognized this before, and looked up guiltily at the maid.

TEN

At the same time, on the west side of Saint John, in an old house built before the middle of the nineteenth century that teetered on pillars overlooking the harbor, Reggie Glidden pondered his future. It was now to him a prospectless place of self-recrimination where an act he had no control over was a cedar he could not dislodge in a stream. He had become indebted to a man he once pitied. That was something he could not overcome. He had lied about that man’s deed in order to save face with a cynical town. He could lie because he had once thought so little of Owen, and too much of himself.

Reggie tried to fathom where his downfall had started. It had not started in the war or in the trench or with the jammed rifle, or even in Owen’s rushing with an extra clip of ammunition to the hole Reggie had dug. It had started when he had once tried to determine whether Owen was manly, and took him across the river to meet the drinking boys. This was a flaw not in Owen’s character, but in Reggie’s. Everything seemed to come from that.

Reggie’s hope had rested on the well-known fact that Owen was off to dentistry if he lived through the war. The rather strange desire not to have Owen live through the war
that had come to Reggie Glidden the closer the end of the war came was a silent problem Reggie could never speak about, for he was deathly guilty of this feeling, and thought of it as remarkably unnatural and unmanly. Yet if Owen had not lived through the war, Reggie could honor his memory and in some way control what was remembered. He could make the saving of his life more fantastic, and still seem a hero himself. But now Owen had come home. His thoughts were torn between feeling desperately grateful and terribly angry about the same circumstance.

He went to Saint John so he would not have to talk about it, and worked this past week loading ships on the dock. In his pocket he had an offer from Estabrook.

He told his cousin, whose house he was staying at, of his fears. He told him about Camellia one night when he was drinking. He thought he might find sympathy with a man he had known, and protected, as a child.

“She is working at the house Owen lives,” he said. “Owen is a hero to everyone and, well, you know how impressionable young girls are! I married her perhaps in haste, but I do love her with all my heart—she is so like a child—and that I suppose is a bad thing—when you consider it—”

The cousin listened to him, felt privy to knowledge that was a silent cancer in Reggie’s heart.

“Well,” he said, as he held a cigarette in front of his face and smiled corruptly through the smoke, “any man who saves your life might have a go banging your wife and take it as good payment. Hell, she probably thinks that too. For sometimes women act innocent just to get men between the sheets. Just once or twice.”

He was no longer that shy child Reggie had cared about but just another man motivated by his own wounds to wound as well.

Reggie said nothing to this blunt, provocative statement.

“I have no loyalty to the Jamesons except for Will,” he said, feeling the note in his pocket that Sonny Estabrook had sent him.

That very night (the same night she spoke to Owen), Reggie received a long-distance phone call from Camellia. She sounded so joyous, it was as if he had suspected another person, in another world.

It was also a luxury to phone Saint John, and she cherished the moment.

She told him to come home. She told him Owen Jameson needed him back, never to mind the townspeople or what they said. It would all be good again.

“You will be foreman.”

“I will be foreman anywhere, it’s my job,” Reggie said.

“Well, Mr. Jameson says he needs you with him—for Buckler is old and his mom is—well, a little dizzy,” Camellia said. He could hear her voice hesitate because she wanted so much to convince him. He could tell she thought this much greater news than he himself did.

“Please come home,” she whispered.

There was a long and desperate pause over the line. He wanted her to say, “Because I love you.” But for some reason she did not.

“So you saw Owen—is he still there and you still working there?”

“Of course, but—well, that’s why I’m phoning.”

“And Owen—will Owen be staying?” he said.

“Yes.”

He sat silent in the chair. For he knew something about himself now. He was frightened. He was not the same man he had been, and that was simply because people no longer respected him as they once had. And he already knew that
Jameson was forced to cut on Good Friday Mountain—the one place more than any in the province he and Will feared. This was where they wanted him to be foreman, and he didn’t know if he could do it.

When he hung up, his face had turned ashen, his lips looked bloodless.

“Bad news, eh?” His frivolous young cousin smiled, hearing only Reggie’s questions about Owen.

“Eh?” he answered, deep in thought. “No—good news all around.”

ELEVEN

The next night Mary Jameson and her brother Buckler showed Owen the letter they had kept from him.

It was the final decision on the stumpage bid on the thousands of acres they had wanted to cut, discovered by Will all those years ago.

The letter told them what they had known for three months. The Jameson bid had not been accepted. The reason was simple. The initial bid had been delayed, until another bid had come in and made it moot.

Why the bid had been delayed until moot was ancient history. But it had taken this long for the timber Will had scouted to mature.

Now that the time had come, now that Buckler had ordered new saws, the government had accepted another bid. This letter told Mary and her brother it was no longer their timber.