The Friends of Meager Fortune (7 page)

Owen was aboard the late afternoon train, on October 17, the one that did not stop.

As the train approached Newcastle, the town had it stopped (which showed for a brief, bright moment Owen’s influence) and men boarded the train and brought Owen off. The men felt there should be a celebration over the fact that Owen had saved Reggie Glidden by crossing a field of withering machinegun fire and taking two bullets for the trouble. It was said Camellia herself begged them to do this, hoping Owen would help Reggie gain his self-respect.

So in a display of affection Owen had never had before, and would not have again, the men got him as drunk as a condemned prisoner, and patches of cold grass at the corner of the buildings looked somehow brighter when the sun shone.

“Let his feet not touch the ground,” they said, raising him up.

These were his brother’s old crew, hard tough men who had little learning save the toughness they lived by—looking upon him now with unaccustomed grace and civility—looking upon him with new eyes, as Will’s blood. They were men who could dance on a log in the middle of rapids strong enough to tear you apart, and were now smiling at him, as one of theirs, with affection as light as a feather in their hearts.

They finally set him down, on the platform, for the very first time among those townsmen who said he was their own.

They held up the old newspaper headline from 1944:
OWEN JAMESON KILLED IN ACTION
.

It was a proud moment for him. Family pride—and the feeling of certain townspeople that they had completely misjudged this second-born—necessitated this.

Lula Brower had sent a note she hoped would be delivered.

SIX

Reggie Glidden, home since the summer of 1945, had left the town on the Miramichi a day or so before Owen arrived.

For weeks after the war Reggie had gone every other day to the station, waiting for Owen Jameson.

Yet over time the talk from old friends about Jameson’s bravery began to wear on him.

Before he married, he admitted to Camellia he felt he had lost part of himself.

“Well, we will get you all back together,” she had smiled.

But there was something else as well. He felt he owed it to Will to keep Owen second. This was the boy who was looked upon by everyone in town as a failure.

As he saw respect for himself draining away, and Will’s name relegated to the actions of a youth, he became bitter.

So over time Reggie Glidden’s desire to celebrate Owen Jameson’s bravery soured and became unnatural to him, while his own death and his young wife’s freedom from him became
more and more paramount. He suspected her, and others exacerbated suspicion.

“Oh, I know she loves me deep down in her heart,” he said.

“Go on—the Browers wanted rid of her, and you would do,” his acquaintance said.

Both were friendless now. Yet her pity for his friendlessness was new. And he could not stand this pity. Sometimes she would just stare at him, from across the room, and in that look he saw what he had not before, a disappointment at who he really was. She smiled at him and took his hand when they went out. But Reggie, plagued by the incident in the war, did nothing but drink by himself. Or if he had money he would drink with others, hoping to find his youth and his joy.

He got into fights like Will Jameson before him. And his young wife would often go in the middle of the night to bail him out with the little bit of money that they had. They were soon two forlorn creatures, and she, without one good skirt or slacks, walking two steps behind him while he cursed the world, imploring him not to make a scene.

Onward he would go, and onward he would curse, and onward she would implore—and onward he would curse her for imploring, and onward she would implore he not curse at her imploring.

Some wondered if their marriage was even consummated.

But drunk Reggie would lay with his face to the wall, wanting no one or nothing for days. “It wasn’t like that—I didn’t freeze in no battle—me gun jammed—and that was that—”

And though this was true, and though others knew it to be true, none cared at all.

The idea that failed men lose their wives is partially true—many drive them away, feeling unworthy.

They said he had frozen in the war—nothing more could be said.

He wanted to drive her away desperately because he saw how little she had and how much she had hoped for that day they were married, when everything seemed so artificial. And he had also seen the look on her face when she realized Owen Jameson was not staying in Europe but was coming home. It was not the elation in her look, as one might think, that disheartened him, but her eventual sadness—as something terrible began to sink into her consciousness. For hours she could say nothing.

