The Friends of Meager Fortune Read online

  So Will became a target of many, too proud to say so and too young to know the consequences over time.

  Will, after a fight at a dance with a Sloan man, wanted to carry a pistol, and though kind enough longed to shoot at least one man in the head, hearing that his father had once done the same at a quarry during a fight over a stone.

  “The Sloans’ men are bastards and will cause trouble to prove it—they have terrorized their own and so will terrorize others.”

  To prove to Owen that dentistry was easy, he took pliers and hauled from his own mouth a rotted shard of a tooth, spitting blood before him as he walked. “There you go, boy,” he said, “don’t be flinchin’ at the sight of no blood.”

  Will would not see his mother or younger brother for weeks on end. And when he passed Owen on the back stair steps coming from the pantry, he would nod in taciturn embarrassment at the boy’s eagerness to please. The dark eyes, the blond hair, the frame weak and not large, but the voice and temperament somewhat inspired—like his mother perhaps, who doted more upon him.

  The year after Will took over the entire Jameson tract, Owen fell in love with a whimsical, emotional girl named Lula Brower. She had a father, Angus Brower, the prosecutor, who might be said to have disliked Byron Jameson, and she had airs of refinement, airs of fairness, her grandfather being a preacher. And if she liked Owen, which some say in hindsight she did, her father did not—did not like the Jameson family—Owen’s father having, it was said, cut Brower’s father out of a certain spot of land. So our Mr. Brower had nothing good to say, and Lula as his child seemed to catch this in fleeting moments herself. For she could be undeniably cruel to the boy. Most of it was done in simple naïveté and from the idea that what she heard from her own father—who kept much from her, and organized her life—must be true.

  Owen would walk up to her lane in the drowsy summer and stand near her property, the small barren house with its tiny porch and insignificant maple tree in the yard. Her father, as town prosecutor, did not like lumbermen especially. They fought and caroused far too much for his liking. He brought too many to court for his liking. He had sent enough to jail. Besides, his daughter had been singled out as “the most talented girl” by our local adjudicator, and he wanted for her more than a common life.

  There was another girl at this house on George Street, this solid mass of solid, uninspired people Owen wanted to impress. Her name was Camellia. There was a dark side to her story. Lula’s father had prosecuted the girl’s father, put him to death for murdering the girl’s mother in Winch’s Cave some years before.

  There was no reason for her not to be an ordinary girl—except the profound realization that the entire town knew her father had hanged, her mother murdered, and already she was the object of what bedeviled so many: scandal and gossip. People said she would ruin a life or two herself, and watched for some signal that this would happen.

  Lula kept tabs on her, and had her friends, the Steadfast Few, as she called them, observe Camellia as well. “For signs,” as they said.

  It was as if Camellia was put into a corner and told not to move when music spilled out of the air. Finally a toe would move. And the scandal came easily—off the tongues of those girls, those Steadfast Few. For rumors against woebegone boys could be true. And the Steadfast Few, as small-town, lower-middle-income girls, loved rumor the best.

  Owen’s father, Byron, they decided that summer, must have been Camellia’s mother’s “love.” And now this Owen was “sneaking about again.” All this speculation went on in the rinse and tide of that sunny little porch, where little Lula Brower sat holding little court.

  “Oh dear and here he comes again,” she would hear.

  Owen Jameson had decided he loved Lula because she read, and because her uncle was a professor, named Professor Stoppard, who wrote poems. Poems that rhyme and don’t lie, Lula said.

  Owen, wise on many fronts, was gullible here. And he paid little attention to that other girl then, or to the gloomy self-righteous stares of the Steadfast Few.

  So one day he told Lula he read books, like her uncle, Professor Stoppard. She showed no interest, even when he talked very well about these books. She ignored him, and rolled her eyes as he spoke. Then, as a last resort, a few days before it was thrown to the fire, he brought Ulysses to her. There, in the heart of that little house, with those very wise people, he read a part aloud.

