The Friends of Meager Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page B

Owen said, “and become more like Will.”
    Mary smiled at such a ludicrous idea and then nodded, for the sentiment was noble. She also admired that Owen spoke directly, as had her husband and oldest.
    Owen in fact had gotten into more trouble than Will—but it was always something you couldn’t put your finger on. It was always very opened. But it was indirect. When hismind took to something, he did it. Like getting drunk before his provincial matrics and making eighties. Or once protecting the young girl who lived at the Browers from teasing. Or bringing a boy home that was being beaten by his father, a LeBlanc man who lived in Injun town. It was long ago—an almost forgotten incident—but it did spell something. It meant that he would do something unexpected, and it would be startling.
    “You will not hit me as you hit your boy,” Owen had said to this man. Mary and Will heard about it. Mary embarrassed and Will condemned it, saying: “Sometimes a cuff is a proper thing—especially for a LeBlanc.”
    Yet Owen did not ask their opinion. Nor would he when he brought in Ulysses . Owen, with his blond curly hair and shiny eyes; his shirt buttons askew, just a little; his pants baggy, just a tad; his fingernails dirty, just a pinch; his hair oily, just a touch—and in all of this was a character, an extreme character—but of what? Not a fellow who was spoiled, like most in town thought, but a child who had been left alone, because of the death of his father. Will had, without knowing it, deserted this boy, and Owen had protected a beaten child because he would never desert him.
    Mary said she did not want wood for her younger son. Nor any part of wood, any measure or drift of wood or the complex commitment of it, or of the men who made their living in the pitiless world associated with it. For it was a pitiless world—for animals, horses, men, it was every bit as pitiless as the sea.
    She told him of their troubles when young—of the heroics of her dead husband, who had seen his fine draft horses fall through the ice and teamsters with tears frozen on their faces trying to get the doomed horses up.
    She told her boy that it was not for him. And she said Owenshould study and become the man books wanted him to be. Here she smiled as if delighted at herself.
    “There will be no one like Will,” Mary said.
    “That’s true,” Owen corrected himself. “He would have been a great man—I’m afraid God does not intend man to be that great, and let him die too soon.”
    “Well then no matter—men are what they are.”
    Owen sitting in his suit was the extension of, the personification of, the family pain, which was suffering through something it did not quite understand. A suit, worn as prop for tragedy, can show the lack of knowledge explicitly about that very tragedy, the unknown sadness with which we as men and women are forced to live and breathe.
    Men now said the Jamesons were unlucky. And now, so suddenly it scalded her, people were turning away, leaving them devoid of friendship and alone. Would she sell her mill? Well, perhaps she would. But not at the moment, and not to Estabrook or Sloan.
    She looked at Owen in a new and terrible light, but just for a second. In this terrible light she decided that this boy was no weakling, and his understanding came from sadness. That is, by neglect unintended, perhaps Mary herself was the main instigator of a prophecy she now fought against, at the same time as she reeled in the philosophical certainty of its apparent absurdity. That is, perhaps for argument’s sake, prophecy given in storm to all, all form prophecy against themselves—this thought transfigured her, made her face wise and troubled.
    She decided she would put the second boy far away from the woods, and have no cause to worry about him again. She would not allow him near the camps, near the saws, or in any way on a cut.
    “No—you must have another life,” Mary said to Owen.“You’re better off