David Adams Richards - Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

ALSO BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

Fiction
The Coming of Winter
Blood Ties
Dancers at Night: Stories
Lives of Short Duration
Road to the Stilt House
Nights Below Station Street
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
Hope in the Desperate Hour
The Bay of Love and Sorrows
Mercy Among the Children
River of the Brokenhearted
The Friends of Meager Fortune
The Lost Highway

Non-Fiction
Hockey Dreams
Lines on the Water
God Is

COPYRIGHT 2011 N EWMAC A MUSEMENT I NC .

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisheror in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Richards, David Adams, 1950
Incidents in the life of Markus Paul / David Adams Richards.

eISBN: 978-0-307-37606-0

I. Title.

PS 8585.I17I5 2010 C813.54 C2010-902500-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limiteds website: www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

FOR YOU, ONCE MY FRIEND, LONG AGO

I asked for quarter
In contempt
You said it was I who should repent
Someday you all will see
The quarter I asked
Was not for me

Poem written on scribbler paper, found by Amos Paul
in the ruins of Roger Savages house, October 17, 1985

T HE DAY H ECTOR P ENNIAC DIED IN THE FOURTH HOLD OF the cargo ship Lutheran he woke up at 6:20 in the morning. It would be a fine, hot June day. He could hear the bay from his windowit was just starting to make high tideand far offshore he could see lobster boats moving out to their traps.

Hector hadnt worked a hold before. He had bought new work boots and new work gloves, and a new work shirt that he had laid out on his chair the night before, and he had checked his jeans pocket ten times for his union card, five times last night and five times that morning.

He was far too excited to eat, though his mother had made him a breakfast of bacon and eggs.

I do not know if I will get on, he said in Micmac, drinking a cup of tea. They might think other men need the job more. He stared at a robin outside on the pole, and then across the yard at Roger Savages house. Roger, the white man living just on the other side of the reserves line.

You go on up and try, his mother said. Amos said you would get on. You tell them you are on your way to university to someday be a doctor.

Oh, I wont say that, he answered. But he felt pleased by this.

Hector was not at all a labourer. He had rather delicate hands, and a quiet, refined face. But loading the hold with pulpwood was the best work he could do at this time to get some money, and he knew if the men would help him learn he would be a good worker.

His mother had put a lunch into a brown paper bag, but couldnt find the Thermos for his tea.

Dont worry. They have a water boy at every holdthats all I need.

Hector asked about his half-brother, Joel Ginnish, just as his chief, Amos Paul, pulled into the yard in his old half-ton truck. Joel once again was in jail.

Hell be back out soon, his mother said.

Hector smiled. I dont know if hell ever forgive me for being born. I think in all honesty thats where his trouble started.

You have a good day working, his mother answered.

Then Hector remembered the cigarettes and gum he was going to take to the hold to treat the other men, and ran upstairs to get them.

Amos Paul, his chief, the one responsible for helping him get this job, and helping him many times besides, had promised him a drive to the boat. It was because of old Amos that Hector was being allowed a union card. He ran back down and got in the cab. Amoss fifteen-year-old grandson, Markus Paul, was in the truck with him, on his way to fish mackerel off the lobster wharf at the end of the shore road. Hector would be working the Lutheran at the pulp wharf in Millbank, some seventeen miles away. Amos would go to early Mass to celebrate the anniversary of his wifes death.

When Amoss truck turned in the Penniacs yard, its throttling woke up Roger Savage, the white man who lived next door. Savage, planning to work the Lutheran as well, knew he would be too late to get into a hold if he didnt hurry, but missed waving down Amos for a ride.

Everything on you looks so very shiny and new, Markus said in Micmac to Hector.

You think I am too shiny? Hector asked, worried.

No, nobut you wouldnt want to be one bit more shiny, Hector, Ill tell you that!

Those would be the last words they ever spoke together.

Roger Savage was one of those men who without realizing it would become cast in a brutal light. He was the kind of man other men call a hard worker, which means he always did a variety of jobs that required his strength to get them done. He had not graduated high school. But he had worked on and was about to receive his GED later that summer. That is not to say he was stupid, but it stipulated a kind of attitudinal demeanour that others, not so bright, could use to construe the type of man they were dealing with: that harsh labour meant a harsh man. But it was more than that. From everything, from television to books, Roger got the idea that he was the man who must change, that he was the man who must break out of the sod of anger and mistrust into the blossoming world that other men had supposedly gone into.

He had worked from the time he was thirteen, carrying buckets of water to the ships that came in. He had cut wood with his fathersometimes 120 cord a year. He was a carpenter in the winter and helped maintain the rink for other boys and girls to play a game he himself never did.

He stayed on the ice flats for smelt, the great nets mended by his own hand and the chainsaw blade sharpened by himself alone. He worked as a spare on lobster boats when he was needed. Hed been in storms and rough seas enough, which those who hadnt been would at various times reenact in grand performance of Maritimes culture onstage. The house he lived in was ninety years old, and blackened by soot up one wall, and with tarred and speckled shingles that were put up by his father. It was sunken on one side, and so near the reserve as to have some say it overlapped the border. No one seemed to mind this, for Roger was not a bother to anyone. He was not at all odd, as others called him, just a loner.

Starting at seventeen he had got on in the hold of pulp boats, though he never sided with the union. He worked boats faithfully, taking the cuts and spills from the loads all in stride.