Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  So Doran resolutely went to the barricade and asked to go back in. For two hours they did not let him. They just laughed at him.

  Finally Isaac gave word that he was allowed to pass.

  “He is not,” Joel said. So two of the young men, Andy Francis being one, Gig Parrish being the other, told him he couldn’t cross back over.

  Then Joel went to see Isaac, while Doran waited, with his big notebook sticking up out of his back pocket and holding his portable typewriter in his hand.

  “Hopefully they will not let me pass, and I will end this story,” he thought. But at the same time, he thought of being mentioned by that famous person on the CBC. Another week or two—certainly he could last that long!

  Another hour passed. He sat down in the dirt, hauled out a pack of cards—he always had one on him—and played solitaire on the road, with his straw hat pushed back on his head and First Nations cars passing around him. Sometimes their tires came very close to his knees.

  He was wondering if being kept on this side of the line was not for the best when word came once again that Isaac had said he could pass. Joel came to the barricade with a .30-30 rifle, and shrugged, opened up the side gate of wire and waved him through.

  And so reluctantly the warriors let him pass.

  Doran went to Isaac that evening. Isaac was too smart not to know that Doran had come to ask permission to write about the conflict now emerging between him and Joel. If he dared write this, about his warriors being out of control, Isaac would be humiliated.

  So unlike before, when it was easy for Doran to come in or out of the house, and even take a beer out of the fridge if he wanted, he now had to wait at the door before Isaac came to see him.

  “I don’t want to see that mooch,” he heard Isaac saying, and then saying things in Micmac he did not understand, and then the word mooch once more.

  Isaac finally came from the dark back room with the flickering shadows of trees on the wall. He had a blinding headache and the light hurt his eyes. Three houses were being targeted by Joel’s men—the two Wissards, who had tattled on him over the fish, and Amos Paul. Isaac had been on the phone all day trying to bring this tension to a rest.

  Now he stood at the door and reiterated his position. Yes, he said calmly, there is evidence that Roger Savage burned the dozer.

  “There is?” Max asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yes,” Isaac said, looking down at him sternly. “Yes, there is evidence that Roger burned it. Why do you think that is strange? Look at the sign he put out on his yard—doesn’t that prove it? He wanted to stop the barricade so he could travel to and from his house. It’s simple to see!”

  “So you minded that the bulldozer was burned.”

  “Of course we minded—it was Roger who burned it! But you always miss the point. All summer you have missed the point—you mooch about, missing the point. So if Roger lit the fire, tell that to your paper!”

  “Is that what I should say?” Doran asked.

  “You’re the reporter, so tell the truth,” Isaac said finally, and he turned away.

  “Could I just ask where you heard that Roger burned the bulldozer?”

  The truth was that Issac did not know because he had not been informed. He too was now being left out.

  “Tell him to go fuck himself and tell the truth,” Isaac said to his wife as he went to the cupboard to get some aspirin. He took four and went into the back room. Then he gave a big blast of Micmac.

  Collette looked at Doran and shrugged as if she didn’t know what to say.

  Doran went away knowing he would not file that story about Roger—that he could not. He also knew that if he wrote any other story, Isaac would disown him. He sat down at his typewriter. He imagined everyone was looking at him as he poured out these words:

  “It is not in my nature to cast blame, so I do not play favourites here. There is just no evidence to suggest it was the warriors. In fact—”

  He tore the page away. What he was really thinking of was Mary Cyr and how he did not want to disappoint her—and how he longed in his heart and soul to see her once again. And the way to do that was to have everyone like him, and everyone on his side.

  He sat up all night, without writing another word.

  The next day Andy Francis came on behalf of Joel and told Doran he was no longer allowed to leave the reserve—that he had been invited to do a story and he must stay until the story was done, and they would give him a place to keep him safe. But his story about Roger burning the bulldozer should be done as soon as possible. In fact this was an order from Isaac himself, and Joel too wanted it written by the afternoon.