  After this, Lula and the girls decided Owen couldn’t come back. She had talked it over with her friends. The reading, to them, was from a “horrible thing” that was not at all “acceptable.”

  And they were to protect Camellia if no one else.

  So Owen was told to leave, while his rival Solomon Hickey looked on from the other side of Lula’s porch door.

  This was only a week or two in his life, in the middle of a drowsy summer, in the middle of adolescence, and would have ebbed away and been forgotten except for events later to take place.

  Owen went home, and lovesickness overcame him. He didn’t eat. He would not go outside. They lived in a large house on the edge of unkept fields at a place called the last outskirt. They were a family in the lumbering trade, and stared down over the town. Blocks and tackles and chains surrounded their muddy doors.

  They had children and folks from broken lives for charity. And two old sleds (two giant sleds attached on which horses hauled the great trees from the woods) and log pits and broken tack, attended them in silence. Mary dressed in finery to go out, often had her shoes covered by manure when leaving the yard. The police were known to have come there to settle teamsters’ disputes, over everything from horses to plug tobacco.

  Jokes grew up about them, about poor unkempt Mary Jameson, her dotty brother, and her two wild boys. In the yard and paddocks, the great broad-backed draft horses that hauled the two sleds prodded and cantered. All weighed over half a ton. The toughest and smallest was the Belgium, which still could weigh twelve hundred pounds. It was most compact and most relied upon. Slightly bigger were the Clydesdales with their beautiful manes and soft-haired feet. These were the drafts the Jamesons relied upon themselves. Then there were the Percherons—a hand taller than the Clydesdales but more gangly in the legs. All were able to haul thousands of pounds of timber.

  These Jamesons did not turn toward the town to work, with its shops and post office tower and giddy Grand Theatre. They turned toward the vast expanse behind them—beyond them, where men likened to soldiers lived and died. It was here that the prosecutor tried them on three occasions, hoping to lay a charge against this Will—not to ruin him but to instill in him respect for a law he assumed did not apply to free men like himself. Once over a stolen horse, once over the disposition of landings (last year’s logs washed up or left on a skid pile) on the shore, once over an “episode” in town.

  They were a house and a people solitary and much talked about and often discussed, especially now that Will Jameson, only eighteen, had to manage a lumber industry of upwards of ten million board feet, walked in and out of camps collecting pay sheets and staring down grown men when he had to.

  This was the house, at the top of the town, where Will Jameson came from. This was the dark, brooding, unkempt, windy, solitary place gray-haired Mary Jameson tried to keep going.

  They were dynasts growing up under the sword of Damocles. And if they were damned by it, both of them damned it, for both boys were solitary from “living in a halfwild state.” Even Owen was wild enough to make one mother “just cringe to see his apelike amble.”

  And this is why Lula didn’t like him. For all her ideas of education what was and was not acceptable to others was the litmus test she herself must constantly pass, for her father evoked it in her. He told her what she needed to know about people, and nothing more. So she did not know people—except to know that, at least for now, all of them liked her.

  “Be with the best part of our town, not the worst,” her father often said at supper, holding up his fork and smiling.

>   If there had been social workers in those days, the social workers would have returned Will to school and Owen to the protection of the province. And the world, of course, would be far the less for both actions.

  Still Will did not have time to worry. He and his best friend and Push, Reggie Glidden, a little older than he was, off to claim some property across the dead of winter, at minus thirty-four and a gale both exclusively and happily death-defying in every pilgrimage they took, walking thirty miles on “shoes” (snowshoes) and making it somewhere “homey” by nightfall, where ninety-nine percent of humanity would think the desolate end of the earth, staying warm, cut off from the world and in the middle of a blizzard, and Will still being able to bring a kettle to boil in one minute.

  This is how over two years Will Jameson mapped out, claimed, and completed the Jameson tract, the seventeen hundred square miles of timber that would be his family’s claim. He did it for the honor of his father, and marked it off as Jameson’s for him alone.

