Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (23 page)

“Of course it can be proved.”

“How?”

“Because I saw them.”

“You saw them plant the marijuana?”

“Of course.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

Joel assumed a hysterical look and began to walk away. “Write the story,” he said. “Tell the truth.”

But Doran knew the truth, or suspected it, and could not write the story. Other than that, he did not know what to do. No one was going to get him to write another word unless he himself decided to.

On this day, too, young people from the university began to arrive at Mary Cyr’s cottage to mount a protest against the police for complicity or cover-up in the death of Hector Penniac. That is, the idea of a cover-up was an active one in the university corridors, and many professors wanted to display their outrage over this. Students set up a human shield to protect the natives from the police and army. Mary set up her barbecue and ordered in sea crab and salad. But by the end of the day she was tired of it all, bored with the students and their inflamed mimicking talk, and so she dismissed them from her yard in a way only Mary Cyr could do, and sat in the back veranda and smoked.

On August 25, the warriors decided they would exact the same penalty on Roger that Isaac was suffering. Rain began to fall, the days became cooler. Doran was at that meeting, but he declined to take notes. It was very tense, and people were worried the army was going to invade. Joel too seemed erratic in what he said. He looked around the room with glittering eyes to pick someone to blame. At first he cursed at two young native men who he felt were not doing their jobs at the barricade—for many now had grown tired of it. Then he spotted Doran.

“If Isaac dies, you’ll pay the price too,” he said to Doran, without the least emotion. He shrugged as if this wasn’t terrible news, and pointed to Andy, as if Andy was the one who wanted to exact justice.

And Andy, who had not known he would be singled out, simply said: “I told you I didn’t want you back here. Well, you came back—so if anything goes wrong, it’s your problem.”

Doran went back to his shed and lay down and listened to the rain against the small roof. He had stated the warriors’ case and now they
were against him. He had no alternative but to resign from the story. That did not mean he thought Penniac’s death wasn’t unjust. It did not mean the concerns of the First Nations band were wrong. It just meant he would hand the story over to someone else. That is all he was thinking. He would go back across the barricade in the morning.

But the next morning when he went to go, the warriors told him he couldn’t. Isaac was too sick, so he must stay, for they had already decided Doran was the one who had betrayed Isaac to the police. They asked him for his passport and said he couldn’t cross without it.

“If you did not betray Isaac, then write the story about the police planting the marijuana,” Joel said, wagging his finger happily. But Doran said again that he would not, because it could not be proved.

“I saw it,” Joel said.

“How did you see it? I was with you at the time,” Doran said.

Joel shrugged and walked away.

All that day Doran heard students shouting insults at the police and at Roger Savage. Roger Savage couldn’t be seen, but now and again the curtain in the upstairs window would move slightly, as if a hand had moved it. The police had decided to take Roger away for his own safety, but approaching his house was now too dangerous, not so much for them as for Roger and the warriors, and especially the students, who had locked arms and stretched from roadway to roadway. So they remained in consultations, trying to defuse the situation. They tried to talk to Roger on the phone but Roger unplugged it, and would not consult with anyone.

Then something else happened to Doran. He suddenly hated the chants of those students. All of them now calling for justice for natives that they could never provide. Doran hated them, but in a way he felt—well, he felt he had created them. And now the students became the main story, and other papers interviewed many of them. And many of them proved they too could be vandals and began throwing rocks. Their pictures appeared, and they would be happy their pictures appeared, until such time as they found themselves ashamed. Doran
listened to them, and walked from the barricade like a forlorn creature and sat in his shed with half the pie the little girl and boy had made him sitting on the table.

After a while Joel sent two men, followed by one of the many stray dogs, to search Doran. The men said he had helped the RCMP plant the dope and Joel was deciding if they would put him on trial. After they searched him one of the men wanted to hit him, but the other said no. Then they decided to take his tape recorder. They left with the stray dog following them back across the dusty road.

After supper, Doran went to see Joel to get his tape recorder back.

