The Friends of Meager Fortune Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS’

  THE FRIENDS OF MEAGER FORTUNE

  Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,

  Best Book, Canada and Caribbean Region

  A Globe and Mail Best Book

  National Bestseller

  “The Friends of Meager Fortune is much more than a book noting the intimacies and actualities of the great logging traditions of our shared past … [it is a] book of a town, of a dynasty; a book of epic proportion.… An excellent portrayal of the shallow pettiness of a society on the brink of change.… The Friends of Meager Fortune only cements [Richards’s] name as an author unafraid to paint our history and supposed civility in the glaring colours of a raw and often unwieldy humanity.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “The heart of The Friends of Meager Fortune is joyful, a celebratory requiem.… The poetry of this magnificently hewn story reveals that pity and woe can be recovered with well-wrought words.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “David Adams Richards is the great tragedian of contemporary Canadian literature.… We are in the hands of a master storyteller.… [The Friends of Meager Fortune is] a layered, highly textured novel … a tragic love story of epic proportion.”

  —Guelph Mercury

  “A Steinbeck of a book.… One of the most remarkable achievements of this book is the delicate juggling of epic and intimate events.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “Given his ear for a catchy phrase, Richards might easily have become a balladeer instead of a novelist.… This sturdily crafted novel … brings an obscure page of Canadian history to breathtaking, vivid life.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “As in many other Richards novels the lives of everyday people are elevated to a place of meaning, seen from the eye of an educated narrator who artfully creates a story of compelling inevitability.”

  —Toronto Star

  “David Adams Richards is one of a handful of Canadian writers whose every book deserves a prize.… [Few] can match [his] simple, powerful language.”

  —The Canadian Press

  ALSO BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

  Fiction

  The Coming of Winter

  Blood Ties

  Dancers at Night: Stories

  Lives of Short Duration

  Road to the Stilt House

  Nights Below Station Street

  Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

  For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

  Hope in the Desperate Hour

  The Bay of Love and Sorrows

  Mercy Among the Children

  River of the Brokenhearted

  Non-Fiction

  Hockey Dreams

  Lines on the Water

  Copyright © 2006 Newmac Amusement Inc.

  Anchor Canada edition 2007

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Richards, David Adams, 1950—

  The friends of Meager Fortune / David Adams Richards.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37510-0

  I. Title.

  PS8585.I17F75 2007 C813′.54 C2007-902577-3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by

  Anchor Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For my friends

  Brian Bartlett, Wayne Curtis, Jack Hodgins, Doug Underhill

  And for my sons

  John and Anton

  With love

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part II Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part III Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part IV Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part V Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part VI Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part VII Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PART I

  ONE

  I had to walk up the back way, through a wall of dark winter nettles, to see the ferocious old house from this vantage point. A black night and snow falling, the four turrets rising into the fleeing clouds above me. A house already ninety years old and with more history than most in town.

  His name was Will Jameson.

  His family was in lumber, or was Lumber, and because of his father’s death he left school when just a boy and took over the reins of the industry when he was not yet sixteen. He would wake at dawn, and deal with men, sitting in offices in his rustic suit or out on a cruise walking twenty miles on snowshoes, be in camp for supper and direct men twice as old as he.

  By the time he was seventeen he was known as the great Will Jameson of the great Bartibog—an appendage as whimsical as it was grandiose, and some say self-imposed.

  As a child I saw the map of the large region he owned—dots for his camps, and Xs for his saws. I saw his picture at the end of the hallway—under the cold moon that played on the chairs and tables covered in white sheets, the shadow of his young, ever youthful face; an idea that he had not quite escaped the games of childhood before he needed gamesmanship.

  If we Canadians are called hewers of wood and drawers of water, and balk, young Will Jameson did not mind this assumption, did not mind the cra
ss biblical analogy, or perhaps did not know or care it was one, and leapt toward it in youthful pride, as through a burning ring. The strength of all moneyed families is their ignorance of or indifference to chaff. And it was this indifference to jealousy and spite that created the destiny Jameson believed in (never minding the Jamesian insult toward it), which made him prosperous, at a place near the end of the world.

