Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  “I didn’t mean to get Little Joe killed,” he called to Sky one night in 1992, when she was far up the road. “I didn’t—mean to—” It was in the winter and he stood by the trees, snow coming down over him almost all night long.

  “You should have joined the military,” a Canadian sergeant, also part of the bodyguard, had said to him that night in Santiago.

  “Yes, well, it is something, isn’t it, sir,” he said.

  “What is something?”

  “That people like you and me will never be liked and almost always be needed.”

  After that they did what Canadian men everywhere do. They didn’t speak of racism or the global war—they spoke of hockey. For what in hell else was there, really, except the precarious balance and the fire dance on ice?

  1985

  1

  MARKUS’S GRANDFATHER AMOS PAUL HAD BEEN A SMALL, wiry, happy-go-lucky man who travelled all over the province to powwows, and had the respect of everyone. He played bingo, and tried to get businesses to donate money and commodities to his reserve. He had started a toys-for-tots program at the supermarkets in Chatham and Newcastle, and made sure three or four native children were sent to camp each summer from the Tim Hortons sponsor. Being chief and wearing the bright vest of the chief was a grand thing. Until now.

  Amos was very bothered by the case of Hector Penniac. Something might happen, and he could foresee it. He must take his reserve’s side. Yet he believed that he must protect Roger Savage if Roger had done nothing wrong. But little by little the idea that he had done something wrong began to infiltrate the thoughts of his friends and colleagues and made it seem as if the ingrained hatreds of the past were again haunting all of them.

  “However,” Amos would answer these people as he walked home from church with his missal tucked up under his arm, “no one is sure, are they?”

  Markus realized now, years later, that he himself had felt shame when he heard this, and a deep betrayal. The betrayal came because most of the reserve wanted Roger Savage’s confession, and most wanted his old house torn down and a lodge put up to perhaps bring in sports fishers. Roger’s place hampered this because it sat directly in front of the pools over which Roger claimed riparian rights. Now no one wanted to blame Roger in order to get this house and these pools, but no one was foolish enough not to know that if he was blamed, this house and these pools would be easier to access.

  Everyone wanted this, and Markus’s grandfather himself became an inhibitor of this. Markus knew he should have trusted his grandfather more back then, and years later, in 2006, he was spurred on because of how his grandfather had been treated.

  For many had felt that a real chief, someone like Isaac Snow, could get Roger’s pools for them and confiscate his house. Not for the little recreation centre that old Amos wanted, but for a big lodge for rich white men to come and pay money to fish. When asked by some of Markus’s young friends what he would do about all of this, Amos only said: “The rec centre is what I am concentrating on now. To get that done—the rest will blow over. The school is built here and we have two Micmac instructors. Why, we are the first nation in the province to have this happen.” He smiled, delighted, and then frowned. “But this other stuff—well, who can say it was more than an accident? Do you remember Roger Savage doing anything that was even close to this? I know he had trouble and got in fights at dances—but, well, that was different. Besides, the police have taken him in three times now, and have brought him back. If they wanted to charge him they would have. We will have to let the police decide.” And he smiled once more.

  “But they don’t want to charge him because he is white,” some said.

  Amos did not choose to answer this. He simply shrugged. He knew this was not true. If not because of Hector, then because of where the load itself had dropped. No, it was dangerous to all concerned in the hold, the white men as well as Hector, so they would charge him if they had to.

  But to Joel Ginnish, who had tried to be patient, it seemed Amos was afraid that if he made a ruckus he would not get the recreation centre built—and that was the reason for his silence. Some also believed he was afraid to call people racist.

  Markus, pondering the case for years, would remember how he himself had acted.

  “But there are racists,” Markus told his grandfather—somewhat condescendingly.

  “Oh, son, yes, I know,” Amos said. But he said he was not thinking of Roger Savage when he thought this, nor was he thinking only of white men.

  Markus remembered, because everyone was saying how deliberately Roger had set Hector up, that he felt his grandfather was a fool. And everyone said that Isaac Snow would take care of it for them. And Joel Ginnish would do what he had to do. That to spite the old man, no one wanted the recreation centre now.

  The idea of the old chief vacillating put more pressure upon Hector’s family—his father, his mother and his mother’s elderly wheelchair-bound uncle—to accept the condolences of some of the men who now wanted their attention, or at least wanted to use the death of Habisha’s son for attention. (That this could not be stated shows how sensitive the subject was.) What was unfortunate was that Habisha knew that some of the very men offering condolences had teased Hector the most, and that on more than one occasion she had to tell them to leave him alone. That he was different. Once some of the boys had painted Hector’s ears blue as a joke.

  She also knew her first-born, Joel Ginnish, was a terrifying presence in her house, but Isaac was invited by Joel to visit them often during those days, and he saw the scale of their pain and their gratitude to him.

  As for Joel, he had never gotten along with Hector’s father, his stepfather, and they often came to a tussle, and he had been put out of the house many times in the dead of winter. Joel never forgot this, or anything else. But if it was not for Hector’s death, he wouldn’t have been allowed back on the reserve, for the band had tried to expel him. His new status, his revised status, his rehabilitation all came because of the death of Hector. This was also something subtle and unspoken.

