Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (11 page)

There
were
a few grim reminders of the unfair play in Max Doran’s approach—reminders that came from a few solitary and somehow unacceptable complaints to the paper about bias. (These complaints would come more frequently over the summer.) They came to the paper by way of scant letters to the editor, letters saying nothing had been proven. At times there was also a halting statement from one of the youngest reporters, Gordon Young, who had lived long in that forbidding area near the reserve, and who did not trust Isaac Snow or Joel Ginnish, for as he said, Isaac Snow was a born politician and Joel Ginnish was a born thief, and he knew them both, better than Mr. Doran ever would. And he said this without the least worry that those who measured themselves by conventional wisdom would think his statements insensitive. Why he did not care what in hell people thought, him with his soft hands and his Hush Puppies, no one knew—but perhaps, some reflected in a pejorative way, he was a throwback to another time, when discrimination against the First Nations was openly accepted. Or, perhaps, in a real way he cared very much for the reserve and could not allow an untrue sentiment to pass as true, even if others thought it true.

“After all they have been through,” Max said to Gordon Young one Tuesday afternoon when the argument began again in the office, “and you are questioning my few reports?”

Everyone laughed nervously at the old-fashioned, deeply conservative young journalist Gordon, who was in many ways an outcast among them. And Gordon Young, who had come from a place even more remote than the reserve, wore silly clothes, and had been foolish enough, or perhaps not, to believe in integrity above anything else, even above irony, said that this is not what he was questioning. “No sir, Mr. Doran” (for he always called Max “Mr. Doran”), “I am not questioning the suffering of the first peoples. I have First Nations nieces and nephews, and will not question that. No, I am questioning others using this suffering to exploit a story, and go in a wrong direction because of it.” He mentioned the crane, the stevedores and other
details from that day Hector Penniac died. And he decried in the most gentle way he could the idea of some people using an uneducated and solitary man like Roger Savage to satiate the already insatiable dislike of that kind of man, a dislike that many, many academics and some students applauding Mr. Doran seemed to feel—people who were writing to the paper with their “unending” support of the band. Max looked at Gordon Young for a bit, and wondered about him a little. Then he replied, with the same bemusement he had felt with Amos Paul, “Ah, I know all of that, Gordon. All of it. I’ve paid my dues, lad. I’ve been on twenty stories like this. And I have come to this conclusion painfully. These guys are always the first to cry foul. And I do not want to blame. No, I don’t. But what keeps hounding me is this: one little Indian goes to the wharf and gets a job, and the poor little bastard is killed outright. And Roger is a liar and a killer. One, he had an ongoing dispute with that family. Two, he fought with the brother over this dispute. Three, he expects to be hired. Four, he arrives late and is surprised that his seniority has been rebuffed. Five, he is angry and starts to drink. Six, he hooked as soon as he got a chance—I went to the wharf and watched how it could be done. You know how long it took? Twenty-five extra seconds!

“So what am I going to say—that he didn’t have an ongoing dispute with that family? That he is a good guy? These guys are always good guys! He’s a good guy who won’t take a lie detector test—a good guy who took a swing at his principal. He won’t admit that he hooked, that he deliberately waited his chance. If he was so brave as to hook, why wouldn’t he admit that? I’ll tell you why. Because he thought he would be applauded by all the rednecks up there for doing this—and now it has blown up on him! He did not think people would be so incensed. And he can’t imagine how wrong he was, and he is weaselling about, trying to get out of it. And you are blaming students at the university—kids who still have some ideals.”

“I’m only saying that some students who have written the paper, in support of you, have never stepped foot on a reserve or ever saw a pulp
boat,” said Gordon Young. “I worry whether you can stop helping them try to prove their case.”

Max Doran was embarrassed by this impromptu lecture, and said nothing else. But this was the one real rebuke he had had. There was silence for some time. But then Gordon Young, who was not a household name like Max was at the time—and would not be a household name until nineteen years later, when he would become known for many great stories, seemingly in another time and dimension—this young journalist asked Max if he had ever heard of Winston Churchill. It seemed a very strange question and people laughed at the general bend and tone of it.

“Know all about him,” Max said, sitting up now and angry, his hair suddenly damp with sweat.

