The Friends of Meager Fortune (44 page)

“A road would have been the thing,” one of the men said to Reggie.

“Never mind that now,” Reggie said. “It is not a big problem. See if the peaveys will work on it—take your crew and go to the other side and try to loosen the jam above.”

But the peaveys did not work, though the men gave it their all, calling on each other to “push and be damned.”

The logs were not cleared, and now backed up all the way to the turn.

Reggie studied the water, could see deeper into it than most.

“If I jump-start that fucker there,” he said, pointing down over the falls to the submerged cedar, “we will have out by suppertime.”

It was twenty feet down over this cliff. Wet and cold, a shorebird had come up this far to nest, and kept its place even as the men worked around it. On the shale side were the letters
BJ
—for Byron Jameson, who had lived out here one winter on his own, cutting with one horse and a double-bitted ax.

Reggie, of course, knew all of this, knew all about bravery except how to answer when people said he didn’t have it.

He asked for rope, and with a rope about his chest was lowered down with a peavey, to pry the main log loose and let the rest come down the falls. He did this for honor, though a road would have been better, and for loyalty to the Jameson name.

The trouble with doing this is once the logs start, you have to be pulled to safety in a second by men atop the cliff, in a vital pull to keep you out of the way of those logs coming down over your neck.

The men, a Matheson and a Curry and a Joyce, held on to this rope and teased Reggie a bit as he moved over these logs.

“She’s all as wet as a varr skid,” he said.

“Or a good woman,” another answered.

“Ah, a good woman,” he said.

The men were silent after.

Reggie kicked at one log, pried at another, and said: “It
would
be the day I quit drinking.”

“You quit drinking?”

“Yes,” he smiled, “I will die a free man now.”

He found the cedar—and how the limb had braced it against a rock.

“Ah, this is easy now,” he said. “I have the problem solved, me dunces—” And he moved about as the rope tangled above him.

“Don’t go over any farther,” Matheson cautioned, “or it’ll be a hard pull to get you back.”

But Reggie could only solve it from the far side, down near the bottom of the falls.

So he paid no attention to the warning. He jabbed his pole down, and with every bit of strength in his tired muscled body he felt the cedar move.

“Watch it now—here she blows!” he roared.

Just then the logs began to come.

Some say his rope was too fast by a tangle, when they tried to haul him up, and he was too far from their cliff.

One man, the diver who had looked for him, Harrison Matheson, risked his life reaching down to grab him. But it was no use at all.

Little Meager Fortune came to the door that night to tell us.

“They was all my friends,” he said, tears running freely down his face, his coat opened to the wind, his chest half bare.

So they had become equals once again: Reggie, Will, and Owen.

SEVEN

My mother knew she had broken Reggie’s heart. And this time he left for good to set her free. She had never told him she loved him. Until after he died. Then tears burning in her eyes, she said it almost every day, sometimes looking out onto an empty street.

We say no so often to those who admire us too much.

I heard a Shaver song not too long ago, and I thought of Reggie and my mother:

You’re going to want to hold me
Just like I always told you—
You’re going to miss me when I’m gone

How often had he reached out for her only to have her turn away? Afterward, at night, I often saw her looking toward the door for him to come home just once more, to call his name.

The town, too, was sorry. The funeral was large. People speculated Camellia would marry someone very rich.

Reggie’s statue was placed on Good Friday Mountain along with the teamsters.

He had gone back to the fold the only way he knew how.

“I like the sea,” he told me on the day of my birthday, when he drove me about town in his old truck before he left for the drive, “but I belong to the woods.”

That is all he said. Except, “Would you like a chocolate bar?”

It was the only thing I remember that he bought me. He patted my head. My eyes half blind, I looked up at him. I believe it was the only time he ever touched me.

“If you think that is good—I got something good,” I said, trembling all over as I sat there.

“Ya, what?”

“I love you,” I said.

I don’t remember what he answered. I never saw him again.

He was the last Push for Jameson. They sold out the next year, parts cannibalized and their holdings restructured. Some said they went bankrupt. One night I saw Sterling rushing past us with a truckload of pilfered wood, a smile on his face.

