Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (16 page)

A few years later, in the fall of 1989, at the library on a university campus, Markus was reading about Amos Paul—though the writer wouldn’t have known it. Markus was reading a stanza from the poem “Self-Dependence,” by Matthew Arnold, and suddenly, looking into the October sun high in the sky that fresh afternoon, he thought about his grandfather, and was filled with terrible emotion in this half-cool place of racks and almost forgotten books.

“Where is Roger’s rifle?” he had written when watching television on September 11, 2001.

And now, five years later, he asked himself this question again.

A
MOS
P
AUL HAD LIVED SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS
(
IN FACT, HE
had had his birthday just before this trouble with Roger Savage started) and by now believed a terrible crime had been committed. Yet he did not know who to turn to. He might turn to Max Doran, but he felt that Doran would not believe him. So he stayed in his garden and looked after his vegetables and patted his dog and walked about Sobeys looking for bargains and stood in the mall and spoke to old men who remembered him from the war years. But he did not know who to say anything to.

The crime, he believed, had taken place inside the hold, involving one or two men who had told the others to be quiet. In the small hold at the rear there were only four people, Hector and three white men. So that made him question things. It was hot and miserable in the hold, and tempers might have flared inside instead of outside on the dock.

“How can you be so sure?” Markus asked.

Amos shrugged.

“If we give it time, we will see that something happened. I don’t know what, but someone will help somehow. Someone will come forward to say what they saw.”

“Mr. Doran is pretty certain in the paper.”

“Yes, he is—he is very certain. But still, he is only human and wants to blame the right person. I’ve discovered the papers do this just like
anyone else. And that’s exactly how Isaac’s father died—someone certain wanted to blame the right person, and that was in the paper too, and Isaac’s father was hanged. Nothing can be as strange.”

But Markus knew that this kind of thing was not strange at all, and in fact was the more ordinary circumstance.

Amos’s five little pictures didn’t seem to prove anything either, Markus thought. But Amos insisted that something had happened to Hector that might have had nothing to do with the load.

“Roger is cantankerous and bullheaded, and dead wrong about the stupid pools that are really ours—but he is no murderer,” Amos said. “But you see, because he is dead wrong about the pools, it is easy to ascribe to him traits that are dead wrong as well.”

So he went over what the police and safety inspectors had told him about the case.

The small under-section of the fourth hold had been almost filled, and two men were reassigned the night before to go to other holds. Hector came on that morning with three men to do the last of the small hold. He would be employed for about a day and a half, until the job was finished. Then, those with seniority would be placed in one of the two larger middle holds. That is, Topper and Bill Monk. When Roger came he was told that all the holds were hired, and that in all likelihood was why he sent the extra load to the fourth—in order to help facilitate its finish.

Hector had just gotten his union card the week before. This was his first boat. Roger responded to this in disappointment because he had not counted the card-carriers right and believed he would get on. And then he had to sit it out.

But looking at the pictures did not tell Amos very much—and his eyes, though still as bright as a hawk’s, were not as good anymore. There was something he was not seeing. There was something else he had to know in order to solve this.

But he said this: if Topper and Bill Monk had seniority and would be moved forward, then they were in the upper portion of the hold,
while the other man, Angus Peel, was in the under-cubby. Then he said, speculatively, “That man Angus is our key—because he wouldn’t have been near Hector and the Monk brothers or his own son, the water boy—yes, the water boy is the key, maybe! What I am saying is—well, here is what I am saying. The surprise Roger felt at having not been picked to work even the fourth hold was not as great as the surprise Bill and Topper Monk must have had when Hector, with his new union card, came down the ladder.”

It was Amos who had gotten little Hector Penniac his union card. Now of course he regretted it desperately.

Amos sat out in the back by the shed and looked out over the islands. Out there was where the real braves were years ago—the great warriors who ran large canoes from here to Chaleur. They would not have bothered with this, until they found the truth from their chief.

