The Friends of Meager Fortune (22 page)

It was a cold day, with bright sunshine and the snow spraying in the wind. Children played hockey across the river on a homemade rink.

Owen wanted some lighter horses in to work the wood toward the skids where the Belgians and Percherons and Clydes could load. That would save Butch and Cole Younger for the longer, more demanding task on the two sled.

He went to discuss this with the horse trader Hutchings, who just by his evasion confirmed the rumors now in town that were known to almost everyone else. That is, looking at Hutchings’ smile, and his nod, Owen realized that the rumors against someone are never told to them.

He felt strangely enraged by this obvious truth.

FOUR

That evening, with the lowering sun yellow across the back field of snow and alders, Owen went into the family barn to
see the two-year-old Belgian, Ronald’s Young. He walked quietly into the adjacent stall and patted it. White snow swept in at the main doors, and doleful rope twisted in the breeze.

Then he saw the stool Will used to sit on, and his heart was stirred. He looked toward the great old house, and thought of his life here.

Coming back to the house he asked Camellia, who for the first time in her life had not smiled and laughed that day, about these rumors and was annoyed when she turned eagerly and said, while backing away from him, almost like a specter toward the dimmer alcove at the back: “Wear your Saint Jude and never mind rumor—and we will see Reggie—he will come back and clear this all up.”

“All of what up?” he said. “There is nothing in the world that is happening—what in Christ is happening?”

“All of whatever it is—never mind them—I am used to it.”

She closed the door, to prevent him from saying anything else. He saw her look quickly away in the fading light. She had been called a bad girl downtown and she wanted to prevent people from saying this again. Closing the door was the only way she knew how.

And he sat in an old leather chair in the corner of the hall. He hadn’t sat here since he was sixteen.

He decided that was the real problem—her being used to it. He remembered at school and other places, how she was treated. That is, she was treated very well by most people—but as always in every situation there was an element at the school who saw her as vulnerable, and treated her mercilessly. Perhaps that is why he didn’t or wouldn’t initiate anything with her when he was young. That and the story, fabricated by the Steadfast Few, that Byron had been her mother’s lover. But if that was the case then everything that had happened to her since was in a way his doing.

He went to see Practical Mary—ostensibly to take her a receipt for the saws but more importantly to speak to her about whatever it was that was being said.

But Mary was in no mood. She had a difficult time not believing something had happened, and she didn’t know Camellia would “act like that.”

“Like what?” Owen said, surprised that supposition had infiltrated his own house.

“I don’t know—I don’t know,” Mary said, “Everyone is saying poor Lula, and Camellia stole you away from her after her father gave her just about everything under the sun—and—”

“NONSENSE!” Owen shouted.

“Well, that’s what I told them, but I’m an old woman—you know I’m sick—I’m running a temperature—my heart thumps, I have weak spells. But you were kissing her—and my friends have been telling me that. Why oh why would you go to Winch’s cave—”

He left her, and walked back toward the front of the house. In the great darkness that invaded it this time of year, he had once spent his happiest hours, knowing that snowfall cut them off from everyone except themselves.

“Phantoms,” he said.

There were two startling “past events,” and some say that both of these events—or discoveries of past events—sent Owen to the bottle that had been prepared for him by the prophecy.

These silent notes from the past were laid away in Will’s room in the old chest that had been brought from the camp at Talons. The trunk that had come on the day he had run downstairs to see if it was Lula paying a visit.

The night after he came home from Nova Scotia, he walked
into Will’s room to see if he could find the company book on board feet and saw this trunk, just where it had been for years, and opened it with the key that lay on the old china plate on the windowsill.

In it he found a full bottle of Scotch unopened and a letter addressed to him, sitting on top of a red blanket beside this bottle. There with a hunting knife and a Remington pistol, a compass and a map of the Jameson tract.

He opened the letter slowly, and went under the light to read.

In this letter to Owen was fifteen hundred dollars tucked away—in fact, Will had put it there the night before he left for his last run, and no one had entered Will’s room until Owen had returned from overseas.

“For your university,” the letter said. “Take hold of the world, boy, and do better than me.”

The letter was dated the day before Will had died.

Owen studied the letter for an hour, the handwriting, trying to determine where Will had been when he wrote this. He lay the letter down and picked up the copper-plated compass, looking at it for a long moment before noticing that the top of the red blanket had been pulled away. He took the bottle and set it beside him. Then he turned the blanket back.

Here Owen discovered something else none would ever have suspected: books. At first he thought they were his, mixed in with everything. But silently he became aware. They had been Will’s—all purchased after the death of Dan Auger.

Owen picked these books out of this old trunk one at a time and brought them to the desk with Will’s name whittled upon it, his face passive, his hands trembling.

Crime and Punishment
.

Leaves of Grass
.

Jude the Obscure
.

Lord Jim
.

Wuthering Heights
.

And finally, and inevitably,
Ulysses
by James Joyce.

Each book had been read—whole passages of
Lord Jim
and
Jude the Obscure
underlined and referenced.

