The Friends of Meager Fortune (45 page)

There is a monument to those teamsters now, looking out over Good Friday Mountain. It is visible from all the roads built near it over the last fifty years. And I am now fifty and go to one of a half-dozen places to see this monument—usually in the fall, when the light from the sky is just right. Statues of Reggie and Will and Owen have been placed there too. It is such a little tribute to them, really.

The woods are muted and stilled and broken and bulldozed away, by machinery none of these men could have foreseen. Nor could they have foreseen our great skyscraper mills that turn our logs into soft toilet paper for softer arses. Our companies owned by other countries.

They could not have foreseen that this monument to tenacity and courage and goodness would be the cause of such disruptive anger over the years. That some mining company would claim this tract and want to take the monuments down, while in the 1980s certain frivolous young men would joke about these men and their horses while drinking in a bar. Or that hunting parties would fire out shots against the granite hides of Missy and Butch.

So these men who died, faithful to Buckler’s mountain, over time became again part of a scandal. Another scandal started because of our famine. To fill up our souls with the trinkets of life, instead of with life itself.

On the roads at times, almost at dark, I meet the tractor trailers bringing the logs out—those great trucks carrying twenty times the wood of those sleds that were once so cared for by Curtis and Richardson. What in the world would they think? Their sled wouldn’t be as high as one of the tires of those trucks I meet along the myriad roads. Yet they had given their life for it all.

When she got sick later that winter, Camellia begged me not to tell people—for she didn’t want them to know she had a disease. She told me to go get her ginger ale. So for days and days I came home from school in the dark afternoon, with icy fog over our river and men across the street at the oil tanks and girls walking home with bookbags across their backs, all stretching toward the sunless future in our lives.

I would sometimes sit into the night at the table listening to the heater glumly, like a sick animal, turn on and off. Her fall had half crippled me, and left me blind in an eye. I suppose at that time I couldn’t conceive of life without her. My poor mother—I was the only stigmata she ever had.

I would stand in abject desolation wanting to know if she wanted soup. For hours I would stand silently in the dark.

She was left alone with me, their living proof—in a way, I was her worst enemy. And she cared for me to the end.

I sought oblivion in the dark and left the lights out as I walked in our little house, so street lights flared across the windows and lighted walls like an omen.

Sometimes I would stare blankly at the TV, which we had bought and which had been taken away and brought back twice in the last year—still owing fourteen dollars. Or I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and look up. So when she rose to her feet, in the scattered hope of children I would believe she was fine.

But one day I came home, the light falling under the old oaks in the park and Antonio’s barbershop being torn away, and found she wasn’t all right. I ran to Foran’s and asked for a taxi.

I got her to the hospital and sat in the waiting room, without a coat, in big black boots, with snow whispering across the
solid golden-tinged field where Owen made his way into the woods that night in 1947.

For a while she had a room with three other people, and then two, and then she was alone at the back of the hospital.

So I was nine when my mother went away from me. But it was no terrible disgrace she died of. It was cancer.

She had treatment, primitive in the 1950s—and they took a breast and then another. Some nights late, I could see her searching for the card that a friend had sent.

Sometimes, not often, she would talk about when she was a little girl. One Christmas her father and mother bought her nail polish in a small jar. She kept it always.

I told a friend I had once, a man from university with his ponytail and beads, about the fingernail polish. But he had trained himself to be curiously unmoved. I am sure he thought it was all sentimental. He was of the same opinion as Graham Greene, that cruel men cry in theaters. That is true. But crueler men don’t.

I buried the polish with her. I didn’t tell anyone I had. I tried to be the man my father was.

In the hospital I found out something I have never mentioned to anyone until now. I was listening in almost dumb despair at the door of the waiting room. I had brought my bookbag from school because the teacher, Miss Gilks, had told me to.

I sat in a chair as nurses spoke in the dying light of afternoon.

The doctor, one nurse told the other, had found this tumor in her when she was pregnant with me. He suggested she remove it.

“And what will happen to my baby if I do?” she had said.

“It will die.”

“Then I will not do it—never.”

The bustling nurses so filled with energy on the last day of my mother’s life, smelling of the faint iodine that covered up smaller wounds.

“Though she come now and again, they couldn’t do nothing about it—after that.”

“And look what she got,” another nurse said, “a cripple no good fer nothing at all.”

I looked at my bookbag a long time, until it was dark and there was a whistle from the mill, and I could no longer see my name written on the bookbag strap, and the chocolate given to me by the orderly had melted away in my mitten.

