There were real tears now in Joel’s eyes. “You have not done enough to promote our cause,” he said, “so maybe I’ll have to kill you someday. How would that be?”
Doran now knew he had compromised himself, even though it was not intentional.
He decided to take his typewriter and leave the next day. He was surprised at how relieved he was to have come to this decision. Because if he did write a story, how much different would it now be from the one Joel wanted?
Topper and Joel began to sing; then they had an argument. Then the talk filtered out into a diatribe in the drunken evening, about the marijuana and when Joel could get it to them, and how to get it off the reserve, and that Isaac wanted him to destroy the crop before the press found out about it. Joel said this and winked at Doran.
And how many girls Joel had had. It seemed to be many more than Topper had had.
And how many barricades had ever worked? “The craziest thing an Indian ever did,” Topper said.
Doran said nothing to all of this.
Then Joel and Topper shook hands. The white men moved off with the fish, and Joel and Doran walked back through the woods, every now and again Joel waiting for Doran to catch up, once or twice standing by a small opening and saying, “This way.”
They came to the water, and Joel backed the canoe out, jumped into the stern and told Doran to get in. He stumbled as he did, and the Micmac patiently waited for him to straighten himself up.
“You like this canoe, Max?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t mine.”
“No?”
“No, Christ. You know who owns this canoe?”
“No.”
“Markus Paul—you know him?”
“Not well.”
“Yeah, he’s a prick. He fishes salmon with a fly rod—in the summer, one at a time.” Joel gave a short, low laugh, and then said, “Though his cast is perfect and he throws out a wonderful line!”
They started back down the river, in the dark under moonlight. The trees went swiftly by, and Doran felt sleepy and happy. But suddenly Joel jammed his pole down and the canoe stopped dead.
“You get out here now,” he said.
“Where?” Doran said, looking around.
“Here. If you cut through there two hundred yards you’ll meet the old dividing marker. Just follow that out to the shore.”
“But where is the reserve?”
“We’re on the reserve—we just came on it. I have to see someone but you can’t come.”
“But where’s this marker?”
“Just go south down that path,” Joel said.
And so Doran, who had never known the woods and hated it, was left in the dark with the terrible insulting whine of mosquitoes, and the only other human figure slowly moving away in the moonlight.
He walked into the woods. The light of the moon was an easy lantern on the shore, but in here it cast out vaguely, and though Joel was essentially correct in that no one should lose their way walking to this marker, Doran within five minutes had come to a big tree fall he could not get around. At first, he didn’t even know what it was. And by the time he realized, he had moved farther off the path and could not get back. So he continued on in the line afforded by the tree fall—which meant he was going northeast into the cedar swamp where Amos had once hunted moose as a boy.
Finally, haunted by blackflies, the air suddenly still and muggy and in some places smelling putrid, he turned back toward the tree fall, hoping to retrace his steps, and tripping over undergrowth he fell into swamp water.
He stood quickly, feeling water rush under his pants and into his shoes. The only thing he could now hear was the sound of his heart.
He did not know whether to try again or wait in the bog. But he could not wait—he had to get away from the flies. But as he turned, hoping once again to find the river and retrace his steps (he would not have found it, for he was going deeper into the bog), he saw a man leaning on the end of another tree fall, watching him. At first he did not even know it was a man, it was so dark. But after a time he realized this. The man simply stared at him, an ornate lever-action rifle in his hand.
“Hi—I’m kinda turned around in here,” Doran said.
For a few moments—painful moments, they were—the man did not speak.
“Yer on my line side of the reserve,” the man finally said.
“And the reserve is where”—he paused—”sir?”
“Five more yards your way,” the man said. “Come, I’ll take you back.”
Doran followed him quietly. Now and again the man would wait for him to climb over some bush or stumps, and soon they were back on the pathway Joel had spoken about, and within minutes they were at the marker Joel had told him about—and then he saw the lane to the shore and could even hear the waves of the bay against the breakwater. He wanted to ask the man a question but when he turned around the man had gone.
And Doran realized (he had been unsure) that he had met Roger Savage, the man who had decided to take on the world. He felt suddenly ashamed that he had insinuated so much in the press about the man. And now he was worried he had not done what was just.
“But it is my job,” he thought. “I am only doing what I have been asked to do. Someone else would have done far worse.”
And for now he left it at that, while having a sudden intense feeling that he wished Roger Savage was his friend.
When Doran got back to the shed, people were all over the road. Women were crying. He walked down to see what had happened. People were saying Isaac had been taken prisoner. Five police officers had come in from the woods in SWAT gear and had raided the old shed at the back of his house, and had taken him away. He had fought valiantly, thrown three of them over his back and knocked one cold, but he was alone.
Some of the women were talking to Doran in a mixture of English and Micmac, and he tried to understand. They threw broken bottles onto Roger’s porch.
