The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  A minute later, he reappeared with a glass of lemonade mixed with gin and thrust it at her. “Here, drink this while I whip up some lunch. There’s nothing in it that’ll do you any harm.”

  Ten minutes later, he reappeared with a platter of tomato and lettuce sandwiches, cold, peeled hard-boiled eggs, and a pitcher of lemonade into which he had poured a half bottle of gin. He sat down beside her.

  “Help yourself to the food and some more lemonade,” he said, reaching over and patting her on the knee. “You must be hungry and thirsty after spending time out there in the sun.”

  Not having had anything to eat or drink since early that morning, Stella eagerly ate and drank while the white man kept his eyes on her, smiling indulgently.

  “My wife, kids, and dog have been away for the past week at the cottage. I get really lonely when they’re not here. Family is really important, don’t you think?” he asked, pouring her another gin and lemonade and edging up against her. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” he added, inserting a hand between her legs. Stella removed his hand and pushed him away. The white man leaned back, took a sip of his drink, and pointed at a series of framed photos in which he and a middle-aged woman were sitting smiling in deck chairs on a beach with two happy teenagers posing behind them.

  “That’s me, the little woman, and the kids,” he said. “I’m so blessed to have such a great family. I don’t know what I would do without them.”

  A half-hour later, Stella came to lying on a bed with her clothes off and her new friend on top of her doing his best to rape her.

  “Come on, Pocahontas,” he was shouting. “I know you like it!”

  Stella shoved him aside and sat up, confused and wondering where she was and how she had come to be on this strange bed. And who was this naked white man beside her?

  He slapped her, and she remembered getting into a car, drinking alcohol straight from a bottle, becoming dizzy, and being hungry and eating and drinking while this white man tried to fondle her and droned on and on about his wonderful family.

  She slapped him back. But she did not stop at slapping him back. She was bigger than he was, and she got off the bed, turned around, and, fueled by the alcohol and years of pent-up rage, she hit him as hard as she could in the face with her fist. As blood gushed from his nose, splattering the sheets, she jerked him onto the floor and kicked him repeatedly in the stomach and groin. Leaving him curled up and moaning, she proceeded to trash his house, hurling to the floor the framed photographs the white man had just shown her, pitching cups, saucers, and dinner plates against the walls, throwing heavy glass ashtrays through the windows, and opening the ice box and emptying bottles of milk and cream, tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, slabs of butter, and cartons of eggs onto the floor.

  After retrieving her clothes and dressing, Stella left the house, went down the driveway to the highway, and carried on walking south toward Toronto. Whenever a car stopped to offer a lift, she waved it on, unwilling to repeat her encounter with the crazy white man. An hour later a car drove up behind her and she turned around, ready to tell the driver to keep on going. But this time it was a police cruiser.

  “Come over here and let me have a look at you,” the cop said, leaning out the window.

  Stella obeyed his order, afraid the white man had reported her to the police for beating him up and making a mess of his house. Instead, he asked her if she was Stella Musquedo from the residential school. When she confirmed her identity, he told her to get in.

  “The principal of your school is worried about you,” he said. “He asked us to track you down and bring you back.”

  Inside the cruiser, the cop’s mood changed when he smelled gin on Stella’s breath. “Don’t you know it’s against the law for Indians to drink? For minors to drink? For bootleggers to sell to Indians?”

  “No one sold anything to me. It’s just your imagination.”

  “Don’t give me any of your lip. I’m going to tell the school that you’ve been into the booze and they’ll deal with you.”

  Stella didn’t care. The worst she would get would be ten lashes of a belt across the bare legs and she had received that many times before. But once back at the school and being led by a hectoring teacher to the basement to receive her punishment, she once again decided that she had had enough. She shouldered the teacher aside and walked slowly up the stairs, defying him to try to stop her, and left the building. This time, to avoid meeting the cop who had delivered her to the school, she made her way to the railway tracks where a locomotive with a load of boxcars was beginning to pull out of a siding. One of the doors was open, and as she ran toward it, a half-dozen hobos standing inside waved and yelled at her to come join them. She reached up and they hauled her inside and welcomed her to their world. After sharing a bottle of cheap wine with her, they told her their hard luck stories and gave her tips on how to survive in the big city.

  “You being an Indian and all that, you won’t have a chance in hell of getting any sort of job. You’re going to have to use your wits to survive, bumming spare change on the streets and knocking on doors for handouts.”

  “The Salvation Army’s always good for a meal and place to spend the night if nothing better turns up. But you gotta close your eyes and be polite when they pray for your soul.”

  “When I was on the bum in Quebec,” another hobo said, “I used to go looking for monasteries when I was hungry. The monks were always good for an apple and a sandwich. But you had to get there early in the morning before they ran out.”

