Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (25 page)

Markus decided he would do this, just to have the old fellow do something. And so after supper, which Amos hardly touched, his old face looking puzzled, they climbed the stairs into the attic and sat down at the old desk, and Amos pulled out his pictures and carefully laid them down and sighed when he did so. And tears came to his eyes.

“They treated me with the utmost respect,” he remembered saying to Isaac. “They treated me with the utmost respect.”

“What are you seeing there?” he asked Markus finally, having spread his little pictures out on the desk.

Markus looked a long time at the picture of the fatal logs.

“The logs that dropped,” he said.

But Amos was puzzled by this.

“Did they all drop? Can you tell me? They are so close together.”

As promised, Amos, as chief during the crisis, had a complete copy of the files for the investigation. These had been handed to him by a
mailman a week ago in a big manila envelope. And he had not had the heart to look at them.

So now he delicately pondered something and opened them up.

They were very orthodox and detailed—and somehow aggravating in their mundane specifics: the size of the
Lutheran
, the number of holds, the trips it made to Canada, the amount of wood it had taken (a lot more than what it took to build Roger Savage’s little house).

Then the number of sailors—where most of them came from, their nationalities, their religion. Then the number of stevedores working the yard—the history of the yard work from 1954. The history of the settlement, and the reserve. There were two documents on the fishing disputes, both in the river, over the salmon pools, and on the bay, over the lobster, over the last twenty-nine years.

Except for the captain, no Dutch sailor had made a report. The men in the hold said only that it had happened too fast to save the boy. Roger Savage was called negligent in the first act, against Hector, but not criminally negligent. He was, though, held criminally responsible for the second incident, the death of Little Joe. But the initial inquest found that the reserve, too, bore some responsibility, for deciding to take Roger Savage from his house. The students were reprimanded for blocking the road. There would be a full inquest a year later and it would reach the same conclusion.

Amos read over the report about Roger.

He was considered a mean man, Roger Savage. And he could have been a mean man, but Amos never thought he was.

“That’s not the Roger you or I knew,” Amos said.

Markus remembered Roger Savage at a party with his girlfriend in the sunset over the tarred logs on the shore. Christ, everyone was happy then. Six days before the
Lutheran
had made berth at Millbank. The first poem by Yeats that Markus had ever picked up had this line:

Markus decided that same fall that someday he would become an RCMP constable. It was an evening when there was a snowfall, when he walked the streets of downtown Newcastle after school, all the shops lit by street lights, and snow falling over boarded-up alleys, the smell of roasted peanuts and perfume from drugstore vents. In a jewellery shop he saw a little Indian figurine called Miramichi Pete, a little boy who lived long ago, when the Indians ruled the land. When they would have fought the Inuit and Huron too. He stared at it a long moment—wanting to buy it for Sky. But Sky had not spoken to him since her brother had died. He had tried everything he could think of to ask forgiveness. Except it could not be asked.

He had a strange feeling for some time, however, and it came from his nausea at “the inner ring” that he had read about. Markus reflected much on this, and decided that the inner ring C. S. Lewis had written about was actually present in those awful days, from the busload of students who came with a professor, his goatee and bald head appearing as a tribute to the kinder man we were supposed to become. They all had a barbecue at Mary Cyr’s and read poems over a loudspeaker against racism, although nothing that approached William Yeats.

One young girl, in an army jacket that came down over her small wrists, yelled: “You killed Isaac like you killed his trees! You take our moose and our honey bees!”

And then began the Golgotha of Roger Savage, who had just got his grade twelve equivalency.

He telephoned his girlfriend, May, to ask her not to believe what the papers said, and to stay with him. She was the only person he had ever begged to do anything.

“Please—you are the only one I have!”

“Of course I don’t believe them—of course I don’t,” she said.

But it was her tragedy too—this May Grant—to be caught up with people who wanted her to be free of him, to acknowledge her mistake
and use that knowledge wisely. She was not so pretty and not so clever—and amid all of this, she seemed incapable of knowing what to do. So she vacillated, first one way and then the other, as if trying to find the side of the dory that would not tip over. Finally she decided in a way to be passive so as not to be imperilled, to sit in the middle and let others handle the oars. And went back to her mother’s house in Doaktown, where many did not know that the man she had been engaged to was Roger Savage. She entered a contest in August, and won second prize for blueberry muffins, and put Roger Savage behind her.

Two years later she would marry a Loman man from Howard who had been in the air force and liked things “just so” and said there was no use going into it, her blueberry muffins were the best.

If Roger had just left the house, many later said, no one would have bothered him. That very well might have been true. But then again he couldn’t—in the flecking off of human guilt and shame, one sometimes had to make a stand.

Certainly it cost the life of Little Joe.

“Maybe you could do something to solve this, if I am unable to,” Amos said when Markus told him he wanted to be a policeman. Then he asked: “What would you do about a standoff?”

“I don’t know,” Markus said. “I do not know. Any side I would be on would be the right side—and the wrong side.”