  He was envied, loved, despised, and held in awe. He was hated by Sonny Estabrook for his looks and by the Sloans for his money. He was disliked by the prosecutor for his freedom, and by others for his prowess.

  His mother tried to warn him about the prophecy, but it hung upon him in ambivalence, light as dust.

  Yet once, after he had broken the jaw of a man ten years older than him with one punch, because wood had been stolen from a sled as a protest, and the sled burned, he drinking a pint of rum straight down said to his brother in boyish exuberance, “What prophecy can fuck me.” His eyes were narrowed and filled with light as he tossed the empty pint aside into the snowpit at the end of the barn, and the wind howled through, and the house seemed far away and dim on a winter’s day.

  Not knowing that in his smile was visible all the boyish tragedy he had already managed to compile. Like the Athenians heading toward Syracuse, not knowing there would be no way back.

  With Will I will give a starting point—like finding the beginning of the tail of a fast-moving comet. Now and then a woodsman Dan Auger would work for Will Jameson, cutting and making roads, as a portager or axman—dependable in his work but not his loyalty. He would come one week, be gone the next, then show up again at the end of the third. He would be for Sloan on the Tabusintac as much as for Jameson on the Bartibog. Which is what infuriated Will Jameson when he was a boy of seventeen.

  “If he works he has to be loyal—he can’t come today and go tomorrow.”

  “He has lived his life that way. He hurts no one and I trust him and I like him,” Mary said. “Your father always said leave him be—and your father knew men.”

  “And I don’t?” Will smiled indulgently at the old woman, who having both born late was already approaching fifty. “He is in league with Sloan and Estabrook—who will never say I own this tract I am cruising—even as a lease.”

  “They may say that—but Auger is not in league with anyone,” Mary advised.

  “Well I won’t have him in my camp—I know he’s a good man on the drive, but I won’t have him. I am working for our future—this tract is yours, Mary,” he said, calling his mother by her first name, which he had done now for over a year.

  “Don’t be an arse, making enemies of tough people is never a smart thing!” she said with that whimsical disassociation, as if she was always thinking of something beyond them.

  It was in 1937 that Will, out of school and away from the schoolmarms who were piteously ignorant and twice as domesticating, had decided to go north to the main camp and see how they were cutting, and if the scaler had come in to rod the yards.

  At eighteen Will was a Jameson and as strong as a grown man, and could read the woods well enough. Besides, he would trust no one else with the pay orders, or orders at large. Will was loyal to his father’s memory to the point of obsession. Though the Tote Road trailed off and was covered by crust a foot down, almost impossible to see, and the wood path he finally followed was not the Tote Road the portager used, but an old one the Jamesons’ first horses once hauled a supply sled up, he still made it without rest, which many grown men could not do.

  He attained the camp at dark. And after resting and looking into the smoke-filled faces of both young and old, all looking the same in the traces of camp light, all smelling of pine poles and socks, he got to the business at hand. He took the scaler’s measures, and then the pay sheets. Seeing a discrepancy, he ordered the men about him.

  “Dan Auger.”

  Auger looked at him.

  “You’ve had three days out in the last fourteen, and so should be paid three days less.”

  “It comes at the end of the year—if he don’t make it up on the drive, which he always do,” Reggie Glidden said. “So I put in now—it will turn on the same dime.”

  But Will showed fury at this, and told them of his obligation coming on the back of their neglected duty.

  Saying simply: “Dan Auger, you’re to go home.”

  Everyone laughed, more like a titter, and looked at one another. Reggie looked at Will curiously, but it was his best friend and he knew him well enough.

  They stood about him, in hats and coats and boots that people much like Lula Brower said “were worn until they rotted off them.” And they would rot, and many would die in them. Of course the pleasantries of minor middle-class life allowed this assessment.