Owen took everything back to his own room and stayed there the next day, drinking from the bottle Will had left, staring at this letter—and these books.

The books, it was said, sent him to the bottle; the bottle sent him to prison. A simple enough prophecy any writer would understand.

Owen was required to go to the doctor for his hip but hadn’t since he had come home. Now he fell into a fitful sleep, and woke up startled and thirsty just as it was growing dark. He was sure in his half-conscious state that Will was calling out to him from the doorway.

“You stay in here until I set things straight with Reggie,” he heard him say.

He woke.

He had been out of uniform for a year and yet he had four letters from the army—two from Ottawa. He left them unopened.

He went downstairs seeing the light fade across the heavy carpets, lingering coldly on the brown windowsills of too many windows, and felt the heaviness one does after sleeping in the afternoon. Camellia was still at the house, cleaning a room off to the side of the living room that almost no one went in. Strangely, he saw her dusting the statuette of Rodin’s
The Kiss
that Will, without knowing what mythology it spoke of, had brought home once upon a time.

And he noticed something else for the first time. A small wedding ring on her finger. He was dazzled by his understanding of how he had avoided her when he was young, just
because others had, even though he could not take his eyes off her whenever she appeared. She turned and looked at him, and brushed a piece of hair back from her forehead. When it fell down again, she gave a quick smile and winked.

FIVE

Although she told him not to, Owen had been drinking and insisted he walk Camellia to her house. As they passed Solomon’s barbershop he insisted she take his arm: “It is slippery, so be safe.”

She took his arm knowing there was no safety in it.

On his way back home, passing Solomon’s barbershop again, he saw the barber look out at him. It was nothing unusual, a momentary glance by a small, deft man who had always been on the right side when they were boys.

Then he thought of the rumor about the cave. Only a person from Newcastle would understand why he was so angry at the suggestion he had taken Camellia Dupuis there.

Solomon, he decided, had started it.

At home, as he drank one Scotch and then another, he knew why he was so bothered—but he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

He had gotten used to being admired—even if it was just a little—and now he had returned from Windsor to the town’s contempt. He put the glass down and sunk into contempt himself. He had killed twelve men in the war—one a boy of seventeen.

It bothered him now more than at any other time.

Later he went for a walk to see if the drugstore was open, to get something for the pain he was in (though the Scotch helped, his leg still burned).

The wind over flat, stark fields and the beautifully built two- and three-story houses as he approached the town seemed ambivalent to his crisis. The silence accompanying that clean cold of night seemed ambivalent as well. And in his heart was the idea that he might very easily have driven a man to his death.

He passed people who just two months ago had lifted him on their shoulders.

Owen nodded and people looked away. He smiled and spoke, but could not decide what was wrong. What was wrong was that the investigation, ongoing by the local police, was scientific. They had taken his and Camellia’s fingerprints, and his mother’s. They had given these fingerprints because they had done nothing wrong. But this science added to general suspicion. It had posed fruitful questions about him and Camellia and had already come to a conclusion based on what people conjectured was an obvious truth. The police themselves were mainly gossips, and told their families, who told others. Camellia especially, more and more as time went on, became sadistic and cruel in people’s imagination—especially when she started to buy liver at the store.

The old mathematician who had risen to say, “There’s the man who knows Pythagoras,” did not shout his way now, but hurried down another laneway.

A feeling of disgust strengthened in Owen as he passed the barbershop where Solomon Hickey worked. Solomon, cutting Billy Pebble’s hair, did not turn to look, but his mouth, as always, worked constantly.

“I will never mind it,” he thought.

He thought of Camellia, and suddenly recognized how much he had to protect her from this scandal.

He wanted to board a train and go away. But, secretly, he wanted to leave with her. Then he thought again, if he had shown interest in her before the war—none of this would be happening now.

So why couldn’t he change it for the better?

He turned the corner at Hanover Street and slipped on the ice. A shot of pain went through his leg and into his side. He grimaced and turned to make his way home, along the same avenues.

Owen was aware of the poor timing that now seemed insurmountable. Poor timing was everything—the moment when he turned on the landing and saw her—in another moment she would have been across the landing to the linen closet and upstairs bath. But he had stopped and kissed her—it had been pure braggart on his part—and some would say not because she was Camellia, but because she was a maid.

When people at the house had smiled knowingly at him the next morning, why hadn’t he taken that for exactly what it was, the smile of gossips, and done something about it then?

Only Owen could tell you why—he had enjoyed the notoriety. He had enjoyed people assuming the worst. For in all of it, there was the idea that he had impressed other men who had once worked for his brother.

Now that he wanted the rumor to stop, it was no longer in his power to do so. For he as a participant in the scandal could twist and turn, but not so much as lessen it by a molecule. Denying fed it. He was as caught up in it as Camellia, and it must run its course.

He knew this now. It struck him like cold in his face—a bluster of sudden wind and snow. Now as he realized he cared for her deeply, he also realized what he himself had allowed
to be thought. He and others had taken advantage because she was still childlike. To say that about a woman was to evoke all kinds of responses. But men like Meager Fortune he knew to be in this unconscious state as well.