Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  And he put both arms around Topper’s head.

  “Hold ‘er now there, Brice buddy, ya got yer fingers over my nose!”

  So this is what the boy said when they were ten feet out over the thirty-foot drop to solid boulders: “If I go—you go.”

  “What are you talking about?” Topper said. “Get yer hands off me head!”

  But the man became aware that the farther he got out on the windfall the more dangerous it was with his top-heavy load—and here he was staring death in the face with a young boy because of an Indian man he had never seen before that terrible morning. And why did this happen to him? What law had made his life so certain to be this way, as it was from the time he was ten? And why now—when he himself had wanted to settle things and have his own house and back lot—why now did that Hector Penniac, a man he had never cared about one way or the other, come clamouring down the ladder into the hold with his fine features looking resolute and dignified and in some respects urban, and his kindness as he offered them gum and cigarettes? And what was in him and his brother to take to tormenting that man—for what sport did men do this, and for what reason did he think it was fine and noble to do that to the young Indian boy, and now that he realized that it was neither fine nor noble, what reason was it that he had to relive it every day, and could not rid himself of it?

  Once they had reached the other side, Topper crossed back and forth much more swiftly and left Brice’s supplies in three boxes by the tamarack tree, near the cabin Brice was to sleep in, as the sun beat down on his red face. He took the boy and showed him that small one-room cabin with the two cots and the rusted stove, airless and sad with a poster from 1966 that said “Gunk, the Great Cleaner” and showed a girl in a half-unbuttoned top leaning over an engine.

  “No one is going to leave you,” Topper said to the boy. “Your dad will be here tonight—everything will be fine.”

  He smiled then and patted the boy’s head, and trod away, and crossed the log again, and went into the gloom on the other side of the brook and the child was alone.

  His father did not come that night, nor until three days later, his face sheepish and his blood-red eyes downcast. The boy, bitten half to death by blackflies, was sitting near a pile of props from the tamarack he had cut, in obligation to his job. He had smashed his cans of beans on a rock and against a tree, trying to open them because they had forgotten to leave him an opener.

  At night the temperature dropped, so he was cold. He said he saw a bear. The camp smelled of urine because he had wet his pants.

  The father talked of when he was a boy, and how he had done more, and how more was expected of him and he did not mind, for that was how to get ahead in life.

  “And you’ve got so far,” the boy said, for the first time in his life answering back. And for the first time in his life his father could not hit him.

  Topper Monk, who crossed the log again and went into the woods, realized the lie he was perpetuating. He was not pleased with it at all. The idea that it was a sin was beginning to inform him, too late. And now it was also too late to say anything about it.

  He had almost not got to work that day himself, for he had been drunk the night before. But his wife got him up and out the door. And he arrived at the Lutheran at quarter past seven in the morning. The shed light was still on, and birds were singing. The Lutheran sat up in the black, awful water like a hundred other ships of trade he had worked, and would work.

  Strange, too, he had almost not worked in the same hold as his brother, but since they would move forward at the end of the day to the second hold, and because of seniority lay off two men, he was allocated to work the hold that would be done the swiftest. They had the boy’s father, Mr. Peel, with them. And they were put in the fourth hold. And since they had taken Mr. Peel’s son under wing, he would be water boy for them.

  The other worker in the hold was Hector Penniac. He climbed down the ladder after the first load was stored.

  The money they gave the boy for cutting his props out of the tamarack and spruce he saved for school. He would get new jeans and a new shirt and sneakers, is what Brice Peel thought. He would leave Angus Peel and be someone special. He would go to dances and get hard-ons and talk to girls. Like other boys his age who never had the benefit of parental care, he had no option but to buy clothes with any money he could get. But as the days bled away and the horizon became purple in the morning, and then nearing mid-August when the winds started, he was depressed and could not drive his bicycle anymore.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Angus Peel said.

  Each day the Monks would drive by, or drop in and look at him, and pat him twice on the shoulder. And sometimes he would stay up in his room so he wouldn’t be patted on the shoulder, and they would call him down.

  “Hey!” his father would call. “Brice—hey, Brice, come down here a moment, will you? Don’t be so big-feelinged now, it’s only Billy Monk.”

  And he would walk down and stand in the kitchen. Billy Monk would talk about almost dying in the hold. He would look at him with pale blue expressionless eyes, a small white mole under the left one, and he would speak almost without moving his lips, so you saw only one or two lower teeth, and Brice was so scared he could never take his eyes off them.

  Then Topper arrived one Saturday with a whole bucket of chicken and a new fishing rod for the boy.

  “I knew ya didn’t have one, for ya got no fish this year—now you has a bike to take you fishin’ and a rod to fish ‘um with.”

  Brice looked at his father and Topper and nodded.

  “Friends is what we are, right? Friends are what, now, Bricey?” Topper asked.

  “Friends,” Brice whispered.

  “Touch me pinky to make it true. C’mon now, touch me pinky.”

  So Brice touched his pinky.

  “You gotta remember now, the only thing is, we don’t want you to be blamed!”

