The Friends of Meager Fortune (29 page)

Owen turned his back and stared out the window. The day was pulpy and warm. Finally he sat down on his bunk. He lighted a cigarette and thought. If only he knew what was happening to his men, now that the cutting was more than half through.

“I wish I was there to watch them,” Owen said, so the jailer looked up from his magazine.

SEVEN

The sky was low, and all day a breeze warmed Tomkins’ face, making him open his coat and stretch into the sun. He stayed out almost an hour after the last of the two sleds went back up the hill, stamping logs with Estabrook’s stamp.

There was a smell of tin in the air, prevalent close to the night, and the dreary sound of the wind against his parka, like snow scattering on tarpaper. It was at about four when the wind started to turn a little cold. Tomkins hid the peavey with the wrong stamp, picked up the other one, and started toward the camp.

He was hungry and lonely and heading toward home along the skid road.

The sky had darkened and Tomkins was miles from anywhere, in a sad empty space unknown by ninety-nine percent of humanity. The cold now seeped through his jacket lining, where he kept the rest of his money.

He had been going to pick up a ride with the last two sled, but the two sled roared by in a whiff of winter horse and a clot of snow while he was doing his business in the woods. He had run out to call them but had tripped—and the old horses were gone. There would be another two sled along—Curtis’s—but not for two or three hours—well after dark Curtis would make his way back, with a lantern light up near his horses fore shoulders, dangling on a peculiar makeshift rod. It was a way to tell Curtis from all the others. But Tomkins, looking behind him into the desolate emptying of the day, saw nothing. He worried about panthers. For they were still here, in these great lost woods.

His boots were soaking, his fingers raw.

He turned and began to walk on boots almost frozen toward the camp miles away.

He zippered his coat as tight as he could and pulled his hat down tighter upon his bald head.

He remembered all the stings against him, many given by his father, and tried his best to forget them. That is why Stretch always made fun of others whom he deemed inadequate, because his father had made so much fun of him. That is why he called them little men and pipsqueaks, for he himself felt so little in his soul.

As he walked along the brook road, he realized he had never been in the dark before without someone to show him the way.

After a while worry crowded his senses and he began to think he was no longer on the path. He might be in the middle of the field of Jack pine, going in the other direction. If that was the case he might stumble over the second cliff that ran down from Good Friday into the back of Arron Brook. He would be lost in the maze of Jack pine in a second.

He lighted a match to look, but the match went out in the wind, and at any rate showed only his fingers. It was now pitch dark.

He began to call, and stumble forward: “Daddy—”

When he stopped, his voice echoed about him, above him, behind him, and then the wind again began to moan in the trees.

He felt he couldn’t make it back to the camp. With this in mind he began clawing the snow with his gloved hands, to burrow a tunnel away from the wind. For now all he wanted was to get down out of the wind. He dug over two feet of dry hard snow, and slipped down under it, looking up at the sky.

He then searched for something to burn. But there was nothing. Only what was left of his bonus, in his pocket. He sat
with his knees up, shivering. In a while there was only deathly silence. The wind had stopped, except for the occasional bluster from across the field. Tomkins knew by the taste of the air that the temperature was about to drop below minus thirty, or minus thirty-five. It had been so warm that day that he had sweated, and he had enjoyed the sweat on his back. Now his body felt like ice. He would be dead within two hours.

He could not burn his bonus. Burning his bonus would be worse than death.

Why had he come up here?

He put his money in a little pile in the snow, picked out his last match and looked at it. The snow burned his hands it was so cold, when he piled the money up. Here, surrounded by a billion tons of wood, Stretch Tomkins was about to burn his money, his wide face and wider mouth in a kind of a carpish, elastic grin. But then: “Mr. Tomkins!” he heard. “Mr. Tomkins—for Jameson—Tomkins!”

He paused, and heard it again. Far, far away, but coming closer. He waited, and then it was unmistakable. Like an angel—though Tomkins did not believe in angels.

