Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

And he thought about the dividing line. The new room Savage had wanted to build had been over it by four feet. But it was as modest as the house he himself lived in.

  When Amos first went into the Cyr cottage as a boy to deliver a salmon, its hardwood floor and its huge stone fireplace, its caribou and moose racks had made him confused and he began to shake. They asked him if he was cold, and all he could do was shake his head, his teeth chattering.

  He did not know which was the real New Brunswick or the real Canada. And that dividing line had always remained. At seventy-five years of age, he still did not know.

  It was this chance meeting with Kevin Dulse that caused Amos trouble. He was suddenly seared by the thought of Roger being called a bigot. Because he knew Roger was not.

  Amos stayed in the woods that night by himself and thought about the case. That is, he thought about the water boy, Brice Peel, and the buckets Brice would have delivered to the hold.

  Before dawn the next morning, Amos was making his pancake breakfast outside in the snow. After breakfast, he cleaned the frying pan, took the jam jar the pancake batter was in and placed it in his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and waited for dawn over the many trees.

  Then he put his jacket and vest on, his snowshoes slung over them, and with his toes cold from being pinched inside his boots, he walked toward the hills above him, and the clouds remained light, with the sky a greyish blue.

  His movement by afternoon had taken him far, far up the ridge, to look down toward the water of the North Church River, where he had hunted pollywogs as a boy. He had flashes of that as he stood there. To his left a close cropping of small firs fed into the hardwood that spread down through the winterish floor, spiked by fallen branches and slivers of ice. The river below was as smooth as a floor but without ice, and he could smell deer in the wind.

  About two-thirty in the afternoon he sensed the buck on the move again. He went farther along the ridge and found his tracks on the rut trail. The buck had gone to his left; its tracks were fresh and large. Most men would have followed it down. But resting his .30-06 against a crook in a poplar, Amos had no intention of doing so. He would go to the right—which was easier going. He would cross the river below the beaver dam, where a spine of rocks allowed the best way, and he would move up the other side into the dark spruce to a rut scrape he had seen the day before, to wait the buck out.

  He started down with the wind behind him, which would be good once he crossed the river. He reasoned the buck, if he could be quick, wouldn’t know he was there. Soon, hanging on to branches to keep himself steady, he moved into the valley, spongy with snow and wet moss, and made his way to the water. He crossed it almost knee-deep in his old work pants and moved halfway toward the upper slope on the south ridge. There, still feeling pain in his arthritic hands, he sat on a stump and waited. Every now and again he turned the rifle slightly sideways to check the screws, as one who knows hunting and rifles will do. The day was about to turn. It was about to snow, and his visibility would be almost zero. He had to keep his scope halfway clean, and keep it from fogging.

  All the while, too, he was surmising.

  There was only one thing to do, he decided, as he looked into the old growth of trees, and that was to drop some of the pulpwood load on someone or something and see what broke. If bones broke, he would have his answer. He thought of his ankle—which broke because of a slip on some moss the year before—and wondered what might have happened with thousands of pounds. Well, there was one way to find out. Yes. There was always a way.

  People think deer are quiet in the woods. They are not. Not a buck in rut who believes it is alone. He heard the deer a long way, the deer who had gone to the river to drink, thirst compelling it to move, and now, in late afternoon, desire and need for sex compelling it up the hill toward its rut marks, farther in toward Tabusintac.

  Amos picked up his rifle, flipped off his scope covers. The snow had started. The wind was at his face, blowing this snow into his eyes.

  The buck came into view at 4:35 that afternoon.

  He hauled it by himself to the water. There he gutted it out. Its liver in a bag, he carried the nine-point buck on a litter of poplar poles and spruce boughs out to his truck.

  It was dark and cold when he got back to his house, and late after he took the hide off the deer, and supper was the liver for him and Markus, and a glass of flat beer. He thought of the pain that would come by reopening the case. He felt it deep, deep in his soul. Like the pain in his hands and old, tortured feet. He spent the evening cutting the meat, and took some steaks over to Mrs. Francis. That night, he wrote in his little diary that Markus had given him in great celebration when he became chief: “I have lost everything in my life except my will to stay alive.”

