Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  But the secret was, Doran did not need old Amos Paul’s permission because he had been on the phone to Isaac now for two days. And Isaac wanted Doran, and no one else, to file the stories. The idea that this was because Doran was a white man they could trust was taken as implicit—but for Isaac it was about control. He had to at least try to control the information coming from the reserve, and the primary reason for this need was Joel Ginnish. Isaac had to keep the most unpredictable member of the reserve satisfied. This was his most pressing problem.

  Isaac had already been at a meeting with the Minister of Fisheries. At this meeting Isaac was offered eleven commercial lobster licences if he would assure the government there would be no problems that summer. The Fisheries said it was an initial offer, but Isaac said it was far too limited—and it also amounted to blackmail. Also, there was no discussion of the home fishery, because the natives refused to consider giving up any part of their treaty right to fish for food for themselves, and certainly not in exchange for the eleven lobster licences.

  So it was Isaac who told Doran to come up.

  “Should I get Amos’s permission?” Doran asked. “I mean, I won’t stay on the reserve but I’ll be there a lot, so I should—”

  “Phone him,” Isaac said. There was a long pause. “But then phone me back and let me know what you decide.” And he hung up.

  Doran, used to boys and young men, had never heard such power in a voice. He was a little in awe. So he had the editor phone Amos.

  “Some say Amos is complicit in a cover-up,” Doran said, though no one actually had said this. But at this moment he was almost as angry with Amos as he was with Roger. And he told all of this to his mother before he went.

  So even if Max Doran did not want it, sooner or later he would be in the cauldron too. And Max seemed to sense this as he left for the Miramichi. He knew in his heart and soul that being a good journalist was always and only what he wanted to be, but already something about this wasn’t right.

  3

  AMOS PAUL HAD AN OLD FORD TRUCK AND A DORY, A SMALL fishing boat that was up in the yard, with a hole just below the starboard gunnels. He was trying to get a recreation centre built, and was working on a program for young native children from his reserve to visit other reserves across the country. There were some new houses being built and two shapely new fire hydrants. He had thought he was doing very well, until this moment. Now, he was thrust into something he did not know how to respond to. To not let Doran on the reserve would be best, but it would look like collusion, especially when Isaac wanted him to come. Still, Amos did not want him, and wished he would go away.

  But who would Amos be in collusion with? The priests who had once beaten him at the French school? The English cottagers who never looked his way? The police who had put his wife in jail and had hit him in the face? Where would this collusion be, and who would it be with? But so many already thought this of Amos—to say Doran could not come into the reserve would reinforce what was already being said.

  Now Amos himself was baffled and tormented, because nothing at all had been proven against this Roger Savage. Still, it looked very bad for Roger—and as always, people were now saying that they’d always known Roger was this way. People—whites as well as natives—were telling stories of how they themselves had had to deal with Roger.

  “I had to backhand him myself a few times,” one white man had told Amos at Sobeys two days before. Amos said nothing to all of this. Sometimes he would say, “My, my,” and sometimes he would say, “Dear, dear,” and sometimes he would be silent altogether.

  It was like picking a person out of a group of people and saying he must be guilty for all the others and then tying him to a post and shooting him. Roger’s father was dead, his mother had deserted him; he was alone in a house he had a deed to that his own mother had tried to take from him because she had had an offer from the band to buy it for twice what it was worth. That is, she had tried to cheat her own child.

  So Amos, in protecting Roger, had a far, far harder task than Isaac, who people were saying was both brave and noble.

  Amos could get himself out of this predicament easily, by siding with them. It was tempting enough, for other sentiments on the reserve were like a giant magnet pulling him. But he did not.

  The only thing Amos could say was this: “Roger Savage has not done anything wrong—as far as I can see—so he is under the band’s protection.”

  The reserve’s interconnected politics were not lost on Max Doran. But to him, this was not at all the issue. He did not blame Roger Savage, a man brought up where he was, but also he could not see how Roger was in the least innocent. This is what he told his mother before he left Saint John. He did try, on the way up in the car, to fathom how it might be that a man such as this was innocent. Perhaps the death was an accident. He knew he did not like people like Roger, so in his own way he really tried to think positive things about him, but he found it hard to do so. Men like Roger did not just bully and beat men like Hector Penniac; they bullied men like Max Doran—and always had. People like Roger were exactly the kind who would destroy people like Hector. And the lie Roger had told about hooking was everything. In fact, it is what put Doran in such a shaky spot.

  The one conversation by phone he’d had with Roger had happened the day before. His mother, who was worried, and sat knitting with a great deal of nervousness, had asked Max to call. So he had. But Roger had become upset almost immediately.

  “Tell me you hooked,” Max said finally, “and I will resolve to find out how it happened the way you say it did.”

  “Well … but I did not hook,” Roger said. “And I have been talking to a lawyer.”

  “Talking to a lawyer!” Max said, bemused. He could do nothing else. The man was a liar.

