Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  But now he thought of something. “It was the last load before noon—so maybe it was an accident. You know, people just getting careless.”

  But no one answered. Andy Francis took a drag on his cigarette and let the smoke speak for him as it came slowly from his nose. Markus lit a cigarette too and took a quick, almost cryptic drag, and held it in his hand, looking at the burning ash, and then flicked the ash twice with his finger. Markus inspected the scar on his left wrist that he had gotten some years before snaring rabbits. He could still feel Sky’s leg pressed against his, and that was worth everything. He had once asked her if she had ever done it with a boy, and she had said, “No—but sometime I will.”

  “And who would you—with?” he asked shyly.

  “With you,” she said so softly he almost did not hear.

  Markus said he was going to the wharf to see where the RCMP were.

  He stood quickly and walked up the shore road, toward the lights, Little Joe between him and Sky. Like a man who must breach rifle fire in order to prove what side he is on, he was walking into the dark, knowing that Tommie and Andy would not do it unless they had lots of boys with them. He disliked how Joel made them run errands and took their little bit of money, but he did not tell them. The secret was people wanted Joel off the reserve because he was always causing trouble of one sort or another, but they were frightened to say so—and anyone who said so would be called a traitor.

  But no one could just put him off the reserve. Not now, after his brother had been killed. In the past his own family had had him arrested. Once he had bound them with duct tape, and was rifling through the drawers of the house. People phoned and could hear little muffled sounds in the background: “Help us! Help us!”

  Then the Ward family came to Sunday dinner and saw the Ginnish family tied and gagged in the kitchen, the youngest girl gagged and in pigtails, and Joel in the living room watching TV and drinking a rum and Coke.

  “Oh, I would have untied them. I forgot all about them! You’d think they would have figured out how to untie themselves!”

  But now, all of a sudden he was “the right-hand man.” Why? Because no one else on the reserve would dare duct-tape their family up in the kitchen and then go watch television in the living room, that was why. He was right-hand man not in spite of his volatile nature but because of it.

  Surely it would not come to rifle fire, but whatever it came to, Markus Paul, as the fifteen-year-old grandson of the chief, must participate.

  “It’s getting some dark,” Little Joe said.

  “Maybe if I pull out my pants pockets you’ll be able to follow me,” Markus said, and Little Joe began to giggle.

  When they got to the wharf road they saw the abandoned lighthouse, with its windows busted almost a generation before, and wild grass covering the steps, and the widow’s walk above. But there were no RCMP officers at all, with rifles pointing at the reserve as they were told.

  “It’s all a big joke,” Markus said.

  “Yes,” Little Joe said, relieved.

  “Isaac just wants us to have our own fishery and have someone speak for us,” Sky whispered, as they half-stumbled in the dark. “That’s what Andy says.”

  But Markus was very perceptive, and everyone knew this. They never liked to argue with him for long. He knew he must defend his grandfather. And he felt there were two errors in what she said. The first was that the band did have its own fishery—it did not have a commercial one, but it had a home one, which people like Isaac Snow wanted to fold within the envelope of a commercial fishery. This is what was being opposed by the white fishermen, and was now in the courts and might go the natives’ way. But Markus knew that it was Amos who was trying to work out a deal and not only Isaac. And Markus wanted this to be understood. Some of the whites were poaching and stealing, yes. But so, too, some of the Micmac were stealing salmon and selling them to white buyers, which didn’t do any of them any good until they all had a share.

  Amos was trying to resolve that as well.

  Markus also knew that the only thing Hector might have had to do with these issues was if he was killed because of them, or if Roger was so angry about them that he became murderous. But this was extremely unlikely. Everyone knew this, and nobody said a thing, for to say anything was to say they were using Hector’s memory for their own purpose, and no one wanted to. So Hector, whose ears Andy’s and Tommie’s new hero, Joel, had painted blue as a joke, became their martyr. And this, Markus knew, would someday be known—that is, not that Hector was a martyr for them, but that he was one in spite of Joel’s painting his ears blue.

