“Sure, if I take my meds and do my exercise, I will be okay.” Doran smiled. “But then, what cures a broken heart?”
Suddenly Markus wasn’t even sure why he had come, or why he was saying what he was. Doran tried to play host, offered him an Alpine, and tried to remember pleasant things about everyone, even about Joel and Andy. Sometimes he breathed heavily for no reason.
Doran asked about everyone, and hoped everyone was fine. But he knew the whole time that this visit had to do with the favour he’d promised Markus the night long ago when Markus had delivered him across the river. If he was here to collect, whatever he might want, Max was hoping to oblige him.
Yet Markus hesitated, because he knew that if Doran opened this envelope and then wrote a book—and told the truth—he would be sued and held in contempt by others. But, he decided, that was the chance he would have to take. So after a length of time, Markus decided to talk about what Doran might or might not want to acknowledge. It was a strange topic: the condition of their souls.
“What? The condition of our souls?” Max Doran said. “What do you mean?”
Yes, thought Markus, you go into a man’s house you have not seen in twenty-one years, carrying budgie birds, and suddenly begin to talk about the condition of the soul, when both of you look like you should be in hospital beds. He would take you for a lay preacher, a Pentecostal enabler, gone insane.
“Do you write anymore?” Markus asked. “What if I have come to collect the favour you promised at the river’s edge and ask you to write something fully and completely? Make you a great writer once again—”
“Oh no,” Doran said, “I just work at a call centre. I have a little girl to take care of—so here I am.” He smiled. “I can’t afford to write—who would take care of Heidi?” he asked, almost incredulous at the suggestion. But then he said, “I still have a book in me—if I could get it out. But it always seems to falter somehow.” He smiled wistfully, perhaps having said it in so many places and so many times, he did not believe it anymore himself. Perhaps he said it not to comfort himself but in some way to comfort Markus, just as he had comforted his little girl with the idea that he would someday write the book he spoke about (and had even, haltingly, started).
Markus wished the case he had spent so many years on could be over. And but for the idea of—well, it was strange one, but for the idea of sin, it would be over. This is what Markus said now.
For if something else had happened than what people think had happened, Markus said, then the case was not yet solved. The Bigot of the Bartibog did not really ever exist, just like old Mallory or those monsters of our youth on long walks home, and we must say he did not exist, for the memory not only of Roger but of gentle Hector Penniac and Little Joe. Other bigots might exist, and they are the ones who must be held accountable and come out from the shade of our youth to stand in the light and be recognized for who they are.
Doran simply said: “I’m getting a cold—I get one every fall.”
“I know,” Markus said, “but maybe you would like to do a real book—a book that you could really write. What do they call it—a blockbuster!”
They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Markus trying to think of something else to say and rubbing his face. He lit a cigarette. “I probably have cancer,” he said, “so I shouldn’t be smoking—find it hard to quit. So you with your heart and me with my lungs should quit together.”
Doran looked at him, startled. Markus winked. Then he took a book from his big pocket and put it on the table, his large hand almost covering the soft cover.
It was the Oxford University Press’s 1985 edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line. Markus had sometimes thought about the fact that perhaps it was being printed at the time the struggle over Roger Savage was happening on the river. But what he said to Doran was that it was a novel about the sea in the nineteenth century. “Have you read Conrad?” he asked.
“Too gloomy.”
“Well, let me say something about The Shadow Line.”
He spoke about this book for a while, for about a half-hour. He had read it in his youth just after Amos died. And it was about youth who are for the first time confronted with the harsh reality of the world—events that will turn idealism around, like a becalmed ship. It is a very funny book too, in an absurdist way, Markus said, and he trusted people more who understood that, and thought less of people who did not. He paused for a while, not knowing what else to say.
