THEY HID THE CANOE BETWEEN SOME MAPLE SAPLINGS, FOR Joel was suspicious, and lifted from the shallow water two broad boxes that he had hidden too, and walked the windswept barrens between two roads that cut down through the small pines. Joel was not as big as Isaac but he was very powerful, with longer-than-normal arms and big hands. He helped Doran along, manoeuvring those heavy boxes between fir and pine, and spoke to him quietly about his life. And it was a life that Doran himself couldn’t imagine. Physical violence—the mere idea of which Doran had always shrunk from—was as much a part of Joel’s life as breathing. Being cheated, shot at and thrown from a half-ton were part of a succession of stories Joel told to impress this young white man who wanted to please both him and Isaac, and was trying to do the best story he could.
They were the first there, and waited in the evening with bugs flicking and whining in their ears. Doran was filled with a kind of unease. He realized now that he would have been much better off if he had never heard of this story of his. He thought at this moment that his safety depended on something other than his integrity, and he was confused about what he should do. That is, the trail to the bottom of the lobster trap was complete, and he could not for the life of him back up and walk away.
After a while a man and a boy approached through the darkness, and Max did not see them until they were less than five feet away.
They met with Topper Monk, who had brought the water boy with him. Topper told Doran that he had almost died in the fourth hold of the Lutheran because the load was meant to drop on them all, because they had given the Indian a union card.
“It weren’t just meant for the poor little Indian,” he said.
But something else was important. And Joel seemed not only to flaunt this but to want to flaunt it. It was what he had promised Isaac he would not do.
It was the salmon that Ginnish had, and that Doran had unwittingly helped carry through those woods under the dark night sky. And Ginnish was selling them.
Ginnish took some ten salmon out of the two large cooler boxes and laid them out on the grass, and counted them. They were beautiful fish, the smell still wonderfully fresh. They had just entered the river pools from the sea a few nights before. Each fish was over eight pounds and under twenty.
Topper complained about the two smaller fish, saying they were grilse—that is, the smaller two-year-old salmon, which almost never go over five pounds. But this argument was dispensed with on the other side, when Joel said the twenty-pound salmon weighed twenty-five. So finally after twenty minutes everything was arrived at. The wind came up slightly, which was a blessing because of the whine of the flies. They put the fish in cooler boxes Topper had brought and covered them with grass and ice.
Then Topper paid Joel two hundred dollars.
“This is how we make money for our struggle.” Joel smiled at Doran, waving the money quickly for some reason before tucking it into his shirt. “So thanks for helping me.” Joel was happy with Doran now and spoke to him like a brother. He took out a bag of marijuana and began to roll it in with tobacco.
“Pretty good stuff, this,” he said. “I call it ‘my reserve,’ ” and he smiled at this and shrugged when Doran did not smile. “You take things too serious,” he said.
“I do?”
“Sure—too serious. Have some fun—slap some pussy, get drunk, steal a car, go for a milkshake—do something! And stop wearing shorts!” And he laughed hilariously. “No one gives a fuck about this. Why do you write so much about it? I think you want to make a name for yourself with all those concerned fuckers in Upper Canada who always write about the Indians every summer, their faces all as pinched as weasels. They can’t shit without their wives’ permission.”
“That’s not the reason,” Doran began. “I came here to do a story and to get it right.”
“Well, let me tell you a secret—you’ll never get it right. Not with us. And you arrived here just to pretend. But Roger is in that house up there all alone … Sometimes, oh oh oh—sometimes I feel bad for Roger because of you. Because you have the big pretend going.”
“Pretend?”
“Sure, the big pretend. You can smell any white man who has it. The big pretend—pretend to know Indians and to like us. You don’t know us, and you certainly don’t like us.”
“Of course I do.”
But here Joel just held up his finger over his lips and said, “Shh,” and smiled sadly.
Then they were silent a moment. An owl fluttered by and scared Doran. Joel looked at him, smiling delightfully, and shrugged.
“Well, then, do you like me?”
