The Friends of Meager Fortune Read Online Free PDF

white mold of the dead boy’s face, that like all the dead held a warning and a meaning not comprehended by living man. Owen was angered by himself—for the first time, he saw his brother. All that morning while Will, only nineteen, was trying to open a jam he had been writing matrics and looking like a proper student, a “fuggin’ lord.” And why?—because Lula’s friends told him she wanted a man who worked in a suit.
    His mother sat in a stupor in the kitchen, talking aloud to her dead husband.
    That night, all having left and being alone with the dead Owen told himself that he would offer what he had. He would put his plans “down” to become a dentist or a businessman, and remain at home. His plans, in the remote agony of youth, had been to please a girl.
    He stood and opened up the coffin to say goodbye. Strange his whole life had taken a back seat to this boy with the parlorlight shining on his puffed and white face. Owen shivered slightly, closed the coffin lid, and in the faint dreary smell of flowers switched off the parlor light. He walked up to the third floor and there, amid his two hundred books, wondered what to do. Even now the town was dismissing them. He hated to see his family in this plight.
    He knew Estabrook, in a very friendly way, would try over the next few years to put his family out of business. What would happen to Mary’s holdings if Estabrook had the best bids? It was what Will had concerned himself over, what he had worried about on his dead father’s behalf. That was Will’s life: obedient and loyal to the death. Loyalty to his own dead father made him send Dan Auger out. Will was a young prince doomed with his family under siege.
    Owen, realizing this, seeing his brother suddenly in a new light, as this young prince struggling, loved him until a cry came from his throat.
    So he would offer what he had to his family: himself. He could do this for he had other traits, and one of these traits—the kind that never minded those who laughed—was a certainty in his own genius. Tonight, for the first time, he saw them all, that is all those men he had once admired, as having been plied like children, made whole by being men and women of parts who scrambled to put parts together and act out sentiment like others.
    Though he had waited ironically and terribly in his room one whole day for impressionable Lula to show up and offer her hand in sympathy, she had not. She seemed in the larger part of town, getting ready for her own bright-as-a-glitter future, wearing the clothes of a young coed and having her faithful Solomon Hickey drive her to the train for a visit to her uncle Stoppard. Once when there was a knock on the door he, certain it must be her, rushed down the stairs andinto the hall, only to see it was men bringing in Will Jameson’s trunk from camp.
    They put it away in Will’s room, and left it unopened.

    The meeting between the mother and the younger son happened the day after the funeral. The friends from town and from the forestry industry across the province had now left, and the parlor except for some cups and china had returned to solitude and a rather traditional naked emptiness. The light from the sun told all. The family was left with this “other” boy, who was nothing like Will. The family was left with this second lad, the one Will’s godmother—the Micmac woman—said would play havoc with the business.
    They sat at opposite sides of the study, an empty leather couch (the place Will often slept when he was home) between them, and a picture of Will on the wall, holding a salmon taken from Grey Rock pool. What struck Owen was his own attitude to his older brother, which he now knew was one of intellectual snobbery. And Will, up nights worrying on behalf of his family, always making sure Owen had spending money and school supplies, did not deserve this.
    Owen told his mom he would be willing to do something else with his life.
    “Willing to what?”
    “Help,”