The Friends of Meager Fortune (15 page)

Reggie decided to walk these poles or not live. To prove to himself that he was still what he once was.

There was silence from the streets above, and amid the winter gales he stood alone—blasted in the furnace of snow, seeming far removed and isolated from other people—even from humanity itself. He wore a black coat and his heavy bent workboots, his shirt opened and his chest hair damp with snow and sweat.

“They’ll be slippery,” he said, looking up at the pulsing sky.

Just as Owen had once decided he would not go home, Reggie decided if his task succeeded he would forever leave the river and its people. That their tormenting had destroyed what he had loved here. You cannot love the soil where your soul was mocked by lesser men. So he was here and now saying goodbye to Camellia Dupuis, that lively, kind-hearted girl who had married him almost without thinking on that gray day six months before, but who had warred for him because of it.

Still, how many times had they made love in their entire marriage? Five times, the last two nights before he went away.

Was he insane to think then of leaving her to others? Or to risk his life on the rod of logs above his head?

Perhaps, but good men are often their best when not hobbled by sanity. He looked up high.

He caught a glimmer of what was in store for him now. If he went back to work, no man would say a thing to him, and no man would forget what was said about him or his wife.

In a practical way, he must challenge the gods in order to have his humanity returned. He did not know great men wrestled the gods at all times, under all circumstances. That Will had as a boy of eighteen, and Owen had as a man running across a burned-over field.

He only knew two things. One was that he cared for Owen, and could not harm him. The other was that he was actually
quite brave in the war. Even as brave as Owen. That he could have, if he had just enough reason to do so, told people he had been brave.

But he was ashamed of so much else.

He was alone, and no one could help him. Always men stood in the middle so as to have support. His support now gone, he remembered the dismissal of men who had once sought his advice. Smiling tauntingly at him. Before, and proudly, he had contempt for all of them. Perhaps humility is what God sought from us, perhaps it was the only thing required.

He walked down to the poles at midnight. He took off his heavy coat. It had bore the brunt of his fist against the wall, and had spots of blood upon it.

He braced himself in the pelting snow, to prove who he was, if only to himself.

He had promised he would take care of Owen in the war. And he had not. He did not at this moment think that a million people had hoped to take care of theirs in the war, mothers and fathers helpless and desperate, and had not been able to.

Taking a breath he walked straight up the tarred, blackened pole looking out over the great, dark river. If, as Will once said of him, he was a “prince of the forest,” then he was a lost one, just as in those pages of
Lear
that Owen carried onto Good Friday. Or as Macbeth had heard, the forest would come to him, as it had so abruptly to Will. But having never heard of William Shakespeare, what did that matter?

He hated the logs that jutted into the open. He knew them too well. He, of course, had placed them there, fitted them when he was twenty. He walked right up to the tip of the first one, some twenty feet above the river ice. It swayed and teetered back and forth, he remembered now on what arc it swung.

“I’m for the fuckers now, Will,” he said.

Here, into the black, sad sky, he jumped.

PART III

ONE

Owen Jameson and Camellia Dupuis would never know when this “energy,” this “force” that alienated them from the town, started. Nor were they entirely sure at first that they both were targeted. Camellia had found a friend in Owen—and, since orphaned at seven, it was the first friend she had ever had. Still, she was too carefree to see that it was dangerous to have a male friend—a rich one, too, and one she could easily be seen to love.

She did not recognize this as others did, or even consider it as others did. Not with the man who had saved her husband.

Her character was such that if she didn’t think disgrace, why should they?

Only a little later did she realize the much more volatile truth. She found this out when she went to ask a woman on her street why she forbade her child to see Camellia after school.

The woman came outside, closed the briny half-wrecked door, and coughing in the dark, cold air said: “Yer fuckin’ him, arncha?” In such a hilarious anointing of blame that Camellia laughed.

Camellia was finally hit with the realization of how her own grace was treated by others.

“Tell yer child to come over anytime,” she said, still managing a smile. “We get along so well—you see I’m not much more than a big kid myself.”

There was a statuette at the house, bought by Will, of
The Kiss
by Rodin. It was from Dante’s
Inferno;
adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, kissing at the gates of hell. Though Will had not known what the statuette actually represented, Owen did. And he knew that he and Camellia were branded by a kiss.

It was a silly moment, his frivolous kiss.

From this kiss a liberty had been taken, not by them but by certain people in town who by December of 1946 wanted or needed them for scandal. It was such a lively thing after the war.

That Owen bore men up to the Good Friday without his Push Reggie Glidden, was all the town needed to feel rumor warranted.

That Reggie had married Camellia was looked upon as a crudity marrying a child. It was in fact hilarious, and showed the Browers for who they were.

Looking back, one might say who better than Camellia, who more than anyone else had tried to maintain her equilibrium despite her father and her mother. Who had tried to keep her uncle Sterling out of jail, and who had married Reggie hoping for a happy life, or at least a life without trouble.

Now people were turning their gaze upon her.

Almost every night that fall, Uncle Sterling would be waiting for money. She told him that Owen was her friend—and that Reggie would come home because she prayed for him to do so.

“Do you really pray?” Sterling would ask, “or do you just go up to church for show because of Les and Trudy?” (her father and mother).

“Oh yes—I tell you, I go to church—and I do pray—I say an Our Father and multiple Hail Marys—for I want my man back home safe.”

“Ahhh—your man at home,” Sterling would say, raising his eyes in false and cunning intrigue.

