Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (15 page)

Isaac knew that to balk at Joel was to make himself a target among those who were insisting he finally do something. These meetings were in reality the most important meetings between Joel and Isaac. They sat together in a small room off the main Fisheries office in the legislature, drinking coffee from a silver coffee pot. Both of them were exhausted and spoke quietly together in Micmac. And Isaac lost both of these important meetings—because both times Joel told him there was no consensus among his supporters, and he was ready to go back home. He looked sad and disappointed: “I have my own people to think of now,” Joel said with a pinch of sanctimony.

“Aren’t they
our
people there, Joel?” Isaac smiled.

But Joel only stared ahead.

“He thinks he’s Jesus Christ!” Isaac thought one day.

So Isaac was unable to sign because if Joel, with his charisma and charm, walked away he would take all the warriors with him, and there would be no unity. So the position Isaac found himself in was not unlike Amos’s position with Isaac, and saying no to the Fisheries did not reveal his strength but his weakness.

It soon became clear to the Department of Fisheries that it did not matter how many licences they offered this year. And the Deputy Minister of Fisheries was extremely astute. He told his boss after the first meeting that the men were bent on something else that the government had no control over. He sent a memo to his Minister stating that every moment that the crisis did not end only meant that it would be harder and harder to have it ended. After the second meeting, he suggested the Fisheries cut off all negotiations, and put pressure on the Micmac leaders to bargain in good faith.

Joel saw this as a moment to raise the temper of the conflict. “Another broken promise” was the headline in the
Telegraph
, and this was the first time a quote from Joel was used.

The Deputy Minister could see clearly that a power shift was coming, and he telephoned a friend, a well-known reporter from the CBC, asking him to get in touch with Isaac. “Isaac is the one who we should speak to,” the Deputy Minister said as diplomatically as he could, calling on every past favour.

Isaac himself knew that he must prevent Joel from becoming spokesman, so he gave the first interview on TV the next night. But in doing so he had to reiterate Joel’s position: that is, that no deal could be arrived at now.

The Deputy Minister wanted to isolate Joel Ginnish. But he also wanted to do something else. He wanted to start negotiations with other reserves in the area, and come to a separate agreement with them. This would be done to show how Isaac and Joel were negotiating in bad faith. So the feelers were sent to other reserves along the bay waters on July 7, and the deals eventually would be signed on August 22, striking a great blow at Isaac’s prestige.

The Deputy Minister could not handle his own Minister, however. In over her head, she felt she must show resolute toughness. That is, she attacked the biggest target, for she knew no other way. “Damn it,” the Minister was quoted as saying, “who should care what happens to Roger Savage? Half the white men up there are bigots as far as I’m concerned!”

This caused a late-night meeting in the department with the Minister, Deputy Minister, Premier and two advisers from Indian Affairs. The statement was firmly retracted the next day, and the Deputy Minister was quoted as saying his Minister had been misquoted the day before. Then the Deputy Minister, a quiet, unassuming man with twenty-three years’ experience, tried to save the reputation of his inexperienced Minister and resigned.

But there was something else going on that remained hidden. Isaac’s Acadian wife, Colette, had a white father who was a fish-buyer off the wharf in Nequac. And as this man sat in his truck on the wharf staring out at the whitecaps, he realized something important. If Isaac could hold out and get an agreement that would allow him to fold the band’s home fishery into the commercial fishery they were after, it would allow for commercial native fishing at times of the year when white fishermen could not fish—and this would make both Isaac and his father-in-law quite rich.

At this same moment, Joel was angry, and it was for the simple fact that no matter how relevant he was to the negotiations, Isaac was still getting the attention. It was at this moment he began to dislike Isaac Snow very much. So it didn’t matter to him if he heard that the Minister of Fisheries was in negotiations with other reserves, and his own reserve was being isolated; he would not negotiate. “Isaac’s always been a big thorn in my side,” he began to tell his followers. But when someone else said something about Isaac, Joel reacted very quickly and slapped his face.

Two days after Isaac appeared on TV, Max Doran wrote another report.

Doran had received a call from the men in the yard, authenticated what they said and then reported on the fact that the hold Roger had hooked to was out of succession. That is, Roger had been supposed to hook to the third hold. The backhoes were always two or three loads ahead along the wharf, but Roger had simply picked the load to the fourth hold, and waved to the crane operator to send it there. This, of course, was done at certain times and there was probably nothing suspicious about it—except that thinking made it so. Yet when this fact was published in the paper on the third week of hot July, on the front page, everyone took notice more than they would have at any other time. This report hit both Amos and Mrs. Francis hard—for they had spent much time trying to make people realize that the dropped load was only an accident, and you could not charge Roger for the terrible suffering the First Nations had endured. But few of the young men wanted to listen to this now. What men like Tommie and Andy Francis wanted to do was break into Roger’s house and hold him captive.

It seemed that Roger had deliberately sent the load that he had tampered with to the hold where poor Hector Penniac was.

The paper’s editors had no real knowledge of how men worked, had never themselves once walked up a gangplank, so they did not know the subtleties of what had happened and could easily imply to the public that there had been a giant crime.