“Then you know what he said to an empty House of Commons after Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact—”

“Sure, but you tell me.”

“Mr. Churchill said, ‘You had a choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war!’ ”

“And what does that mean to me?” Doran said, looking over some notes, propping these notes against his knees and looking up.

“It means that lots of people are at war with their own honour, and often choose dishonour—because certain of those they want to impress do not know or value honour. I think you have to have more time with this story—you and you alone can get it right.”

There was silence again—and bitter silence, too. Then Max Doran said, “I have no worries about my honour, lad, or getting anything right.”

“Well, it keeps materializing in front of us—the word ‘racist’—because you have already implied that about Roger, and he is an easy target. That’s what worries me about honour.” Gordon paused and then said calmly: “Could you call Joel Ginnish a racist? Because if ever Roger was a racist, then Joel is too—”

Most of the people listening did not yet know who Joel was; Doran had never mentioned him by name.

“We are talking about a murder here!” Doran said, just as calmly. “A murder—not racism. That’s the difference—”

“Churchill was a British imperialist, I think!” a young journalist named Katie Houtte said, her eyes shifting from one to the other. That’s what she had heard, and she knew war was bad—so she said what she thought she must.

Gordon Young glanced at her without comment, then looked back at Doran, and said very quietly: “I do not believe you are charging Roger with murder. The murder cannot be proven, and won’t ever be proven as much as racism itself, which has been implied in the last few weeks. It is hard to stop playing Grey Owl, if the act brings national attention. It bothers me—pandering in this regard—and always has.”

Katie asked who Grey Owl was, and again Gordon looked around as if troubled by something immeasurable he could not overcome—the way Canadians believed truth was democratic and objective and already arrived at.

Doran waited a moment, lit a cigarillo. “Don’t worry, it won’t go on much longer—Roger will confess, and everything will be over in a week or two at most, and I’ll see to it,” Doran answered. “For I am not backing down from this. And if it was your story you wouldn’t either. Maybe you should have taken it—I guarantee there is not a reporter who wouldn’t come to the same conclusion.”

Gordon reflected that Doran’s mother was sick, and that he had a bottle of medicine he was taking home to her. Doran kept the number of the doctor in front of him on the desk. And Doran’s pretending he was not worried made it obvious that he was. Gordon felt ashamed of himself when he saw this doctor’s number on a yellow pad by the phone. “Leave him alone,” he thought. “He is probably right—don’t yourself get involved, simply because Roger is your cousin.” And he remembered his own family, and how they always maintained that Roger would do something terrible sooner or later. And if Gordon’s family, who worried about Roger, thought this, then perhaps it was the case. Perhaps Roger had pushed the clamp on only
partway simply because he was angry—not intending that what did happen should happen.

So Young shelved the discussion. And people spoke of the fire downtown two nights before and whether it had been deliberately set. They moved away from Doran’s desk, and the heat came through the broad windows and landed upon the typewriters and the filing cabinets and the picture of Mr. Cyr, who looked out over his employees with a kind of Rotarian disinterest, and everyone went back to work.

The journalist Gordon Young was upset about this second story and then the third, which came shortly after, and even thought of resigning. And no one understood why for a while. Then they discovered that Gordon was Roger’s cousin, and that seemed to explain it. They also believed he was jealous.

Max Doran, meanwhile, believed Roger deserved his scrutiny. But as Markus Paul reflected years later, Doran must have found himself in a terrible bind. He could not admit Gordon Young was right about these articles, for then he would have had to change tactics. And he would lose the support of those he counted upon. For someone would say, “I knew he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

And someone else would get the cream of the story and the national attention Doran craved. And this is what he feared more than anything else. This and the idea that the young journalist in some way might want him to suppress this story. So as Doran told his mother, he believed others were trying to suppress this story—and he was priggishly determined not to. And the longer Roger went without being charged, the more determined Max Doran became to show how valuable his reporting, his scrutiny and his exposé were.

But it was not Max Doran alone who felt this. It was most people, as Markus remembered, during that time. All of them, himself included, thought that what Max Doran was doing was justified.

So, prodded by all these thoughts, Doran had to keep going.

