Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  Doran stepped into the cold, silty evening, and went drinking in a bar, thinking of Little Joe.

  He was getting up to go over to the jukebox when suddenly, looking over at the waiter running some water over dishes, he staggered a little. People thought he was drunk.

  For the very first time he remembered what the water boy had said, what the water boy had hoped he would write, come hell or high water. That Roger Savage, as simple and as troublesome and as redneck as he was, had done nothing. At all.

  Doran would never be able to hold a steady writing job again.

  6

  THE DAY AFTER HE CAME BACK FROM HUNTING, AMOS went over to the house that had burned down, trying to find Roger’s graduation ring—the one sent him because of his GED. This had been important to him, and Amos was going to send it to his mother. But in all the ruined things he could not find it. Only a few items remained, and the snow was covering them up. He put a few bullets in his pocket and decided not to mention them right away. He placed them upstairs in his desk drawer.

  He told Markus after school that night that he might solve things all by himself. Except he was not completely sure what it was he was thinking. “Two things are wrong—but I am not sure what I am trying to remember,” Amos said. He looked up from his tea, with an almost frightening expression, as if asking something so acutely painful it was hard not to look shocked. “Something is wrong at the boat, and with those water buckets, and something was wrong that night at Roger’s house.”

  “In what way?” Markus asked.

  “Well—it is like a dream you have where you almost grasp it. But what if we started in the hold, and stayed inside the hold, and did not go out of the hold until we saw what happened? The water boy is the key. Then later, after the hold, we can go for a walk to Roger’s house and see what happened there.”

  “How could we ever do that?”

  “I don’t know. But since everyone else thinks they saw what happened, why can’t I see it too? Because perhaps we are seeing two different things.”

  People saw Amos and Markus outside on that late fall afternoon in 1985. They thought it was more than a little funny that an old man would have a female mannequin out in the yard that had once belonged to his mother, and have constructed the moose tripod up against the old shed, and have the logs that had lain inside the small room hauled out and raised up on it. And they made fun of it, saying: “Well, he lost his wife, and Mrs. Francis and he don’t see each other no more, so I guess he’s down to smooching with mannequins!”

  A few here and there began to realize what he might be doing, and reacted with surprise. Trying to resurrect the bones of Hector by crushing a mannequin? Up on the highway, far away from the reserve, on those cold days, and into evenings with the stars glowing like cold, distant spikes, the stars that old Amos Paul could never finish counting, Topper Monk sat in his easy chair in the dark, curtained TV room and heard about Amos doing this. Topper had a sore foot, and this gout would be with him forever. He whined too at times about his blood pressure, and often he went to see the doctor. He had taken a leave from working the boats, and in fact couldn’t stand to see one in the channel. When he did he drew the drapes—and yet, as the saying goes, he could never draw the drapes on that.

  Amos and Markus studied the marks on the mannequin for a good length of time. They dropped the logs seven times, for posterity, and placed the mannequin at different angles.

  “You know what I think?” Amos said, sitting on his haunches and spitting and smoking.

  “What do you think?” Markus asked.

  “There is no way my mom’s dummy does not exhibit more trauma than poor Hector Penniac.”

  Markus said nothing. He picked up a stick and tossed it toward the black spruce below him. He had lost everyone now. No one spoke to him. When he walked up the street, kids he had known all his life would separate and veer around him. He did not want to tell his granddad this. Markus had found the yellow note, signed by Brice Peel, water boy, in the file the old man was given.

  “If he was going back for a bucket—why?” Amos asked.

  “Maybe one had a hole inside it or something.”

  “Maybe that’s it. But if it is not the reason, then there is another reason that might tell us what happened.”

  Amos studied the mannequin. He knew one person who had taken care of his broken ankle, and had visited him, and maybe she would do so again. He talked to Markus and said, “Yes, she might visit me again—I am not sure, but she might—and help us decide what happened when the logs did fall.”

  So he called Kevin Dulse’s wife, Pamela, who was a head nurse at the Miramichi hospital.

  “Are you sick, Amos? You know you can go to the hospital, and I will be in by nine tomorrow morning—”

  “No, dear girl, this is about broken bones—”

  There was a long pause.

  “Okay, I’ll be down,” Pamela Dulse said.

  “Thank you.”

  “But if it is your damn ankle and you were out hunting on it, I will chop it off!”

  Pamela Dulse was, like many nurses, ambivalent not about the pain of others but about how much stock they put in it. For she had seen and dealt with it in trauma centres all of her adult life. She needed a healthy scepticism, a removal from what faced her each day, from the palliative care ward to the children she saw who would never get better, and this is exactly why old Amos had telephoned her. For she pretended an aloofness she did not have, but it made her the most professional of nurses. Besides, she liked scolding him about his cholesterol count, and he would put up with this for a while if she could tell him what he was seeing, both in the autopsy picture and in his re-enactment of the accident. She went to his house with her big wide eyes engaged in a kind of self-debate over whether she should be angry or not. Her face was milk white and thin; her chin, elbows and knees were sharp. Amos knew at a glance, as did Markus—just as they did with anyone—that she drank too much.

