At the same time, on the west side of Saint John, in an old house built before the middle of the nineteenth century that teetered on pillars overlooking the harbor, Reggie Glidden pondered his future. It was now to him a prospectless place of self-recrimination where an act he had no control over was a cedar he could not dislodge in a stream. He had become indebted to a man he once pitied. That was something he could not overcome. He had lied about that man’s deed in order to save face with a cynical town. He could lie because he had once thought so little of Owen, and too much of himself.
Reggie tried to fathom where his downfall had started. It had not started in the war or in the trench or with the jammed rifle, or even in Owen’s rushing with an extra clip of ammunition to the hole Reggie had dug. It had started when he had once tried to determine whether Owen was manly, and took him across the river to meet the drinking boys. This was a flaw not in Owen’s character, but in Reggie’s. Everything seemed to come from that.
Reggie’s hope had rested on the well-known fact that Owen was off to dentistry if he lived through the war. The rather strange desire not to have Owen live through the war that had come to Reggie Glidden the closer the end of the war came was a silent problem Reggie could never speak about, for he was deathly guilty of this feeling, and thought of it as remarkably unnatural and unmanly. Yet if Owen had not lived through the war, Reggie could honor his memory and in some way control what was remembered. He could make the saving of his life more fantastic, and still seem a hero himself. But now Owen had come home. His thoughts were torn between feeling desperately grateful and terribly angry about the same circumstance.
He went to Saint John so he would not have to talk about it, and worked this past week loading ships on the dock. In his pocket he had an offer from Estabrook.
He told his cousin, whose house he was staying at, of his fears. He told him about Camellia one night when he was drinking. He thought he might find sympathy with a man he had known, and protected, as a child.
“She is working at the house Owen lives,” he said. “Owen is a hero to everyone and, well, you know how impressionable young girls are! I married her perhaps in haste, but I do love her with all my heart—she is so like a child—and that I suppose is a bad thing—when you consider it—”
The cousin listened to him, felt privy to knowledge that was a silent cancer in Reggie’s heart.
“Well,” he said, as he held a cigarette in front of his face and smiled corruptly through the smoke, “any man who saves your life might have a go banging your wife and take it as good payment. Hell, she probably thinks that too. For sometimes women act innocent just to get men between the sheets. Just once or twice.”
He was no longer that shy child Reggie had cared about but just another man motivated by his own wounds to wound as well.
Reggie said nothing to this blunt, provocative statement.
“I have no loyalty to the Jamesons except for Will,” he said, feeling the note in his pocket that Sonny Estabrook had sent him.
That very night (the same night she spoke to Owen), Reggie received a long-distance phone call from Camellia. She sounded so joyous, it was as if he had suspected another person, in another world.
It was also a luxury to phone Saint John, and she cherished the moment.
She told him to come home. She told him Owen Jameson needed him back, never to mind the townspeople or what they said. It would all be good again.
“You will be foreman.”
“I will be foreman anywhere, it’s my job,” Reggie said.
“Well, Mr. Jameson says he needs you with him—for Buckler is old and his mom is—well, a little dizzy,” Camellia said. He could hear her voice hesitate because she wanted so much to convince him. He could tell she thought this much greater news than he himself did.
“Please come home,” she whispered.
There was a long and desperate pause over the line. He wanted her to say, “Because I love you.” But for some reason she did not.
“So you saw Owen—is he still there and you still working there?”
“Of course, but—well, that’s why I’m phoning.”
“And Owen—will Owen be staying?” he said.
“Yes.”
He sat silent in the chair. For he knew something about himself now. He was frightened. He was not the same man he had been, and that was simply because people no longer respected him as they once had. And he already knew that Jameson was forced to cut on Good Friday Mountain—the one place more than any in the province he and Will feared. This was where they wanted him to be foreman, and he didn’t know if he could do it.
When he hung up, his face had turned ashen, his lips looked bloodless.
“Bad news, eh?” His frivolous young cousin smiled, hearing only Reggie’s questions about Owen.
“Eh?” he answered, deep in thought. “No—good news all around.”