Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

Searing, brilliant, and tension-filled, this is a foreboding tale about truth, lies and justice--quintessential David Adams Richards. One fine sunny day in 1985, seventeen-year-old Hector Penniac, a Micmac boy from a local First Nations reserve, begins his first real job to earn money for university: placing logs in the hold of a cargo ship down at the wharf. By noon, Hector is dead. And his neighbour, a young white man named Roger Savage, is accused of killing him. Taking this shocking incident as his starting point, and demonstrating his justly celebrated insight into the hearts and minds of diverse characters, including those most often silenced and misunderstood, master storyteller David Adams Richards subtly and precisely unravels a complex tale about crime and punishment, truth and lies, power and justice, that is at once an addictive mystery, a nuanced portrait of a close-knit community in crisis, and an illumination of some of the still-unhealed wounds at the heart of our country.

“Brilliantly scours the conscience of a community. . . . [He] moves deftly between the multiple voices and points of view . . . [and] never fails to capture the right details to a scene. . . . That Richards can consistently bring such potentially mawkish figures to vivid life is just one reason to keep reading him.”
—Quill & Quire (starred review)
 
“In a stark, stunning and profound new novel, New Brunswick’s David Adams Richards . . . exposes Canada’s rawest nerve. . . . The construction of this novel is brilliantly conceived, and flawlessly executed. This is Richards at the height of his powers, which is very high indeed. The word masterpiece is not too strong.”
—National Post

“The searing emotion and stirring probity we have come to expect of an author fighting to stave off anachronism’s claim to right and wrong, good and evil. . . . the characters themselves, who could have been frozen into moral archetypes . . . attain a welcome level of complexity. . . . Richards’s larger picture includes a moral lesson at once topical and timeless.”
—The Globe and Mail

Auteur

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS is one of Canada's pre-eminent writers. His recent novels include Mary Cyr and Principles to Live By, as well as Crimes Against My Brother and Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, both of which were longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Among his other novels, The Lost Highway was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; The Friends of Meagre Fortune won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book; Mercy Among the Children won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Trillium Award. Richards is also the author of the celebrated Miramichi Triology and has written four bestselling books of nonfiction, Lines on the Water, God Is, Facing the Hunter and Hockey Dreams, and most recently the collection of essays Murder. In 2017, David Adams Richards was appointed to the Senate of Canada on the advice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Échantillon de lecture
The day Hector Penniac 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 window—it was just starting to make high tide—and far offshore he could see lobster boats moving out to their traps.
 
Hector hadn’t 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 Savage’s house. Roger, the white man living just on the other side of the reserve’s 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 won’t 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 couldn’t find the Thermos for his tea.
 
“Don’t worry. They have a water boy at every hold—that’s 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.
 
“He’ll be back out soon,” his mother said.
 
Hector smiled. “I don’t know if he’ll ever forgive me for being born. I think in all honesty that’s 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. Amos’s 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 wife’s death.
 
When Amos’s 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 didn’t 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, no—but you wouldn’t want to be one bit more shiny, Hector, I’ll 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 father— sometimes 120 cord a year. H…