“Sure.”
“Well, then, tell my story,” he said. “Tell what I’ve been through—I have been the one who had to deal with this. Tell about me—how my brother was Hector. Take my picture for the paper!”
“Sure I will,” Doran said, hoping that they would leave to go back.
But they did not go back. They sat on the bank and smoked some grass, and drank a little from a bottle, and Doran found himself becoming a part of the story he was writing. He suddenly blurted this out. It surprised even him that he did.
But when he said this, Joel simply shrugged.
“Haven’t you always been? I know exactly how Isaac thinks. Now you stay here until this is resolved—please, for my sake.” And he put his arm around Doran and handed him the bottle of rum. “You said you like us, prove it. Later you can write a book about me. I’ll give you all the information—about Amos and the whites—Isaac too—and how much he has against me. Now we’ll do things my way. No more Isaac. Isaac is a dead man. And when the movie is made I can be a consultant—or play a small part!”
Of course he was drunk and falling sideways—but Doran was drunk too.
“Who’s the only one willing to do something?” Joel said. “Wait and see, and it will be me!”
About an hour later the wind came up much stronger. There was the smell of the enclosed trees and the rushing water. Doran was unfamiliar with the woods. If Joel left him, he would never find his way out.
He went to the trees to relieve himself and there suddenly the young water boy, Brice Peel, tugged at his arm and whispered to him these words:
“Roger Savage didn’t do nothing. The load didn’t fall on anyone—tell them at the paper.”
“What?” Doran said.
The boy said nothing else, because Topper was coming toward them, and he moved away quickly, grabbing on to the grasses so as not to fall into the water. But he fell in anyway. Joel laughed and rushed down and helped him out.
“There you go, my little white poky-dot friend.”
Topper smiled and slapped at some flies, and asked Doran if he liked it here and was everyone nice to him? Doran nodded, listened to the wind rising. He tried to be comfortable and sit like Joel did. Joel, who seemed to be impervious to wind and flies, and simply stared into the dark.
There were real tears now in Joel’s eyes. “You have not done enough to promote our cause,” he said, “so maybe I’ll have to kill you someday. How would that be?”
Doran now knew he had compromised himself, even though it was not intentional.
He decided to take his typewriter and leave the next day. He was surprised at how relieved he was to have come to this decision. Because if he did write a story, how much different would it now be from the one Joel wanted?
Topper and Joel began to sing; then they had an argument. Then the talk filtered out into a diatribe in the drunken evening, about the marijuana and when Joel could get it to them, and how to get it off the reserve, and that Isaac wanted him to destroy the crop before the press found out about it. Joel said this and winked at Doran.
And how many girls Joel had had. It seemed to be many more than Topper had had.
And how many barricades had ever worked? “The craziest thing an Indian ever did,” Topper said.
Doran said nothing to all of this.
Then Joel and Topper shook hands. The white men moved off with the fish, and Joel and Doran walked back through the woods, every now and again Joel waiting for Doran to catch up, once or twice standing by a small opening and saying, “This way.”
They came to the water, and Joel backed the canoe out, jumped into the stern and told Doran to get in. He stumbled as he did, and the Micmac patiently waited for him to straighten himself up.
“You like this canoe, Max?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t mine.”
“No?”
“No, Christ. You know who owns this canoe?”
“Markus Paul—you know him?”
“Not well.”
“Yeah, he’s a prick. He fishes salmon with a fly rod—in the summer, one at a time.” Joel gave a short, low laugh, and then said, “Though his cast is perfect and he throws out a wonderful line!”
They started back down the river, in the dark under moonlight. The trees went swiftly by, and Doran felt sleepy and happy. But suddenly Joel jammed his pole down and the canoe stopped dead.
“You get out here now,” he said.
“Where?” Doran said, looking around.
“Here. If you cut through there two hundred yards you’ll meet the old dividing marker. Just follow that out to the shore.”
“But where is the reserve?”
“We’re on the reserve—we just came on it. I have to see someone but you can’t come.”