  The first thing she looked at was the picture of Hector Penniac.

  “He was hit with a blunt object,” she said quickly, handing the picture back almost in accusation about such a frivolous inquiry. Amos nodded. He nodded not just at what she said but at how she said it, hiding behind a professionalism that she never quite mastered, and so seemed more angry than she intended.

  “Yes, but where?”

  “On the head.”

  “Yes—but only there?”

  She grabbed the picture back again and looked at it.

  “Seems only there. Why?”

  “Because that means for five months everything about this case has been all wrong, and a man and a little boy died for nothing—and the man was brave and the little boy was as brave as the man, and they both knew each other since the little fellow was a baby, and I might be old-fashioned but I do not think Roger had anything to do with it. I mean, it is not that he couldn’t have hooked the load wrong. I am thinking, however, that if he did hook the load wrong he would have owned up to it. So everything is wrong.”

  “Everything about what? How it fell?”

  “Come—I want to show you something.”

  Pamela followed him. It was the coming of winter and the reserve looked bleak, the shoal waters still and dark, and the sky seemed today to be perpetually at twilight, with swift-moving clouds, and all along the shore the boats had been lifted. The cottages, those great structures Markus once imagined never being in, were boarded up, their lawns stifled and stunted by salt. Ice clung to the ditches, and the Indian houses were closed up, some of the foundations banked with spruce boughs to keep off the wind.

  It was to Pamela a strange sight. In behind the old house of Amos Paul, where the old man lived sitting out in his dooryard that looked out at a life that had betrayed him, a moose tripod had been fitted with great chains, and had four eight-foot logs pulled to the pinnacle, so they seemed like a brooding carcass in the autumn wind. They were not at the fifteen feet Amos had wanted, but the height w
ould do. Pamela took a piece of gum and chewed on it, looking at Amos speculatively, her woollen hat pulled down over her ears, and every now and again rubbing her nose with her mitten.

  Under these logs was a dressmaker’s dummy that had been reconstructed a number of times, as if a child couldn’t get enough of tormenting it. The sea outside the shoal water looked on with great dark waves, and the trees along the wood lane blew almost sideways, so she was freezing cold.

  He left Pamela and walked toward the tripod. Then, looking back at her almost impishly, he pulled the chain from the spike on the shed wall, and the four logs came tumbling down upon the dummy, shattering the head and twisting all the arms and legs again, leaving gouges in the skull again. There was silence and a bit of cold dust, and a raven cawed out over them.

  Amos was delighted when he looked at her. She went to the mannequin.

  “Would that have broken a human bone?” he asked her.

  “Oh yes—very many,” she said.

  He sighed, and coughed, and glanced away. It was as if a great weight had been finally lifted off him, or perhaps off Hector Penniac.

  He looked pleased with himself as he lit a cigarette.

  “What is it?” she asked, taking the cigarette from his mouth and flicking it into the wind.

  The little old man stared at the cigarette tumbling away, and then looked at her.

  “It is proof, I think, that Hector Penniac wasn’t hit by these logs, but that he was hit, as you say, by a blunt-force instrument.”

  “That’s the case on the ship?”

  “Yes, dear—the case on the ship. And I believe it will come down now like a ton of bricks.”

  But Amos felt he could not prove his case without the help of some eyewitness. So that night, in the cold, with little sleep, Amos made his way toward the highway, with the picture of the broken body in his pocket. They said that Hector was tormented on this highway when he would hike home after school, and now he was being carried along it in the pocket of an old man.

  “I will show it to the water boy,” he told Markus, who walked beside him.

  “Then why not drive?”

  “Oh, because it is better,” he said, “because they will not see my truck parked at his house.”

  “Is that why you think he fought me—because he knows something?”

  “I think this Brice is a good boy and is now in trouble. So it is better that we don’t take the truck and better that we walk.”

  “And where do you think the Lutheran is now?”

  “It is way over in Europe now—somewhere, and those sailors too, and the only thing they remember is this little old Indian staring up at them from the hold, so they will remember it for years, even though they could hardly see me in the darkness.” He paused for a moment and then said, “You know, in 1944 I was on the bridge in Antwerp that we had to get over to enter their country. Roger’s grandfather Lawrence was killed on that bridge. Do you think they would have all sailed off if they had known that?”

  “It’s as if they were the first ones who came here.”

  “Yes, that’s the likes of it,” Amos said, “that they were the first white men and I was the first Indian and there I was, and I told them to go back home and they turned around and left. But I gave them some lumber before they went, because I am a nice enough chief.”

  Markus giggled at this, in spite of all the terrible things that had happened, and they continued on.

  And then they were quiet when they saw the lights in the distant houses. Small little lights that glowed out on an autumn night, against the trees, where ground fog rolled. The bear dens Amos had watched when he was a boy, with his silver Mauser from the Boer War, were now gone, the land they were burrowed in part of the long highway.

  “You know, I was taught that to kill my enemies was the best thing,” Amos said. “That was when I was little. But you have to find the enemy. And often when you do, you cannot bring yourself to kill him. And sometimes, like Roger Savage with his GED, it is the wrong enemy entirely.”