That is, as Markus Paul now knew, Max was much like a lobster in a trap. He would come in through a large door to find a small one, and then a smaller one still, always looking forward, always finding himself able to fit in, not knowing he would never be able to back out.

D
ORAN WENT BACK TO THE RIVER AND INTERVIEWED THE
people who should have known the most about what happened: the Monks, the two brothers in the hold.

“So you work the holds?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Work hard?”

“Yes, sir—work some hard. Well, we all do up here at this end of ’er. It ain’t like workin on a big newspaper, not that there is nothing wrong with that—but one slip and yer dead in there. And we was working hard that day too, and most days, up in the morning before dawn most days.”

“And you don’t mind the hard work?”

“Ya gotta do it—so no—I don’t mind.”

“And you were in the hold on that day—”

“Yes sir, I was—I mean, we both was in the hold on that day that young Indian boy Hector Penniac died.”

“And what happened?”

“A load shouldn’t be hooked like that. I don’t know—I thought, ‘Now Morrissey knows some better than that.’ That’s Georgie Morrissey, our friend there, George. And then when we brought the boy’s broke body up—well, we heard it was Savage hanging around the fourth hold all morning long. Savage, who was a problem on the wharf and always fought with Hector’s brother there—Joel, you know.”

“What was wrong with the hook?”

“Jammed partway open. So the swing like a pendulum would make her scatter, let me tell you—”

“How was it left opened?”

“It just was—that’s all I know. I don’t want to cast blame on him or no one else. I just want to work the boats.”

“Could it have been an accident?”

“Could have been, but who wouldn’t clamp it down? It’s a poor hook on anyways. We were treated like we was hookin on in the ‘50s—so it only takes a little to make it all go bad. Still you have to want to make it go bad to do so.”

“Can you tell me about Mr. Savage?”

“No, boy, I’d rather not say nothing about him. Our lawyer there, Mr. Reynolds our lawyer, told us not to.”

“You have a lawyer?”

“Of course—Mr. Reynolds, all the way from Fredericton. The union insisted we do. You know, something happens like that—who is safe when that happens?”

“Why—have you been threatened or anything?”

“Won’t say,” Topper sniffed.

And Billy Monk added: “The Indians say they’re gonna burn Roger out for what he done, but if he did do it—what is they supposed to do? No, there is a lot of fair Indians—don’t you think there ain’t. I know Joel Ginnish a long time, and you’d go a hard walk to find a better man.”

Roger made up his mind, sitting alone that night in his house after the interview with the Monks came out. He would stay. Hell or high water, he would stay—he would hay the pools downriver from his land (that is, put hay in the water which would carry downriver and sweep the Indian gill nets) and burn out those who burned him (since everyone was saying he was going to be burned out). That is, all his life they had expected this from him, and in some way, in some inscrutable way, the gods planned and wanted it too. For if they did not, why put him here, on this scrape of earth? If they had not wanted Sisyphus to roll the boulder up the hill, why condemn him to it? Camus said Sisyphus
was free on the walk back down the hill. Roger was free the moment he realized he had lost everything, perhaps even his fiancée, whom he ached for and loved.

And now he had no choice. They had told him to take shop in school and he had; they had told him to work and he had. They had even told him not to hope for anything beyond the few square feet he owned, and he hadn’t. So now this would be the one thing—the one thing he would not allow them to take away.

“Anyone who comes close, I will shoot,” he wrote in a scribbler that was found by Amos Paul after the events of the summer. “I won’t let no one rob this house from me!”

He wouldn’t say squat to the reporter either, and he wouldn’t back down. He would by this act become essentially what the press said he was, and he would do what they believed he would do, in order to retain his sense of self, even though this sense of self was almost directly contrary to what the papers believed he was. So if there was a choice between war and dishonour, he would choose war. They had forced his hand to choose war, and he instinctively knew he must. He also knew this: the press was hoping he would not come out of his house, and hoping too to have this go on, and for it to blow up, to sell papers and to prove he was what they had already implied. By taking this course of action, he showed them exactly what they wanted. And he realized that Max Doran would get the story that would propel him into the national spotlight, with both arrogance and sanctimony.