  Markus told Sky all of this very succinctly, and she never answered, and as always, with most people when they win an argument, there was a feeling of having done someone injury, and Markus tried to make it up by telling jokes.

  The group came up on the shore road again, leaving the breakwater behind. Little Joe Barnaby was cold, so Markus took off his jacket and held it out to him. Little Joe kept smiling, thinking he was surrounded by his friends, who would protect him, and he would protect them as well.

  “No,” Little Joe said, refusing the jacket, but Markus pretended he didn’t hear him. “I don’t want it,” Little Joe said, but Markus again pretended he didn’t hear him. So Little Joe put the jacket on, over his thin T-shirt with a little donkey on the front, and buttoned it up, so he looked as if he were walking in a trench coat. Then Markus gave him some bubble gum. The wind came from the north and was like a winter gale suddenly.

  Then some more people showed up, walking toward them. Tommie and Andy.

  “What’s going on? What are you doing—did you see the RCMP? Where are they? Joel wants to know.”

  “There’s no one anywhere,” Markus said.

  They waited awhile, and then some talked about going onto the wharf and demanding some of the lobster traps. But they didn’t do that. They waited another while. It was pitch black now, and they smelled the salt from the bay, and they turned for home, the only place that seemed left to them. Behind them the faraway lights reflected a bit on the night sky. Suddenly the boys began to yell at the empty cottages that sat on huge manicured lots. When they got to the long turn in the road, called dead man’s turn, just before the reserve proper, they passed Roger’s house. Only one light was on. Everyone was silent.

  Things would be either true or false. He was either a murderer or not. There could not be a middle ground. They were all silently thinking of this.

  “Markus, I can’t get this gum to blow bubbles, it keeps stumbling about in my cheeks,” Little Joe whispered.

  It was pitch black, and Markus took Little Joe’s hand.

  At the decline into the reserve at a time of night when they were usually in bed, Amos watched the little troop of kids as they came lumbering home. Yes, they had made it safely back, without any trouble, which he had been worrying over for an hour. For Amos knew that if any of them were hurt, he would be responsible. Of course most people, no matter who they were, would never hurt children. Yet Amos knew that just as a few men on the reserve would sooner or later proceed from one level of harm to another, so would certain white men.

  He knew, too, there was probably no longer a way not to blame Roger Savage for what had happened to Hector.

  Amos had gone to see Savage that night. He just walked in the back door of Savage’s house and sat at the kitchen table. He was pleasant and happy, as if nothing was amiss.

  “What’s happening?” Roger asked.

  “Oh nothing, boy, nothing. Well, you know, not much.”

  “What have they been saying about me?”

  “About you? Oh nothing. I mean, I haven’t heard them saying nothing.”

  “Amos, I don’t think that’s true.”

  “True—yes, no one is saying anything. Mrs. Francis thinks it’s all an accident. And I think if we can get our heads around it, most people will say within a day or two—I’d say a day or two—that it was an accident. Mrs. Francis has sent a
way to the place there to get your graduation ring, so that is good!”

  Roger nodded, and made Amos a cup of tea. The summer wind blew across the lawn in a sweet, sad way, as if this breeze had just come from a fairy tale and found its way here.

  “I was thinking, though,” Amos said, “that if you could put the new room you intended to build on the other side … I was thinking that might help.”

  “But there’s no room,” Roger said. “It belongs to Mary Cyr’s family.”

  “Oh well—that’s right, there is no room over there. Well. All things will get straightened up,” Amos said. “But then I was thinking, if you could just admit you hooked, it might go a long way—you know?”

  “But I can’t say nothing now one way or the other—for whatever I say now is a lie.”

  And so Amos left Roger and told him not to worry, for he was chief, and the little sad trumpets of wind blew down the lane as he walked.