Then he said, “This is what happened—in our case. The contest was not between Roger Savage and us. That was the secondary show, the secondary battle. The primary war was between you and you, or me and me, or my grandfather and my grandfather. Isaac against Isaac. Joel against Joel.” He was almost whispering now. “That is a strange thing. It was The Shadow Line—and suddenly truth became untruth, and we encountered sin. If we even believe in sin.”
“Believe in what?”
“In sin—believe in sin. Do you believe in sin?”
“I—I—don’t know. I suppose I have to in some way.”
“Oh, well—I do, too,” Markus said. “Now more than ever.”
He continued: “Joel Ginnish is dead. He was killed in 1997. Amos is dead. Mrs. Francis is dead. Andy, my friend who killed my old dog, is dead.” Then he whispered, choking up: “If we waited until everyone died, would that be better?”
Doran shrugged. “I do not know, Markus,” he said quietly. But he was saying “I do not know” because he had been running from wanting to know for many years.
“It is up to you,” Markus said, “to find out. I can give you the start of the book, but you have to collaborate with someone, and you have to say, even to your daughter—even to her—that you made a mistake and that may have caused a life to be taken, and that is a terrible duty for us to get right. Me and you, we have to get it right—to get rid of the sin. We will be partners, okay?” He smiled. His lips trembled slightly, and his voice faltered. “White man and red—partners, okay?” Then he took the envelope, placed it down beside the Conrad book. He took out a pen and his little notebook.
“I am going to give you his address. He won’t know you are going to phone him or want to see him—if you do—if you decide to do so. He won’t want to talk to you, maybe. But I’m going to leave it up to you and him. Then you have to decide to finish the story the way it should have been done years ago. I am putting my confidence in you that you will decide to finish this story now—for me and for you. To keep the promise you made to me years ago.”
He put the piece of paper in Doran’s hand. “Not in spite of your child but for her sake—and not in spite of my reserve but for its sake. It will be very hard on you if you do this. I of course will need the envelope back, no matter what you decide.”
Markus stood, and went toward the door. He was tired, and his ribs and his lungs hurt. The little girl came out to say goodbye. He saw her energetic bright face and thought of Little Joe Barnaby—and a dozen other little boys and girls in that adobe village in Chile. He patted her head with his large hand and bent and kissed her cheek, and placed an American silver dollar in her hand.
6
IT WAS BEFORE MARKUS LEFT SAINT JOHN REGIONAL THAT they came to see him.
He was in a sitting room looking out over the hills in the distance, beyond where the Bay of Fundy must have been. It was cold and he could feel this cold through the window. He wore a hospital gown and huge slippers and was drinking a bottle of iced tea. He had a nicotine patch on his upper right arm. He had had the biopsy. He had not had a cigarette in a week (well, one). He heard the elevator door open. Behind him, as always in hospitals in mid-afternoon, it was still dark, and the corridors were filled with pushcarts, filled with levels of things, and somewhere there was the sound of a telephone ringing, and somewhere else some man speaking.
He turned, and Max Doran and Brice Peel were standing there, Brice with the letter in his hand.
For some reason Max had his hand on Brice’s neck, as if to guide hi
m forward, an action that may have been required more for Max Doran than for Brice—a kind of civil mentoring that he was now obligated and determined to fulfill. They had brought back the envelope.
“You have to read this,” Doran said. “You are the one he wanted to bring it to. I don’t know how to prove it, that’s all. But I will do nothing until you do prove it, and then I will write what I have to—that’s my pledge. I will file the damn story!” Here his lips trembled slightly with determination and dignity.
Then Brice handed the envelope to Markus, with his arm pushed straight out. Brice looked at him like a scared bird might. He was still little Brice with the big ears and thin, knobby knees, a rural boy caught up in a world no longer rural. Just like the First Nations world, too.
Markus suddenly remembered a pathetic old dog licking his hand one night—and looked down at his wrist, to see the scar from the rabbit snare he had got when he was thirteen. They’d killed that dog with rocks. Even when they were throwing the rocks, it had tried to wag its burr-covered tail.
