“I never found her again—though I found her boy!”
Jim smiled and stared at Alex for a long time. It was unnerving. And then he said, “This is the road I built in 1955. This is my road. This road we drove when I got you at the foster home. When my search paid off! When I found you and brought you home—”
After a time he was silent. Then he said, “You know something now—you have everything that is mine.”
“I don’t need it,” Alex said.
“Well I’m not asking you if you do—but it’s yers—it always was—it was a promise I made to yer dead momma for treating her shabby.” He said this weakly, as if to himself.
“It’s all I have left.”
It was the last thing he said. They were near Tabusintac hill. When Alex turned to look, old Jim Chapman was dead, his eyes glazed, and his hands folded on his lap—exactly like Poppy’s had been. In death, Jim Chapman was seeming to tell Alex not to bother admitting what he now knew.
—
THE OLD MAN WAS WAKED IN THE SMALL CHAPEL AT ONE end of the church. It was what Jim had requested, and Alex was happy about this, first because so few came, and second because he could not have people in the old man’s house. Nothing had been put straight in it since he and Leo had looked for the ticket, and he was worried someone would think a break-in had occurred.
The chapel was small. It was a closed coffin, with a picture of Jim sitting on it. In happier times it seemed. Fanny Groat was the first at the chapel, with Minnie and Amy. Fanny wore a fox shawl, and with her dyed black hair, her coarse-colored lipstick and her intensely self-absorbed face, she kept asking him questions about so many things that he finally went into the small side room and sat by himself, leaning ahead in his chair as if about to bolt. Burton stood alone with a kind of whimsy, his shadow cast by the light of one electric candle, and then some stragglers came in: some men from work, some women from the Catholic women’s league, some old soldiers who seemed happy to see other old soldiers there.
Father MacIlvoy came up to Alex and said, “It comes to us all sooner or later.”
A rather stupid saying, Alex decided.
The day was sweet and warm—one thought of a fine harvest—as they lowered the brown coffin into its resting place. Two of the pallbearers were those rough boys Jim had given the wine to on the day he held the party for Alex. One was bald. The other had ballooned to 270 pounds.
Alex longed to see Minnie alone—but when she came toward him, he turned quickly away, as if he had been scalded, and when he turned back she had gone down the steps of the church. There, as he came down, Amy was walking up. For the first time they looked at each other with a kind of mutual terror that came from a certain hidden knowledge. Amy seemed to be trying to decide what this knowledge was.
She looked away, smiling slightly, and he, feeling he must, patted her shoulder, then rushed toward the long lane to go home.
—
IT WAS TWO HOURS AFTER THE FUNERAL OF JIM CHAPMAN before Leo came out of his old shed, chewing a radish. It had spitted rain a little, the drops falling on the deep dust in the driveway, making deep dark marks in the dust and then drying out, leaving a kind of spotted depth.
He had worked all day quietly in the yard, on the wood. He spoke to no one. He, however, did wave at some cars. At about four in the afternoon Markus Paul arrived in his squad car, after his other work was done, to tell Leo that he believed the search would have to be discontinued, at least discontinued with the assumption that Old Poppy was alive, and might now be continued and scaled back with the certainty that the man was dead. He then took a walk up and down the drive looking, for some reason, at the truck’s tire marks.
“Dead—that’s bad news,” Leo said. They conversed in French—for Markus Paul was trilingual, knowing his own Micmac, French, and English.
“It will break the little girls’ hearts,” Leo said with certainty. “I will go out tonight and start the search again.”
“Where would you go?” Markus asked, by way of asking.
“Perhaps, who knows, he took a walk on the highway and was hit by a truck—sometimes that happens and they don’t report it.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” Markus said. “He could be somewhere along a ditch, the poor old man. These are tire marks from Poppy’s truck?”
Bourque nodded. “Why do you want to know?”
“Ah, nothing so much—just interested to know what truck was in that small woods lane.” He asked this as an inquiry, and Bourque knew it.
Bourque shrugged.
“Which way,” Markus asked, “would he have gone? I mean if he went out for a walk, late at night without his truck?”
“Up or down—one way or the other,” Leo sniffed.
“Yes—but for the fact that he was an old man, he might have done so. But I believe—here is what I believe, between you and I, Leo, and keep this in confidence please—I believe he was in for the night, and someone came to his house. I believe they enticed him out for a drink—maybe they had something for him, or wanted him to do something for them. In fact, I have tried to put myself in his shoes. I am an old man in for the night, getting ready for the biggest day of the year. I haven’t even finished loading my truck. Why would I expend energy going out? Perhaps I would go out if I knew someone—better yet since I was painting my signs and had no beer in the fridge, for the last bottle was empty with cigarette butts in it, then I might go for a beer—or if someone wanted to celebrate something with me. Someone who said he would come back later and help me get ready. So I am thinking someone French.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I don’t yet. But he spoke to Bridgette at quarter to nine, told her he was painting his signs and for her to get ready to be an ear of corn.”
“Does that matter?”