  Habisha felt guilty about this whenever she looked at her first-born, with his toss of wild hair and glittering eyes, and believed that she in some way had undermined his life by remarrying too soon after his own father’s death. When she tried her best to apologize now, he looked at her and shrugged.

  “I’m here to help you, Mom, that’s the only reason I am back” was all he said to her. But he never glanced at his stepfather—and the strange feeling in him now, akin to giddiness, was that he would prove himself to his mother come what may. That he would do what he had to do. That this was his one chance to take on the world.

  Many young men were often at the house, saying they would do what they had to. Isaac wished their condolences to have a sincerity that matched their wishes to comfort. He himself had been very harsh with Hector once or twice in the past. This is something Isaac regretted very much. So now he became very harsh to Roger Savage, as they sat about the table drinking and speaking of him.

  “That Roger, why would he do something like that?” Joel said, looking at him for advice. “It means war with me—it means I won’t stop,” Joel said.

  Isaac did not know exactly what to say about it, but he did know this—even if it was untrue, the momentum had started, and they were going downhill and could not stop, so they would quite likely proceed as if it was true, until the end. Did that make them different from other men? No, it made them the same.

  This is why the situation was so delicate. It was a strange word, delicate, used like this. The situation was delicate meant that violence might happen and blood might flow. That as always was the problem with the world, as Amos Paul tried to tell his grandson.

  Situations that caused things to be called delicate were very often the worst situations, but you began by explaining them like little flowers that bloomed somewhere in small forgotten summer fields.

  “It is strange to call things delicate, which means they might explode. I
suppose in that way we are like sappers.”

  “Granddad, they treated you terrible, and Momma, and my aunts and uncles too,” Markus said. “They used to drive through the reserves on summer nights before the Second World War and take pictures of our reserve as if we were in a zoo!”

  “Yes, it is right. They treated us very poorly.”

  “Poorly! They treated us worse than dogs—you especially know that.”

  “I treat my old dog pretty good,” Amos said, as a joke. But he knew his grandson was not joking.

  Markus said, “Do you know that apartheid in South Africa was modelled after the reserves in Canada!”

  The old man fumbled about and nodded and patted the old dog’s head. He had not known that, and tried to think of what to say, and suddenly his face brightened a bit.

  “Well, yes—but we can’t blame apartheid on Roger Savage, can we? In fact we shouldn’t even be blaming him for painting Hector’s ears—it was Joel Ginnish himself who did that!” Saying this, he smiled in victory.

  So although Markus did not agree with his grandfather, some small part of him resisted joining in with those who wanted to protest by blocking the long drive to Roger’s house or by netting his pools that they wanted to claim. Markus was fifteen at the time—and many of his friends wanted him, as the grandson of the chief, to join them.

  The trouble was this: his grandfather was losing credibility, and if he did not join, he might jeopardize not only his own standing but by extension that of his grandfather.

  2

  ROGER COULDN’T SLEEP. THE OLD LACE DRAPES HUGGED the window when the breeze blew off the bay. There was a smell of crab from the long pebbled shore. The smell of herring too, for they used herring in the lobster traps, and the smell of salt on the small rock garden in the yard. He would lay in bed, thinking of nothing, or suddenly his whole body would jerk up and he would remember the lie he had told about not hooking.

  He sat up in this room looking out over the still water and remembered many of the winter storms, and how snow would come up over the white houses and circle the white driveways and enclose the dark barns, and how all of this seemed to keep him safe. How there were almost no books—except his mother’s romance novels—in his house, and very few conversations about anything that wasn’t immediate, that there was no talk of politics that wasn’t local, and no history, except that of D-Day.

  His long, cold winter days were spent in school in much the same way. That is, people expected certain things of him. They expected him not to graduate. They expected him to take shop class and become a carpenter. And they would expect those sorts of things until he died, and there was now no way to change them. He was a labourer and they expected him to be one, a jack of all trades and they expected that too, and what was more telling was that he had expected the same things, and relied on them to expect what they did. But last year, he went onto the reserve and was tutored by Mrs. Francis, and got his GED. That was going to prove something to them all. Then he took his GED and went to town and applied for jobs. But it didn’t even matter to them that he had his GED. So he went back to being what they expected. And now somehow this unspoken pact was broken, and he had no idea what in the world to do or to expect. But he realized that the newspapers were beginning to assess him and to believe in a certain way that he had done what was expected as well.

  He was sorry for that boy. Hector had told Roger one day he was going to be a doctor. No First Nations friend of his paid any attention to that, until now. Now it seemed as if this was the main problem. The papers had mentioned not only who Roger was—“a journeyman labourer,” they said—and what he did, but what Hector had planned to do. He thought of this as he folded his arms and looked out the window, taking a drag off his cigarette once in a while, and calmly moving the curtain back just an inch or so when he wanted to see if anyone had come into his yard. But what did the papers say?