“But where’s this marker?”
“Just go south down that path,” Joel said.
And so Doran, who had never known the woods and hated it, was left in the dark with the terrible insulting whine of mosquitoes, and the only other human figure slowly moving away in the moonlight.
He walked into the woods. The light of the moon was an easy lantern on the shore, but in here it cast out vaguely, and though Joel was essentially correct in that no one should lose their way walking to this marker, Doran within five minutes had come to a big tree fall he could not get around. At first, he didn’t even know what it was. And by the time he realized, he had moved farther off the path and could not get back. So he continued on in the line afforded by the tree fall—which meant he was going northeast into the cedar swamp where Amos had once hunted moose as a boy.
Finally, haunted by blackflies, the air suddenly still and muggy and in some places smelling putrid, he turned back toward the tree fall, hoping to retrace his steps, and tripping over undergrowth he fell into swamp water.
He stood quickly, feeling water rush under his pants and into his shoes. The only thing he could now hear was the sound of his heart.
He did not know whether to try again or wait in the bog. But he could not wait—he had to get away from the flies. But as he turned, hoping once again to find the river and retrace his steps (he would not have found it, for he was going deeper into the bog), he saw a man leaning on the end of another tree fall, watching him. At first he did not even know it was a man, it was so dark. But after a time he realized this. The man simply stared at him, an ornate lever-action rifle in his hand.
“Hi—I’m kinda turned around in here,” Doran said.
For a few moments—painful moments, they were—the man did not speak.
“Yer on my line side of the reserve,” the man finally said.
“And the reserve is where”—he paused—”sir?”
“Five more yards your way,” the man said. “Come, I’ll take you back.”
Doran followed him quietly. Now and again the man would wait for him to climb over some bush or stumps, and soon they were back on the pathway Joel had spoken about, and within minutes they were at the marker Joel had told him about—and then he saw the lane to the shore and could even hear the waves of the bay against the breakwater. He wanted to ask the man a question but when he turned around the man had gone.
And Doran realized (he had been unsure) that he had met Roger Savage, the man who had decided to take on the world. He felt suddenly ashamed that he had insinuated so much in the press about the man. And now he was worried he had not done what was just.
“But it is my job,” he thought. “I am only doing what I have been asked to do. Someone else would have done far worse.”
And for now he left it at that, while having a sudden intense feeling that he wished Roger Savage was his friend.
When Doran got back to the shed, people were all over the road. Women were crying. He walked down to see what had happened. People were saying Isaac had been taken prisoner. Five police officers had come in from the woods in SWAT gear and had raided the old shed at the back of his house, and had taken him away. He had fought valiantly, thrown three of them over his back and knocked one cold, but he was alone.
Some of the women were talking to Doran in a mixture of English and Micmac, and he tried to understand. They threw broken bottles onto Roger’s porch.
An hour later Joel arrived, having just heard the news himself. He walked up the road with everyone speaking to him, and while he moved through the throng he passed some grass around to the young men, and then sat on a tar pole near the breakwater. Then he passed some uppers out of a huge bag to Andy and Tommie. And he passed a hit of acid to one of the women. (Doran did not know that this woman was Amos’s granddaughter, Peggy Paul.)
But everyone felt as if there could be no reconciliation now. The dark was salty sweet, the wind was warm off the waves, and they could just make out each other’s faces, like lovers on a lane.
“We’ll fight now,” Andy said happily, “so write that down in your fuckin paper. See what they say to that!” And he smiled and took another drink of beer.
To Little Joe it seemed as if a big war had come and he must do something to protect his mother, Mrs. Francis, and his big sister, Sky. Sky of course was trying her best to protect him, and no matter that three or four of the young men were trying to impress her, hoping everything would go back to the way it was. But now they knew this had come to something none had really expected—all of them were vulnerable.
“I don’t want to see you near the barricade anymore,” she told Little Joe.
He was seen in his yard with a BB gun, but he did not have any BBs.
