Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (19 page)

And Mary Cyr talked of magic wands that would take all the sorrow of the world away. The cottagers soon relied upon her to find out what was happening on the reserve because her grandfather owned the paper and liked Chief Amos, so she became an extraordinary guest who was sought out and coveted while the wind blew smells of ash from shore fires on the beach.

Sometimes she would walk up to the barricade and speak to the natives.

“How are you guys now? You want a toke?” And she would reach out and hand them one, with her three-thousand-dollar gold bracelet falling back on her arm. “I agree with you guys!”

That her own huge cottage, its outbuildings, its motorboat shed, its croquet lawn, was not bothered by them was, she believed, ironically enough, because of her and her love for them and for all things.

Then she would turn and walk back and sit in the large country kitchen and watch the shenanigans through the bay window, and watch the little hummingbird wash that the gardener had placed outside her window. Or she would put in an order for scallops from Collette’s father and he would arrive
tout de suite
.

Little Joe Barnaby, whom she did not know, would wander to the brink of the barricade and sit eating an apple and watch the goings-on, with his feet dangling down and his toes wiggling, until one of the warriors would tell him to go home. So she would invite Little Joe over, and in he would come, standing on the mat, looking at her with big, dark eyes and a smile on his face.

“You want an ice cream?”

“Sure, why not.”

“And a Coke?”

“Sure, why not.”

And since everyone was his friend and he was everyone’s friend too, he would tell her all the stories of the reserve that Max Doran didn’t seem to get. That his adopted mom was scared, and that at night he heard an owl, and that some men tossed rocks at Amos’s porch.

One day Little Joe saw a strange sight. Mary Cyr had driven the truck and trailer carrying her small sailboat to the barricade. There it sat like some kind of Trojan horse waiting to cross so it could be launched from the slip on the reserve, something she had done every other summer. But now they would not let her cross.

“C’mon, guys, I’m Mary Cyr,” she said, somewhat incredulous.

But the warriors would not let her or her boat pass. It sat in the shimmering afternoon heat on one side of the barricade, with the beach smelling of seaweed and sandstones and the slip on the other. Little Joe climbed a tree to watch, and wondered, sitting there and trying to blow a bubble, what he would do if he had a sailboat.

Finally, late in the day, they told her she would have to go back and take her boat up to the wharf.

So she drove the trailer back to her yard and let the sailboat sit.

Some days Mary Cyr would make a call to Halifax to see if someone might drive her Jaguar up to the beach for her. Sometimes she would telephone the stables in Toronto to find out about her horses. Sometimes she would sneeze because of allergies.

Sometimes, on a very few occasions, she would speak with her grandfather in Quebec, who owned the local paper and dozens of others. She did this when Max Doran, her sudden new friend, was there, to show him—well, that she was exactly who she was. To place his and her new friendship in the right context, and that right context was simply—that she was Mary Cyr.

That the very summer air that surrounded her was better than other summer air, and Max liked this air better than other air as well. And she made him realize that he should and must. He could smell lilac scents in the rooms, and fly-dope in the porch, and these scents were not only ordinary but wondrous. So he was influenced by her to write the best story, because after all she was Mary Cyr who had had dinner with Prime Minister Mulroney, and she liked to say, between small sips of sherry, that she could “influence you to the Max.”

She was Mary Cyr. She had smoked marijuana in Amsterdam and bared her beautiful breasts on a beach in southern France. Her rebellion, her irreverence, had an exclusive quality, and could only be done in a certain way.

She told him she was a woman with tricks up her sleeve. He asked
her in what way, and she smiled, cracked open the tail of a lobster and winked. That wink was rather fatal for poor Doran, who had never had much luck with women, and was now head over heels in love. If she knew this, she did not seem to care. She spoke endlessly of her own dreams and her need for true love, and the fortune teller she went to, and he would sit in rapt attention, unable to move his lips. In fact he found it hard to take his eyes off her, and all he could do was swallow.

Then she would sway away from him, and look back over her shoulder and smile. “You get the story, and we’ll be a team!”

And Doran could not help thinking about wanting to be a team. He even thought of marrying Mary and her grandfather giving her away. There would be some great joke told at the wedding, everyone would laugh—Isaac Snow would be best man. He was lovesick and he knew it, and he telephoned his mom about Mary Cyr and spoke about things going better. He wanted to visit his mother but he couldn’t at the moment. “Yes, Mom, but right now I can’t because I’m—well, indispensable, I guess. That’s what Mary says. Mary—well, she is someone you’d be proud that I know. And,” he whispered, “I think she likes me too!”

“Oh that’s so lovely, Max,” his mother said. “I am happy for you, dear!”

Tears flooded Doran’s eyes, because of how weak her voice was now.

Then, a week later, after a call from Mr. Cyr, Mary was allowed to cross the barricade and place her little twenty-one-foot sailboat—which she almost never sailed—into the sea.

And after that phone call, Doran, who hadn’t been allowed stories for a week because Isaac had told the band not to speak to him, and whose managing editor was worried lest he lose out on this whole summer, was fortunate enough to begin to file his reports from behind the native blockade and thus capture the attention of radio and television,
who were being kept away by the warriors. So for a brief time he became indispensable to each and every other reporter, for they all had to rely upon him. He became the conscience of Canada—or so said Mary Cyr.

“Am I indispensable?” he asked.

“Yes, and I made you so,” she said.

Doran went behind the barricade, with his special dispensation, and was filled with determination to tell the exact truth. Which is what he told Mary he was after, and to which Mary replied: “Ah yes, the truth. How vital that is. And so we have made you vital too,” and she patted his cheek with a slim hand that smelled of soft fabric.

