Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (27 page)

So Markus went and got his jacket and told Doran to follow him. And they started out, the boy of fifteen and the man of twenty-five with his hair up under an old ball cap. They got across the road and past the trailers, toward Stone Street, where Markus’s own father had died. When they came to the back field they saw Joel with the .30-30 walking along the upper lane with five or six men; two had shotguns, and Andy had a .22 pistol. Markus had to tackle Doran and put his hand over his mouth as the men passed only ten feet away.

But Joel and his men moved away toward the south, holding torches made of cattails and gas, and speaking in Micmac.

“I’ll never forget this,” Doran said. “I’ll do you a favour someday.”

“Then someday I will come to you and get it.”

“Okay, okay, you do that,” Doran said.

It was hard to get across the river. Doran slipped many times on the rocks and in the swirling currents, and Markus had to hold him up. They were sitting ducks, too, in the middle of the water, where they could have been seen at any moment. And Markus was taking much more of a chance than Doran. Finally they made it to the slippery granite bank on the far side. There were three RCMP cars just at the turn.

Doran grabbed Markus’s hand and shook it with a new resolve. “You come to me for that favour,” he said, his white shirt soaking from the water and his loafers ruined.

Markus nodded quickly, slipped back and returned in the dark to his own house by another way.

The next morning—that is, on the day of the confrontation—Amos went over to visit Roger to tell him to leave.

“Just leave the house until I figure this out. It might only be a month or so. I knew your grandfather—he was my friend,” Amos said. “You have to get out now—you must—they think you are guilty, and they
will think that until it is proven otherwise. They called you right wing,” Amos said, trying to sound stern for effect.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Amos said. “I don’t know what it means—when I was in school I was left-handed, and they beat me with a ruler. It might have something to do with that.”

“Well, I am not going anywhere. If they bring the barricade down, I am not going. If the police come to get me, I will fire at them. I have done nothing to anyone—so since I have done nothing, I am not going.” Here Roger smiled a little self-contentedly. “Do you think I did something wrong?”

“Yes,” Amos said. But he lied just to get Roger away.

Roger looked hurt, and said nothing for a moment.

“My father fished for thirty years,” he said then. “He saved men in the Esuminac disaster—men who are now not saying anything. And we have university kids out here protesting who have never met me, and they have insulted my family. My girlfriend has left me—going out now with a pigeon”—by this he meant an air force man—“who tells her how sorry he is for her. So tell me, what have I done, and what good is it for me to go out? If I go I will be condemned by those students—they are yelling at me.” Then he said, almost as if hurt, “They say I’m uneducated—well, I could tell them, I got my GED.”

He spoke this with great dignity, though his lips trembled slightly.

“But you can go and clear your name,” Amos said hopefully, his fingers twitching.

“But my name has done nothing it needs to be cleared of, so someday they will have to clear it for me. I will not try to clear my name for them. I will not. They will have to clear it—let them. They are the ones who say I am guilty and did it on purpose. What in hell did I do? I went to the ship, and I hooked a load because Morrissey went and had a piss. So let
him
clear my name. I will die here—and then we will wait and see.” Roger seemed perfectly happy to say this.

“But if you could just tell them what you did.”

There was a long, long, bitter silence.

“I will tell you what I did. I hooked.”

“I know, boy. Ya hooked,” Amos said.

On a weekend in November 1985, the day after Doran had resigned from his paper, there was snow coming down to blur the edge of the fields, and Amos went hunting. He thought: If the body was lying underneath the pulp, and not hit by the pulp, Penniac was hit before the pulp came down. Yet if that was the case, then it was murder, or manslaughter, or even an accident that had been covered up. So the outrage by the little Micmac band in the middle of nowhere was, in some ways, completely justified. But going in the wrong direction had caused the death not only of Roger Savage but also of Little Joe Barnaby. It had also ruined Amos’s grandson’s chances with Sky. She now dismissed Markus, and would not speak as he walked by her house in the snow that fell at night, or when he stood outside the house like, as Fitzgerald once wrote, “all the sad young men.”

