The Friends of Meager Fortune (39 page)

“You will not touch our Meager Fortune again,” Trethewey said, staring out at the same man. “For it is easy for charlatans to take what little fortune we have.”

And they took the rope down.

FOURTEEN

On this same night the ice had broken out of the bay, and the sea was high. The heavy schooner
Jensen
, coming in on diesel
with the main sail up and four yards against the wind, was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the far northwest side of Prince Edward Island. There were men in the lower berths, and under heavy seas with ice collecting across its ropes, making about nine knots in a gale. The captain had before him two reports, each now requiring a change in his plans and wanting him to come into the strait and bay as early as possible. Or so he had decided that night.

One was a Halifax newspaper sent on request from Newcastle to the ship as it traded along Nova Scotia, which he initially thought nothing about; the other was a picture of a man given to him earlier in the week by his first mate Conner, who had gone in off Prince Edward Island for a chart.

Now, putting these two things together, the captain exclaimed that could they, this old bulking
Jensen
, fitted out with sail and diesel, past her prime by twenty years, be the missing piece in this strange mystery puzzle?

This ship, this strange missing link, was now chugging toward the Miramichi to be born.

Conner, a great young sailor, told him of how things now happening on the Miramichi might have become imbued with a scandal out of all proportion to the cause. The newspaper report asking for information about any missing relative or friend made things urgent, especially with the picture that Conner had handed him as well.

The newspaper asked if anyone was missing a relative or friend—that a body had been found in its bare feet.

And the picture? The picture was of the very man who had signed on with this ship to work, going out off the strait in December, and who had come back with it, and was resting below.

Things were puzzling until the captain reasoned that the man actually missing—the notice that old Buckler in frantic
hope had put in all the Maritime papers—might be a man off his ship now unheard of for more than four months.

“If he was up on the sails he would likely have been barefooted and without a coat, even on that night,” Conner stated.

The man they now had with them, Conner told him, was this other fellow, the disappeared one, the one the police had probably mistaken their own man, Dressler, for. “Dressler could have fell from the riggin’—that very night we were going out.”

That Dressler was not accounted for in the log was a scandal within the ship itself. But no one wanted to admit this, for most of them, captain included, had been drunk coming from Mr. Estabrook’s.

The other man, however, was the completely alive and hardworking and common enough seaman Reggie McDonald Glidden, who had taken to the sea well and kept his guts and was fine on the ropes.

So it was in fact nothing more than a simple case of mistaken identity. Glidden had been hired on late at their turn out toward the gulf, because Dressler was gone. And they had taken board down the coast to South Carolina and had come back with cotton bails and electrical fans. This cargo was headed toward Montreal, but a turn would have to be made in the interest of justice.

The captain went below and woke Glidden, and told him what was going on, and asked him to bear with him please, and if he could bear too with the whims of the sea.

“If ice is gone, we can make it to the outside of Sheldrake Island in three days—there Conner will take you in on a skiff, and you will have good enough opportunity to clear this strange matter up.”

“Tomorrow we will have good enough opportunity to clear this matter up,” Trethewey said. And no beating would be allowed of any man caught. They would take him out to the depot at the talons and hand him to the rangers, and not a hair on his head would be harmed.

“For we are to be civilized men,” Curtis said.

It was easy enough to know. Tomkins was the prime stamper—therefore, if his stamp was legitimate as he said it was, then the other stamp, the false one, would have had to be stamped over the Jameson stamp. That would be easy enough to see and would have ruined the subterfuge anyway.

“If we see that, then we know it is not Tomkins who used the false stamp,” Richardson said.

“There you go,” Tomkins said, clapping his pipe on his knee and laughing almost hysterically, “there you go.” And he kept nodding his head and spitting, “There you go, there you go—I knew it,” and he glared or tried to glare at every one of them.

Then he took his hat off and decided he would hit Meager over the head with it.

“I’ll have an apology for this,” he kept saying, “I’ll have an apology for this—”

Meager simply sat there taking all the hits on the head.

But they stopped Stretch and took his hat away. He kept rubbing his hand across the top of his bald head under the lantern light, looking at each in turn with pursed lips, hoping against hope there was some way to extricate himself and run away.

The idea that Owen would come and get my mother and take off was stirring feelings across the lanes and alleyways. It had been since the evening.

Cora Auger was sure the temptress had something to do with it all. She remembered when Camellia’s mother died, and her father was hanged—how that had given Camellia more sympathy than Cora ever had later on. How her picture was in the paper more than Cora herself got. She had never been able to understand the fame such scandal generated. Though the scandal around her had given something, it was not enough. And she had loved and honored her father for years. Secretly, she blamed the Jamesons for this lack of scandal. They were able to snuff it out like a wick in church. She had been alone, apprenticed to a seamstress in 1935. She had fought for union on her own, and bled for it too, until Camellia’s scandal caught her up. Now, after all these years, the chance to reclaim something for her father was at hand. They would all know Dan Auger had been the greatest woodsman in the world.