  When he was about to be born his mother went on the bay and stayed with the Micmac man Paul Francis and his wife. She lived there five months while her husband, Byron Jameson, was working as an ordinary axman in the camps, through a winter and spring.

  In local legend the wife of Paul Francis was said to have the gift of prophecy when inspired by drink, and when Mary Jameson insisted her fortune be read with a pack of playing cards, she was told that her first-born would be a powerful man and have much respect—but his brother would be even greater, yet destroy the legacy by rashness, and the Jameson dynasty not go beyond that second boy.

  Mrs. Francis warned that the prophecy would not be heeded, and therefore happen. It would happen in a senseless way, but of such a route as to look ordinary. Therefore the reading became instead of fun or games a very solemn reading that dark spring night, long ago, as the Francis woman sat in her chair rocking from one side to the other, and looking at the cards through half-closed eyelids.

  “Then there is a choice,” Mary Jameson said, still trying to make light of its weight.

  “If wrong action is avoided—but be careful to know what wrong action is.”

  “In work?”

  “In life,” said Mrs. Francis, picking the cards up and placing them away in a motion that attested to her qualifications.

  Mary Jameson had the boy christened Will, and had Paul and Joanna Francis as his godparents. During the baptism, the sun which had not shone all day began to do so, through the stained glass. Mary decided she would keep this prophecy to herself. But she told her husband, who as the youngster grew became more affluent, and spoiled solemnity by speaking of the prophecy as a joke.

  Soon the prophecy was known by others, and over time translated in a variety of ways.

  It was true Mary forgot about it until the second boy, Owen, was born, so sickly he almost died.

  She forgot about it again, until her husband was killed in a simple, almost absurd accident on the Gum Creek Road, coming out to inspect his mill on a rain-soaked day in April.

  Mary thinking that it was a strange way for her husband to be taken from her. She almost a grandmother’s age with two small boys. Worse, she had asked her husband to come out on that spring day—frightened that he would take to the drive and be injured, and he was killed by a fall on a road.

  Mary and her brother Buckler took over the mill until Will came into his own, which was soon enough, and seemingly too soon for his competition.

  It is a common misconception that people are as bright as their knowledge. Will Jameson was a boy far brighter than what he knew, which is an ordinary problem in a country like ours, partly in bondage to winter, where snow is a great blessing on the land. His father had started with nothing but a crippled roan horse—and Will now had camps and horses and men, and a sawmill he had to take care of.

  He left school because of his father’s death, and said leaving school was the least thing he ever regretted.

  “Holding him is like holding a current itself,” Old Estabrook said of the young man.

  Yet his mother, Mary, warned him, he had his faults, could be cruel or uncaring, and laughed at his mother’s sentiment and superstition. These traits came gradually. That is, he believed, because it was what society believed, what his father had believed, that a stiff presence at church service was what constituted good behavior, and jokes were meant to be manly and told in private. He thought, even at seventeen, of children as a woman’s responsibility and a man’s ignorance of the offspring showed a healthy character.

  “She’ll be wantin’ me to believe in saints soon enough,” he said of Mary. “Some darn old statues with damn wings.”

  But even as a boy there was never a person, or a nation that person was from, that he deliberately insulted, knowing how things were held against his father for no apparent reason. Nor could there be talk against the Indian, Brit, French, Scot, or Irish, or any other at supper, without him leaving the table and saying: “Besides us all needing a horsewhip, each nation is the same.”

  It was true he had a brother. The younger boy Owen he himself deemed “too sensitive” and “too weak” for the industry their family owned.

  The second son Mary looked upon in secret, and decided over time there was nothing in him that could be mettle for greatness.

  As time passed Will, who ran the house like a patriarch, decided this younger boy take what lessons his own leadership offered. He did not proffer this; it simply seemed the way things would be. Once a month he would come to his brother and speak about what Owen might do with his life. These lectures were impersonal ramblings, caught up in ideas of what a man should say to a boy. They were an embarrassment to Owen, who saw through them but loved his brother enough not to say so.

  Will decided he would give the younger boy something—dentistry, he supposed. He decided this when he himself had a toothache.