He said he would read the letter, and act upon it, but not that day. He would go back home before he did. He would wait for the right moment.
Markus did not get back home for another week. The spot on his left lung was benign. The one on his right lung was not a spot in the lung, but blood outside the lung itself that had coagulated after he had been hit in the ribs in a brawl one night.
The unopened letter was in his possession and the weather had turned cold. Snow was falling and the world was white and even, the roads to and from long and almost forgotten. This little place, this little reserve, was at the end of nowhere at all.
He snared a rabbit, skinned it off and left it hanging over the sink. He was chopping onions and carrots to make a stew when he decided to phone Isaac.
“When do you get your Order of Canada?” he said.
“Next week.” Markus didn’t speak.
“Why?” Isaac asked.
“I would like you to get it,” he said. “I think you deserve it.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you ever visited your father’s grave?” Markus asked.
“No—I never did.”
“I suggest you find time to visit it, and request the body be brought home. I seriously suggest you visit Roger Savage’s grave—and say a prayer.”
There was a pause on the other end. Markus hung up without saying goodbye.
All the goodbyes save one had been said.
That night, alone in his apartment, Markus opened the letter, sitting on the couch in the living room with a beer on the table and his arms on his knees. He realized as he opened the letter that he was unfolding an event from long ago that had caused everything since. That had caused Amos’s heartbreak, and his own—and Sky’s. He stared at it a long time, looked at the number of pages, and then found his reading glasses.
Then he took a drink of beer. He finished the beer and went to the kitchen and opened another. Then he went back to the couch and sat in the exact same position.
It was written in Brice’s hand, and filled with spelling mistakes. This is what it said:
The first thing Brice wrote was that he remembered Roger coming into the yard ten minutes late, just as Hector Penniac was climbing the gangplank. Roger ran down to the yard and was out of breath when he got there. It was Hector’s first boat. No one was sure if he could handle it. So they put him in the fourth hold with Bill Monk and his brother, Topper. Brice’s father was the other man in the hold—he was in the cubby below. The other two, Bill and Topper, would move forward at the end of the day to the middle hold. That is why Roger hung around. He was hoping that when the fourth hold was full his seniority would give him another day and a half. (And that is why he had sent the extra load to the fourth hold instead of hooking to the third—to fill the fourth hold faster.)
Hector had fine hands and delicate features but he was willing to work, and he offered gum to everyone just after he had climbed down the ladder. The name Lutheran was written on the inside of that hold for some reason, and Brice remembered it years later. He remembered the bulwark was painted brown instead of green as it was along the other holds. He remembered, too, how insufferably hot the day became—which made people only wonder why Roger was hanging around, and then allowed an accusation when he hooked to the fourth hold. Topper was hungover as well, and Bill Monk was in a hurry to get the fourth hold done and move on, and so he took some amphetamines that he had on him in order to work at a faster pace. There were two water buckets in the hold, one on the left, the other on the right, nearer the cubby where his father, Angus Peel, worked.
Brice remembered that some of the men were talking about the stag film Little Oral Annie that George Morrissey had, and how she sucked good cock. Bill Monk said he had problems with his stomach the last week. That is when Brice remembered Hector said he was going to be a doctor and maybe Bill Monk shouldn’t take so many amphetamines. They didn’t like this comment, especially Bill Monk, and felt it a presumption to have an Indian talk to them about being a doctor. But Hector with his refined manners did not know he had made a mistake, crossing the line talking about civil matters to uncivil men. What was more troubling is the conversation had started because Bill Monk was worried about his own doctor telling him he had to take a certain kind of pill for his stomach. It was in some way an intrusion on his own limited knowledge.
So when Hector moved too soon to pulp hook a log and it dropped near Topper’s boot, Topper gave him a shove, a small, unpleasant but un-noteworthy one.
“Watch that, sweetie pie,” he said, “or you’ll need a doctor before you become one.”
