They left before the boy’s father got back, and they walked along the battered old highway.
“Do you want me to try to hitchhike a car?” Markus said.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” Amos answered.
They were silent again. Sky and Little Joe’s mother had no husband, and when she died they were taken care of by Mrs. Francis. Amos asked Markus if he knew who Sky’s father was.
“Everyone says it’s Isaac, the time his wife went away,” Markus said.
They walked along for a moment without saying anything.
“And Little Joe’s father?” Amos asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Joel Ginnish,” Amos said.
Then he said he was tired, and wanted to know if Markus would like his rifle.
“Why?”
“I killed my last thing,” Amos said.
SEPTEMBER 24, 2006
IT IS BEST TO HUNT MOOSE IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN THE wind has startled the branches and the nights get cool. Lately in the Maritimes, as if the world were being reset, September had come in too warm and the moose didn’t move in the rut as soon. And the rut was everything for a moose hunt.
Markus Paul was in his grandfather’s attic thinking these things, and cleaning the .306 that his grandfather had given him that night after they got home from Brice Peel’s place twenty-one years before.
He thought about how in 1986 Joel had begun a lawsuit, charging the Canadian government with negligence because of his back problem. Joel became obsessed with the technicalities of the case. He dressed well in a suit and tie and was always punctual in court. His contention was simple: the soldiers had come in to the reserve and wrestled him to the ground. He had been charged with arson and spent fourteen months in jail. When he came out, the reserve had changed—many men had their lobster licences and boats and many of them no longer wanted him around. Isaac had done all of this when he was away, had weeded out the bad apples.
Joel got a settlement in 1994 and walked around the reserve telling people about it. He was going to buy a boat and get his own lobster licence. He had walked into Markus’s in a blustering way and showed him a letter from the Minister of Indian Affairs.
Joel had not spoken to Isaac in seven years, but he was going to go up to his house to show him too.
$34,354.27.
That’s the amount on the cheque he showed to everyone.
Mrs. Francis told him she had won that much playing bingo.
He kept his suit and tie on, even though he was on the reserve. He bought drinks for people he didn’t know.
“I was the guy who got our lobster licences,” he said.
“You were?”
“Yep. Just ask Andy Francis—that was me!”
There was some dispute. Whatever it was, Markus couldn’t remember now.
But Joel never got the licence for his boat. People wanted him off the reserve. He tried to open a small convenience store. He stood behind the counter waving at young people who no longer knew who he was.
Fifty-five hundred dollars. That’s what Markus heard that Doran got: fifty-five hundred dollars as his severance, and not all at once. Doran tried to publish his own paper for a while, solicited articles from people he knew. He went back to journalism school, but felt out of place. He convinced a young woman taking the course that he was still a rising star in journalism. Everyone still knew who he was. He wrote for weeklies and spent time in bars. They married, that woman and he.
The woman told Doran to go to Newfoundland and investigate the terrible priests in the terrible Catholic Church. She told him to write about brutality in hockey. To both, he said no. Once when she thought he was on a story, she found out he had rented a room to hide in. There he was with a hotplate and a blanket over him, drinking a cup of tea.
Then Doran disappeared. The trouble was, and Markus knew this, that Doran’s greatest moment as a journalist had occurred when he was on his own in a small shed at night, because he refused to do a story or help arrest Roger. That he was a journalist—and perhaps still a great journalist who could no longer write—had helped destroy him. It certainly destroyed his marriage. Doran’s wife kept trying to encourage him to be the man she believed she had married. Finally she left, with a boyfriend from the Telegraph, to work on a paper in London, Ontario. Doran stalked her until he was arrested. He tried to give the severance money to Markus’s band. They refused. So he gave it to the native band in Red Bank.
“It is not the Conibear trap that kills the beaver, but the drowning that follows.”
When his grandfather died a few years later, Markus was nineteen.
“Everyone has been too kind to me,” were Amos’s last words.