  In Markus’s eyes, his grandfather seemed to be back to the same old Amos. He seemed again to be lively, even thinking of the recreation centre. Still, though the events of the summer and fall had given them a good amount of exposure, they were back in the same place, on the same reserve, and it all seemed futile, Amos told Markus. Once again the paper admitted many mistakes had been made regarding them, and once again they were told that things would soon get better.

  But if one looked upon the world as being full of the minutiae of cause and effect, of balance and counterbalance, had they, the people on the reserve, done all of this, then, just to kill Little Joe? What would Glooscap, the God of the Micmac, think of them now? If they had just waited, buying some time, Roger would have come out of his house.

  But they couldn’t wait.

  Joel had to act—he was as forced to do so as anyone else. You see, not to act would have made him a disappointment to those children to whom he’d promised he would act. Such as Andy and Tommie. Nothing could be done for him, for Joel Ginnish. In the end he was forced, like everyone.

  “Someday you will understand and figure it all out,” Amos told Markus.

  Amos was supposed to be an old man. But years ago Amos had walked into a group of white men who were saying they were going to hang him one night, after his friend had been hanged, and he had beaten them all. And he now faced the labyrinth of his conscience because his band, when he was chief, may have acted in the same way, like those very white men.

  This is why Amos went to Brice Peel’s house with Markus. He appeared at the door like a child. Markus stood behind him.

  At first there was no answer. Inside the door into the old porch, it was almost darker than midnight. They stood together, he and his grandson. And as Amos knocked, Markus whispered:

  “Have you ever been in a white person’s house?”

  “Yes,” Amos whispered, “when I delivered salmon to the cottages. But those are not houses, they are cottages—even though they are ten times the size of our house. But this house looks more like our house.”

  “Yes,” Markus said, shaking slightly. “I’ve never been in a white man’s house before.”

  “Well, I saw them up at Sobeys, and they buy Red Rose tea just as we do,” Amos said.

  Finally, after they spoke and knocked, and then knocked again, the door opened. And a light snapped on at the same moment, and out of that doorway a man stood looking at them, his face expressing a kind of bold and almost insane hilarity, as if he was waiting for them. And yet as if he was ambushed at the same time.

  “Yes?” the man said, thrusting his face forward. “Yes—what?” His face gave away his fear-glazed merriment. His eyes were wide and ghastly.

  “Yes—hello, Mr. Peel. How are you, sir?”

  “I am just dandy—and I don’t want no smelts.”

  “Ah well—I am not selling smelts. Besides, it is too early. The bay, as you know, has not made ice. I was wondering if young Peel was here.”

  “I am here. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No,” Amos said, “is young Mr. Peel here?”

  “Who is young Mr. Peel?”

  “Brice,” Markus said.

  “Oh, he’s long in bed now—can’t come out to play.” And he gave the same look of inscrutable hilarity, with his head going back slightly into the kitchen.

  “I see,” Amos said.

  “What do you want from him? Perhaps I can tell him when he wakes up in the morning.”

  “No, thank you,” Amos answered.

  “Why—am I not good enough?”

  “Oh, it is not a message anyone can deliver. In fact, it is something he might be able to tell us,” Amos said.

  Then he turned, and Markus turned with him. Markus did not know why he turned so suddenly, and in some respects did not know why they had come to this house. Very soon after they got to the gravel drive, Angus closed the door.

  For a moment or t
wo Amos stood still and clutched Markus’s arm. When he saw the upstairs light go on above the porch, he pushed his grandson toward the trees.

  “Wait here,” he whispered.

  “For what?”

  “For him to leave.”

  He looked up at the stars, took his handkerchief out and wiped his nose, and looked up at his grandson—who was already taller than he was. There was one sound—a kind of muffled shout—and a door slammed. In two or three minutes, the door opened and Mr. Peel walked out, got into his own little Datsun and drove away.

  After a while the sound of the car faded.

  “He is gone far up the road,” Amos said.

  “Yes.” Markus shrugged.

  “Well, now we will go see Brice.”

  They walked into the room, and Brice was there, a scared little boy, with his T-shirt hanging off him, and eighty dollars on the windowsill, and a bicycle sitting in the corner of his room, and a fishing rod leaning against the back of the door.

  Amos smiled. “Have you been working a shut-down?”

  The boy looked at them scared to death, holding a bag of marbles in his hand. But he told them he had nothing to tell about Hector Penniac.

  “What happened that day? Why did you go for another bucket? Why didn’t you lift the other buckets and take them? That means those buckets were full, or partially so, so why did you go for another one?”

  Then Amos took out the picture of Hector in the morgue and showed it to the youngster.

  “You have to tell sooner or later,” Amos said, not unkindly. “Then you won’t be bothered anymore. Think of Roger Savage in his house all summer. He was a white boy, and he did nothing wrong—someone else must have.”

  The boy shrugged. “But Roger killed a little boy,” he answered, “so what is so big about him?”

  There were tears starting to his eyes, but he was brave enough to say nothing else.

  “But just maybe he didn’t kill the little boy,” Amos whispered.

  “Everyone knows he did!”