Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  Amos would lie on his back in the dark with his cigarette glowing in the room and he would try to think. Then he would speak to Markus, who was alone in his own bedroom.

  “What happened to Hector down in the hold? Certainly he was way out of place—and if he was, then something happened to make him be out of place. Why was the water bucket so far away?”

  Sooner or later all things would be understood. Everything came around in one way or the other to that truth.

  Amos’s mother had been able to look at a dress and see a flaw. The flaw might be an almost unseen thread, and when she pulled on it, the flaw became evident and the skirt unravelled. And now Amos worked from the thread he had found, and the case little by little began to unravel. The thread was the autopsy picture, and the fact that not a bit of pulp, as he remembered, had ever hit the upper sides of the hold. When the sailor Vanderhoof was sent to wash away the blood, he had concentrated on washing only in one place. But that would have been almost impossible if Hector had been hit by the full weight of the load.

  The front of Hector’s skull had been crushed, but not another bone in his body—not even a rib was cracked, though two were bruised. And under all that pulpwood too. That pulp that hit him was still in Amos’s side shed.

  “I can tell you one thing,” old Amos said to Doran one day shortly after Isaac was arrested.

  “What is that?” Doran asked.

  The old man patted Doran’s arm kindly.

  “It is not the Conibear trap that kills the beaver, but the drowning that follows,” the old man said. “You will come to realize this with time, my son.”

  So Amos had his first lead. He did not particularly see it as being definitive, though. The Conibear and the beaver story was one he had told many times. He had first mentioned it to Markus when the boy’s father was found dead that long-ago day. The drink was the Conibear trap, and the man slowly drowned.

  But then Amos considered how tall Hector Penniac was—five foot ten—and he realized the drop would have to have been from that distance. And the Monk brothers said the load fell fifteen feet. If that was the case, a fifteen-foot drop of two tons of pulp would certainly have bruised some bones, and have landed helter-skelter, and might have injured more than one person. Unless it missed Hector, and he suffered only a glancing blow. But if it missed him, then why was the boy lying under the wood? He would have been thrown to the side.

  Strangely enough, thought Amos, the fact Hector was under the pulp, which made it look like the pulpwood had killed him, meant that he had not been killed by the pulpwood at all. Which meant he had been placed underneath. This was not so difficult to comprehend now that Amos saw the autopsy photo and read the report. Why hadn’t he seen this long ago? He should have figured it out. But others had not figured it out either.

  This is what Amos took to Joel when Isaac was incarcerated in August of 1985—that is, the idea, though he hadn’t completely proven it, that something else might have happened to Hector. Joel sat at the head table in the band council office and liked the idea that he had two phones. He had a phone to the barricade and another one to the outside that the police had supplied in the hope that he would tell them if anything got out of hand. He liked to look at them as he spoke to people who came to see him. These phones made him weary of little Amos, who now came with his claims while Joel sat exactly where Amos had two months before.

  “What’s this about, then?”

  Joel had really too much to do to bother with Amos.

  Amos said his surmising was about the possibility that Roger had done nothing—but perhaps the Monk brothers had.

  Joel smiled while he listened, sardonically, because he knew the truth and did not want the truth impinged upon by the old fellow. Besides, there was another problem, perhaps the real problem. It was the fact that Joel had dealt with the Monk brothers over the last four years. He supplied them with amphetamines for the stevedores, and this would come to light if they were investigated.

  But Joel allowed Amos to speak to him and explain his reasons. And then he said: “Couldn’t have happened that way.”

  “Why?” Amos asked.

  “Just didn’t,” Joel said, sniffing. And then he said, “Be gone with you.”

  Both Andy and Tommie were with him. They sat at either end of the table and stared at Amos as Joel spoke, wearing bandanas and camouflage pants. This was their standard now, how they observed decorum.

  Amos picked up his pictures and went back out into the sun.