Now Markus tested the scope on the .306 in the field beyond his grandfather’s, just about where Doran had spoken to Amos on that first visit long ago.
It came in, at a hundred yards, high and to the right. He tweaked it a few degrees this way and that half the morning. But he didn’t like firing shots. He fired only eight in all and realized he had it as well as he could. He fired from a fifty- and then a hundred-yard stop. Both would show the same trajectory and hit the same place.
“I can’t hit anything, anyway,” Markus said. That, of course, was not true. But it didn’t matter anymore. He lit a cigarette, and sat on the porch steps and thought of something. The way the bullet went high and to the right. Strange, for he was sure the rifle had been centred—but there were so many variables. Anyway, most moose shots were not that far. It was warm, and the sky was light and the weeds in the garden were turning yellow. He would hit the moose below the shoulder. Best-case scenario. A car honked as it went by. He never knew if it was a derisive honk or not.
The neighbours would see his car or his truck at his grandfather’s, and they would think it was strange, and many would think he had come to persecute them. Or perhaps, as Samantha once told him, he was being delusional and they did not think that at all.
“Ah yes—but you are white. And I can tell.”
Markus would hunt the barrens, which would mean a longer shot. That was the thing. He took his shells out and lined them up, 180 grain. Many years he had loaded the bullets himself, but he didn’t bother now, though he still tied his own flies for fishing and made his own rods. He had a ten-foot sage given to him by the department when he solved a crime last year that had been in the papers for months. But he had not used it. It seemed too special to use, and so he went back to his old heavy standard.
He lay down with the cartridges lined up on the coffee table, his truck loaded. He sipped on a beer. He thought of all kinds of bullets and shells and the different hunts he had been on, and what constituted a good hunt, and what were his happiest hunts—those with his grandfather, of course, when he had to borrow the old rifle from Roger Savage, a rifle he never fired, but just carried to make him look proud. The rifle had once belonged to David Paul, Markus’s father. That is why Roger readily lent it back to him. But he was only a little boy and they never gave him shells.
He went to sleep thinking of Roger, and for some strange reason dreamed of his own mother, Conde, whom he had hardly known. The dream, like so many, was out of sequence. But his father, David Paul, came in and sat down, and patted his head, and Conde said: “You see, it’s all right—and we will be with you forever—and you didn’t even know.”
“That people rise from the dead?” he asked.
“Yes—almost every day.”
He travelled up to the great chop-down the next morning and made his way, with his tent and provisions, two miles south of the road, toward an old, dead haphazard moss and blueberry ground. Here and there was bear scat, and the two front claws of a black bear digging away at something. Lonely was the sky, and the trees at dawn. Beyond him was the barrens. This is where he hoped for a sighting. Since he had no tree stand made, he would work the ground and wait for a bull to appear. Sometimes a cow would have a bull or two in tow as she came out in the evening, the bull or bulls fol
lowing her, with their nose in her quiff if she was prime.
The first day of the hunt was warm. At noon on the first day, he sat in his small tent and peeled an apple, and looked out over the barrens. He had used his grandfather’s old birch moose call; calling the short huffs of a mature bull, he got no answer. He followed this with the long moan of the cow.
“Unhhg,” he would call, for the bull.
Then “Ohhhnnooooooouuuuoohhhooouuu,” he would trail off for the cow. And then a chipmunk would scold him. And he would shrug and go back and sit down. And wait. Of course, both calls were to attract a bull.
The first was the call of a bull moose challenging a bull, the second of a receptive cow. But the woods were silent and did not stir. In the late part of the afternoon it was warm enough to have a beer sitting in his shirtsleeves and playing solitaire on an upside-down box.
Later the wind picked up just a little. It was sharper, so perhaps it might cool. Far, far above him, planes travelling the route between Toronto and London, England, made their way across the great blue sky.
“A sky-blue life,” he thought, looking up, saying the name of a Maxim Gorky story.
He flipped the last card over and found he did not have a match.
