Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (31 page)

This is why Amos went to Brice Peel’s house with Markus. He appeared at the door like a child. Markus stood behind him.

At first there was no answer. Inside the door into the old porch, it was almost darker than midnight. They stood together, he and his grandson. And as Amos knocked, Markus whispered:

“Have you ever been in a white person’s house?”

“Yes,” Amos whispered, “when I delivered salmon to the cottages. But those are not houses, they are cottages—even though they are ten times the size of our house. But this house looks more like our house.”

“Yes,” Markus said, shaking slightly. “I’ve never been in a white man’s house before.”

“Well, I saw them up at Sobeys, and they buy Red Rose tea just as we do,” Amos said.

Finally, after they spoke and knocked, and then knocked again, the door opened. And a light snapped on at the same moment, and out of that doorway a man stood looking at them, his face expressing a kind of bold and almost insane hilarity, as if he was waiting for them. And yet as if he was ambushed at the same time.

“Yes?” the man said, thrusting his face forward. “Yes—what?” His face gave away his fear-glazed merriment. His eyes were wide and ghastly.

“Yes—hello, Mr. Peel. How are you, sir?”

“I am just dandy—and I don’t want no smelts.”

“Ah well—I am not selling smelts. Besides, it is too early. The bay, as you know, has not made ice. I was wondering if young Peel was here.”

“I am here. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No,” Amos said, “is young Mr. Peel here?”

“Who is young Mr. Peel?”

“Brice,” Markus said.

“Oh, he’s long in bed now—can’t come out to play.” And he gave the same look of inscrutable hilarity, with his head going back slightly into the kitchen.

“I see,” Amos said.

“What do you want from him? Perhaps I can tell him when he wakes up in the morning.”

“No, thank you,” Amos answered.

“Why—am I not good enough?”

“Oh, it is not a message anyone can deliver. In fact, it is something
he
might be able to tell
us,”
Amos said.

Then he turned, and Markus turned with him. Markus did not know why he turned so suddenly, and in some respects did not know why they had come to this house. Very soon after they got to the gravel drive, Angus closed the door.

For a moment or two Amos stood still and clutched Markus’s arm. When he saw the upstairs light go on above the porch, he pushed his grandson toward the trees.

“Wait here,” he whispered.

“For what?”

“For him to leave.”

He looked up at the stars, took his handkerchief out and wiped his nose, and looked up at his grandson—who was already taller than he was. There was one sound—a kind of muffled shout—and a door slammed. In two or three minutes, the door opened and Mr. Peel walked out, got into his own little Datsun and drove away.

After a while the sound of the car faded.

“He is gone far up the road,” Amos said.

“Yes.” Markus shrugged.

“Well, now we will go see Brice.”

They walked into the room, and Brice was there, a scared little boy, with his T-shirt hanging off him, and eighty dollars on the windowsill, and a bicycle sitting in the corner of his room, and a fishing rod leaning against the back of the door.

Amos smiled. “Have you been working a shut-down?”

The boy looked at them scared to death, holding a bag of marbles in his hand. But he told them he had nothing to tell about Hector Penniac.

“What happened that day? Why did you go for another bucket? Why didn’t you lift the other buckets and take them? That means those buckets were full, or partially so, so why did you go for another one?”

Then Amos took out the picture of Hector in the morgue and showed it to the youngster.

“You have to tell sooner or later,” Amos said, not unkindly. “Then you won’t be bothered anymore. Think of Roger Savage in his house all summer. He was a white boy, and he did nothing wrong—someone else must have.”

The boy shrugged. “But Roger killed a little boy,” he answered, “so what is so big about him?”

There were tears starting to his eyes, but he was brave enough to say nothing else.

“But just maybe he didn’t kill the little boy,” Amos whispered.

“Everyone knows he did!”

They left before the boy’s father got back, and they walked along the battered old highway.

“Do you want me to try to hitchhike a car?” Markus said.

“No, it doesn’t matter,” Amos answered.

They were silent again. Sky and Little Joe’s mother had no husband, and when she died they were taken care of by Mrs. Francis. Amos asked Markus if he knew who Sky’s father was.

“Everyone says it’s Isaac, the time his wife went away,” Markus said.

They walked along for a moment without saying anything.

“And Little Joe’s father?” Amos asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Joel Ginnish,” Amos said.

Then he said he was tired, and wanted to know if Markus would like his rifle.

“Why?”

“I killed my last thing,” Amos said.

I
T IS BEST TO HUNT MOOSE IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN THE
wind has startled the branches and the nights get cool. Lately in the Maritimes, as if the world were being reset, September had come in too warm and the moose didn’t move in the rut as soon. And the rut was everything for a moose hunt.

Markus Paul was in his grandfather’s attic thinking these things, and cleaning the .306 that his grandfather had given him that night after they got home from Brice Peel’s place twenty-one years before.

He thought about how in 1986 Joel had begun a lawsuit, charging the Canadian government with negligence because of his back problem. Joel became obsessed with the technicalities of the case. He dressed well in a suit and tie and was always punctual in court. His contention was simple: the soldiers had come in to the reserve and wrestled him to the ground. He had been charged with arson and spent fourteen months in jail. When he came out, the reserve had changed—many men had their lobster licences and boats and many of them no longer wanted him around. Isaac had done all of this when he was away, had weeded out the bad apples.