She would go and clean for Mary Jameson, and earn fifteen dollars a week, her young body smelling of Lysol and clothes detergent. From that money she would try to put enough away for groceries and heat, and give a dollar to her uncle Sterling. But ashamed in his heart, Reggie would take the money to get drunk.

Once when drunk, he told a crowd of men that it was he who had saved Jameson—but because of Jameson’s name, Owen got the credit. This was the worst lie he could imagine.

So here is what he did to pay himself back.

He had some men chain his left arm to a tying pole in the lumberyard, and he bet them that they could throw pulp sticks at him and he would bat them all down with his right hand. And if not one touched his head, they would owe him a bottle of wine, and if one did touch his head—well, he might be dead, mightn’t he, and might he not be better off? He laughed at his own macabre joke.

It spread around town that this was what Reggie Glidden was doing, and a crowd gathered.

Reggie Glidden like an old bear, hunched over, waiting for the pulp sticks. Each one thrown in the late afternoon, he swatted away with his right arm. The men, at first reluctant,
became more incensed at his prowess and threw them harder, and with better accuracy, as rain started to pelt down over the red muck, making it seem as if the world was being spotted with blood.

Still he batted them away, even as they came so close to his forehead that you would think he had to be hit, and he could feel the tiny scared bits of wood brush his temple.

But then, as men gathered, as people howled, with Reggie Glidden’s right arm so battered and bloodied it would seem impossible for him to swat away another stick, Camellia jumped in front of him.

“Please,” she said, “please, I beg you all—stop now please.” Reggie insensible and grinning, the mad crowd howling in joy.

And Camellia took her man home as he lagged behind in the rainfall, accusing her of sabotaging his good name.

The next morning after he woke, so ashamed he blurted, “Leave me be, for I am damned,” almost willing it to be, his right arm now scarred to the bone.

It was at this time Reggie told her he would not be Push for a Jameson.

“What do you mean?” she said, her eyes startled with tears, her heart pounding like that of a child.

“Nothing, only I have other things to do,” he said.

Neighbors could hear them arguing for a day—the name Owen Jameson being mentioned as the dark, metallic fall night came on. Finally Reggie threw a lamp, smashed it against the wall, and left.

Glidden left town. He told a priest that he would annul the marriage if she wanted and say that he couldn’t have children.

“When will you come back?” she begged. (For it was Camellia
who needed to prove to everyone that this marriage would work—if for nothing else for her own mother and father.)

“I will come back when I am myself,” he said.

SEVEN

On the frozen platform, the hastily arranged celebration for Owen Jameson took place.

“There’s the man who knows Pythagoras,” his old math teacher yelled, and everyone laughed.

“We have defeated tyranny,” someone else exclaimed, and none spoiled the moment by saying “no.”

Owen was brought home in early evening. He was almost falling down drunk, his own mother reprimanding him.

It was a moment for the great barren house, and its people of the woods. A dozen of them stayed overnight.

After ten that night Owen was dragged upstairs to bed. There he saw a girl, the one who was once at Lula’s house, and kissed her. The one who had written him a support letter during the war. She was a beautiful woman. He did not know that she was there late, only to give him the letter from Lula. He said: “You deserve a medal for your beauty, I’m going to marry you—what is it, Camellia?—ya, that’s it—we’ll get married tomorrow.” When she began to protest he laughed and said, “I should have married you before the war—don’t tell me you have someone else—well, we’ll take care of him!”

He swept her hair back with his hand. Her dark eyes looked up at him, a mole on her cheek—her skin was soft brown.

He laughed and kissed her. She pushed him away in an instant, and told him he was drunk.

When he woke the next day a teamster said: “Camellia has something for you—” and winked. His intention was to look as if he was pleased for Owen’s sake. A cold wind blew through the opened door, the hallway seemed to regale in morning light that suddenly ebbed by cloud.

“Who?”

“The little maid whose panties you was in—”

“That didn’t happen,” Owen said sternly.

Two other men looked at each other and laughed, and so did a man at the door, who had come selling apples in a crate.