He had gone into the woods with his father, too, years ago. And every time he did, his grandfather Amos would show up at eight or nine at night, no matter what Amos was doing. After supper at home, Amos would get his things together and make his way to the bog to see Markus and his own son, David. For a few years Markus did not understand this, and then one night he woke up with his father’s knife at his throat.
“The bastards are coming,” his father said. “Who are you?”
“David,” came the sudden voice of his grandfather, who was sitting on his haunches in the corner. “That’s your son, so you can go back to sleep, please.”
After solitaire and the solitary meal he ate of beans and wieners, Markus heard the distinctive snap, snap down in the valley of a bull walking slowly toward him, toward the smell of cow urine he had placed near an old bed a cow had dug up the year before. It was snapping the branches of birch and poplar with its great rack. Each snap had the reverberations of a .22 bullet. But he was no fool, this big bull. He came cautiously. Markus called twice more. Just at evening Markus heard the bleat of a young bull. Knowing the big bull was coming, he was choosing to back away.
Leaving Markus and the big bull alone.
As he lay down he thought of rifles and bullets and all kinds of things. He remembered that once his father, David, got so angry at his rifle that he was going to smash it against a tree. They were far away on the river hunting deer. Markus never knew what was wrong. But it was something to do with the shells a friend had given him. They were the wrong shells—though to Markus they looked the same as the shells his father had used before. But there was a mistake of some sort, and he had brought the wrong ones. He remembered this incident as one of the most important between him and his father—brooding, melancholy and holding the almost glittering brass shells in his hand. How could they be the wrong ones?
Then later David awoke, and thinking Markus was someone else, took a knife and put it to his throat. That was the night Amos said: “That’s your son.”
So after that they took the rifle and gave it to Roger Savage.
Markus slept just in a tarp and sleeping bag. The fire died down, and the rain started about three in the morning. He pulled the tarp over his head and waited until dawn. Then he stood, had a leak and picked up his rifle to check it—see if it was wet or the scope fogged. He heard a sudden grunt, and turned. In the fallow dawn light a nineteen-point bull was staring at him, no more than seventy-five yards away. He had time to put one 180-grain bullet into the chamber, aim and fire before the bull ran over him. The bull stopped, turned slightly, staggered and fell over on the tarp Markus had just left.
Nothing in the woods was as dangerous as a bull moose in rut.
He usually quartered the animal himself—and he managed to do this now, after the animal was opened and staked out. Then he moved a pulley line to the hindquarters and got them lifted off the ground. It took him most of the day to get the hide off it, get it sawed and quartered. He removed the rack at the crown of the head and placed it in the back of the truck.
Late that night, some time way after dark, he was able to hang the four quarters down in the cold cellar in his grandfather’s house.
Here were old Saturday Night and Star Weekly magazines—Canadian magazines that his own father had grown up with. In this house his grandfather had given him one thing, a love for reading. That is why Amos had tried to start the school, and had finally gotten it built. In one magazine, from August 1985, was a small article, on page 15. “A Reserve’s Anguish,” it said. It had a picture of Hector Penniac. When Markus looked at it, it seemed almost crisp and brand new—as if the article had been written the day before.
He was exhausted, and went upstairs. He sat in his room staring at a TV game show, Wheel of Fortune. It revolved. Yes, he thought, there would be a time when he would kill no more, and perhaps this was the time.
He then emptied his pockets and laid out his cartridges on the table. Then he thought of how he used to hunt deer with a small .30-30.
No charging bull moose would have been stopped by a .30-30. Markus would have surely been injured, or dead. He shook slightly thinking of this. Amos had taken the rifle from his father, David, after he had flashbacks of Vietnam, and given it to Roger.
So it was his father’s rifle Roger had used that terrible night long ago.
“Fuck you,” Roger had said at the last.