  But, he thought, at times that wasn’t a small thing to hold on to.

  4

  THE WATER BOY, BRICE PEEL, HAD HAD A DEEPLY DISTURBING summer. All of this had been kept from everyone around him. How could it be that taking a job as a water boy when he was little—that is, a boy of fourteen, happily thinking that he would be able to buy a bicycle—how was it that because of this, everything good in his life had been dashed? That his whole life had been turned upside down, and his yearning and longing for goodness eclipsed by his duty to protect a father who would not have protected him? And how was it that no one had come to check up on him? This, despite the fact that he lived in his little house near the old black station, that he lived near the grand old stagecoach road where the Irish woman named Jessie Monk in 1864 had been ambushed and killed by a Scotsman and a Micmac hunter?

  To say Brice was bad, though he stole and lied, was a mistake. Even to say he was wrong in not telling what he knew to the police was a mistake. For in so many ways he lived a life not only of fear but also of obligation to those who had given him and his father a job five months before.

  Brice had grown up under the influence of the Monks, devoted to all they said. But he suddenly found out, on that one day in June 1985, that to them integrity was lack of integrity and character was lack of character; and once you lost these things, character and integrity, then to the Monks you were acceptable and superior.

  So where was he to go and what was he to do?

  Brice’s father said, as they drove back from the Lutheran and crossed the Bartibog, that it was a terrible thing that had happened.

  At home, Brice sat for a long time wondering what to say, like someone stunned by being hit over the head with some pulpwood.

  “Did Topper hit him?” he finally asked.

  “Don’t be so foolish,” his old man said. “They were nice enough to give us a job.”

  “But I just don’t see—I mean, how is it that Hector fell under?”

  His father tried to explain in the mid-afternoon heat that he was upset as well. Then the telephone rang, and when his father came back from the other room he said, hauling up his suspenders, “The police will be coming—so you don’t go yappin’ or you’ll get your mouth slapped. No boy of mine is a yapper.”

  This, then, was integrity. No one was a yapper. And Brice found this idea was to be enforced and reinforced.

  But the boy kept asking about the water bucket. Ten times he asked about it. His father was shaking too, standing near the sink, with his hands blistered, and told him to shut up. Then his father left to find out what was going on.

  In a while Brice’s father came back. The sky was white and there were bugs filling the air, and the scent of evening dropping low, and cars passing down on the highway and the clucking of a chicken or two scratching for food, and a rooster half-blind and old that the hens would peck to death within a week. Behind the dark, blistering house was an old rabbit pen that the water boy had and his little rabbit pen was the only thing he lived for.

  His father asked what the boy would say if the police came. He told the boy everyone down the hold was saying it was Roger Savage because he disliked the idea of the union turning on him and hiring an Indian.


  The little fellow said nothing, tucking his thumbs up inside his fists and staring in a kind of silent agony.

  His father said, “They were kind enough to take us on, and you cannot ever say they did anything wrong—first of all, they probably didn’t, and second of all, they are the Monks.”

  Brice shrugged. Then he asked if he could lick the peanut butter jar, for it was almost empty and the welfare cheque had not come.

  And so, the next day when the water boy was called upon to give a statement, when the police sat him in their car and asked him what had happened, he said that he had gone to get a bucket of water. The police officer wrote this down, but didn’t seem to understand there was a glitch here, for he had never worked a boat before, and did not know that two buckets was the standard, and two buckets were already there.

  “When I come up the load fell.”

  “So you saw the load fall.”

  “Certainly, like a ton of fuckin’ bricks.”

  “Did you see who hooked?”

  “No sir.”

  And that was it, in red pencil, written and laid away for four months, and now in the possession of Amos Paul—who had not got to the red-pencilled note yet. The boy’s name was signed on that little note: Brice Peel, the water boy.