  “Hector Penniac was planning to go into medicine at Dalhousie. He would have been the first doctor ever from the Micmac Reserve here.”

  At first Roger thought nothing of this, but now it seemed to be an instrument in deciding the very qualities of the two—and the guilt or innocence of him. He dragged on his smoke and thought of this too, and looked at the cigarette paper as it burned, as if telling him in the vast quietude of the moment that his trouble was once particular and universal. He was building the room for his girlfriend, May, yet she herself was now scared because she had read what was in the papers as well.

  So though he tried not to give in to worry, there was much indictment in how one said what was to be said in the paper. And he was beginning to see that papers were deceitful in how they said what they did. And this deceit was pervasive, and what was worse, it was believed by the vast majority of those who wanted to believe it. So in some respects he was already convicted. He was too smart not to know, though he could not articulate it well. As always with those who were expected to be only one way, he often pretended he didn’t know what he actually did.

  That night, after the heat relented, and the wind off the bay made you think of lost Irish ghosts, of little girls who died on the crossing and of lepers from Sheldrake Island in 1847, as wind here always did, and would always do, he fell into a light sleep, and dreamed Hector was standing before him making him laugh.

  “Yes, I knew you were alive,” he said. “Can you wait until I wake up and get Isaac and Amos? They want to see you too!”

  When Roger awoke it was daylight, and a fine rain fell, and he heard a tractor, which Mr. Cyr had donated to the band, travelling along the shore road going toward the rec centre.

  Roger worked in the heat all day, cutting wood on his back woodlot, and came home in the evening with welts on his neck from the flies, his socks soaked through with sweat and dried blood. No one had said a thing to him when he went down to the corner to check his mail. There was little mail. Only an advertisement for golf courses in P.E.I. and a bill from hydro.

  But what was more telling was this: he had often gone over to the site to help with the mortaring, for Amos Paul and his men were hard pressed to get this done. Since the accident he had not gone down the shore road to the reserve. He sat in the back room and tried to read one of the romance novels that his mother had read at a rate of a dozen a week and had left around the house when she went back home to a life of other men and questionable pleasures. But very often he would put the book down and stare into nothing at all.

  3

  THE RAIN STARTED TO FAN, AND THE SHIP—THE Lutheran, which those who loaded called simply “a boat”—had to sit where it was, for over two weeks, with the generator going, a feeling of profound silence on the deck, with porthole windows looking out at the sawdust-strewn lumber wharf, while the investigation into the death continued. The Monks went aboard to show where they had been, and how they had seen the load fall in time, and had tried to grab Hector but it had happened too fast. The clamp was examined. It wasn’t twisted or bent; so if the load fell it had to have been left opened. The Monks brought the water boy with them, to show where he had been standing, and he said he had yelled at Hector to get out of the way, as well. Then Roger had to stand where he had been, and show what he had done, which he lied about. This very physical act of having him recreate a scene he said had not happened made it seem very suspicious.

  “It was not me who leaned over an’ put the clamp to ’er,” he said. He said this again and again. Standing in the harsh sunlight with the smell of rinsed water running from the ship’s sewer flukes made it all seem base and suspect.

  The inner bulwark was examined. Then, too, the entire yard. There were still three and a half rows of yarded pulp—each stretching back an acre or more. And the boat could not go until the investigation was over. Or at least this was the consensus. The Dutch wanted to go home, wanted all of this to be over with. They were not saying anything here—they stared at everyone with mild, impassive faces. They were polite and even timid.

  However, to
the papers back home in Rotterdam they complained and even bragged about everything, about how stupid the people were here, how backward, saying that Roger Savage’s name fit him very well. They did this until their captain told them not to open their mouths again to any papers home or here. The ship needed to offload in England take on new cargo for Rotterdam and he had to get going. He decided by the third day that whoever was needed at an inquest could be flown back at Canadian expense. This was his decision, and he cancelled all shore leave and moved toward slipping port.

  The investigation continued very slowly. The coroner had little to go on. He was a retired local police officer and had relied on the reports about the load.

  “The load fell and killed him,” he sniffed, “which is pretty obvious.”

  Everyone had been co-operative, but the place had been cleaned by the able-bodied seaman sent into the hold. Things were washed away when the body was moved. This caused a delay in his final pronouncement. And there was no expert on hand to testify to the skill of the hook-on, or where Hector was exactly when the load came down. The Monks said that the clamp was not hooked, and that the load started to tumble at fifteen feet above their heads. The rumour was that this was done in a thoughtless moment as an energetic and malevolent joke, and that Roger couldn’t be charged for there was no proof, but that he would never work another boat.

  Except it was done by a man not used to playing pranks or jokes—he had no form for that—which under the flat, grey sky seemed almost more deft and subtle reasoning to call him what people were calling him, a killer. Malicious or malevolent. The action seemed to have been the result of a spur-of-the-moment decision. One could think of thick, gleeful hands suddenly doing this as soon as poor George Morrissey’s back was turned.

  “He waited his chance,” Kellie Matchett said to young May, Roger’s girlfriend he was hoping to marry. “I mean, that’s what they say.”