The Friends of Meager Fortune (10 page)

“She’s a gold digger,” she whispered piously. “It’s what I hear downtown at the cookie shop—I go for Mrs. Jameson and it’s what I heard.”

“I’ll go tell her,” he said.

“Don’t you dare,” she said.

“Well—let me see—what is she doing now?—ah, there she is—she is out playing hopscotch in the back lane with your granddaughter—a scurrilous thing. And she speaks to people as equals—young and old—a terrible thing—and she finds beauty almost anywhere—a maddening thing.”

“Hopscotch can’t fool me—or beauty—” the old lady mumbled (and rejoiced in her mumbling).

But hopscotch was not Camellia’s only fault. Her hiking up her skirt as she did the floor was something too, which he had witnessed coming downstairs one morning. She looked up at him as he stared down at her almost-naked thighs.

“Oh God, ya saw my bloomers,” she said, pulling her skirt down. “There is usually only women here this time a day.” And she laughed, shrugged as if to shrug off embarrassment, both his and hers, and kept working.

More to the point, he was saddened by her being on her hands and knees, and told her he wished she didn’t have to do it. She was so beautiful then that he caught his breath as he spoke.

“Oh, I don’t mind nothin’ like this,” she said.

“What do you do?” he said, another time, seeing small bits of ribbon in her pockets.

“Oh dear,” she laughed, “well, you caught me good for thievin’.” She explained that the ribbons were off Mary’s knitting baskets, and she was taking them to tie back three or four young girls’ hair who lived in the neighborhood—and “who had little to make them look pretty.”

“Then you take all you want,” he said.

However, going into the woods, Owen felt things would straighten out, and he had a long, cold winter ahead.

Owen also knew it was great timber, but didn’t exalt—for it was a hard, long way from the water, and no easy road down that great precipice. He was silent about such blessings. He had the letter of acquisition but knew Bots allowed him this quota on Good Friday Mount because he felt guilty about his slip of the tongue that day years ago.

After three weeks of preparation Owen went in to camp with the Clydesdales, Missy and Butch, Missy Butch’s mother, to further the road and bring in supplies. All day he rode in behind them, on a two sled hauled over snowy gravel, with Innis the portager leading him on and cursing the horses at regular intervals, until Owen told him to stop, for the horses could not answer back and so it wasn’t fair.

They stopped to rest along the flats beside Arron Stream, and could see the high ground rising up before them—already
testing the horses to sweat—as they drank tea and ate a cold lunch. All along this flat in the coming months, they would have their timber yarded up on skids, waiting for the break in the weather. Owen pictured it all in his mind’s eye, and for some unknown reason shuddered. Innis saw this shudder and Owen replied: “We better head up to it, or it’ll be evening soon.”

They arrived at evening and Owen went to the hovel, making well sure his horses were tended to. Smoke came from the camp stack, and lay serene in the icy air, which was thinner here, and made the cough of the horses distant, and the footfall of the men crack against the brittle ice. It grew suddenly dark among these sounds, and then the wind picked up as snow began to fall.

A week before (the first time he was in camp) he had had it out with his teamsters. At that time he went to Mr. Gravellier, a lead teamster, and asked if he would be able to move his Belgians, the smallest yet toughest of the big draft horses, down that steep grade that they had managed to make, cut out and cursed at, that plummeted from the top cut on the mountain to Arron Stream.

“The devil’s back,” one swamper called it. And the name stuck.

Owen wanted to know if he had the right teamsters to go down such a decline. It was a sheer drop to the river, with a wild turn to the right to cross the Bailey Bridge.

From the first, this cut up on Good Friday was considered a terrible place—and it was not just those teamsters who thought so, but ordinary people.

Mr. Gravellier had been subcontracted to hire his own teamsters—and he had done this, and Owen knew some of the men but not all. Gravellier was in the hovel, in a black coat and red braces, smoking a pipe, when Owen arrived, and soon left to go back toward the cut, looking over his shoulder at the boss.

People everywhere were giving Owen advice on who and who not to hire, each person having their own prejudices and dislikes. Owen had waited for Reggie, but Reggie had not come. So now Owen himself acted Push.

Gravellier’s teamsters, their names nailed to the wall, were Colson, Davies, Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins, and Lloyd.

Owen had chosen Curtis and Trethewey to come in when their teams were ready. He chose Richardson and Nolan, who were already there.

“How far up is we past the Arron Brook proper?” Gravellier had asked that day a week ago. He had a gaze that implied a continual questioning of the one he spoke to, as if the one he spoke to was suspected of something dishonest. The gaze did not diminish when one was answering him, but fastened to the man’s face as if trying to discover lie or weakness. Nor did he ever agree with anything that anyone said. The closest Gravellier came to accommodation was not to disagree. If he disagreed, he would disappear into the woods and sit with his horses, or cause a mutiny—that it was too dangerous, or poor, or cold, or whatnot—and would connive to convince those with him to leave.

He had done so on other sites and Owen knew this, but had no choice. He was starting late as it was. There was talk about him already as it was.

But that day a week ago, Owen answered Gravellier with the same querulous, quizzical look he gave: “Twenty-seven miles—from that bridge to the proper brook—hard and rough all the way. I will say it won’t be a light time for any of your men or your horses—any inexperienced teamster better hold off. The horses will be worked, no doubt about that—but I want to know if you can go down that grade. We have dammed the stream and plan to use it to float out to the brook—and from there to the river—”

“Down where?” Gravellier asked.

“Why, down here, sir—right here,” Owen said, throwing over a stick.

Gravellier asked to speak with his men. They held a conference standing along the skid road. The wind so strong that it blew the men’s pant legs like they were standing before the propeller of a plane.

After a time Gravellier came back: “What my men is thinking is we can go around—meet it from the other end—have a longer road.”

