The Friends of Meager Fortune (2 page)

Mary and her brother Buckler took over the mill until Will came into his own, which was soon enough, and seemingly too soon for his competition.

It is a common misconception that people are as bright as their knowledge. Will Jameson was a boy far brighter than what he knew, which is an ordinary problem in a country like ours, partly in bondage to winter, where snow is a great blessing on the land. His father had started with nothing
but a crippled roan horse—and Will now had camps and horses and men, and a sawmill he had to take care of.

He left school because of his father’s death, and said leaving school was the least thing he ever regretted.

“Holding him is like holding a current itself,” Old Estabrook said of the young man.

Yet his mother, Mary, warned him, he had his faults, could be cruel or uncaring, and laughed at his mother’s sentiment and superstition. These traits came gradually. That is, he believed, because it was what society believed, what his father had believed, that a stiff presence at church service was what constituted good behavior, and jokes were meant to be manly and told in private. He thought, even at seventeen, of children as a woman’s responsibility and a man’s ignorance of the offspring showed a healthy character.

“She’ll be wantin’ me to believe in saints soon enough,” he said of Mary. “Some darn old statues with damn wings.”

But even as a boy there was never a person, or a nation that person was from, that he deliberately insulted, knowing how things were held against his father for no apparent reason. Nor could there be talk against the Indian, Brit, French, Scot, or Irish, or any other at supper, without him leaving the table and saying: “Besides us all needing a horsewhip, each nation is the same.”

It was true he had a brother. The younger boy Owen he himself deemed “too sensitive” and “too weak” for the industry their family owned.

The second son Mary looked upon in secret, and decided over time there was nothing in him that could be mettle for greatness.

As time passed Will, who ran the house like a patriarch, decided this younger boy take what lessons his own leadership offered. He did not proffer this; it simply seemed the way
things would be. Once a month he would come to his brother and speak about what Owen might do with his life. These lectures were impersonal ramblings, caught up in ideas of what a man should say to a boy. They were an embarrassment to Owen, who saw through them but loved his brother enough not to say so.

Will decided he would give the younger boy something—dentistry, he supposed. He decided this when he himself had a toothache.

“Goddamn thing,” he said, staring at Owen and coming to that conclusion. Of course his mother wanted it too—that is, dentistry for the boy—because it would be nice to have at least one dentist in the family. In all her life she had not known a relative who had gone to school. In fact, if truth be told, she had not known a relative. Being younger by two years, Owen would have to do what Will said, for Will’s temperament was iron, and he held the reins in a society which at that time demanded leadership from the first-born son.

Will was like his dead father, with a shrewd mind and fists to match, when required.

The younger son, however, was fanciful and into fairness.

Will hated fancy, and could not fathom fairness. That is, fairness could never be parceled, and he shunned those who thought so.

The poetry of the woods he himself sang, and was known to have penned a song or two. Still he frowned upon his brother’s ideals, and all those books brought to the upstairs shelves were like slights toward Will, whose proudest moment was to state he would earn a million and never read a book.

In 1936
Ulysses
was brought into the house by Owen Jameson—the Joyce that destroyed the Irish, Will said (because he had asked someone who Joyce was). He threw it into the stove. Mary, if she disapproved, condoned this action by silence.

This was the bowing and scraping to a propriety that men of Will Jameson’s ilk believed they never bowed or scraped to. It was also the despotic teaching of mother, of school, of school principal, of pastor, of pastor’s maid, of the maid’s toady, of toady’s boy, and of almost every twat on the street—all strangled by that propriety embracing tyranny, from university dorm down, that Will had by such independent measure escaped, and now unknowingly, unwittingly embraced, because power allowed him to. This then was Will’s ultimate sin. One he never admitted, and therefore could not correct.

“I do not need no learning from no fuggin’ book like that there,” Will said proudly.

“He lives in poverty and great want,” Owen said of Joyce.

“I’ll feed him but I won’t read him,” said Will, showing his measure of charity and justice.

This was serious for Owen—for he was in all ways under his older brother’s talons, and knew enough to realize he had, at that moment, no say. Or at least no say in the open. He decided, therefore, to leave the house, but got no farther than a street in Moncton when he decided to come home. It was three days later, but the very supper he had left was sitting at the table waiting.

Will was in all these household promotions and demotions his own man, even before his father died. Saying himself with a look of consternation when he was fourteen: “There is nothing to be done with Owen—he ain’t sharp,” and spitting a head of snot into the straw of the barn in youthful bravado at the contempt untested youth holds for weakness.

Therefore put him “out in the world,” which meant for some reason, for Will, “not the world I know.”

“It’ll be a dentist’s work for that boy,” Will would tell his budding friends on a three-day moose hunt in late September, with the smell of moose hide and sperm and blood mingling
with the fall’s early budget, the huge carcass of the animal hanging down from spruce tripod, next to the white tent in the sunny and somehow muted clearing.

Reggie Glidden, Will’s best friend, would caution him not to be rash with Owen.

“No—its dentistry for the youngster,” Will said in fancy of a grown man, when he was in the camp taking a beaker of water. Yes, a somewhat practical profession, this dentistry business, and not given to the world of fancy, like
Ulysses
, which in truth disturbed Will more than it had his mother. Nor allow him, this Owen, the raw world or the tough world or the untamed world, our world where we must live and wrestle to protect those boys like Owen from their fuggin’ selves.

