The Friends of Meager Fortune (38 page)

Almost no one in the world would be able to find it—it had been, however, discovered by this crew of untamable, hard-living, and generous men.

And now, more hellish, a rogue stamp.

The stamp was found in the most terrible moment, a moment of drink and celebration. Meager Fortune was letting the younger boys hear what Big Ben sounded like. In the midst of this drink and hootenanny on the last night before the
last day of the haul—they were drinking raisin beer they had made after Christmas and had stored in a lock underground, so that the youngest boy, a Childs from Millerton, swaggered drunk from wall to bunk and was put to bed by Gibbs at ten—Meager had fashioned a great bell out of a coat hanger and string. Then he instructed the boys thus: “You tie a piece of string on each end of a hanger, wrap the strings about each index finger, put your fingers in your ears, and rock the hanger until it hits against a wooden wall—and there you have it, my pal: Big Ben.”

The young boys lined up to try it, while Meager was smiling from ear to ear, when one of the cutters who had drunkenly fallen over Meager’s bunk felt under the gray army-issue blanket, hidden well and tucked away, the godawful stamp.

At first he said nothing—but the portent of the disaster was everywhere he looked. All those children lining up to hear Big Ben, and all those men who would bleed to death for their families, in a second, now to be at the last leg of their journey, going home. What did it mean? It could mean that they had only part of the wood they had cut. But the cutter didn’t know—so he called in Claire Mutterly and showed it him. They were in the dark near the side of the cabin where they had fermented their beer, and boys were still lining up for cups to drink the dregs. Already a fist fight had been stopped, over one boy telling another in dire confession that though he had seen the other’s girlfriend’s snatch twice, he had had the fortune to feel it but once. That being taken care of still left the air raw, at this part of the cabin, when Claire Mutterly saw this stamp.

He called Fortune over. But Meager said nothing. He would not say how he had found the stamp or where he had got it from. The argument spread, so that men, laughing and grinning with the celebration going on, slowly stopped, as if some
moving current made them struggle. They turned to listen, their silhouettes against the heated wooden walls and their expressions changing to consternation, which in men who have faced death can be terrifying.

“WHERE!” was heard now above the din of men in Humphreys and dark checked shirts, boots with cork and lining, and socks three months worn on feet that had danced on a scaler’s pitch against the snowbound ridges.

“Where,” was said by others more slowly and with temperate consideration, their smiles now gone, it seemed, forever. The information was spectacular, dazzling, and deadly. Someone had tried to steal their work for Estabrook—and it was of all people little Meager Fortune. And little Meager Fortune sat in a room, surrounded by men, some twice his size, who he had cared about and fed, and walked miles a day to keep alive, and he cautiously smiled kindly, for there was nothing else at the moment he could do.

Tomkins heard the guffaws change to anger while he was outside. Above him the sky was clear and the night was cool. The moon had softened the grand treetops about the cabin, so all seemed tranquil and bathed in light.

He had gone in to see the animals, and had spoken to Pitman about next year, and how he wouldn’t be back for a Jameson but would go with Estabrook after twenty-three years.

“Estabrook is the best man,” Tomkins said with a sugary smile, “because he knows who I am and what I have done.” And this smile then seemed to expand over those trees, and become a part of the light clouds as he spoke. It was poor Tomkins’ last smile for a long while.

As he was turning about he heard the arguing—a kind of primitive, hellish thing that his daddy had always protected him from. He walked from the hovel, over the hundred thousand wood chips treaded into the snow, and heard it increase.
He did not know what it was about until he had entered the door, with its colorful beer caps and its drawing of a mermaid, and walked into the inner sanctum of men. Here was Pitman’s place, he who had cut out trees that would build the house of a millionaire in Europe. Pitman would never see this house. There was Fraser’s bold, small place, he who had done the same and would live another forty-four years after this night and die in Hamilton after telling his grandchildren tales of Good Friday.

“The greatest cut in the history of New Brunswick—and four books written, and I’m in one.”

Here was Bartlett whose 171 finest trees would construct a church where two presidents would hear the offering from God, though neither listened to it. Yet he too would die alone, after seeking for years to have his memoirs published.

Tomkins turned to his left along the smoky corridor between the rows of bunks and saw, as if in his worst nightmare, the handle of the Estabrook stamp, which he was sure he had left in the woods near Arron Brook. It was the smoothest, most benign handle one might ever see in one’s life, and yet nothing is wrong but thinking makes it so. Thinking had turned this benign object into the one telling point of all disaster.

Meager looked up at Tomkins and said nothing. He simply stared at him. His nose was bloodied and his left arm hung down, because they had hit it with the very peavey stamp they now accused him of using, trying to extract some kind of confession. Tomkins, a man like ourselves, could not believe it—Meager Fortune had not spoken, had not said a word about Stretch’s involvement.

Stretch turned and fled, back through the smoky room with clothes stinking and ragged and hanging over poles to dry, and back into the serene night where a moment before
the whole world had seemed joyful to him. His body shrunk as he walked, and his long legs wobbled, as if in fear of being hit. He sat on a spruce stump looking down over the valley of snow and sweet moonlight. His shoulders thinned and his body shrunk down like a mushroom as he tried to escape the thought of what he must do.

Of course, he did not think, What must I do? He thought only, How must I act to extricate myself from all of this? How much time before I could reach the depot at talons? Or anyplace else, if I could last in the woods long enough to do so? Who would ever be the one person to lead me there—the one person? Well, the only person would be little Meager Fortune, who was now being tormented by a group of furious men.

“Woe is me,” Tomkins said, thinking now of his own life of short duration, “woe is me.”

He huddled into himself, corked down lower and lower on the stump as the moon became higher and higher and bathed his ignominious body in more and more benign light. Yes, if only he were as small as Meager Fortune, he could run away. However, little Meager Fortune did not run away from anything or anyone—would not, even if he could.

