The Friends of Meager Fortune Read Online Free Page B

that of all conversations with the boy this was the definitive moment, the one question and answer the boy needed—that in all the hard living, the miles of woods and swamp, their love for each other, this was the one answer with which she failed her oldest child, who had sent Dan Auger out, not on her bequest but on her behalf. The answer, in a secret way, left him broken. He remained so for a year and a half.

    In May of 1939, Will, sober for a month, took to the spring drive. They had cut the winter logs free of their block andchains into the water, and after a good day’s run, found they had a jam at the fork of one of the great turns in the river where the water is swift. It happened in the night when they decided to run the landings (last year’s logs left on the bank) down into a river already full, and this crammed the logs together at the turn.
    There was much cursing and blame, and the turn was blocked solid by morning. A few of Jameson’s men were out on the jam trying to pry the timber, with a man in a scow to rescue them if those timbers gave. They decided by ten a.m. that if a charge was laid, the four timbers holding back the logs behind would split and allow the drive to continue.
    “Who can set a charge?” Will asked his friend Reggie Glidden.
    “The best one is not here,” Reggie said.
    “Who is the best one?” Will asked, inspecting the great timbers like mixed and matched toothpicks, and jumping surely from one log to the other like a flea.
    “Dan Auger.”
    Dan Auger was the best. And there was no one else to lay a charge. Will’s father would have done it, but he was gone. So Will reasoned he must replace Dan Auger and his father as well. He reasoned it was his duty.
    “We can get Harold Dunn to come over,” Reggie Glidden said, “or I could do it easy enough—”
    “It’s not a problem, Reg—and Dunn is angry at me, so bring the charges forward and I will do it meself,” Will said.
    The dynamite was brought forward after one o’clock on a 1918 Pope L-18 motorcycle, a V twin with crank case cast from aluminum alloy.
    “There ya go, me young lad—she’s all yours now,” a toothless, grinning fellow said, tapping the box behind him.
    The occupants in the houses upon the far bank wereinformed. And Reggie Glidden went with his friend to set the charges—on the three main logs to bust through the one hunkered underneath.
    “Take the cedar and the princess pine, and unnerneath will move,” Glidden said, looking into the black, frothing, bark-filled water.
    “And the whole world will be one great stick,” Will answered, looking behind him into the gray wall of wood.
    They set the dynamite almost at water level on the three logs, taped them secure and twined the fuses together, then hopped back to the shore with the long wick. Reggie, with a look of professional aloofness, lighted the fuse with a Player’s cigarette, and the men watched it wind its way above the stalled timbers, like trying to follow a scattering snake. For a second the fuse disappeared. Then, without warning, it blew and the three cedars bogging down the run flew into the air, a great groan and foam threw itself into the rainbow the parting water made. Then logs started inching forward to the cheers of wood-hardened men. And then everything went still. There seemed to be a slight sideways canter to the whole drive—and everything stopped.
    They waited a minute in the silence.
    “It didn’t go,” Will said.
    “Bring the Clydesdales—and attach them on the other bank,” Reg said. That seemed to be the best idea—the Clydesdales could put the jammed logs right. That might work. But the Clydes were seven miles upriver, and would take a good two hours to get here. Nor was there another team, except at Brennan’s farm. All they had to do was ask. But Brennan had the jaw that Will’s temperament broke. And so he could not go ask for those horses, even if Reggie pleaded.
    “No boy—I take no source from a