  Amos’s father had once told him about people willing to join something. He said this: “There is always a big hidden giant in the room, and this giant attaches itself to people in a crowd, and moves them in one direction or another. Those who do not join this giant are outcast, and sometimes will get stepped on by great big feet. Those who join the giant have the benefit of puffing themselves up and acting like one, and sometimes do the stepping—until their friends leave and then they just get smaller and smaller. And sometimes after it is all over, they simply disappear!”

  “Joel is a big giant,” Amos thought, “for now. But someday he will be the smallest man on the reserve. And so will Doran. Doran someday will be the smallest man on the paper—and maybe someday he won’t have a paper anymore.”

  So Amos must solve this himself before it got out of hand. The Micmac police officers on the reserve had gone into hiding—they were like seamen who left a listing ship to the passengers. Someone had stolen a purse, and one of them came out to investigate, asked four people four questions and, realizing it might have been Joel or his friends, scolded the woman for leaving her purse lying about, went back to the jail and closed the door.

  Now the wind blew and sad old Amos watched the road, and Roger’s house. Roger’s house already looked as if it was under siege. Yes, but weren’t they all?

  At night Roger would sneak away and keep an eye on his pools or walk the hills near where his mother lived in the small pink-and-rouge house up near the highway, with its old twisted metal door, bent from kicks, and its porch sunken. He could not leave for long, for he was worried his house would be taken over by the group around Joel Ginnish, so most often he left only for an hour. In fact he went to visit his mother for the first time in two years the night Amos visited him. And he was like a little boy with her, nervous and scared, and hoping for her approval, which he had never in his life had.

  Then there was this: To keep his hopes alive, his mother—who had abandoned him years before for friends whom she drank with and fucked, playing bingo, going to dances and quarrelling—crossed the line into a bigotry Roger never had, pretending solace, and Roger had to endure the very narrow-mindedness that had once informed his youth, about people he had generally said nothing against. He remembered, too, what he had escaped from, the screaming and hatred in his house.

  His mother sat in her soft chair looking him up and down and said “Tch-tch” with her tongue. “Tch-tch, you got yerself into a fine old mess, haven’t you? I knew you shouldn’t have taken that old house—that only got it all started.”

  “Mom, be quiet.”

  “Living right next to them—didn’t I tell you that?—sooner or later you’re bound to upset a few. Niggers of the north is what they are. I always said.”

  “Momma, be quiet—go to bed if you’re going to talk that way. I don’t need to hear it.”

  His mother’s civil bigotry was horrible to listen to. But she was the only mother he had. Her words came and went with the wind in the grass, and the smell of manure across the highway in Topper Monk’s cherished little field. Topper and Bill Monk, who were in the hold with Penniac, and who shied away from looking at Roger now—when he knew they did see him. He knew they had been under the load and could have been killed themselves. Despite this, he hoped they could tell him something about what actually happened, so he’d gone to their door. But they had nothing more to say.

  “Roger, you were the one who dug the hole, get out of it yerself,” Bill said. “I don’t know if you was drunk or just bitter over a loss of pay. I woulda made it up to you, but I’ve had no contact with anyone over this, and I am doing it for you—even if you don’t think so.”

  “No one is gonna help me outta this mess,” Roger said to his mother now, staring up at the stars, in the doorway, with the wind smelling of pine and spruce.

  His mother lit a cigarette in quick affirmation of what he said, and her match flared in the dark by the metallic stove. It was as if she was casting blame with that match.

  And he decided not to visit her again.

  That night he went down the back road under the sweet moon and lingered in the pines near the river. He was thinking of leaving, just going away, giving up the old house and all he had lived for. But he couldn’t think of himself being anywhere else. He stood out on the shore, a man contemplating his small, winding pools, and the rocks jutting up, like a painting by some fine local artist.

  Later, he telephoned his girlfriend. And the phone rang and rang. At last her father answered and asked him pointedly what was true and not true about what he was hearing.

