Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (28 page)

This, then, was integrity. No one was a yapper. And Brice found this idea was to be enforced and reinforced.

But the boy kept asking about the water bucket. Ten times he asked about it. His father was shaking too, standing near the sink, with his hands blistered, and told him to shut up. Then his father left to find out what was going on.

In a while Brice’s father came back. The sky was white and there were bugs filling the air, and the scent of evening dropping low, and cars passing down on the highway and the clucking of a chicken or two scratching for food, and a rooster half-blind and old that the hens would peck to death within a week. Behind the dark, blistering house was an old rabbit pen that the water boy had and his little rabbit pen was the only thing he lived for.

His father asked what the boy would say if the police came. He told the boy everyone down the hold was saying it was Roger Savage because he disliked the idea of the union turning on him and hiring an Indian.

The little fellow said nothing, tucking his thumbs up inside his fists and staring in a kind of silent agony.

His father said, “They were kind enough to take us on, and you cannot ever say they did anything wrong—first of all, they probably didn’t, and second of all, they are the Monks.”

Brice shrugged. Then he asked if he could lick the peanut butter jar, for it was almost empty and the welfare cheque had not come.

And so, the next day when the water boy was called upon to give a statement, when the police sat him in their car and asked him what had
happened, he said that he had gone to get a bucket of water. The police officer wrote this down, but didn’t seem to understand there was a glitch here, for he had never worked a boat before, and did not know that two buckets was the standard, and two buckets were already there.

“When I come up the load fell.”

“So you saw the load fall.”

“Certainly, like a ton of fuckin’ bricks.”

“Did you see who hooked?”

“No sir.”

And that was it, in red pencil, written and laid away for four months, and now in the possession of Amos Paul—who had not got to the red-pencilled note yet. The boy’s name was signed on that little note: Brice Peel, the water boy.

That night after Brice Peel gave his police statement, Topper Monk came over to see the water boy’s father, Angus. And Angus Peel went out on the doorstep and shook his head. He had a piece of straw in his mouth and he said, “Yes, I know it,” and looked behind into the dark little window, where the paint was peeled. There was one highway light that shone down on the road, and now and again the sound of a car faint and tragic and longing.

Angus Peel came back in and glared at his son.

“What did you say to the police? Topper is askin’.”

“I never said nothing—I said the load fell.”

“Topper Monk has done a lot fer us.”

The boy went into the living room with the glare of the television meandering out into the dull, drab furniture and the smell of sweat, and sat there, and looked guilty, as if he had done something wrong. He stared out at his rabbit pen. His knees shook. His father looked at him with compassion, his son’s thin neck and the little bruise on his cheek.

“Topper has done a lot fer us,” he said kindly, “that’s all I am saying. You know I’ve had a hard time—and I took that job even though they
knew I couldn’t handle it. It was the happiest day of my life—and you were water boy—and now I am sorry I got you into this.”

“I know,” the boy said. “I know, Dad. I know you’re sorry—I know you always have been sorry.”

Brice Peel woke up the next morning to the telephone ringing, and he listened as his father climbed the stairs.

“Topper Monk wants to sees you,” his father said. “So just mind.”

“Mind what?”

“Mind what Topper Monk is saying.”

Brice got out of bed and put on his worn trousers over his skinny little legs, and an old red T-shirt that his mother gave him two years before, so it made his arms hang out and came up on his belly, and his floppy hat that he liked to wear, and went out to his rabbit pen.

Topper Monk did something very strange. He showed him the bicycle Brice had said he wanted to save for and placed it beside the cage, with the boy’s mouth hanging open in the dry air, and the smell of dark manure coming out in whiffs as if from a dark tunnel.

“Now that’s some bicycle,” Topper said.

And that bicycle allowed a preternatural silence for weeks and weeks, as the calamity grew over at the edge of the bay where Roger Savage was building a room onto his house. The boy hardly washed, and the bicycle was driven around the Peel yard in the desperate gloom. The boy drove around on the bicycle, his pants bobbing up and down on the black seat so it smelled of his own shit, for he was too scared or defiant to wash.

