Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

by David Adams Richards

  The birds were a present from his nephew.

  “Oh? Who’s that?” Markus asked one afternoon. “I mean, your nephew?”

  “Brice Peel,” George said.

  Markus nodded quickly and said nothing for a time. He gave another terse nod and his face flushed. He fed Morrissey some yogurt with a spoon.

  George told Markus he had taken it upon himself to rewire his room for a computer last winter and had short-circuited the entire hotel and put everyone in the dark. People were banging on his door, he said. “George, you get out here, you crazy son of a bitch!”

  “They were some upset about that,” George said. So he was worried about his funeral, and whether those at the hotel would go. It made him very anxious to think they might not attend because they were still angry at him.

  “I’ll see that they do,” Markus promised.

  “I’ll need six pallbearers too, and I don’t know where they’ll come from.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  “Would you mind being one?”

  “Honoured!”

  “And I wouldn’t mind someone buying a toast and drinking to me.”

  “I’ll do that too.”

  “That’s about all I’d want.” George smiled lamely at this. He had come and gone like a shadow the last fifteen years. The ships and their livelihood had gone from the river for good. All that internecine play in the holds and at water level, over who worked or did not work, the rows over who got on and who didn’t, did not matter one bit now.

  After a time, George gave Markus the key to his hotel room.

  Markus would go to this room, on the second floor of the hotel, and feed George’s budgies. There was no light. The place was dank and musty. A plaque on the mirror was for a softball team George once had been part of, as assistant manager or coach. His discoloured window looked over a gravel lot with an oil barrel and a shed. Ice had by now crept into the puddles. There were two pornographic tapes, Pumping Irene and Little Oral Annie, on the windowsill.

  “Quien es?” Markus thought. When he went back to the hospital he told Morrissey that everyone was somehow in the same position over the miscarriage of justice that had happened so long ago. Then he quoted William James: “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

  Whether George understood this, Markus did not know.

  “When Joel died I had to go and identify the body,” Markus said. “Not one of the warriors or anyone else went to his funeral. By then, at the end, they even stopped him from going to see Isaac. He got thirty-four thousand or something from the lawsuit, and two months later he was walking along the highway, not enough for a taxi.”

  Then he said: “I can solve the second case—if you help me solve the first, Mr. Morrissey.”

  “If you solve the second case, I will tell you about the envelope I got from Brice,” George whispered.

  “Oh—the envelope. Well, in point of fact you have just told me.”

  3

  ONE AFTERNOON, TWENTY-ONE YEARS AFTER THE DEATHS of Hector Penniac and Roger Savage and Little Joe Barnaby, the smell of cold salt and tar coming from the shore, Isaac Snow sat in his comfortable chair in the living room of his house with the door open and evening coming on. He had a Jacuzzi and a swimming pool. He had a corkboard on which articles that had been written about him, and tributes given him, were posted. Behind his house there was a huge lawn that ran back to a large hardwood ridge where many an outbuilding sat. There was a smell of newness and lime on the land, even in the side lane. All of this suggested Isaac’s status now.

  He saw Markus Paul coming to the door.

  “Hello!” he yelled out as the younger man entered. “Hide the drugs—the cops are here!” he shouted. “Come in and see me.” His voice was that of a man used to having his way.

  Isaac half stood and reached out his hand in a laboured way, holding his body up while his other hand clutched the armrest. That very movement, impeded as it was, showed him to once have been strong and resilient, and since the death of his father intent on winning back for the natives their identity. Markus shook Isaac’s hand quickly and sat down when the hand beckoned him to do so.

  “What’s the honour?” Isaac asked with sudden mock gravity.

  “Nothing—come to see how you were,” Markus said. “You’ve given up your band meetings.”

  “Just until I get back on my feet,” Isaac said.

  He asked Markus if he would like a beer.

  “No, not today,” Markus said.

  “Diet?”