An hour later Joel arrived, having just heard the news himself. He walked up the road with everyone speaking to him, and while he moved through the throng he passed some grass around to the young men, and then sat on a tar pole near the breakwater. Then he passed some uppers out of a huge bag to Andy and Tommie. And he passed a hit of acid to one of the women. (Doran did not know that this woman was Amos’s granddaughter, Peggy Paul.)
But everyone felt as if there could be no reconciliation now. The dark was salty sweet, the wind was warm off the waves, and they could just make out each other’s faces, like lovers on a lane.
“We’ll fight now,” Andy said happily, “so write that down in your fuckin paper. See what they say to that!” And he smiled and took another drink of beer.
To Little Joe it seemed as if a big war had come and he must do something to protect his mother, Mrs. Francis, and his big sister, Sky. Sky of course was trying her best to protect him, and no matter that three or four of the young men were trying to impress her, hoping everything would go back to the way it was. But now they knew this had come to something none had really expected—all of them were vulnerable.
“I don’t want to see you near the barricade anymore,” she told Little Joe.
He was seen in his yard with a BB gun, but he did not have any BBs.
2
YES, IT WAS COLD IN THE BAR, AND COLDER OUTSIDE, AND almost November 1985. Doran had written his last article on the “disturbing” case weeks ago, and today he had just resigned from the paper. He had his hair cut above his ears, and he looked older. He had promised his mother for years he would get his hair cut, and had done so for her funeral yesterday.
He had heard that Chief Amos had tried on four occasions to get Roger to leave his house. Yet each time, Roger had come to the point: he stated that he was innocent and was finishing his room. It was a room, Doran knew, that Mary Cyr could see from her bath. She would sometimes stand in the light at the opened window, with a bath towel loose around her, her hair damp from the
shower.
All during this time Roger’s sign was still in place in the middle of his yard:
I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR WHO I WAS OR AM
I WON’T BE DRIVEN OUT
AND I DO NOT GIVE A DAMN!!
Doran wondered if he himself would be that courageous. Most men wouldn’t be.
What had happened since that night he’d met Roger Savage? Well, for one thing, Doran had refused to write any more stories because of how he was being told what to write. And because of this, both Mr. Cyr and Joel Ginnish were furious with him. But he had stood his ground. He reread all his copy, and decided he had said what he had said, and for better or worse he would say no more.
“Get someone else in here to write,” he said. “Get that old Mr. Thompson—you know, the man who said he taught me all I know, and has never written a line in his life worth reading. And fuck it.” His face was thin, and he couldn’t eat for being worried, but he stuck to his decision.
Just when people were beginning to think things had gone as far as they would, that the bulldozers and the graders and the trucks sitting like battle-scarred portents was enough, the police had arrested Isaac.
They had arrested him not understanding that he was actually a moderate influence, but believing that he was the main broker of the unrest. They had arrested him because he had five big bales of marijuana in his shed.
But Isaac was not Joel’s moral support; he was Joel’s moral stabilizer. To arrest Isaac was far worse than arresting Joel—for Joel was like a man standing on a cliff and being swayed by his own preternatural desire to fall.
Isaac sat in his cell most of that first long, hot afternoon after his arrest without moving a muscle. He did not speak to anyone, either. The same compressed rage that Amos had seen on his face reappeared. He had started out in the earlier part of the summer to get lobster licences for his poverty-stricken band, and to keep his men from revolting because of Hector. He had tried, and now he was in jail! No matter how you thought about it, it was a betrayal.
He stared straight ahead. A few of the local toughs yelled through the window at him.
“Hang him!” they yelled. Isaac did not even glance at them.
Nor, as the shadows lengthened at supper, did he react when they set his food down. Not that day or, in the swell and smell of rain, the next.
After two days it became clear Isaac was on a hunger strike. He said nothing to the nurse, Pamela Dulse, when she came in to check his blood pressure and pulse on the third day. By this time he lay on his cot all day, with his face to the wall, and listened to the rain breaking down over the barrels outside, listened to the kids coming and going from the old volleyball court down the hill, listened now and again to a siren.
“You have to eat,” she said.
He shrugged. So she left the cell.
Then he wrote a long letter to the editor of the paper, speaking about his trials since his father, an innocent man, had been hanged by a white court and an all-white jury in 1955. He spoke of having his mother die of cancer. He spoke of quitting school, and of being in jail for taking meat for himself one winter.
He spoke about how he fought injustice by picking up seaweed and by fishing with gill nets in a private pool. Arrested again, and again.
But he said that the bales of marijuana were planted. He did not use marijuana, nor did he encourage anyone to, and everyone on the reserve knew this. It must have been the police who planted it. So if he was not released, it would cause even more trouble.
This sparked outrage and pleas for his release around the province. These pleas and the publicity his hunger strike received did one thing only. They made those in power more inflexible, to prove he could not sway law, because to them he had disobeyed the law and had stored marijuana.
