Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (24 page)

The RCMP, a dozen strong, came in directly after, along with two companies of soldiers from Gagetown. They had been held up on the road, near Mary Cyr’s cottage, by a couple of dozen students and their professors. The captain in charge of the second company was a Micmac, Freddy Ward, who had known Isaac for a number of years. Finally he talked the students into letting them pass without incident. He arrested five people, turned them over to the RCMP, restored order with fifteen soldiers and returned the band to Amos Paul.

All this, briefly, was what happened after the police officer Hanover ordered Isaac taken to jail.

Over the next many weeks Amos Paul, wanting to know what had happened, wrote letters to the editor of Doran’s paper, simply signing his name “Amos.” October came and went, and now it was almost November.

Doran now drank his wine and stared out at the small flurries of snow. No one considered the stand-off would lead to death, he told people.

Especially the death of a little boy.

What was his name? Doran tried to forget it, but he never could—Little Joe Barnaby.

There had been a rumour going around that Isaac had died. Who had put that rumour out? Someone told Doran it had been one of the students, who had become hysterical the day before and started shouting, “You killed him!”

Others said it was Kellie Matchett who had told the students this as they gathered on the road near Mary Cyr’s.

But no matter who had started it, it was because of this rumour about Isaac that Joel and Andy Francis went to take Roger to jail on the reserve. Men came toward the house from the front, and Andy and Joel were at the back, and Roger Savage fired that beautiful, ornate lever-action that Doran had seen that night in the woods.

Little Joe, who had run toward the house with his BB gun to arrest Roger and take him to jail, suddenly said, “Oooo, Markus,” and fell face first into the mud.

It was pouring rain. The men then rushed the house. There was no time for Roger to come out before the propane tank exploded.

And everything ended on August 31.

Little Joe, with his cheeks painted with stickers and his small cowboy boots, and his coupons for free pizza he had gotten from the delivery man, was going to take Roger to jail and, he told Markus, give him a pizza.

He fell face first into the mud, the back of his navy blue jacket covered in blood, and blood spattered on the front of Markus Paul’s shirt.

What was terrible for Markus was how Little Joe’s eyelashes kept blinking those last few seconds of his life.

Two days later Isaac was released on bond.

A week later all the charges against Isaac were dropped.

Yesterday, Doran had heard, Isaac had become chief of the reserve. There had been subdued fanfare and a realization that things between the Government of Canada and the First Nations people would never be the same until certain issues were addressed. At least, that was what Doran wrote in the last story he filed before he resigned.

I
F NOT FOR AN ACCIDENT PLAYING SOFTBALL, RCMP OFFICER
Markus Paul might never have gone over the Hector Penniac case once again. That is, for the tenth or twentieth time.

A broken foot, which laid him up during the spring and summer of 2005, caused him to revisit it. Penniac’s death had happened before computers and DNA. Many of the participants were dead. Many of the places they’d lived no longer existed. The particulars were stored in the basement of the old section of the RCMP headquarters in a filing cabinet, and in all there were seven files. (That was all he could find, anyway.) They had sat in file cabinets in one of the old cells that was ventilated in order to lessen the smell of drunks, but was still persistently hot and morbid all summer.

He remembered his grandfather Amos Paul had broken his ankle just the year before all of this had taken place in 1985—so with Markus having a broken ankle as well, it was a revisiting in almost a physical way. And perhaps the ghost of his grandfather was telling him that now was the time to get this done. Markus wanted to solve the case too, not only because he was an officer and determined to find the truth but because of his grandfather, who had tried to keep the peace that summer.

So as he started going over it again that spring and into summer of 2005 while his ankle healed, dressed as it was in a great big bun with his toes sticking out, and him using crutches, he realized that the case had never left him, even for a second. As early autumn of 2005 came, his
foot had healed enough that he could walk down to the local store with a cane to play his lotto or buy his cigarettes or go to Blockbuster and get a movie and come home and sit in the dark, going over in his mind how it had all happened.

He was trying to concentrate on finding Roger Savage’s rifle—for that was, perhaps, in all of this, the most important missing part of the puzzle. But no matter how often he went over all the information, the rifle’s whereabouts eluded him. Sometimes late at night he would sit in the dark talking out loud to the memory of his grandfather: “Well, Amos, as you see I am in quite a mess here—my wife is gone, my VCR is broke and I can’t solve the case I promised you I would solve. Besides that, everyone is at me about my smoking.”

Then, one bright last-of-summer day, Markus received notice that his divorce was final. The next day—that is, September 6, 2005—he received a letter from his ex-wife, Dr. Samantha Dulse, asking his forgiveness.

But of course, so much of life had gone on. Where was everyone now?

He slipped into a depression of some sort, put all the Penniac files away, and yet would mull over the case, day in and day out, for another year. And in mid-September 2006, he thought he would take a trip—the one trip his grandfather had never managed to take—and remember the things his grandfather Amos Paul had told him never to forget.

T
HE NIGHT IN
A
UGUST AFTER THE POWER HAD BEEN SHUT
off, the night after the band had voted to take Roger out of his house, when the reserve was filled with noise and commotion, Markus made his way outside and looked here and there, and saw only darkness filtering down between cattail torches and candles.

