Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  So Markus knew he would have to fight his friends or stay away. He chose to stay away—for now—hoping that this would allow him to save face.

  Old Amos, hardly able to read or write, had said that this was what would happen. That is, that men would form this alliance and rely upon others to tell them what was right or wrong. So old Amos, without having read C.S. Lewis, was worried about the same thing as Markus.

  But, Markus thought, Isaac had proven himself in a hundred battles with authority, with the RCMP, with crass and obnoxious legislation. And now everyone wanted justice, so what was wrong with that? Was Isaac fair? He was as fair as the white people were. Was he kind? He was as kind as they had been to his own father, who had been falsely accused and hanged in 1955. Did Isaac’s father’s death inflame the idea of injustice in Isaac? Of course it did. Had he sought revenge? Most certainly! Would he use other whites to call down to nothing people like Roger Savage? Sure. Much of what was said about Roger was probably true. Did it matter if it was proven? So much was unproven against the Micmac band, and what recourse had they had? So to start a war against Roger and use psychology that the whites would fear was fine by Isaac. That is, from now on, no one was allowed to say that Roger was innocent. And Joel Ginnish, acting as Isaac’s right-hand man, let Markus know this himself.

  “We cannot call him innocent,” Joel said. “The white man is not innocent.”

  “But what if Roger was innocent?” was the question Markus continually asked, because it is what Amos had told him to ask.

  “Ask it as you would for any Indian friend of yours,” Amos said.

  But the answer came: So what if, in this one instance, truth was not cut and dried? Why did it ever have to be? If Roger Savage was singled out, that was okay, for how many First Nations men had been singled out? And to belong, to be inserted into the inner circle, to be loved by those who believed they were sweeping their broad wings toward ideological change—beside that, what did a Roger Savage matter? That Roger was beginning to be called a racist after the funeral, what did it matter? Roger had visited the grave of Hector Penniac—everyone knew about this. For everything he did was now seen.

  Joel went about saying that those who wanted to join Isaac were fine. Those who did not want to join were then against him. And if you were against him, then you were against the First Nations themselves. And the First Nations would then stand against you.

  This was all whispered, and yet there was such wonderful power and truth and sincerity in the whispers that Markus trembled.

  Who, then, could go against Isaac’s new group, to halt this presumption? Or to even dare to call it presumption? Perhaps there was only one man on the six-hundred-person reserve brave enough to do so.

  And that man was seventy-five-year-old Amos Paul, who had been given an honorary elders’ dinner just last year. This was the only man, old and arthritic, who had hunted moose from the time he was a child, who had chased moose down in the winter air, who had fished on the sea and had laboured against discrimination and injustice, who had known both, who had fought in the battles of the Second World War, who had been decorated and then not allowed to enter the Legion with his regiment to have a beer with those his rifle had helped save—this man was the one who now looked across the withered fields and small houses, where every window told of tragedy and broken promises, and stared into the faces of Isaac and especially Joel and saw aggrandizement, not at the expense of Roger Savage—no, that was not the point—but at the expense of the band itself.

  When Markus had come home that night from Isaac’s, the old man was sitting at the kitchen table, doing a jigsaw puzzle, and as always searching everywhere for the small piece he already held in his hand.

  “He will have a right-hand man,” Amos said, not looking his way, but mulling over the puzzle.

  “Who?”

  “Who would Isaac want? Well?”

  “I don’t know! Maybe Joel.”

  Amos said nothing for a moment. Then, “No, he won’t want Joel, but he will need him.” He hemmed and hawed over the puzzle. “Joel. Do you know he steals out of our own nets and sells the fish?”

  “Everyone says that,” Markus said.

  Old Amos hemmed and hawed once more, and held the piece out and dragged it across the puzzle trying to find a place where it would fit.

  “It’s true. He stole from Francis’s net and Ward’s, and he stole from mine—four big fish last week. And do you know who he sells them to?”

  “No,” Markus said.

  “He sells them to the Monk brothers, who sell them again up the road. That’s my fish he stole, and Mrs. Francis’s, who has all those kids, and Denny Ward’s. And yet”—here he inserted the piece—“Joel is now chief appointment maker. So what am I to say?”

  Then he added: “You remember that I have taken some pictures of the boat, and it is a very strange accident. Very strange all the way around.”

  Two days after Isaac had invited those boys to his house and spoken of Hector’s death, Joel woke up early and went to the corner store to buy the paper. There was nothing in it about Hector that day—yet there was a Canadian Press report about the United Nations. Then he looked to see if his letter about his brother’s murder had been printed. It had not been.

  Very upset with the lack of action, Joel took the ceremonial hunting-lodge spear right from the hunting lodge and threw it into a tree that Roger was standing beside, near the edge of a secondary pool where the river followed the bend, close to Micmac ground. Roger came out there each day to see if the salmon had made their way up after the Micmac nets were lifted. The grilse run would of course be bigger later on. The fish did not stay in these pools very long, but Roger could tell the strength of the run by seeing them, and decide on the number the band was catching. He did not mind the band catching them—his dispute was with Joel, who he believed took far too many. Roger took the spear out of the tree and was going to break it, but realizing how old it was he set it on the bar and walked away.