“What nincompoops to let him escape,” she said puffing on a cigarette, the smoke rising up in the thin air above her reddish brown hair, at eight that night. She sent her men out to look for him.

They came back after a while saying Owen had given them the slip.

“The slip, is it?” Cora Auger said. “Well, go and find him if you want to work for me—find him dead.” In fact, Cora Auger was using the same tactic as those she hated once had. She knew what strikes and breaking strikes with lumber barons were like.

“To Glidden’s,” she said, mud on her new boots and snow on her jeans. She was using her power in union to control the destiny of poor, half-illiterate men.

Four followed her, with much commotion and tired rhetoric, to the isolated house on the windy, open Strawberry Marsh, one-eighth of a mile from the great open dump.

“Owen is in there with that whore!” Sterling kept shouting.

My mother was alone. She had tried to run downstairs and lock the door, but they burst in on her. She ran, but they grabbed her.

“Running, is it?” Sterling said, forcing her to come with him. “I never thought a niece of mine would be like this here.”

She was brought into the room. She looked at all the startled, angry faces, angry that she would dare deceive them. Her running had proved she was guilty. There was Colson and Butler and Peterson too, all caught up in the moment.

“Where is he?” Cora shouted, so loud the neighbors heard.

“Where is he?” Sterling said, waving his old Winchester so dangerously that others took it from him.

“Search the house—and don’t be shy, take her things!” Colson yelled.

Cora sat in the hard-back rocking chair in the little living room with its one faded plant and its few knick-knacks as they went in and out. She never spoke. Only rocked back and forth with a small squeak, both arms on the armrests waiting, her new boots crossed one over the other in front of her.

One of the men took Camellia’s chin in his hand and looked at her, twisting her face sideways. For years afterward he would say he never had. Cora watched this without comment and then exclaimed, “Never mind her, he’s meeting her in Montreal—he isn’t here!”

And they turned, their faces filled with a kind of delighted hatred, and let her go. She should have stayed just where she was. Again, the world would have been different if she had. But she was disgusted by them and ran after them to shut the door—I have long had dreams where I see this in my mind’s
eye, as if I am hovering over her head at that moment. Reaching for the door, she fell over the mat one of the men had ruffled and hurled stomach-first from the porch onto the ice. The wind moaned, and no one turned to see or hear her. They had departed and were already near Hanson Street.

She lay in the cold, bleeding from the mouth, for fifteen minutes.

“Everything,” she told me later, “seemed to have left me—and I was somewhere far away into the heaven. But then I asked God to please let me come back—for you.”

Many nights I wish she hadn’t.

She managed to get inside the house, and locked the door. Shaking, she took up her rosary. For over an hour she was sure I was dead.

By 10:07 that night she felt the first sting of labor, crawled on her hands and knees to the bathroom, and locked the door, saying in a weak voice: “You leave me alone.”

There was blood down her legs. The baby was going to come far too soon.

No one heard her, and the commotion and the desperate search for her lover continued.

Monroe had not given up, but had gotten lost in the thicket northeast of town, and was not discovered until the next day when he wandered into Buckler’s backyard with a troop of disheveled confederates.

Lula Brower suddenly heard that Owen had escaped and saw her father’s car go by. Thinking he would be outraged that she was gone, and that he would think she had had something to do with it, she made her way, with her face aching and cold sores on the right side of her mouth, to my mother’s house.

Brower himself had been at the curling club for the ice removal dance. Everyone had loved him at that moment, and he was saturated with glad tidings from the people.

Up on deck, Reggie McDonald Glidden felt the cold spray, and watched for lights in the distance that would indicate the mouth of the great desolate bay. Hearing now what was happening, he felt he should have known it would. He felt even more responsible, and more guilty, than when he had left.

He wanted to rush across the water and save his wife, ready to kill anyone who touched her. But he had to endure the swells moving under him without repose, and lashing water over the gunnels and across the deck.

“WHAT HAVE I DONE?” he roared. Only the creak of the sails, the taut of the rope, the wind answered.

PART VII

ONE

It was Holy Thursday night. They stayed up late, playing some cards. Down at the stream they could hear ice cracking and breaking, and knew that soon they would be out on the run, with a massive amount of logs primed for Jameson’s mill. They would have bonus and be the heroes of the river this year. And why not—why stay in hell for six months if you can’t come out a hero?