Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  Sometimes, on a very few occasions, she would speak with her grandfather in Quebec, who owned the local paper and dozens of others. She did this when Max Doran, her sudden new friend, was there, to show him—well, that she was exactly who she was. To place his and her new friendship in the right context, and that right context was simply—that she was Mary Cyr.

  That the very summer air that surrounded her was better than other summer air, and Max liked this air better than other air as well. And she made him realize that he should and must. He could smell lilac scents in the rooms, and fly-dope in the porch, and these scents were not only ordinary but wondrous. So he was influenced by her to write the best story, because after all she was Mary Cyr who had had dinner with Prime Minister Mulroney, and she liked to say, between small sips of sherry, that she could “influence you to the Max.”

  She was Mary Cyr. She had smoked marijuana in Amsterdam and bared her beautiful breasts on a beach in southern France. Her rebellion, her irreverence, had an exclusive quality, and could only be done in a certain way.

  She told him she was a woman with tricks up her sleeve. He asked her in what way, and she smiled, cracked open the tail of a lobster and winked. That wink was rather fatal for poor Doran, who had never had much luck with women, and was now head over heels in love. If she knew this, she did not seem to care. She spoke endlessly of her own dreams and her need for true love, and the fortune teller she went to, and he would sit in rapt attention, unable to move his lips. In fact he found it hard to take his eyes off her, and all he could do was swallow.

  Then she would sway away from him, and look back over her shoulder and smile. “You get the story, and we’ll be a team!”

  And Doran could not help thinking about wanting to be a team. He even thought of marrying Mary and her grandfather giving her away. There would be some great joke told at the wedding, everyone would laugh—Isaac Snow would be best man. He was lovesick and he knew it, and he telephoned his mom about Mary Cyr and spoke about things going better. He wanted to visit his mother but he couldn’t at the moment. “Yes, Mom, but right now I can’t because I’m—well, indispensable, I guess. That’s what Mary says. Mary—well, she is someone you’d be proud that I know. And,” he whispered, “I think she likes me too!”

  “Oh that’s so lovely, Max,” his mother said. “I am happy for you, dear!”

  Tears flooded Doran’s eyes, because of how weak her voice was now.

  Then, a week later, after a call from Mr. Cyr, Mary was allowed to cross the barricade and place her little twenty-one-foot sailboat—which she almost never sailed—into the sea.

  And after that phone call, Doran, who hadn’t been allowed stories for a week because Isaac had told the band not to speak to him, and whose managing editor was worried lest he lose out on this whole summer, was fortunate enough to begin to file his reports from behind the native blockade and thus capture the attention of radio and television, who were being kept away by the warriors. So for a brief time he became indispensable to each and every other reporter, for they all had to rely upon him. He became the conscience of Canada—or so said Mary Cyr.

  “Am I indispensable?” he asked.

  “Yes, and I made you so,” she said.

  Doran went behind the barricade, with his special dispensation, and was filled with determination to tell the exact truth. Which is what he told Mary he was after, and to which Mary replied: “Ah yes, the truth. How vital that is. And so we have made you vital too,” and she patted his cheek with a slim hand that smelled of soft fabric.

  Still, the story that Doran was indispensable to tell was not really his idea anymore. In fact, the story was basically Isaac Snow’s. And Isaac had played his cards right by sending Max away and then bringing him back. That made Max reliant upon him. Since Isaac was the only source, and since Max was the only link between Isaac and the outside world, Max slowly but surely became the voice of Isaac. And since Isaac wanted one slant on his voice and another on Roger’s, the story was told that way too. Everyone was now singing Max’s praises. And he told this to Mary Cyr, saying in a vulnerable moment, “Yes—they will probably even want to give me some award.”

  “Yes, an award—maybe even a humanitarian one,” Mary said. “I discovered that Canada is like that at certain times.”

  And although he believed Mary Cyr was waiting on his reports and longed for information because she cared deeply for him (because she told him she did), in truth she cared for the story only insofar as people would like her better if she had more information. And though Doran was clumsy, inept and shy with women, Mary Cyr was not at all clumsy or inept with men. Neither here, nor in Spain, nor in Amsterdam, nor in Australia in 1983.

  Doran bought her a present—a little pendant—and wrapped it, and wrote on the card, “Love.” Then, tearing this up, he wrote on the second card, “With affection,” and tore that one up as well. Then he decided not to give her a card when he gave her the present. He handed this present awkwardly to her one late afternoon. After an hour, he said, “Are you going to open it?”

  “Oh—it’s for me?”

  She opened the box, removed the white cotton, and the poor pendant fell to the floor. But she did not notice and kept looking in the box in a rather mystified way.

  “It’s on the floor,” he said.

  “Oh, of course!” She picked it up and placed it on the table and looked at it with a fresh and serious gaze. “Yes, it is—gorgeous—wonderful—thank you.”

  She put her hand—her wonderful hand—to his cheek, and he blushed.

  “They are taking your stories away,” Isaac told Doran the next day, “and shelving them. Gordon Young has that story about the oil spill on the Bay of Fundy. Maybe you are spending too much time in love with Mary Cyr.”