“Daddy,” Brice said once.

“What?”

“Do you know Roger Savage?”

“Yeah, I know of him. Can’t say I know him completely, but I do know of him.”

“They say he’s the killer of that Indian boy.”

“That’s what they say,” Angus Peel noted.

“But do you think so?” Brice asked, almost as a whisper.

“It’s what I know,” Angus said. And expressing himself as finely as some of the educated people, he extended his grace to the band by saying, “I’m no Indian lover, but I will tell you, a death is a death and can’t be celebrated.”

Then there was silence for a moment.

“Son, I have to have dialysis, what am I supposed to do?” And Angus Peel looked at his son, who was born with such hope into such a world.

Later in the month Topper Monk began to inquire whether Brice—little Brice Peel—wanted another job. One where the real money was.

“It’s not so bad. Just go up to the end of Onion Brook and cut some sprags for the back of the barn. I’ll give him six bucks an hour, which is not bad for a boy.”

“But can he do it?” Angus asked, knowing if he was a father at all he would have to take up for his son.

“Oh God, yes, he can do it, Mr. Peel—he’s not no idiot.”

“I don’t want to do it,” Brice Peel said. “I don’t want to go way up to the reaches of Onion Brook and stay there, for that’s what they want me to do, and the flies will have a feast—I’ll be bone soup for the bugs.”

But his father could not get him out of it, and they both knew it.

Brice Peel went to Onion Brook. So if he was wanting to tell someone of what he thought had happened, that person would first have to travel the highway and then the upper stretches of the Tabusintac, then cross to Blueberry Barrens and from there walk toward Upper Onion, where you would find in a place of nothing three small ruined buildings rotting against overgrowth—buildings that belonged to the Monk brothers’ father’s sister’s father-in-law. A connection that had entrapped the father-in-law’s siblings in a kind of hell. A Monk’s hell, as one them put it back in 1973.

There, someone looking for little Brice Peel was not done looking but
would have to complete another three miles along a pathway ribboned out through a swamp and alder growth, toward the brook that could be heard now and then against a lost blue sky. Here, in among the smell of vetch and musk and the constant whine of bugs, one would hear the roar of Onion Falls sooner or later—and an old windfall over that deep gorge was the only way for the boy to get across to the other side.

In the entire universe, there was only one wee boy who could tell what had happened in the hold of the
Lutheran
. Worse, he was the boy the Monk brothers had taken on as a water boy because they genuinely felt sorry for him and his father. And George Morrissey was this boy’s uncle.

“He’s a problem,” Topper had said, sitting in the living-room dark the night before they decided to send Brice to Onion Brook. He heard of the commotion rising and falling on the reserve and knew things were pointed in one direction: away from them. The paper was open on the kitchen counter, with its story about the death of Micmac fur traders in 1839—and all of this was true. But to the men sitting in that room, the story covered up a crime of gigantic proportions: the death of Hector Penniac in 1985.

Doran had interviewed them. And he had done them a favour. But Doran did not know this yet. That is, he was not irresponsible so much as doggedly sure of everything, just as Hanover was. He was a prim-ass, doggedly sure of himself, Topper said, and yes that was true, Bill Monk said, and we made him more sure of himself.

“And he does not know it!” Monk said.

Yet that young boy, with his small frame, and the red T-shirt with the bumblebee on it that said “You bee my honey bee,” did know it. Or he was certain of something.

Billy Monk was much thinner and smaller than Topper. Billy’s pale Irish skin and pale blue eyes looked out at the world of misery with resolute
indifference. He had an absolute love of the gleeful torment, whether he was in school, on the bus or at home playing baseball. He had cultivated that torment into a pleasure that made life a misery for certain others.

But he had liked the boy and he liked the boy’s father, who was an old drinking comrade from the sixties, when they both grew their hair long in feral deference to the time and made sure they took their teeth out and wrapped them in Kleenex before they entered a bar.

“We’ll take him to Onion till this blows over,” Billy said, tapping on the newspaper’s front page.

