The Friends of Meager Fortune (12 page)

“She has the bastard French,” he heard the Scot maid say.

Tonight the men brought him a treat—to show they knew his stature—a white cloth napkin to wipe his face after he ate a piece of hot apple pie and drank a scalding cup of tea.

It was a lonely world, and this showed its loneliness, down deep. Small implements from home made it lonelier still. Great burly men became mothering to young swampers in their charge, and overcame embarrassment in doing so. Later, meeting on the roads in summer, they might not even acknowledge each other.

To the men, he looked peculiar—a small replica of the Jameson clan, yet an unknown quantity in their lives, a strange anomaly of substance they could not easily fathom.
A ladies’ man, some said—too cute by half to lay into Glidden’s wife.

He was a bookworm and had made the rank of major. He had been wounded, and yet didn’t look like he could fight. They were silent in front of him, and as yet did not talk so much about him behind his back. They did not want to swear, though they had already heard him swear like a trooper.

The book he read was
Lear
, the play he had often returned to, trying at one time to fathom his brother’s moods and whimsy and his mother’s curious worry. It was an old tattered edition bought in London during the Blitz—a curious shopkeeper reminding him that bombs breaking overhead might mean more to an interpretation, and he answering that yes, and “so too my son our share of landings off a boom.”

To which the shopkeeper replied: “You come from a land I have no knowledge of—what is it called?”

“Home,” Owen said.

FOUR

The wind blew snow all night up against the outside walls, and far up against the trunks of trees they were to cut. Higher than the head of a man by dawn the snow had piled, the world outside frozen solid—with “an extra mountain of ice” on the mountain they were on. Each tree the fallers would cut today was boughed down with snow, and each tree trunk had to be freed from snow to be felled, and each felled tree had to be cut in two or three, and each section had to be hauled
by grunting, overworked men and horses—both seeming to enlist each other’s pain—leaning on and mocking it at the same time.

The world inside the camps was filled with the smell of smoke and meat and rank sweat. It was built in a hurry and was half a foot too low for many men. It was dark for the most part—and certain of the men feared theft from others. There were no rifles allowed in camp, though any man here could use a knife and throw an ax or hatchet well. One turn at forty feet and stick into a cedar tree. But a rifle was brought in by Owen himself and given to the cook, just in case.

“You might need this come sometime,” was all he said.

Owen was up long before dawn. The first thing he had to do this morning was dig himself out of the camp, because the door never was free of the nightly drifts. The air was arctic and split his lip, so he tasted his blood a second before it froze. The trees stood in blackness and weighed down boughs, for miles, like muted solitary soldiers.

Meager Fortune coming through the door, snow falling down the back of his underwear, shook himself bare, picked up an ax, and cut some firewood for breakfast, the ax blade coming close to the fingers that held the birch chunk. He had been up in the night stoking, but the fire had gone down.

Owen had traveled with Meager in the war, and had hired him as a general camp keeper. He was up at 4:30 mending seven pairs of socks for the axmen and the teamsters, his little face having a childlike gaze when Owen awoke,
Lear
over his chest. Meager was considered simple-minded, but had fought all the way to Antwerp. He had been saved by a minister of
the Lower Rapids in 1934 and baptized in the “full” dress—and he set an example because of it.

He was learning to cook, and learning to write, and had recipes hidden in his boots that he had copied from the cook to take home, as he told everyone, to his wife and little boy, Duncan. He called everyone
sir
and was looked upon by most, Tomkins especially, as a simpleton. Tomkins had already taken to teasing him, but Meager Fortune didn’t seem to pay much attention to it.

Slightly ten minutes later, the acrid smell of burning birch and then hard rock maple drifted out over the camp’s tin roof toward the sky that was just beginning to be shaded by gray. Along the sides of the hovel, where the horses started to clomp, the outline of boards and old sled parts loomed as the day dawned.

Gibbs, the number one tend team, was shaken awake, and came out in his Humphreys and long underwear to feed the horses oats.

The teamsters were the next to wake, an hour before the rest.

In the frozen snow, Gravellier and Nolan came out. A few of the two sleds were already loaded, a few weren’t.

Owen helped harness the Clydesdales for Nolan. It took five men to dig his two sled free from a hard night’s crust of snow and get it turned. The two sled weighed almost twelve hundred pounds before it was loaded, and it ran on slick runners with a great timber and block and chains in the middle. One of those chains could be wrapped about the crazy wheel, a contraption welded to a tree that would stop the sled on the downhill run if anything went wrong. Some of Gravellier’s men used the crazy wheel. Nolan’s men did not—but on the devil’s back there was nothing to attach a wheel to.

“Who is lead teamster?” Gravellier said, throwing the question back over his shoulder, into the dark smelling now of back bacon and tea.

“You will be, if you don’t mind,” Owen said.

Nolan looked at his boss. His happy-go-lucky expression never wavered, though his eyes showed less mirth. Nolan was certain of his position and did not like being challenged. This was as true with his friends as his enemies—for anyone to tell him that his best friends Richardson and Trethewey were better teamsters was enough to make him mute for two days.

Owen was aware, and so were they, that any of these men could die, and that to haul for four to five months from this position, over a mountain, it was almost a certainty someone would be injured. And that further to this thought, they were already predicting calamity in town. So the bottles he had found last night in the bear hides he left to the designs of those who put them there, the beer hidden from him in the storeroom too.