“A medicine man,” Angus Peel erupted from down in the cubby. They all laughed.
Hector smiled and offered an apology, but when Bill Monk asked why he said “sweetie pie,” Topper answered, “Everyone knows he’s a fruity boy—that’s what Joel Ginnish tells us.”
“That’s not true,” Hector said.
“But it is—it’s what a dozen of yer Indians told me,” Topper said. “Yer a fruity pie!—trying to fruit them all the time.”
Topper wished to make no more of this, except Bill Monk said, “Then he can drink no water of mine out of my bucket.”
And Topper shrugged and said, “Why is that?”
“Well, Hector is the big doctor—big medicine man—telling us all what to do! Ridiculing me for what I do! So I want no AIDS-ridden Indian slobbering over my water—not with that AIDS. I ain’t drinkin’ from the same bucket as a foul-mouth Indian,” Bill said, his eyes mirthfully cold. He looked to the others and nodded, and they did too. Hector smiled clumsily and said only that none of that was true.
“That’s right,” Angus Peel said, in order to show his complicity, because he himself had never belonged to anything—and so it started. What was at first a joke became by 9:50 a matter of civic responsibility for these three wonderful men, and they kept taking turns to guard the buckets. Hector tried to go without, and tried to suck the liquid out of his gum, but by 10:30 he was unable to open his mouth.
As the morning wore on, and as the work increased, Bill took off his shirt and worked in a T-shirt, which showed his arms to be as taut as iron and his eyes as blue as steel. The smell of wood and human sweat permeated the hold.
“No man who sucks dick will get a drink out of my bucket,” Brice heard above after Hector asked for water. Hector again said that was not true.
Brice Peel was ordered then to lower buckets to only one of the two Monk brothers.
“Maybe then youse the fruit,” Hector said to Bill Monk, and this enraged him. Hector kept working, and kept trying to get to a bucket to get water, at first playfully, but as the morning became hotter his quest became more and more urgent. He said he would go up the ladder, but they told him climbing out was a dangerous thing when loads were coming and he would never be allowed on another boat. And he needed to work them.
“Not only that, but no other Indian will get a uni
on card—I’ll see to it!” Bill Monk said.
So Brice, watching this, and trembling because his own father was caught up in this, said, “Just a minute, Hector.”
He ran down the gangplank and searched in the yard near the scales for another bucket. There he heard his uncle George Morrissey say he had to take a piss, and for Roger to snap the next load after the backhoe came by. And there seemed to be no worry about it.
By now, the men believed their unjust behaviour was somehow commendable and hilarious—and the three of them in the hold swore that Hector would not be allowed to drink if he had AIDS, and he as a “doctor” should understand that.
“You of all people should know,” Bill Monk kept saying, “a medicine man like you is!”
By eleven that morning Hector could not spit, his mouth was so dry.
It was about eleven-fifteen in the morning when Roger hooked, and it was then, as the load was lifted into the hold, that Hector realized his chance, because the men had all gone to the same side. He ran under the load to take a drink.
“Don’t you let him, Topper!” Bill said.
So Topper, determined he would not drink from his bucket, tried to knock it from his mouth when he lifted it. He ran to that side, and in a careless moment swung the pry bar in his hand. His wide overhand swing missed the bucket entirely and hit Hector in the forehead, and the boy was dead before he hit the ground. Cigarettes he had offered everyone, and the gum, too, fell from his shirt pocket. He lay still as the load came down.
There was only a bit of blood and bruising on his forehead, and a bit of missing scalp.
It had all started as a joke, just an hour or two before.
The men ran to the load, unhooked the cable at about five feet from the ground and put the load over Hector. When they looked up into the sunlight above, they saw little Brice Peel with the third water bucket that he had gotten out of kindness looking down in resolute terror.
They yelled up that the load had dropped and the clamp was unhooked—they yelled there was a man under it, and for someone to come and help.
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Page 28
