The Friends of Meager Fortune (9 page)

This decision cut their board feet down by two-thirds. The men had built camp and hovel and store, and for what? They were by this letter soon to cross into an illegitimate cut. That is, it was now Sonny Estabrook’s cut. They could have what wood they had yarded, but they must leave now. Mary left most of this up to the men she hired, and some were unscrupulously taking advantage of her—some were stealing her wood and selling it over to Estabrook, who pretended he did not know where it had come from. Buckler himself tried to figure this out but could never catch them. Their mill was in desperate shape.

The section that Will had found in the middle of Northumberland and claimed when juvenile would reap a great harvest of wood for the great Estabrook mill now.

Mary Jameson felt that she had been cheated out of this timber that the family felt always belonged to Will.

She had told Camellia about this just before they heard Owen was coming home.

That was one reason why Camellia asked the men to bring Owen from the train. This, in fact, was how those wheels had stopped. She wanted Owen back to save the mill, to save her husband, and her husband to save the wood.

She did not know Reggie would leave.

Owen also realized this year was life or death. How ordinary that was: life and death in a man’s life’s work. No one seemed to mind when it wasn’t their own life. He would have to go into the woods himself and leave Buckler in charge of the mill—new saws had to be bought, and the wood already in the yard had to been sawed. The landings would have to be collected in a half-dozen places. He would do it for Will; he owed that much.

Yet the government decision meant Owen would have to have his men go further up river, past where anyone had gone
before, and cut out of the wilderness once again his batch houses and his horse hovels, make his claim for the timber. So Owen decided the only chance to save the mill was going to cut on Good Friday Mountain, called Buckler’s Mountain by some. None had gone there before. He would go there now. He did not know that Buckler had decided the same a month before.

Buckler believed it was his fault they had lost the holdings Will had struggled so hard to bid on. All that lumber that Will had mapped out—perhaps forty-five million board feet at maturity—what he thought of as Will’s greatest legacy would be turned over to other mills.

“Tell me why that is,” Owen said.

It was very simple to understand once Owen saw the date that bid had opened. It was years ago. The day after Will was killed. In the hidden fury that is grief, no one reminded Mary to make the bid that day. Buckler now blamed himself. He said that he had failed Mary’s husband, failed Mary’s son, and now failed Mary.

“Don’t be silly,” Owen said. “How could you have known?”

By the time they realized this oversight, Will’s intention had been discovered by Estabrook and contested. Now that the wood had matured, the government had changed and all bids were reopened. Europe needed to rebuild.

Now that the stand was ready, it was no longer theirs.

If Will had not died that day, the bid would have been made the very next evening. The first evening of the wake.

But how had Estabrook found out about this? It took Buckler a while to understand how simply fate had played out its hand against them. Estabrook Sr. and Jr. were, along with
knowledgeable timber men from the government, pallbearers at Will’s funeral.

Fred Bots, an underling in the forestry department, had let it be known to the Estabrooks that the timber was found but the bid not made, because Will had died.

Estabrook Jr. (called Sonny) realized their chance and translated
non-bid
as
non-desire:
“The family probably doesn’t want to bid on it after this,” Sonny told his father. “Most of it’s not going to be prime for ten years anyways—let’s you and I go take a look ourselves—we have to go over to the
Jensen”
(this was a Norwegian ship that had come up from New England, and they had been asked aboard by the captain—they wanted to do business with his employer) “and then we can take a jaunt to see it—take the captain with us, to show him—how’s that?”

“Ah—perhaps—Freddy, see what you can do to get us in a bid,” Old Estabrook said.

Freddy Bots realized he had betrayed a man at his funeral out of stupidity, and a longing to impress. He was, however, too afraid of Old Estabrook to do much about it.

Buckler discovered this shortly after, but did not have the qualities that made Owen’s father and brother so feared. He could do nothing.

It was using Will’s death that mattered most to Owen. A stand that was no longer theirs, because of human grief and death. He also realized that Estabrook Jr. could easily have paid Bots a kickback for this lot. Of course, nothing like that could be proven.

It was in this moment that Owen decided he could not leave, for the memory of Will demanded that he stay.

“I’m staying here until you get straightened about—and that’s an end to it,” Owen said. “Tell the men to go up on Good Friday.”

“I already have,” Mary said.

Now Owen coming home was a great blessing. Buckler grabbed his hand and shook it, tears in his eyes. And it was on the tip of his tongue to call Owen, Will—but he stopped himself before that.

TWELVE

The woods are much changed, and how a good man lived then would try the best men now.

The next day Owen went out on the Tote Road with a team, packing in canned peaches and flour, pork and beef, and a barrel of doughnuts, to the camp far up on Good Friday Mountain. It took hours to get there, and so he slept the first night under the moon. By the time he reached higher ground, snow had fallen.

The next morning, in the crisp snow-filled air, he saw Good Friday Mount, and knew the teamsters would be hard pressed to get down a load. And on every foot up that mountain, he saw in his mind’s eye the horses stumble, and the loads come down upon their backs.

