But there was something else going on that remained hidden. Isaac’s Acadian wife, Colette, had a white father who was a fish-buyer off the wharf in Nequac. And as this man sat in his truck on the wharf staring out at the whitecaps, he realized something important. If Isaac could hold out and get an agreement that would allow him to fold the band’s home fishery into the commercial fishery they were after, it would allow for commercial native fishing at times of the year when white fishermen could not fish—and this would make both Isaac and his father-in-law quite rich.
At this same moment, Joel was angry, and it was for the simple fact that no matter how relevant he was to the negotiations, Isaac was still getting the attention. It was at this moment he began to dislike Isaac Snow very much. So it didn’t matter to him if he heard that the Minister of Fisheries was in negotiations with other reserves, and his own reserve was being isolated; he would not negotiate. “Isaac’s always been a big thorn in my side,” he began to tell his followers. But when someone else said something about Isaac, Joel reacted very quickly and slapped his face.
Two days after Isaac appeared on TV, Max Doran wrote another report.
Doran had received a call from the men in the yard, authenticated what they said and then reported on the fact that the hold Roger had hooked to was out of succession. That is, Roger had been supposed to hook to the third hold. The backhoes were always two or three loads ahead along the wharf, but Roger had simply picked the load to the fourth hold, and waved to the crane operator to send it there. This, of course, was done at certain times and there was probably nothing suspicious about it—except that thinking made it so. Yet when this fact was published in the paper on the third week of hot July, on the front page, everyone took notice more than they would have at any other time. This report hit both Amos and Mrs. Francis hard—for they had spent much time trying to make people realize that the dropped load was only an accident, and you could not charge Roger for the terrible suffering the First Nations had endured. But few of the young men wanted to listen to this now. What men like Tommie and Andy Francis wanted to do was break into Roger’s house and hold him captive.
It seemed that Roger had deliberately sent the load that he had tampered with to the hold where poor Hector Penniac was.
The paper’s editors had no real knowledge of how men worked, had never themselves once walked up a gangplank, so they did not know the subtleties of what had happened and could easily imply to the public that there had been a giant crime.
Once again, the small, tidy, well-dressed young reporter Gordon Young brought this up with Max, saying that although it may have been planned, perhaps it wasn’t planned maliciously, for he had had uncles once in the yard who worked themselves until their fingers bled. So perhaps there was nothing at all suspicious about this work within the pungent moil of wood and heat. That is, if you wanted the small hold to finish, so that the workers with seniority would move forward to the bigger holds, and you were a worker with seniority sitting on the dock, wouldn’t you send an extra load or two to the smallest hold, knowing you would be hired in the afternoon?
But even Gordon Young knew it looked abysmal for Roger now, and so did Markus Paul when he read this in the paper. And so did Max Doran, who actually seemed shaken to have to report this.
“Do you think I want to condemn him?” Doran said to Gordon. “At first, yes—maybe I did think he was to blame. But I have tried everything to get him to speak in the last two weeks! And now I am convinced he is to blame.”
Gordon nodded, and was silent a moment. Then he said, “The real problem is, no one is telling the truth there. The union is protecting itself, and the head of the union controls a good many of them—the company is fine with that, for it is Savage who is out of line. But then there are the First Nations men themselves. Did you talk to any of them about how they had treated that Hector? Well, you should not be so credulous—it’s bad for business. I will tell you, some are using this just to milk all they can from it! That sounds bad—but they are no different than other politicians.”
“I am not at all that credulous,” Doran said. “I know everything you said. I thought of it all. I am, however, certain Roger is lying—and that is where the story is.”
“Yes, I am aware of that—he might be lying. But others might be lying as well. There is a certain silence about those Monk brothers too. Those in the hold that day.”
But Doran argued that the only one who did not seem to be telling the truth, the only one who was out of place, was Mr. Savage. Here at five in the afternoon the whirr of fans occupied the room, and the solemn late-day shadows began to appear tenuously as they did in summer, and the smell of brick heated by the sun came in from a slightly opened window. There was a sudden energy at five, as if office romance was in the air between the man and woman who always drove home together, or from the echo of humming electric typewriters that had suddenly stopped. That is, all but one.
Doran, his left knee held up with his hands, said: “Why is Roger not speaking, and why has he lied? Why was he hanging about and hooked to that hold? These are not just questions, they are facts. And why did Hector need the job? Because no one on the reserve had a lobster licence! What have we done to them!”
“Yes, you are right,” Gordon said. “But what I am saying is, if they could arrive at the truth—a truth which would exonerate Savage at this moment—do you think Isaac or Joel would do so?”
“Of course they would—I am sure of it,” Doran said. He was angered this was mentioned because it was a question all of them had to think about and no one could answer for someone else. He knew Isaac was a brave and good man, but he could not answer for him either. Nor could he answer for himself. For the story had gained much attention and his copy was on the wire as far away as New York. So he tapped a pencil and looked at it a moment. Both he and Gordon Young suddenly looked at his pencil tapping and knew that Joel and maybe even Isaac would not use a sudden truth to exonerate Roger Savage now. And perhaps Doran would not either. And perhaps even the public would be disappointed—so certain were they that things were the way they had been reported.