Only now was Stretch understanding what a horrible part he had played, and who he had sided with in order to play it. And what in fact all his proud vainglory had gained him—nothing at all, not a cent.

This was a breach most serious. It involved Claire Mutterly’s report of eight million board feet. That meant Mutterly would never be allowed to scale again. It meant that Bartlett and the five axmen who had stayed, the teamsters and the cook, the apprentice boys so happy go lucky, and the tend teams too, would have worked half the year in this frozen hell for nothing at all. Pittance even less than what they would have. All
of this had been fine for Tomkins until he began to realize it. Now that he did, he wanted to hide. He must hide. He had to. He wanted the moon to go away, but it wouldn’t. He wanted to take back the stamp and say to Estabrook, How dare you ask me to steal from these men—these men of all men, their trees, the stunted strong who I have laughed at? But he couldn’t bring himself to speak, and when Bartlett passed to say do you know what is going on with little Fortune, Stretch squeaked and sat up straight and then shrunk again to a lump.

He himself, his long spidery legs shaking now in his big ridiculous Humphrey pants, wanted to change places with Meager Fortune, but Tomkins’ own ill fortune at being a coward prevented him.

“I have to make it right.” And he stood up and walked about in a circle and sat on the stump again. “I have to make it right,” he said, and he stood up and walked about in a circle in the opposite direction, and sat on the stump again.

Meanwhile, Meager was not saying anything of value.

“Simply because you found it in me bunk, boys, don’t mean she’s mine—just like someone else’s woman, I suppose, if I suppose I ever would be that lucky.”

He would look from one to another with curious compassion given the circumstances. They would hit him and he would flinch but he would not yell, and when on a few occasions he got a chance he would throw out a punch that when it connected would send his tormentor back.

“The Germans are better at this,” he said, having been in a POW camp for four months in 1945. “Better all around—in fact, if I was gonna be snapped on the head, it’d be by a German—or,” he said lazily, to a cutter he knew to be from
Denmark, “or a Dane. They spent most of the war hidden up Hitler’s arse. Hey,” he said to a French boy, “ya think I could sue fer peace?”

They could get nothing out of him, and the moon came down through the one ragged little window. And once Meager looked, his eye black and his nose broken, and saw Stretch Tomkins looking in at him. He winked.

Beyond that window, out in the shine, without knowing what was happening in the cabin, were teamsters and loaders, making the last loads of the year secure on those old two sleds, their runners buckled by exhaustion. And as high as Richardson’s load was, he wanted more—so, therefore, did Nolan, and Trethewey and Curtis wanted theirs to match his. All of them had decided in the hubris of the moment to “snatch” the load.

“I’ll snatch yours by ten,” Curtis said—and this had now been going on all day and far into the night, with the moonbeams palavering down among them, against the sweet hillocks of snow that still stretched away high and soft through the trees.

The last great trees pulled up out of our great bedeviled mountains.

“The beavers made these trees up here,” Old Trethewey said, “and I hear it was Will Jameson hisself brought in the beaver.”

“Stole them from Estabrook,” Nolan said, spitting his black-as-arse plug.

“So in a way, gave this land to his brother,” Curtis said. “And I heard the other land is rotted.”

The loads now were almost secure, and it was after ten, and boys were up on the top, putting the last tie-down chains across each one, and checking the great runners underneath.

They would hitch the horses up in the morning and roar downhill, one behind the other, to shouts of enormous freedom, and perhaps a photographer, coming to take a picture to show Miss McCord who she missed out on when she laughed at Richardson for having only one arm.

Poor Richardson did not know that no matter what kind of picture was taken, Miss McCord, who had taught a primary grade, would not see it. She had died three years before.

Richardson’s sternness might have come because of this load. But he was in no mood to be trifled with tonight. Not when tomorrow, one load higher than all the others would go down that hill. He could only think now of all the ghosts in the past who had done this, and his name would be just perhaps matched to theirs.

But then Gibbs, his favorite tend team and a boy of not yet seventeen, came over to him and whispered about the trial going on.

“You mean Owen Jameson’s trial, therefore?” Richardson asked.

Gibbs explained that it was not Owen’s trial he was speaking about—but a makeshift one against Meager Fortune where some of the men said they would hang him because of an Estabrook stamp. An Estabrook stamp. The teamsters looked at each other, and made their way to the cabin by 10:30 that night.

“They already have a rope secured over a beam,” Gibbs said, walking behind them. Richardson was the first to arrive, Trethewey behind him. They came in through the crowd, and the crowd parted for them.

“What’s this?” Curtis, who came in also, asked.

“He stamped our logs with Estabrook,” Claire Mutterly said, “and he’ll pay for it, I’ll tell you that.”

“He was the boy who kept us alive most of the winter,” Richardson said. “Why in fuck would he do this?”

“Kept us alive to work for Estabrook,” one of the axmen, a Duffy, said.

“Well, if that is true, he’ll be cut down when he gets out—we’ll take him to court.”

“Well, do it tonight,” Duffy said.

“Then you come against me and we’ll do it tonight,” Trethewey said, at which the lad shrunk.

In fact, the teamsters formed a wall about Fortune, who sat there looking from one to the other in bemused isolation.

“Did you stamp?” Richardson asked.

“No sir,” Fortune said.

“Who stamped here?” Richardson asked.

He looked about at all the faces, bleak and dirty—and because of the very dirt, somehow serene—and missed one. He looked through the window, past the old thermometer, and saw sitting on the stump of that great cedar Good Friday Mountain had been named for, our Stretch Tomkins “shrunked down,” as Bartlett reported in his somewhat overindulgent memoir. Shrunk down and worried, as if on a storm-tossed sea.