Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (8 page)

But the painful fact for Markus, who was not allowed in the group, for he was not trusted, was that this group was formed as a rebellion against Amos Paul and included many of his friends, who no longer
included him. Dates and treaties that had gone back almost two hundred years were spoken about as being dissolved. “It is all dissolved,” Joel said, shaking his head, “all dissolved. There is no more reserve, no more Canada. We will do what we want.”

No one said this, but most knew that sooner or later a crime would have to be committed.

Each morning Markus saw Roger Savage walk along the demarcation line toward his woodlot and come out later in the day, after cutting wood or checking his pools and the beaver lodges farther upriver toward Tabusintac.

Roger was not a coward. He had walked into a meeting two nights before. And with men standing beside the door, he had excused himself as he passed them. There in their midst, with Amos in his seat as chief, Roger said, “I have nothing against anyone here, and have never had. I will tell you, if you come upriver to net my pools, I will hay yours.” That is, he meant he’d put hay in the water, which would carry downriver and sweep the Indian gillnets.

The silence was unbearable. Old Amos nodded but said nothing. Isaac, taller than Roger but probably no stronger, simply looked at him and did not speak.

This was not out of fear, of course, but out of respect for the band meeting. From 1755, from the time of the first band meeting held here with people from other races, everyone was allowed to have their say.

Later, Roger continued working on his house after dark using two propane lanterns, for he had a large propane tank, so that he himself appeared only in shadow and the saw-cuts of dust fell like warm grace.

But soon after that, Max Doran, with his shiny eyes and straw hat and terrible earnestness to get at the truth, which he believed he had already arrived at, started to attract notice. And then the papers started their stories.

Suddenly. Like a hailstorm.

M
ARKUS LIKED
J
OHN
W
AYNE MOVIES AND OFTEN WALKED
to the store late at night to get them, coming back through side lanes to his apartment. Yet he could never get used to his VCR and always seemed to push the wrong buttons. He had heard that now VCRs were almost obsolete.

So if he had never learned to use what was obsolete, how could he learn to use what was coming? He had a cell phone, but it was almost never charged. He no longer drove a squad car, but his old red Honda. He was an insomniac and would wake up at night and walk, sometimes for miles, along the road. He had pain now and again in his chest.

In 1998, he’d been to London and had sat near the fountain in Trafalgar Square, where Nelson viewed the sky. He’d flown someone back across the ocean—he’d been the bodyguard of a famous author who had come to Canada and was very distressed that people would want him killed. The RCMP had given him Markus.

“What will happen if the assassins get through the door?” the author asked.

“I am sure they never will.”

“But if they do—if and when they do?”

“If they do, you will not be here, and I will face them alone.”

Markus had wanted to get the author’s autograph, but never did.

He had watched John Wayne’s last movie,
The Shootist
, four times. Each time tears came to his eyes. Lauren Bacall was still beautiful in that movie.

Then he would write in his notebooks, which were piled helter-skelter in the corner of the room.

“Where is Roger Savage’s rifle?” he wrote in 1998, after that trip to England.

Now, in the early fall of 2006, he would come home from work and stare at his bookshelf. He had a good two thousand books stashed everywhere, packed in boxes and on shelves. He was looking for the book that would define that summer long ago when Hector Penniac had died. For himself and Max Doran. He believed he might find it. That one book.

When the time was right.

L
ATE ONE AFTERNOON IN EARLY
J
ULY OF
1985,
AS
A
MOS
sat out on his old couch behind the shed and looked down over the small lot to the great bay and his few crabapple trees that never seemed to have a reasonable crabapple, a newspaperman, Max Doran, came to see him. The reporter was about twenty-five with reddish blond hair tied in a ponytail. He had done a good job on several labour disputes and a case about pollution in the last year. It was his dogged determination to hold others accountable that had made him a hero. He gave up on nothing and intimated some terrible things. He had his own slogan: “Viewer discretion is advised.”

Like many who believed in sedition, he’d had, from youth, a deep puritanical strain.

The whole nature of investigative reporting was to expose—and to say Doran was impartial was absurd. He had never been impartial. But he had a very strong sense that his facts were the legitimate ones, that his posture was moral, that the purity of his notions were liberal and therefore inviolate. He would not lose a story; he would continue until the end. He had been threatened before and was hard to scare. He believed he must try to change the fabric of government. And someday, Max knew, he would write his blockbuster.

Amos had heard of Max Doran. Amos had read him. This is why Amos feared him.

A veteran journalist had taken Doran under his wing two years before, a man who had never written anything too memorable but had once drunk with Louis Robichaud and once with Dalton Camp. He told everyone he was Doran’s mentor, and he now lived vicariously through the work the boy did. So this veteran told Doran to take this story and to look at the strain of overt bigotry in the province. He sat in his faded grey suit drinking his fifth gin of the day.

“You know this has been Canada’s festering sore!” the man pontificated. “You need to get those arrogant, lying bastards—make our government wake up.”

