The Friends of Meager Fortune Read Online Free Page A

knock came at the door and they heard from dutiful Eric Glidden, Reggie’s father, that Dan Auger had gone through on a patch of ice while trying to cross to his little stretch of land, at the talons below Good Friday Mountain, and though as a man of great courage and tenacity he managed to break ice for an hour, had drowned only fifteen feet from shore.
    Will remembered how seemingly innocuous the moment was when he turned and told Auger to grab his kit and go. Now it seemed a deliberate settling of a score that could never warrant any man’s death. He still a boy might have given a man a death sentence because of pettiness or fierce loyalty his family did not need. The next three days the Jamesons tried to make restitution to Auger’s daughter Cora. Though only a girl of fourteen, she refused any clemency. She was as silent and as stern as stone. She listened with incomparable dignity to their offer and turned away.
    Will went to the wake and walked behind the hearse and did his duty.
    But that night his mother said, “You should never have questioned a man as fine as Dan Auger.”
    But she knew this was a wrong thing to say, and gave the boy’s heart more trouble. Besides, nothing could be done about it now. Nothing, too, could be done about the way thetown turned against him. The prosecutor sent the RCMP to investigate the death in the camp, and was rumored to be considering charges. Or wanting charges. This was the rumor flying in the air. Scandal was always meat to the famished.
    After a while it died away.
    Yet no one saw the signs of change in Will that Owen saw. Owen tried for the first time to protect his older brother from needless exhibition. And so did Glidden.
    There were men waiting for him on every corner. Owen was skinny and woebegone and not quite five-eight. Will was five-eleven and strong as a young bull. It was somehow incongruous to see the younger brother try to protect the older. But the older boy could not be protected. His fights at dances became legendary within nine months, and he sat in jail many a weekend.
    “Your brother’s in jail again,” Lula once said to Owen, who had run to catch up with her after school. “What will your family do, being ruined by your awful brother—that’s what my father asks—so we pray.”
    Such was her mode of fairness. To explain the failings of others to themselves.
    Solomon Hickey, the thin, dark-haired barber’s son, looked at him with sadness, the kind seen so often in university.
    Owen stupidly trailed along behind them. Lula spoke about her uncle, Professor Stoppard: “The smartest man I’ve ever met, writes poems as fresh as daisies.”
    Owen decided to ask her what it was like to have a professor as an uncle, but was interrupted by: “Solomon, you know him, don’t you? You met him at my house.”
    Solomon Hickey, the only male member of the Steadfast Few.

    Will was prosecuted twice, twice he received thirty days.
    Twice the displeasure of the town came down upon his head. Twice police had him in court. And his bedroom, where his bed remained unslept in, cast a shadow over the lives of those in the house.
    After each exhibition, each stint in jail, came terrible remorse, and he would sit in the barn, alone on a three-legged stool. The men who came at him, as Owen saw, were never man enough to be sober, never brave enough to be alone. Reggie Glidden was Will’s only confidant and source of strength.
    “You have to get back to the woods—we have a drive you know I need you in—not in jail—we have landings on three shores, and a loss of six drivers.”
    But he left it to Reggie and when he himself showed up at camp he seemed restless and changed.
    One night he asked his mother about his father, who starting out was known to be tough.
    “What about killing a man?” Will asked.
    “He never done so,” Mary said, “and except for shaking a man or two he never acted out.” She stared at him, hoping it would register.
    She did not realize