  What people did not know—or some did not know—was that the stevedores had a very good arrangement: they were able to work boats and get unemployment insurance at the same time, which gave many of them another four hundred dollars a month, while still collecting their unemployment for the winter. That this was arranged under the table at the dock, and the names shifted from one boat to another, and that Billy and Topper Monk controlled it kept most people quiet about most things. So though no one knew what had happened in the hold, they closed ranks. It was a dangerous spot to work, and having someone do something careless was enough to have him expelled from the yard. That is why Roger did not work the Liverpool Star.

  When Topper came back the day he swore friendship on the pinky, he was still worried about the boy, so Billy Monk decided this: “Take him with you tomorrow night when you go to see Joel and help him bring back the fish. Give him some grass, and we’ll show him we have nothing against those people, which we don’t. An Indian is as good as us, and we were only foolin’. Then take a quart of the Captain, give it to him for his dad. You let him go with you tomorrow night to meet with Joel and it’ll be fine.”

  “That might be a mistake,” Topper said, looking up quickly.

  “I don’t make mistakes,” Billy Monk said.

  But in fact, over the entire summer this was the one mistake he made. And no one would know that until it was long over.

  And the boy Brice Peel went to school that long-ago year in a new pair of jeans and with lots of money given to him by Billy Monk. Some said they saw him drinking from a quart of Captain Morgan rum one night. And he got in fights, once for no reason with the young Indian boy Markus Paul, because Markus refused to take twenty dollars he wanted to give away.

  5

  DORAN KEPT GOING OVER THINGS IN HIS MIND, AS IF SOME part of that mind had hidden something and he could not find it. No one knew why he had stopped filing stories. They thought he had been swayed by Joel into not saying anything. But he had refused to do what Joel wanted. But he did not tell them at work, for he knew no one would believe
him.

  “You were in Joel’s pocket,” one of the younger reporters said. When the managing editor passed him in the hall, he always looked away.

  So many were against him now, at work and everywhere else. So he lived in his own world just as Roger Savage must have. He tried to contact Mary Cyr, but couldn’t find her. And after a while he began to run—from everything that would remind him of who he was that summer, and of how silly and exploited he became.

  Then, about the time Amos started to review the case, the Old Man, Mr. Blair Cyr himself, came down from Quebec. He stayed in a hotel in a windswept, frozen area, in a room where he would seem to be out of place, but very much like the hotel rooms in which he had started his newspaper empire forty years before. He ate shrimp in his room and thought of what had happened. He drank mineral water and stared at the bleak bay water, now sullen and deep. He walked though the lobby, passing racks upon racks of his own papers with brooding regret.

  Then Doran and Mary Cyr were invited out to supper.

  Doran believed he was to be told to rewrite the story, look at it from another angle, and he would do so. He was nervous about it, but he understood he had to do it over. He believed that Mr. Cyr would ask him many questions dealing with all of this, and he would hand his notes and his tapes over (he had gotten them back) and Mr. Cyr would ask him to write more about it.

  Mary picked him up in the Jaguar, and shifted the gears with insistency as she spoke to him of unrelated topics.

  “Nice car,” he said.

  “You think?” she asked, shrugging. “It gets me where I’m going, I suppose.” She no longer wore the pendant.

  He still loved her, almost desperately. After he got his story going again, he hoped things would return between them.

  “You chopped your hair off,” Mary said.

  “Yes,” Doran said expectantly. But Mary said nothing more.

  He knew he was meeting with a man who could make or break his life, and from the first moment of their encounter in the quiet lobby with its insistently noncommittal music he was aware of a certain taciturn demeanour in Mr. Cyr that meant much more than one might think shaking hands.

  “I have the tapes back,” Doran said for some reason. “I mean, of my conversations with Chief Amos—those might help us.”

  Mr. Cyr simply went around him, on the way to the restaurant.

  Mr. Cyr did not ask for those tapes. Did not ask for anything, even a resignation. From the start he seemed to drive home another idea, and it was this: Cyr was not the enemy but the one who wanted change and a first-rate livelihood for the First Nations people. But even so, Doran’s stories had permitted—or overlooked—a certain kind of situation. They were too one-sided. If the stories had been done better, at least with more insight, maybe the catastrophe would have been averted. For people were saying in fact the stories promoted the very catastrophe. This is what the paper was now facing. Competing papers were taking them on, and men who had grudges against Cyr were relishing this. The headlines in other papers said as much. Most of the province was sick of the story now, so when Doran mentioned re-investigating, Cyr just stared at him blankly. For Doran did not seem to realize that everyone wanted him investigated—no one else.

  Cyr shrugged and looked at his menu for a bit. Then, after talking for ten minutes to his granddaughter about the sailboat, the closing of the cottage, the covering over of certain hedges and so on, he turned to Doran again, and as if just thinking of it, asked if anyone had wanted anyone else to be injured.

  “Of course not,” Max answered.

  “Therefore we did not want Mr. Savage to be injured either. The idea that he was a ‘common enough journeyman,’ as one article stated, did not mean that he should be injured.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, this is very strange—for the paper itself. This is what I have just spoken about today with my journalists,” he said. “To be more circumspect. For it seems”—and here he took out Doran’s articles—“that you hoped for someone to be injured. You seemed to delight in lessening Mr. Savage—well, him as a human being. Until it did not seem important that he wasn’t protected.”