Markus shook his head. “He could not have gone too far in the dark—he didn’t take his flashlight. He didn’t take his truck. He had no reason to go unless someone offered him a drink. Most of his life he spent alone—most of his visitors, all in the last five years, were Acadian—at least 90 percent of them were.”
“Perhaps.”
“There is no one nearby who had him over for a drink—I checked—and the first English house is six miles farther upriver. So.”
“So.”
“So that likely makes the visitor French—but where would they be going to—?”
Leo shrugged, and looked down as if inspecting something.
“Brennen’s,” Markus Paul said, his face suddenly emptying of gravity and becoming delighted. “What do you think—Brennen’s?”
“Why?” Leo asked, his legs buckling just slightly.
“Simply because it is closest—fifteen miles closer than the bar downriver. So say they were on the way to Brennen’s.”
“Why couldn’t they go to the French bar downriver?”
“Well I don’t know—you got me there—but a couple of reasons: one, it was late, and they would want to get to the tavern before it closed, they would go to the closest one. He would go if he was told they wouldn’t be all night—say, for an hour or so.”
Leo shrugged again, turned his head away and immediately scratched his ear—a nervousness not lost on Markus.
“He mightn’t have gone with anyone—or if he did he may be somewhere else right now—”
“True enough!”
“So why Brennen’s if they were French?” Leo contended.
“Well, French go there,” Markus said.
Leo shrugged.
“You go there at times?”
Leo shrugged.
“Or maybe there was someone with them—English guy?” Markus paused, and then nodding at his own answer continued. “You see, an English guy driving; a French guy goes to the door.” (Here Markus pivoted on his legs a little to show his theory.) “They started to take him somewhere. But they didn’t make it. No one did—at least no one we can account for—so something happened on the way—”
> “That’s if any of it happened,” Leo said.
“That’s right—that’s if any of it happened,” Markus said, staring at Leo for a long moment. “I know it’s far-fetched,” he said quietly.
“Did you check the camp where Johnny Proud hangs out?” Leo asked.
“Oh yes—and I will again—it’s all still open.” He smiled.
“Well that’s good,” Leo said. “I just hope the old lad comes walking up me drive. I’d certainly give him a big hug!”
“So would I,” Markus said.
Markus Paul believed it was murder over something—perhaps money. Probably committed late at night when Poppy was in a truck or fleeing from a truck. He believed Poppy had trusted those he was with. He believed it was two people. He also believed it was a French and an English man traveling together who knew the area. He believed it was an English man driving. All of this was easy for him. Police car tire marks didn’t hide the fact that the passenger side of the truck had two people come to it: Poppy and someone else. This in fact was terribly easy for him, even though his colleagues’ footprints hampered the evidence.
If it was an English-speaking and a French-speaking man—who were younger than the missing man—the French fellow would probably go to the door; the English man might be the one driving. That, to Markus, meant the truck came from upriver not downriver toward Shippigan or the French villages as Leo believed. He had already thought the truck was from the English side of the phone booth—simply because of where it was parked, on the English side. If it was from the French side, it would have been parked on a lane almost identical down from the house, not up. So all of this was suggested simply by the way the truck’s front tires had been positioned on the little pile of sawdust on the old logging lane.
“Of course,” Sergeant Bauer said, “that could have happened that morning or the evening before—and it may have been other people entirely.”
And all that could be true, if one did not think like Markus Paul.
Markus believed something terrible had happened, and the men had hidden the body. In the last two days, some had wondered why Markus would get the case. People who knew him said wasn’t his daddy worse than anyone, and what about his drop-her-pants sister and his renegade cousin Johnny Proud! This is what they were whispering already behind his back, and this is what he already knew. And they had begun to look at the reserve, which rested just in back of Poppy Bourque’s, as the place where the real culprit came from.
Markus had searched Poppy’s house for the last two days trying to discover something missing people might have wanted, but couldn’t. Poppy had almost nothing at all.
After Markus Paul left, Leo sat out in his T-shirt that showed his body to be as strong as iron, and he stared down through the back woods that went for acres, as if he was thinking of something, or remembering something.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “yes, well there you go.”
How close to solving it Markus had come, just off the top of his head, just by noticing the beer was gone, and the painting was stopped, and the flashlight wasn’t taken. How close someone could get to the truth over such incidental things, so Bourque knew they would have to hide the body soon. Far from trying to emulate Alex now, as he did when he was younger and wanted to be educated, he discovered Alex to be a weakling and a vast problem.
The big cheese, he thought, the big cheese!
But he suddenly realized there was a far greater problem, coming like a torpedo into view on the starboard side of his life.
He thought so suddenly of Amy it was physically painful, almost as if she were present beside him. That little girl who once gave him a cupcake she had made in her little girl’s oven that Sam had gotten her for Christmas. The girl with the impish smile who could play a guitar as well as anyone he knew.
He remembered that he had stood at the door, and snow fell on the cupcake, and she said, “Oh, I will get you another one.” And she ran back into the kitchen in her panties and T-shirt to get another, carefully bringing it to him. But snow fell on that cupcake too. Tears came to her eyes as she stared at the snow on her cupcakes, and she ran to get another.