  There was not another man there who did not think Dan Auger was the best man in the woods that year. Worse, he had come in here out of the same respect for Will’s father that Will himself had.

  “Dan Auger, I said you are to go out—I will not be paying a man for six who worked three.”

  Will’s task was finished. Abruptly, with no lies and no hesitation. He stood in the middle of grown men who were having their supper of pork and potatoes that those loyal Clydesdales had hauled in by the portager, and declined everything himself but tea. Glidden, to soften it, told Auger it was late, and asked him to stay until morning. But Auger, a man almost his father’s age, fired a look of contempt at Will and left though the wind was howling at the door, saying: “Yer father was a man. No man questioned me before—no man does it now.”

  His person soon obliterated by the sound of snow.

  “If he finds his track he will be okay,” Reggie decided. Other men said nothing. It was a hard thing, the woods, and harder a boss who makes a mistake.

  Will remained utterly calm. He sat by himself watching them. Except for Reggie he would not be their friend. Still, he admired them, and wanted to be like them—where no inclemency or danger could cow them. (A romantic view to be sure—many were terrified of the woods, and swallowed that terror because they needed money for their families.)

  Still, Will had proved himself at danger before. He knew there was not a man among them who could not be a hero, and he knew in his wild heart he was to be as great as any.

  He drank the dregs of the tea and went to sleep.

  Reggie sat alone that night at the camp table, silent and worried that this act would cause something against them.

  But the next morning, without sleep himself, he was the first to get the men up for work.

  Back in town, Will took the pay sheets to his mother—spoke of the greatness of the teamsters they had and told an off-color joke.

  “Mom, did you hear about the queer bear?”

  “What?”

  “He laid his pa on the table.”

  Without a word his mother listened, smiled at the joke, and then told him to wash up for supper. Without a word the clock ticked and the snow started to fall out of an iron-gray sky.

  It was on that winter night, long past supper hour, when a knock came at the door and they heard from dutiful Eric Glidden, Reggie’s father, that Dan Auger had gone through on a patch of ice while trying to cross to his little stretch of land, at the talons below Good Friday Mountain, and though as a man of great courage and tenacity he managed to break ice for an hour, had drowned only fifteen feet from shore.

&
nbsp; Will remembered how seemingly innocuous the moment was when he turned and told Auger to grab his kit and go. Now it seemed a deliberate settling of a score that could never warrant any man’s death. He still a boy might have given a man a death sentence because of pettiness or fierce loyalty his family did not need. The next three days the Jamesons tried to make restitution to Auger’s daughter Cora. Though only a girl of fourteen, she refused any clemency. She was as silent and as stern as stone. She listened with incomparable dignity to their offer and turned away.

  Will went to the wake and walked behind the hearse and did his duty.

  But that night his mother said, “You should never have questioned a man as fine as Dan Auger.”

  But she knew this was a wrong thing to say, and gave the boy’s heart more trouble. Besides, nothing could be done about it now. Nothing, too, could be done about the way the town turned against him. The prosecutor sent the RCMP to investigate the death in the camp, and was rumored to be considering charges. Or wanting charges. This was the rumor flying in the air. Scandal was always meat to the famished.

  After a while it died away.

  Yet no one saw the signs of change in Will that Owen saw. Owen tried for the first time to protect his older brother from needless exhibition. And so did Glidden.

  There were men waiting for him on every corner. Owen was skinny and woebegone and not quite five-eight. Will was five-eleven and strong as a young bull. It was somehow incongruous to see the younger brother try to protect the older. But the older boy could not be protected. His fights at dances became legendary within nine months, and he sat in jail many a weekend.

  “Your brother’s in jail again,” Lula once said to Owen, who had run to catch up with her after school. “What will your family do, being ruined by your awful brother—that’s what my father asks—so we pray.”

  Such was her mode of fairness. To explain the failings of others to themselves.

  Solomon Hickey, the thin, dark-haired barber’s son, looked at him with sadness, the kind seen so often in university.