YES, IT WAS COLD IN THE BAR, AND COLDER OUTSIDE, AND almost November 1985. Doran had written his last article on the “disturbing” case weeks ago, and today he had just resigned from the paper. He had his hair cut above his ears, and he looked older. He had promised his mother for years he would get his hair cut, and had done so for her funeral yesterday.
He had heard that Chief Amos had tried on four occasions to get Roger to leave his house. Yet each time, Roger had come to the point: he stated that he was innocent and was finishing his room. It was a room, Doran knew, that Mary Cyr could see from her bath. She would sometimes stand in the light at the opened window, with a bath towel loose around her, her hair damp from the shower.
All during this time Roger’s sign was still in place in the middle of his yard:
I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR WHO I WAS OR AM
I WON’T BE DRIVEN OUT
AND I DO NOT GIVE A DAMN!!
Doran wondered if he himself would be that courageous. Most men wouldn’t be.
What had happened since that night he’d met Roger Savage? Well, for one thing, Doran had refused to write any more stories because of how he was being told what to write. And because of this, both Mr. Cyr and Joel Ginnish were furious with him. But he had stood his ground. He reread all his copy, and decided he had said what he had said, and for better or worse he would say no more.
“Get someone else in here to write,” he said. “Get that old Mr. Thompson—you know, the man who said he taught me all I know, and has never written a line in his life worth reading. And fuck it.” His face was thin, and he couldn’t eat for being worried, but he stuck to his decision.
Just when people were beginning to think things had gone as far as they would, that the bulldozers and the graders and the trucks sitting like battle-scarred portents was enough, the police had arrested Isaac.
They had arrested him not understanding that he was actually a moderate influence, but believing that he was the main broker of the unrest. They had arrested him because he had five big bales of marijuana in his shed.
But Isaac was not Joel’s moral support; he was Joel’s moral stabilizer. To arrest Isaac was far worse than arresting Joel—for Joel was like a man standing on a cliff and being swayed by his own preternatural desire to fall.
Isaac sat in his cell most of that first long, hot afternoon after his arrest without moving a muscle. He did not speak to anyone, either. The same compressed rage that Amos had seen on his face reappeared. He had started out in the earlier part of the summer to get lobster licences for his poverty-stricken band, and to keep his men from revolting because of Hector. He had tried, and now he was in jail! No matter how you thought about it, it was a betrayal.
He stared straight ahead. A few of the local toughs yelled through the window at him.
“Hang him!” they yelled. Isaac did not even glance at them.
Nor, as the shadows lengthened at supper, did he react when they set his food down. Not that day or, in the swell and smell of rain, the next.
After two days it became clear Isaac was on a hunger strike. He said nothing to the nurse, Pamela Dulse, when she came in to check his blood pressure and pulse on the third day. By this time he lay on his cot all day, with his face to the wall, and listened to the rain breaking down over the barrels outside, listened to the kids coming and going from the old volleyball court down the hill, listened now and again to a siren.
“You have to eat,” she said.
He shrugged. So she left the cell.
Then he wrote a long letter to the editor of the paper, speaking about his trials since his father, an innocent man, had been hanged by a white court and an all-white jury in 1955. He spoke of having his mother die of cancer. He spoke of quitting school, and of being in jail for taking meat for himself one winter.
He spoke about how he fought injustice by picking up seaweed and by fishing with gill nets in a private pool. Arrested again, and again.
But he said that the bales of marijuana were planted. He did not use marijuana, nor did he encourage anyone to, and everyone on the reserve knew this. It must have been the police who planted it. So if he was not released, it would cause even more trouble.
This sparked outrage and pleas for his release around the province. These pleas and the publicity his hunger strike received did one thing only. They made those in power more inflexible, to prove he could not sway law, because to them he had disobeyed the law and had stored marijuana.
