The Friends of Meager Fortune (42 page)

“Why do you want me to stay here,” he said, tears in his eyes, “this old world. Why can’t I go home to you?”

By the evening of the fourth day of the run, a thousand logs were seen by women watching for their men, a thousand more—and then ten thousand after that. It was incomprehensible that four teamsters had done so much, they thought of them now as spirits, they thought of them now, and forever, as ghosts.

Men who became legends in spite of all that was held against them while they did what they now were legends for doing. They were spoken about in whispers.

“I remember when he lost his arm,” one said about Richardson. “ ‘I don’t need ‘er,’ he said; he said, ‘I do as much with one arm as any a you boys do with two.’ ”

Until that moment, none remembered Richardson ever
having said that. Now a man would take his life in his hands to refute it.

Trethewey had knocked ten men out in one fight. His wife, they said, had come home, and was here for the funeral. They always loved each other—you could tell by her letters.

Nolan, a man they had dismissed for being washed up, old and silly, they now said was overall the greatest of the teamsters. All of them had done what they could. All of them had stayed with their horses.

They would go and build a monument to them on Good Friday Mountain.

FIVE

The news spread of Owen’s death. It seemed a chapter was over. The sordid business, as Sterling called it, was done.

And then, quite shamelessly, a man walked in from the old Curry Wharf, at about nine in the morning of the fifth day after the deaths.

He stopped at Flynn’s store to buy cigarettes. The woman shook as she waited on him. He looked into the corner by the old pot-bellied stove with its two extra homemade reflectors and smiled at Old Flynn, brother of the mathematics teacher, but Flynn was staring at the floor shaking. The man said, “Good day,” and went across the street and along the old dirt road in behind Strawberry Marsh. Sometimes he stopped people, asking questions as innocently as a child, and then, cigarette in his mouth, kept moving.

“My good God,” men and women said, looking out the windows of their houses into the great April wind.

They believed he was Lazarus. In fact, at first they didn’t believe it was him at all.

It was this man they had mocked when alive and made monolithic when dead. Reggie McDonald Glidden.

Finally they gathered about him near the post office, and what was unusual became usual, what was unheard of became commonplace. He had come home.

He was told in spitting gestures from outraged people, all of what had happened in the last five months.

Some wanted to touch him—some wanted to know if he was real, wanted to see the wound on his head, for they couldn’t believe he was alive.

“I am completely in the dark,” he said, “about all you are saying now.”

By four that afternoon all charges against Owen Jameson were dropped. Mary Jameson was at the station to pick up his books.

“Things fall apart—the center cannot hold,” was written on the back of a page. For the rest of her life Mary would tell her friends Owen had written it.

Crossman turned toward the filing cabinet as she left, and stayed in that position for an hour or more, looking out at Owen’s friends as they dismantled the gallows.

At first, few seemed to care that this had happened. It was simply a mistake, and people should get over it and get on with their lives, for there was much work to do.

Owen died from the wound in the war. That was not unusual.

Yet over the next week, the knowledge of the miscarriage of justice spread, so that ten papers covered the story and people became flabbergasted at it all across our country. And then from Cora Auger to Gravellier to those on the jury, people literally ran away and hid. Suddenly they couldn’t stand to look each other’s way. They blamed Crossman for not taking care of Jameson’s wound.

“How dare he not take care of the wound of a VC winner?”

Recriminations started against Judge Fyfe, and Butler, McLean, Urquart, Hamilton, and others. Mackey the coroner was sent packing back to London. Sterling stood at the crossroads near Camellia’s house, guarding it, he said, for her.

“God, I hear it was nothin’ but a big jessless lark,” he said. He kept walking about town trying to shake people’s hands.

For days the streets of our town were empty. For the next two weeks, no local paper was printed. The truth itself had vanished.

Everyone was speechless, as if their souls had suffered when the sustenance they had taken for their famine disappeared.

The
Jensen Otter
came in to Will Jameson’s wharf, and over time a great load of wood was taken, three-quarters of the money from that year given over to the widows and the families of the men. It essentially broke the back of Jameson industry.