Amos was tracking a big buck—there were also two or three smaller bucks in this area of furious streams and birches that ran up the side of the hills and then went for two or three miles intermingled with spruce and fir. He had seen the big buck’s tracks, rounded at the front and deep in the twisted grass, and its weight had trampled the grass and left the snow beneath it bluish. But he lost any sign of it at the north end of Buckler Stream, and then he met another hunter walking toward him. It was the surveyor Kevin Dulse, with his daughter, Samantha, out hunting partridge. They carried a small brace. So Amos stopped and talked a moment or two.

Mr. Dulse had been brought in to survey and rezone the line between the reserve and the cottages after all the trouble was over the month before. His hair was prematurely white, and he walked with his shoulders hunched together. His eyes had become weak, and he wore heavy glasses. He was proud of his daughter—as life is proud of life. She was
fourteen, thin as a rail, with big black eyes and jerking motions when she spoke. She was like her mother, high-strung and nervous, and her nervousness hid or showed an eclectic brilliance, whichever it might be. The zone had gone in the natives’ favour, so the band had been completely in the right about Savage’s house, and because of this Kevin was thought highly of. But now, after all of the tragic circumstances surrounding it, the band did not want the property to build on, and decided to make it into a softball field in honour of Little Joe.

Amos and Kevin spoke for a moment. The birds were no longer sunning themselves and had moved into the thickets, and after a while Sam and Kevin moved off.

Soon Amos was alone and prepared himself some tea, then sat on an old windfall, and realized that this area of the woods wouldn’t have been much travelled by his ancestors, except perhaps the waterways below here. He stirred the tea with a stick and looked at its darkness, trying to entertain thoughts of the past and the future. Then he sat on the windfall so that his short legs didn’t touch the ground, and he sighed. No, he wasn’t a very impressive-looking man, not like Isaac or Joel Ginnish. There were the real men, he supposed.

And he thought about the dividing line. The new room Savage had wanted to build had been over it by four feet. But it was as modest as the house he himself lived in.

When Amos first went into the Cyr cottage as a boy to deliver a salmon, its hardwood floor and its huge stone fireplace, its caribou and moose racks had made him confused and he began to shake. They asked him if he was cold, and all he could do was shake his head, his teeth chattering.

He did not know which was the real New Brunswick or the real Canada. And that dividing line had always remained. At seventy-five years of age, he still did not know.

It was this chance meeting with Kevin Dulse that caused Amos trouble. He was suddenly seared by the thought of Roger being called a bigot. Because he knew Roger was not.

Amos stayed in the woods that night by himself and thought about the case. That is, he thought about the water boy, Brice Peel, and the buckets Brice would have delivered to the hold.

Before dawn the next morning, Amos was making his pancake breakfast outside in the snow. After breakfast, he cleaned the frying pan, took the jam jar the pancake batter was in and placed it in his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and waited for dawn over the many trees.

Then he put his jacket and vest on, his snowshoes slung over them, and with his toes cold from being pinched inside his boots, he walked toward the hills above him, and the clouds remained light, with the sky a greyish blue.

His movement by afternoon had taken him far, far up the ridge, to look down toward the water of the North Church River, where he had hunted pollywogs as a boy. He had flashes of that as he stood there. To his left a close cropping of small firs fed into the hardwood that spread down through the winterish floor, spiked by fallen branches and slivers of ice. The river below was as smooth as a floor but without ice, and he could smell deer in the wind.

About two-thirty in the afternoon he sensed the buck on the move again. He went farther along the ridge and found his tracks on the rut trail. The buck had gone to his left; its tracks were fresh and large. Most men would have followed it down. But resting his .30-06 against a crook in a poplar, Amos had no intention of doing so. He would go to the right—which was easier going. He would cross the river below the beaver dam, where a spine of rocks allowed the best way, and he would move up the other side into the dark spruce to a rut scrape he had seen the day before, to wait the buck out.