There was some strange loathing this newspaper reporter had for Roger Savage that they didn’t understand.

Isaac would have to deal with that, they decided.

When Topper brought him to the falls, Brice realized he had to cross a deadfall, and it was a thirty-foot drop to the low stream and boulders.

“Mark me words, you can do that, boy.”

The boy shook. He did not know what to say. He stared at the falls and the rainbow it made, and felt the heat suffocate him. His father was supposed to have come with him. But his father was sick. Brice had never in his life been this alone.

He had to cross a log, and far beneath him he could see some sea trout. It will be so much fun, they had said. You will be able to catch trout.

“I can’t go over alone,” the youngster said.

“Here,” Topper Monk said. “Get up on my shoulders and I’ll walk you across.”

So Topper grabbed the boy and put him on his shoulders and with his knapsack in one hand and the bucksaw in the other started out. By the time they were two feet out it was impossible to turn back, and sitting hunched up on Topper’s shoulders the boy was off balance and felt they’d fall.

“Keep straight up on me,” Topper warned.

The boy, with his red T-shirt black with sweat under the arms and with the bee on the front with its caption that read “You bee my honey bee,” suddenly thought of the story his mother had told him about the fox and the gingerbread man. And he believed Monk was going to let him go.

“He won’t be able to,” the boy thought, “not when he has me—because if I go I’ll latch onto his head until he goes too—I’m a pretty good latcher. In fights I can latch pretty good, no doubt about it. I’m a latcher!”

And he put both arms around Topper’s head.

“Hold ‘er now there, Brice buddy, ya got yer fingers over my nose!”

So this is what the boy said when they were ten feet out over the thirty-foot drop to solid boulders: “If I go—you go.”

“What are you talking about?” Topper said. “Get yer hands off me head!”

But the man became aware that the farther he got out on the windfall the more dangerous it was with his top-heavy load—and here he was staring death in the face with a young boy because of an Indian man he had never seen before that terrible morning. And why did this happen to him? What law had made his life so certain to be this way, as it was from the time he was ten? And why now—when he himself had wanted to settle things and have his own house and back lot—why now did that Hector Penniac, a man he had never cared about one way or the other, come clamouring down the ladder into the hold with his fine features looking resolute and dignified and in some respects urban, and his kindness as he offered them gum and cigarettes? And what was in him and his brother to take to tormenting that man—for what sport did men do this, and for what reason did he think it was fine and noble to do that to the young Indian boy, and now that he realized that it was neither fine nor noble, what reason was it that he had to relive it every day, and could not rid himself of it?

Once they had reached the other side, Topper crossed back and forth much more swiftly and left Brice’s supplies in three boxes by the
tamarack tree, near the cabin Brice was to sleep in, as the sun beat down on his red face. He took the boy and showed him that small one-room cabin with the two cots and the rusted stove, airless and sad with a poster from 1966 that said “Gunk, the Great Cleaner” and showed a girl in a half-unbuttoned top leaning over an engine.

“No one is going to leave you,” Topper said to the boy. “Your dad will be here tonight—everything will be fine.”

He smiled then and patted the boy’s head, and trod away, and crossed the log again, and went into the gloom on the other side of the brook and the child was alone.

His father did not come that night, nor until three days later, his face sheepish and his blood-red eyes downcast. The boy, bitten half to death by blackflies, was sitting near a pile of props from the tamarack he had cut, in obligation to his job. He had smashed his cans of beans on a rock and against a tree, trying to open them because they had forgotten to leave him an opener.

At night the temperature dropped, so he was cold. He said he saw a bear. The camp smelled of urine because he had wet his pants.

The father talked of when he was a boy, and how he had done more, and how more was expected of him and he did not mind, for that was how to get ahead in life.

“And you’ve got so far,” the boy said, for the first time in his life answering back. And for the first time in his life his father could not hit him.

Topper Monk, who crossed the log again and went into the woods, realized the lie he was perpetuating. He was not pleased with it at all. The idea that it was a sin was beginning to inform him, too late. And now it was also too late to say anything about it.