  That night after Brice Peel gave his police statement, Topper Monk came over to see the water boy’s father, Angus. And Angus Peel went out on the doorstep and shook his head. He had a piece of straw in his mouth and he said, “Yes, I know it,” and looked behind into the dark little window, where the paint was peeled. There was one highway light that shone down on the road, and now and again the sound of a car faint and tragic and longing.

  Angus Peel came back in and glared at his son.

  “What did you say to the police? Topper is askin’.”

  “I never said nothing—I said the load fell.”

  “Topper Monk has done a lot fer us.”

  The boy went into the living room with the glare of the television meandering out into the dull, drab furniture and the smell of sweat, and sat there, and looked guilty, as if he had done something wrong. He stared out at his rabbit pen. His knees shook. His father looked at him with compassion, his son’s thin neck and the little bruise on his cheek.

  “Topper has done a lot fer us,” he said kindly, “that’s all I am saying. You know I’ve had a hard time—and I took that job even though they knew I couldn’t handle it. It was the happiest day of my life—and you were water boy—and now I am sorry I got you into this.”

  “I know,” the boy said. “I know, Dad. I know you’re sorry—I know you always have been sorry.”

  Brice Peel woke up the next morning to the telephone ringing, and he listened as his father climbed the stairs.

  “Topper Monk wants to sees you,” his father said. “So just mind.”

  “Mind what?”

  “Mind what Topper Monk is saying.”

  Brice got out of bed and put on his worn trousers over his skinny little legs, and an old red T-shirt that his mother gave him two years before, so it made his arms hang out and came up on his belly, and his floppy hat that he liked to wear, and went out to his rabbit pen.

  Topper Monk did something very strange. He showed him the bicycle Brice had said he wanted to save for and placed it beside the cage, with the boy’s mouth hanging open in the dry air, and the smell of dark manure coming out in whiffs as if from a dark tunnel.

  “Now that’s some bicycle,” Topper said.

  And that bicycle allowed a preternatural silence for weeks and weeks, as the calamity grew over at the edge of the bay where Roger Savage was building a room onto his house. The boy hardly washed, and the bicycle was driven around the Peel yard in the desperate gloom. The boy drove around on the bicycle, his pants bobbing up and down on the black seat so it smelled of his own shit, for he was too scared or defiant to wash.

  “Daddy,” Brice said once.

  “What?”

  “Do you know Roger Savage?”

  “Yeah, I know of him. Can’t say I know him completely, but I do know of him.”

  “They say he’s the killer of that Indian boy.”

  “That’s what they say,” Angus Peel noted.

  “But do you think so?” Brice asked, almost as a whisper.

  “It’s what I know,” Angus said. And expressing himself as finely as some of the educated people, he extended his grace to the band by saying, “I’m no Indian lover, but I will tell you, a death is a death and can’t be celebrated.”

  Then there was silence for a moment.

  “Son, I have to have dialysis, what am I supposed to do?” And Angus Peel looked at his son, who was born with such hope into such a world.

  Later in the month Topper Monk began to inquire whether Brice—little Brice Peel—wanted another job. One where the real money was.

  “It’s not so bad. Just go up to the end of Onion Brook and cut some sprags for the back of the barn. I’ll give him six bucks an hour, which is not bad for a boy.”

  “But can he do it?” Angus asked, knowing if he was a father at all he would have to take up for his son.

  “Oh God, yes, he can do it, Mr. Peel—he’s not no idiot.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” Brice Peel said. “I don’t want to go way up to the reaches of Onion Brook and stay there, for that’s what they want me to do, and the flies will have a feast—I’ll be bone soup for the bugs.”

  But his father could not get him out of it, and they both knew it.