  “Didn’t happen that way!” Joel yelled as he left the building. “Remember I told you that.”

  3

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CATASTROPHE THAT LED TO LITTLE Joe’s death, Joel had called a meeting of the old council and the new. And they made their way over to Mrs. Francis’s, where Andy had assured them safety from being arrested.

  There they sat saying little to one another for the longest time. Amos came in, with his cowboy hat in his hand, and no one got up to give him a place at the table. So he sat on a heater at the end of the room—now out of favour with everyone who wanted action. And many there wanted action to prove that Amos was out of favour, and to prove they had done with the old days. And for Andy, who was the embodiment of this spirit, it was to prove to his former friend Markus that he had gone on in the world. The crux of his thinking was this: if you did not now take on the white man, you never would.

  The two Francis brothers said they would take Roger to the small holding cell they had on the reserve, and keep him.

  Amos said he could not allow it.

  “What are you talking about?” Joel Ginnish said. “You cannot allow it. Who are you again? I didn’t get your name.”

  Everyone began to laugh.

  This was to be the last and crucial disagreement between Amos and Joel.

  “We will hold him until the whites press charges against him and let Isaac go. Once they do, we will hand him over. If they don’t we will keep him,” Andy Francis said, looking over at Markus with grave pride.

  But the little old man was neither frightened nor troubled by Joel Ginnish. He simply stared at his young grandson Markus and then looked back at Joel. He mentioned that if Joel was strengthened by anything, he was strengthened by the fact that Isaac was out of his hair, and he could act accordingly.

  This was considered very bad to say. It did not matter if it was true.

  Amos continued: “The police were silly to take Isaac, and I don’t know why they did. But I cannot allow you to hold someone who is innocent in a cell for the guilty.”

  There was silence, and Amos set about rolling a cigarette. He took his tobacco out and put it on his knee, then his paper, and held it in his right hand, and pinched out some tobacco on it, rolled it and licked it. Then, seeing others looking at him, he attempted to pass the cigarette papers and tobacco around. But no one wanted any. He cracked a match with his finger and lit the smoke, and spit a bit of tobacco out. Then he was silent, and folded his arms.

  The warriors, some in camouflage, with bandanas tied about their glowing black hair, looked from one to the other.

  “Many know you’re in cahoots with them,” Joel finally said.

  “No, son, I’m in cahoots with no one, and never have been—well, except for my wife. I was in cahoots with her for a bit, but not since she died have I been in cahoots.”

  Old Amos said this in a pleasant enough voice and was kind when he said it. When Markus looked at his grandfather, his grandfather sneezed and shrugged.

  Not very much like a hero.

  Amos sneezed again and took a big white handkerchief and wiped his nose.

  “Look,” Joel said. “He already has the white flag out.”

  Amos laughed when others did, his false teeth slipping.

  Looking back, Amos remembered that Little Joe was all this time sitting on the counter, looking from one person to the other, preoccupied with eating peanut butter from the jar, with a spoon.

  Just before they left
the Francis house, what Joel had been warned about happened.

  The power to the entire reserve was cut.

  There were women and children on the reserve, and this was unconscionable. Joel pushed people aside and away from him as he walked outside. He pushed old Amos away too, and Markus was too young to stand up to him.

  All up and down the road was blackness. Silence and just the sound of waves. People began to come out of their houses and stand in the streets.

  “What are you going to do, Joel?” people said.

  “What’s going to happen?” Little Joe asked Markus.

  “I don’t know,” Markus said. “We’ll see.”

  And so whatever Amos wanted or hoped for was once again dashed by those outside. Beyond the reserve, the barricade, the lights flickered, and rain came down.

  The evening before they heard Isaac had died, Doran knew he had to get off the reserve, for many were saying he was white and should be held too. But in fact, he was not concerned by this. The real reason he had to leave was that his own mother was now terribly ill. He had no one to take him past the barricade, however. He had gone there twice, but had been stopped. The Indians kept asking him to show his passport. So he turned and went back along the road. There he met Little Joe and Sky—and recognized them as the kids who had given him the pie.

