The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards Page A

had won, which he had pinned to her breast pocket. She told him to button his shirt and take care of his medal.
    The rest of the day he tried to find out where she lived, and if he could ask her out, while others just stared at him.
    “What about Lula Brower?” The Scot maid said.
    “Oh—Lula—I thought she’d be married up to Sonny Estabrook by now.”
    When he was told what had happened to Lula he was sorry, but thought no more of it.
    “Anyway,” he said, with complete openness, “I was a damn fool not to see Camellia for what she was.”
    That night his mother brought him into her parlor, and with yards of knitting, which she had never learned to do, all around her said: “Camellia is Reggie Glidden’s wife. They was married a few months ago—he took to her and Mr. Brower arranged it, so you leave them be.”
    Owen stared at her, blood leaving his face.
    He simply said: “Why in Christ didn’t someone tell me— I made a mistake.”
    He didn’t say “a fool of myself,” for he knew he had done more damage than that.
    He limped across the parlor and went to his room. He sat rubbing his left leg, his eyes startled by pain.
    “It will pain every day of your life—far more than you think now—and far more than the insults to you because of it,” the doctor had told him in London. “And you must keep vigilant about it, or you will lose it, do you hear?”
    Owen inquired about Glidden and said he wanted to see him. But it was all out what he wanted to do with Reggie’s wife, and people did not take his inquiry seriously. Besides, Glidden had left town.
    Camellia went home and, as fate would have it, washed the Lysol-stained skirt she had been wearing, and forgot Lula’s letter to Owen in the inside pocket.

EIGHT
    Owen had to go to the mill the next afternoon, even though he was preparing to leave town on a train to Montreal. He had his acceptance letter from McGill and found no reason now to stay here.
    At the mill he saw his uncle Buckler sitting on a pile of sawdust peeling an apple and reading a magazine. Here he heard his first bad news: they had no good saws—and the cutters had just started a month or so behind.
    “Well, when Reggie gets in—things will change around.”
    But the problem was Reggie’s pride was hurt.
    “He said he wouldn’t be Push.”
    “That’s nonsense,” Owen said, “I’ll talk to him.”
    Owen then took a cruise of the ground, and saw how they were handling everything. Everything at the mill and in the lumberyard was a mess. It spawned a thousand cannibalized parts to keep it going, and was in its death rattle at the edge of the water.
    He came home, went into the office to see what their finances were, and became morbidly aware of the need to stay.
    “Where was Reggie for the last year?” he said.
    The idea was this: Reggie had not been himself—and Mary had paid him anyway.
    After dark he sat out on the veranda smoking, until after the six o’clock train left.
    Then he saw Lula. She had taken it upon herself to leave the house, something she seldom did. She was pushed into this by her father, concerned that Owen had not come to visit. The father worried all day thinking that someone—perhaps Camellia herself—had told him how disfigured and ugly Lulawas. And so Lula was compelled by her father, who wanted the world for her from the time her mother died, to leave the house. She hadn’t wanted to, and finally was bullied into it.
    “You have to see your fiancé,” Brower said.
    If someone who had won a VC would marry his daughter, everything in his life would be fulfilled. That is, her stigma would not matter. She knew this is what he thought, and so did it for him.
    She walked slowly up the great old lane at sunset, with the sun flaring in the naked alders on her right. Her red coat and flat blond hair could be seen almost specter-like in the distance. For some moments he did not know who she was. She was plain, and thin, and now walked with a cane. He