Some days I take a backpack and walk all the way to Good Friday, imagining those sleds and the horses—the tack and harness, the boldness of the loads—seeing Pitman, Fraser, and Gibbs, seeing Bartlett, Nolan, and Curtis, Trethewey and Richardson, and Meager Fortune, all in their prime once more. They are hilarious at supper, or playing cards about a stove.

Once I found a peavey stamp in the snow. It was a Jameson stamp left behind when the wood was remarked over to Buckler, when all the timbers were unleashed.

Bullets fired from boyish hunters far away have littered Butch’s flanks, and the carved-out two sled is covered with curses, and down in the dark toward the stream there is nothing anymore, and no logs wait.

The mountain has long ago been bulldozed back by the mining company looking for ore. There, in its silent tractor ruts, I found the buckle from Nolan’s harness. And on the far
slope, the remains of the devil’s mount sticking out of the snow, like a top-heavy mushroom.

I sketched them all one night. Butch with his head half turned on the downhill run, and the Percheron, Cole Younger. I was going to keep it forever—but I was only fourteen then and, like Owen with Camellia’s picture, I cannot find now where I set it down.

There are still those places in our life, swallows in the air and brooks sounding like children when darkness is coming, filled with the memories of young women far up on rivers picking out berries in the trembling grasses.

But the world has moved on, and they are unknown.

Over time, I discovered Owen Jameson was right. Those who someday would tell the story would no longer be ourselves.

I was treated very well by Lula—I was like her own child, so in the end I called her my mother. But she died many years ago. Still, people didn’t know where to place me or what to say or who the hell I was. So I never spoke to anyone about who I was. Not since the day Camellia died.

I bore the physical injury so many of these real men who mocked me on the street have run from most of their lives. Camellia had given it to me in that fall. It was my bonus given on the very day those men died. My heritage I bore for them.

I bore it fifty years.

Often, though, I just wandered from one place to the other, all across our river, drinking Jameson whiskey down until at forty-five the doctor told me he wondered how I was still alive. No liver could take it, he said.

“Well, we’ll have to wait and see,” I answered.

He told me that alcoholics didn’t know they were ill.

“They and everyone else,” I said.

I live in my mother’s house at Strawberry Marsh. I have a dog named Jeb Stuart. I was given every one of Owen Jameson’s books.

When DNA testing became common, a doctor asked if I wanted to find out who I was.

“Come close and I’ll whisper,” I said, “I already know.”

Unlike poor Reggie, I had no choice in the matter. I could never be in the middle of the pack.

Now, whenever I look out my upstairs windows, I can see the new generation traveling on their skateboards off those old pipes at the side of the mill Will Jameson once owned. They teeter and move like princes in the wind, their shirts behind them, and maneuver across the cold railings in this desolate broken lot, thirty feet above the ground. They are the out-of-work children of out-of-work fathers whose grandfathers worked in the long ago. They are as tough as stone and as kind as a day is long.

Their names are Underhill and Nolan and Curtis and Curry and MacLeod. And they move like their forefathers before them, as if in their primitive hearts a fortune was at stake.

Meager fortune, to be sure.

Just before I turned fifty, I was sent Owen Jameson’s Victoria Cross.

Someone felt I should have it before they settled the estate.

As I told you at the beginning of this story, I walked up to see the great Jameson house once more before it was torn down, the huge lot sold off for smaller prefab houses manufactured in Germany.

Too many pictures of men and streams and wood, and too many failed memories.

So I turned away in the night. And going down through the graveyard found the place where my mother is buried, quite near Reggie.

There would be no more famine for her now.

Her famine is over.

And the rest?

All is cut out, muted, torn away.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my editor, Maya Mavjee, and her assistant, Martha Leonard. Special thanks to my agent, Anne McDermid, and my wife, Peggy.

The author is indebted to the historian Don McKay and his book on Lumbering, and to Louise Manny’s
Songs of the Miramichi
.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Adams Richards’ previous novel,
River of the Brokenhearted
, was received to immense critical acclaim.
Mercy Among the Children
won the 2000 Giller Prize and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award. He is the author of the celebrated Miramichi trilogy:
Nights Below Station Street
, winner of the Governor General’s Award;
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
, winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award; and
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. Lines on the Water
, his memoir of fishing the Miramichi, won the Governor General’s Award in 1998. His 1998 novel,
The Bay of Love and Sorrows
, has been made into a feature film.