  “I don’t know what you have been hearing—nor do I care,” Roger said.

  And so his girlfriend’s father told him May was fast asleep, and would be busy tomorrow too.

  8

  THE FIRST NATIONS DISPUTE WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF Fisheries went on and on. And it seemed that the progress of the case with the Fisheries paralleled the accusations levelled against Roger.

  Twice more Isaac was called to meet with officials, and people outside the dispute were involved in the negotiations. The premier wished everyone could meet halfway. Each time Isaac was offered more, and each time his conditions were met, to the point where he could or should accept. But each time Joel, as his adviser, spoke to Isaac in private, and both times, on the verge of an agreement, Joel managed to wrest this agreement away. And his logic came down to this: “We can get more because of what has happened. If Hector’s death means anything, we can get more—much more.”

  Isaac knew that to balk at Joel was to make himself a target among those who were insisting he finally do something. These meetings were in reality the most important meetings between Joel and Isaac. They sat together in a small room off the main Fisheries office in the legislature, drinking coffee from a silver coffee pot. Both of them were exhausted and spoke quietly together in Micmac. And Isaac lost both of these important meetings—because both times Joel told him there was no consensus among his supporters, and he was ready to go back home. He looked sad and disappointed: “I have my own people to think of now,” Joel said with a pinch of sanctimony.

  “Aren’t they our people there, Joel?” Isaac smiled.

  But Joel only stared ahead.

  “He thinks he’s Jesus Christ!” Isaac thought one day.

  So Isaac was unable to sign because if Joel, with his charisma and charm, walked away he would take all the warriors with him, and there would be no unity. So the position Isaac found himself in was not unlike Amos’s position with Isaac, and saying no to the Fisheries did not reveal his strength but his weakness.

  It soon became clear to the Department of Fisheries that it did not matter how many licences they offered this year. And the Deputy Minister of Fisheries was extremely astute. He told his boss after the first meeting that the men were bent on something else that the government had no control over. He sent a memo to his Minister stating that every moment that the crisis did not end only meant that it would be harder and harder to have it ended. After the second meeting, he suggested th
e Fisheries cut off all negotiations, and put pressure on the Micmac leaders to bargain in good faith.

  Joel saw this as a moment to raise the temper of the conflict. “Another broken promise” was the headline in the Telegraph, and this was the first time a quote from Joel was used.

  The Deputy Minister could see clearly that a power shift was coming, and he telephoned a friend, a well-known reporter from the CBC, asking him to get in touch with Isaac. “Isaac is the one who we should speak to,” the Deputy Minister said as diplomatically as he could, calling on every past favour.

  Isaac himself knew that he must prevent Joel from becoming spokesman, so he gave the first interview on TV the next night. But in doing so he had to reiterate Joel’s position: that is, that no deal could be arrived at now.

  The Deputy Minister wanted to isolate Joel Ginnish. But he also wanted to do something else. He wanted to start negotiations with other reserves in the area, and come to a separate agreement with them. This would be done to show how Isaac and Joel were negotiating in bad faith. So the feelers were sent to other reserves along the bay waters on July 7, and the deals eventually would be signed on August 22, striking a great blow at Isaac’s prestige.

  The Deputy Minister could not handle his own Minister, however. In over her head, she felt she must show resolute toughness. That is, she attacked the biggest target, for she knew no other way. “Damn it,” the Minister was quoted as saying, “who should care what happens to Roger Savage? Half the white men up there are bigots as far as I’m concerned!”

  This caused a late-night meeting in the department with the Minister, Deputy Minister, Premier and two advisers from Indian Affairs. The statement was firmly retracted the next day, and the Deputy Minister was quoted as saying his Minister had been misquoted the day before. Then the Deputy Minister, a quiet, unassuming man with twenty-three years’ experience, tried to save the reputation of his inexperienced Minister and resigned.