Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (6 page)

“You will walk the fuckin ocean like our Lord if I hear another word,” he said. Testifying would mean an unending delay in a court none were familiar with. He had made a petition to slip port and leave by weekend, but had no answer as of yet. The shipping company, too, feared a lawsuit and had instructed the captain, who had not left the wheelhouse all week, not to speak, and not to let his men speak.

“Where was the Micmac boy?” old Amos called up, in his singsong way. He sounded like a little gnome far, far beneath the Dutch, below deck and below water. In fact, he could hear the water along the bulwark. The seamen stared at him, and then over at Markus trying to make them out. Amos took off his hat and waved it at them.

But they did not answer. There were no more leaves where any of them could get drunk. All they could do was stare at this godawful pulpyard and a line of broken spruce trees cut by an old asphalt road. Yes, it was terrible. But they were in a foreign land, and this calamity had nothing to do with them. They talked of the barbarity of the people among themselves, but the truculent captain reminded them that they too had been pillagers for centuries and that some of their
own ancestors had been part of terrorizing many indigenous peoples in the Dutch East Indies, until the Japanese took over the islands in 1940. But the men did not believe this history was comparable to the present calamity.

“Believe it or not,” the captain said, in his strong Rotterdam accent, born of poverty not unlike that of Roger Savage, “and howl all you will, but say nothing outside your berth. For it is a lesson in Dutch history what the Canadians did for us in war—and many back home are already reminding the papers of that fact. So be quiet, all of you. If the boy did something wrong they will decide it among themselves. If any of you did see it—step forward now and I will phone the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

He waited.

Not a soul stepped forward.

As far as the captain was concerned, the sooner they were out of the strait and at sea the better. Besides, the men were aware that the
Liverpool Star
, which they were holding up, might if it came to it make sure the
Lutheran
was held up when unloading in England. One call at the right time and place might make them have to wait in channel an extra four or five days. They stared at the bulwark of their own ship, and thought longingly of their own families.

Old Amos put some tobacco in his mouth and chewed it while he inspected the walls. Two steel girders jutted out about a foot from the smooth wall of the hold and ran parallel to each other on both sides, about fifteen feet above them. There were two chains hanging halfway below that, to a foot above the wood that was holed. On either side of the hold, the water buckets sat, one on its top and the other on its side, with both ladles lying in the same place. Above the heads of the sailors, the sky, murky with blue-grey clouds, and far above them an osprey looking for some flatfish or perch. Amos was standing on the pulp that had been placed in the hold the morning of Hector’s death and he looked at it quizzically. He wondered how many loads came down that day—then looked up at the girders again.

When the men above him turned away, and he was sure he was not being looked at, he hauled out his small Instamatic and took five pictures. Then he looked over at Markus and smiled and winked.

Then he straightened up his sore back and brushed off his pants and climbed back up the ladder, letting Markus go before him.

When Amos got to the deck he looked down at the hold, and then at the pulp still in the yard. Then he tried to rub his back with his right hand. Then he nodded at all the men looking at him, aware that he seemed most foreign to these foreigners.

“Old back on me—just about had it.” He smiled.

Then, with his grandson leading the way, he walked down the gangplank with his shadow off to the side, cast into the green and beautiful Miramichi water.

He walked toward the crane and looked at it, and at the date of the last inspection, three years before the accident. Amos was very troubled. Craig and Co., which owned the crane and the yard, would not want to be seen as negligent. But they had an out. Roger Savage had hooked on without being hired to hook on. The company had already issued a statement to the paper that Roger had been asked to leave the yard. No one could determine at the moment if this was in fact true. Most of the time it wouldn’t be. That is, he was often there, and had been hired to work before. He was known and a very good worker. So letting him wander the yard wouldn’t be considered anything out of the ordinary—until scrutiny and cover-up said it was.

So Amos scratched at the side of his face and looked up at the pulleys, and then he walked over to the last stretch of pulpwood in the long lot and looked back at the ship, humming lonely in the clear day, and said to himself:

“Dear, dear.”

And looked at Markus and sighed.

Isaac waited for Amos to make a report, some report about what he intended. But nothing happened. Old Amos came back from the ship and went in and ate his supper of fish cakes and pickled beets. Isaac went back to the house and again, just like the last time, Amos was feeding his face. He waited at the door because he’d been told by Amos that he would be the first to receive any new information. But old Amos simply ate his supper, with the radio turned on to the French country music station. “J’aime Cherie” was playing.

Amos, with the five pictures he had taken but not yet examined, had no information that Isaac would want. For if he said, “It is nothing to worry our noodles about,” Isaac would not believe him. If he said, “It was an accident,” Isaac would not want to hear him. He knew Isaac wanted him to say: “It is a murder and I am taking action—I will block the road to his house until Savage is charged with murder, and we will take over the riparian rights to those pools! And build our lodge, and you will be in charge of it!”

This Isaac now wanted because it was needed by those who surrounded him, and he needed to please them.

But then Amos considered all of this slightly further and decided that Isaac did not want him to say he would take action either, for it would make Isaac less important if Amos mounted his own protest. In fact the one thing he could do to quash Isaac’s power at this moment was to usurp Isaac’s part in it. But he did not. He had to solve something first.

“Roger is not a bad man,” he said.

“Go tell that to Hector,” Isaac said.

“Oh yes, well, dear me.”