That night, Sky was home with Little Joe. Mrs. Francis had told them to stay where they were until she got back. She had gone to find Andy and Tommie and bring them home. People were saying that Isaac had died. No one knew who started that rumour, and it probably didn’t matter, but no one could get a message in or out to say it was or wasn’t true.

There was a smell of fall in the air and smoke from the fires along the road, a smell of tin and tar. Everyone shouted at Markus, telling him they were on the way to the barricade. They had broken all the dead streetlights and had ruptured the fire hydrant.

Old Amos was sitting in his living room when Markus left.

“Be a man!” the crowd yelled at him when he stepped into the night air.

All the faces in the crowd were filled with an almost incomprehensible determination and alarm. Markus thought: One understands the fastidiousness of a mob when people begin to look and dress the same.

The army was supposed to come, and everyone thought Amos had sent for it. There was going to be a showdown, and people—the boys and young men—had armed themselves, with rifles and rocks and sticks and bottles and Molotov cocktails, and were now going to the barricade. If Markus did not go he would be considered a traitor. Markus walked to Little Joe and Sky’s in great agitation, and Little Joe ran to get his cowboy boots.

“I’m coming I’m coming I’m coming!” Little Joe yelled.

“I don’t want Little Joe to go,” Sky said. “You stay here with us and we will make popcorn—I promise—I just have to go to the store. I can cook it on the Coleman. Please—we can have a few beers when he goes to bed—just you and me—Grandma Francis is not here.”

She was pleading with Markus and offering the only thing she had: herself. She took his hand.

“I’ll take care of him,” Markus said. He suddenly liked the idea that he would be seen by Joel and the others. He could smell the ash from the fires and it filled him with a kind of happy rebellion. He would prove to them that his family was okay.

“Please!” She grabbed Markus’s hand again. “You bring him back.”

“We’ll just stand by the side and watch.” And then he laughed and lit a cigarette. “Why don’t you trust me?”

Little Joe ran out the door, came flying back in, grabbed his BB gun and raced out the door.

“Bring that back!” Sky called, tears running down her face.

“Don’t worry, I don’t have any bullets!” Little Joe yelled, rushing up the lane, jumping over puddles like a deer.

“Please, Markus—please,” Sky begged.

Markus knew he had to go too, for his family’s sake, for Amos’s sake. He did not want to wake up in the morning and be called a traitor by his own people.

Roger had dropped the load and then had fired to scare people away. That was what everyone had decided by the first real frost of the year.
The inquests came to no other conclusion. The reporters had finally all gone away. It was now November. But old Amos, sitting in his porch, with the sun on his legs, still wondered about it.

Markus would come and go from school in a kind of daze. But he had changed now—changed deeply. He felt sorrow for his doddering old grandfather and wanted to help.

Now when people wanted to restart the recreation centre, Amos only sat and looked out the window. Now when people told him he was still part of the band council, he didn’t go. Now when they told him he should still be chief because Isaac wasn’t doing right, he only shrugged. Now, people would see him walking beside Roger’s burned-out house. There were no cherished mementoes there. Roger had had nothing. A father dead and a mother who had abandoned him for her vices. A girlfriend who had no courage to take his side. Yet who could blame her? Scared to death. And she had begun to realize Roger was a boy she hardly knew, that he was a boy who actually would put his life on the line—not in some romantic way, as she had dreamed of as a girl riding her bicycle in the wanton heat of bygone afternoons, but in some obstinate, deliberate manner where, like Isaac on his hunger strike, he had no choice.

But sometimes Amos would walk through this burned-out house anyway. And when he got home his boots would be covered with soot, his ears would be cold and red and his wrinkled face would look even more sunburned.

Markus felt guilty for having disobeyed his grandfather because he had wanted to be seen to be doing something brave. He had learned that Amos had told the police not to take Isaac off the reserve. But they didn’t listen. They believed arresting Isaac would solve everything.

“Pretty foolish thing,” Amos said.

But that was the harshest indictment he would come up with.

Amos had no reserve now. What a place was jail to put men? How could one think that doing this, incarcerating Isaac, was just? And what justice did they seek? And what would the men on the reserve do now? And who would say that if the whites were taken and put on a
reserve, at the edge of a forlorn bay, they would not burn a bulldozer too? In fact if you gave them a thousand bulldozers and kept them where they were, sooner or later people would burn them all, and who could blame them?

As the wind swept down over the bay, days in autumn walking alone along the shore, the wind at his face, Amos would remain alone. No, not even Markus could get him to eat his fish cakes. Markus was afraid that like Amos’s friend Simon Terri, his grandfather would walk into the woods one autumn day and disappear. How could this man, Amos Paul, not have been awarded his war medals, and not been made a part of Canada?

Markus was studying now, many things. He was reading all he could. He said he would do something great for his grandfather.

But then one afternoon, when the wind blew down on the house from all angles, Amos simply said: “Remember the pictures I took?”

“Yes,” Markus said.

“I am not sure—but maybe right now would be a good time to look at them again.”