  Hector had had nothing to do with Roger’s pools, but this was now seen by some as the reason for his death.

  So by evening everyone on the reserve had heard of this act of defiance against the white man Roger Savage, who had taken their pools.

  Markus wanted to think that his grandfather had somehow sanctioned all this action. But he soon knew that this was not the case. His grandfather only seemed old and bewildered.

  In fact, the next evening the old man walked to the band council meeting that came after the spear throwing. Joel stood among them, accepting the congratulations of some boys, while the night smelled of sea salt and tar, one side door having been left open. Amos walked through the crowd and up to him.

  “You should not have thrown that spear,” he said mildly, his right hand trembling slightly. “You might have hurt someone. And for what—a salmon pool that will come back to us for good in a year or two more? No, my boy, you should not have done that.” He fumbled about, looking from one face to the other. But there were no friendly faces.

  Joel shrugged. “My brother’s dead,” he said, “and you’re worried about a spear thrown at a fuckin tree!” He was the first to leave, as if he did not want to disrespect himself by staying.

  Other people turned away, and soon the old man was alone with Markus, who was waiting silently outside to drive him home.

  “What happened, Granddad?” Markus asked.

  “I do not know what I am supposed to do,” Amos said.

  After the band meeting, back in Isaac’s smoky kitchen, some of the young men told Isaac that he was their chief.

  Isaac held up his hand. “Give me time now,” he said, “to find a reasonable explanation.”

  But the reasonable explanation was already there. More importantly, Isaac was already legendary. Not to use him in this crisis, not to exploit him, would be senseless. And each of the young men knew this would be part of the reasonable explanation that Isaac would discover.

  So this was whe
n the warrior group around Isaac was formed. It was only six or seven men, those who were the most trusted by him, those who were the more secretive and brave.

  But the painful fact for Markus, who was not allowed in the group, for he was not trusted, was that this group was formed as a rebellion against Amos Paul and included many of his friends, who no longer included him. Dates and treaties that had gone back almost two hundred years were spoken about as being dissolved. “It is all dissolved,” Joel said, shaking his head, “all dissolved. There is no more reserve, no more Canada. We will do what we want.”

  No one said this, but most knew that sooner or later a crime would have to be committed.

  Each morning Markus saw Roger Savage walk along the demarcation line toward his woodlot and come out later in the day, after cutting wood or checking his pools and the beaver lodges farther upriver toward Tabusintac.

  Roger was not a coward. He had walked into a meeting two nights before. And with men standing beside the door, he had excused himself as he passed them. There in their midst, with Amos in his seat as chief, Roger said, “I have nothing against anyone here, and have never had. I will tell you, if you come upriver to net my pools, I will hay yours.” That is, he meant he’d put hay in the water, which would carry downriver and sweep the Indian gillnets.

  The silence was unbearable. Old Amos nodded but said nothing. Isaac, taller than Roger but probably no stronger, simply looked at him and did not speak.

  This was not out of fear, of course, but out of respect for the band meeting. From 1755, from the time of the first band meeting held here with people from other races, everyone was allowed to have their say.

  Later, Roger continued working on his house after dark using two propane lanterns, for he had a large propane tank, so that he himself appeared only in shadow and the saw-cuts of dust fell like warm grace.

  But soon after that, Max Doran, with his shiny eyes and straw hat and terrible earnestness to get at the truth, which he believed he had already arrived at, started to attract notice. And then the papers started their stories.

  Suddenly. Like a hailstorm.

  SEPTEMBER 6, 2006

  MARKUS LIKED JOHN WAYNE MOVIES AND OFTEN WALKED to the store late at night to get them, coming back through side lanes to his apartment. Yet he could never get used to his VCR and always seemed to push the wrong buttons. He had heard that now VCRs were almost obsolete.

  So if he had never learned to use what was obsolete, how could he learn to use what was coming? He had a cell phone, but it was almost never charged. He no longer drove a squad car, but his old red Honda. He was an insomniac and would wake up at night and walk, sometimes for miles, along the road. He had pain now and again in his chest.

  In 1998, he’d been to London and had sat near the fountain in Trafalgar Square, where Nelson viewed the sky. He’d flown someone back across the ocean—he’d been the bodyguard of a famous author who had come to Canada and was very distressed that people would want him killed. The RCMP had given him Markus.

  “What will happen if the assassins get through the door?” the author asked.

  “I am sure they never will.”

  “But if they do—if and when they do?”

  “If they do, you will not be here, and I will face them alone.”

  Markus had wanted to get the author’s autograph, but never did.

  He had watched John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist, four times. Each time tears came to his eyes. Lauren Bacall was still beautiful in that movie.

  Then he would write in his notebooks, which were piled helter-skelter in the corner of the room.

  “Where is Roger Savage’s rifle?” he wrote in 1998, after that trip to England.