“Never you mind,” old Amos said to the blind old dog, patting it roughly. “We will have to figure this out—won’t we, though!”

And then he would go down and weed his garden in the heat, or drink from a pitcher of lemonade.

The day after the report came out about what hold Roger had skipped and what hold he’d hooked to, old Amos got up very early, dressed very carefully and walked very calmly to the RCMP station. There he sat for over an hour, silently with his hands on his knees, watching the many people come and go. He wanted to talk to them about the pictures, and the way the logs were, and if anything could be garnered by how the logs lay on the body.

“I am no expert,” he kept saying, looking around and smiling. “No, I am no expert, but my theory is—”

The people in the office would look at him and walk away. He held the pictures in his hand, and would wait for someone else to come by. Some of the people he spoke to weren’t even police officers, but secretaries and clerks.

“Look here, please. I am no expert but—see how the logs are all in just this spot? And the walls—I thought it was strange—not a bit of bark scraped along the walls—after such agitation! But there are marks from other loads swinging.”

“How do you know it is not from that load that fell?” a secretary asked him.

Amos’s face brightened, and he said: “Well, the marks from other loads are between two and five feet off the ground, which shows they hit the walls when the men grabbed them. But if the other load fell from fifteen feet, then it should have hit farther up on the wall—for it wouldn’t have missed the walls altogether.”

He continued to speak to whoever would listen, but they nodded or politely ignored him and walked on. So he sat in the seat, and as he was prone to do he said, “They are treating me with the utmost respect.”

At about ten in the morning Amos had his meeting with Sergeant Hanover of the local RCMP, but found that his inquiry about the hold was not answered. The man dismissed it, as a person in power is certain of having the answers a common man would be too much of a novice to understand. Amos, in his new spangled shirt he had decided to wear, and his old cowboy hat with the pin-sized hole at the tip, and with his whitish grey hair drooping down under it, looked ridiculous in the sergeant’s eyes. The sergeant wanted to know the situation on the reserve, and wanted to know about a person or two. He also wanted to know about a certain woman claiming a band card, given by a boyfriend from his reserve—and did he know about this?

“No, I do not,” he said, seemingly amazed that anyone from his reserve would do this. Of course he knew all about it. The woman was alone and poor and they had given her a moose quarter last winter. But now he said no, and stuck to it.

Then he took out a cigarette and lit it and looked at the sunshine coming in on the small plastic flowers in a dish on the desk.

“Do you know there is no recreation centre along the North Shore that is as nice as yours will be?” Hanover said, intimating a kind of official enmity. “Even the whites don’t have one as good.”

“Of course I know.”

“Well, then. Every one of you has to remain calm—don’t go for the war paint, eh?” the sergeant said. “You haven’t lost anything yet. We’ll figure this out. If he did this intentionally, he will go to jail. We’re going to offer him a deal—he might plead guilty to a lesser charge.” And here he stacked some papers, and looked to the side of the desk to find a paper clip.

Amos stared at the man saying this with a good deal of patience. He took another drag of his cigarette. They had lost five hundred thousand acres of land, two river systems and two major bays. Had the whites forgotten that? he wondered. Had they forgotten the band had lost Hector Penniac? No, to be fair, he knew many whites had not forgotten that.

“Everything will be taken care of,” a constable told him, more politely, at the door. “Don’t fret—it will all turn out.” What they really wanted to know was if Isaac could keep the men under control. It was as if they had resigned themselves to the fact that he, old Amos, could not.

“Oh yes, he does a good job, that one,” Amos said in his singsong way.

“Well, he’s doing better than you, isn’t he?” Hanover said.

Amos only smiled. But he felt outmanoeuvred, outdistanced and ashamed.

They did not know that as chief he once would have been able to put them to death with a nod of his head. And yet Amos Paul never would have done so.