  “Diet.” Markus smiled. In fact, he was thinking that this was the first thing he remembered Isaac saying to him—“Beer?”—the night he had visited Isaac’s house after Hector’s funeral. Isaac had said: “Come on, yer grandfather won’t mind.” It was the first beer Markus had ever drunk.

  “Do you ever think of Joel?” Markus asked now.

  Isaac looked at him a second.

  “Ah, poor Joel … The booze, eh—you think?”

  That summer was never mentioned anymore. There had been numerous investigations, and they had all been closed for lack of witnesses.

  But now that it had all quieted down—now that the world had gone on by twenty-one years, and so much was forgotten—perhaps it was time to revisit these things. Yet why him, why Markus Paul? Why not someone else? It was as if in the entire world of comfort and relative ease a man suddenly chooses to go away and protect a bit of jungle from criminals, or to take on the mob.

  Perhaps he would be called a traitor.

  Still, Markus reasoned, he had known many traitors in his life, some of them white and some of them First Nations, and he was not about to pick one kind over the other.

  Isaac was loved and honoured now.

  He had addressed convocations and been honoured by the Premier, just the year before, with the Order of New Brunswick. He had been given an honorary doctorate by Saint Michael’s. All the academics tried to get their picture taken with him, for their proxy fight for justice. Isaac was to receive the Order of Canada. He told Markus this and smiled. “I’m a bona fide saint!”

  Markus smiled.

  Markus had not come to talk about the lumber boat and the death of Hector Penniac. That was another matter. This visit was about Roger. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he said.

  “Go ahead!”

  Markus lit a cigarette and looked out the window. He had come about the rifle that had killed Little Joe Barnaby. There was something he had been trying to remember—and he’d remembered it when he looked at the bullet fragment taken from Billy the Kid.

  “Quien es?”

  All of a sudden Markus had realized what he had witnessed when he was eight years old.

  He remembered his father, David, that night deer hunting, angry because he had picked up the wrong bullets and had tried for over an hour to fit them into his rifle.

  David had .30-30 bullets that night—and a .32 Winchester rifle. That is, two rifles, two bullets, almost identical—almost.

  It was on the tip of Markus’s tongue to bring up Hector Penniac, but Isaac looked at him as if to say, I know.

  Or at least this is what Markus thought. He shrugged and smiled slightly.

  Isaac said: “It is something I still think about—all of them.” He said it softly, as if he had mellowed into his situation now. “Even poor Roger—holding out over something so insane. Losing his girl, and his life—over a drop of logs that might well have been an accident.”

  He was silent a moment, took his feet out of his slippers and then slipped them back in again. Then he said, staring at his slippers:

  “Little Joe—you know when he played peewee hockey he was never able to score a goal? So I went to the players one day when he wasn’t there and I said, in a big speech, ‘Boys, now you know Little Joe is out with an injury to his big toe and won’t be back for two games, but he has never scored a goal—so wouldn’t it be nice if you guys could try to set him u
p, get the puck to him, so he could score one goal—so he could look back and say after his career is over, “I scored a goal when I played hockey”?’ And, Markus, they all looked at me for a long time and said, ‘Mr. Snow, we have been trying to do that since the start of the year—we have been doing all we can! Every game, we say: “Let’s set up Little Joe, let’s get Little Joe the puck.” Even the goalie is in on it and says, “I will stand out of the way to let him score—if you allow us an even up.” But it just doesn’t happen. It’s an impossibility, Mr. Snow. He misses the passes or shoots wide and falls down.’ ”

  Isaac said, “The little fellow never did get a goal. He always said he would next year, remember?”

  Markus nodded. His eyes welled. His lungs ached as he took a drag, and so he dragged deeper. Snow had started to fall. Snow would clear everything up. The bay would make ice, and in a sudden, incomprehensible reverie he trembled as he remembered his father and himself in happy times. They were going to build a smelt shed on the ice. They never did. His father had four medals from Vietnam, and left the Bronze Star to him.

  “Do you ever think of how it all happened to Roger Savage and Little Joe—I mean, if it could have happened in some other way than we think?”