Did Will know that he himself lived in a world of fancy, of guns and hides and treks into unknown wilds that Ulysses proper would approve of? Mary herself sometimes wondered it when she sat home knitting of a night. But if not, there was no time for a man of action to mope about and find out. He was the product himself of rebellion, his mother and father married at seventeen, when everyone thought his father would be a failure, nothing more than another of the thousands who used an ax. His father had begun their prosperity, Will made it fivefold by taking chances and dealing blows to the two great mills on the river—Estabrook and Sloan—making two rivals, who whispered rumors about him in grave ignorance and envy, hoping to stop him up.

They spoke about it to the twaddle on the street and hoped loyalty, envy, and common despair would allow others to take up their cause against this whelp. Others did take it up in the famine of their lives to impart disgrace on the Jameson name.

So Will became a target of many, too proud to say so and too young to know the consequences over time.

Will, after a fight at a dance with a Sloan man, wanted to carry a pistol, and though kind enough longed to shoot at least one man in the head, hearing that his father had once done the same at a quarry during a fight over a stone.

“The Sloans’ men are bastards and will cause trouble to prove it—they have terrorized their own and so will terrorize others.”

To prove to Owen that dentistry was easy, he took pliers and hauled from his own mouth a rotted shard of a tooth, spitting blood before him as he walked. “There you go, boy,” he said, “don’t be flinchin’ at the sight of no blood.”

Will would not see his mother or younger brother for weeks on end. And when he passed Owen on the back stair steps coming from the pantry, he would nod in taciturn embarrassment at the boy’s eagerness to please. The dark eyes, the blond hair, the frame weak and not large, but the voice and temperament somewhat inspired—like his mother perhaps, who doted more upon him.

The year after Will took over the entire Jameson tract, Owen fell in love with a whimsical, emotional girl named Lula Brower. She had a father, Angus Brower, the prosecutor, who might be said to have disliked Byron Jameson, and she had airs of refinement, airs of fairness, her grandfather being a preacher. And if she liked Owen, which some say in hindsight she did, her father did not—did not like the Jameson family—Owen’s father having, it was said, cut Brower’s father out of a certain spot of land. So our Mr. Brower had nothing good to say, and Lula as his child seemed to catch this in fleeting moments herself. For she could be undeniably cruel to the boy. Most of it was done in simple naïveté and from the idea that what
she heard from her own father—who kept much from her, and organized her life—must be true.

Owen would walk up to her lane in the drowsy summer and stand near her property, the small barren house with its tiny porch and insignificant maple tree in the yard. Her father, as town prosecutor, did not like lumbermen especially. They fought and caroused far too much for his liking. He brought too many to court for his liking. He had sent enough to jail. Besides, his daughter had been singled out as “the most talented girl” by our local adjudicator, and he wanted for her more than a common life.

There was another girl at this house on George Street, this solid mass of solid, uninspired people Owen wanted to impress. Her name was Camellia. There was a dark side to her story. Lula’s father had prosecuted the girl’s father, put him to death for murdering the girl’s mother in Winch’s Cave some years before.

There was no reason for her not to be an ordinary girl—except the profound realization that the entire town knew her father had hanged, her mother murdered, and already she was the object of what bedeviled so many: scandal and gossip. People said she would ruin a life or two herself, and watched for some signal that this would happen.

Lula kept tabs on her, and had her friends, the Steadfast Few, as she called them, observe Camellia as well. “For signs,” as they said.

It was as if Camellia was put into a corner and told not to move when music spilled out of the air. Finally a toe would move. And the scandal came easily—off the tongues of those girls, those Steadfast Few. For rumors against woebegone boys could be true. And the Steadfast Few, as small-town, lower-middle-income girls, loved rumor the best.

Owen’s father, Byron, they decided that summer, must have been Camellia’s mother’s “love.” And now this Owen
was “sneaking about again.” All this speculation went on in the rinse and tide of that sunny little porch, where little Lula Brower sat holding little court.

“Oh dear and here he comes again,” she would hear.

Owen Jameson had decided he loved Lula because she read, and because her uncle was a professor, named Professor Stoppard, who wrote poems. Poems that rhyme and don’t lie, Lula said.

Owen, wise on many fronts, was gullible here. And he paid little attention to that other girl then, or to the gloomy self-righteous stares of the Steadfast Few.

So one day he told Lula he read books, like her uncle, Professor Stoppard. She showed no interest, even when he talked very well about these books. She ignored him, and rolled her eyes as he spoke. Then, as a last resort, a few days before it was thrown to the fire, he brought
Ulysses
to her. There, in the heart of that little house, with those very wise people, he read a part aloud.

After this, Lula and the girls decided Owen couldn’t come back. She had talked it over with her friends. The reading, to them, was from a “horrible thing” that was not at all “acceptable.”

And they were to protect Camellia if no one else.

So Owen was told to leave, while his rival Solomon Hickey looked on from the other side of Lula’s porch door.

This was only a week or two in his life, in the middle of a drowsy summer, in the middle of adolescence, and would have ebbed away and been forgotten except for events later to take place.