The body was exhumed, double-checked, found out easily—by the marks on his bare feet from climbing the yards, and the clothing from England—to be the able-bodied seaman Dressler, and given to the captain of the
Jensen
and buried at sea.

He was a man who had climbed the yards when drunk, was knocked by a pulley when trying to scamper down, and fell. From his picture later published, people could see he was
almost the same age and size as our Reggie. Therefore, the paper said in its editorial of half-apology, it was a mitigation.

Mary Jameson and Buckler bought a new 1947 Chevrolet and drove about town every day. Though their hearts were not in it. It was the last car they would ever buy.

Mary’s friends all came back to the great kitchen, saying something should be done against those who perpetrated all of this. For days there was talk of Estabrook and Bots, Sloan and others—how they had all conspired. How they would all end badly—how they used false public opinion to further their own ambition.

This was true—but I suppose no worse than the untruths said about Owen or Camellia.

Owen’s Victoria Cross was returned to Mary.

Meeting Reggie Glidden on a windy day in May, when seagulls were full in the sky, little Cora Auger, her plump legs in heavy jeans, turned and said from a distance, while backing into the future she no longer held dear: “I gave her my blood.”

Yet over time there was the idea that this had been done by Reggie on purpose, to hang Jameson because of what was suspected to have been an illicit romance. Because he himself was impotent, and my mother had a proof of crime in her belly.

I was the stumbling block to reason. I was in an incubator for weeks and half-blind until I was ten. I had a crippled left hand, and all of this pointed to some secret liaison. My life was set at the moment of her fall to be something other than what she had ever planned. In a way, I was proof of her infidelity—like some wounded bastard in the back end of a Shakespeare play, the one they pointed to as divination.

There wasn’t much I could say about it.

The idea grew that Reggie knew, being impotent, she had had me by Owen.

This rumor began to spread against Reggie, sometime that June. It lingered over the wavy lilacs and the red-winged blackbirds on the cliffs. In part, I think it was understandable. He had tricked them all by not giving them the right to defame him in public. He had left on a ship to start his life anew.

He had come back, however, to save his friend.

The conflagration once again spread out willy-nilly to houses of people who hardly knew the participants and yet wanted scandal for themselves, to fill up the famine in their lives.

The idea of Reggie’s elaborate memorial at the union hall was most distressing now. Yet he said nothing, and did his best to protect his wife and me from any defaming that might arise.

Amid speculation of a call to be debarred, Brower resigned on July 5. Coming from the bank, the first person he saw was Mary Jameson, arriving with a certified check for the lumber, ready to take out cash and give bonus. There were tears in her eyes. She had lost so much.

He tried to smile, but his great dignity came unhinged. People now said he was an outsider, not one of ours. How dare he try a man who had won the Victoria Cross? They remembered him dancing too close with Mrs. Mackey as her little husband tittered in the corner.

Unfortunately, the one who fared the worst was Lula. Scathing things were said; she was called whore and worse as she walked our streets, and was seen but rarely.

To everyone she had started the rumors that had killed
Solomon Hickey. And that itself had killed the greatest man who ever came from town, Owen Jameson.

There was even a group formed, called The Friends of Owen.

On July 10, in the midst of summer heat, Lula was seen out at the restaurant with her father to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday. Her hair was blond and lay flat upon her head. Her face and skin were deathly white now. She walked in with her cane and on her father’s arm. The celebration had been planned for a long while. Now it had whittled down through the bric-a-brac of shifting loyalties, and a ten-place setting on that hot evening was reduced to two.

There was bravery shown by both Browers because of this, or in spite of it all.

They were alone, sitting at a table with the silverware glittering under the light. No one came to wait upon them. She looked shallow and small in her new dress with Owen’s small brooch pinned on her breast. She smiled at nothing as she looked about.

They tried to signal the waitress, but no one came. Finally, old Buckler, tottering and half-drunk, who had dined in a room by himself as he’d done once a week for years, saw their predicament and insisted they be treated with respect. He insisted and stayed until they were.

He left without them knowing that he had done so.