The Friends of Meager Fortune (36 page)

But little Gibbs was unsure about the job—not that it wasn’t done well, but that the weight of this load might cause a sled to bound.

Meanwhile Butch, gelding from Missy off Byron’s Law, grunted under the weight of each log, so saving Missy they brought Duff Almighty to hook up with another mount, which caused his teamster, Curtis, to say he would give the horse over for a day, as long as Richardson did the same for him, for they were coming to the end of the year and Richardson would be done his haul.

These horses fearlessly strode uphill, disregarding the men guiding them until Butch’s huge feet broke the ice at the top of the skid and he came up in a roar of steam and pain, surrounded by glitters of ice and four twigs stuck in his tail.

All this while Richardson sat chewing an apple, and though it was still minus ten, waving his old civil war–shaped hat as if chasing away flies.

“Ya think ya’ll live?” Pitman asked.

“No matter,” Richardson said, lighting Fraser’s well-rolled smoke and thinking of everything he had lost in his entire life, “no matter ever no more.” For the McCord girl he had once loved and had not seen in years was no longer his, no matter what.

Far down across the ice flat, almost to Arron Brook proper, Tomkins stamped logs with the illegal and counterfeit stamp. Once in the water with thousands upon thousands of other
logs, they would be recognized not as what they were—the fruit of Buckler’s mountain—but would be thought of as Estabrook’s prize. Tomkins, a man like ourselves, did this because he had not been given a team, because no one had treated him well, and because he had taken a bonus from Sonny to do what he was doing now.

And so he worked. He worked along this old skid road stamping the logs, far away from camp, as dutiful as a squirrel in fall, and did not notice Meager Fortune walking toward him with a Thermos of soup he had made. Meager had made it and decided to bring it to Tomkins because no one else would. And Tomkins was a muncher.

Tomkins had the ability to attract kindness to himself, though he himself never was kind.

“And anyway, he is not a bad lad,” Meager thought that morning, neglecting to think of all the things Tomkins had deliberately done to him.

Meager, having been in the woods all his life, thought others were like him. That is, he did not know and never considered that Tomkins wouldn’t know he was approaching. Even though he was as silent as a cat, even though he walked half hidden against the side of Arron Brook so you would see him one moment and then not see him for fifteen minutes, he simply thought no one would fail to detect him moving in and out of the old sprag trees and iced-over boulders in April of 1947. As he walked, he was thinking of Duncan and his wife Evelyn and how he loved them. Yes, they were fine people. And if what he had heard was true, that poor Evelyn had loved someone else when he was away, it didn’t matter now. He only felt sadness and love when he thought of her.

“Life is hard enough, anyway—and so many of us make mistakes—why, I have made a bunch myself and so why should I say nay to her?” Then he spoke to Evelyn; he said, “If you
think you have to wait a long time for me, I believe you will be surprised. I think this world has just about done with old Meager Fortune—for as you know, the new world is here and by the 1950s there will be real fortunes to be made.”

He walked up toward Tomkins, smiling and almost ready—almost ready to wave—when he stopped and looked down at a large spruce, with its ragged beeled-back bark and its lumps where the branches came off, and he thought: “This is very strange.”

And then thought, “What is Estabrook’s timber doing up on Arron Brook side—did he take so much from his cut, he piles it in the freshets next to ours?”

Then he thought: “We have got down all the way to the old Jameson cut.” But then looking ahead in the sunlight, seeing the nodding mesmerized head of Tomkins—his elongated shadow seeming to make three people—Meager began to realize something very wrong. Then he thought of what Blind Andre had said. It was suddenly as if he was staring at someone alien with a small nodding head and stiff goatee.

“My God, what has he done to us?” he whispered. “If he is the one to claim our legitimacy, what in God’s name will happen?”

Meager turned and walked at an angle down through the yarded trees along a rut road, toward Arron Brook, and sat among some popals and talked to the birds that came around him, sitting at his feet like they had with Saint Francis some years before. If his feeling was right, what was he to do? Meager Fortune, who had caused nothing to befall anyone, really, in his life—whom God had played a great trick on, taking his wife and child away while he was running about killing Germans—this Meager Fortune now had to tell on someone. He had never told on anyone before. What was he to do?

The moose birds flew about him, softly about his knees and arms, and he took out bits of bread to throw at them. He did this for well over an hour. The sun began to disappear behind the wood, slowly and ominously, and he heard the two sled picking up Tomkins and heading back to camp, just as the sun was above some old sprag popals by the river. He got up and, walking up the pathway toward the skid road, seeing his old boot marks, realizing how happy he had been but a brief time ago, he said: “Evelyn, Evelyn, what am I to do—tell me what to say?”

The ground, slightly broken free of winter, was turning hard and cold again. And he turned down Arron Brook in the direction of the last logs Tomkins had stamped. Here he was, our Meager Fortune, wearing dark woolen pants and big heavy-toed boots three sizes too big, with huge buttons up his chest, walking about in the middle of nothing but a channel of wood and rock and ice, looking for a sign of betrayal.

It wasn’t hard for Meager to find the Estabrook stamp hidden under long logs right near where Tomkins had done his latest business.

It wasn’t difficult either for him to know what a crisis this was now.

“The men—” he thought suddenly, “the men will kill him if I tell he has tried to steal our work. Tomkins has tried to steal our work!”