“Oh my dear I like snow,” Leo had said, laughing.
Now, he began to wonder. This was a dangerous moment. For what would happen if she went and told Markus she had seen Alex and him together? That would go a long way to prove the Indian’s theory.
But then his thoughts would trail off. It would in a way prove nothing. Best to let it go. Then he thought: She was the only witness who saw them together that night. He was a relative of Poppy Bourque. He had told Sergeant Bauer and everyone who asked him that he was home. If she told people she saw him?
He would have to talk to Alex. To see what Alex would say, and just to see if the theory Alex preached about years ago at university held water. For Alex’s was the classic intellectual idea that murder could hold juridical weight in the right circumstances. Alex himself had written an essay about this in the paper years before when he was trying to hold Chapman’s Island for the native band.
“What if someone gets hurt?” a reporter with a little mustache and a crooked face had asked Alex, tantalizingly.
“Sometimes a person has to get hurt to understand things must change,” Alex had said, born of the knowledge that he himself was almost certain not to be harmed.
Bourque had read it and thought it was very smart at the time, and it lingered in his mind later, when he took the bid to his boss. Now it was playing in his mind again.
But there was something else as well, and it has to be said now. To Bourque, the act of abortion was murder. It didn’t obsess him or absorb him—he didn’t bother marching against it, or ever think of blowing up clinics—and he knew in his heart that some intellectuals like Alex loved the thought that common, stupid men like Bourque thought this way. So he had kept it to himself much of his life. Still, he wouldn’t or couldn’t change his mind about the act. That is, he did not mind if people did the act, but he refused to call it anything else but what he considered it was. Do it if you want, but I refuse to legitimize it, he might say.
So this is what he felt Alex had wanted to make legal (for he wrote many times that it should be), and he knew, as did a lot of people his age, why Alex had left the priesthood, and how much he loved Minnie.
This is what “stupid” Bourque was thinking as he sat out on his sawhorse and scratched his arms, and watched as afternoon wore on.
Amy and the fair and the painted sign, and Poppy. All of this now swam in Bourque’s mind.
“Loose ends,” Leo said, “too many loose ends that I have to take care of all by myself.”
He lit a cigarette, and loaded some wood, and crossed the field in the dark, where the east wind howled out like wounded monsters just at dusk.
Yes, he would have to talk to the big cheese soon. He would have to talk to the big cheese tonight.
—
LISTENING TO THE SAME WIND WAS ALEX CHAPMAN, WHO had not eaten in days. He had come back from the funeral, and was still in his suit. He sat in the corner of the largest of the three rooms. His whole world had been turned upside down from the moment he started to look for the ticket.
But most ironic was this: If he had just left things alone, he would have had the property and the ticket, and would now have been safe and secure for life. In his anguish he had given the ticket to his worst enemy.
At different points in the day he would remember his mother’s stringy hair, the drab yellow walls, the children crying out in the apartment behind them, the little girl Pat who he liked and who he believed he would remain with forever, the great red dog that scared him (there was a red good dog and a red bad dog, he remembered), the man who said he knew Miller Britain. All of this made him cry out: “I have never done anything like that!”
And the answer: You have done what you have done.
He thought of what they should have done and might have done differently, and came back to the same answer.
>
Go to the police, he heard.
How could he say anything to the police? What would happen if he did say something?
Shame, jail, prison, death.
At his uncle’s funeral he had listened to the mass in a kind of anguish. So he had left the church early and far across the lot was his grotto, its hood covered in falling leaves and a clear blistering wind coming from off the bay. And just as he was looking in the Virgin’s direction, the sound of “Ave Maria,” sung by Pavarotti, that Jim had requested for his funeral mass, came to him in all its wonder, as if reaching once again, and once more, and always, always toward what life is supposed to be.
That old hypocrite, he thought, when he thought of Jim, screwed every woman he could. Still and all, the song he requested had no hypocrisy, and perhaps Jim had known this.
Fearing he would collapse, Alex turned as soon as the graveyard prayers were over, and hurried first to the little reception and then back to his cabin. He hurried, walking alone up the dirt road, so people watched him go, as if watching a madman.
Of course the house was his now, the debt was paid at death, and the ticket was actually his as well. His uncle had left him everything. In fact, he should ask Bourque to give it to him to cash. But no, the idea of Amy knowing something stifled that thought. They could not cash the ticket yet.
He went to his own shed and locked the door.
—
ALEX STAYED IN THE SMALL BACK BEDROOM, WITH THE plastic grocery bags over the small window and garbage bags with cans and bottles collected about the room, and hid.
He decided that it was time to go away, anywhere. And he packed his bags, and sat alone by the window. Then he thought that if he left, he left others to that man, Leo Bourque, and he could not do that. Bourque had to go away first. But that was not the only reason. Any sudden movement would turn all eyes upon him, he felt. He had to act natural.
—
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