Still, the story that Doran was indispensable to tell was not really his idea anymore. In fact, the story was basically Isaac Snow’s. And Isaac had played his cards right by sending Max away and then bringing him back. That made Max reliant upon him. Since Isaac was the only source, and since Max was the only link between Isaac and the outside world, Max slowly but surely became the voice of Isaac. And since Isaac wanted one slant on his voice and another on Roger’s, the story was told that way too. Everyone was now singing Max’s praises. And he told this to Mary Cyr, saying in a vulnerable moment, “Yes—they will probably even want to give me some award.”

“Yes, an award—maybe even a humanitarian one,” Mary said. “I discovered that Canada is like that at certain times.”

And although he believed Mary Cyr was waiting on his reports and longed for information because she cared deeply for him (because she told him she did), in truth she cared for the story only insofar as people would like her better if she had more information. And though Doran was clumsy, inept and shy with women, Mary Cyr was not at all clumsy or inept with men. Neither here, nor in Spain, nor in Amsterdam, nor in Australia in 1983.

Doran bought her a present—a little pendant—and wrapped it, and wrote on the card, “Love.” Then, tearing this up, he wrote on the second card, “With affection,” and tore that one up as well. Then he decided not to give her a card when he gave her the present. He handed
this present awkwardly to her one late afternoon. After an hour, he said, “Are you going to open it?”

“Oh—it’s for me?”

She opened the box, removed the white cotton, and the poor pendant fell to the floor. But she did not notice and kept looking in the box in a rather mystified way.

“It’s on the floor,” he said.

“Oh, of course!” She picked it up and placed it on the table and looked at it with a fresh and serious gaze. “Yes, it is—gorgeous—wonderful—thank you.”

She put her hand—her wonderful hand—to his cheek, and he blushed.

“They are taking your stories away,” Isaac told Doran the next day, “and shelving them. Gordon Young has that story about the oil spill on the Bay of Fundy. Maybe you are spending too much time in love with Mary Cyr.”

Doran blushed and blinked and didn’t know what to say. How could anyone know this? But he was obviously deeply infatuated. And worse, he didn’t want to be teased about it, and people could tell. And so Isaac began to tease him there and then.

The next story Doran wrote was one Mary Cyr told him to write. It was about day-to-day life on the reserve. It was published on page three while a story by Gordon Young took up the top half of page one.

Suddenly Doran felt he was failing.

“No no no,” Mary said to him. “As for me—I loved the story.”

“You did?”

“Well, of course I did. You are so particularly bright!”

“I am? I mean, you think I am?”

After a suitable pause she said: “Well, what do you think?” He noticed that she was wearing his little pendant on her blouse.

And poor Doran’s heart leapt with joy.

People understood what was going on—that certain men were now running the reserve. Mrs. Francis at the moment was caught in the middle. She begged her two oldest boys to come home, especially Andy, but they did not listen. She was out half the night tramping the ground looking for them, and coming home with tears in her eyes.

She wanted Little Joe, her foster child, to go to the Tim Hortons summer camp, as he had been approved, and had been waiting to go, and the night she gave him his bath he had packed his knapsack, taking the lure Markus had given him. But now she realized this was impossible, so she had to tell him it was impossible. So on the day he was to leave he sat on his bed, with his Mickey Mouse knapsack, and stared at the floor. He had waited half the year, and now he could not go.

“I don’t care,” he said. “It don’t matter.”

He spoke more English than Micmac, and so this is how they spoke to him.

“But we need you here,” Mrs. Francis said and smiled, “so you have to be brave.”

“I am brave,” Little Joe said, matter-of-factly.

All of this time Amos remained chief, and remained positive. He told people the barricade would come down soon and things would get back to normal now that Roger was not going to be charged. And this is what most people wanted. But without them being conscious of it, their every action created a counteraction and caused greater consternation. And this consternation caused more worry, and this worry made people more likely to say and do things they would not normally ever do. The barricade became the place where everything was most concentrated, and that is where Joel Ginnish most often was. Joel and Isaac had not spoken to each other in some time.

After trying to keep things on an even keel for two weeks, Amos received word that the funding for the recreation centre was cut off, and would probably never be re-established.

“Why—why do that to the children?”

Because the men had taken equipment to use at the barricade and used recreation funds. Amos had to break the word at the council meeting that night. When he walked in, and sat down, and stared at his pen, he looked much older than he had before. Even Doran was surprised at how much he had aged. “The funding has been cut.” Amos smiled apologetically and shrugged. He spoke only to a few people. He did not say the funding was cut because equipment was stolen or money had been taken to pay the warriors—but this was the reason.

Many asked him questions, but Amos went home, and closed the door, and opened a tin of peaches, and sat in the dark eating them and rocking on the rocking chair.

Now Joel, who had wanted people to stay away from the recreation centre and not help build it, and had insisted the warriors confiscate the equipment, said he was outraged because the funding had been cut. He called a meeting without Isaac Snow being present and said things were untenable. But he wanted Doran present.

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “the ground is rocky and shaky, and I would even say volatile. That is what our leader, Isaac, won’t admit. He is too interested in getting his name in the paper. But we don’t see much of our names in the paper, do we? So,” he said, frowning now, “it will be left up to me to turn this around!”

What happens when the situation men find themselves in becomes volatile? At first there is silence. And there was, for a week, complete silence.

On the evening of July 28, someone wearing a sweater and a hood climbed the bulldozer from the back, and taking his cattail torch, set the dozer ablaze. It had already been doused with gas—and the flame scorched the sleeves of the man who lit it. (It was reported ten years later that this was Andy Francis.)