  That statement froze Doran. He could not believe Mr. Cyr had said this. It was not true—it wasn’t true. All his life he would believe it wasn’t true. But he was now in a position where the truth did not matter at all—for people were after him.

  Mr. Cyr looked at Doran quietly, intently, and what is more, with a power Doran had never, ever felt before, except perhaps with Isaac Snow.

  “What about the big hedge out front?” Mary asked.

  “Wasn’t that burned a little?”

  “Yes, it was a bit,” Doran answered for her, although suddenly it seemed inappropriate.

  “What do you think of this circumspection, Max?” Mr. Cyr asked.

  “I wanted to arrive at the truth,” Doran said. “When I realized I couldn’t, I stopped filing. But I’m willing to file again. I can travel up there next week. I was thinking—”

  Mary looked at him a second and then glanced away, to the large plaque on the wall, as if suffering suddenly from some kind of personal injury.

  Mr. Cyr picked up his glass of sparkling water to drink, still holding some articles crumpled in his left hand, a hand that in this light seemed large and blue. And it became evident—more so than anything else—that Mr. Cyr had been the one to allow every article Doran had written, and kept waiting for him to turn it about. That was what the phone call was about. And the managing editor who no longer looked his way had vouched for him.

  “You had to continue to file,” Mr. Cyr said, his eyes suddenly mirthful because he found it so incredulous. “You had to—that was the time to file—that was the only time! The Globe did not have the story. The Star did not have the story. No Sun had it. We had it!!”

  “I didn’t think I could,” Doran said, “and keep my respect at that moment.”

  “But you had to file—that was where your self-respect began and ended!” Mr. Cyr smiled. And one more time he held up the clipped articles in his large left hand—which now seemed so much like a part of the indictment.

  “As I say, I did not think I could.”

  Mary said, quite suddenly, “I wish someone had been brave enough to get the real story. That’s what I was waiting for all summer long—someone to come in and just get it right.” She looked intently at her grandfather, as if this statement could be made as true as any of her others, as long as she said it suddenly and said it without losing her dreamy tone. To her, therefore, the summer, like so much else in her life, never really existed.

  That is, truth and falseness had become distinctly inseparable, and Doran felt exactly as Roger Savage must have. Mary Cyr had simply changed sides. Being the granddaughter, she was allowed to do so.

  As if feeling the weight of her own betrayal, she got up and left him sitting alone with her grandfather.

  “I could redo the story—I mean, look at it all again—get a different perspective. I could make sure of it—do one, no, two major pieces!”

  Mr. Cyr looked at him with the same incredulity as before, and Doran did not know what else to say.

  Doran had acted extremely decently in the end, but he could not say this now.

  He saw the first snowflakes fall outside and blur the land, and sat in silence. He felt a sudden sweat over his body like a haze.

  Mary came back to the table much later, after her plate of fries was cold. She spoke to her grandfather of leaving now, of going back to school in Toronto.

  “That will be fine,” Mr. Cyr said.

  Mary smiled.

  Doran pretended it would be wonderful too.

  What Doran did not know until that day was how exclusive this story was—how Mr. Cyr had gone along with the managing editor and chosen him personally for the story. Now Cyr felt he had been let down by them both.

  That is, Doran had had to get it right, without knowing Mr. Cyr had chosen him personally or that he
had to get it right.

  So from this point on, just as Savage had been, like a lawyer who botches a once-in-a-lifetime case, Doran was to be vilified. And the reason was Roger Savage’s mother—penitent and justifiably angered by his death. The paper could be sued. She had hired a prominent lawyer from Toronto whose name Cyr feared. Everyone was running for cover, as people tend to. But much of the public was sick of them all.

  “You are all whores!” someone shouted one night as Doran was leaving the office. Still, the policy and direction of the paper were ultimately Blair Cyr’s. Cyr had made a drastic mistake that could easily have been hidden if it had not led to death. False reporting, and the wounds it creates, is often forgotten. Now, lawyers were looking over Mr. Doran’s articles, and Cyr was trying to stop this. That is why, he decided, Doran could not write anything else for him—ever again.

  Cyr had written two editorials that contradicted his own reporter. And he had secretly been behind the promotion of the young journalist Gordon Young, whom Doran so resented, to managing editor and the dismissal of the one who had recommended Doran. This had happened in the days before the dinner with Doran.

  Then Cyr had telephoned his granddaughter.

  “Let’s have dinner with that Doran fellow—Yes, I have to meet him—You know I agreed to him in part because of you. By the way, no need for him to get dressed up.”

  Mary caught the inflection and said nothing more. But she knew getting dressed up was required of her.

  For no matter how independent she was, no matter if she was able to smoke marijuana in Amsterdam or bare her breasts on a beach in southern France, eighty thousand dollars a year could be cut off with the snap of a finger.

  In November, Doran was asked to go back to writing obits for seven months. He thought about it and declined. So he was let go by the new young managing editor. But this was not how it was stated. He was allowed to resign.