  “Not too much anymore,” Isaac said now. “It was a bad thing—it got out of hand, but nothing can be done about it now.”

  “I suppose not,” Markus said. His father, David, had gone to Vietnam because he wanted to prove himself to Amos. It was easy to go. A First Nations man just went across the border to Maine. A different David had come home.

  “It’s all forgotten now—no one much remembers.”

  Markus shrugged. He looked at Isaac and said, “So many things have remained unanswered about all of this.”

  Isaac shrugged too, and then looked out the window as if contemplating something.

  After a pause, Markus, without knowing he would bring it up so soon, said, “Can I see the .30-30?”

  “What, my old .30-30? Why?”

  “I just want to show you something. I have a rifle in the car I want to show you too. And we will compare both rifles for a moment.”

  “Ah, I knew it—come to shoot me!” Isaac laughed.

  “No. I would be ashamed to lay a hand on a great man,” Markus said.

  Isaac shrugged as if he didn’t believe him or was embarrassed. He spoke to his wife in Micmac: “Bring out the old rifle in my closet—not the one in the case, the little one without the scope.”

  And as she went and got the rifle, Markus went outside and brought in the rifle that had belonged once to his father and then to Roger Savage. He held it lightly in his fingers like a man who knows rifles does.

  “This has been damaged,” he said. “But I polished it over and over, and cleaned it, and stroked it up. You see, it belonged to my dad—”

  “Amos?”

  “No, no—David. He used to take me hunting deer. Then it was given to Roger Savage. It was his weapon that night. I kept trying to think of something about it—but you see, it was all damaged, and they never took the time to even consider it wasn’t the weapon.”

  Markus took the .30-30 from Isaac’s wife, a dour, small woman who had never interfered with anything her husband did and whose reluctance to speak or be a party to life Markus had never understood.

  “Here,” he said. He took out two cartridges from his jacket pocket and stood them on the coffee table. “What do you see, Isaac?”

  “I see two bullets.”

  “The same calibre?”

  “Sure,” Isaac said.

  Markus handed the shells to him, and Isaac studied them. “Almost identical—.30-30?” he asked.

  “Yeah—almost identical,” Markus said. “Almost.”

  He took Isaac’s rifle. He fitted the first shell into the chamber, and then the second. Both fitted into the chamber.

  “You won’t believe why I became a police officer.”

  “To protect the nation,” Isaac said, partly as a question, partly as an answer.

  “Yes. But the reason—well, someone killed our dog when I was a boy. They did it because they disliked my family during the barricade. Old thing, lame and blind, had never done anything to anyone except wag its tail.”

  “Someone killed your dog,” Isaac said. He gave a slight start, and blushed.

  Markus nodded. He didn’t say anything else but kept almost mirthful eyes on Isaac, half-ashamed of having to mention such a thing in front of a person he considered a brave man. He took the second shell out of the rifle, and holding both of them in his hand, he handed the .30-30 back to Isaac and picked up Roger Savage’s rifle.

  “So that’s why you became RCMP,” Isaac said, his left hand trembling involuntarily.

  “That’s it,” Markus said. “In some ways I’m still looking for the man who killed my poor old dog because he disliked my poor old grandfather’s stand during the barricade. Anyway, both those bullets fit into the .30-30.”

  “Yes, they do,” Isaac said.

  Markus then picked up Roger Savage’s rifle and pulled the lever down.

  “This rifle, the one Roger had that night, lay away for twenty years, in the cellar of the RCMP office. And for twenty years I was sure something was amiss, but I was too stupid. Then I went down to Texas, and I saw some bullet fragments taken from Billy the Kid.”

  “Really—”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw bullets out of Billy the Kid.”

  “Yes—and suddenly it all made sense. Pat Garrett’s bullets made sense of a case a hundred years later. It made so much sense that I started to shake. I couldn’t stop shaking for three days. I was like a big baby. Well, that’s what Samantha called me anyway—a big baby—so I guess I am.”

