The Friends of Meager Fortune (40 page)

Yet if it was true that anyone had stamped their logs with the wrong stamp—even a partial yard—they would be furious.

Tomkins did not know how to escape. Except for most of the night he spoke in a soft and soothing voice to Meager. “Why did you do it?” he asked, just loud enough for others to hear. “You can tell me, Meager—was it because of your wife and children—what was it for, to ruin these men—”

Finally Meager spoke. “Your famine caused this.”

“What famine is that?” Tomkins asked.

“The famine in people that rips us all apart. That’s what I think,” Meager said.

He said he had started to think about this in the war.

“What?” Tomkins snapped.

“That men have rid themselves of God, and are famished, and therefore do terrible things to make such famine go away.” Meager’s face looked peevish in the light after he spoke, unused to making such pronouncements.

Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins was silent. At one time he had thought he would be in a great revolution—like the ones they had in places like Spain—and he would be “instrumental” in New Brunswick politics. He had used this idea and this hubris to do something deadly to men he had worked with, and as the night went on, a solid mass of fear crept over him, so for moments he couldn’t move his boots, or his legs in his great big Humphreys, or his fingers, or even his ears.

Why had this happened? What had possessed him except the very famine Meager spoke about, which allowed his lying and deceit. Carefully it was crafted to weave about him a web in which fear caused him paralysis.

When Tomkins looked over, Meager was curled up on half a bunk sound asleep. A child with no cares who had, it was reported, escaped from a German POW camp in 1945 and spent a month fighting alongside the Russian army pressing toward Berlin.

The Russians called him Misha and gave him sweets and adopted him as one of their own.

That night, while Meager was asleep, Lynch the axman whispered to Tomkins. “Why have you teased him so badly—is it because he is small?”

“I never did,” Tomkins maintained.

“We’ve all seen you—watched you. But here is something you may or may not know. He,” Lynch whispered, “killed seventeen men—four with his bare hands.”

Tomkins shuddered suddenly. He himself had not gone overseas because of a pinched kidney.

It was now six a.m. on Good Friday Mountain, and the men would be done and off job and out for Easter Sunday. They
would then come back, the best drivers to plunge the wood into the streams and brooks and run them down across Arron Brook, where the danger was, past the talons where Dan Auger had met his end—and then into the sunshine on the Bartibog. Moving onward toward the big circular boom, near the bend in the river where those landings had caused the jam that had taken Will Jameson’s life.

If he had just said no to Estabrook at that moment of seduction, every imaginable worry that plagued Tomkins would be gone. But from the first, he couldn’t. Meager was right. It had been famine in the soul.

The men had a light breakfast of pancakes and bacon and tea, then went out into the relatively warm air of early morning April, watching as the teams came forward. But what was most sought did not come, the photographer up from Maurice’s. All the men wanted him, and all the men waited.

Of course, they had not understood that a photographer needed a guide. They believed because they themselves could come in forty miles, anyone else could as well. They had hitched their horses with as fine a tack as they had left, and made the runners on the two sled shine, and made themselves look presentable for this great day.

The teams now had walked by the hovel, great cedar pressing down every two sled, the horses’ bodies already glistening with sweat.

It was Richardson’s lead, and he had 323 logs—a great amount to go over this hill. A hill suddenly heavy with spring. Behind him came Trethewey, Nolan, and Curtis.

There are many versions of this story—you yourself have probably heard all about it.

Richardson nor anyone else would go down without a
photographer, which Innis from the depot had assured them was coming, and by letter the photographer had as well. So in common ego, Richardson held up the great Clydes at the top of the camp skid road, looking down into the chunnel of sled tracks, rocks, and clotted dung to the heavy, bowed Bailey Bridge. There was a sheen in the air and a sweetness of early spring—a moment when you think of girls at Easter, the smell of snow and horses, the long timbers along the side of the skid road yarded up with chains. The sound for the first time in months of birds in the early morning.

“We will give it another moment,” Richardson said, disappointed, now and then spitting his plug over the side of the logs.

“He was up three stories on those logs,” Gibbs reported, for Gibbs and three other men were going to follow down and join after the Bailey in order to be there in case those thousands of logs down on the flats had to be remarked with a Jameson stamp. This is what angered the men more than anything. To them, it was an unthinkable betrayal. The idea that Tomkins was not “one of us” and had stolen the great efforts off Buckler’s mountain was inconceivable.

Men muttered as they looked at him, and he was relieved only when they looked away. He knew what it was like to be condemned and to see the gallows being built with Jameson wood. In fact, he knew this now in his heart as well as Owen Jameson would ever know it. He knew now what it was like to be an outcast as Reggie Glidden had been. Who had teased Glidden about Camellia the most—talking about her unfaithfulness? It was poor Tomkins; he did this only to please Gravellier, whose eyes would always light up.

Now he needed a way out. A way to set things straight. And it came. Then and there—and for all time. If this had
happened five minutes later, no tragedy would have occurred. Yet it happened, just as it was supposed to.

There was a speck in the distance holding hard to the side of little Arron Stream. It moved first like an animal, far away, a buck against the horizon or a small spring bear. But then its form took shape in the glimmer of the sun, and all the men were watching him as he came closer. That is, the men on the bank—the other teamsters couldn’t see him yet. Except for Richardson, in the lead.

“Yes, there he is now,” Richardson said, “the photographer is coming.” Richardson nodded, put the reins under the front bindings, and climbed down off the rig and started to walk away. Some said he was going in to put on a clean shirt. That was ridiculous—all the shirts were tatters, hanging on poles with the camp doors left open, the smell of bacon grease and snow.