But his hunger strike did something else, and Isaac knew it would—it truly saved his reputation within the reserve. For Joel, ready to act on his own, in direct conflict with Isaac’s orders, now more than ever seemed to be acting on Isaac’s behalf, and in his honour. Further, it did this—it did not allow him to give up his hunger strike even unto death. And one reason he had the courage not to give up was because of the police planting the marijuana in his shed.
Sergeant Hanover believed Isaac was the one who had fired at the spotter plane, and Hanover believed keeping him in jail would defuse the situation, and that’s what Hanover believed no matter what.
Isaac, as he began to grow weak, called his wife to see him. Collette came and sat outside the cell and was shocked to see how her husband had failed.
“You have to eat,” she begged him. “Who cares about this anymore?”
“I care,” he said. Then he paused and gave her a smile. “I have to care. You see, everything now is up to me. It is as if the load fell on our whole band—that now we must do something—if not now then never.”
He smiled at her simply, showing the dimples on his face that were childlike and that she loved. And he said:
“Do not worry. For at this time next year you will walk to our wharf, to stand on our lobster boat—or to our graveyard, to stand by my grave.”
The reserve became more tempestuous, anxious and depressed. No one knew what to do. Joel took control of the houses, of the recreation centre, of everything to do with money. This was done to keep Amos away from power—and it was done, in a certain way, as a reaction to Isaac’s growing fame. Which meant that something else, something more dangerous and something better, would have to be done, and Joel knew this. To take power was to act powerfully—and more powerfully than your predecessor. That, in fact, was what having power meant.
So Joel and his supporters held meetings each night from August 21 on, trying to decide what this something should be.
On that very day, Joel had asked Doran to write an article about the police planting the marijuana. But Doran said he could not, because it could not be proved.
“Of course it can be proved.”
“How?”
“Because I saw them.”
“You saw them plant the marijuana?”
“Of course.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
Joel assumed a hysterical look and began to walk away. “Write the story,” he said. “Tell the truth.”
But Doran knew the truth, or suspected it, and could not write the story. Other than that, he did not know what to do. No one was going to get him to write another word unless he himself decided to.
On this day, too, young people from the university began to arrive at Mary Cyr’s cottage to mount a protest against the police for complicity or cover-up in the death of Hector Penniac. That is, the idea of a cover-up was an active one in the university corridors, and many professors wanted to display their outrage over this. Students set up a human shield to protect the natives from the police and army. Mary set up her barbecue and ordered in sea crab and salad. But by the end of the day she was tired of it all, bored with the students and their inflamed mimicking talk, and so she dismissed them from her yard in a way only Mary Cyr could do, and sat in the back veranda and smoked.
On August 25, the warriors decided they would exact the same penalty on Roger that Isaac was suffering. Rain began to fall, the days became cooler. Doran was at that meeting, but he declined to take notes. It was very tense, and people were worried the army was going to invade. Joel too seemed erratic in what he said. He looked around the room with glittering eyes to pick someone to blame. At first he cursed at two young native men who he felt were not doing their jobs at the barricade—for many now had grown tired of it. Then he spotted Doran.
“If Isaac dies, you’ll pay the price too,” he said to Doran, without the least emotion. He shrugged as if this wasn’t terrible news, and pointed to Andy, as if Andy was the one who wanted to exact justice.
And Andy, who had not known he would be singled out, simply said: “I told you I didn’t want you back here. Well, you came back—so if anything goes wrong, it’s your problem.”
Doran went back to his shed and lay down and listened to the rain against the small roof. He had stated the warriors’ case and now they were against him. He had no alternative but to resign from the story. That did not mean he thought Penniac’s death wasn’t unjust. It did not mean the concerns of the First Nations band were wrong. It just meant he would hand the story over to someone else. That is all he was thinking. He would go back across the barricade in the morning.
But the next morning when he went to go, the warriors told him he couldn’t. Isaac was too sick, so he must stay, for they had already decided Doran was the one who had betrayed Isaac to the police. They asked him for his passport and said he couldn’t cross without it.
“If you did not betray Isaac, then write the story about the police planting the marijuana,” Joel said, wagging his finger happily. But Doran said again that he would not, because it could not be proved.