“Poor fuckin’ horses,” he thought, for unlike Will he had always thought a little more of horses than men—which even he considered a weakness. And Will would consider unforgivable.

Any qualms or weakness here would soon be known by men who cherished strength.

He reviewed his site—knew which teams of horses would come in, the men, the cutting they had done at the top of the
hill where they would start in a week or so to haul it by horse to the riverbank, to block and chain it up until the spring drive. He needed dams built so the runoff would be great enough to carry the timber, and that very morning he ordered his men down to do it. He also ordered a road straight down over an embankment—the only place on the face of the mountain where one could possibly do it—and to have a bridge constructed at the bottom. They did what he said.

Still, even the loyal ones knew it was a harsh place.

“I know it is a harsh place,” Jameson said, “so go now if you need to.”

None did.

It was widely thought in the last week or two that Jameson would give over their holdings and sell out to Estabrook. And that Owen had come home as a war hero to get the best price.

Owen made it clear that this was not the case.

They would continue to cut upon Good Friday, and they would bring the wood to the mill in the spring.

Later that day he walked down into the shine and told the fellers that he knew it was a hard place—but they had been in hard spots before, hadn’t they. The way they would fashion the run down to Arron Brook would be the most dangerous run in the province. He told them this point blank.

One of the teamsters who had come in early, Gravellier, said there might be another way around. He asked Owen if he knew that.

“Yes I do,” Owen, who had looked at a map of the area, said, “but there is no time to trim another road so far away.”

They asked Owen if he had run out a team.

“Yes I have,” he said, “once or twice. I won’t lie, I am not a great teamster—but I will rely upon great teamsters here!”

They stood about him in the year’s first snow, with axes, draft horses, and chains, the “shine” they had cut looking
like a tunnel into the future, bright with the bark-scalped trees and dark with the shadow of trees ready to be felled, some of the men like ghosts scattered here and there, wearing thick woolen shirts, Humphrey pants, and old coats, their beards scrapped with tree chips, ice, and snot, they breathed in the dense wood, the only world they knew—while the world at that moment in Toronto, New York, or London knew nothing or cared little for the millions of board feet these men had cut, skewered out of the earth for the benefit of those cities and city dwellers, who would think of them, if at all, as savages.

Owen sat that night in the smoky camp—where things were not much different than what he had seen as a boy. He saw the socks and woolen underwear sacked up to dry on poles above the stove, the arms and muscled backs of men making ready for the night in the sweet acrid smell of burning wood. He understood it was the last of the lumber baron years, and of his family’s operation (although he pretended not to). New companies as far away as the States would come in and create a new market, for tissue and toilet paper, for boxes to put trifles in. For commodities they did not even now know existed. They would haul by truck and not horse, they would cut by chainsaw and not ax, they would load by harvester and not hand—they would rid the world of the very woods they depended on. Owen could glimpse this future more than some others here, but it was an erstwhile glimpse, a glimpse he himself did not fully understand.

In twenty years this life, these men of almost two centuries, would be no more. They would be like Yeats’ dissatisfied ones. Unable, many of them, to exist in the world now—at this time, what would happen—what would happen to dreams still soft in the night air?

A man like many here would not live in the world to come. They would fight it—would fight the new world unto death.
But the world would not lose. Just like the First People before them, these men, these tough, kind-hearted men, would lose. For that was the way of the world, and Owen knew it. That was why he was full of sadness when he saw these men scattered about the trees and imagined them ghosts, with their bodies still strong and hearts innocent. He knew if he told any of them to walk fifty miles into the wilderness they would turn and go, so anxious they were to prove themselves to those they worked and bled for. Already there was a great road being hacked out of the middle of the province by companies ready to use truck instead of horse and river, so in ten years horse and river would become obsolete, and truck and gas be the measure.

Owen’s objection to the world changing might be the objection of a good man—but what did that matter? Ten thousand good men could object and still the battle of Stalingrad happen.

He looked at these men and sighed. He certainly had brought them to a tough place.

But for him was another tougher place, not yet seen.

The tougher place was the blossoming opinion of the town. In this opinion, of the old woman who had seen them, and drinking men on the corner, Owen had lied to the men who did not want to cut on a dangerous mountain, and was having relations with Reggie’s wife—Reggie, who Owen had fired over a disagreement about this cut.

In the blossoming opinion of the town, which had so recently raised him up, “so not a foot touch the ground” Owen had snubbed his former sweetheart Lula, who had suffered a stroke and therefore suffered too much. This alone was
the most disparaging rumor against him. He was obligated to marry her.

In the blossoming opinion of the town, Camellia was asking Reggie for a divorce, a very serious matter back then, especially for a Catholic girl.

This was the opinion of our town, which neither Owen nor Camellia had heard, but would have to face in the coming months.

PART II

ONE

Owen had been home three weeks, and much had changed in his relationship with people who had come to honor him. Some questioned him about Reggie Glidden and why he wasn’t Push.

Others, the old maid at the house, told him to beware of Camellia.