But there was something Markus Paul was able to find out years later. Even though he was getting the notoriety he had craved, twice Doran had asked to be taken from the story; yet the paper told him he must continue. Isaac had asked him to include something about the treaties and the fishery dispute in his next story, and about the natives’ demands for licences, and Doran had felt he had no choice. For that powerful man Isaac Snow could stop him in a second from getting a story and then give it to someone else. Doran had brooded about this and then he had rashly asked to be removed from the story. But the paper did not take him from it. “We have no one else who has as many connections—you are the one! So stand tall and you will be as known across the country as you are here!” The managing editor had squeezed his shoulder and smiled.
Doran did not tell Gordon Young this, and they said nothing more. But Doran knew that unless this story ended quickly, it would scatter out of control.
So he decided: “I have to continue now—I have no other choice. If I leave this story without finishing it, there will never be another story for me.”
“No one will believe anything I say from now on,” Roger joked to Joel himself after he read the latest report about him intentionally sending the load to the wrong hold, “so I will not be saying anything else.”
“Well, then, can I say things on your behalf?” Joel joked. “Like how you’ve decided to give your pools to me?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, we’ll get them one way or the other.”
Then Joel said: “You know my cousin the dope fiend there? Well, he has everyone calling you the Bigot of Bartibog, so if you hear that, I wasn’t the one who started it. Just to let you know.” And he even patted Roger on the shoulder, for old times’ sake.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2006
MARKUS PAUL SURMISED MANY THINGS. ONE WAS HOW SMART Amos was, but m
ore importantly, how great the forces against his grandfather were during those days in 1985. It was not that Amos hadn’t minded what was said about him—no, he minded greatly. He couldn’t help it. It had made the last of his life sorrow-filled. But he kept his own belief that Roger Savage had done nothing except hook on.
“The Bigot of Bartibog!” That, at times, meant each of them—English, French, Indians too.
A few years later, in the fall of 1989, at the library on a university campus, Markus was reading about Amos Paul—though the writer wouldn’t have known it. Markus was reading a stanza from the poem “Self-Dependence,” by Matthew Arnold, and suddenly, looking into the October sun high in the sky that fresh afternoon, he thought about his grandfather, and was filled with terrible emotion in this half-cool place of racks and almost forgotten books.
“Bounded by themselves, and unregardful
In what state God’s other works may be,
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.”
“Where is Roger’s rifle?” he had written when watching television on September 11, 2001.
And now, five years later, he asked himself this question again.
1985
1
AMOS PAUL HAD LIVED SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS (IN FACT, HE had had his birthday just before this trouble with Roger Savage started) and by now believed a terrible crime had been committed. Yet he did not know who to turn to. He might turn to Max Doran, but he felt that Doran would not believe him. So he stayed in his garden and looked after his vegetables and patted his dog and walked about Sobeys looking for bargains and stood in the mall and spoke to old men who remembered him from the war years. But he did not know who to say anything to.
The crime, he believed, had taken place inside the hold, involving one or two men who had told the others to be quiet. In the small hold at the rear there were only four people, Hector and three white men. So that made him question things. It was hot and miserable in the hold, and tempers might have flared inside instead of outside on the dock.
“How can you be so sure?” Markus asked.
Amos shrugged.
“If we give it time, we will see that something happened. I don’t know what, but someone will help somehow. Someone will come forward to say what they saw.”
“Mr. Doran is pretty certain in the paper.”
“Yes, he is—he is very certain. But still, he is only human and wants to blame the right person. I’ve discovered the papers do this just like anyone else. And that’s exactly how Isaac’s father died—someone certain wanted to blame the right person, and that was in the paper too, and Isaac’s father was hanged. Nothing can be as strange.”
But Markus knew that this kind of thing was not strange at all, and in fact was the more ordinary circumstance.
Amos’s five little pictures didn’t seem to prove anything either, Markus thought. But Amos insisted that something had happened to Hector that might have had nothing to do with the load.
“Roger is cantankerous and bullheaded, and dead wrong about the stupid pools that are really ours—but he is no murderer,” Amos said. “But you see, because he is dead wrong about the pools, it is easy to ascribe to him traits that are dead wrong as well.”
So he went over what the police and safety inspectors had told him about the case.
The small under-section of the fourth hold had been almost filled, and two men were reassigned the night before to go to other holds. Hector came on that morning with three men to do the last of the small hold. He would be employed for about a day and a half, until the job was finished. Then, those with seniority would be placed in one of the two larger middle holds. That is, Topper and Bill Monk. When Roger came he was told that all the holds were hired, and that in all likelihood was why he sent the extra load to the fourth—in order to help facilitate its finish.
