Free The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards

the wood.
    She did not know Reggie would leave.
    Owen also realized this year was life or death. How ordinary that was: life and death in a man’s life’s work. No one seemed to mind when it wasn’t their own life. He would have to go into the woods himself and leave Buckler in charge of the mill—new saws had to be bought, and the wood already in the yard had to been sawed. The landings would have to be collected in a half-dozen places. He would do it for Will; he owed that much.
    Yet the government decision meant Owen would have to have his men go further up river, past where anyone had gonebefore, and cut out of the wilderness once again his batch houses and his horse hovels, make his claim for the timber. So Owen decided the only chance to save the mill was going to cut on Good Friday Mountain, called Buckler’s Mountain by some. None had gone there before. He would go there now. He did not know that Buckler had decided the same a month before.

    Buckler believed it was his fault they had lost the holdings Will had struggled so hard to bid on. All that lumber that Will had mapped out—perhaps forty-five million board feet at maturity—what he thought of as Will’s greatest legacy would be turned over to other mills.
    “Tell me why that is,” Owen said.
    It was very simple to understand once Owen saw the date that bid had opened. It was years ago. The day after Will was killed. In the hidden fury that is grief, no one reminded Mary to make the bid that day. Buckler now blamed himself. He said that he had failed Mary’s husband, failed Mary’s son, and now failed Mary.
    “Don’t be silly,” Owen said. “How could you have known?”
    By the time they realized this oversight, Will’s intention had been discovered by Estabrook and contested. Now that the wood had matured, the government had changed and all bids were reopened. Europe needed to rebuild.
    Now that the stand was ready, it was no longer theirs.
    If Will had not died that day, the bid would have been made the very next evening. The first evening of the wake.
    But how had Estabrook found out about this? It took Buckler a while to understand how simply fate had played out its hand against them. Estabrook Sr. and Jr. were, along withknowledgeable timber men from the government, pallbearers at Will’s funeral.
    Fred Bots, an underling in the forestry department, had let it be known to the Estabrooks that the timber was found but the bid not made, because Will had died.
    Estabrook Jr. (called Sonny) realized their chance and translated non-bid as non-desire: “The family probably doesn’t want to bid on it after this,” Sonny told his father. “Most of it’s not going to be prime for ten years anyways—let’s you and I go take a look ourselves—we have to go over to the Jensen” (this was a Norwegian ship that had come up from New England, and they had been asked aboard by the captain—they wanted to do business with his employer) “and then we can take a jaunt to see it—take the captain with us, to show him—how’s that?”
    “Ah—perhaps—Freddy, see what you can do to get us in a bid,” Old Estabrook said.
    Freddy Bots realized he had betrayed a man at his funeral out of stupidity, and a longing to impress. He was, however, too afraid of Old Estabrook to do much about it.
    Buckler discovered this shortly after, but did not have the qualities that made Owen’s father and brother so feared. He could do nothing.
    It was using Will’s death that mattered most to Owen. A stand that was no longer theirs, because of human grief and death. He also realized that Estabrook Jr. could easily have paid Bots a kickback for this lot. Of course, nothing like that could be proven.
    It was in this moment that Owen decided he could not leave, for the memory of Will demanded that he stay.
    “I’m staying here until you get straightened about—and that’s an end to it,” Owen said. “Tell the men to go up on Good Friday.”
    “I already