  “Can you help me?” he asked. “I have to go home.”

  Sky nodded, and she and little Joe took him to the old trailers beyond the ball field where the kids used to meet in secret. Then Little Joe scampered up a tree, the better to see when everything was clear. Sky sat looking at this man for a long time, trying to think of what to do.

  “Is what you said about Roger true?” she asked, point blank.

  “I don’t know—but I can’t wait any longer to see.”

  She sighed and took Doran’s chin in her hand, and studied him. Then she smiled. She told him to take his ponytail out and put on the ball cap that she wore and tuck his hair under it. Then she lighted a cigarette and looked at him, and handed him the smoke. “Put some dirt on your face and I will get you a jacket from home. Wait here—and then we will go.”

  “Where—where will we go?”

  “Well, we will go to the only place we can go,” Sky advised. “We will just go along to see Amos.”

  So later, after dark, and after Sky had come back with an old jean jacket stained with oil, Little Joe climbed down from the tree, and they snuck across the back field to Amos’s house. There they left Doran, and he was overcome with emotion and wanted to hug them both goodbye. Little Joe gave him a thumbs-up and then just disappeared.

  Doran went onto the porch, and waited for the door to open. What if Amos wouldn’t speak to him? But Amos came to the door, opened it and smiled.

  “Oh, how are you?” Amos said.

  Doran asked if Amos could take him by the water up to the bridge. But the old man couldn’t. He felt he had to stay where he was. For he was still chief, and he must be here. Markus stood behind the old man, listening patiently.

  “Can you lead me back through, Markus?” Doran said.

  Amos looked at his grandson. “Take him,” he said, in Micmac. “It’s our duty.”

  So Markus went and got his jacket and told Doran to follow him. And they started out, the boy of fifteen and the man of twenty-five with his hair up under an old ball cap. They got across the road and past the trailers, toward Stone Street, where Markus’s own father had died. When they came to the back field they saw Joel with the .30-30 walking along the upper lane with five or six men; two had shotguns, and Andy had a .22 pistol. Markus had to tackle Doran and put his hand over his mouth as the men passed only ten feet away.

  But Joel and his men moved away toward the south, holding torches made of cattails and gas, and speaking in Micmac.

  “I’ll never forget this,” Doran said. “I’ll do you a favour someday.”

  “Then someday I will come to you and get it.”

  “Okay, okay, you do that,” Doran said.

  It was hard to get across the river. Doran slipped many times on the rocks and in the swirling currents, and Markus had to hold him up. They were sitting ducks, too, in the middle of the water, where they could have been seen at any moment. And Markus was taking much more of a chance than Doran. Finally they made it to the slippery granite bank on the far side. There were three RCMP cars just at the turn.

  Doran grabbed Markus’s hand and shook it with a new resolve. “You come to me for that favour,” he said, his white shirt soaking from the water and his loafers ruined.

  Markus nodded quickly, slipped back and returned in the dark to his own house by another way.

  The next morning—that is, on the day of the confrontation—Amos went over to visit Roger to tell him to leave.

  “Just leave the house until I figure this out. It might only be a month or so. I knew your grandfather—he was my friend,” Amos said. “You have to get out now—you must—they think you are guilty, and they will think that until it is proven otherwise. They called you right wing,” Amos said, trying to sound stern for effect.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Amos said. “I don’t know what it means—when I was in school I was left-handed, and they beat me with a ruler. It might have something to do with that.”

  “Well, I am not going anywhere. If they bring the barricade down, I am not going. If the police come to get me, I will fire at them. I have done nothing to anyone—so since I have done nothing, I am not going.” Here Roger smiled a little self-contentedly. “Do you think I did something wrong?”

  “Yes,” Amos said. But he lied just to get Roger away.

