The Friends of Meager Fortune (26 page)

“No, we will stay,” Nolan said, “we have worked in snow before.”

“But if four are going out, how will you get half the wood
yarded?” Innis asked—for he was hoping not to have to make this terrible trip again.

But Nolan’s four had decided they would stay.

So the axmen and the tend teams decided as much, and the cook brought out soup and they had it by two a.m., while the four going out—and two besides—made themselves a shelter near the storeroom, and shared the soup as well. Behind them, three cedar trees rose high up in a circumference of stumps and thrashed roots, logs and limbs, for miles.

Bartlett, being a practical and punctilious man, was already deciding how to fell the trees in the huge dark lot behind these—for this was the major cedar vale that would lead them down the far side of the mountain.

In this cedar vale stood Richardson after going to fetch Curtis’s horses, which he had seen rush down. Here he was alone, staring at those huge trees that rose up from beneath him. He was thinking of 310 logs; 310 would be a championship load. Then the woman he had lost in Strathadam, the McCord woman who left him, would know his feat.

Innis had told them the rumor was that Estabrook’s wood was no good. The cedar was filled with sand, hemlock tottering and rotted up to the branches, and worms in the spruce. No one knew how it was ruined, but Estabrook, happy to get it, never much decided to inspect it.

“It’s as if a plague came to it the day Will died,” Innis said. For ghosts and hyperbole went together in the dark.

Here it was much better. It was in fact the largest and best wood seen on this river since the great Miramichi fire.

Jameson’s scaler had been in. The cedar had no sand, hemlock no rot—at least not too far up, and so if they stayed all would be well.

“It is bona fide,” Nolan said, smiling.

Tomkins now knew why Estabrook, who could have had any lease he wanted, had Tomkins doing what he did.

The next morning Innis and the four teamsters left just after dawn. Meager Fortune had made them breakfast. The men staying were already working, and the tents they had in the storehouse were already set up, stretched down from that big cedar cross, comfortable enough but not a camp. Those staying reminded Meager of a dispatch of bedraggled soldiers. The one in the worst mood was Tomkins, who threw the cup of tea Meager had handed him.

But another cup was passed to Tomkins. He knew now that he could not escape. He had already taken $350—a fortune for him, though counting it up he had lost more than a hundred in the fire. He had been promised more if he stayed the course.

A glaze of frost sat on each two sled three inches thick, and pools of frozen black water had collected in all those places the men had danced the hootenanny two nights before, drinking off the last bottled beer.

Seeing Mr. Innis’s portage sled teetering along on the flat, hauled by his skinny roans, made it seem to some of the youngsters too proud to say they wanted to go home as if humanity was leaving them in the figure of that tall, aloof, somewhat prurient man. They watched this man until his body became speck and then speck disappeared.

The wind called out hilariously at their expense, saying through the treetops:
“It will snow.”

Tomcat Tomkins, more than any, wanted to be gone too.

PART V

ONE

Long before Owen had gone to the barbershop, long before he had seen this as anything troubling, long before that, friends had already warned Camellia not to “act up.” At least a few, though generous themselves, had gotten caught up in it all themselves and needed for their own sake to come to her rescue. They needed once again, even though some were as stunned as doorknobs, to show her the way.

So the Steadfast Few, as Lula had dubbed them in happier days, led by the one who wrote Lula the letter about Owen and Camellia’s affair, went to Camellia’s house and knocked on the door. They had a long meeting at Susan Gladstone’s house before they did this. And decided, all holding hands, that if one went down to that place near the docks then by God all of them would. So, all of them stood together on the doormat in the coming dark and knocked while Camellia, sick for days, felt now like a trapped animal.

“She is in danger of slipping back into that world,” one said as they had walked in single file along the snow-filled pathway, teetering this way and that and holding their hats. What world were they referring to? Who knows, for they themselves did not.

They were as pained by her poor surroundings as by what they eventually had to say. They looked only to one another for comfort—doing this for her stepfamily, those illusively proud Browers.

“You’re a married woman,” one said, suddenly smiling corruptly. “And you know how we care for you. You have to try to behave yourself before people begin to talk.”

“Who cares for me?” Camellia asked.

“Why, dear, all of us—yes—don’t we, girls! And we were the ones who did so much for you when you were getting married—”

The idea that outrage comes with moral certitude and without self-interest is in itself the harbinger of self-interest.

“Go,” she whispered.

“Pardon us, dear?”

“I said go—” Camellia said, going to the door. “Go the hell away. Goodbye—you are SUCH FRIENDS—Will Jameson was right—schoolmarms for schoolmarms, he said, and he was goddamn right!”

So the Steadfast Few went away waiting for the hammer to fall, and knowing happily it wouldn’t fall on them. And three of them were in fact teachers, and schoolmarms well enough. They traipsed back up that narrow path toward the center of town in single file, holding on to their hats, tch-tching that woman and that desperate world.

But though Camellia would break out laughing in the night as one does at people’s terrible suppositions about them, and how wrong supposition could be, she was still broken-hearted.

Yet now that it had happened, now that all this had occurred, her few acquaintances could take up the rod against her. Which is exactly what the scandal was for in the first place. And her laughing at them was even more disastrous for her. So why shouldn’t they condemn her now—they saw very quickly it was to their advantage to do so.