“I saw it,” Joel said.
“How did you see it? I was with you at the time,” Doran said.
Joel shrugged and walked away.
All that day Doran heard students shouting insults at the police and at Roger Savage. Roger Savage couldn’t be seen, but now and again the curtain in the upstairs window would move slightly, as if a hand had moved it. The police had decided to take Roger away for his own safety, but approaching his house was now too dangerous, not so much for them as for Roger and the warriors, and especially the students, who had locked arms and stretched from roadway to roadway. So they remained in consultations, trying to defuse the situation. They tried to talk to Roger on the phone but Roger unplugged it, and would not consult with anyone.
Then something else happened to Doran. He suddenly hated the chants of those students. All of them now calling for justice for natives that they could never provide. Doran hated them, but in a way he felt—well, he felt he had created them. And now the students became the main story, and other papers interviewed many of them. And many of them proved they too could be vandals and began throwing rocks. Their pictures appeared, and they would be happy their pictures appeared, until such time as they found themselves ashamed. Doran listened to them, and walked from the barricade like a forlorn creature and sat in his shed with half the pie the little girl and boy had made him sitting on the table.
After a while Joel sent two men, followed by one of the many stray dogs, to search Doran. The men said he had helped the RCMP plant the dope and Joel was deciding if they would put him on trial. After they searched him one of the men wanted to hit him, but the other said no. Then they decided to take his tape recorder. They left with the stray dog following them back across the dusty road.
After supper, Doran went to see Joel to get his tape recorder back.
Joel said that he could have the tape recorder back when he left, but there might be sensitive police information on it.
Doran replied that there were only the sounds of birds he’d recorded and he was ready to go because he wasn’t doing stories anymore. Joel turned on the tape recorder, and smiled expectantly, waiting to hear the police, or pretending to want to hear this. Then he turned it off.
“Why in hell would anyone record birds?” he asked, mystified.
Max didn’t answer.
“Tell the truth,” Joel said, “in a story about them planting the marijuana. That’s the big story. If you write about them planting it, I’ll let you go.”
But what Doran was hearing was something else. This is what his informers told him (yes, Doran had informers—three boys he paid): Joel and his men were going to come and get him—the boys did not know when—and they were going to force him to help them get Roger out of the house.
“They think you can go up to the house because you are white—and Roger will open the door for you—and then they will rush him, with a gun.”
“Roger won’t trust me,” Doran said.
“Joel says he will make you do it—that it’s the only way to get Roger, and you were the one who started this.”
“I was the one!” And Doran and the three boys laughed.
OLD AMOS KNEW THAT ISAAC HAD STARTED SOMETHING HE could not back down from. If he gave up his hunger strike he would be looked upon as a cheat. Worse, he had set out nobly to help his people and now he realized this was the only way to do so, even if he died. If he died they would have those lobster licences he so desperately sought. And so he lay with his back to the wall, staring at a small spot.
In that small, distinct spot, a tiny green bulb of paint over a crack, he saw the entire world, and for days the entire history of the world, and at times the entire history of his people over the last three thousand years. When the jailer came in to talk to him, to beg him to eat, he whispered:
“Let me die so my people will live the way people should.”
On the night of the ninth day of the hunger strike, Isaac fell into fitful unconsciousness. They took Isaac from his cell to the hospital, but word came that he had pulled an intravenous from his arm, in order to deny the sustenance that might keep him alive.
They all had a meeting later that night at Mrs. Francis’s.
It ended with a nine-to-two vote to take Roger out of his house and hold him.
Later that night, the RCMP turned the power off, and the entire reserve was left in darkness.
Just after this happened, Max Doran was sitting alone in his shed, staring at the book he was trying to read without being able to, when Joel and Andy came to see him. The room was in semi-darkness, as were their faces, while the air outside seemed wet and still, and the trees no longer blew.
