Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (37 page)

Markus stood, and went toward the door. He was tired, and his ribs and his lungs hurt. The little girl came out to say goodbye. He saw her energetic bright face and thought of Little Joe Barnaby—and a dozen other little boys and girls in that adobe village in Chile. He patted her head with his large hand and bent and kissed her cheek, and placed an American silver dollar in her hand.

I
T WAS BEFORE
M
ARKUS LEFT
S
AINT
J
OHN
R
EGIONAL THAT
they came to see him.

He was in a sitting room looking out over the hills in the distance, beyond where the Bay of Fundy must have been. It was cold and he could feel this cold through the window. He wore a hospital gown and huge slippers and was drinking a bottle of iced tea. He had a nicotine patch on his upper right arm. He had had the biopsy. He had not had a cigarette in a week (well, one). He heard the elevator door open. Behind him, as always in hospitals in mid-afternoon, it was still dark, and the
corridors were filled with pushcarts, filled with levels of things, and somewhere there was the sound of a telephone ringing, and somewhere else some man speaking.

He turned, and Max Doran and Brice Peel were standing there, Brice with the letter in his hand.

For some reason Max had his hand on Brice’s neck, as if to guide him forward, an action that may have been required more for Max Doran than for Brice—a kind of civil mentoring that he was now obligated and determined to fulfill. They had brought back the envelope.

“You have to read this,” Doran said. “You are the one he wanted to bring it to. I don’t know how to prove it, that’s all. But I will do nothing until you do prove it, and then I will write what I have to—that’s my pledge. I will file the damn story!” Here his lips trembled slightly with determination and dignity.

Then Brice handed the envelope to Markus, with his arm pushed straight out. Brice looked at him like a scared bird might. He was still little Brice with the big ears and thin, knobby knees, a rural boy caught up in a world no longer rural. Just like the First Nations world, too.

Markus suddenly remembered a pathetic old dog licking his hand one night—and looked down at his wrist, to see the scar from the rabbit snare he had got when he was thirteen. They’d killed that dog with rocks. Even when they were throwing the rocks, it had tried to wag its burr-covered tail.

He said he would read the letter, and act upon it, but not that day. He would go back home before he did. He would wait for the right moment.

Markus did not get back home for another week. The spot on his left lung was benign. The one on his right lung was not a spot in the lung, but blood outside the lung itself that had coagulated after he had been hit in the ribs in a brawl one night.

The unopened letter was in his possession and the weather had turned cold. Snow was falling and the world was white and even, the
roads to and from long and almost forgotten. This little place, this little reserve, was at the end of nowhere at all.

He snared a rabbit, skinned it off and left it hanging over the sink. He was chopping onions and carrots to make a stew when he decided to phone Isaac.

“When do you get your Order of Canada?” he said.

“Next week.” Markus didn’t speak.

“Why?” Isaac asked.

“I would like you to get it,” he said. “I think you deserve it.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you ever visited your father’s grave?” Markus asked.

“No—I never did.”

“I suggest you find time to visit it, and request the body be brought home. I seriously suggest you visit Roger Savage’s grave—and say a prayer.”

There was a pause on the other end. Markus hung up without saying goodbye.

All the goodbyes save one had been said.

That night, alone in his apartment, Markus opened the letter, sitting on the couch in the living room with a beer on the table and his arms on his knees. He realized as he opened the letter that he was unfolding an event from long ago that had caused everything since. That had caused Amos’s heartbreak, and his own—and Sky’s. He stared at it a long time, looked at the number of pages, and then found his reading glasses.

Then he took a drink of beer. He finished the beer and went to the kitchen and opened another. Then he went back to the couch and sat in the exact same position.

It was written in Brice’s hand, and filled with spelling mistakes. This is what it said:

The first thing Brice wrote was that he remembered Roger coming into the yard ten minutes late, just as Hector Penniac was climbing the gangplank. Roger ran down to the yard and was out of breath when he got there. It was Hector’s first boat. No one was sure if he could handle it. So they put him in the fourth hold with Bill Monk and his brother, Topper. Brice’s father was the other man in the hold—he was in the cubby below. The other two, Bill and Topper, would move forward at the end of the day to the middle hold. That is why Roger hung around. He was hoping that when the fourth hold was full his seniority would give him another day and a half. (And that is why he had sent the extra load to the fourth hold instead of hooking to the third—to fill the fourth hold faster.)

Hector had fine hands and delicate features but he was willing to work, and he offered gum to everyone just after he had climbed down the ladder. The name
Lutheran
was written on the inside of that hold for some reason, and Brice remembered it years later. He remembered the bulwark was painted brown instead of green as it was along the other holds. He remembered, too, how insufferably hot the day became—which made people only wonder why Roger was hanging around, and then allowed an accusation when he hooked to the fourth hold. Topper was hungover as well, and Bill Monk was in a hurry to get the fourth hold done and move on, and so he took some amphetamines that he had on him in order to work at a faster pace. There were two water buckets in the hold, one on the left, the other on the right, nearer the cubby where his father, Angus Peel, worked.

Brice remembered that some of the men were talking about the stag film
Little Oral Annie
that George Morrissey had, and how she sucked good cock. Bill Monk said he had problems with his stomach the last week. That is when Brice remembered Hector said he was going to be a doctor and maybe Bill Monk shouldn’t take so many amphetamines. They didn’t like this comment, especially Bill Monk, and felt it a presumption to have an Indian talk to them about being a doctor. But Hector with his refined manners did not know he had made a mistake, crossing the line talking about civil matters to uncivil men. What was more troubling is
the conversation had started because Bill Monk was worried about his own doctor telling him he had to take a certain kind of pill for his stomach. It was in some way an intrusion on his own limited knowledge.

