Free The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards Page B

was the last of the lumber baron years, and of his family’s operation (although he pretended not to). New companies as far away as the States would come in and create a new market, for tissue and toilet paper, for boxes to put trifles in. For commodities they did not even now know existed. They would haul by truck and not horse, they would cut by chainsaw and not ax, they would load by harvester and not hand—they would rid the world of the very woods they depended on. Owen could glimpse this future more than some others here, but it was an erstwhile glimpse, a glimpse he himself did not fully understand.
    In twenty years this life, these men of almost two centuries, would be no more. They would be like Yeats’ dissatisfied ones. Unable, many of them, to exist in the world now—at this time, what would happen—what would happen to dreams still soft in the night air?
    A man like many here would not live in the world to come. They would fight it—would fight the new world unto death.But the world would not lose. Just like the First People before them, these men, these tough, kind-hearted men, would lose. For that was the way of the world, and Owen knew it. That was why he was full of sadness when he saw these men scattered about the trees and imagined them ghosts, with their bodies still strong and hearts innocent. He knew if he told any of them to walk fifty miles into the wilderness they would turn and go, so anxious they were to prove themselves to those they worked and bled for. Already there was a great road being hacked out of the middle of the province by companies ready to use truck instead of horse and river, so in ten years horse and river would become obsolete, and truck and gas be the measure.
    Owen’s objection to the world changing might be the objection of a good man—but what did that matter? Ten thousand good men could object and still the battle of Stalingrad happen.
    He looked at these men and sighed. He certainly had brought them to a tough place.

    But for him was another tougher place, not yet seen.
    The tougher place was the blossoming opinion of the town. In this opinion, of the old woman who had seen them, and drinking men on the corner, Owen had lied to the men who did not want to cut on a dangerous mountain, and was having relations with Reggie’s wife—Reggie, who Owen had fired over a disagreement about this cut.
    In the blossoming opinion of the town, which had so recently raised him up, “so not a foot touch the ground” Owen had snubbed his former sweetheart Lula, who had suffered a stroke and therefore suffered too much. This alone wasthe most disparaging rumor against him. He was obligated to marry her.
    In the blossoming opinion of the town, Camellia was asking Reggie for a divorce, a very serious matter back then, especially for a Catholic girl.
    This was the opinion of our town, which neither Owen nor Camellia had heard, but would have to face in the coming months.

PART II

ONE
    Owen had been home three weeks, and much had changed in his relationship with people who had come to honor him. Some questioned him about Reggie Glidden and why he wasn’t Push.
    Others, the old maid at the house, told him to beware of Camellia.
    “She’s a gold digger,” she whispered piously. “It’s what I hear downtown at the cookie shop—I go for Mrs. Jameson and it’s what I heard.”
    “I’ll go tell her,” he said.
    “Don’t you dare,” she said.
    “Well—let me see—what is she doing now?—ah, there she is—she is out playing hopscotch in the back lane with your granddaughter—a scurrilous thing. And she speaks to people as equals—young and old—a terrible thing—and she finds beauty almost anywhere—a maddening thing.”
    “Hopscotch can’t fool me—or beauty—” the old lady mumbled (and rejoiced in her mumbling).
    But hopscotch was not Camellia’s only fault. Her hiking up her skirt as she did the floor was something too, which he had witnessed coming downstairs