After a while Joel sent two men, followed by one of the many stray dogs, to search Doran. The men said he had helped the RCMP plant the dope and Joel was deciding if they would put him on trial. After they searched him one of the men wanted to hit him, but the other said no. Then they decided to take his tape recorder. They left with the stray dog following them back across the dusty road.
After supper, Doran went to see Joel to get his tape recorder back.
Joel said that he could have the tape recorder back when he left, but there might be sensitive police information on it.
Doran replied that there were only the sounds of birds he’d recorded and he was ready to go because he wasn’t doing stories anymore. Joel turned on the tape recorder, and smiled expectantly, waiting to hear the police, or pretending to want to hear this. Then he turned it off.
“Why in hell would anyone record birds?” he asked, mystified.
Max didn’t answer.
“Tell the truth,” Joel said, “in a story about them planting the marijuana. That’s the big story. If you write about them planting it, I’ll let you go.”
But what Doran was hearing was something else. This is what his informers told him (yes, Doran had informers—three boys he paid): Joel and his men were going to come and get him—the boys did not know when—and they were going to force him to help them get Roger out of the house.
“They think you can go up to the house because you are white—and Roger will open the door for you—and then they will rush him, with a gun.”
“Roger won’t trust me,” Doran said.
“Joel says he will make you do it—that it’s the only way to get Roger, and you were the one who started this.”
“I was the one!” And Doran and the three boys laughed.
3
OLD AMOS KNEW THAT ISAAC HAD STARTED SOMETHING HE could not back down from. If he gave up his hunger strike he would be looked upon as a cheat. Worse, he had set out nobly to help his people and now he realized this was the only way to do so, even if he died. If he died they would have those lobster licences he so desperately sought. And so he lay with his back to the wall, staring at a small spot.
In that small, distinct spot, a tiny green bulb of paint over a crack, he saw the entire world, and for days the entire history of the world, and at times the entire history of his people over the last three thousand years. When the jailer came in to talk to him, to beg him to eat, he whispered:
“Let me die so my people will live the way people should.”
On the night of the ninth day of the hunger strike, Isaac fell into fitful unconsciousness. They took Isaac from his cell to the hospital, but word came that he had pulled an intravenous from his arm, in order to deny the sustenance that might keep him alive.
They all had a meeting later that night at Mrs. Francis’s.
It ended with a nine-to-two vote to take Roger out of his house and hold him.
Later that night, the RCMP turned the power off, and the entire reserve was left in darkness.
Just after this happened, Max Doran was sitting alone in his shed, staring at the book he was trying to read without being able to, when Joel and Andy came to see him. The room was in semi-darkness, as were their faces, while the air outside seemed wet and still, and the trees no longer blew.
They were filled with an excitement that Doran did not understand. But then he realized Joel was high, as he had been every day since Isaac was arrested. Andy was high also, and filled with an exuberance that only proving himself to others would contain. “Do you want to help us?” Andy said, pulling up a chair to sit beside him and looking at him intently. Doran could see only parts of their faces in the semi-darkness. The wind blew just as Joel moved his chair closer.
“C’mon, you have to help us now,” Joel said.
“Of course,” Doran said after a moment. He was sweating, and felt ill.
“You must help us—it’s our last bargaining chip to get Isaac back.”
“How? I can write only what I know—and I do not know about the marijuana, I do not know about the bulldozer being burned.” He ended in a whisper: “I don’t want to blame—anyone.”
“No one has ever put the blame on us,” Joel said simply, “have they?”
Doran said nothing.
Andy then took a .22 pistol from his pocket and put it on the blanket.
“Roger’ll trust you. Go to the door and knock tomorrow—say you want to write his story. Then you pull this on him and we’ll rush him—that’s all it’ll take. We take him to our jail until we get Isaac back. Do it for Isaac like we are! There’s no one else here that can do it!”
“Roger will not trust me.”
“Well, he will trust you more than he will trust me.” Joel smiled.
Doran stared out at the small fence rails in the backyard, until they had disappeared with nightfall, and he could hear an owl in the trees, the same owl Little Joe had told Mary Cyr about.
The next afternoon was quiet and dusty. Joel, sitting in his mother’s house, could smell dust from the gravel lane and see dust on the small leaves and his windowpane. And suddenly it was as if everything, from the dust to the light coming in, was preordered. It was that strange a sensation, and Joel had not had this sensation for years. But he realized that this sensation was not at all trivial. For if not for Hector’s death, he might still be in jail. Certainly without his half-brother’s death he wouldn’t have half the reserve doing his bidding and confiscating trucks and guns. He wouldn’t have men from other reserves—men who would not have spoken to him at other times—now waiting to hear what he had to say. He looked at his mother and wondered if she knew what he was thinking—that all this sudden power had been thrust upon him by the death of a boy. That in a certain biblical sense all power, the preponderance of all men’s desires, might be granted in just this way. That is why Saul must kill David. So a story from three thousand years ago was at this moment true.
And then, suddenly, everything changed again.