  “It’s not a bad thing to stay on the reserve, is it?” Andy added, to change the subject.

  “What do you mean?” Doran asked.

  “Oh, well … we’ve been staying on the reserve for two centuries,” Andy said.

  They could still smell the burned tires and the diesel. It wafted through the air and tainted everything, so the mothers couldn’t take their young children out without putting cloths over their mouths.

  “Is this what Isaac thinks?” Doran asked. “I mean, do we have proof?”

  Andy took Doran’s head and turned it in the direction of the barricade, still singed by black soot and burned tires.

  “There it is—proof,” he said.

  Isaac had managed to allow the women and children to pass up the road to Sobeys that day and shop. So to lessen antagonism the store was kept opened and hours extended just for them. Little Joe went shopping with his sister Sky. He had a big cart. He had some bananas, four bags of marshmallows, a bottle of ketchup, a can of tomato soup, two big bottles of Pepsi, seven Cadbury bars, a bar of soap (to be respectable), fifteen puddings and a pie mix.

  They had put Doran in a shed, on Stone Street, with a sink and a small tub—but no hot water. If he wanted hot water he would have to go across the street to Mrs. Demers’s house. He had a toilet and an old stove—it was a wood stove, but he had an electric burner. He had one main light, and could type at the metal kitchen table. He learned this was the shed where Markus’s father, a Vietnam vet, had lived with his son and his daughter for almost three years. He learned that Roger Savage used to come over now and again to look in on him and the kids, and bring them groceries when he had the chance, for he was very close by.

  “You mean the Roger Savage?” he asked when he went to Mrs. Demers’s to have a shower.

  “What other Roger would it be?” Mrs. Demers said, as if nothing was amiss, and shrugged.

  Staying here, and seeing the great kindness of the band toward him by all but a few, made Doran feel deeply humble. And after he took his shower he sat on the edge of the tub with a white towel wrapped about him, his thin shoulders freckled, and listened to the waves beating monotonously out on the shore.

  Two nights later, at about seven in the evening, Doran was listening to robins call from the trees. There was a knock on the door and Little Joe and Sky were there, bringing him a blueberry pie, from blueberries they had picked the day before.

  They burst out laughing and left it, still warm from the oven, at the door, and turned and ran away.

  Then Joel came to Doran the next day before noon. He said, “Did Andy treat you well?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good, for he’s young and mighty impatient. He wants all the changes now,” Joel said, and he laughed as if this was impossible.

  Doran nodded and said he understood how that could happen, for in his life he also requested justice for all. “That’s why I write my articles,” he said. “I demand justice too!”

  “Noble, noble,” Joel said, looking around as if agitated. “Noble for sure.” He paused, lit a cigarette and added: “I will show you where Roger hayed our nets and washed our livelihood away. You can use that in your next submission. Come with me.”

  “Is Isaac mad at me?” Max asked.

  “Why?”

  “He seemed very angry at me.”


  “Don’t worry about Isaac.” Joel smiled his engaging smile. “I never do!”

  This struck Doran as a strange comment, even a betrayal, but he said nothing. He went with Joel to see where this haying had occurred. After they looked at where the hay supposedly had been dropped, Doran was going to leave, but Ginnish said, “No, stay with me. You don’t need to tell Isaac’s story—you need to tell mine.”

  “What do you mean? I thought—I mean, it’s the band I’m dealing with.”

  “Not a bit. People are upset,” Joel said emotionally. “Isaac wants all the publicity for himself. I said let it go, but many people are telling me Isaac’s getting too much attention—that’s what the men are saying, that there’s too much about him in the paper. He is leading you in the wrong direction.” Here Joel whispered, emotional still, “We think he and Roger might have made a deal about the pools. I don’t want to believe it, but other bands are making deals with the government and Isaac won’t. Anyway, everyone is sick to death of Isaac. So you have to tell some other story—about my struggle for independence, even from Isaac himself! Isaac wanted you back on the reserve to control you, but I am going to put a stop to that. You come with me tonight, and I’ll show you what to write about.”

