Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  “Well, it keeps materializing in front of us—the word ‘racist’—because you have already implied that about Roger, and he is an easy target. That’s what worries me about honour.” Gordon paused and then said calmly: “Could you call Joel Ginnish a racist? Because if ever Roger was a racist, then Joel is too—”

  Most of the people listening did not yet know who Joel was; Doran had never mentioned him by name.

  “We are talking about a murder here!” Doran said, just as calmly. “A murder—not racism. That’s the difference—”

  “Churchill was a British imperialist, I think!” a young journalist named Katie Houtte said, her eyes shifting from one to the other. That’s what she had heard, and she knew war was bad—so she said what she thought she must.

  Gordon Young glanced at her without comment, then looked back at Doran, and said very quietly: “I do not believe you are charging Roger with murder. The murder cannot be proven, and won’t ever be proven as much as racism itself, which has been implied in the last few weeks. It is hard to stop playing Grey Owl, if the act brings national attention. It bothers me—pandering in this regard—and always has.”

  Katie asked who Grey Owl was, and again Gordon looked around as if troubled by something immeasurable he could not overcome—the way Canadians believed truth was democratic and objective and already arrived at.

  Doran waited a moment, lit a cigarillo. “Don’t worry, it won’t go on much longer—Roger will confess, and everything will be over in a week or two at most, and I’ll see to it,” Doran answered. “For I am not backing down from this. And if it was your story you wouldn’t either. Maybe you should have taken it—I guarantee there is not a reporter who wouldn’t come to the same conclusion.”

  Gordon reflected that Doran’s mother was sick, and that he had a bottle of medicine he was taking home to her. Doran kept the number of the doctor in front of him on the desk. And Doran’s pretending he was not worried made it obvious that he was. Gordon felt ashamed of himself when he saw this doctor’s number on a yellow pad by the phone. “Leave him alone,” he thought. “He is probably right—don’t yourself get involved, simply because Roger is your cousin.” And he remembered his own family, and how they always maintained that Roger would do something terrible sooner or later. And if Gordon’s family, who worried about Roger, thought this, then perhaps it was the case. Perhaps Roger had pushed the clamp on only partway simply because he was angry—not intending that what did happen should happen.

  So Young shelved the discussion. And people spoke of the fire downtown two nights before and whether it had been deliberately set. They moved away from Doran’s desk, and the heat came through the broad windows and landed upon the typewriters and the filing cabinets and the picture of Mr. Cyr, who looked out over his employees with a kind of Rotarian disinterest, and everyone went back to work.

  The journalist Gordon Young was upset about this second story and then the third, which came shortly after, and even thought of resigning. And no one understood why for a while. Then they discovered that Gordon was Roger’s cousin, and that seemed to explain it. They also believed he was jealous.

  Max Doran, meanwhile, believed Roger deserved his scrutiny. But as Markus Paul reflected years later, Doran must have found himself in a terrible bind. He could not admit Gordon Young was right about these articles, for then he would have had to change tactics. And he would lose the support of those he counted upon. For someone would say, “I knew he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  And someone else would get the cream of the story and the national attention Doran craved. And this is what he feared more than anything else. This and the idea that the young journalist in some way might want him to suppress this story. So as Doran told his mother, he believed others were trying to suppress this story—and he was priggishly determined not to. And the longer Roger went without being charged, the more determined Max Doran became to show how valuable his reporting, his scrutiny and his exposé were.

  But it was not Max Doran alone who felt this. It was most people, as Markus remembered, during that time. All of them, himself included, thought that what Max Doran was doing was justified.

  So, prodded by all these thoughts, Doran had to keep going.

  That is, as Markus Paul now knew, Max was much like a lobster in a trap. He would come in through a large door to find a small one, and then a smaller one still, always looking forward, always finding himself able to fit in, not knowing he would never be able to back out.

  4

  DORAN WENT BACK TO THE RIVER AND INTERVIEWED THE people who should have known the most about what happened: the Monks, the two brothers in the hold.

  “So you work the holds?”

  “Yes, sir—”

  “Work hard?”

  “Yes, sir—work some hard. Well, we all do up here at this end of ’er. It ain’t like workin on a big newspaper, not that there is nothing wrong with that—but one slip and yer dead in there. And we was working hard that day too, and most days, up in the morning before dawn most days.”

  “And you don’t mind the hard work?”

  “Ya gotta do it—so no—I don’t mind.”

  “And you were in the hold on that day—”

  “Yes sir, I was—I mean, we both was in the hold on that day that young Indian boy Hector Penniac died.”

  “And what happened?”

  “A load shouldn’t be hooked like that. I don’t know—I thought, ‘Now Morrissey knows some better than that.’ That’s Georgie Morrissey, our friend there, George. And then when we brought the boy’s broke body up—well, we heard it was Savage hanging around the fourth hold all morning long. Savage, who was a problem on the wharf and always fought with Hector’s brother there—Joel, you know.”

  “What was wrong with the hook?”

  “Jammed partway open. So the swing like a pendulum would make her scatter, let me tell you—”

  “How was it left opened?”