For just as the reserve had heard of Hector’s death, now they heard of Isaac’s.
He had died in the ambulance on the way to Moncton, people said. Two young men ran to tell Joel. One of them was Little Joe Barnaby.
“Mr. Joel!” Little Joe said, tugging at his arm, looking up at him with a strange kind of brave independence, goodness and love. “Mr. Joel—they say that Isaac has just died.”
Joel’s mother had made him a steak, for she worried he was not eating. And just as Amos had learned about the giant taking over men in the room, the giant had taken over Joel. And he was suddenly frightened.
That is, he did not know what to do. He called a meeting of the warriors, but it was as if he could not speak. So Andy and Tommie told him that Doran must be arrested and Roger taken from his house.
“They will give us a bargaining chip,” Andy said. And Joel nodded that they were right. Both of them cast their eyes away, as if he was now losing their respect—just as Saul had lost David’s—and this is what he could not allow.
Joel went out just at dusk, in a cold wind, to Doran’s shed, to hold him against the threat of the police, and discovered him gone. So he went searching and could not find him, carrying the .30-30 lazily under his arm. He walked the reserve shouting Doran’s name.
“He’s gone,” someone said.
“How did he get away?”
“I don’t know. But we have to get Roger now, or he too will go!”
All these young faces were now inordinately urgent as they looked to Joel for advice. The wind began to blow crazily in the trees.
“We should hear what Amos has to say,” someone said. “He’s still our chief.”
Joel only laughed. But he felt terribly stung by this. “Come, then,” Joel nodded. “Come with me.”
He took the sixteen-foot canoe and stood and poled it upriver, against the rapids, and between the stones and rocks, without touching the bottom on anything. He put the canoe in some bushes by the back
field and walked to the road that came out at the side of Roger’s place. He had Andy and two others with him. He suddenly realized, just as so many other men of power had, that if he did not do something for his men, they would no longer follow him. This idea of being in charge did not make him look wise as it had with Isaac, or kindly as it had with Amos. It only made him look afraid. The men saw this too, and reacted to it by not looking at him.
They came behind Roger’s house and heard shouting from the street, shots being fired, and saw wild and burning cattails against the night sky.
Ginnish and Andy crouched down and hid near some bushes behind the house.
“What in hell’s going on?” Joel said.
“Fire at him,” Andy said.
“What?”
“He’s firing at us!” someone else yelled. “Fire or give Andy the gun—if you’re too gutless.”
“But I don’t know what to do.”
“Then give me the gun,” Andy said.
Joel pushed him back, took aim, his body shaking, put the rifle down, aimed again and fired two shots at the propane tank. The second shot hit the lit lantern in the room—one of two lanterns attached to the propane tank.
In an instant a flame caught the curtains over the back porch door of Roger Savage’s house, and spread to the propane tank itself. They saw Roger turning to look in their direction. It was the last thing he would do. Within five seconds everything blew, back and out as if in slow motion. Great pieces of plywood flipped high in the dark night air.
People said that the explosion killed Roger Savage in an instant.
That is all that young Andy Francis remembered when he spoke to the police. He remembered nothing else, for he was close enough to suffer a major concussion.
Joel had left his friends and tried to run away—something, people said, Isaac or Amos never would have done.
The RCMP, a dozen strong, came in directly after, along with two companies of soldiers from Gagetown. They had been held up on the road, near Mary Cyr’s cottage, by a couple of dozen students and their professors. The captain in charge of the second company was a Micmac, Freddy Ward, who had known Isaac for a number of years. Finally he talked the students into letting them pass without incident. He arrested five people, turned them over to the RCMP, restored order with fifteen soldiers and returned the band to Amos Paul.
All this, briefly, was what happened after the police officer Hanover ordered Isaac taken to jail.
Over the next many weeks Amos Paul, wanting to know what had happened, wrote letters to the editor of Doran’s paper, simply signing his name “Amos.” October came and went, and now it was almost November.
Doran now drank his wine and stared out at the small flurries of snow. No one considered the stand-off would lead to death, he told people.
Especially the death of a little boy.
What was his name? Doran tried to forget it, but he never could—Little Joe Barnaby.
There had been a rumour going around that Isaac had died. Who had put that rumour out? Someone told Doran it had been one of the students, who had become hysterical the day before and started shouting, “You killed him!”
Others said it was Kellie Matchett who had told the students this as they gathered on the road near Mary Cyr’s.
But no matter who had started it, it was because of this rumour about Isaac that Joel and Andy Francis went to take Roger to jail on the reserve. Men came toward the house from the front, and Andy and Joel were at the back, and Roger Savage fired that beautiful, ornate lever-action that Doran had seen that night in the woods.
Little Joe, who had run toward the house with his BB gun to arrest Roger and take him to jail, suddenly said, “Oooo, Markus,” and fell face first into the mud.
It was pouring rain. The men then rushed the house. There was no time for Roger to come out before the propane tank exploded.
And everything ended on August 31.