After a time, on long ago summer nights, my mom would go to the Pines dances, and sit alone, and listen to the music of Harold Savage and the Savage Boys, as they fiddled and stomped out the last of an age that was ending. She loved music. She was solitary, mostly alone. Sometimes I would see her walking along our lane, coming home alone with a small present for me in her pocket, once a mouth organ that I learned to play, or bits of colored glass she carried to give the girls who played hopscotch.

We lived on a military pension. She could be talked into buying anything—always saying she would pay for it later. But of course she never had enough money.

At times I remember when collectors were at the door, men vastly experienced at scrounging. We would hide upstairs so
we wouldn’t have to pay, her arm about me and holding her nose, trying not to giggle. A child to the end.

She bought me a record player so I could listen to Gene Vincent: “Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby.”

When I was nine she came home from the Pines with a man I had never seen before. He was sitting at the kitchen table and spoke like a woodsman for Sloan. He had in his time hated and fought both Reggie and Will. My mom did not know this.

I remember seeing the tip of his cigarette as he flicked the ashes into the cuffs of his green pants.

It was May, and I could smell fresh mud and grass. I was alone for a time, awake in my bed. He had a loud voice, serious and cross. She was trying to explain something. But I could hardly see because of my eyes.

“I love May nights,” she said. And, “I never finished school—someday I’d like to.”

I listened to this melancholy enthusiasm and drifted in and out of sleep.

Then the lower hallway light came on. There was a song on the radio. I think it was Hank. I think it was “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

I cannot hear that song now without breaking a radio. Strange, how much I love Hank Williams.

She was so fragile. After a while he was cursing and then called her something and slammed the door.

I got out of bed. She was lying in the living room, vomit in her hair, her skirt pushed up. Her underwear torn off. The man whoever he was, had gone. There were photos on the table. Most were of she and me and dad, she had been showing him.

“I’ll help,” I said.

I ran to the only person I knew—far away. Lula opened the door.

Time had changed her as well. The suffering had changed us all.

“A man beat her up,” I said.

Lula left with me in her black sedan.

It was as if Lula was now of a different world and time, and we were in a past that had already ended. She had married Peabody, the high school principal, after her father had died. Peabody, they said, married her for the money. I will never know.

She went to meetings where they spoke of “preserving our natural heritage.”

She wore her hair back, which made her forehead broad and white. Sometimes she and Peabody went to Florida at Christmas to visit his brother.

So the fiddle music of Harold Savage and the Savage Boys had all but stopped.

Lula told her to go to the police. But Mommy couldn’t. Who among them would believe her? It was to her the most terrible thing she had ever done, asking someone to come into her house.

She tried to put the pictures away, but her hands were shaking.

She asked Lula to forgive her.

“Don’t be absurd,” Lula said.

And then at the door, Lula, once the most self-serving of girls, kissed my mother’s cheek and whispered: “He loved you—he always did—and you loved him.”

It may sound absurd but which one, Reggie or Owen, did my mother have to be reassured about?

Someone phoned my mother to ask her what she was doing, and who she thought she was, and don’t think she hadn’t heard about her shenanigans years ago and her bastard crippled kid. Well, as if they didn’t know!

Then men started to phone her.

The phone would ring—late at night.

She never went again to listen to music.

Sometimes I stood in the hallway all by myself as dark was coming on, saying, “Oh boy,” because she cried and I didn’t know what to do.

She was sure that she had a disease.

In 1968 I found out the man was Huey Gravellier. I took my father’s 303 and went searching for him. I walked right to the wharf with it over my shoulder. Before I got there, I was tackled, charged by police and the weapon taken from me.

“Yer gonna end up like yer fuggin’ granddaddy,” Monroe said.

Meager Fortune died in 1970—on a sunny afternoon in April. He was in his barn painting a small skiff he used to ride the rapids in.

He is buried beside Duncan and Evelyn.

Stretch Tomkins is still alive, and as far as I know has written a first-hand account of Good Friday Mountain. “I blame the bosses,” he wrote.

He and Cora Auger are pals and go out to bingo and cards together—now almost in their eighties, they are figures in our town.