  “It just was—that’s all I know. I don’t want to cast blame on him or no one else. I just want to work the boats.”

  “Could it have been an accident?”

  “Could have been, but who wouldn’t clamp it down? It’s a poor hook on anyways. We were treated like we was hookin on in the ‘50s—so it only takes a little to make it all go bad. Still you have to want to make it go bad to do so.”

  “Can you tell me about Mr. Savage?”

  “No, boy, I’d rather not say nothing about him. Our lawyer there, Mr. Reynolds our lawyer, told us not to.”

  “You have a lawyer?”

  “Of course—Mr. Reynolds, all the way from Fredericton. The union insisted we do. You know, something happens like that—who is safe when that happens?”

  “Why—have you been threatened or anything?”

  “Won’t say,” Topper sniffed.

  And Billy Monk added: “The Indians say they’re gonna burn Roger out for what he done, but if he did do it—what is they supposed to do? No, there is a lot of fair Indians—don’t you think there ain’t. I know Joel Ginnish a long time, and you’d go a hard walk to find a better man.”

  Roger made up his mind, sitting alone that night in his house after the interview with the Monks came out. He would stay. Hell or high water, he would stay—he would hay the pools downriver from his land (that is, put hay in the water which would carry downriver and sweep the Indian gill nets) and burn out those who burned him (since everyone was saying he was going to be burned out). That is, all his life they had expected this from him, and in some way, in some inscrutable way, the gods planned and wanted it too. For if they did not, why put him here, on this scrape of earth? If they had not wanted Sisyphus to roll the boulder up the hill, why condemn him to it? Camus said Sisyphus was free on the walk back down the hill. Roger was free the moment he realized he had lost everything, perhaps even his fiancée, whom he ached for and loved.

  And now he had no choice. They had told him to take shop in school and he had;
they had told him to work and he had. They had even told him not to hope for anything beyond the few square feet he owned, and he hadn’t. So now this would be the one thing—the one thing he would not allow them to take away.

  “Anyone who comes close, I will shoot,” he wrote in a scribbler that was found by Amos Paul after the events of the summer. “I won’t let no one rob this house from me!”

  He wouldn’t say squat to the reporter either, and he wouldn’t back down. He would by this act become essentially what the press said he was, and he would do what they believed he would do, in order to retain his sense of self, even though this sense of self was almost directly contrary to what the papers believed he was. So if there was a choice between war and dishonour, he would choose war. They had forced his hand to choose war, and he instinctively knew he must. He also knew this: the press was hoping he would not come out of his house, and hoping too to have this go on, and for it to blow up, to sell papers and to prove he was what they had already implied. By taking this course of action, he showed them exactly what they wanted. And he realized that Max Doran would get the story that would propel him into the national spotlight, with both arrogance and sanctimony.

  But in the end, Roger Savage had no choice.

  This is what he told his girl. And she was a nice girl too, May, a pleasant, kind girl who had always done what was expected of her. Just as her mother had married and had a nice wedding, so she too wanted to marry and have a nice wedding, and just as she had gone to the dances and said the same things everyone said, so she expected all the same things to happen to her. She had great aptitude in small things and wanted others to recognize that. So she pooh-poohed great aptitude in great things. She didn’t want to look at the big picture, because the picture her mother and father had always focused on was small, and the picture most of her friends focused on was small. So the big picture had nothing to do with her. And this is what Roger, without knowing it, was forcing her to get involved in—the big picture—and she did not like that. So a week or two after the story came out, people were hedging their bets for her. Her mother and her father and her best friends, like Kellie Matchett, were wondering about Roger because everyone was saying he had deliberately tried to kill men in a hold. Now, one person could say that, and that would be fine—and two could as well—but when you had seventy thousand papers saying it every day, that was the big picture, and May did not like big pictures.

  She did not know what to do—and Roger sensed her confusion. When she came to visit, she was nervous and jumped at noise, and had eyes as big as saucers. And he knew he frightened her when he spoke of his rifle. Once when he came to the kitchen, she was backed up near the counter staring at him as if she wanted to run away.

  5

  MARKUS PAUL, NOW THAT HE WAS OLDER, KNEW MORE ABOUT how Max Doran was caught in a trap, and felt more sympathy for him. And he also believed that Isaac had not wanted to use the newspaperman for his own advantage in the deepening crisis.

  But in another way, perhaps Isaac had wanted it. Or like any other politician, he did not worry over what he wanted or did not want. He existed on what might happen that he could then use. To say he had planned this was silly. He was the proof positive that mankind planned almost nothing. That is, he did not hope for Hector to die, or in his wildest dreams ever thought that he would, but it was now suddenly best that he had. He knew, strangely, that anyone else would not have moved so many whites to concern. It was because of Hector’s tiny frame and his eloquent talk—the very things some boys, including Joel, used to mock. So Isaac had been forced to act more concerned than he was, and he could not help it either, for he saw how Doran was even more upset at the gruesome pictures of the death than he was, and he could use this as well.

  Isaac did not start out to be opportunistic, but no politician alive can give up opportunity. The boy’s death meant little to him for a while. That is, politically. Then two things happened: Joel Ginnish came home and wondered why things were not being done about such obvious contempt toward his brother, and Isaac was compelled to play the part he had trained himself from adolescence to play.