Joel said that he could have the tape recorder back when he left, but there might be sensitive police information on it.

Doran replied that there were only the sounds of birds he’d recorded and he was ready to go because he wasn’t doing stories anymore. Joel turned on the tape recorder, and smiled expectantly, waiting to hear the police, or pretending to want to hear this. Then he turned it off.

“Why in hell would anyone record birds?” he asked, mystified.

Max didn’t answer.

“Tell the truth,” Joel said, “in a story about them planting the marijuana. That’s the big story. If you write about them planting it, I’ll let you go.”

But what Doran was hearing was something else. This is what his informers told him (yes, Doran had informers—three boys he paid): Joel and his men were going to come and get him—the boys did not know when—and they were going to force him to help them get Roger out of the house.

“They think you can go up to the house because you are white—and Roger will open the door for you—and then they will rush him, with a gun.”

“Roger won’t trust me,” Doran said.

“Joel says he will make you do it—that it’s the only way to get Roger, and you were the one who started this.”

“I was the one!” And Doran and the three boys laughed.

3

O
LD
A
MOS KNEW THAT ISAAC HAD STARTED SOMETHING HE
could not back down from. If he gave up his hunger strike he would be looked upon as a cheat. Worse, he had set out nobly to help his people and now he realized this was the only way to do so, even if he died. If he died they would have those lobster licences he so desperately sought. And so he lay with his back to the wall, staring at a small spot.

In that small, distinct spot, a tiny green bulb of paint over a crack, he saw the entire world, and for days the entire history of the world, and at times the entire history of his people over the last three thousand years. When the jailer came in to talk to him, to beg him to eat, he whispered:

“Let me die so my people will live the way people should.”

On the night of the ninth day of the hunger strike, Isaac fell into fitful unconsciousness. They took Isaac from his cell to the hospital, but word came that he had pulled an intravenous from his arm, in order to deny the sustenance that might keep him alive.

They all had a meeting later that night at Mrs. Francis’s.

It ended with a nine-to-two vote to take Roger out of his house and hold him.

Later that night, the RCMP turned the power off, and the entire reserve was left in darkness.

Just after this happened, Max Doran was sitting alone in his shed, staring at the book he was trying to read without being able to, when Joel and Andy came to see him. The room was in semi-darkness, as were their faces, while the air outside seemed wet and still, and the trees no longer blew.

They were filled with an excitement that Doran did not understand. But then he realized Joel was high, as he had been every day since Isaac was arrested. Andy was high also, and filled with an exuberance that only proving himself to others would contain. “Do you want to help us?” Andy said, pulling up a chair to sit beside him and looking at him intently. Doran could see only parts of their faces in the semi-darkness. The wind blew just as Joel moved his chair closer.

“C’mon, you have to help us now,” Joel said.

“Of course,” Doran said after a moment. He was sweating, and felt ill.

“You must help us—it’s our last bargaining chip to get Isaac back.”

“How? I can write only what I know—and I do not know about the marijuana, I do not know about the bulldozer being burned.” He ended in a whisper: “I don’t want to blame—anyone.”

“No one has ever put the blame on us,” Joel said simply, “have they?”

Doran said nothing.

Andy then took a .22 pistol from his pocket and put it on the blanket.

“Roger’ll trust you. Go to the door and knock tomorrow—say you want to write his story. Then you pull this on him and we’ll rush him—that’s all it’ll take. We take him to our jail until we get Isaac back. Do it for Isaac like we are! There’s no one else here that can do it!”

“Roger will not trust me.”

“Well, he will trust you more than he will trust me.” Joel smiled.

Doran stared out at the small fence rails in the backyard, until they had disappeared with nightfall, and he could hear an owl in the trees, the same owl Little Joe had told Mary Cyr about.