  Markus took the two shells that both fit into Isaac’s .30-30. He put the first one in the chamber of Roger’s rifle, still with a cigarette in his mouth, and his eyes half closed because of the smoke, cradling the rifle in his arm, resting against his thighs.

  “This bullet fits?”

  “Yes, it does,” Isaac’s wife said suddenly, and quite convinced of something.

  There was another silence. Isaac and his wife watched Markus intently.

  Markus removed the shell, and very carefully took the second one, the one that had also fitted into Isaac’s rifle, and attempted to put it in the chamber of Roger’s rifle.

  It did not fit. He lifted it out, showed it to them, holding it up as if he were a magician, and then tried to put it in again.

  It did not fit.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Collette Snow asked, as if the magician’s trick was about to be revealed. She smiled suddenly, and in the flash of her smile was tension, as if this was a moment twenty-one years in the making. She looked at her husband, who glanced over at her.

  “Nothing is wrong,” Markus said. “But this second bullet is a .30-30 calibre, and it will not fit into the chamber of Roger’s beautiful little rifle because Roger’s rifle is a .32 Winchester. A .32 Winchester is almost identical to a .30-30, but it is not one. That was the difference between Dad’s rifle, this beautiful rifle which was given to Roger, and the other rifles around here. Roger had a .32, but almost everyone assumed it to be a .30-30.”

  He said this slowly, and looked about. In the corner was the article written by Mr. Max Doran: “Isaac Snow: Profile in Courage.”

  “What we need to know is that both a .30-30 shell and a .32 shell will fit into the chamber of a .30-30 rifle,” Markus said. “But the .30-30 shell will not fit into a .32 chamber. That is because the .30-30 shell is ever so slightly larger. Otherwise, both rifles are identical. Roger’s Winchester was damaged, and no one was smart enough to check it. But I have to ask, how could Roger Savage have fired a .30-30 bullet from a .32 Winchester into the stomach of poor Little Joe Barnaby when I have just shown it cannot fit?”

  “What does that mean, though?” Mrs. Snow asked.

  “Little Joe was killed with a .30-30. bullet.” Markus pu
t his cigarette into the ashtray. “That bullet couldn’t have been fired from Roger Savage’s .32. It had to come from a .30-30,” he said. “It had to come from the back of the house at the same time Roger was firing from the front of the house—Roger was firing into the air, because he wanted to hurt no one. Joel must have fired your rifle. He was really only trying to scare Roger, I am sure of it. He certainly was not trying to hit Little Joe—and didn’t realize he did. Maybe not for a year or two. Then it came to him suddenly, like a revelation. Though he couldn’t admit it—and within ten years he was dead of misery and shame. For Little Joe was his son.”

  He put down the Winchester on the hardwood floor as carefully as he could and picked up the .30-30. He took out a bullet fragment that he had taken from the evidence locker.

  “This is the .30-30 rifle that Joel had. Your rifle, Isaac. It killed Joe Barnaby,” he said, looking over at the man. “This is the rifle that killed my little friend—yes, sir! This is the .30-30 bullet that killed him.”

  “Why didn’t the dumb-as-dirt RCMP ever figure that out!” Isaac said.

  Markus looked at the rifle with a peculiar sense of self-affirmation.

  “Well, sir—well, sir—yes, sir, they just have,” Markus answered.

  Markus took Roger’s Winchester and went back to his car. He sat for a long time.

  Then suddenly he decided to go and visit Roger Savage’s grave because no one ever did.

  The grave was overgrown, at the edge of the trees. It didn’t have a tombstone, only a small marker, with the initials and dates: R.F.S October 5, 1962–August 31, 1985. He stared at it for ten minutes or more.

  Soon there would be whiteouts and a blizzard. The bay would be making ice.

  Milton, Markus Paul remembered from Paradise Lost, suggested that politics had started in hell—hell is where it became fashionable. In this hell, such as it was, people cozied up to ideas they didn’t even believe in—wrote columns about things they knew were false to promote an idea of justice they themselves didn’t share.