The Friends of Meager Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page A

Brennan.”
    “So what to do,” Reggie said.
    Will thought a moment. At nineteen, all eyes were on him. Thinking it his responsibility, without hesitating, he started out to the jam once more.
    Reggie Glidden started after him, but Will ordered him back.
    “I am just going to look,” he said. “I thought I placed the sticks right on—I have to try it again.”
    “I want to go with you.”
    “No.”
    “Well let me bring up the scow—and wait on you—”
    “If the jam goes, the scow goes—you’re a sittin’ duck—
    “ Will turned and, looking back at his friend longingly—as if there was a gulf between them the latter could not imagine—suddenly asked: “Do you remember that song my father taught us—when we were young?”
    “Which one?”
    And Will answered slowly:
No mortal on earth is as happy as we
Ah me dearie dearie, hey dearie down
Give the shanty boys whiskey and nothin’ goes wrong!
    He laughed, and with that turned away. He walked out to the logs and stood looking down in some pose, questioning the universe, as if he in his youthful pride and boast had never questioned the universe before. Then he looked behind him. Before another sound came, the log he had placed the largest charge upon gave way, and in that second the logs behind, the thousands of tons of wood, moved toward him like an avalanche. As they moved Will jumped backward and turned to the shore. He was sure-footed and had never fallen from a log his feet planted on.
    “He’ll be scamperin’ now,” someone said.
    He jumped one log to the next with this wall at his back. And as he moved the logs themselves grew up over him. But even then, his brother heard later, he managed to dodge the first volley of logs that fell almost on him. He made a giant Hail Mary leap, when the logs as loud as a crack in the center of the earth swallowed him whole.
    There was silence; after a minute or two everything settled, and then it seemed peaceful—the air alive with the smell of fresh wood.
    Reggie, even before the logs settled, ran toward him. And was the first to him. Reggie found him jammed down under a massive timber, with his left arm twisted sideways, his right arm missing, and his back crushed. There was a smell of spring smoke, and a little boy far down the shore trying to fish eels.
    When they moved Will they found his backbone exposed. Yet he lived for a while.
    He was taken to Dan Auger’s camp—it being closer—and in a life that seemed to have so much promise, he died that evening, amid the smell of earliest spring and spring chickadees, within the sight of swinging lanterns, the shadows of muscled and muted men, agitated as men are in the presence of death, and the enclosed forest in which he and they had lived. The doctor fetched by Simon Terri came too late, and could have done nothing anyway. His own mother did not get to him before he died.

    The mother had lost her oldest—and wept for days; Reggie, who loved him more, did not cry, but brought back the shirt the boy was wearing, torn and bloodied, and lay it across a table for the three days of the wake. The boy was waked in the house, the town and the province’s forestry men comingout in support of a great family grieving, to mourn and act as pallbearers.
    Owen, looking on from the back of the room in crumpled suit, knew his place was not at the front of the mourners. Will’s best friend, Reginald Glidden, came over to Owen, in parting held Owen’s hand with the power of a vice.
    “Thank you for coming—Will would be honored.”
    “You get some meat on yer bones, boy—yer momma needs you now,” Reggie said.
    Later, after everyone had gone, and the trees tapped against the house, Owen felt pity for the memory of Will’s boyish, intemperate laughter. Will’s great matter-of-fact principles did not matter; everything the family held on to had been solid while now it was transported to the netherworld of prayer and the elusive shadow of metaphysics, even in the