After breakfast Richardson jumped aboard the Clydesdales heading out behind Gravellier and the Belgians. Miss Maggie Wade and Mr. Stewart teamed by Nolan. Then Colson and Davies and Choyce.

Two hours later, just as sunlight was flushing cold against the far ridges and flaring red on the one-paned window, the Belgians came back with the first load—six feet higher than the heads of the horses, which seemed dwarfed and puny—all big logs, placed vertically but flattened like an accordion squeezebox toward the base. That made it square and stable for the teamster and the horses to pull. The great two sleds almost disappeared under the weight of the wood. Each load was supported by heavy cross-chains.

This would be the best Jameson cut and haul since long before the war.

It was still just light and they moved past the hovels as silent as a nineteenth-century painting of some other place and time—heavy with logs and moving under a fresh snowfall, the very essence of romance those painted pictures seemed to illustrate.

They had to come off a mountain with these logs. It was what Will, when he was only fifteen and in argumentative fashion with his father, just before Byron died, said he would never allow his men to do. He would quit before he worked men on Good Friday Mountain, no matter how the trees grew up there.

The Jamesons now had no choice. So they sent this second son high, to do what the favorite son warned against a few years before he died.

With
Lear
tucked into his parka pocket and his chest still half bare, and the light from a lantern he carried lighting his shoulder bone as he swung it forward, Owen yelled, in a voice almost too shrill, as if he was giving something away about the hidden worry in his nature: “We have much to catch up with if we are to get our fuckin’ pay!”

And he swung the lantern in the black air, as snow still came down on the exposed shoulder, and melted there against a patch of white skin. He walked forward swinging the lantern, as if at a runaway train. But this train was on eight sturdy legs, buckled by harness and twitching in the cold.

To get them down such a steep run, Owen ordered Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins, along with some swampers, to get out with the shovels and sand and chaff the downhill as smooth as they could. In a minute Tomkins was running alongside his mentor Gravellier whispering, and in another moment Gravellier stopped his two sled and came back over. Both men reared out of the still half-dark like phantoms and stood before Owen, who was leaning heavy to get the stone to move better on the axes.

“What is this?” Gravellier said. “Trouble here—with Stretch—you know he came in as a teamster?”

“That’s what I know,” Owen said, holding Bartlett’s double-bladed ax. “And he can go out today as a teamster, but he can’t have a team of mine—can he have a team of yours, Huey?”

Gravellier was quiet. His lips twitched against the frozen morning and the side of his big, plump face. His eyes narrowed like many people saw when he spoke at union meetings. He shrugged his huge, round shoulders. He wouldn’t take any of his men off to give a team to Tomkins, because he got a part commission on the load—and would not sacrifice one of his better teamsters. Yet if Tomkins took one of Owen’s teams, he would get commissioned on that from Tomkins himself.

“That’s settled then,” Owen said. “We both know where we stand.”

“Never mind—you go work here today,” he said to Tomkins. “We’ll have a grievance over this.”

“A grievance, Gravellier?” Owen said, picking up a bucksaw and handing it to Pitman. “A grievance—in what way—let us have the cunt now, sir!” Owen shouted, shouldering an ax and putting his foot up on the stone. “This is not a union cut—and I’ll have no fuggin’ remarks about grievance this high up. For we all have a fucking grievance, sir—and it is this.” And he swung the ax high against the snow.

Gravellier was too refined, and refused comment. He turned away and in the gloomy dawn was heading toward his load again, as paralytic snow wavered before the lantern’s light.

Owen drove the ax down into a stump, and took another bucksaw and gave it to a youngster named Fraser.

Tomkins waited to see if there was any chance at all that people would protest. He then looked at Meager Fortune and said: “Meager, you couldn’t have had all those kids by yourself.” (He did not know how many kids Meager had but
decided, because the man had almost no teeth, it must be seven or eight.) He smiled at this great joke. Meager simply looked at him curiously, like, Tomkins thought, the simpleton he was.

But with no more support, Tomkins turned and went down over the hill, muttering and carrying a bucket of hot sand, heated at one of three places along the downhill just that morning.

Owen heard the muttering trail off amid the sound of tin pans and coffee cups clinking against the side of the cabin wall, and what would be familiar for months, the squeaking of timbers and sleds moving together, with the hellish offsetting sound of wind.

FIVE

Soon after, the chaff was laid almost a half mile down—and across the hastily constructed bridge, then the Belgians came very slowly past Owen Jameson to the top of the great hill. And the larger Clydesdales that Richardson teamed, Missy and Butch, followed behind by a good two hundred yards; Nolan behind by the same mark. The Clydes would replace the Belgians as the lead within a week, seeing their strength on the downhill run. This would create tension between the two crews, even more than there was now. But by that time the loyal men would be ready for any show.

The horses breathed frozen air against the sharpening wind, their breath coming now like steam from a boiling pot, and
icicles already forming under their mouths. Their great broadened backs seemed to shimmer, even in the gallant dawn, with muscle. They were animals who did not walk, but like the great giant moose that they themselves sometimes met on their journeys, they strode forward, the very purpose of their life cast in the symmetry between movement and power.