Max could not detect the envy in the old socialist’s voice. He listened to this advice while his mentor cupped his hands over Max’s hands, leaned close and rasped, “Festering, festering, festering fucking sore! The arrogant bastards, all of them! For once in his fucking life he was kept from a job by an Indian, and the prick kills him—kills him! If that load had dropped from the very top, it might have killed them all.”

“Don’t worry,” Max said, gently. “I intend to take this all the way!”

“Yes, yes,” his mentor said, sitting up and finishing off his gin. “I pray you will, for an old man who has been in the fight too long—take it all the fucking way!”

It made Doran feel good to be considered working class, to go to the press club and drink scotch with older, haggard, alcoholic reporters from the Louis Robichaud years who now looked forward to their pensions, and who spoke of great stories they themselves had never written.

This story, about a “deeply disturbing” death in the north of the province—a place that had more than 32 percent unemployment at any given time, a place given to bad roads, disputes and violence that you always heard about—would be the catalyst to change his life.

So in some ways, Doran already believed the allegations against Roger
and was simply finalizing a report that he had been waiting to file most of his life.

“I had no idea that this plum would be handed to me,” he told a colleague. The younger journalist, Gordon Young, wished him good luck and quietly offered him a piece of advice that his mentor had not: “All kinds of people will say all kinds of things. I would not go on the reserve at the invitation of any one person or group. I would interview only those involved or having some knowledge of what happened in the pulp yard on that day—anything else will lead to a conundrum.”

Max humbly nodded his thanks.

He got directions to find Chief Amos Paul, and went to the house and knocked, but no answer came. So he looked in the living-room window and saw right through to the backyard—for the living-room had a window at the front and the back. And there Amos was, a little old man on a lawn chair, whittling on a piece of poplar.

“Well, once again you’ve had an awful time here,” Max said, holding out his hand.

“Oh, what an awful time,” Amos said, taking the hand limply and letting go.

“I’m talking about the killing of Hector Penniac,” Doran said more loudly, as if the old man were deaf.

“Hector—did you know him?”

“No, I never had that privilege.”

“The what?”

“Privilege.”

“Ahhh,” old Amos said, holding his whittled stick and looking at the ground. “So many people have not had that.”

“What do you think happened?” Doran asked.

“He was killed in the hold up there …”

“Well, I know—that’s why I’m here. So do you, sir, think this is a criminal case?”

“My soul,” Amos said, and grinned and scratched his cheek.

Then Amos spoke in his mild-mannered way, and looked up at the young man looking down at him. “Perhaps, in a way, we do not know yet,” he said. The old man knew that many people, no matter who they were, said they wanted the truth, and then wanted certain answers to fit what their idea of truth was.

Max continued: “Some say it was another crime against the people here—that the dispute is really over fishing? That Hector paid the price because of this dispute between his brother and that man … his name … his name …”—here he looked at his notes—“Roger Savage, who was at the scene?”

“I do not know,” old Amos said truthfully. He began tapping his stick and looking out toward the trees. This man had already made the connection between Joel and Hector, and Joel and Roger—and therefore Roger and Hector. That was a pretty good start, the old fellow thought, to get Roger in trouble. So after a time Amos simply did not answer Doran anymore. Doran would speak and Amos would blink.

Doran sat down on a rock, and looked over toward the wood where Amos was looking. He spoke about the over-cutting of trees and the great pollution up at Little River, the ducks that had died. One hundred and thirty-two ducks. What did a First Nations man think of that? One hundred and thirty-two ducks.

“A bunch of ducks, for sure. I don’t know,” Amos said.

Doran spoke about the ship, the
Lutheran
, having left port, and the case now seeming stalled.

Amos puzzled over this a moment but said nothing.

Max opened his notebook again, looked at his five pages of notes and asked how old Amos was. Amos told him. Doran asked if he’d fought in the war.

“Many,” Amos said, smiling and still tapping his stick on the ground.

“And what is the one thing your people need?”

“For all time?”

“Yes, for all time.”

“To be left alone,” Amos said. And he set about rolling a cigarette. He took his tobacco out and put the rolling paper on his knees and spread the tobacco. Then he rolled it carefully, with his tongue stuck in his cheek, and licked the paper. Then he snapped a match, and lighted it. Then he rubbed his ankle, which he had broken the year before, falling from his roof, and which still pained him. He was rubbing his ankle as Doran made his next comment.

“I want to help you,” Doran said.

“You do?”

“Yes. You need to realize that. I am here to help—so what is it you need?”

“I need a cold pack for my ankle,” old Amos said.

Once last year, after Doran’s most famous article, about a mayor he had secretly taped, had been published, a young woman—a hairdresser—came up to him in the mall, and asked: “How can you do that to people?”

But Doran had pressed on; he’d been certain of that story. And he needed no hairdresser to tell him what to do. Once, Max saw the mayor on the street and couldn’t help but tell him he had no hard feelings. He stuck out his hand for the mayor to take. Part of what he did was for himself, and part of it was to please his mentor, who egged him on, but part of it was to help pay his mother’s rent and the night nurse she now needed. He had never had a date, and except for a few older alcoholic journalists, he had never had a friend. His father had deserted him and then had died in New York ten years ago.