  Now, in the early fall of 2006, he would come home from work and stare at his bookshelf. He had a good two thousand books stashed everywhere, packed in boxes and on shelves. He was looking for the book that would define that summer long ago when Hector Penniac had died. For himself and Max Doran. He believed he might find it. That one book.

  When the time was right.

  1985

  1

  LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN EARLY JULY OF 1985, AS AMOS sat out on his old couch behind the shed and looked down over the small lot to the great bay and his few crabapple trees that never seemed to have a reasonable crabapple, a newspaperman, Max Doran, came to see him. The reporter was about twenty-five with reddish blond hair tied in a ponytail. He had done a good job on several labour disputes and a case about pollution in the last year. It was his dogged determination to hold others accountable that had made him a hero. He gave up on nothing and intimated some terrible things. He had his own slogan: “Viewer discretion is advised.”

  Like many who believed in sedition, he’d had, from youth, a deep puritanical strain.

  The whole nature of investigative reporting was to expose—and to say Doran was impartial was absurd. He had never been impartial. But he had a very strong sense that his facts were the legitimate ones, that his posture was moral, that the purity of his notions were liberal and therefore inviolate. He would not lose a story; he would continue until the end. He had been threatened before and was hard to scare. He believed he must try to change the fabric of government. And someday, Max knew, he would write his blockbuster.

  Amos had heard of Max Doran. Amos had read him. This is why Amos feared him.

  A veteran journalist had taken Doran under his wing two years before, a man who had never written anything too memorable but had once drunk with Louis Robichaud and once with Dalton Camp. He told everyone he was Doran’s mentor, and he now lived vicariously through the work the boy did. So this veteran told Doran to take this story and to look at the strain of overt bigotry in the province. He sat in his faded grey suit drinking his fifth gin of the day.

  “You know this has been Canada’s festering sore!” the man pontificated. “You need to get those arrogant, lying bastards—make our government wake up.”

  Max could not detect the envy in the old socialist’s voice. He listened to this advice while his mentor cupped his hands over Max’s hands, leaned close and rasped, “Festering, festering, festering fucking sore! The arrogant bastards, all of them! For once in his fucking life he was kept from a job by an Indian, and the prick kills him—kills him! If that load had dropped from the very top, it might have killed them all.”

  “Don’t worry,” Max said, gently. “I intend to take this all the way!”

  “Yes, yes,” his mentor said, sitting up and finishing off his gin. “I pray you will, for an old man who has been in the fight too long—take it all the fucking way!”

  It made Doran feel good to be considered working class, to go to the press club and drink scotch with older, haggard, alcoholic reporters from the Louis Robichaud years who now looked forward to their pensions, and who spoke of great stories they themselves had never written.

  This story, about a “deeply disturbing” death in the north of the province—a place that had more than 32 percent unemployment at any given time, a place given to bad roads, disputes and violence that you always heard about—would be the catalyst to change his life.

  So in some ways, Doran already believed the allegations against Roger and was simply finalizing a report that he had been waiting to file most of his life.

  “I had no idea that this plum would be handed to me,” he told a colleague. The younger journalist, Gordon Young, wished him good luck and quietly offered him a piece of advice that his mentor had not: “All kinds of people will say all kinds of things. I would not go on the reserve at the invitation of any one person or group. I would interview only those involved or having some knowledge of what happened in the pulp yard on that day—anything else will lead to a conundrum.”

  Max humbly nodded his thanks.

  He got directions to find Chief Amos Paul, and went to the house and knocked, but no answer came. So he looked in the living-room window and saw right through to the backyard—for the living-room had a window at the fron
t and the back. And there Amos was, a little old man on a lawn chair, whittling on a piece of poplar.

  “Well, once again you’ve had an awful time here,” Max said, holding out his hand.

  “Oh, what an awful time,” Amos said, taking the hand limply and letting go.

  “I’m talking about the killing of Hector Penniac,” Doran said more loudly, as if the old man were deaf.

  “Hector—did you know him?”

  “No, I never had that privilege.”

  “The what?”

  “Privilege.”

  “Ahhh,” old Amos said, holding his whittled stick and looking at the ground. “So many people have not had that.”

  “What do you think happened?” Doran asked.

  “He was killed in the hold up there …”

  “Well, I know—that’s why I’m here. So do you, sir, think this is a criminal case?”

  “My soul,” Amos said, and grinned and scratched his cheek.

  Then Amos spoke in his mild-mannered way, and looked up at the young man looking down at him. “Perhaps, in a way, we do not know yet,” he said. The old man knew that many people, no matter who they were, said they wanted the truth, and then wanted certain answers to fit what their idea of truth was.

  Max continued: “Some say it was another crime against the people here—that the dispute is really over fishing? That Hector paid the price because of this dispute between his brother and that man … his name … his name …”—here he looked at his notes—“Roger Savage, who was at the scene?”

  “I do not know,” old Amos said truthfully. He began tapping his stick and looking out toward the trees. This man had already made the connection between Joel and Hector, and Joel and Roger—and therefore Roger and Hector. That was a pretty good start, the old fellow thought, to get Roger in trouble. So after a time Amos simply did not answer Doran anymore. Doran would speak and Amos would blink.