  Brice Peel went to Onion Brook. So if he was wanting to tell someone of what he thought had happened, that person would first have to travel the highway and then the upper stretches of the Tabusintac, then cross to Blueberry Barrens and from there walk toward Upper Onion, where you would find in a place of nothing three small ruined buildings rotting against overgrowth—buildings that belonged to the Monk brothers’ father’s sister’s father-in-law. A connection that had entrapped the father-in-law’s siblings in a kind of hell. A Monk’s hell, as one them put it back in 1973.

  There, someone looking for little Brice Peel was not done looking but would have to complete another three miles along a pathway ribboned out through a swamp and alder growth, toward the brook that could be heard now and then against a lost blue sky. Here, in among the smell of vetch and musk and the constant whine of bugs, one would hear the roar of Onion Falls sooner or later—and an old windfall over that deep gorge was the only way for the boy to get across to the other side.

  In the entire universe, there was only one wee boy who could tell what had happened in the hold of the Lutheran. Worse, he was the boy the Monk brothers had taken on as a water boy because they genuinely felt sorry for him and his father. And George Morrissey was this boy’s uncle.

  “He’s a problem,” Topper had said, sitting in the living-room dark the night before they decided to send Brice to Onion Brook. He heard of the commotion rising and falling on the reserve and knew things were pointed in one direction: away from them. The paper was open on the kitchen counter, with its story about the death of Micmac fur traders in 1839—and all of this was true. But to the men sitting in that room, the story covered up a crime of gigantic proportions: the death of Hector Penniac in 1985.

  Doran had interviewed them. And he had done them a favour. But Doran did not know this yet. That is, he was not irresponsible so much as doggedly sure of everything, just as Hanover was. He was a prim-ass, doggedly sure of himself, Topper said, and yes that was true, Bill Monk said, and we made him more sure of himself.

  “And he does not know it!” Monk said.

  Yet that young boy, with his small frame, and the red T-shirt with the bumblebee on it that said “You bee my honey bee,” did know it. Or he was certain of something.

  Billy Monk was much thinner and smaller than Topper. Billy’s pale Irish skin and pale blue eyes looked out at the world of misery with resolute indifference. He had an absolute love of the gleeful torment, whether he was in school, on the
bus or at home playing baseball. He had cultivated that torment into a pleasure that made life a misery for certain others.

  But he had liked the boy and he liked the boy’s father, who was an old drinking comrade from the sixties, when they both grew their hair long in feral deference to the time and made sure they took their teeth out and wrapped them in Kleenex before they entered a bar.

  “We’ll take him to Onion till this blows over,” Billy said, tapping on the newspaper’s front page.

  There was some strange loathing this newspaper reporter had for Roger Savage that they didn’t understand.

  Isaac would have to deal with that, they decided.

  When Topper brought him to the falls, Brice realized he had to cross a deadfall, and it was a thirty-foot drop to the low stream and boulders.

  “Mark me words, you can do that, boy.”

  The boy shook. He did not know what to say. He stared at the falls and the rainbow it made, and felt the heat suffocate him. His father was supposed to have come with him. But his father was sick. Brice had never in his life been this alone.

  He had to cross a log, and far beneath him he could see some sea trout. It will be so much fun, they had said. You will be able to catch trout.

  “I can’t go over alone,” the youngster said.

  “Here,” Topper Monk said. “Get up on my shoulders and I’ll walk you across.”

  So Topper grabbed the boy and put him on his shoulders and with his knapsack in one hand and the bucksaw in the other started out. By the time they were two feet out it was impossible to turn back, and sitting hunched up on Topper’s shoulders the boy was off balance and felt they’d fall.

  “Keep straight up on me,” Topper warned.

  The boy, with his red T-shirt black with sweat under the arms and with the bee on the front with its caption that read “You bee my honey bee,” suddenly thought of the story his mother had told him about the fox and the gingerbread man. And he believed Monk was going to let him go.

  “He won’t be able to,” the boy thought, “not when he has me—because if I go I’ll latch onto his head until he goes too—I’m a pretty good latcher. In fights I can latch pretty good, no doubt about it. I’m a latcher!”