Hector had just gotten his union card the week before. This was his first boat. Roger responded to this in disappointment because he had not counted the card-carriers right and believed he would get on. And then he had to sit it out.
But looking at the pictures did not tell Amos very much—and his eyes, though still as bright as a hawk’s, were not as good anymore. There was something he was not seeing. There was something else he had to know in order to solve this.
But he said this: if Topper and Bill Monk had seniority and would be moved forward, then they were in the upper portion of the hold, while the other man, Angus Peel, was in the under-cubby. Then he said, speculatively, “That man Angus is our key—because he wouldn’t have been near Hector and the Monk brothers or his own son, the water boy—yes, the water boy is the key, maybe! What I am saying is—well, here is what I am saying. The surprise Roger felt at having not been picked to work even the fourth hold was not as great as the surprise Bill and Topper Monk must have had when Hector, with his new union card, came down the ladder.”
It was Amos who had gotten little Hector Penniac his union card. Now of course he regretted it desperately.
Amos sat out in the back by the shed and looked out over the islands. Out there was where the real braves were years ago—the great warriors who ran large canoes from here to Chaleur. They would not have bothered with this, until they found the truth from their chief.
“Never you mind,” old Amos said to the blind old dog, patting it roughly. “We will have to figure this out—won’t we, though!”
And then he would go down and weed his garden in the heat, or drink from a pitcher of lemonade.
The day after the report came out about what hold Roger had skipped and what hold he’d hooked to, old Amos got up very early, dressed very carefully and walked very calmly to the RCMP station. There he sat for over an hour, silently with his hands on his knees, watching the many people come and go. He wanted to talk to them about the pictures, and the way the logs were, and if anything could be garnered by how the logs lay on the body.
“I am no expert,” he kept saying, looking around and smiling. “No, I am no expert, but my theory is—”
The people in the office would look at him and walk away. He held the pictures in his hand, and would wait for someone else to come by. Some of the people he spoke to weren’t even police officers, but secretaries and clerks.
“Look here, please. I am no expert but—see how the logs are all in just this spot? And the walls—I thought it was strange—not a bit of bark scraped along the walls—after such agitation! But there are marks from other loads swinging.”
“How do you know it is not from that load that fell?” a secretary asked him.
Amos’s face brightened, and he said: “Well, the marks from other loads are between two and five feet off the ground, which shows they hit the walls when the men grabbed them. But if the other load fell from fifteen feet, then it should have hit farther up on the wall—for it wouldn’t have missed the walls altogether.”
He continued to speak to whoever would listen, but they nodded or politely ignored him and walked on. So he sat in the seat, and as he was prone to do he said, “They are treating me with the utmost respect.”
At about ten in the morning Amos had his meeting with Sergeant Hanover of the local RCMP, but found that his inquiry about the hold was not answered. The man dismissed it, as a person in power is certain of having the answers a common man would be too much of a novice to understand. Amos, in his new spangled shirt he had decided to wear, and his old cowboy hat with the pin-sized hole at the tip, and with his whitish grey hair drooping down under it, looked ridiculous in the sergeant’s eyes. The sergeant wanted to know the situation on the reserve, and wanted to know about a person or two. He also wanted to know about a certain woman claiming a band card, given by a boyfriend from his reserve—and did he know about this?
“No, I do not,” he said, seemingly amazed that anyone from his reserve would do this. Of course he knew all about it. The woman was alone and poor and they had given her a moose quarter last winter. Bu
t now he said no, and stuck to it.
Then he took out a cigarette and lit it and looked at the sunshine coming in on the small plastic flowers in a dish on the desk.
“Do you know there is no recreation centre along the North Shore that is as nice as yours will be?” Hanover said, intimating a kind of official enmity. “Even the whites don’t have one as good.”
“Of course I know.”
“Well, then. Every one of you has to remain calm—don’t go for the war paint, eh?” the sergeant said. “You haven’t lost anything yet. We’ll figure this out. If he did this intentionally, he will go to jail. We’re going to offer him a deal—he might plead guilty to a lesser charge.” And here he stacked some papers, and looked to the side of the desk to find a paper clip.
Amos stared at the man saying this with a good deal of patience. He took another drag of his cigarette. They had lost five hundred thousand acres of land, two river systems and two major bays. Had the whites forgotten that? he wondered. Had they forgotten the band had lost Hector Penniac? No, to be fair, he knew many whites had not forgotten that.
“Everything will be taken care of,” a constable told him, more politely, at the door. “Don’t fret—it will all turn out.” What they really wanted to know was if Isaac could keep the men under control. It was as if they had resigned themselves to the fact that he, old Amos, could not.
“Oh yes, he does a good job, that one,” Amos said in his singsong way.
“Well, he’s doing better than you, isn’t he?” Hanover said.
Amos only smiled. But he felt outmanoeuvred, outdistanced and ashamed.
They did not know that as chief he once would have been able to put them to death with a nod of his head. And yet Amos Paul never would have done so.
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Page 12