They were filled with an excitement that Doran did not understand. But then he realized Joel was high, as he had been every day since Isaac was arrested. Andy was high also, and filled with an exuberance that only proving himself to others would contain. “Do you want to help us?” Andy said, pulling up a chair to sit beside him and looking at him intently. Doran could see only parts of their faces in the semi-darkness. The wind blew just as Joel moved his chair closer.
“C’mon, you have to help us now,” Joel said.
“Of course,” Doran said after a moment. He was sweating, and felt ill.
“You must help us—it’s our last bargaining chip to get Isaac back.”
“How? I can write only what I know—and I do not know about the marijuana, I do not know about the bulldozer being burned.” He ended in a whisper: “I don’t want to blame—anyone.”
“No one has ever put the blame on us,” Joel said simply, “have they?”
Doran said nothing.
Andy then took a .22 pistol from his pocket and put it on the blanket.
“Roger’ll trust you. Go to the door and knock tomorrow—say you want to write his story. Then you pull this on him and we’ll rush him—that’s all it’ll take. We take him to our jail until we get Isaac back. Do it for Isaac like we are! There’s no one else here that can do it!”
“Roger will not trust me.”
“Well, he will trust you more than he will trust me.” Joel smiled.
Doran stared out at the small fence rails in the backyard, until they had disappeared with nightfall, and he could hear an owl in the trees, the same owl Little Joe had told Mary Cyr about.
The next afternoon was quiet and dusty. Joel, sitting in his mother’s house, could smell dust from the gravel lane and see dust on the small leaves and his windowpane. And suddenly it was as if everything, from the dust to the light coming in, was preordered. It was that strange a sensation, and Joel had not had this sensation for years. But he realized that this sensation was not at all trivial. For if not for Hector’s death, he might still be in jail. Certainly without his half-brother’s death he wouldn’t have half the reserve doing his bidding and confiscating trucks and guns. He wouldn’t have men from other reserves—men who would not have spoken to him at other times—now waiting to hear what he had to say. He looked at his mother and wondered if she knew what he was thinking—that all this sudden power had been thrust upon him by the death of a boy. That in a certain biblical sense all power, the preponderance of all men’s desires, might be granted in just this way. That is why Saul must kill David. So a story from three thousand years ago was at this moment true.
And then, suddenly, everything changed again.
For just as the reserve had heard of Hector’s death, now they heard of Isaac’s.
He had died in the ambulance on the way to Moncton, people said. Two young men ran to tell Joel. One of them was Little Joe Barnaby.
“Mr. Joel!” Little Joe said, tugging at his arm, looking up at him with a strange kind of brave independence, goodness and love. “Mr. Joel—they say that Isaac has just died.”
Joel’s mother had made him a steak, for she worried he was not eating. And just as Amos had learned about the giant taking over men in the room, the giant had taken over Joel. And he was suddenly frightened.
That is, he did not know what to do. He called a meeting of the warriors, but it was as if he could not speak. So Andy and Tommie told him that Doran must be arrested and Roger taken from his house.
“They will give us a bargaining chip,” Andy said. And Joel nodded that they were right. Both of them cast their eyes away, as if he was now losing their respect—just as Saul had lost David’s—and this is what he could not allow.
Joel went out just at dusk, in a cold wind, to Doran’s shed, to hold him against the threat of the police, and discovered him gone. So he went searching and could not find him, carrying the .30-30 lazily under his arm. He walked the reserve shouting Doran’s name.
“He’s gone,” someone said.
“How did he get away?”
“I don’t know. But we have to get Roger now, or he too will go!”
All these young faces were now inordinately urgent as they looked to Joel for advice. The wind began to blow crazily in the trees.
“We should hear what Amos has to say,” someone said. “He’s still our chief.”
Joel only laughed. But he felt terribly stung by this. “Come, then,” Joel nodded. “Come with me.”
