Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (26 page)

Sky was drinking and went to dances, and dated white boys from up the road, all petulant and sure of themselves in their dull daddies’ cars. Her beauty startling her eyes dark, she tried and tried and tried again to wrest the agony from her heart.

Amos was alone morally, and painfully aware of this fact. All he had was the boy Markus, who was obligated to him in such a way it seared the old man’s heart.

“I will solve it or I will die trying,” Markus said, “no matter how long it takes—if it takes me to the year 2000,” he said, believing that date was so far away it would never come.

Amos was as tragic as a king relying on his only son when the enemy had entered the castle and there was nowhere left to go. He no longer had his camp. It had been burned by some whites after the barricade went up, which had put many of them at a two-month-long inconvenience. Still, he would go hunting once more.

He planned to stay in a tent, which he would shore up with boughs, and if the snow was right he would use his snowshoes. He could track a deer quite easily this way. He loved more than anything to track deer in a snowstorm, and was known to have gone thirty miles on snowshoes in a day.

So here is what he had asked himself.

What did the protesters and screaming young warrior poets in their army jackets want? They wanted Roger to feel the full weight of their displeasure while taking pleasure in it as modern and conciliatory whites. This is what Amos, the odd little fellow, decided the real case was about. It is what he had known since last August but couldn’t say. For he could not say to the whites, “You are just being conciliatory, but if I had to rely on anyone in a storm at sea, it would be Roger Savage. I would rely upon him in the woods—and in fact all of you would, too—and be very thankful he was there.”

The snow did not fall much that autumn, so Amos waited for a time to hunt. And he began to surmise what might have happened in the hold of the
Lutheran
.

Amos would lie on his back in the dark with his cigarette glowing in the room and he would try to think. Then he would speak to Markus, who was alone in his own bedroom.

“What happened to Hector down in the hold? Certainly he was way out of place—and if he was, then something happened to make him be out of place. Why was the water bucket so far away?”

Sooner or later all things would be understood. Everything came around in one way or the other to that truth.

Amos’s mother had been able to look at a dress and see a flaw. The flaw might be an almost unseen thread, and when she pulled on it, the flaw became evident and the skirt unravelled. And now Amos worked from the thread he had found, and the case little by little began to unravel. The thread was the autopsy picture, and the fact that not a bit of pulp, as he remembered, had ever hit the upper sides of the hold. When the sailor Vanderhoof was sent to wash away the blood, he had concentrated on washing only in one place. But that would have been almost impossible if Hector had been hit by the full weight of the load.

The front of Hector’s skull had been crushed, but not another bone in his body—not even a rib was cracked, though two were bruised. And under all that pulpwood too. That pulp that hit him was still in Amos’s side shed.

“I can tell you one thing,” old Amos said to Doran one day shortly after Isaac was arrested.

“What is that?” Doran asked.

The old man patted Doran’s arm kindly.

“It is not the Conibear trap that kills the beaver, but the drowning that follows,” the old man said. “You will come to realize this with time, my son.”

So Amos had his first lead. He did not particularly see it as being definitive, though. The Conibear and the beaver story was one he had told many times. He had first mentioned it to Markus when the boy’s father was found dead that long-ago day. The drink was the Conibear trap, and the man slowly drowned.

But then Amos considered how tall Hector Penniac was—five foot
ten—and he realized the drop would have to have been from that distance. And the Monk brothers said the load fell fifteen feet. If that was the case, a fifteen-foot drop of two tons of pulp would certainly have bruised some bones, and have landed helter-skelter, and might have injured more than one person. Unless it missed Hector, and he suffered only a glancing blow. But if it missed him, then why was the boy lying under the wood? He would have been thrown to the side.

Strangely enough, thought Amos, the fact Hector was under the pulp, which made it look like the pulpwood had killed him, meant that he had not been killed by the pulpwood at all. Which meant he had been placed underneath. This was not so difficult to comprehend now that Amos saw the autopsy photo and read the report. Why hadn’t he seen this long ago? He should have figured it out. But others had not figured it out either.

This is what Amos took to Joel when Isaac was incarcerated in August of 1985—that is, the idea, though he hadn’t completely proven it, that something else might have happened to Hector. Joel sat at the head table in the band council office and liked the idea that he had two phones. He had a phone to the barricade and another one to the outside that the police had supplied in the hope that he would tell them if anything got out of hand. He liked to look at them as he spoke to people who came to see him. These phones made him weary of little Amos, who now came with his claims while Joel sat exactly where Amos had two months before.

“What’s this about, then?”

Joel had really too much to do to bother with Amos.

Amos said his surmising was about the possibility that Roger had done nothing—but perhaps the Monk brothers had.

Joel smiled while he listened, sardonically, because he knew the truth and did not want the truth impinged upon by the old fellow. Besides, there was another problem, perhaps the real problem. It was the fact
that Joel had dealt with the Monk brothers over the last four years. He supplied them with amphetamines for the stevedores, and this would come to light if they were investigated.

But Joel allowed Amos to speak to him and explain his reasons. And then he said: “Couldn’t have happened that way.”

“Why?” Amos asked.

“Just didn’t,” Joel said, sniffing. And then he said, “Be gone with you.”

Both Andy and Tommie were with him. They sat at either end of the table and stared at Amos as Joel spoke, wearing bandanas and camouflage pants. This was their standard now, how they observed decorum.

Amos picked up his pictures and went back out into the sun.

“Didn’t happen that way!” Joel yelled as he left the building. “Remember I told you that.”

