Read Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Online
Authors: David Adams Richards
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (3 page)
He looked out the back window across the flat, dry field, across the small pit props that rested black against the sky on this humid day, dead like soldiers, and at the back door of Hector’s house, where there was some wash on the line, and an old wash pot overturned, and upstairs a dry curtain and a broken window. He saw Hector’s older sister open the door and enter so quickly it was hard to believe he had just seen her. Silence again. Then the sound of a fly buzzing against the window.
He stood and took the Skilsaw and began to cut the two-by-four for the last section of the back room he was redoing. When he stopped cutting, with the fine sawdust on his arms he sat and thought: “They are already thinking—I mean some—that it was set up. How could I ever do that to anyone?”
“Why did I hook on?” he said bitterly. “Everything was all right before.”
From his youth he had prosecuted the world only on his own terms and had learned no talent to solve problems when the world turned against him. He was a loner, and most often those who turned against him were not alone.
He washed his arms and face with turpentine and water, removing the paint and sawdust, and went along the back road with the high pines, all the way to the grave. The gate seemed to swing along its arc too fast when he opened it, and Roger stopped for a moment and tightened the hinge with his powerful fingers. Then he went down and stood before the mound of dirt. He was in the little Micmac graveyard with old graves crumbling from the 1840s.
He had never been off the river in his life and probably had never thought that he would have a crisis placed before him like the mound of dirt. Like many boys he had thought that his life would be very exciting by being like everyone else’s. And what in the world was wrong with that? Many people who labelled him old-fashioned ended up doing what he had done to begin with.
He went back home and the night was sweet, but the trees blew in the wind and the smell of cold sand came up from the bay and the twizzle-shaped seeds fell from those trees in front of his yard—the one he had been so proud of in the years gone by.
Perhaps Roger loaded it there and then. That is, his rifle.
M
ARKUS
P
AUL HAD NEVER FORGOTTEN THE CASE, HAD NEVER
solved it.
He had been a policeman since 1992. And people told him he surmised too much. Certainly he drank too much. In late August, wherever he was, he would begin to think of things that had happened that summer of 1985 and he would long to go back to his reserve.
He remembered that day he and Little Joe Barnaby had gone fishing. He had put the biggest worm on the smallest boy’s hook and set the line down in the best rip, and Little Joe took his shoes off and wiggled the line up and down, waiting for the trout to strike. Markus went up on a limb of the spruce above him and watched the shadows of the pool.
“There there there,” Markus would whisper, “it’s coming it’s coming—now!”
But the trout would pass by, or skim away, and the water would become still. There was a smell of spruce gum in the trees, and the pulpy smell of warm air travelling in the branches. Little birds hopped on small dead twigs a few feet away.
“Will I ever never ever be able to catch a trout?” Little Joe said later.
“Sure you will,” Markus said as they walked back up the road in the white twilight with bugs flitting over their heads. “Here, do you want to carry mine for a while?”
“I don’t want to kill them,” Little Joe said, holding the trout, his socks sticking out of his pockets. “I want to catch them and eat them.”
“That’s the best policy,” Markus had said. He still remembered the warm air, and the scent of warm spruce gum, and the birds hopping.
Behind them Markus’s girlfriend, Sky Barnaby, was listening to the older girls talking—they whispered about Much Fun. It was a fine and dreamy night. The waves washed on the shore when they got down to the bay, and someone saw a shooting star.
Once, when Markus was in South America as part of the bodyguard for the Governor General and her entourage, he found himself visiting the adobe villages of the natives in the hills outside Santiago and crying. He did not know why, and would never be able to tell you why. But he sat on a stump in a yard filled with children and broke into tears. A strange thing to see, this man, six foot three, who was a native man like the villagers were—and yet all those children simply made him cry. A little girl with a big hat and huge earrings came over to him and took his hand gently, smiling.
Some nights he had to stay up late, for the Governor General and her entourage were celebrating something, and he would look up at the Chilean sky and count the stars.
“Amos, they aren’t the same stars anymore,” he would say.
He had his black belts in two disciplines. And you could insult him and he would laugh. Or shrug. Or like his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend you could call him a big baby and he would nod and say yes.
He had married young, a white woman—young Samantha Dulse—but that did not last, even though they were still friendly and she probably still loved him, and then he had a native girlfriend, whom he did not love enough. In fact, he did not love either of them enough. He loved Sky Barnaby. He had always loved Sky Barnaby, from the time he was fifteen. But she was wild too, and had knifed a man in a fight downriver in 2000. It didn’t kill the man. But Markus had lost touch with her. It all seemed so long ago.
His own people disliked him. The whites distrusted him too, and
like his grandfather Amos he was morally on his own. So Markus often thought of Amos. On the trip to Chile a man, drunk on too much champagne, tried to intercept Her Excellency—and Markus reached his hand out and grabbed him by the collarbone and quietly caused him some pain for a second. Her Excellency did not notice. It wasn’t much—but it ruined the evening for him. He had been invited to dine with some Chilean native men, but now he felt he could not leave Her Excellency at that time, and so declined.
“I will not leave the building until Her Excellency does,” he said.
He stood near her for three more hours, and got back to his room without having eaten a thing. He took off his shirt and looked at the reflection of the tattoo on his upper chest. It read:
Sky
.
It was the anniversary of Little Joe’s death. He had not thought of it until he looked at the reflection of the tattoo. He blessed himself and said a prayer, and thought of the graveyard in Canada, in the Maritimes, on the Miramichi, so far away.