  Doran blushed and blinked and didn’t know what to say. How could anyone know this? But he was obviously deeply infatuated. And worse, he didn’t want to be teased about it, and people could tell. And so Isaac began to tease him there and then.

  The next story Doran wrote was one Mary Cyr told him to write. It was about day-to-day life on the reserve. It was published on page three while a story by Gordon Young took up the top half of page one.

  Suddenly Doran felt he was failing.

  “No no no,” Mary said to him. “As for me—I loved the story.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, of course I did. You are so particularly bright!”

  “I am? I mean, you think I am?”

  After a suitable pause she said: “Well, what do you think?” He noticed that she was wearing his little pendant on her blouse.

  And poor Doran’s heart leapt with joy.

  People understood what was going on—that certain men were now running the reserve. Mrs. Francis at the moment was caught in the middle. She begged her two oldest boys to come home, especially Andy, but they did not listen. She was out half the night tramping the ground looking for them, and coming home with tears in her eyes.

  She wanted Little Joe, her foster child, to go to the Tim Hortons summer camp, as he had been approved, and had been waiting to go, and the night she gave him his bath he had packed his knapsack, taking the lure Markus had given him. But now she realized this was impossible, so she had to tell him it was impossible. So on the day he was to leave he sat on his bed, with his Mickey Mouse knapsack, and stared at the floor. He had waited half the year, and now he could not go.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “It don’t matter.”

  He spoke more English than Micmac, and so this is how they spoke to him.

  “But we need you here,” Mrs. Francis said and smiled, “so you have to be brave.”

  “I am brave,” Little Joe said, matter-of-factly.

  All of this time Amos remained chief, and remained positive. He told people the barricade would come down soon and things would get back to normal now that Roger was not going to be charged. And this is what most people wanted. But without them being conscious of it, their ev
ery action created a counteraction and caused greater consternation. And this consternation caused more worry, and this worry made people more likely to say and do things they would not normally ever do. The barricade became the place where everything was most concentrated, and that is where Joel Ginnish most often was. Joel and Isaac had not spoken to each other in some time.

  After trying to keep things on an even keel for two weeks, Amos received word that the funding for the recreation centre was cut off, and would probably never be re-established.

  “Why—why do that to the children?”

  Because the men had taken equipment to use at the barricade and used recreation funds. Amos had to break the word at the council meeting that night. When he walked in, and sat down, and stared at his pen, he looked much older than he had before. Even Doran was surprised at how much he had aged. “The funding has been cut.” Amos smiled apologetically and shrugged. He spoke only to a few people. He did not say the funding was cut because equipment was stolen or money had been taken to pay the warriors—but this was the reason.

  Many asked him questions, but Amos went home, and closed the door, and opened a tin of peaches, and sat in the dark eating them and rocking on the rocking chair.

  Now Joel, who had wanted people to stay away from the recreation centre and not help build it, and had insisted the warriors confiscate the equipment, said he was outraged because the funding had been cut. He called a meeting without Isaac Snow being present and said things were untenable. But he wanted Doran present.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, “the ground is rocky and shaky, and I would even say volatile. That is what our leader, Isaac, won’t admit. He is too interested in getting his name in the paper. But we don’t see much of our names in the paper, do we? So,” he said, frowning now, “it will be left up to me to turn this around!”

  What happens when the situation men find themselves in becomes volatile? At first there is silence. And there was, for a week, complete silence.

  On the evening of July 28, someone wearing a sweater and a hood climbed the bulldozer from the back, and taking his cattail torch, set the dozer ablaze. It had already been doused with gas—and the flame scorched the sleeves of the man who lit it. (It was reported ten years later that this was Andy Francis.)

  The fire could be seen across the water for twenty miles. It could be seen far away along the road, where the RCMP were at that moment debating what action to take. Sparks and heat filled the air, and peeled the paint on Roger’s front steps.

  Roger, like everyone else, came out to stare at it. Some of the men backed away. Others decided to throw tires on the blaze, so it grew to cast an eerie light on all the cottages around it. The reserve’s new pumper came, but the four firemen from the reserve couldn’t get it to work. Finally they set the hose up, and though the men braced for a great rush of water only a dribble came out. All the women who were watching began to roar and laugh—one even fell on the ground laughing.

  Sparks flew in the air and the fire trucks from Neguac were called but the pumper was kept away by the warriors. Some of the warriors, guided by this hooded man, twisted one of the hoses to cut off the flow of water, and torches were lit from the blaze and thrown at Roger’s house. One shard of glass thrust toward him cut his arm. He ran back and forth collecting the torches and throwing them back toward the warriors. Then he disappeared, came out a moment later with his rifle, pulled down the lever and put in a shell. The firemen left them and began to wet down the cottages. There was great fear that the hundred-year-old Cyr cottage, a landmark from the lumber baron years, would go up in flames. In fact sparks did catch a back eave, and had to be doused. So did Roger Savage’s propane tank.

  Little Joe sat far up in an elm tree, looking down on the great sight, his eyes staring at the world in wonder and alarm.