“I’m here—I’m here!” he roared, grabbing his money. “I’m here—please—good God, I’m here!” He stuffed his money into his pockets with fingers so numb he could not feel them.

Who was here to search for him? Who would it be—who would have come for him—if anyone? He waited ten, fifteen minutes.

And then, walking out of the dark, he saw the tiny, eager, smiling face of Meager Fortune.

When Tomkins had not arrived in the two sled, Meager said they had set out searching.

“Who—”

“Half the camp.”

“Really—for me?”

“Yes, of course.”

This was not true—most of them simply believed a man should take care of himself. Meager was the one who had worried.

“I’ll give you money—here—money for finding me,” Tomkins said.

“I don’t want your money—and don’t parade money, or they will get you into a card game sure as hell.”

“They will—who will?”

“Them boys who are the ones to play,” Meager said.

So Tomkins stuffed his money away again.

Now Meager had to force him to walk, and so told him of all the times he had been sick, just to keep him moving. Of once when he fell down a shoot into a dam of water, with his parka on. They had to lift him out by crane, a line hooked to his back. And when he was cranked out he was frozen stiff, like an abominable snowman. But, he told Tomkins, not only did he not get sick, but his cigarettes didn’t even get wet. Why? Well, because all of his outer clothes had frozen solid and left him snug as a bug inside the ice, and the only thing he could move as they took him to a stove to thaw open his zippers was his eyes.

But that wasn’t all, he said.

Why, he lived in a house where the space between the boards allowed you to see the traffic going by on the street, so he could tell who had new cars.

“Try that on for size if you don’t think it’s cold,” he said. And besides that, he had to wake every morning and shovel snow out of his bedroom window, because every night he would have a drift come in. Besides that, the rats would run over his bed, in twos and threes, and he would play a game where he would grab them by the tail and toss them out the window.

“But then again, try an outhouse in January—well, of course, you have tried that—I know—I’ve seen you in the outhouse many times. Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Tomkins, it’s just our humanity.”

Then he told Tomkins about his family—his little boy, Duncan, and his wife, Evelyn. And he told him the secret he had told no one else except Missy and Butch—that is, that Evelyn and his little boy Duncan had died in a fire when he was in Europe. They had died on June 5, 1944.

“I miss them,” he said, and he coughed. “Isn’t then that a nice name—Evelyn? I think it’s the finest name in the world. I was in Europe, it was June 6—I had not heard they had died—we were pinned down just off the beach, the Germans throwing those fuckin’ potato mashers on us. And I get caught—a potato masher gets caught in my jacket—honest! And there I am thinking I’m done for—even more than the time I froze solid—yet out of the blue this lad comes takes the masher and throws it in the air and jumps on me. So I’m saved, Mr. Tomkins, and I said to the lad: ‘What’s yer name, son?’ And he looked at me with the finest eyes and kindest smile I ever knew and said, ‘Sir, my name is Evelyn.’ And I had never seen him before or after.

“Here—I almost forgot—have some soup—I made it myself—I’m becomin’ nothin’ if not sort of a half-arsed cook—”

Tomkins drank the soup and kept saying, “Thank you, thank you,” whenever Meager told another story.

Meager kept talking, and kept saying: “Come, Mr. Tomkins, come, come.”

“I only want my daddy to be proud of me—he was so tough I never measured up,” Stretch said.

“Well, what nonsense,” Meager answered. “I know your father—you just keep walking and we’ll get there and your dad
will be proud of you. You don’t think he is—well, I will tell you—yes, yes, yes—he always says he is when you aren’t there.”

They hobbled disjointedly down the road, one voice of humanity to another, both making echoes into the void.

When they came up finally to the last long hill toward the camp, Meager holding Tomkins under the arm, Stretch was a witness to the strangest sight in the world.