Over the dim, longing, guttered candles she prayed, as her great-grandmother had done in the same spot a century before, her head bowed, her hands folded like a child at confirmation, as the night crept silently on.

But after a while, she realized she couldn’t say anything to Sterling because he was taking it wrong and telling people everything she said.

She became sickly looking and had weak spells after this. Her whole idea of what was happening changed.

So she tried then not to speak to Owen. But by mid-December things were bound in one direction.

The cave
, one of Lula’s Steadfast Few wrote her in a Christmas card.
It happened at the cave—you know certain women go there to wait for lovers—that is why her mother was killed, because of Byron Jameson—well, like mother like daughter. A certain soldier went there to wait for a woman—that that woman was your best friend and that you were betrothed to the soldier makes it all the more mean. And makes us all so angry
.

Every sentiment recorded in this letter was a lie, even the idea that Lula’s friends, who no longer visited her, were angry. Yet Lula had nothing else to hold on to. And she believed it entirely at least for the moment, even though she herself had started it.

TWO

The day after Reggie in secret ran the top of those poles, a day overcast with sudden apprehensive squalls of snow, and the big tree being lighted in the square, there was a phone call to the house—the thirty-third day of the haul.

Camellia had arrived on this cold day, having walked up the hill in the soundlessness of early morning.

It had been almost three weeks since she had heard a word from him.

“He’s probably run off,” Sterling had said. “Run off why?” she had replied.

“Oh, you know—he’s probably heard all about it,” Sterling had said, winking.

The phone call then concerned what she most feared in her life: Reggie’s disappearance. No one knew where he was. He had been missing some while—four or five days now.

“Is he home?” his cousin from Saint John asked.

“No—he wouldn’t come home—I have been waiting to hear from him.”

“But he said he was going home,” his cousin stated. “He said you wanted him to come home—he was going home to see you and be Push.”

“But he said he wouldn’t come—” Camellia said.

The cousin, Billy Monk, was silent for a moment, then added in a sterner voice: “Something is not right here, Camellia—I mean, why would he tell me you needed him home if he wasn’t going there—?”

Before she could answer or even think of a possibility he had hung up.

A Detective Gaugin of the Saint John department then
phoned Camellia, first to ask if Reggie was at home, and then to tell her her husband, if not at home, was missing—unless he was on his way home.

There was no dispute on the dock, so then was there a domestic dispute? He asked all of this as if he was offering a prize for the correct answer—and he already knew all about her, this Mr. Gaugin. (For he had heard much from Billy Monk that he would not argue—first that she was the daughter of the “violent criminal” Les Dupuis who had killed his philandering wife in a domestic dispute.)

“There was no domestic dispute,” Camellia said. It was the second time in her life she had heard the phrase “domestic dispute.” Like the word
adultery
, another word she had not heard in many years, it would become more and more common to her as time passed. It would become almost riveted in her brain, like a teamster would rivet a runner to a birch pole.

“Then what was he doing in Saint John?”

Camellia did not answer. Not for her sake, but for Reggie’s.

“Did you argue the last time you spoke to him?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, and though not wanting to, she started to cry.

“Well—try to remember,” Detective Gaugin stated. “And try to stop blubbering,” he cautioned.

Camellia ran to the large old office to see Owen, who was preparing to meet with Mr. Trethewey, the owner of the big black Percherons. He was coming north to help them even though he was an old man now. It was to be his last hurrah— Good Friday Mountain.

“Something has happened to my Reggie,” was all Camellia said. Her face was frightened in a kind of surprised and reflective attitude, as if she expected Owen to tell her what was happening, that everything was a surprise for Christmas. She
was ready to smile at this delusion if he allowed it. Again she looked like that child of seven who was left waiting for her father.

Owen phoned Saint John but got no answer at Reggie’s cousin. Now Camellia was frantic—and it was the frantic, guilty state others were to notice and reflect upon her today.

“She’s worried now,” the older maid said, thinking this was unusual unless someone was unusually guilty. “All her kissing has done her in!”

Now the entire household was caught up in this event. It was the start of something that would last for months, seeping through the carpet and furniture like the smell of horses.

Sometime later a call came from the town police.

They had found Reggie Glidden’s jacket at the conical poles near Jameson’s old family warehouse, and Chief Crossman wondered what he had been doing there, and why Owen hadn’t told them he was in town. Here Owen made his first mistake, angered by this disruption, worried for Camellia’s sake, and feeling the pain in his leg he snapped: “I didn’t know I had to inform you of him.” Realizing this was not the best response, he added, “Besides, I don’t know why he was there. Are you sure it is his jacket?”

“Yes—”

“How?”

“Well, it has his name stitched into it—maybe by Camellia herself,” Crossman said, as if this act of domesticity was part of the proof of culpability. “But even so, she might come to identify it—and there is something else we found we might just talk to you about.”

“Where is it again?” Owen asked, trying to fathom what was being said.

“Well it was on your property,” Crossman stated, as if, since
this was a revelation to him, it should in some way frighten Owen Jameson.

Owen made perhaps another fundamental mistake. He simply hung up.

“He might have gone to your place,” Owen said. “Let’s go there.”

“But I have to wax the hallway floor here,” she said.

The old maid smiled, taking this as a ruse.

“Not now,” Owen answered angrily. This frightened her even more.

They went to Camellia and Reggie’s small house. Clothes hung over the side grate, a piece of toast was half eaten that morning, but it was not Reggie’s.