Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul will be available wherever books and eBooks are sold on May 10, 2011, but we’ve got a sneak peek for you:
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.
Click here to continue reading the first chapter of Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul by David Adams Richards.