Amos walked down the dusty lane, his old legs crooked and the sun in his face. Twice he turned to look back at the little station with its glass door and evergreen shrubs. Twice he thought he should go back to explain to them why he came there and show them the pictures, and tell them there was something wrong with where the logs lay and where the water buckets were. One of the water buckets was broken, but it lay far from where the logs had landed.

But no, he didn’t think he needed to do that anymore. He stopped to take a small rock from his shoe, and kept going.

That night Amos went to bed and lay on his back and tried to think of all the things he had discovered in his life about white men. It was not that they themselves were different, but they considered others to be and then tried to control who was. And it did not matter if they worked for the paper or the university or somewhere in between. And some were certainly brave, and some were certainly foolish. So therefore they were just like other men. Now and again, here and there, was a sound like thunder. He thought of his recreation centre. His mind was filled with mortar and bricks, and offices and basketball courts. He certainly was proud of it. He thought of his wife, dead now seven years, and what she would think of his being chief—well, it wasn’t that important, but still, not every man became one. Then he thought of his retirement and what he wanted to do. He wanted to get on a bus and go all across North America, and Mrs. Francis whose husband had died said she would go with him. So he had asked about tickets and had taken a map and plotted their journey. But was she only fooling? Maybe when the time came she wouldn’t go. He wanted to see the land of the Apaches and Sitting Bull. The land of the Lakota Sioux. Not that he felt they were any greater than his tribe, but certainly more had been said about them. They said they hunted by horseback, and many called them the finest light cavalry in the world. His own people had run caribou and moose to ground without the need of horses, and had run thirty miles on snowshoes without the need to rest, and had fought both Inuit and Huron for a thousand years. So then to go to Wounded Knee, maybe for a day. Yes, perhaps he would get to do that.

He lay in the dark, his hands behind his head, thinking. Something was not right. That was a bad thing. But so many things against the natives had been let go, and now it seemed a crushing force for instant justice had taken over. And the big, blustery, do-good-all-the-time
heapin’ big reporter had come in to make it right. (This is what Amos called Doran privately.) And once it started it could not be stopped. It must run its course like a fever. Just like the little boys who died of the flu all those years ago. The fever had come, and the reporter had caught it—and it was spreading, faster and faster, and he did not think he could stop it.

The real truth was, he was picked as chief because Isaac wasn’t here at the time. Isaac came home a month after the election. He knew he was just an old man they wanted to make feel good. Now Isaac was home, and no one listened to Amos anymore.

It nagged at him, and he wondered what would happen. Years ago, he himself had been at a hanging of an Indian friend. At that time no one, except the poet Alden Nowlan, had taken up his cause—and Amos was driven down to the hanging by Roger’s father, for no one else would take him.

How strangely fate worked. For now it seemed the same was happening to Roger, and there was nothing he could do, and he felt as bad as he had the first time.

He had asked Markus at supper if he would help him discover the truth. It was a harsh thing to be a boy living with an old man.

Markus had said, “Yeah, okay, Granddad,” but the old man felt lousy having to ask a boy for help.

“We will figure this out, Markus—you and me. Something happened in that hold. Something to do with a water bucket—I am not sure what …”

“Yes, Granddad—you and me.”

M
EN DID NOT GO BACK TO WORK AT THE REC CENTRE SITE
, and the boys who had been hired to pick up bricks, like Little Joe and Markus, had no one to supply bricks to—unless Amos Paul did the
mortar all by himself. He was too old to do that. He was too tired to even try. Andy and Tommie decided that Amos was wrong and Joel, who bought them smokes and talked about his connections and girls, was right. So when Markus asked them to help, they looked at him with suspicious disregard, and gave him the kind of blunt silence given to friends on the outs. Then they came back to warn him not to go to work there himself.

“Joel is going to do something,” they told Markus. “He told us pretty soon Isaac is going to put him in charge. He is already Isaac’s bodyguard—Isaac won’t go anywhere without him now. You’re either for us or against us!”