“I didn’t mean to get Little Joe killed,” he called to Sky one night in 1992, when she was far up the road. “I didn’t—mean to—” It was in the winter and he stood by the trees, snow coming down over him almost all night long.
“You should have joined the military,” a Canadian sergeant, also part of the bodyguard, had said to him that night in Santiago.
“Yes, well, it is something, isn’t it, sir,” he said.
“What is something?”
“That people like you and me will never be liked and almost always be needed.”
After that they did what Canadian men everywhere do. They didn’t speak of racism or the global war—they spoke of hockey. For what in hell else was there, really, except the precarious balance and the fire dance on ice?
1
M
ARKUS’S GRANDFATHER
A
MOS
P
AUL
HAD BEEN A SMALL
, wiry, happy-go-lucky man who travelled all over the province to powwows, and had the respect of everyone. He played bingo, and tried to get businesses to donate money and commodities to his reserve. He had started a toys-for-tots program at the supermarkets in Chatham and Newcastle, and made sure three or four native children were sent to camp each summer from the Tim Hortons sponsor. Being chief and wearing the bright vest of the chief was a grand thing. Until now.
Amos was very bothered by the case of Hector Penniac. Something might happen, and he could foresee it. He must take his reserve’s side. Yet he believed that he must protect Roger Savage if Roger had done nothing wrong. But little by little the idea that he
had
done something wrong began to infiltrate the thoughts of his friends and colleagues and made it seem as if the ingrained hatreds of the past were again haunting all of them.
“However,” Amos would answer these people as he walked home from church with his missal tucked up under his arm, “no one is sure, are they?”
Markus realized now, years later, that he himself had felt shame when he heard this, and a deep betrayal. The betrayal came because most of the reserve wanted Roger Savage’s confession, and most wanted his old house torn down and a lodge put up to perhaps bring in sports
fishers. Roger’s place hampered this because it sat directly in front of the pools over which Roger claimed riparian rights. Now no one wanted to blame Roger in order to get this house and these pools, but no one was foolish enough not to know that if he was blamed, this house and these pools would be easier to access.
Everyone wanted this, and Markus’s grandfather himself became an inhibitor of this. Markus knew he should have trusted his grandfather more back then, and years later, in 2006, he was spurred on because of how his grandfather had been treated.
For many had felt that a real chief, someone like Isaac Snow, could get Roger’s pools for them and confiscate his house. Not for the little recreation centre that old Amos wanted, but for a big lodge for rich white men to come and pay money to fish. When asked by some of Markus’s young friends what he would do about all of this, Amos only said: “The rec centre is what I am concentrating on now. To get that done—the rest will blow over. The school is built here and we have two Micmac instructors. Why, we are the first nation in the province to have this happen.” He smiled, delighted, and then frowned. “But this other stuff—well, who can say it was more than an accident? Do you remember Roger Savage doing anything that was even close to this? I know he had trouble and got in fights at dances—but, well, that was different. Besides, the police have taken him in three times now, and have brought him back. If they wanted to charge him they would have. We will have to let the police decide.” And he smiled once more.
“But they don’t want to charge him because he is white,” some said.
Amos did not choose to answer this. He simply shrugged. He knew this was not true. If not because of Hector, then because of where the load itself had dropped. No, it was dangerous to all concerned in the hold, the white men as well as Hector, so they would charge him if they had to.
But to Joel Ginnish, who had tried to be patient, it seemed Amos was afraid that if he made a ruckus he would not get the recreation centre built—and that was the reason for his silence. Some also believed he was afraid to call people racist.
Markus, pondering the case for years, would remember how he himself had acted.
“But there are racists,” Markus told his grandfather—somewhat condescendingly.
“Oh, son, yes, I know,” Amos said. But he said he was not thinking of Roger Savage when he thought this, nor was he thinking only of white men.
Markus remembered, because everyone was saying how deliberately Roger had set Hector up, that he felt his grandfather was a fool. And everyone said that Isaac Snow would take care of it for them. And Joel Ginnish would do what he had to do. That to spite the old man, no one wanted the recreation centre now.
The idea of the old chief vacillating put more pressure upon Hector’s family—his father, his mother and his mother’s elderly wheelchair-bound uncle—to accept the condolences of some of the men who now wanted their attention, or at least wanted to use the death of Habisha’s son for attention. (That this could not be stated shows how sensitive the subject was.) What was unfortunate was that Habisha knew that some of the very men offering condolences had teased Hector the most, and that on more than one occasion she had to tell them to leave him alone. That he was different. Once some of the boys had painted Hector’s ears blue as a joke.
She also knew her first-born, Joel Ginnish, was a terrifying presence in her house, but Isaac was invited by Joel to visit them often during those days, and he saw the scale of their pain and their gratitude to him.
As for Joel, he had never gotten along with Hector’s father, his stepfather, and they often came to a tussle, and he had been put out of the house many times in the dead of winter. Joel never forgot this, or anything else. But if it was not for Hector’s death, he wouldn’t have been allowed back on the reserve, for the band had tried to expel him. His
new status, his revised status, his rehabilitation all came because of the death of Hector. This was also something subtle and unspoken.
Habisha felt guilty about this whenever she looked at her first-born, with his toss of wild hair and glittering eyes, and believed that she in some way had undermined his life by remarrying too soon after his own father’s death. When she tried her best to apologize now, he looked at her and shrugged.
“I’m here to help you, Mom, that’s the only reason I am back” was all he said to her. But he never glanced at his stepfather—and the strange feeling in him now, akin to giddiness, was that he would prove himself to his mother come what may. That he would do what he had to do. That this was his one chance to take on the world.