  Part of it—perhaps much of it—was sincere, but from the moment Doran came to visit him, something secretive began to happen. He realized he did not want things to go well for the band, for the investigation or for Roger—for any one of these things could hamper the power struggle he was now in against Amos Paul. And most of all, he did not want Max Doran to have sympathy for Roger.

  He knew this, and his wife knew this, but both knew they could never mention it. So both of them were depressed when anything positive happened and both of them exalted when anything bad did. And neither of them could help feeling this. For like anyone in opposition, Isaac must hope the ruling party failed.

  To his way of thinking, the death of Nathan Blacksnake would be avenged. So this death must be too. He could not allow Nathan Blacksnake’s case to take precedence over the case of Hector Penniac in the broadening public consciousness.

  Max Doran did not want this either—for he wanted to make his own story the one urban Canadians gravitated to. So although he tried to rein himself in one moment, he pushed forward with his incriminating articles the next.

  All this did not give Roger Savage much hope.

  Isaac, with his grade seven education, knew all about Max Doran in a second. But he also knew this: if you pushed Max Doran too far and he truly felt he was compromising himself, he would never trust you again. Isaac was a born politician. At seventeen his whole reserve, on his instruction, had mounted a protest over the collection of seaweed. It was a government experiment, collecting seaweed to be used as fertilizer. But not one native had been employed. No one had been able to get a protest started—and Amos Paul, who at that time was forty-seven, had helped Isaac organize one. Their friendship had started then, soon after the death of Isaac’s father, and had not been strained until now.

  “What do you plan to do?” Joel asked in Micmac. He was sitting back in the kitchen chair, on two legs, with his arms folded, chewing gum and watching his mentor.

  Isaac knew much about Joel, and had followed him from afar. Joel had been a grade-school plotter. If you wanted a chair, he would bring you a couch. If you wanted a bicycle, he would bring you a car. Once he told some white cottagers he could get them a nice new door, and then he took the front door off his stepfather’s house and sold it.

  “Can’t you get another?” he asked his outraged stepfather. “From Indian Affairs?”

  He had robbed his old uncle’s pension money and forged a will. Or two wills. Isaac couldn’t remember. Joel stored his marijuana bales in the old cement store on the other side of the reserve, and sold it to boats coming in off P.E.I. He made thousands a year from this and complained he was poor. He sold fish to the Monk brothers, who constantly demanded more fish. The RCMP were well aware of this, and had planned a raid. Joel knew this, and Isaac knew that Joel would press for a barricade to claim sovereignty. This is what he had been trying to promote since the first band meeting about the crisis. If they put up roadblocks, the roadblocks themselves would protect the marijuana until he could get it moved away. This was as much of a concern as anything.

  Joel was handsome and a bane to women. He had been kicked out of school in grade nine for impregnating a teacher. He would sit on the school steps and try to explain to her that he had no money to take care of the child. He once took a Sunday school group into the woods and forgot about them when something more important attracted him—a bobcat he chased for four miles. Late that night he realized their picnic must be over.

  “Oh, come now, it won’t be hard to find them in the dark,” he told their worried parents. “They’re white.”

  But Joel was a necessary part of the reserve. A man who would and could take action whenever you needed him, fearless, bold and a great fighter.

  So after being let out of jail for smuggling cigarettes across the border—“Only two and a half truckloads—what’s the
problem?” he said—and stealing from his own people’s fish traps, Joel was now always appearing at the door with a grave concern that his brother’s memory be treated with proper solemnity

  “You’re quite the captain,” Isaac had said to him for the last four years, as a warning. “Look at you, you’re always up to no good,” he’d joked all last winter, as a warning. “Haven’t they locked you up yet?” Isaac would always say this jokingly, but as an indication as to where they morally parted company.

  “Not yet,” Joel would say, smiling, “so let’s blow something up.”

  Isaac well knew the band would have problems with anyone so volatile, that Joel would continue to do very reckless things unless he could be held in check. Yet a division between them now would make one or the other a liar, and both were in this position where they must rely on each other.

  They both lied about unity in order not to be considered liars. Isaac, for his part, realized the only way not to have Joel do something erratic was to include him, and try then to handle him.

  That evening, sitting in the soft, darkening room in Isaac’s house, they devised a plan. It was a warm night, and the window at the front was open. They heard children on the beach, and saw the lights twinkling off the wharf, and far away a buoy light too. Joel had his audience with the man he admired. But in reality Joel admired men only so long. He had no friends, only contacts. This is what Joel wanted: First a work stoppage at the recreation centre. Then if need be, the one thing the whites could not stand, a blockade, disrupting all traffic needing to use their roads, and essentially isolating Roger Savage’s house.

  Both of them felt gratified to have each other’s support in this, but Isaac knew in his heart as a shrewd politician that it probably wouldn’t be enough, and to keep himself in power, in the spotlight and in the political arena, he would have to order more action, even if his better nature told him not to. Not only his own warriors but others from other reserves would want him to. He was in contact with many other reserves by now.