Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul Read Free Page B

course, did not take the money.
    Roger, money still in hand, went along the shore and stared out at the islands in the bay draped in evening mist.
    He walked back along the bleak shore road, with clouds overhead. He looked like a common labourer, his pants and his boots dusty, his forehead broad, his eyes dark brown. He was a very good carpenter and a good mason. He was exceptionally strong and very quiet. Bad luck had plagued his family most of his life, and he had decided that the one thing he could not do was become embittered by it. His mother had left him as a child. His father had fallen from a scaffold when working on the bridge. He had taken care of himself from fifteen on. He had no training from a father to be a man, and so came to manhood on his own. He had lived in his father’s house, rumoured to be part of the native settlement of 1815.
    It did look in hindsight as if Roger offering his money was not a spontaneous act of generosity but calculated to assuage the guilt of privilege. This was the crux of the problem, and Chief Amos Paul sensed it. He also sensed something more—that the white papers would soon get hold of the story. And a lot would depend on who they sent to cover it.
    He hoped this would not happen, but told his grandson Markus that night while sitting on the back porch, “This will work against Roger, I know. The papers might jump on him.”
    Over the next few days, as the old chief went along the streets of his shabby little reserve, people asked him what he was going to do about this man Roger Savage.
    “What do you mean?” he would say.
    “I mean, we make an appeal for his land now, is what I mean!” Joel Ginnish, obviously upset, said. “We need a chief who will take our side. Roger should be off our land. There is no doubt this is a racist act against our people!”
    “Do you understand,” Amos answered, “that this has nothing to do with him claiming the land? One case does not involve the other. So we must see what happens.”
    Before, Amos had sounded wise and reasonable; now he only sounded old. So Joel Ginnish turned away and went over to Isaac’s house.
    After he offered the money, Roger went home and drank a large glass of water sitting at the kitchen table. In his own mind he still might have thought that nothing was wrong—or that everything would be all right. But then he became very uncertain. He had said a few months ago that the First Nations men weren’t welcome anymore along his back fields if they insisted his pools were theirs.
    But saying that they were not welcome was a very stupid thing, and he realized this now.
    His hand was trembling, for he had told a lie and he would be seen in a bad light because of it. He had told people he hadn’t hooked on because George Morrissey, who was supposed to hook, might lose his union card. But now George didn’t want any part of it, was saying he’d had no idea Roger was going to hook that particular load. Roger hadphoned George and asked him to back him, but George said, “Who told you to hook? I was just going to take a piss.”
    Others had already told George not to get involved—that this was a dispute between Roger and a bunch on the reserve. But these words were like a thunderclap over Roger’s head. How had the clamp been left opened? He was sure he had hooked right. So now he had to continue with his story, that he did not hook, for if he admitted to the lie he was by proxy admitting to something more treacherous.
    He looked out the back window across the flat, dry field, across the small pit props that rested black against the sky on this humid day, dead like soldiers, and at the back door of Hector’s house, where there was some wash on the line, and an old wash pot overturned, and upstairs a dry curtain and a broken window. He saw Hector’s older sister open the door and enter so quickly it was hard to believe he had just seen her. Silence again. Then the sound of a fly buzzing against the window.
    He