The next afternoon was quiet and dusty. Joel, sitting in his mother’s house, could smell dust from the gravel lane and see dust on the small leaves and his windowpane. And suddenly it was as if everything, from the dust to the light coming in, was preordered. It was that strange a sensation, and Joel had not had this sensation for years. But he realized
that this sensation was not at all trivial. For if not for Hector’s death, he might still be in jail. Certainly without his half-brother’s death he wouldn’t have half the reserve doing his bidding and confiscating trucks and guns. He wouldn’t have men from other reserves—men who would not have spoken to him at other times—now waiting to hear what he had to say. He looked at his mother and wondered if she knew what he was thinking—that all this sudden power had been thrust upon him by the death of a boy. That in a certain biblical sense all power, the preponderance of all men’s desires, might be granted in just this way. That is why Saul must kill David. So a story from three thousand years ago was at this moment true.

And then, suddenly, everything changed again.

For just as the reserve had heard of Hector’s death, now they heard of Isaac’s.

He had died in the ambulance on the way to Moncton, people said. Two young men ran to tell Joel. One of them was Little Joe Barnaby.

“Mr. Joel!” Little Joe said, tugging at his arm, looking up at him with a strange kind of brave independence, goodness and love. “Mr. Joel—they say that Isaac has just died.”

Joel’s mother had made him a steak, for she worried he was not eating. And just as Amos had learned about the giant taking over men in the room, the giant had taken over Joel. And he was suddenly frightened.

That is, he did not know what to do. He called a meeting of the warriors, but it was as if he could not speak. So Andy and Tommie told him that Doran must be arrested and Roger taken from his house.

“They will give us a bargaining chip,” Andy said. And Joel nodded that they were right. Both of them cast their eyes away, as if he was now losing their respect—just as Saul had lost David’s—and this is what he could not allow.

Joel went out just at dusk, in a cold wind, to Doran’s shed, to hold him against the threat of the police, and discovered him gone. So he went
searching and could not find him, carrying the .30-30 lazily under his arm. He walked the reserve shouting Doran’s name.

“He’s gone,” someone said.

“How did he get away?”

“I don’t know. But we have to get Roger now, or he too will go!”

All these young faces were now inordinately urgent as they looked to Joel for advice. The wind began to blow crazily in the trees.

“We should hear what Amos has to say,” someone said. “He’s still our chief.”

Joel only laughed. But he felt terribly stung by this. “Come, then,” Joel nodded. “Come with me.”

He took the sixteen-foot canoe and stood and poled it upriver, against the rapids, and between the stones and rocks, without touching the bottom on anything. He put the canoe in some bushes by the back field and walked to the road that came out at the side of Roger’s place. He had Andy and two others with him. He suddenly realized, just as so many other men of power had, that if he did not do something for his men, they would no longer follow him. This idea of being in charge did not make him look wise as it had with Isaac, or kindly as it had with Amos. It only made him look afraid. The men saw this too, and reacted to it by not looking at him.

They came behind Roger’s house and heard shouting from the street, shots being fired, and saw wild and burning cattails against the night sky.

Ginnish and Andy crouched down and hid near some bushes behind the house.

“What in hell’s going on?” Joel said.

“Fire at him,” Andy said.

“What?”

“He’s firing at us!” someone else yelled. “Fire or give Andy the gun—if you’re too gutless.”

“But I don’t know what to do.”

“Then give me the gun,” Andy said.

Joel pushed him back, took aim, his body shaking, put the rifle down, aimed again and fired two shots at the propane tank. The second shot hit the lit lantern in the room—one of two lanterns attached to the propane tank.

In an instant a flame caught the curtains over the back porch door of Roger Savage’s house, and spread to the propane tank itself. They saw Roger turning to look in their direction. It was the last thing he would do. Within five seconds everything blew, back and out as if in slow motion. Great pieces of plywood flipped high in the dark night air.

People said that the explosion killed Roger Savage in an instant.

That is all that young Andy Francis remembered when he spoke to the police. He remembered nothing else, for he was close enough to suffer a major concussion.

Joel had left his friends and tried to run away—something, people said, Isaac or Amos never would have done.