But his hunger strike did something else, and Isaac knew it would—it truly saved his reputation within the reserve. For Joel, ready to act on his own, in direct conflict with Isaac’s orders, now more than ever seemed to be acting on Isaac’s behalf, and in his honour. Further, it did this—it did not allow him to give up his hunger strike even unto death. And one reason he had the courage not to give up was because of the police planting the marijuana in his shed.
Sergeant Hanover believed Isaac was the one who had fired at the spotter plane, and Hanover believed keeping him in jail would defuse the situation, and that’s what Hanover believed no matter what.
Isaac, as he began to grow weak, called his wife to see him. Collette came and sat outside the cell and was shocked to see how her husband had failed.
“You have to eat,” she begged him. “Who cares about this anymore?”
“I care,” he said. Then he paused and gave her a smile. “I have to care. You see, everything now is up to me. It is as if the load fell on our whole band—that now we must do something—if not now then never.”
He smiled at her simply, showing the dimples on his face that were childlike and that she loved. And he said:
“Do not worry. For at this time next year you will walk to our wharf, to stand on our lobster boat—or to our graveyard, to stand by my grave.”
The reserve became more tempestuous, anxious and depressed. No one knew what to do. Joel took control of the houses, of the recreation centre, of everything to do with money. This was done to keep Amos away from power—and it was done, in a certain way, as a reaction to Isaac’s growing fame. Which meant that something else, something more dangerous and something better, would have to be done, and Joel knew this. To take power was to act powerfully—and more powerfully than your predecessor. That, in fact, was what having power meant.
So Joel and his supporters held meetings each night from August 21 on, trying to decide what this something should be.
On that very day, Joel had asked Doran to write an article about the police planting the marijuana. But Doran said he could not, because it could not be proved.
“Of course it can be proved.”
“How?”
“Because I saw them.”
“You saw them plant the marijuana?”
“Of course.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
Joel assumed a hysterical look and began to walk away. “Write the story,” he said. “Tell the truth.”
But Doran knew the truth, or suspected it, and could not write the story. Other than that, he did not know what to do. No one was going to get him to write another word unless he himself decided to.
On this day, too, young people from the university began to arrive at Mary Cyr’s cottage to mount a protest against the police for complicity or cover-up in the death of Hector Penniac. That is, the idea of a cover-up was an active one in the university corridors, and many professors wanted to display their outrage over this. Students set up a human shield to protect the natives from the police and army. Mary set up her barbecue and ordered in sea crab and salad. But by the end of the day she was tired of it all, bored with the students and their inflamed mimicking talk, and so she dismissed them from her yard in a way only Mary Cyr could do, and sat in the back veranda and smoked.
On August 25, the warriors decided they would exact the same penalty on Roger that Isaac was suffering. Rain began to fall, the days became cooler. Doran was at that meeting, but he declined to take notes. It was very tense, and people were worried the army was going to invade. Joel too seemed erratic in what he said. He looked around the room with glittering eyes to pick someone to blame. At first he cursed at two young native men who he felt were not doing their jobs at the barricade—for many now had grown tired of it. Then he spotted Doran.
“If Isaac dies, you’ll pay the price too,” he said to Doran, without the least emotion. He shrugged as if this wasn’t terrible news, and pointed to Andy, as if Andy was the one who wanted to exact justice.
And Andy, who had not known he would be singled out, simply said: “I told you I didn’t want you back here. Well, you came back—so if anything goes wrong, it’s your problem.”
But the next morning when he went to go, the warriors told him he couldn’t. Isaac was too sick, so he must stay, for they had already decided Doran was the one who had betrayed Isaac to the police. They asked him for his passport and said he couldn’t cross without it.
“If you did not betray Isaac, then write the story about the police planting the marijuana,” Joel said, wagging his finger happily. But Doran said again that he would not, because it could not be proved.
“I saw it,” Joel said.
“How did you see it? I was with you at the time,” Doran said.
Joel shrugged and walked away.
All that day Doran heard students shouting insults at the police and at Roger Savage. Roger Savage couldn’t be seen, but now and again the curtain in the upstairs window would move slightly, as if a hand had moved it. The police had decided to take Roger away for his own safety, but approaching his house was now too dangerous, not so much for them as for Roger and the warriors, and especially the students, who had locked arms and stretched from roadway to roadway. So they remained in consultations, trying to defuse the situation. They tried to talk to Roger on the phone but Roger unplugged it, and would not consult with anyone.
Then something else happened to Doran. He suddenly hated the chants of those students. All of them now calling for justice for natives that they could never provide. Doran hated them, but in a way he felt—well, he felt he had created them. And now the students became the main story, and other papers interviewed many of them. And many of them proved they too could be vandals and began throwing rocks. Their pictures appeared, and they would be happy their pictures appeared, until such time as they found themselves ashamed. Doran listened to them, and walked from the barricade like a forlorn creature and sat in his shed with half the pie the little girl and boy had made him sitting on the table.
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Page 17