He started down with the wind behind him, which would be good once he crossed the river. He reasoned the buck, if he could be quick, wouldn’t know he was there. Soon, hanging on to branches to keep himself steady, he moved into the valley, spongy with snow and wet moss,
and made his way to the water. He crossed it almost knee-deep in his old work pants and moved halfway toward the upper slope on the south ridge. There, still feeling pain in his arthritic hands, he sat on a stump and waited. Every now and again he turned the rifle slightly sideways to check the screws, as one who knows hunting and rifles will do. The day was about to turn. It was about to snow, and his visibility would be almost zero. He had to keep his scope halfway clean, and keep it from fogging.

All the while, too, he was surmising.

There was only one thing to do, he decided, as he looked into the old growth of trees, and that was to drop some of the pulpwood load on someone or something and see what broke. If bones broke, he would have his answer. He thought of his ankle—which broke because of a slip on some moss the year before—and wondered what might have happened with thousands of pounds. Well, there was one way to find out. Yes. There was always a way.

People think deer are quiet in the woods. They are not. Not a buck in rut who believes it is alone. He heard the deer a long way, the deer who had gone to the river to drink, thirst compelling it to move, and now, in late afternoon, desire and need for sex compelling it up the hill toward its rut marks, farther in toward Tabusintac.

Amos picked up his rifle, flipped off his scope covers. The snow had started. The wind was at his face, blowing this snow into his eyes.

The buck came into view at 4:35 that afternoon.

He hauled it by himself to the water. There he gutted it out. Its liver in a bag, he carried the nine-point buck on a litter of poplar poles and spruce boughs out to his truck.

It was dark and cold when he got back to his house, and late after he took the hide off the deer, and supper was the liver for him and Markus, and a glass of flat beer. He thought of the pain that would come by reopening the case. He felt it deep, deep in his soul. Like the pain in his hands and old, tortured feet. He spent the evening cutting the meat, and took some steaks over to Mrs. Francis. That night, he wrote in his little
diary that Markus had given him in great celebration when he became chief: “I have lost everything in my life except my will to stay alive.”

But, he thought, at times that wasn’t a small thing to hold on to.

T
HE WATER BOY
, B
RICE
P
EEL, HAD HAD A DEEPLY DISTURBING
summer. All of this had been kept from everyone around him. How could it be that taking a job as a water boy when he was little—that is, a boy of fourteen, happily thinking that he would be able to buy a bicycle—how was it that because of this, everything good in his life had been dashed? That his whole life had been turned upside down, and his yearning and longing for goodness eclipsed by his duty to protect a father who would not have protected him? And how was it that no one had come to check up on him? This, despite the fact that he lived in his little house near the old black station, that he lived near the grand old stagecoach road where the Irish woman named Jessie Monk in 1864 had been ambushed and killed by a Scotsman and a Micmac hunter?

To say Brice was bad, though he stole and lied, was a mistake. Even to say he was wrong in not telling what he knew to the police was a mistake. For in so many ways he lived a life not only of fear but also of obligation to those who had given him and his father a job five months before.

Brice had grown up under the influence of the Monks, devoted to all they said. But he suddenly found out, on that one day in June 1985, that to them integrity was lack of integrity and character was lack of character; and once you lost these things, character and integrity, then to the Monks you were acceptable and superior.

So where was he to go and what was he to do?

Brice’s father said, as they drove back from the
Lutheran
and crossed the Bartibog, that it was a terrible thing that had happened.

At home, Brice sat for a long time wondering what to say, like someone stunned by being hit over the head with some pulpwood.

“Did Topper hit him?” he finally asked.

“Don’t be so foolish,” his old man said. “They were nice enough to give us a job.”

“But I just don’t see—I mean, how is it that Hector fell under?”

His father tried to explain in the mid-afternoon heat that he was upset as well. Then the telephone rang, and when his father came back from the other room he said, hauling up his suspenders, “The police will be coming—so you don’t go yappin’ or you’ll get your mouth slapped. No boy of mine is a yapper.”