He stepped off to relieve himself, was another theory. He could have done that from the top of the sled. Someone said he was going to get his scarf that he wore all winter and tie it to his neck. That is a possibility.

One reason might be that he needed to check the rivets he and Gibbs had put on the runners—that the sled felt bowed on that side, and one of the rivets had snapped. Late the night before they had used the English wheel to bend another sliver of metal against that birch runner, and maybe he sensed it loose.

It may have been that. For he did look and walk away—perhaps to go to the hovel to find something to change it over.

Gibbs said it was inexplicable, why he stepped down. But he felt the photographer was still far away and would have to set up. The others, however, did not see this; they were ready to go when Richardson went.

No one will know why Richardson stepped down.

My feeling, somewhat romanticized, is that he suddenly decided he didn’t want his picture taken after all—fame to please or worry a girl who had turned her back on him. The McCord girl, who he did not know had died of pleurisy long sad winters ago.

So the men held up their last great loads, all over two hundred logs. Richardson walked by Tomkins, and glanced over at him as he stepped about the hard snow in the spring weather. They glanced at each other just a second. In their looks at that moment was complete understanding of one another’s essential natures. Yet Richardson kept moving.

Bartlett’s diary is exhaustive in how all of this happened, but I do not think it any better than what I will say. Tomkins wanted a chance to escape ignominy that his lifetime of scandal had caused. And he stepped up, looked about, and decided to steal Richardson’s championship load. This was exactly where his days of famine had led him. He climbed the same side of the sled that Richardson had just exited, and made his way to the top.

Butch, the great gelding on the right nearest the embankment on the way down, looked back at this man and gave a head toss as if he suddenly understood there would be death.

TWO

I was born two months premature, in a small house’s bathroom on a side lane, near the marshes on Good Friday morning, 1947, at about that exact moment.

Lula Brower was in attendance. Why had she come that night before? My mother always said an angel of the Lord had sent her—or Mom would have bled to death, because no one expected the child this soon.

Why didn’t my mother get to the hospital? Lula herself did not think my mother could be moved, and my mother did not want to leave.

“I am not going anywhere—if I move I will kill the child—” She was so certain of this, Lula concurred.

“The angel of the Lord told her to be with me,” my mother said. “And that’s why you are here.”

Lula did her best, but she was positive I was stillborn. She lay me down on the floor and cried. Then I did.

They said I would not live; if I lived, I would not walk; if I walked, I would not run. That I would not speak or learn. That I would never attend school, let alone university.

Nor could they then determine, by this premature birth, whose son I really was.

Timing might make it impossible to know.

Camellia never forgave herself her trip, and so coddled me a while. Not knowing that when this happens a child will either smother or fight. No one realized at that moment how well I could fight.

I began to cry, and the Clydes on a mountain forty-four miles away were whipped forward simultaneously.

THREE

Tomkins pulled the whip and struck out at the animals far beneath him. The first thing he did not understand is that neither Richardson nor Curtis nor Trethewey nor Nolan ever in their lives touched the animals with the whip, but only cracked it above him.

He snapped the ten-foot-long whip down across the burnt back of Butch, and bringing it back across them again allowed the tip of this whip to hit Missy’s right eye.

They were gone but his hold on the reins made their heads crank as they left, and Tomkins felt his stomach in his mouth. The great timbers began to groan in their chains and the animals were suddenly turned halfway blind by Tomkins wiping them down furiously one moment and hauling them back another.

It took everything he had to keep from falling forward into the animals themselves.

The others behind the Clydes had not seen Tomkins replace Richardson on the sled (Tomkins having lost his fine parka to Pitman was one reason), all of them watching for each other to leave. When the Clydes went, they went too, as they had all winter, thinking the photo would be taken, and would be published in the papers for them to give their loved ones—all this great wood coming off the mountain at the same time!

Yet Tomkins’ inability had caused his horses to stumble, so that Nolan’s Miss Maggie Wade and Mr. Stewart were almost running Tomkins off the downhill by the time they got to the first turn. Behind Nolan, Curtis; behind Curtis, Trethewey with the Percherons. All of them now dancing toward the bottom. How long did this take? I think about thirty-five
seconds. My airways were being unclogged while the lives of the four greatest teamsters in the history of our river were coming to an end.

Richardson had turned as soon as he saw the Clydes move. “HEY!” he roared, and ran along the bank.

He managed to jump from the cliff near the Percherons’ hovel to the sled as it straightened after the first turn. It was his duty to do so—the team had been entrusted to him, and were Jameson Clydes. It would be the last thing he ever attempted. His physical disability finally betrayed him.

He tried to put out his left arm, which no longer existed, to grab the bit of pole at the back of the load, and stumbled. As he fell, his right hand grabbed a cedar, and he strained to lift himself up. But the sled bounced and he fell under Miss Maggie Wade and was spit out behind the sled, laying on his side, his colored jacket like a bit of fall foliage, his body crushed.

Tomkins had no idea Richardson had given his life to try to stop the runaway. He was bouncing two feet off the cedars and falling to and fro as the sled came to the last turn. There, his eyes frantic, he saw Meager Fortune, who had been down on the flats helping with the last chaff, waving the horses to turn. It was useless. The whip had opened up a sore on Butch’s back, had half-blinded old half-blind Missy, and Stretch’s heaviness on the reins caused Butch to bolt.

Nothing would stop Butch from trying to escape the load that had taken three days to pile. All Butch’s memories, whatever they were—to do too much and do it well, of coming from the devil’s mount to the sled, of working beyond exhaustion through the horror of this mountain—came to a moment in April when he may very well have decided to do exactly what he wanted—to kill the bastard who had whipped him across the back.