  “Goddamn thing,” he said, staring at Owen and coming to that conclusion. Of course his mother wanted it too—that is, dentistry for the boy—because it would be nice to have at least one dentist in the family. In all her life she had not known a relative who had gone to school. In fact, if truth be told, she had not known a relative. Being younger by two years, Owen would have to do what Will said, for Will’s temperament was iron, and he held the reins in a society which at that time demanded leadership from the first-born son.

  Will was like his dead father, with a shrewd mind and fists to match, when required.

  The younger son, however, was fanciful and into fairness.

  Will hated fancy, and could not fathom fairness. That is, fairness could never be parceled, and he shunned those who thought so.

  The poetry of the woods he himself sang, and was known to have penned a song or two. Still he frowned upon his brother’s ideals, and all those books brought to the upstairs shelves were like slights toward Will, whose proudest moment was to state he would earn a million and never read a book.

  In 1936 Ulysses was brought into the house by Owen Jameson—the Joyce that destroyed the Irish, Will said (because he had asked someone who Joyce was). He threw it into the stove. Mary, if she disapproved, condoned this action by silence.

  This was the bowing and scraping to a propriety that men of Will Jameson’s ilk believed they never bowed or scraped to. It was also the despotic teaching of mother, of school, of school principal, of pastor, of pastor’s maid, of the maid’s toady, of toady’s boy, and of almost every twat on the street—all strangled by that propriety embracing tyranny, from university dorm down, that Will had by such independent measure escaped, and now unknowingly, unwittingly embraced, because power allowed him to. This then was Will’s ultimate sin. One he never admitted, and therefore could not correct.

  “I do not need no learning from no fuggin’ book like that there,” Will said proudly.

  “He lives in poverty and great want,” Owen said of Joyce.

  “I’ll feed him but I won’t read him,” said Will, showing his measure of charity and justice.

  This was serious for Owen—for he was in all ways under his older brother’s talons, and knew enough to realize he had, at that moment, no say. Or at least no say in the open. He decided, therefore, to leave the house, but got no farther than a street in Moncton when he decided to come home. It was three days later, but the very supper he had left was sitting at the table waiting.

  Will was in all these household promotions and demotions his own man, even before his father died. Saying himself with a look of consternation when he was fourteen: “There is nothing to be done with Owen—he ain’t sharp,” and spitting a head
of snot into the straw of the barn in youthful bravado at the contempt untested youth holds for weakness.

  Therefore put him “out in the world,” which meant for some reason, for Will, “not the world I know.”

  “It’ll be a dentist’s work for that boy,” Will would tell his budding friends on a three-day moose hunt in late September, with the smell of moose hide and sperm and blood mingling with the fall’s early budget, the huge carcass of the animal hanging down from spruce tripod, next to the white tent in the sunny and somehow muted clearing.

  Reggie Glidden, Will’s best friend, would caution him not to be rash with Owen.

  “No—its dentistry for the youngster,” Will said in fancy of a grown man, when he was in the camp taking a beaker of water. Yes, a somewhat practical profession, this dentistry business, and not given to the world of fancy, like Ulysses, which in truth disturbed Will more than it had his mother. Nor allow him, this Owen, the raw world or the tough world or the untamed world, our world where we must live and wrestle to protect those boys like Owen from their fuggin’ selves.

  Did Will know that he himself lived in a world of fancy, of guns and hides and treks into unknown wilds that Ulysses proper would approve of? Mary herself sometimes wondered it when she sat home knitting of a night. But if not, there was no time for a man of action to mope about and find out. He was the product himself of rebellion, his mother and father married at seventeen, when everyone thought his father would be a failure, nothing more than another of the thousands who used an ax. His father had begun their prosperity, Will made it fivefold by taking chances and dealing blows to the two great mills on the river—Estabrook and Sloan—making two rivals, who whispered rumors about him in grave ignorance and envy, hoping to stop him up.

  They spoke about it to the twaddle on the street and hoped loyalty, envy, and common despair would allow others to take up their cause against this whelp. Others did take it up in the famine of their lives to impart disgrace on the Jameson name.