Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  Doran sat down on a rock, and looked over toward the wood where Amos was looking. He spoke about the over-cutting of trees and the great pollution up at Little River, the ducks that had died. One hundred and thirty-two ducks. What did a First Nations man think of that? One hundred and thirty-two ducks.

  “A bunch of ducks, for sure. I don’t know,” Amos said.

  Doran spoke about the ship, the Lutheran, having left port, and the case now seeming stalled.

  Amos puzzled over this a moment but said nothing.

  Max opened his notebook again, looked at his five pages of notes and asked how old Amos was. Amos told him. Doran asked if he’d fought in the war.

  “Many,” Amos said, smiling and still tapping his stick on the ground.

  “And what is the one thing your people need?”

  “For all time?”

  “Yes, for all time.”

  “To be left alone,” Amos said. And he set about rolling a cigarette. He took his tobacco out and put the rolling paper on his knees and spread the tobacco. Then he rolled it carefully, with his tongue stuck in his cheek, and licked the paper. Then he snapped a match, and lighted it. Then he rubbed his ankle, which he had broken the year before, falling from his roof, and which still pained him. He was rubbing his ankle as Doran made his next comment.

  “I want to help you,” Doran said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. You need to realize that. I am here to help—so what is it you need?”

  “I need a cold pack for my ankle,” old Amos said.

  Once last year, after Doran’s most famous article, about a mayor he had secretly taped, had been published, a young woman—a hairdresser—came up to him in the mall, and asked: “How can you do that to people?”

  But Doran had pressed on; he’d been certain of that story. And he needed no hairdresser to tell him what to do. Once, Max saw the mayor on the street and couldn’t help but tell him he had no hard feelings. He stuck out his hand for the mayor to take. Part of what he did was for himself, and part of it was to please his mentor, who egged him on, but part of it was to help pay his mother’s rent and the night nurse she now needed. He had never had a date, and except for a few older alcoholic journalists, he had never had a friend. His father had deserted him and then had died in New York ten years ago.

  “Come here,” Amos said now, and the young man walked with him to the edge of the field. When they were standing side by side, looking out over the dark edges of black spruce, Doran squinting expectantly, Amos said, “If I could, I would like to move my hunting camp from there into the boggin above the highway—beyond the Tabusintac and into the region where I went as a boy with my mom and dad. That is all gone now. Can you help me move my camp? If we do it one board at a time it will take most of the summer.” Then he laughed and patted Doran on the back, hard enough to drive the younger man forward so that he almost fell.

  Amos grabbed him to steady him. “Don’t worry, it will all turn out,” he said. “I am sure if you knew Roger you would like him—at least a little.”

  “Oh, I think I know him fairly well,” Max answered. He was angry now, and he smiled slightly.

  For a moment they were silent. Amos dragged in smoke through his mouth and let it out through his nose and looked at the young man mildly. “Mr. Doran, have you hunted?”

  “I don’t like guns—”

  “Fished?”

  “No .”

  “Been in a storm at sea?”

  “No.”

  “Lived in the woods and hunted for food, and killed moose on your own?”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me—but do you even know one rifle from another?”

  “No, I know I cannot match you there.” Doran laughed. “I know you know far more about it than I do—”

  Amos interrupted him, mildly: “I am not at all talking about me, son. I am talking of Roger Savage, who you just said you know—yet you have done nothing he has, lived nothing like him. So please, you should not judge.”

  Doran shrugged. “I am not judging anyone, Mr. Paul.”

  “Then I am happier with you than I was,” Amos answered, winking.

  All Amos talked about on the way back to the house was the recreation centre and the new school, and how the reserve was really coming along. But when they arrived, Doran spied the pulp in the truck, and looked at it peculiarly. He put his hands in his pockets—and Amos decided this might be his way of trying to look grown up.

  “What is this?” Doran asked.

  “The wood that was dropped,” Amos said. “What is strange about it?”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean?”

  Amos shrugged and said nothing more.

  “Is there something strange about it?” Doran asked.

  “Yes, it is peculiar—I think. I am about to make myself lunch. Would you like some smoked salmon?”

  Doran left the old chief and continued on, muttering to himself about the old fool. He walked here and there, along the patched road, with crabgrass and broken bottles in the ditches, the smell of old cinder block in the weeds, now and then bending over to brush off his shoes. And as he walked he saw the small spindrift houses, the broken porch steps, old sheds and older dogs. That is, he did not see what old Amos did when he looked at the same scene—that with a rec center and school, things were better.

  He tried not to be angry at the old fellow. But no one made a fool of Max. He jutted his chin out, thinking this. Mr. Cyr, sixty-eight years old, who owned the paper Doran worked for and many more like it, was waiting to see how this reporter would do his job, for he could have put other reporters on the story. The managing editor had vouched for Max, and Cyr had sent Doran a telegram which Doran cherished more than anything: “Awaiting your report with much anticipation, for this is the place I grew up.” It was almost as if a gauntlet had been thrown down, and he, Max, must prove himself. He remembered too what his mentor said about bigotry being a festering sore.