Markus went up to the back room to sleep. But he could not, so he got up, made himself a cup of tea and went back up to the attic and opened the gun cabinet. He took the two bullets Amos had found in the soot at the back of Roger’s house and placed them on the table—looking at them as if he thought they might dance.
1985–2006
1
“YOU DON’T LIKE PEOPLE,” MARKUS’S INDIAN GIRLFRIEND had said to him once, just before they broke up in 2005. “That’s why Samantha left you—you don’t like people.”
“I do,” he protested. “I do, I do—I do like people.”
Then he added: “On occasion.”
But there was something he was trying to figure out. He got so angry over it that he threw a telephone against the wall. What’s wrong? his Indian girlfriend asked.
“I know who is innocent and who is guilty and I can’t for the life of me prove it,” Markus answered.
She took the blankets away; she was naked except for small panties.
“Come back to bed. We are all guilty,” she said.
After the final inquest into the deaths of Hector Penniac and Little Joe Barnaby, Amos had taken all his information to the police in three envelopes. But the case was not active then. It was July 1987.
Sergeant Hanover said: “Roger Savage killed Hector Penniac and Little Joe Barnaby, and you are here—bothering me—trying to clear his name to save your own reputation. You are a disgrace, even for an Indian. Now go home!”
So the old man took the envelopes and went home. And he never spoke of it again.
When he was a teenager, Brice Peel started to have seizures. Bill Monk gave him drugs. Brice began to like the drugs. He went to Bill to get more. He learned how to get the most out of them. He liked cocaine. He went to dances. He began to step-dance on a table, all by himself.
Most of the time he was “right out of her,” as they say here. He lost his teeth in a fight. He was down to 122 pounds. He liked things that would give him adrenalin.
He quit school in grade eleven and worked at the carpet ranch but was caught robbing money. The Monks paid his bail. This was written down on a file that Markus now had. The Monks always paid.
Brice lived in town. He had no telephone numbers of girls. He had no happy memories of home. He kept some budgie birds and a rabbit, and picked up stray cats to feed
. He had milk bowls outside his little apartment door.
He read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. The books allowed him to vanish into space gullies and dragons in the sky.
Though Markus tried to keep tabs on him, by 1996 Brice seemed to have disappeared.
Brice Peel worked at the pet store in Saint John for eight years. He never told anyone where he was from. The seizures continued, as long as he drank and took medication, and yet he drank and took medication because of the seizures. After a time no one paid any attention to him, so he was a lost soul, no longer a bother or a problem to anyone. Bill Monk told him he was a disgrace and not to come back.
In the autumn of 2004, he left the pet shop and walked out into the sterile parking lot with bread for the pigeons. Then, as always, he walked along the empty streets, the trees uniformly naked and the windows as dark and oppressive as a Sunday afternoon. He had been drunk for a week, and the owner of the pet store told him, for the last time, not to come back until he got help because he was upsetting the guppies.
His room was small, and he had two hamsters and a guinea pig. He brought home their food in a big brown bag. Outside on the street he could hear children. He had newspaper over his window so no one could see in.
His father was dead, so he would not have to go to jail. He turned the television on and sat down and wrote out his story.
Then, after he wrote his story, he wrote a letter to George Morrissey:
“Dear George—I am sending you over the story—I am telling you not to open it until my death—and then take it to Markus Paul, who is now an RCMP—but not until I die—and am good and dead—as dead as a doornail—please—I have sent you along that new budgie food with the 3 kinds of vitamins for healthy beaks and polished feathers—Brice Peel.”
He mailed the letter the next morning.
Then he lay down and sliced his wrists. He bled a lot, but unfortunately, it seemed to him, he did not die.
Doran worked at many odd jobs. He was, as he knew, provoking his own death, in subtle ways, mysterious to those who do not know. He drank, and used OxyContin to sleep, and Benadryl over the counter, was in his own way providing for a hatred of himself. He knew as much about journalism as anyone in the country, yet did not write a word, even when the young journalist Gordon Young switched papers and phoned him, asking him aboard.
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Page 24