Once again, the small, tidy, well-dressed young reporter Gordon Young brought this up with Max, saying that although it may have been planned, perhaps it wasn’t planned maliciously, for he had had uncles once in the yard who worked themselves until their fingers bled. So perhaps there was nothing at all suspicious about this work within the pungent moil of wood and heat. That is, if you wanted the small hold to finish, so that the workers with seniority would move forward to the bigger holds, and you were a worker with seniority sitting on the dock, wouldn’t you send an extra load or two to the smallest hold, knowing you would be hired in the afternoon?

But even Gordon Young knew it looked abysmal for Roger now, and so did Markus Paul when he read this in the paper. And so did Max Doran, who actually seemed shaken to have to report this.

“Do you think I want to condemn him?” Doran said to Gordon. “At first, yes—maybe I did think he was to blame. But I have tried everything to get him to speak in the last two weeks! And now I am convinced he is to blame.”

Gordon nodded, and was silent a moment. Then he said, “The real problem is, no one is telling the truth there. The union is protecting itself, and the head of the union controls a good many of them—the company is fine with that, for it is Savage who is out of line. But then there are the First Nations men themselves. Did you talk to any of them about how they had treated that Hector? Well, you should not be so credulous—it’s bad for business. I will tell you, some are using this just to milk all they can from it! That sounds bad—but they are no different than other politicians.”

“I am not at all that credulous,” Doran said. “I know everything you said. I thought of it all. I am, however, certain Roger is lying—and that is where the story is.”

“Yes, I am aware of that—he might be lying. But others might be lying as well. There is a certain silence about those Monk brothers too. Those in the hold that day.”

But Doran argued that the only one who did not seem to be telling the truth, the only one who was out of place, was Mr. Savage. Here at five in the afternoon the whirr of fans occupied the room, and the solemn late-day shadows began to appear tenuously as they did in summer, and the smell of brick heated by the sun came in from a slightly opened window. There was a sudden energy at five, as if office romance was in the air between the man and woman who always drove home together, or from the echo of humming electric typewriters that had suddenly stopped. That is, all but one.

Doran, his left knee held up with his hands, said: “Why is Roger not speaking, and why has he lied? Why was he hanging about and
hooked to that hold? These are not just questions, they are facts. And why did Hector need the job? Because no one on the reserve had a lobster licence! What have we done to them!”

“Yes, you are right,” Gordon said. “But what I am saying is, if they could arrive at the truth—a truth which would exonerate Savage at this moment—do you think Isaac or Joel would do so?”

“Of course they would—I am sure of it,” Doran said. He was angered this was mentioned because it was a question all of them had to think about and no one could answer for someone else. He knew Isaac was a brave and good man, but he could not answer for him either. Nor could he answer for himself. For the story had gained much attention and his copy was on the wire as far away as New York. So he tapped a pencil and looked at it a moment. Both he and Gordon Young suddenly looked at his pencil tapping and knew that Joel and maybe even Isaac would not use a sudden truth to exonerate Roger Savage now. And perhaps Doran would not either. And perhaps even the public would be disappointed—so certain were they that things were the way they had been reported.

But there was something Markus Paul was able to find out years later. Even though he was getting the notoriety he had craved, twice Doran had asked to be taken from the story; yet the paper told him he must continue. Isaac had asked him to include something about the treaties and the fishery dispute in his next story, and about the natives’ demands for licences, and Doran had felt he had no choice. For that powerful man Isaac Snow could stop him in a second from getting a story and then give it to someone else. Doran had brooded about this and then he had rashly asked to be removed from the story. But the paper did not take him from it. “We have no one else who has as many connections—you are the one! So stand tall and you will be as known across the country as you are here!” The managing editor had squeezed his shoulder and smiled.

Doran did not tell Gordon Young this, and they said nothing more. But Doran knew that unless this story ended quickly, it would scatter out of control.

So he decided: “I have to continue now—I have no other choice. If I leave this story without finishing it, there will never be another story for me.”

“No one will believe anything I say from now on,” Roger joked to Joel himself after he read the latest report about him intentionally sending the load to the wrong hold, “so I will not be saying anything else.”

“Well, then, can I say things on your behalf?” Joel joked. “Like how you’ve decided to give your pools to me?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, we’ll get them one way or the other.”

Then Joel said: “You know my cousin the dope fiend there? Well, he has everyone calling you the Bigot of Bartibog, so if you hear that, I wasn’t the one who started it. Just to let you know.” And he even patted Roger on the shoulder, for old times’ sake.

M
ARKUS
P
AUL SURMISED MANY THINGS
. O
NE WAS HOW SMART
Amos was, but more importantly, how great the forces against his grandfather were during those days in 1985. It was not that Amos hadn’t minded what was said about him—no, he minded greatly. He couldn’t help it. It had made the last of his life sorrow-filled. But he kept his own belief that Roger Savage had done nothing except hook on.

“The Bigot of Bartibog!” That, at times, meant each of them—English, French, Indians too.