  There was another reason for Doran’s constant deliberation, as he told his mom. It was this: Did those who ran the paper give one fig for him? No, and he knew they did not. Some of them, he knew, hated him. “Do you think, Mom, if I don’t do a good job, I will get another chance? There are five other reporters who want this!”

  So if Doran did not use this one story to advance himself, he was as doomed as Hector Penniac.

  “But do you need such a spotlight?” his mother asked.

  “I want to report!” was all he could answer.

  “Would you give up this story to bring Hector back?” his mother asked, almost kindly, looking up at him and trying to smile. And his heart went out to her, because she was ill.

  So this thought came over him too as he got to Rogersville, and it bothered him more than once. Would he give up this story to bring Hector back? He knew he could say yes in a second, but he was unsure whether it was true. Also, would he give up a story if it provoked a death?

  The road to the Miramichi was long and crooked enough to think of these disturbing things.

  After Doran’s first article was published, he was silent, wondering what his mother had said about it. Yet everyone at the paper was impatient with him. And he’d had to ask himself if he was determined enough to see things through, come what may, or should he really be doing something else?

  So a week after the Lutheran drifted away, there came an article, suddenly and explosively, which showed Max Doran could not take Roger’s explanation seriously, and believed his reticence bespoke a guilty conscience. Max needed to link a fascinating story in the national media with his own story, so his own story might tag on to the one already in the national press. It was Isaac Snow who had brought this up with him, who asked him why his story wasn’t getting more recognition. It was Isaac who was disheartened by how small-potatoes the local story was, and so he had spurred young Doran on.

  And this is what Doran wrote:

  “The murder of a First Nations man, Nathan Blacksnake, in Saskatoon last month brings home our rather blasé attitude toward the death of Mr. Hector Penniac, a young Micmac man who went to work a boat up on the Miramichi, and was found dead in the hold at quarter p
ast eleven that morning. He lasted at this job—a job that he needed—just two hours. That in itself is a tragedy. What is more so is the attitude of those in authority who must deal with this. How much are they willing to divulge to us? The ship has already sailed, the case seems closed; it is being called an accident. Hector Penniac graduated with honours, and wanted to be a doctor and come back to a reserve sorely in need of gifted men. Some people on the reserve are hesitant to talk—and who can blame them? For years we, as white men, told them what they could and could not do. If we are to respect ourselves as human beings, that must change now, and the guilty, whoever they are, must be held responsible.”

  Although Doran never stated it, when he mentioned Mr. Blacksnake, who was sickeningly beaten to death by three white men, he implied that Hector Penniac had been murdered too. No one wanted a bad story or a wrong story—but a story, like anything else, has its own life, and Max Doran, in trying to be fair, was in fact following the life of the very story he had created. So far the paper’s owner had been spared embarrassment by his connection to the land claim case on the river and to the Dutch shipping company, of which he himself owned a percentage. But in receiving compliments from certain friends and people in positions of authority, especially at the university, Doran again felt shallow—for he believed he had written in the main what Isaac Snow had wanted, and this sat very heavy on him.

  Roger was twice more taken in by the police to be questioned. He sat in the office and said what he had said before—he’d had nothing to do with Hector’s death. He had not hooked, and he was sorry for the death of the man. The police became as insistent as temper allowed, calling him a coward and a bully, saying that he would not get away with it. “Would you know how to hook to have the clamp jam open—I mean, if you did it?”

  “Yes, I would jam it open. The weight would shift and might make the logs fall—I suppose … but it wouldn’t be for certain.”

  “But you could do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s damn funny that you know what happened. I mean, that’s what people say you did, as a prank. You didn’t really want to kill him, did you—just have fun and scare him so he would quit and you’d get the job?” a policeman named Hanover asked. “Why don’t you just admit how surprised you were that Indian fella got a job? And now you are sorry about it—we know that.”

  “Sure—except I didn’t hook.”

  They kept Roger in the office more than four hours. But finally they had to let him go home.

  Both times, First Nations men went to the police station and waited in the dry, listless parking lot to hear what would happen. And both times Roger came out, walked past them and went home. Both times, he reiterated he had not hooked. And there was no proof he had hooked, except for the leaners, who were both drunk and said so.

  Both times, Joel Ginnish shrugged and put his hands out as if all this was beyond him, and then they all turned and followed Roger back to his house.

  “You hay our nets, you’ll be in for it,” one of the men said.

  “Yeah—or step over our line, too, when you’re in your yard.”

  “Or speak to our women,” someone else said.

  Then they all broke out laughing, even Roger. And all of them would laugh, and then stop laughing, and then Joel would say something, and that would strike them all as funny, and all of them, even Roger, would laugh again.

  Doran went back to Saint John and had a meeting with the Fisheries officers about the lobster. While there his mother asked him to stop, to turn that story over. To think that maybe another story about something else might interest him. He sat with his mother during supper hour, putting a blanket around her because of the breeze from the Bay of Fundy bringing in fog.

  “Isn’t this my destiny?” he asked. “Isn’t this my one chance?” He shrugged at the night falling, and shivered slightly, lighting a cigarillo, his face tragically certain in the match’s flare. “I have learned about Roger Savage, Mom—he is the worst of all. And you, Mom, are the best of the best—and human beings should never be allowed to forget the difference!”