Joel got a settlement in 1994 and walked around the reserve telling people about it. He was going to buy a boat and get his own lobster licence. He had walked into Markus’s in a blustering way and showed him a letter from the Minister of Indian Affairs.

Joel had not spoken to Isaac in seven years, but he was going to go up to his house to show him too.

$34,354.27.

That’s the amount on the cheque he showed to everyone.

Mrs. Francis told him she had won that much playing bingo.

He kept his suit and tie on, even though he was on the reserve. He bought drinks for people he didn’t know.

“I was the guy who got our lobster licences,” he said.

“You were?”

“Yep. Just ask Andy Francis—that was me!”

There was some dispute. Whatever it was, Markus couldn’t remember now.

But Joel never got the licence for his boat. People wanted him off the reserve. He tried to open a small convenience store. He stood behind the counter waving at young people who no longer knew who he was.

Fifty-five hundred dollars. That’s what Markus heard that Doran got: fifty-five hundred dollars as his severance, and not all at once. Doran tried to publish his own paper for a while, solicited articles from people he knew. He went back to journalism school, but felt out of place. He convinced a young woman taking the course that he was still a rising star in journalism. Everyone still knew who he was. He wrote for weeklies and spent time in bars. They married, that woman and he.

The woman told Doran to go to Newfoundland and investigate the terrible priests in the terrible Catholic Church. She told him to write about brutality in hockey. To both, he said no. Once when she thought he was on a story, she found out he had rented a room to hide in. There he was with a hotplate and a blanket over him, drinking a cup of tea.

Then Doran disappeared. The trouble was, and Markus knew this, that Doran’s greatest moment as a journalist had occurred when he was on his own in a small shed at night, because he refused to do a story or help arrest Roger. That he was a journalist—and perhaps still a great journalist who could no longer write—had helped destroy him. It certainly destroyed his marriage. Doran’s wife kept trying to encourage
him to be the man she believed she had married. Finally she left, with a boyfriend from the
Telegraph
, to work on a paper in London, Ontario. Doran stalked her until he was arrested. He tried to give the severance money to Markus’s band. They refused. So he gave it to the native band in Red Bank.

“It is not the Conibear trap that kills the beaver, but the drowning that follows.”

When his grandfather died a few years later, Markus was nineteen.

“Everyone has been too kind to me,” were Amos’s last words.

Now Markus tested the scope on the .306 in the field beyond his grandfather’s, just about where Doran had spoken to Amos on that first visit long ago.

It came in, at a hundred yards, high and to the right. He tweaked it a few degrees this way and that half the morning. But he didn’t like firing shots. He fired only eight in all and realized he had it as well as he could. He fired from a fifty- and then a hundred-yard stop. Both would show the same trajectory and hit the same place.

“I can’t hit anything, anyway,” Markus said. That, of course, was not true. But it didn’t matter anymore. He lit a cigarette, and sat on the porch steps and thought of something. The way the bullet went high and to the right. Strange, for he was sure the rifle had been centred—but there were so many variables. Anyway, most moose shots were not that far. It was warm, and the sky was light and the weeds in the garden were turning yellow. He would hit the moose below the shoulder. Best-case scenario. A car honked as it went by. He never knew if it was a derisive honk or not.

The neighbours would see his car or his truck at his grandfather’s, and they would think it was strange, and many would think he had come to persecute them. Or perhaps, as Samantha once told him, he was being delusional and they did not think that at all.

“Ah yes—but you are white. And I can tell.”

Markus would hunt the barrens, which would mean a longer shot. That was the thing. He took his shells out and lined them up, 180 grain. Many years he had loaded the bullets himself, but he didn’t bother now, though he still tied his own flies for fishing and made his own rods. He had a ten-foot sage given to him by the department when he solved a crime last year that had been in the papers for months. But he had not used it. It seemed too special to use, and so he went back to his old heavy standard.

He lay down with the cartridges lined up on the coffee table, his truck loaded. He sipped on a beer. He thought of all kinds of bullets and shells and the different hunts he had been on, and what constituted a good hunt, and what were his happiest hunts—those with his grandfather, of course, when he had to borrow the old rifle from Roger Savage, a rifle he never fired, but just carried to make him look proud. The rifle had once belonged to David Paul, Markus’s father. That is why Roger readily lent it back to him. But he was only a little boy and they never gave him shells.

He went to sleep thinking of Roger, and for some strange reason dreamed of his own mother, Conde, whom he had hardly known. The dream, like so many, was out of sequence. But his father, David Paul, came in and sat down, and patted his head, and Conde said: “You see, it’s all right—and we will be with you forever—and you didn’t even know.”

“That people rise from the dead?” he asked.

“Yes—almost every day.”

He travelled up to the great chop-down the next morning and made his way, with his tent and provisions, two miles south of the road, toward an old, dead haphazard moss and blueberry ground. Here and there was bear scat, and the two front claws of a black bear digging away at something. Lonely was the sky, and the trees at dawn. Beyond him was
the barrens. This is where he hoped for a sighting. Since he had no tree stand made, he would work the ground and wait for a bull to appear. Sometimes a cow would have a bull or two in tow as she came out in the evening, the bull or bulls following her, with their nose in her quiff if she was prime.