The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online Page A

London, took a job at the Canadian barracks until that was closed. He became a nondescript citizen of the world, wearing a second-hand London Fog coat and reading George Orwell’s essays. He drank dark bitter and had an affair or two of the heart.
    No one seeing him would think his family had a million. So many millionaire Canadians did not affect a million. He disappeared into the great mystery of London fog, with little to keep body and soul.
    He planned to write a book. He planned for a second or two to remain abroad like Hemingway, or claim British citizenship, but did not. There were a few months when he lived on the street. He took to drink, and liked it a lot. He went to Paris, and then to Marseilles. The book came to nothing—he found that though filled with ideas and events witnessed, he himself could not write. He was kind, he was good, but he had made no friends in the army, had little or none now.
    Finally Europe bored him in the way only Europe can do—its history, even after a war, stifled, its art in excess, boasting of great people its own institutions had starved to death. So he turned his eyes toward Canada. The land of numbing promise which would come to nothing, he supposed, or be worse than Europe in the end.
    When he came back in 1946 on a train going west he had no intention of stopping in town. He had built up a resentmenttoward his town in a way that was natural for a man who had proven himself so well, who felt he had been belittled or treated with a lesser hand then deserved.
    He wired his mother from Halifax that he would continue on, and to post money to Montreal. No, he would not be a dentist, as Will had decided once. For him it was the university in Montreal and the study of law.

    Owen was aboard the late afternoon train, on October 17, the one that did not stop.
    As the train approached Newcastle, the town had it stopped (which showed for a brief, bright moment Owen’s influence) and men boarded the train and brought Owen off. The men felt there should be a celebration over the fact that Owen had saved Reggie Glidden by crossing a field of withering machinegun fire and taking two bullets for the trouble. It was said Camellia herself begged them to do this, hoping Owen would help Reggie gain his self-respect.
    So in a display of affection Owen had never had before, and would not have again, the men got him as drunk as a condemned prisoner, and patches of cold grass at the corner of the buildings looked somehow brighter when the sun shone.
    “Let his feet not touch the ground,” they said, raising him up.
    These were his brother’s old crew, hard tough men who had little learning save the toughness they lived by—looking upon him now with unaccustomed grace and civility—looking upon him with new eyes, as Will’s blood. They were men who could dance on a log in the middle of rapids strong enough to tear you apart, and were now smiling at him, as one of theirs, with affection as light as a feather in their hearts.
    They finally set him down, on the platform, for the very first time among those townsmen who said he was their own.
    They held up the old newspaper headline from 1944: OWEN JAMESON KILLED IN ACTION .
    It was a proud moment for him. Family pride—and the feeling of certain townspeople that they had completely misjudged this second-born—necessitated this.
    Lula Brower had sent a note she hoped would be delivered.

SIX
    Reggie Glidden, home since the summer of 1945, had left the town on the Miramichi a day or so before Owen arrived.
    For weeks after the war Reggie had gone every other day to the station, waiting for Owen Jameson.
    Yet over time the talk from old friends about Jameson’s bravery began to wear on him.
    Before he married, he admitted to Camellia he felt he had lost part of himself.
    “Well, we will get you all back together,” she had smiled.
    But there was something else as well. He felt he owed it to Will to keep Owen second. This was the boy who was looked