“We could if we had two years,” Owen said, turning away and holding the bridle on the little roan named Dixie, who had gone skittery in the gale. “We wouldn’t get half the wood yarded. The men will have to go down here—” and he pointed down, into a narrow path between shale rock and cliff, where the snow swirled up in tormented circles, called the devil’s belly.

Owen’s hair was cut short, his eyes as penetrating as any Gravellier.

“That might be impossible,” Gravellier said.

“If you think it is impossible, I will hire the teamsters who don’t. You’ll all have bonus in the end! But it has to be down here—the boys made time making this road and the bridge, and I’m not going to waste it by not believing in ourselves. Buckler oversaw it, and he knows something about this mountain. We are already a good two weeks behind Estabrook, three behind Sloan—”

Gravellier did not think Owen would know he would balk. But Owen had known from the moment he first spoke to him.

“How much is bonus?”

“Bonus is two hundred,” Owen said calmly. This was a great deal of extra money for a teamster then.

“I’ll see,” Gravellier said, and he went to sit in the woods with his horses, not confiding in anyone, not even Colson. Colson
didn’t know who to agree with. Sometimes he agreed with Gravellier, sometimes with Owen—and sometimes he stood between the two, nodding his head at whatever anyone said.

Now he shook his head at the idea of going over such a hill as that.

The next day when Nolan and Richardson arrived, they said they would go over the hill to the brook.

“And drink a pint on the fuckin’ way down,” Nolan said.

It would save hours on every trip. It would therefore save money, and the horses as well.

Colson and Tomkins (speaking for Gravellier, who chose not to) said no horse should go where Richardson and Nolan decided—and tried to talk them out of it by appealing to their knowledge of horses and loads—something they felt Owen, as green Push, did not know. But Nolan said it could be done, and had to be done, and once the horses got used to it, it would be no problem at all.

“In fact, it must be done,” he said. “And the long road around would tear the horses up in the end, just slower.”

This had been the standoff, the men on both sides blaming each other for bad husbandry, and calling each other names like children standing in a schoolyard—ferocious and hard—while the sun bled through the naked trees and lighted slimly on the one-paned window of the forlorn camp.

Owen knew that whatever he decided would harm his relations with half his teamsters. He couldn’t help but think that a wrong decision here would cause a terrible blow later.

“What would Reggie decide?” he thought. But he cursed himself for this and decided thus: “Nolan—take the first load over with Miss Maggie Wade and Mr. Stewart and see if you can make it across the bridge without losing your load. If you make it across without losing a stick, I’ll buy you some good plug.”

Gravellier muttered something out of the corner of his mouth to the men gathered about him shaking their heads. He broke wind for spite. Tomkins shook his head for spite. Colson shrugged for spite.

Then Gravellier turned and walked back into the hovel while his teamsters looked back at Owen, and then followed Gravellier. The clouds covered the sky and it began to rain in heavy pellets, against their already half-washed-out downhill.

The two sled was loaded in the freezing rain late that afternoon, by Pitman and Fraser, and before suppertime Nolan, a short man with broad arms who had a face like an owl, climbed onto the two sled over the first load of timber, and at twilight of November 19, with the waif of smoke coming from the cookstove, mingling harsh smoke with the smell of dying leaves, the smell of wet tin and bark in the air, Nolan looked down at a drop that seemed to plummet into the void.

“Let’s see, here—I go from his mouth to his guts—to his arse—very best.”

The other teamsters came out from the evening shadows and walked to the edge to watch, like children looking down a great hill.

“Don’t make a wrong turn in his guts,” Richardson advised.

Once Nolan climbed the timber, sticking his boots between the logs as if he was climbing a mountain, he was, even with this small load, almost six feet above the horses’ ears, and the timber though sound would tip in an instant if not hauled right, even with the tie-down chains. He calmed his horses, especially Miss Maggie Wade, by whistling to them, and then whispering something no one else ever heard. These two Belgians, tough as nails with short broad legs, had hauled his great loads for the masters for six years.

Nolan knew if the sled slid off to the right on the way down, he would lose his entire load over the cliff. He seemed to think of this at the exact same time as Owen did. He walked the load to check it, then came to the front again and stared down the precipice while he kicked at the chains.

“I’ll be on my way, boys,” he said. “No snow in the quiff’s belly will slow me—”

Owen paced back and forth with his wounded leg paining.

He knew some, like Stretch Tomkins and Colson, would want Nolan to lose this load, and perhaps his life, to prove that they should go around. He had noticed what type of men they were. Gravellier would then have accomplished a good deal, and his name would be heard of in town, as having advised an inexperienced boss, named Owen Jameson, the VC winner. He knew Nolan was doing this for him, without knowing him and with a shrug of his shoulders, because of his name and Will’s. That, on this mean scowl of a day, was faith.

It was a desolate place, this mountain. An article written in the
Leader
in October of 1946 states this implicitly. It also states that the entire town was watching them—to see if they would be able to work there. Estabrook, the main rival, was watching most closely.

At first the town had championed Owen Jameson’s pluck—but now it was more reticent about what might happen.

Even in the summer the heat never seemed to ripen the adolescent blueberries that grew on the mountain’s side ledges. Five men had lost their lives here since 1903—which was the talk of our newspaper editor, a man not from here.

The trees however were of a stronger stuff, bent and gnarled they rose upwards, passed all obstacles and still towered above the heads of the axmen, who had to crawl over mountains of felled logs like ants, day in and out, covered in snow—and already twice this year falling into the dens of bears.

“Small bears,” the axman who killed both said.

Owen felt sudden aching sadness in the wind now, through to his soul, the carcasses of those bears pinned to the wall behind him, like forlorn and graceful reminders of man’s inherent thoughtlessness.