  Doran waited for Joel near a laneway until nearly eight that evening. It was better than having Mrs. Demers tell him innocently that his managing editor was expecting to hear from him. So he stood in the laneway and chain-smoked. Twice he had written a story about the bulldozer’s burning being suspicious—perhaps even the result of “he who is being investigated.” He wrote, “The whites wanted the barricade destroyed. Some whites said they wouldn’t tolerate First Nations men in town.” That was probably true. Yet twice he’d torn it in two.

  Then an hour before dark, Ginnish appeared and took Doran to the back cove in a canoe to meet one of the people who had been in the hold. Doran hoped for some firm proof of what had happened. To finally put the story to bed.

  MARKUS PAUL’S DIARY

  Sept. 11, 2006

  I will take the canoe down tomorrow and put it in just below the Bailey Bridge, where I cut the juniper last fall for the keel, and I will put on a 6 lb test leader. If there is a mist, I will try bug or butterfly and drift down to Green Brook and wait until the sun hits the water over the back trees. This will be my last chance to fish before moose season, and I have yet to scope my rifle. I have yet to do all those things, and my wife—well, my ex-wife now—Samantha Dulse has asked me to come in for an X-ray, but what is an X-ray against this? So the day should be cool, and therefore the water, too, cool enough—and then when the sun splits the back trees the fish will be active enough. I will use the old heavy rod I like, with the hardy reel. The new one given to me, I never have used. I put it together once, and once I felt it for balance, and as fine as it is, it just doesn’t seem like mine. I have not had a fish on the hook most of the summer, and do you know what—I will tell you a secret—most of the time, I hand tail them, take the hook out and let them go. They slide back into the great water of our river, and disappear.

  1985

  1

  THEY HID THE CANOE BETWEEN SOME MAPLE SAPLINGS, FOR Joel was suspicious, and lifted from the shallow water two broad boxes that he had hidden too, and walked the windswept barrens between two roads that cut down through the small pines. Joel was not as big as Isaac but he was very powerful, with longer-than-normal arms and big hands. He helped Doran along, manoeuvring those heavy boxes between fir and pine, and spoke to him quietly about his life. And it was a life that Doran himself couldn’t imagine. Physical violence—the mere idea of which Doran had always shrunk from—was as much a part of Joel’s life as breathing. Being cheated, shot at and thrown from a half-ton were part of a succession of stories Joel told to impress this young white man who wanted to please both him and Isaac, and was trying to do the best story he could.

  They were the first there, and waited in the evening with bugs flicking and whining in their ears. Doran was filled with a kind of unease. He realized now that he would have been much better off if he had never heard of this story of his. He thought at this moment that his safety depended on something other than his integrity, and he was confused about what he should do. That is, the trail to the bottom of the lobster trap was complete, and he could not for the life of him back up and walk away.

  After a while a man and a boy approached through the darkness, and Max did not see them until they were less than five feet away.

  They met with Topper Monk, who had brought the water boy with him. Topper told Doran that he had almost died in the fourth hold of the Lutheran because the load was meant to drop on them all, because they had given the Indian a union card.

  “It weren’t just meant for the poor little Indian,” he said.

  But something else was important. And Joel seemed not only to flaunt this but to want to flaunt it. It was what he had promised Isaac he would not do.

  It was the salmon that Ginnish had, and that Doran had unwittingly helped carry through those woods under the dark night sky. And Ginnish was selling them.

  Ginnish took some ten salmon out of the two large cooler boxes and laid them out on the grass, and counted them. They were beautiful fish, the smell still wonderfully fresh. They had just entered the river pools from the sea a few nights before. Each fish was over eight pounds and under twenty.