It had already spread about the neighborhood, and to the town core—even to one of the town drunks, who happened to be Camellia’s uncle. Two of the Steadfast Few, hearing of it that morning, rushed to tell others in their group. They could suppress neither their dismay nor their eagerness to share it. And what had they heard, which they hoped Lula had not—yet: Owen had said he was going to marry Camellia. Had kissed her, and laughed about it, saying he would “take care” of her husband.

Now Owen washed and went to see Camellia in the kitchen.

“You have something for me?” he asked.

She nodded and handed him the VC he had won, which he had pinned to her breast pocket. She told him to button his shirt and take care of his medal.

The rest of the day he tried to find out where she lived, and if he could ask her out, while others just stared at him.

“What about Lula Brower?” The Scot maid said.

“Oh—Lula—I thought she’d be married up to Sonny Estabrook by now.”

When he was told what had happened to Lula he was sorry, but thought no more of it.

“Anyway,” he said, with complete openness, “I was a damn fool not to see Camellia for what she was.”

That night his mother brought him into her parlor, and with yards of knitting, which she had never learned to do, all around her said: “Camellia is Reggie Glidden’s wife. They was married a few months ago—he took to her and Mr. Brower arranged it, so you leave them be.”

Owen stared at her, blood leaving his face.

He simply said: “Why in Christ didn’t someone tell me— I made a mistake.”

He didn’t say “a fool of myself,” for he knew he had done more damage than that.

He limped across the parlor and went to his room. He sat rubbing his left leg, his eyes startled by pain.

“It will pain every day of your life—far more than you think now—and far more than the insults to you because of it,” the doctor had told him in London. “And you must keep vigilant about it, or you will lose it, do you hear?”

Owen inquired about Glidden and said he wanted to see him. But it was all out what he wanted to do with Reggie’s wife, and people did not take his inquiry seriously. Besides, Glidden had left town.

Camellia went home and, as fate would have it, washed the Lysol-stained skirt she had been wearing, and forgot Lula’s letter to Owen in the inside pocket.

EIGHT

Owen had to go to the mill the next afternoon, even though he was preparing to leave town on a train to Montreal. He had his acceptance letter from McGill and found no reason now to stay here.

At the mill he saw his uncle Buckler sitting on a pile of sawdust peeling an apple and reading a magazine. Here he heard his first bad news: they had no good saws—and the cutters had just started a month or so behind.

“Well, when Reggie gets in—things will change around.”

But the problem was Reggie’s pride was hurt.

“He said he wouldn’t be Push.”

“That’s nonsense,” Owen said, “I’ll talk to him.”

Owen then took a cruise of the ground, and saw how they were handling everything. Everything at the mill and in the lumberyard was a mess. It spawned a thousand cannibalized parts to keep it going, and was in its death rattle at the edge of the water.

He came home, went into the office to see what their finances were, and became morbidly aware of the need to stay.

“Where was Reggie for the last year?” he said.

The idea was this: Reggie had not been himself—and Mary had paid him anyway.

After dark he sat out on the veranda smoking, until after the six o’clock train left.

Then he saw Lula. She had taken it upon herself to leave the house, something she seldom did. She was pushed into this by her father, concerned that Owen had not come to visit. The father worried all day thinking that someone—perhaps Camellia herself—had told him how disfigured and ugly Lula
was. And so Lula was compelled by her father, who wanted the world for her from the time her mother died, to leave the house. She hadn’t wanted to, and finally was bullied into it.

“You have to see your fiancé,” Brower said.

If someone who had won a VC would marry his daughter, everything in his life would be fulfilled. That is, her stigma would not matter. She knew this is what he thought, and so did it for him.

She walked slowly up the great old lane at sunset, with the sun flaring in the naked alders on her right. Her red coat and flat blond hair could be seen almost specter-like in the distance. For some moments he did not know who she was. She was plain, and thin, and now walked with a cane. He rose then to meet her, and helped her to the veranda.

He had heard of the stroke and felt sorry for her. But he did not know her anymore. Long ago he assumed she had married. The only letter he had received from any one of those young girls had been from Camellia.