  People said that this fire signalled the end of Isaac’s power over the warriors. That he had no more and it was all a joke—everything was a joke—and Joel would soon be in charge.

  The next morning Roger Savage came out of his house, in the twilight created by the still-hovering smoke, and with determined gestures seen only in the young, planted a sign in the middle of his yard. People said later it was written in his own blood from the cut on his arm the night before. The sign stood until the end of the affair:

  I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR WHO I WAS OR AM

  I WON’T BE DRIVEN OUT

  AND I DO NOT GIVE A DAMN!!

  5

  IF ISAAC’S POWER WAS OVER, THEN THE RESERVE WOULD reel into chaos. And Max Doran knew as much. He went to Isaac to get a statement—in fact to help Isaac put a better perspective on everything—but could not get an interview, and the whole reserve was the same. No one would tell him anything, about the fire, or who had set it or why, and some seemed to blame him for something. Many of the women and more than a few of the men seemed ashamed.

  So after a few days, with no one speaking to him, he decided to go back out, after filing only four stories, including the one that was published on page three.

  He was allowed to cross over the barricade at nine the next night.

  “If you go, do not come back,” Joel told him, “for if you come back, you might not get away so easily. For so far you are telling the wrong story. I have been in touch with a reporter from Halifax, and he says you are an amateur.”

  It was the closest Doran had ever come to swinging at someone, but he knew even if he managed to hit Joel he would never be able to hurt him. In fact he had seen Joel punched in the mouth by one of the warriors a few days before, and simply laugh.

  “No one can do the story as good as me,” he said instead.

  But Joel just looked away and busied himself with other things.

  Doran crossed to Mary’s yard. Some of her grasses had been singed by the fire, and he could smell burned rubber that had melted right into the asphalt. There had been a camera crew from CTV there all day, and they had finally been told to pull back.

  Doran had his bag packed and was ready to go down to Saint John. That was because no one would talk to him. He knew that to file another story about the reserve or Roger Savage and not mention the fire would be unprofessional. Yet here is what he felt secretly: to file a story about the fire Isaac did not approve of would be psychologically damaging and would work against him and his position at the paper. He sat in Mary Cyr’s house, thinking he had done his level best, even if he had failed. She had a handyman there helping replace the eaves. But he walked back and forth looking at Max with distrust.

  Max asked Mary for advice.

  “What do you think you should do?” she replied.

  And here he sensed for the first time that she was not as wise or beneficial as he had believed, or perhaps was wisely beneficial to herself. But that made him love her even more. He then tried to make a joke about the pendant falling on the floor, but she looked at him for a long time, as if she didn’t remember.

  “Oh,” she said finally. “Yes. The pendant. How nice that was of you.”

  Doran went to town the next day just to be away from things. The RCMP let him pass their monitoring station without a word—except they did check his licence and the car trunk.

  When he got back from town at seven in the evening, Mary Cyr told him that all day her grandfather had been trying to reach him.

  “Reach me?” Doran said, flabbergasted. “Your grandfather—my God—why reach me?”

  Mary shrugged as if she had been the one to orchestrate this, and walked away from him with her beautiful hips moving in what could only be described as triumph.

  And so he spoke to her grandfather that night.

  “That equipment was donated by me,” her grandfather said, quite distinctly. “I was asked to donate it. I donated it to help the band. So what I want to know is this: why was it burned? And I also want to know this because my cottage was almost destroyed. But what you were writing never indicated this kind of situation might erupt. Your last piece was simply a human int
erest story—good enough but not enough.” This was said without the least change of tone.

  “But I had no idea this would happen,” Doran said, “and I don’t think, sir, that anyone could foresee it.”

  “I was told this would happen two weeks ago,” Mr. Cyr said.

  “Oh,” Doran said. “Yes.” He tried to think. “By whom?”

  “By Gordon Young.”

  Mr. Cyr simply hung up. After this, the managing editor telephoned. Though obsequious and polite with Mary Cyr, he was furious with Doran.

  “I vouched for you, damn it!” And he too hung up.

  Doran had to go back into the reserve or lose the story. Yet Doran didn’t know if they would allow him to cross, and if he did write, he would have to be 100 percent right in what he said—if not, his career would be over. If he lost it, he would never get another chance. But he could not really change his story or he would lose face. That too he knew.

  So suddenly Doran was in another bind. How could he write the same thing and say nothing about the barricade being burned? He couldn’t. How could he change the angle of his story? He couldn’t.

  He slept in the back bedroom of Mary Cyr’s and had nightmares about trees and nets and big smiling fish. The next morning he learned that the handyman fixing the eaves was a private detective sent along by Mr. Cyr to keep an eye on the property and protect his rather impressionable granddaughter. And this private detective did not seem fond of Doran and what he was implying about the whites in the area being backward and bigoted—though these words were never used exactly. And once the man stared at him with eyes of steel from the far side of the room when Max was trying to flirt with the woman under his protection.

  “No, go on—go,” Mary said, pushing him by the back after breakfast and waving goodbye. “You are our indispensable mole—and so do go and do the mole-like things!”