Besides, anyone who did not join in their condemnation was now suspect of having no feeling toward Lula Brower, the
jilted fiancée of Owen Jameson. And this was the main issue—their own feelings of disloyalty toward their friend Lula over the last few years. Camellia was a way to make it up.

“Look how Lula always tried to help her,” Miss Donnehy said. And they hurried on into the dark, tottering over the slippery ice.

“We must stop the rumor,” another said, “for Lula’s sake.” This being the rumor that Camellia was well knocked up by Owen Jameson that all of them had started a month before, for Lula’s sake.

“Yes, yes, yes.”

Lula had been kept in the dark for a long time about these rumors, too. She, they said, was too sensitive to know, and it would break her heart to know, for she loved Owen Jameson so much. And as they all said: “We thought he liked books—well, this just goes to show!”

Just as they had told her that Owen was coming back to marry her—just as they had said this was a certainty, now they let it slip over the next few days to this woman that Camellia was pregnant with Owen’s child.

“Then if it is Owen’s, I feel sorry for them,” Lula said.

“Just never you mind, dear,” the one who visited her said.

None tormented Lula more than those who were trying to protect her.

“Marriage to her is nothin’—not even a blessed sacrament—more like a snot rag, I figure,” Sterling said about his niece, blowing his big red nose in the middle of the street and running to the priest. Ah, the priest caught shit over this later, but the priest must comfort those who call—and though there are bad priests, the best ones always have, even poor Sterling who now had the support of the entire town.

Camellia knew the rumor, and knew the rumor wasn’t true. Yet for her to go to confession and not confess adultery would
be seen as sacrilege. So she did not go, and did not confess, and was seen by old nuns and old parishioners not to have gone, and not to have confessed.

But on the seventy-seventh day of the haul, Camellia went to see Owen.

An old man, a neighbor who liked her, the grandfather of the Foley girl, told her she shouldn’t visit if she wanted to keep perception of innocence. But she could not do this to Owen Jameson.

“Then go, girl,” he said, “and never mind them.”

Even before she got to Jail Street, a crowd spotted her.

“His lovebird has come—so hang her too—fer Reggie’s sake,” a woman shouted.

“She’s got the devil right in her guts—” another yelled.

“Hang ‘em back to back—the whore,” one of the men said.

Crossman stood as soon as she came in, and walked toward her—quickly, as if to frighten her. But then he calmed himself; though the very look of her enraged others now, he was suddenly sorry for her. And so he smiled in spite of himself and asked how she was, asked if she was feeding herself for she looked sick—said he remembered she played the piano so well, did she play it now? Now, she said, she had no piano to play, but she could play and did play the spoons, at night by herself in her room. Then she laughed at this absurdity.

He looked at her old coat, her small hat, her ratty boots run down on the heels, and smiled again.

He was the one who had arrested her father, Les Dupuis, after he had killed his wife. It was a very strange day, that day seventeen years ago—how it clouded the town and the entire river. Dupuis had come home from work, gone to the cave
and caught his wife waiting for someone. There in Winch’s cave he pulled his knife and she was dead in a second. Not having wanted to kill her, seeing her plain drab face, worn down over the years by work, her small hands she held up to prevent him, he took the knife and stabbed himself. He bled on the stones but did not die.

Camellia was at home, waiting for them to come back, and bore the terrible knowledge of death at an early age. In school she was teased viciously by a few who wanted to lash out at the world.

“Who could make anything of such a disaster?” one reporter for the Halifax paper wrote at the time.

Well, in a certain way, Crossman knew, many people—even the reporter from the Halifax paper. Looking at her in her small hat and half-scared eyes, he realized this. That is, everyone involved had taken whatever they could from Camellia, to further their own ambition. He remembered her alone in a gale of wind, at the crossroads waiting to hear the sentence against her father. Everyone left the court jubilant at his death sentence. When she saw their jubilation, she thought he had been declared innocent and became jubilant too. This very picture of her was used against her father’s appeal.
YOUNG CAMELLIA, ORPHANED BY MURDER, REJOICES
.

Before he was hanged Les Dupuis made an appeal to the town for someone to take in his daughter. Everyone at every juncture hesitated, and it seemed as if she would follow the road down to the orphanage of the Sisters of Charity. But Brower made the humane gesture, which was written about across the country. He who had sent Dupuis to his death would now care for the girl. It was a kind and noble thing he did.

Once they heard of Owen’s greatness in battle, Brower completely changed his opinion about the boy, longed to see him again, and convinced Lula they were engaged because
of that small brooch. Lula clutched this brooch like a drowning girl. There was, however, Camellia—who was not engaged, who was beautiful, and who had written Owen during the war.

“So get her married,” Crossman said glibly.

“How?” Brower asked.

Crossman thought a moment.

“Well, I have a man in my cell. Reggie Glidden. Glidden always liked her—it might straighten them both out.”

The idea that it would straighten them both out was appealing.

Brower told Camellia about Glidden that afternoon.

“Oh I know him, he’s Owen’s friend—just let him out of jail and tell him to come and see me,” she said excitedly, thinking they wanted her to help a friend of Owen, for the interest Owen had shown in saving him.