  Roger looked hurt, and said nothing for a moment.

  “My father fished for thirty years,” he said then. “He saved men in the Esuminac disaster—men who are now not saying anything. And we have university kids out here protesting who have never met me, and they have insulted my family. My girlfriend has left me—going out now with a pigeon”—by this he meant an air force man—“who tells her how sorry he is for her. So tell me, what have I done, and what good is it for me to go out? If I go I will be condemned by those students—they are yelling at me.” Then he said, almost as if hurt, “They say I’m uneducated—well, I could tell them, I got my GED.”

  He spoke this with great dignity, though his lips trembled slightly.

  “But you can go and clear your name,” Amos said hopefully, his fingers twitching.

  “But my name has done nothing it needs to be cleared of, so someday they will have to clear it for me. I will not try to clear my name for them. I will not. They will have to clear it—let them. They are the ones who say I am guilty and did it on purpose. What in hell did I do? I went to the ship, and I hooked a load because Morrissey went and had a piss. So let him clear my name. I will die here—and then we will wait and see.” Roger seemed perfectly happy to say this.

  “But if you could just tell them what you did.”

  There was a long, long, bitter silence.

  “I will tell you what I did. I hooked.”

  “I know, boy. Ya hooked,” Amos said.

  On a weekend in November 1985, the day after Doran had resigned from his paper, there was snow coming down to blur the edge of the fields, and Amos went hunting. He thought: If the body was lying underneath the pulp, and not hit by the pulp, Penniac was hit before the pulp came down. Yet if that was the case, then it was murder, or manslaughter, or even an accident that had been covered up. So the outrage by the little Micmac band in the middle of nowhere was, in some ways, completely justified. But going in the wrong direction had caused the death not only of Roger Savage but also of Little Joe Barnaby. It had also ruined Amos’s grandson’s chances with Sky. She now dismissed Markus, and would not speak as he walked by her house in the snow that fell at night, or when he stood outside the house like, as Fitzgerald once wrote, “all the sad young men.”

  Amos was tracking a big buck—there were
also two or three smaller bucks in this area of furious streams and birches that ran up the side of the hills and then went for two or three miles intermingled with spruce and fir. He had seen the big buck’s tracks, rounded at the front and deep in the twisted grass, and its weight had trampled the grass and left the snow beneath it bluish. But he lost any sign of it at the north end of Buckler Stream, and then he met another hunter walking toward him. It was the surveyor Kevin Dulse, with his daughter, Samantha, out hunting partridge. They carried a small brace. So Amos stopped and talked a moment or two.

  Mr. Dulse had been brought in to survey and rezone the line between the reserve and the cottages after all the trouble was over the month before. His hair was prematurely white, and he walked with his shoulders hunched together. His eyes had become weak, and he wore heavy glasses. He was proud of his daughter—as life is proud of life. She was fourteen, thin as a rail, with big black eyes and jerking motions when she spoke. She was like her mother, high-strung and nervous, and her nervousness hid or showed an eclectic brilliance, whichever it might be. The zone had gone in the natives’ favour, so the band had been completely in the right about Savage’s house, and because of this Kevin was thought highly of. But now, after all of the tragic circumstances surrounding it, the band did not want the property to build on, and decided to make it into a softball field in honour of Little Joe.

  Amos and Kevin spoke for a moment. The birds were no longer sunning themselves and had moved into the thickets, and after a while Sam and Kevin moved off.

  Soon Amos was alone and prepared himself some tea, then sat on an old windfall, and realized that this area of the woods wouldn’t have been much travelled by his ancestors, except perhaps the waterways below here. He stirred the tea with a stick and looked at its darkness, trying to entertain thoughts of the past and the future. Then he sat on the windfall so that his short legs didn’t touch the ground, and he sighed. No, he wasn’t a very impressive-looking man, not like Isaac or Joel Ginnish. There were the real men, he supposed.