Lanterns had been placed at every turn on that long hill down the ravine, burning like glow-worms on the frozen, scattered sled path slick with ice, and up on the two sled—with 175 logs piled high—was Richardson. He was ready to start the first load down at night. That is why Nolan, long ago, wanted space near the foot of the hill, and Gravellier called him crazy.

Tomkins passed the sled by and looked up toward Richardson’s scarfed face, the fine horses with black harness as black as bolt air, while scuds of snow blew up against the two sled’s long runners and through the harsh and piled timbers, and the little dog Nancy whined waiting for a handout.

Richardson made no sign to Tomkins, but catching him in the corner of his eye, dropped his colored scarf, spit his plug, and whipped the animals down into the void Stretch Tomkins had just escaped.

He heard the sled go down and heard the horses whinny. He watched starkly, shivering, as the back of the sled disappeared beyond snowdrifts toward the bottom turn.

“Is he really doing that, Meager?” Tomkins said, his mouth split open by the cold, and trying to catch his breath.

“Yes, he is,” Fortune said. “Trethewey, Nolan, and Curtis will do it too.”

They had rebuilt the camp from the battered timber and hung tents about it like sealskin. But at times the wind caught it mournfully, and people would say it was the ghost of Will Jameson watching them.

When Tomkins got into camp, the first thing he did was take off his wet boots and parka—and when he did, the money he had gathered up fell in a hump on the floor. He stroked it up quickly and went to his cot to count it, while a ten-dollar bill fell behind him, and then another. Bartlett picked these up and brought them over, laying them beside Tomkins. The men looked at each other cautiously.

Tomkins looked at them all, and turning away continued to count.

“One hundred, one-twenty, one-forty,” he said aloud. And then realizing they were listening, took off his hat, put it on a nail, and began counting again, his lips feverish and the lantern above him glowing on his bald head.

The men went back to eating their stew—saying nothing when Tomkins came to the table.

“Some cold—we had to walk a fair piece tonight—hey Nolan—you shoulda held up for me,” Tomkins said, rubbing his hands together and looking at them. “Pass down the stew—will ya—that’s the ticket. Meager tells me his house is so old you can see right though the walls—boys, it must be a pretty cold place to take a piece off your wife there, Meager. Her old twat must be cold when you grab at it.”

Meager looked at him, his small face looking hurt, but then nodded.

“You’re right at that, Mr. Tomkins—you got me a peg.”

PART VI

ONE

I was asked if work in the woods ground to a halt because of the trial. It did come to a halt, but it might not have had anything to do with the trial. For instance, at Sloan’s on the Tabusintac the buzz saws froze, the chains became embedded in the cedar trees, a man lost his leg by a saw jump, and no real axmen had been hired, for Sloan used inexperienced men to buzz saw to save money. In fact he had fired the best men he had that year, Simon Terri and Daniel Ward. Then the snows came, as deep as any since 1908. It was the same storm that caught the Prince family out in the open, and froze a couple starting out on their honeymoon from the Church of the Great Nativity.

Sloan came to a halt sometime in February and could not start up again until late April, when the roads opened enough to allow the trucks he had hired to get in. He was a visionary who had lost his gamble this year. He cursed and swore everyone up and down, under a spell of depression, and sent men to report to him about the progress on Good Friday, for everyone was interested now in the great cash of wood that had been found there.

Estabrook was at a halt because his entire cut was poor. They had not allowed a scaler near, and the men were worried about
working for nothing. The worst of them had taken to going on forays to try and steal other cutters’ wood. The Push tried his best to keep their spirits up but finally told them to leave. Estabrook, knowing this to be the case, felt he would be the laughingstock of the province the first year he took over the reins of business from his father.

That is, Sonny Estabrook was the first to realize what became in the next twenty years common opinion, and what I have researched to a stalemate in the last fifteen months. That he, in cruising the large tract of immature Jameson timber after Will’s death, was the most likely to have carried the very blight on his boots, into the stand he would challenge the Jamesons for. With the first reports now coming to him, he was just beginning to realize this great irony as the trial began.