So when Hector moved too soon to pulp hook a log and it dropped near Topper’s boot, Topper gave him a shove, a small, unpleasant but un-noteworthy one.

“Watch that, sweetie pie,” he said, “or you’ll need a doctor before you become one.”

“A medicine man,” Angus Peel erupted from down in the cubby. They all laughed.

Hector smiled and offered an apology, but when Bill Monk asked why he said “sweetie pie,” Topper answered, “Everyone knows he’s a fruity boy—that’s what Joel Ginnish tells us.”

“That’s not true,” Hector said.

“But it is—it’s what a dozen of yer Indians told me,” Topper said. “Yer a fruity pie!—trying to fruit them all the time.”

Topper wished to make no more of this, except Bill Monk said, “Then he can drink no water of mine out of my bucket.”

And Topper shrugged and said, “Why is that?”

“Well, Hector is the big doctor—big medicine man—telling us all what to do! Ridiculing me for what I do! So I want no AIDS-ridden Indian slobbering over my water—not with that AIDS. I ain’t drinkin’ from the same bucket as a foul-mouth Indian,” Bill said, his eyes mirthfully cold. He looked to the others and nodded, and they did too. Hector smiled clumsily and said only that none of that was true.

“That’s right,” Angus Peel said, in order to show his complicity, because he himself had never belonged to anything—and so it started. What was at first a joke became by 9:50 a matter of civic responsibility for these three wonderful men, and they kept taking turns to guard the buckets. Hector tried to go without, and tried to suck the liquid out of his gum, but by 10:30 he was unable to open his mouth.

As the morning wore on, and as the work increased, Bill took off his shirt and worked in a T-shirt, which showed his arms to be as taut as
iron and his eyes as blue as steel. The smell of wood and human sweat permeated the hold.

“No man who sucks dick will get a drink out of my bucket,” Brice heard above after Hector asked for water. Hector again said that was not true.

Brice Peel was ordered then to lower buckets to only one of the two Monk brothers.

“Maybe then youse the fruit,” Hector said to Bill Monk, and this enraged him. Hector kept working, and kept trying to get to a bucket to get water, at first playfully, but as the morning became hotter his quest became more and more urgent. He said he would go up the ladder, but they told him climbing out was a dangerous thing when loads were coming and he would never be allowed on another boat. And he needed to work them.

“Not only that, but no other Indian will get a union card—I’ll see to it!” Bill Monk said.

So Brice, watching this, and trembling because his own father was caught up in this, said, “Just a minute, Hector.”

He ran down the gangplank and searched in the yard near the scales for another bucket. There he heard his uncle George Morrissey say he had to take a piss, and for Roger to snap the next load after the backhoe came by. And there seemed to be no worry about it.

By now, the men believed their unjust behaviour was somehow commendable and hilarious—and the three of them in the hold swore that Hector would not be allowed to drink if he had AIDS, and he as a “doctor” should understand that.

“You of all people should know,” Bill Monk kept saying, “a medicine man like you is!”

By eleven that morning Hector could not spit, his mouth was so dry.

It was about eleven-fifteen in the morning when Roger hooked, and it was then, as the load was lifted into the hold, that Hector realized his chance, because the men had all gone to the same side. He ran under the load to take a drink.

“Don’t you let him, Topper!” Bill said.

So Topper, determined he would not drink from his bucket, tried to knock it from his mouth when he lifted it. He ran to that side, and in a careless moment swung the pry bar in his hand. His wide overhand swing missed the bucket entirely and hit Hector in the forehead, and the boy was dead before he hit the ground. Cigarettes he had offered everyone, and the gum, too, fell from his shirt pocket. He lay still as the load came down.

There was only a bit of blood and bruising on his forehead, and a bit of missing scalp.

It had all started as a joke, just an hour or two before.

The men ran to the load, unhooked the cable at about five feet from the ground and put the load over Hector. When they looked up into the sunlight above, they saw little Brice Peel with the third water bucket that he had gotten out of kindness looking down in resolute terror.

They yelled up that the load had dropped and the clamp was unhooked—they yelled there was a man under it, and for someone to come and help.

To their surprise and consternation they learned later that it was Roger Savage, denied a job that very morning, who was lurking around.

The pry bar was hidden in the bulwark under the cubby and, along with the
Lutheran
, was returned to the sea.

Markus sat for an hour, staring into nothing. Once in a while he would begin to shake, so terribly that the muscles in his legs would tremble. Then he would be very calm.

He looked again at the front of the envelope:
To be opened on my death. Brice Peel, water boy for the fourth hold of the
Lutheran
on June 19, 1985
.

S
OMETIMES DURING THAT LONG LAST WINTER
, M
ARKUS
would take Brice’s envelope out and look at it. But he did not open it again.

At times when he went to his grandfather’s house he would look at the pictures Amos had taken. Then it all became clear—the bucket damaged by the swing that Topper had taken, the logs lying in one place, everything in order, and the gum from Hector’s shirt pocket, which he had so offered about, lying up against the bulwark almost unseen. The same gum Hector had offered Markus in the truck cab that morning.

There was a story he had heard when he was little, one his father, David, had told him. It was about a boy years ago working alone in the woods. He had got turned around, and had not eaten or drunk anything in two days. And he stopped at an old Indian house near the barrens and knocked on the door, and he asked for something, and the woman in the house said, “I am sorry—but I only have a glass of water.”

Now, years later, the woman was in hospital, and was unable to pay for her care. Her doctor happened to be Dr. Hennessey, who had paid his way through school by working in the woods years ago. He went to her chart late one night and he wrote across her bill: “Paid in full, with one glass of water.”

Markus thought of that story, now and again, as the days got shorter, and colder, and the snow scattered between the buildings at the edge of this nowhere. Sometimes he would sit in the window to catch the sun.