  It would be Doran’s tragic certainty that Markus would notice within the next few months, and think about in the years and years to come. And the blockbuster Doran wanted to write when the world gave him enough experience would be, because of this, tragic too.

  There were a few grim reminders of the unfair play in Max Doran’s approach—reminders that came from a few solitary and somehow unacceptable complaints to the paper about bias. (These complaints would come more frequently over the summer.) They came to the paper by way of scant letters to the editor, letters saying nothing had been proven. At times there was also a halting statement from one of the youngest reporters, Gordon Young, who had lived long in that forbidding area near the reserve, and who did not trust Isaac Snow or Joel Ginnish, for as he said, Isaac Snow was a born politician and Joel Ginnish was a born thief, and he knew them both, better than Mr. Doran ever would. And he said this without the least worry that those who measured themselves by conventional wisdom would think his statements insensitive. Why he did not care what in hell people thought, him with his soft hands and his Hush Puppies, no one knew—but perhaps, some reflected in a pejorative way, he was a throwback to another time, when discrimination against the First Nations was openly accepted. Or, perhaps, in a real way he cared very much for the reserve and could not allow an untrue sentiment to pass as true, even if others thought it true.

  “After all they have been through,” Max said to Gordon Young one Tuesday afternoon when the argument began again in the office, “and you are questioning my few reports?”

  Everyone laughed nervously at the old-fashioned, deeply conservative young journalist Gordon, who was in many ways an outcast among them. And Gordon Young, who had come from a place even more remote than the reserve, wore silly clothes, and had been foolish enough, or perhaps not, to believe in integrity above anything else, even above irony, said that this is not what he was questioning. “No sir, Mr. Doran” (for he always called Max “Mr. Doran”), “I am not questioning the suffering of the first peoples. I have First Nations nieces and nephews, and will not question that. No, I am questioning others using this suffering to exploit a story, and go in a wrong direction because of it.” He mentioned the crane, the stevedores and other details from that day Hector Penniac died. And he decried in the most gentle way he could the idea of some people using an uneducated and solitary man like Roger Savage to satiate the already insatiable dislike of that kind of man, a dislike that many, many academics and some students applauding Mr. Doran seemed to feel—people who were writing to the paper with their “unending” support of the band. Max looked at Gordon Young for a bit, and wondered about him a little. Then he replied, with the same bemusement he had felt with Amos Paul, “Ah, I know all of that, Gordon. All of it. I’ve paid my dues, lad. I’ve been on twenty stories like this. And I have come to this conclusion painfully. These guys are always the first to cry foul. And I do not want to blame. No, I don’t. But what keeps hounding me is this: one little Indian goes to the wharf and gets a job, and the poor little bastard is killed outright. And Roger is a liar and a killer. One, he had an ongoing dispute with that family. Two, he fought with the brother over this dispute. Three, he expects to be hired. Four, he arrives late and is surprised that his seniority has been rebuffed. Five, he is angry and starts to drink. Six, he hooked as soon as he got a chance—I went to the wharf and watched how it could be done. You know how long it took? Twenty-five extra seconds!

  “So what am I going to say—that he didn’t have an ongoing dispute with that family? That he is a good guy? These guys are always good guys! He’s a good guy who won’t take a lie detector test—a good guy who took a swing at his principal. He won’t admit that he hooked, that he deliberately waited his chance. If he was so brave as to hook, why wouldn’t he admit that? I’ll tell you why. Because he thought he would be applauded by all the rednecks up there for doing this—
and now it has blown up on him! He did not think people would be so incensed. And he can’t imagine how wrong he was, and he is weaselling about, trying to get out of it. And you are blaming students at the university—kids who still have some ideals.”

  “I’m only saying that some students who have written the paper, in support of you, have never stepped foot on a reserve or ever saw a pulp boat,” said Gordon Young. “I worry whether you can stop helping them try to prove their case.”

  Max Doran was embarrassed by this impromptu lecture, and said nothing else. But this was the one real rebuke he had had. There was silence for some time. But then Gordon Young, who was not a household name like Max was at the time—and would not be a household name until nineteen years later, when he would become known for many great stories, seemingly in another time and dimension—this young journalist asked Max if he had ever heard of Winston Churchill. It seemed a very strange question and people laughed at the general bend and tone of it.

  “Know all about him,” Max said, sitting up now and angry, his hair suddenly damp with sweat.

  “Then you know what he said to an empty House of Commons after Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact—”

  “Sure, but you tell me.”

  “Mr. Churchill said, ‘You had a choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war!’ ”

  “And what does that mean to me?” Doran said, looking over some notes, propping these notes against his knees and looking up.

  “It means that lots of people are at war with their own honour, and often choose dishonour—because certain of those they want to impress do not know or value honour. I think you have to have more time with this story—you and you alone can get it right.”

  There was silence again—and bitter silence, too. Then Max Doran said, “I have no worries about my honour, lad, or getting anything right.”