Markus realized now, in 2006, that when Amos had said at a band meeting in late July 1985, “Beware of what you wish for,” he was speaking to those who were hoping for the death of someone, anyone, really—though no one would say this. Why were they hoping for such a death? So they could say they had partaken in something that was dangerous without its being dangerous to themselves.

“I bet I’ll catch a trout next year,” Little Joe had told Markus when he carried the trout that August night, running along in the dust to keep up, his bare feet as tough as leather. “Maybe four—or even five!”

A
MOS STARTED IN LATE
O
CTOBER
OF
1985
GOING OVER THE
autopsy report of Hector. Here, after about forty minutes, he found something unusual. He stared at the picture of the boy in the morgue. It was part of the files, along with everything else. The skull had suffered a severe fracture causing immense hemorrhaging into the frontal lobe. The death was registered first as undetermined and finally as an accident.

The police officer in charge was Sergeant Hanover. They had interviewed the crane operator, and George Morrissey, who had told them first that he had hooked and then two days later said he had not. The crane operator could not be sure how the load fell. At some point he lost it, but had no idea when exactly. The Monk brothers said the clamp had been left open, which would be extremely dangerous, and almost lethal.

Reading everyone’s statements, from the boys in the hold to the crane operator, it did seem to Amos as if Roger had done something and someone was trying to cover for him.

But suddenly Amos said: “What if it was the opposite? What if Roger was covering for Morrissey, who was away from the site—and hooked in innocence?”

“Except for the fact that he wouldn’t admit that he hooked,” Markus said. “So that made it all seem deceitful.”

“Well, his innocence is just as possible as anything else,” Amos mused. Then he said, “If you become a policeman, please do not become one like Sergeant Hanover, who seems to always take the wrong man to jail.”

Markus went to school the next day, and he saw the water boy, Brice Peel, with a lame pigeon he was trying to heal. He would not look at anyone, and for weeks and weeks did not speak, and rumour had it that he’d threatened one boy with a knife one day after class.

In the late fall, the apples shed from the trees and the side of the river made ice, and thin rivulets and streams went down, and the ground turned grey as an owl’s back, and maples thrust naked and crooked to the sky. Nights were filled with the glorious scents of frost. The storm windows sat glassy and black in the houses along the roadway. Halloween was over, and then came Remembrance Day with its smell of gunpowder along the miles of uncovered tamarack trees.

People said, most good-heartedly, that what defined Amos Paul as Micmac was his procrastination. That he would start and stall, many times. And this was true of him, and everyone who knew him knew this. He was also absent-minded. Even his beloved school could have been finished sooner if he had not lost a list of government contracts and had to establish contact with all of them again, retrieving the quotes and estimates he had been given.

But in fact many great men did this, and had to be prodded forward. And Amos had other things to think about besides that terrible case that seemed to veer this way and that in his conscience. He had his grandchildren to look after, and many other things going on.

Still, Amos had discovered one thing: the case against Roger Savage rested on flimsy evidence. And he was becoming more certain that Roger had done little—and perhaps, just perhaps, nothing, not even to Little Joe.

The feeling did not leave him, and could not until he tended to it.

Amos sat in the attic and sifted among the papers for a number of days in this cool fall, and heard the trees wave outside, and listened to the bay water cry out in cold, turbulent ways the cost of living beside it. He would be there when Markus came home from school and he would be there late at night when Markus went to bed.

In the corner of this attic was Amos’s father’s old hat, and the fishing spear he used up on the Tabusintac River as a boy, until he was told by the landowners up there that the river where his Micmac Nation had fished in peace for twenty-five hundred years did not now belong to them, and the old hunting grounds of caribou and moose were gone from the leaning barrens. This was when Amos himself was fourteen.

There were other things here as well. A letter from the Premier of the province that was covered in plastic and placed in a binder when Amos became chief. So too was an article about his seventy-fifth birthday in the local paper.

But beyond this, in the old attic there was little else, the smell of burnt paper and a mannequin for dressmaking that Amos’s mom once owned, where she would blister her hands working for the white choir and children getting First Communion.

Then there was a small grey stone placed on a table where the binder sat. It was in fact the stone that had come from Amos’s shoe when he had walked up to see the RCMP officers that early-summer day after Hector Penniac died.

Amos and Mrs. Francis never got to take their trip. But this was Amos’s decision. In the end, as Mrs. Francis packed to go away on that trip of discovery across the great wide North America, he simply stated, “I am too old.”

“But don’t you want to see where the Apaches were and the Sioux?”

“No, not anymore. They are where they are, and I am where I am, and we should leave it at that.”

For a few days Mrs. Francis tried to make him change his mind, for she wanted to try to escape the memories of Little Joe.

How was it that tragedy happened so easily? It was not that he had been too old. But the death of Little Joe Barnaby, which he blamed on himself, had broken his heart. It had broken Sky’s heart as well. Both Markus and Amos knew this, and said nothing to each other about it.