These great logs—thousands of them now scaled and stamped with a wrong stamp—would simply be pushed into the river without anyone noticing what stamp they had, until they went into the great communal circular boom to be sorted by stamp for each mill.

If he, Meager, did not himself stop it. And if he did stop it—if he did, it would mean—well, it would be the death of Stretch Tomkins.

He held the Thermos of soup that he had made especially for his friend, and tears dazzled his eyes.
Betrayal is such a vicious sin, worse than the cauldron Dante put his sinners in
.

TWELVE

Holy Thursday, 1947.

The jail on a side street, not hampered by light—and an alley in behind. Darkness was coming and Owen was in pain. Still, the idea of being in pain was one he had gotten used to. But he found by about four that afternoon, he was in great discomfort. He lay on his bunk and listened to children playing on the side street. The men who were building the gallows had left. There was supper to be brought and he waited for it. It got darker, the corridor wall flared once in sunshine, then turned gray and dark. Outside, on the roof, there was a shifting of snow.

“Ahh,” he thought, “spring will be here.”

Finally Monroe came shuffling in with Owen’s mashed potatoes, peas and smelts, and weak half-cold tea. He opened the door carefully and went to push it in.

“I have to see Hennessey,” Owen said. “Call him.”

“Not tonight—I’m goin’ home—Clive is out—he comes back, I’ll tell him to come look at you—”

“You can’t go home while the jailer is out.”

“I don’t need to babysit you—that was yer problem—babysit too much.”

“What if there was a fire—I’d never get out of the cell.”

“There was never a fire here—”

“Sure there was.”

“Ya, when?”

“October 1825—”

This was the date of the great fire, which burned eight thousand square miles in ten hours. It took, among two hundred others, the life of a woman in jail for having killed her infant.

Monroe looked at him. Owen was sweating, now, though it was not hot. “It’ll take too long for Hennessey to get here anyway—I don’t know,” Monroe said.

“He will come—you phone him.”

“No.”

“Well, then take me up to the hospital—”

“Oh, you’re nothing but a baby.”

So Monroe went back into the office grumbling. But he made the call. Hennessey said he would come down after he finished with a patient.

Lula came out of her house that very night, and was seen in town. She walked slowly and painfully into the dark. Exactly why may never be known. Waiting until her father left to go to the curling club at five for the end-of-the-year supper and dance—something she always received an invitation to but could never attend—she had finally decided she did not believe what was being said, for everyone pretended to be saying it on her behalf. And she must hear it from Camellia herself. She would even pay her—bribe Camellia to tell her the truth. That is all Lula Brower wanted in her life. For people to finally tell her what was true, and what was not.

She made her way down the long, sanded street in the gloom. None of the Steadfast Few attended her now. In fact, it took her a half-hour to walk down the stairs in the shadow
of fading afternoon and then wait on the porch until certain her father had gone. As Camellia’s priest had told her, if a rumor has destroyed others, it has destroyed you—you must correct the rumor to put your soul at ease.

But each step was painful, and every carpeted stair held a memory of childhood temper.

She knew the porch steps were slippery going down, and she knew that it was not a matter of if, but when, she fell, for poor Solomon Hickey who had always loved her was no longer here to take her arm. There were many houses with small dark porches and quiet lights—a cold ground fog had settled, and people passed her, some didn’t even know her name.

The reports of Lula’s journey have varied over time, and left us with a still scene when all the building fronts and businesses had signs of people you grew up with, and the loitering gray filtered across the plain, unhurried streets among us—she standing for long moments at every pole, to rest, her face in semi-darkness. One of my friends painted this scene, and it hangs in the courthouse as a reminder of that time. It took Lula an hour to make it almost down to Pleasant Street. It was close to 6:30. The shops were closed, and young women who worked in those shops hurried home—it seemed without a care—to lives that would come to fruition in the 1950s. Women who with care and love would raise children who would rebel against everything they held dear or knew. The way of the world.

“Is the doctor coming?” Owen asked at about the same time. There was no sound at all. Monroe, hungry and not wanting jail fare, had gone home for supper as he had threatened to do. The jailer was not yet back. Owen would have been able
to make out the light in his apartment if he was. He sat in front of his plate of cold smelts and waited. It was ten minutes later that Hennessey came in. Owen could hear him walking about the desk to get the key from the far side. He heard him come down the three steps, fumble while finding the key to open the heavy door, and come into the cells. Owen was simply sitting there, watching.

“Where is everyone?” Hennessey asked.

“They all of them went someplace,” Owen answered.

“Well, you shouldn’t be left alone,” Hennessey said.

Hennessey did not want to talk about an appeal but he did say he had spoken to the captains of four ships, to see if any sailor was missing.

“Are there?” Owen asked hopefully.

“There is one more we are trying to contact,” Hennessey answered.

Owen nodded and said nothing. He stood, winced, and looked at the top of the gallows and shrugged. When Hennessey opened the cell door he just walked in with his bag, as he had done on another occasion. The door was left opened. Monroe, and the jailer too, were out.

It almost had to be spur of the moment, a kind of instantaneous decision that once started couldn’t be stopped. Owen watched until the cell door was opened and his friend came in. He told Owen to take his trousers off, so he could look at the leg.