  Doran sat down on the side of the breakwater and ate his lunch—two egg sandwiches his mom had made. He looked out toward a far-off island, shimmering in haze, and some of the lobster boats that were making it over the soft swell toward the wharf. He was lonely. He was also afraid—he did not know of what. The First Nations people who saw him slowed down, waved and said hello.

  “What a strange place this is,” Doran thought. He had wanted the chief to be more upset and now he nibbled at his second sandwich wondering what to do.

  As he was walking back toward his car he came upon young men pitching horseshoes in a field by one of the houses. So he went to ask about Hector. They stared at him a long time, wondering if they should answer. But these men, Andy and Tommie Francis and two others, finally did respond.

  “Of course he was murdered,” one of the men said. “Who wouldn’t know that—or be able to figure it out? We’re Indian, aren’t we?”

  “Well—I went to the chief—”

  “Whose chief? Not my chief anymore,” Andy Francis said, laughing bitterly. “Look what he did—he took the logs from the ship himself so no one would see what happened.”

  So Max asked about Roger Savage, and took out his notebook. He learned Roger Savage was after Hector because Hector had taken his job on the boat, and Roger had fought with Hector’s older brother.

  “He couldn’t handle Joel, no white man can,” one of the young men said, “so he went after the weaker guy—that’s what happened. He went after someone littler and weaker, and we weren’t there to protect Hector. Roger thought he was going to work in the hold, and when he wasn’t allowed, he tried his trick.”

  “Hector,” another young man said, and he believed this truthfully, just like most of the boys gathered about, “was going to be a doctor and come back to our reserve and work.”

  Max Doran said nothing. His face was inscrutable, as it often was when he interviewed people. But he was thinking, “How could such a life not be honoured?” And in that regard he was right. “T
here have been too many Rogers,” he whispered to himself. “Too many old Amos Pauls, who just simply go along to get along.” He thanked the boys and continued on his way.

  He went to Roger’s house and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again and walked around to the new room the man was building. No one was home, the place so silent it was unnerving.

  Before Doran left the reserve, he walked back to the chief’s house and took a picture of those logs, to publish with his article.

  The article was printed four days later. Doran had been asked about his sources, about the dispute between Roger and Hector’s family. But all of these things did pan out—in fact, the fight between Joel and Roger was in the public record.

  The editor who had vouched for Doran let the article go to print after a few changes. “It is pretty hard-hitting against that boy Roger, and the chief—who is that? Amos whatever? Why don’t you take the accusations against the chief out? They aren’t needed,” the editor said, and so Max took them out. Still he had decided the chief was the real problem toward progress.

  “The man Isaac Snow is the real hero in all of this anyway,” he told his managing editor. “Not that comical little old man who simply wants to be called chief, and takes me down the street to show me a damn fire hydrant.”

  But Max did tone down the article. He took out any flat accusations. And though he wrote the article, he included a paragraph from the Canadian Press to make it seem broader based, and not so personal. So the article was fairly non-specific. It recounted the event, spoke also of how depressed the region was, how little the Micmac had and how they were kept from fishing lobster though it was their only livelihood in the region. It mentioned how Hector had wanted to take a job at the wharf, and how his was one of two union cards given to First Nations that year. But then, at the end of the article, Max added something. He quoted one man as saying: “We’ve always had trouble with him.”

  “This him they talk about is the person who has denied he hooked the last load, the load that fell on Hector Penniac—Mr. Roger Savage.”

  This was the last line in the two-column article. The line everyone worried about.

  And the paper printed a picture of the derelict and murderous logs.

  2

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, ROGER SAVAGE’S GIRLFRIEND, MAY, phoned him, and told him to buy the newspaper—for he was now on the front page. Her voice was shaking, and for a few moments Roger did not know it was her.

  “The first page,” she said. “The first page!”

  May was more concerned now that the report was on the front page, and wanted to know what he had to say.

  “Let me read it first,” he said. He tried to sound lighthearted, but he wasn’t.

  He walked to the store, and knew people were watching him. When he bought the paper, the clerk, a man he knew, didn’t look at him as he rang his twenty-five cents in.

  Roger walked home as if he was carrying his own death sentence.

  He read the story, and for the first time he knew something he had not foreseen was to be made of the accident. That is, who he was and what he represented in the Canadian consciousness was going to come into play—though he did not know how to say this—and was going to be used against him as a rebuke. The byline—“Max Doran, with files from the Canadian Press”—gave it all a very formal and frightening air.

  “What did I do?” Roger said, even questioning himself now. “Maybe I was always a bully—that’s what they say!”

  No one wanted to be accused of supporting a man who would do this—yet by not supporting him he suddenly became not a single individual who might do this but “that kind of man.” What was absurd is that Roger wouldn’t have supported any man who would deliberately do this—but perhaps because of his own sense of honour, he would still have said hello to him.

  More to the point, the union, which would have, or might have, supported Morrissey accidentally doing the exact same thing, could never support Roger, because he wasn’t supposed to have hooked. The company backed the union because they feared a lawsuit.