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE THE CATASTROPHE THAT LED TO
L
ITTLE
Joe’s death, Joel had called a meeting of the old council and the new. And they made their way over to Mrs. Francis’s, where Andy had assured them safety from being arrested.

There they sat saying little to one another for the longest time. Amos came in, with his cowboy hat in his hand, and no one got up to give him a place at the table. So he sat on a heater at the end of the room—now out of favour with everyone who wanted action. And many there wanted action to prove that Amos was out of favour, and to prove they had done with the old days. And for Andy, who was the embodiment of this spirit, it was to prove to his former friend Markus that he had gone on in the world. The crux of his thinking was this: if you did not now take on the white man, you never would.

The two Francis brothers said they would take Roger to the small holding cell they had on the reserve, and keep him.

Amos said he could not allow it.

“What are you talking about?” Joel Ginnish said. “You cannot allow it. Who are you again? I didn’t get your name.”

Everyone began to laugh.

This was to be the last and crucial disagreement between Amos and Joel.

“We will hold him until the whites press charges against him and let Isaac go. Once they do, we will hand him over. If they don’t we will keep him,” Andy Francis said, looking over at Markus with grave pride.

But the little old man was neither frightened nor troubled by Joel Ginnish. He simply stared at his young grandson Markus and then looked back at Joel. He mentioned that if Joel was strengthened by anything, he was strengthened by the fact that Isaac was out of his hair, and he could act accordingly.

This was considered very bad to say. It did not matter if it was true.

Amos continued: “The police were silly to take Isaac, and I don’t know why they did. But I cannot allow you to hold someone who is innocent in a cell for the guilty.”

There was silence, and Amos set about rolling a cigarette. He took his tobacco out and put it on his knee, then his paper, and held it in his right hand, and pinched out some tobacco on it, rolled it and licked it. Then, seeing others looking at him, he attempted to pass the cigarette papers and tobacco around. But no one wanted any. He cracked a match with his finger and lit the smoke, and spit a bit of tobacco out. Then he was silent, and folded his arms.

The warriors, some in camouflage, with bandanas tied about their glowing black hair, looked from one to the other.

“Many know you’re in cahoots with them,” Joel finally said.

“No, son, I’m in cahoots with no one, and never have been—well, except for my wife. I was in cahoots with her for a bit, but not since she died have I been in cahoots.”

Old Amos said this in a pleasant enough voice and was kind when he said it. When Markus looked at his grandfather, his grandfather sneezed and shrugged.

Not very much like a hero.

Amos sneezed again and took a big white handkerchief and wiped his nose.

“Look,” Joel said. “He already has the white flag out.”

Amos laughed when others did, his false teeth slipping.

Looking back, Amos remembered that Little Joe was all this time sitting on the counter, looking from one person to the other, preoccupied with eating peanut butter from the jar, with a spoon.

Just before they left the Francis house, what Joel had been warned about happened.

The power to the entire reserve was cut.

There were women and children on the reserve, and this was unconscionable. Joel pushed people aside and away from him as he walked outside. He pushed old Amos away too, and Markus was too young to stand up to him.

All up and down the road was blackness. Silence and just the sound of waves. People began to come out of their houses and stand in the streets.

“What are you going to do, Joel?” people said.

“What’s going to happen?” Little Joe asked Markus.

“I don’t know,” Markus said. “We’ll see.”

And so whatever Amos wanted or hoped for was once again dashed by those outside. Beyond the reserve, the barricade, the lights flickered, and rain came down.

The evening before they heard Isaac had died, Doran knew he had to get off the reserve, for many were saying he was white and should be held too. But in fact, he was not concerned by this. The real reason he had to leave was that his own mother was now terribly ill. He had no one to take him past the barricade, however. He had gone there twice, but had been stopped. The Indians kept asking him to show his
passport. So he turned and went back along the road. There he met Little Joe and Sky—and recognized them as the kids who had given him the pie.

“Can you help me?” he asked. “I have to go home.”

Sky nodded, and she and little Joe took him to the old trailers beyond the ball field where the kids used to meet in secret. Then Little Joe scampered up a tree, the better to see when everything was clear. Sky sat looking at this man for a long time, trying to think of what to do.

“Is what you said about Roger true?” she asked, point blank.

“I don’t know—but I can’t wait any longer to see.”

She sighed and took Doran’s chin in her hand, and studied him. Then she smiled. She told him to take his ponytail out and put on the ball cap that she wore and tuck his hair under it. Then she lighted a cigarette and looked at him, and handed him the smoke. “Put some dirt on your face and I will get you a jacket from home. Wait here—and then we will go.”

“Where—where will we go?”

“Well, we will go to the only place we can go,” Sky advised. “We will just go along to see Amos.”

So later, after dark, and after Sky had come back with an old jean jacket stained with oil, Little Joe climbed down from the tree, and they snuck across the back field to Amos’s house. There they left Doran, and he was overcome with emotion and wanted to hug them both goodbye. Little Joe gave him a thumbs-up and then just disappeared.

Doran went onto the porch, and waited for the door to open. What if Amos wouldn’t speak to him? But Amos came to the door, opened it and smiled.

“Oh, how are you?” Amos said.

Doran asked if Amos could take him by the water up to the bridge. But the old man couldn’t. He felt he had to stay where he was. For he was still chief, and he must be here. Markus stood behind the old man, listening patiently.

“Can you lead me back through, Markus?” Doran said.

Amos looked at his grandson. “Take him,” he said, in Micmac. “It’s our duty.”