  Topper complained about the two smaller fish, saying they were grilse—that is, the smaller two-year-old salmon, which almost never go over five pounds. But this argument was dispensed with on the other side, when Joel said the twenty-pound salmon weighed twenty-five. So finally after twenty minutes everything was arrived at. The wind came up slightly, which was a blessing because of the whine of the flies. They put the fish in cooler boxes Topper had brought and covered them with grass and ice.

  Then Topper paid Joel two hundred dollars.

  “This is how we make money for our struggle.” Joel smiled at Doran, waving the money quickly for some reason before tucking it into his shirt. “So thanks for helping me.” Joel was happy with Doran now and spoke to him like a brother. He took out a bag of marijuana and began to roll it in with tobacco.

  “Pretty good stuff, this,” he said. “I call it ‘my reserve,’ ” and he smiled at this and shrugged when Doran did not smile. “You take things too serious,” he said.

  “I do?”

  “Sure—too serious. Have some fun—slap some pussy, get drunk, steal a car, go for a milkshake—do something! And stop wearing shorts!” And he laughed hilariously. “No one gives a fuck about this. Why do you write so much about it? I think you want to make a name for yourself with all those concerned fuckers in Upper Canada who always write about the Indians every summer, their faces all as pinched as weasels. They can’t shit without their wives’ permission.”

  “That’s not the reason,” Doran began. “I came here to do a story and to get it right.”

  “Well, let me tell you a secret—you’ll never get it right. Not with us. And you arrived here just to pretend. But Roger is in that house up there all alone … Sometimes, oh oh oh—sometimes I feel bad for Roger because of you. Because you have the big pretend going.”

  “Pretend?”

  “Sure, the big pretend. You can smell any white man who has it. The big pretend—pretend to know Indians and to like us. You don’t know us, and you certainly don’t like us.”

  “Of course I do.”

  But here Joel just held up his finger over his lips and said, “Shh,” and smiled sadly.

  Then they were silent a moment. An owl fluttered by and scared Doran. Joel looked at him, smiling delightfully, and shrugged.

  “Well, then, do you like me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, then, tell my story,” he said. “Tell what I’ve been through—I have been the one who had to deal with this. Tell about me—how my brother was Hector. Take my picture for the paper!”

  “Sure I will,” Doran said, hoping that
they would leave to go back.

  But they did not go back. They sat on the bank and smoked some grass, and drank a little from a bottle, and Doran found himself becoming a part of the story he was writing. He suddenly blurted this out. It surprised even him that he did.

  But when he said this, Joel simply shrugged.

  “Haven’t you always been? I know exactly how Isaac thinks. Now you stay here until this is resolved—please, for my sake.” And he put his arm around Doran and handed him the bottle of rum. “You said you like us, prove it. Later you can write a book about me. I’ll give you all the information—about Amos and the whites—Isaac too—and how much he has against me. Now we’ll do things my way. No more Isaac. Isaac is a dead man. And when the movie is made I can be a consultant—or play a small part!”

  Of course he was drunk and falling sideways—but Doran was drunk too.

  “Who’s the only one willing to do something?” Joel said. “Wait and see, and it will be me!”

  About an hour later the wind came up much stronger. There was the smell of the enclosed trees and the rushing water. Doran was unfamiliar with the woods. If Joel left him, he would never find his way out.

  He went to the trees to relieve himself and there suddenly the young water boy, Brice Peel, tugged at his arm and whispered to him these words:

  “Roger Savage didn’t do nothing. The load didn’t fall on anyone—tell them at the paper.”

  “What?” Doran said.

  The boy said nothing else, because Topper was coming toward them, and he moved away quickly, grabbing on to the grasses so as not to fall into the water. But he fell in anyway. Joel laughed and rushed down and helped him out.

  “There you go, my little white poky-dot friend.”

  Topper smiled and slapped at some flies, and asked Doran if he liked it here and was everyone nice to him? Doran nodded, listened to the wind rising. He tried to be comfortable and sit like Joel did. Joel, who seemed to be impervious to wind and flies, and simply stared into the dark.