He took the sixteen-foot canoe and stood and poled it upriver, against the rapids, and between the stones and rocks, without touching the bottom on anything. He put the canoe in some bushes by the back field and walked to the road that came out at the side of Roger’s place. He had Andy and two others with him. He suddenly realized, just as so many other men of power had, that if he did not do something for his men, they would no longer follow him. This idea of being in charge did not make him look wise as it had with Isaac, or kindly as it had with Amos. It only made him look afraid. The men saw this too, and reacted to it by not looking at him.
They came behind Roger’s house and heard shouting from the street, shots being fired, and saw wild and burning cattails against the night sky.
Ginnish and Andy crouched down and hid near some bushes behind the house.
“What in hell’s going on?” Joel said.
“Fire at him,” Andy said.
“What?”
“He’s firing at us!” someone else yelled. “Fire or give Andy the gun—if you’re too gutless.”
“But I don’t know what to do.”
“Then give me the gun,” Andy said.
Joel pushed him back, took aim, his body shaking, put the rifle down, aimed again and fired two shots at the propane tank. The second shot hit the lit lantern in the room—one of two lanterns attached to the propane tank.
In an instant a flame caught the curtains over the back porch door of Roger Savage’s house, and spread to the propane tank itself. They saw Roger turning to look in their direction. It was the last thing he would do. Within five seconds everything blew, back and out as if in slow motion. Great pieces of plywood flipped high in the dark night air.
People said that the explosion killed Roger Savage in an instant.
That is all that young Andy Francis remembered when he spoke to the police. He remembered nothing else, for he was close enough to suffer a major concussion.
Joel had left his friends and tried to run away—something, people said, Isaac or Amos never would have done.
The RCMP, a dozen strong, came in directly after, along with two companies of soldiers from Gagetown. They had been held up on the road, near Mary Cyr’s cottage, by a couple of dozen students and their professors. The captain in charge of the second company was a Micmac, Freddy Ward, who had known Isaac for a number of years. Finally he talked the students into letting them pass without incident. He arrested five people, turned them over to the RCMP, restored order with fifteen soldiers and returned the band to Amos Paul.
All this, briefly, was what happened after the police officer Hanover ordered Isaac taken to jail.
Over the next many weeks Amos Paul, wanting to know what had happened, wrote letters to the editor of Doran’s paper, simply signing his name “Amos.” October came and went, and now it was almost November.
Doran now drank his wine and stared out at the small flurries of snow. No one considered the stand-off would lead to death, he told people.
Especially the death of a little boy.
What was his name? Doran tried to forget it, but he never could—Little Joe Barnaby.
There had been a rumour going around that Isaac had died. Who had put that rumour out? Someone told Doran it had been one of the students, who had become hysterical the day before and started shouting, “You killed him!”
Others said it was Kellie Matchett who had told the students this as they gathered on the road near Mary Cyr’s.
But no matter who had started it, it was because of this rumour about Isaac that Joel and Andy Francis went to take Roger to jail on the reserve. Men came toward the house from the front, and Andy and Joel were at the back, and Roger Savage fired that beautiful, ornate lever-action that Doran had seen that night in the woods.
Little Joe, who had run toward the house with his BB gun to arrest Roger and take him to jail, suddenly said, “Oooo, Markus,” and fell face first into the mud.
It was pouring rain. The men then rushed the house. There was no time for Roger to come out before the propane tank exploded.
And everything ended on August 31.
Little Joe, with his cheeks painted with stickers and his small cowboy boots, and his coupons for free pizza he had gotten from the delivery man, was going to take Roger to jail and, he told Markus, give him a pizza.
He fell face first into the mud, the back of his navy blue jacket covered in blood, and blood spattered on the front of Markus Paul’s shirt.
What was terrible for Markus was how Little Joe’s eyelashes kept blinking those last few seconds of his life.
Two days later Isaac was released on bond.
A week later all the charges against Isaac were dropped.
Yesterday, Doran had heard, Isaac had become chief of the reserve. There had been subdued fanfare and a realization that things between the Government of Canada and the First Nations people would never be the same until certain issues were addressed. At least, that was what Doran wrote in the last story he filed before he resigned.