Little Joe, with his cheeks painted with stickers and his small cowboy boots, and his coupons for free pizza he had gotten from the delivery man, was going to take Roger to jail and, he told Markus, give him a pizza.
He fell face first into the mud, the back of his navy blue jacket covered in blood, and blood spattered on the front of Markus Paul’s shirt.
What was terrible for Markus was how Little Joe’s eyelashes kept blinking those last few seconds of his life.
Two days later Isaac was released on bond.
A week later all the charges against Isaac were dropped.
Yesterday, Doran had heard, Isaac had become chief of the reserve. There had been subdued fanfare and a realization that things between the Government of Canada and the First Nations people would never be the same until certain issues were addressed. At least, that was what Doran wrote in the last story he filed before he resigned.
SEPTEMBER 16, 2006
IF NOT FOR AN ACCIDENT PLAYING SOFTBALL, RCMP OFFICER Markus Paul might never have gone over the Hector Penniac case once again. That is, for the tenth or twentieth time.
A broken foot, which laid him up during the spring and summer of 2005, caused him to revisit it. Penniac’s death had happened before computers and DNA. Many of the participants were dead. Many of the places they’d lived no longer existed. The particulars were stored in the basement of the old section of the RCMP headquarters in a filing cabinet, and in all there were seven files. (That was all he could find, anyway.) They had sat in file cabinets in one of the old cells that was ventilated in order to lessen the smell of drunks, but was still persistently hot and morbid all summer.
He remembered his grandfather Amos Paul had broken his ankle just the year before all of this had taken place in 1985—so with Markus having a broken ankle as well, it was a revisiting in almost a physical way. And perhaps the ghost of his grandfather was telling him that now was the time to get this done. Markus wanted to solve the case too, not only because he was an officer and determined to find the truth but because of his grandfather, who had tried to keep the peace that summer.
So as he started going over it again that spring and into summer of 2005 while his ankle healed, dressed as it was in a great big bun with his toes sticking out, and him using crutches, he realized that the case had never left him, even for a second. As early autumn of 2005 came, his foot had healed enough that he could walk down to the local store with a cane to play his lotto or buy his cigarettes or go to Blockbuster and get a movie and come home and sit in the dark, going over in his mind how it had all happened.
He was trying to concentrate on finding Roger Savage’s rifle—for that was, perhaps, in all of this, the most important missing part of the puzzle. But no matter how often he went over all the information, the rifle’s whereabouts eluded him. Sometimes late at night he would sit in the dark talking out loud to the memory of his grandfather: “Well, Amos, as you see I am in quite a mess here—my wife is gone, my VCR is broke and I can’t solve the case I promised you I would solve. Besides that, everyone is at me about my smoking.”
Then, one bright last-of-summer day, Markus received notice that his divorce was final. The next day—that is, September 6, 2005—he received a letter from his ex-wife, Dr. Samantha Dulse, asking his forgiveness.
But of course, so much of life had gone on. Where was everyone now?
He slipped into a depression of some sort, put all the Penniac files away, and yet would mull over the case, day in and day out, for another year. And in mid-September 2006, he thought he would take a trip—the one trip his grandfather had never managed to take—and remember the things his grandfather Amos Paul had told him never to forget.
1985
1
THE NIGHT IN AUGUST AFTER THE POWER HAD BEEN SHUT off, the night after the band had voted to take Roger out of his house, when the reserve was filled with noise and commotion, Markus made his way outside and looked here and there, and saw only darkness filtering down between cattail torches and candles.
That night, Sky was home with
Little Joe. Mrs. Francis had told them to stay where they were until she got back. She had gone to find Andy and Tommie and bring them home. People were saying that Isaac had died. No one knew who started that rumour, and it probably didn’t matter, but no one could get a message in or out to say it was or wasn’t true.
There was a smell of fall in the air and smoke from the fires along the road, a smell of tin and tar. Everyone shouted at Markus, telling him they were on the way to the barricade. They had broken all the dead streetlights and had ruptured the fire hydrant.
Old Amos was sitting in his living room when Markus left.
“Be a man!” the crowd yelled at him when he stepped into the night air.
All the faces in the crowd were filled with an almost incomprehensible determination and alarm. Markus thought: One understands the fastidiousness of a mob when people begin to look and dress the same.
The army was supposed to come, and everyone thought Amos had sent for it. There was going to be a showdown, and people—the boys and young men—had armed themselves, with rifles and rocks and sticks and bottles and Molotov cocktails, and were now going to the barricade. If Markus did not go he would be considered a traitor. Markus walked to Little Joe and Sky’s in great agitation, and Little Joe ran to get his cowboy boots.
“I’m coming I’m coming I’m coming!” Little Joe yelled.
“I don’t want Little Joe to go,” Sky said. “You stay here with us and we will make popcorn—I promise—I just have to go to the store. I can cook it on the Coleman. Please—we can have a few beers when he goes to bed—just you and me—Grandma Francis is not here.”
She was pleading with Markus and offering the only thing she had: herself. She took his hand.
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Page 18