  “It don’t matter what they say about me—I didn’t do nothing,” Roger told his girlfriend later. It worried him that his girlfriend, for the first time, did not completely exonerate him but was silent as he tried to explain himself.

  “But I didn’t do nothing!” he yelled. “You have to believe that or I will lose my mind!

  “Well, I know that,” May said at last. “And don’t yell at me—I’m not the newspaper man.”

  “I know you aren’t,” he said.

  “But people said you hooked and the paper implied you did, even if you says you didn’t! And that you fought with people down there. I know you were upset all last summer with that Joel man, and he is Hector Penniac’s brother. What is the newspaper to say if everyone tells them that? I mean, they is only human—aren’t they now?”

  “Damn the paper, I did not hook! And the man who wrote this would not know a hook or a pin—and wants everyone all riled up over nothing.” And Roger hung up. The possibility that he would have to lie like this had never before entered his head. But now he had to hold to his lie no matter what. What was worse, he had thought of a lawyer he’d once guided for moose, and had phoned this man, and the lawyer had suggested he take a lie detector test, since that would strip away all the rumours.

  “I’ll think it over,” Roger said.

  But with that statement the lawyer knew Roger was hiding something. And Roger could not face phoning him again. He pondered whether he should admit that he’d hooked; but he felt that if he did so this late, he would never overcome the suspicion of murder. And the natives would burn him out for sure. So he did not phone the lawyer back, and the lawyer was free to tell people this, and it became known that Roger Savage would not take a lie detector test.

  Roger’s hair was short and his nose blunt, his arms and shoulders strong, his neck thick. His legs too were thick and strong, and he most often wore leather shoes rather than sneakers, and had his jean cuffs rolled up. He had not seen his mother in two years, and his father was dead. He had earned his own way entirely since he was sixteen. He had fought the people who wanted to help him and had sent social workers away. And now he was worried about this paper man, and how sending the social workers away and fighting at school would work against him. But he was worried too about the lie that he had invented at first to protect Morrissey and now could not take back.

  The article was not like a punch in the head—he had taken enough of those—or a bad cut with an axe—he had taken one of those too. It was not like anything he had felt before—cold on the ice flats or the bump of waves out on the bay at night when it came up to swell. No, this article was much different. It made him ill. It was as if voltage crept through him. As if, worse, he who had never felt he had to explain himself to anyone must now explain himself to the whole province and tell them he had not done anything wrong. And worse, the surge of this strange electricity that came from the paper told him that the more he spoke, the less he would be believed.

  He sat in the house and smoked, and it got dark, and then darker. It was like fighting a giant shadow. Each time you swung your fist, your arm went through, the shadow disappeared, only to reappear in another part of the room.

  The article deeply worried others too. And one was a little fellow named Chief Amos Paul.

  Amos was very bright. He was annoyed that this death would now play into Isaac’s hands. He was not saying Isaac wanted this, but he knew Isaac would be told he wanted it, and be forced in the end to act as if he believed it. The newspaperman would act as if he believed it too. He would have to. For if the newspaperman now said there was no miscarriage of justice and it was all nonsense, he would be looked upon as being criminal. So this newspaperman had to continue; he had no choice. And that was bad for Amos. And it meant that others would spur the newspaperman on, by telling him not to be cautious but to be resolute, and he would do so in order to keep his story on the front page.


  This did not mean a miscarriage of justice had not taken place, however. Nor did it mean a crime had not taken place either. But it did mean that this crime had made opportunities that those who sought opportunity could not ignore. Amos was not quoted in the article—and that placed him outside the concern of those who were quoted. And their concerns suddenly seemed to be exactly the right concerns to have, while Amos’s little concerns seemed pedestrian and old-fashioned.

  If Amos did not see this as an insult toward him, fifteen-year-old Markus did. He became disheartened that the man he loved, and who his people up until this moment had loved, was now not even acknowledged as chief. This would torment Markus Paul for years.

  Amos did not take a phone call from Roger late in the day. It was not that he did not want to take it, just that at this moment he couldn’t tell Roger anything to give him hope. And there were so many phone calls of support for the band.

  “Yes, yes, yes—something will be done—yes yes, yes!” Amos continued to deflect the enthusiasm.

  Then, three days later, Amos got another phone call. “Here is what I will do,” Doran’s managing editor offered. “The police are stalling—I think they are frightened. But I have a reporter here who is not. I will send Max to the river again and he will write about the progress of the case. He will be fair to all—and he will be fair to Mr. Savage as well. The paper has a policy and we adhere to it pretty ethically. What do you say to that?”

  All of it made Amos feel uncomfortable. Especially how this man said the word progress. For Amos was one of those old-fashioned men seen in every race, who do not believe in progress when it concerns the hearts of men. He saw that every generation believed they would be the generation to set things straight, and no generation did.

  Amos asked to speak to Doran, but was told Doran was finishing up another story. Doran was actually standing by the desk, making hand signals, and mouthing: “Tell him I respect him very much.”

  His boss waved his hand at Doran to be quiet. Then he said: “What could be the harm? I mean: the truth! The absolute Truth for a change—no dilly-dallying—and you find out if it was an accident or a murder of one of your own people?”