The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards Page B

rose then to meet her, and helped her to the veranda.
    He had heard of the stroke and felt sorry for her. But he did not know her anymore. Long ago he assumed she had married. The only letter he had received from any one of those young girls had been from Camellia.
    However, Lula was wearing the brooch he had given her. One of the Steadfast Few who had been at the house, had run and pinned it on.
    “You’ve always been a greater charmer than Camellia, dear,” she had said.
    The air was cold, the trees were baring, and the ground was hard as frozen turnip at dawn. She sniffed as she spoke, her red woolen glove rubbing her face; there was a slight impediment, or slur, in her speech.
    “Well—I’ve gotten hold of you—being a hero must take up your time—” she said. She found it difficult to look at him, as if guilty of something. He knew this and tried to put her at ease.
    “Don’t be silly, of course not—and I am not,” he said.
    “I wore your pin,” she said. She smiled, a small red crease on her throat that followed up her right cheek. He was silent.
    “Are ya staying?” she asked.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Ah well, the world is yours, I guess,” she said. “Did you get the letter?”
    “What—no—what letter? In the war, you mean—overseas?”
    “No—I wrote you one the other day. I asked—anyway, never mind it—I just wanted to—I mean, Daddy and I, to congratulate you.”
    He looked at her now, could think of nothing to say except ask her if she was seeing a doctor.
    She acted puzzled at his overall silence, lingered awhile to talk of the war dead, like Bennie and Bill and Donald and Sam, then quickly offered him a kiss, and left in the same shadows that held her cheek and hair, the elusive quality of both desire and despair.
    The world was terrible, he thought. Terrible for her, and terrible for her father, and terrible for everyone else. He could see old Brower in this move—as in every move the poor woman made. That house he had once longed to enter a shapeless prison and nothing more.
    Solomon Hickey was waiting at the edge of the property. Hickey looked back over his shoulder and nodded at something she said. Hickey, the little boy who was her confidant, little boy still.
    She too looked back over her shoulder, which showed her paralyzed cheek captured in a desperate moment, as her perfume was caught in the flimsy late October night. Then Solomon took her arm.
    If Owen had loved her once, that was gone. Her afflictionmade it impossible for him to tell her this. He thought he wouldn’t have to, for he would simply disappear again into some city where among the cacophony of engines and machines he could be alone.

NINE
    The next night, going over certain papers about board feet and men, and equipment left inland after the spring run, he discovered there had been sabotage of a two sled, and a depot had burned the previous year. They suspected Cora Auger’s fifteen men, brave and true—but no charges had been filed by the prosecutor.
    “Where in fuck was Reggie?” he said angrily. He had pictured, perhaps a little too vainly, Reggie being completely loyal to his family now.
    The thought of his mother and his well-meaning uncle trying to run things alone complicated matters.
    “Tell me tomorrow what is going on here,” he said to his mother.
    “Oh—of course—I mean I thought I had been telling you.”
    He went to the third floor and lighted a cigarette in the drowsy, stilled air.
    The hallway was dark, and portraits of Will and of his father and mother in a horse-drawn carriage on their wedding day hung on the wall. They sat mute and solid in the moment taken—forever in that split second of daylight and meaning no longer evident anywhere else.
    It was then that he saw Camellia at the far end of the hall—for the first time in two days. Actually, he had avoided her.
    But it was as if she was oblivious to the tensions already beginning to swirl about her and him. And two things