So Isaac stayed outside, and Amos laid the photos out on the table and strained to see what they said. He sat eating fish cakes as his grandson Markus watched him, as he picked up a photo, shook his head, tapped a photo with his finger, shook his head, then ate another fish cake. Now and again he would look over at his grandson, and Markus would edge forward in his chair, with his feet wrapped about the legs, hoping the old man would speak. So the old man said:

“Markus.”

“Yes?” Markus asked hurriedly. “What?”

“Snare me a piece of bread, will you?”

Isaac went away without Amos speaking further to him.

This was the day of the first newspaper report by Max Doran. The article was not specific, but gave a needling sense that things had been botched from the start—and not only by the wharf, but by the band council. This was what Amos expected, and again he was troubled.

“But you might be judging him all wrong,” Mrs. Francis said. “He probably wants to say nice things about Hector—won’t that be nice for the family if he does?”

“Yes, he might want to say nice things,” Amos admitted, “but I wish we had all said nice things about Hector before.”

The next morning, Amos went to Isaac’s house and, standing in the small foyer with his hat in hand, asked the man if he would like to go up to the ship.

“Yes, I would like that,” Isaac said. He looked at his wife and nodded as if to say,
Now things will get done
.

Amos nodded too, happy to please this fellow finally.

So both got into Amos’s old truck and travelled up the highway. Amos had only first and third gear on the truck, so the engine was either lugging along or whining. And every once in a while he would look over at Isaac apologetically.

“Roger probably hooked more than one load—trying to do Hector in—that’s how I think and that’s what many of our men are thinking too,” Isaac said when Amos looked at him again. “I mean, he could have jammed it opened with a rock or taken that supporting pin away. What do you think?”

“The captain has treated me with the utmost respect,” Amos said, “and he is very concerned about all of this.”

But as they drove down the old lane they saw something, little by little, emerge through the dark spruce trees, saw it as if a conjurer had played a trick—that was the feeling Amos had when he first realized that the ship’s berth at the wharf was empty. He and Isaac stared at nothing—space and nothing else. It struck them almost as perverse, to stare at this empty wharf, while farther out in the water, as if to add insult to injury, the
Liverpool Star
was turning its engine over.

“My God—it’s gone!” Amos said at last, in astonishment. He said this in astonishment because the fourth hold had not been filled, and he felt that the workers would have done this before they left. But they had left it the way it was, and took what they had in the other, larger holds. What would that do out in the sea, where these holds had to be balanced? This fact is what Amos had been relying on.

Finally he looked at Isaac and shrugged and smiled. “They all ran away, Isaac. Look at that!”

Isaac looked at Amos and said nothing. But his face was filled with a compressed rage. The incriminating load of logs was left on the wharf, as if perhaps the sailors thought it was bad luck to take.

“Do you think I should take the logs?” Amos said.

“How in hell should I know?”

“Well, maybe I will take the logs, then,” Amos said. “What do you think? I mean, will they think I am stealing?”

“We once owned a hundred billion tons of wood, and you worry about a few logs.”

“I suppose you’re right. They might have thought they gave the ship bad luck. What do you think?”

“How the hell should I know? All they ended up doing is running away!”

Amos got out of the truck, and painfully and slowly loaded the eight-foot logs into his box, and got into the cab again. He looked at Isaac and smiled as if confused.

“Yes, they left us,” he said, “but does that matter? We do not need them to figure this out. We are both very clever, you and I—and if we work together we can come to solve it ourselves.”

But the compressed rage on Isaac’s face remained. He wanted nothing to do with this small fellow beside him.

“Call the Coast Guard and have the ship pulled up,” Isaac said. “Do it now—they are still in Canadian waters. They haven’t even reached the last bell buoy yet.”

Amos simply shrugged again. “What power do we have over the Coast Guard?” he asked quietly.

Amos, who had finally got his chance to be chief, now realized the position he was in: although he had thought he would be having powwows and ceremonial meets, and exhibition hockey games against triple-A teams from around New Brunswick, a crisis was developing and he was in over his head. He remembered how many people had said Isaac should have run for chief when he came back from out west the year before. And now Joel Ginnish was out of jail and back on the reserve, his half-brother dead, and both Isaac and Joel were walking up and down.

I
SAAC WAS A FAR, FAR GRANDER-LOOKING MAN THAN TIRED
little Amos Paul. Isaac wore his hair long, in a ponytail down his back; he wore a deer shirt with symbols. In winter he stood out against gale-force winds to protect a stretch of land for Micmac hunters—a photo of him in the local paper attested to his courage.

Markus had dreamed that Isaac and Amos would join together and do wonderful things. But now little Amos Paul seemed outclassed and alone, hobbling around trying to keep things safe.

On the night after Amos and Isaac had been to the wharf, Markus made his way to Isaac’s house just after dark, with the smell of gas in
the cool air and thin clouds beginning to form far away and the early croaking of frogs. The road stretched down between dilapidated houses and past unpaved streets running up against the hills into black shrubs and twisted windfalls.

He was bothered by the thought of Hector, because of what he knew in his heart. No one had cared for Hector the way they should have. Not even Markus. They had all teased him for being skinny and tiny like a girl. And this is the one thing he had told Amos after the meeting of the band council. No one had spoken to Hector, no one cared about him, and he was mostly alone. That is why he went up to work the boat that day. He was lucky to get on, because of Amos. Because who ever bothered with him?

Sometimes Hector would sit on the big rock down on the shore and skip stones for an hour or two without saying a thing. The only one who was kind enough to skip stones with him was Little Joe Barnaby, who was eight.