  Stella jumped off the train when it slowed to a crawl approaching the freight yards in downtown Toronto. She had no friends, no money, no knowledge of the city, and she had a splitting headache. But she was free for the first time in her life to do whatever she wanted.

  A hard-faced railway cop carrying a truncheon told her to get a move on. “I seen you get off that train. If I ever see you here again, it’ll be the Don Jail for you.”

  “Go to hell, you asshole,” she said, and ran off when he came after her. She stopped a passerby to say she was hungry and to ask where she could find a monastery or the Salvation Army.

  “Don’t know any monasteries around here. But the Salvation Army’s got a soup kitchen over on Jarvis Street and it’s not a long walk.”

  The soup kitchen was closed when Stella reached it and she stood at the door waiting for it to open, asking people for spare change. Eventually, someone came out and told her to go away and come back later. She then noticed that there were women, their faces powdered and their lips smeared with lipstick, standing on the sidewalk beckoning to men in uniform. Although raised in a residential school, Stella knew they were whores. A teacher at the school had once tried to humiliate her by calling her that when she asked for money after he had sex with her, but it hadn’t bothered her. One of the women saw her and came over.

  “New in town?”

  “Just arrived on a freight. Don’t know anyone down here.”

  “What’s this about a freight? Did you really just arrive in town?” A pimp had been listening to the conversation, and over a coke and a hamburger he told Stella that he could help her make a lot of money.

  “I’ll provide you with a room to do your work and spend your free time, and I’ll be around to protect you if the johns cause trouble. You’re young and the customers like that. But you’re an Indian and a lot of guys around here don’t like Indians. Just the same, the city’s been full of lonely soldiers since the start of the war and they’ll pay one dollar for every trick you turn. My cut is fifty cents. Interested?”

  One September evening, fifteen months later, Stella was standing on the sidewalk on Jarvis Street outside the King’s Arms Hotel, which rented rooms by the hour to prostitutes to carry out their business. One of her friends, a big, raw-boned Ojibwa teenager from a reserve in northern Ontario, who had likewise drifted onto the streets after running away from her residential school, was with her. The two women were doing what they did every day a
t that time: trying to catch the eyes of potential customers cruising down the street in their cars. But it was hot and muggy and business was slow. A car stopped, and the driver leaned out the window and motioned to Stella to come over to him. But as Stella began to discuss prices, the other woman pushed her aside and took her place.

  “Goddamn Indian bitch,” Stella hissed, grabbing her by the hair, dragging her away from the car and pushing her down on the pavement.

  “Goddamn Indian whore,” the other girl replied, scratching Stella’s face and pulling her down on top of her and kneeing her in the groin.

  “The cops!” someone yelled.

  The john drove quickly away, the crowd dispersed, and the women ran up the steps into the hotel. Shortly afterward, Stella’s father, Jacob Musquedo, entered the hotel and spoke to the clerk behind the desk.

  “I’ve been told Stella Musquedo lives here,” he said. “I need to talk to her.”

  “You a cop?” the clerk asked. “I guess not,” he said, glancing at Jacob’s dark brown face and not waiting for an answer. “Wait right here and I’ll go get her. She just came in in a bit of a hurry.”

  A few minutes later, a smiling Stella, her face swollen and scratched, came down the stairs.

  “Looking for a good time, handsome?” she said, not recognizing her father. “I give special rates for Indians and extra special ones for old men like you.”

  “Stella? Are you Stella Musquedo? Can we go up to your room? I’ve got something to say to you.”

  2

  Shortly after the start of the Great War in 1914, well before Jacob found his daughter working the streets of Toronto, a recruitment officer addressed a public meeting at the Chippewas of Rama Indian Reserve. “Our country is in peril,” he told the assembled people. “Tens of thousands of young Canadians have already fallen in battle in Europe fighting alongside their British cousins under the leadership of His Majesty King George V whose grandmother, Queen Victoria, was the beloved mother and protector of all the Indians of Canada. Men are needed to replace them as soon as possible, for the hour is late and the Hun is winning.”

  With his unlined face and raven-black hair, Jacob looked decades younger than his actual age of fifty-one, and had no difficulty in persuading the recruitment officer to let him join up. In May of the following year, he received Stella’s letter pleading for him to let her go home for the summer, but set it aside after reading it, just as he had with the others she had sent him over the years. Ignoring his daughter’s correspondence, in his way of thinking, however, did not in any way mean that he was unmoved by her pleas for help. His overriding desire was to do what was in her best interest, and in his opinion she was better off staying at the residential school in the safe hands of its staff than spending the summer at the Indian Camp where she would probably start running around with the boys. And as for her complaints of mistreatment by her caregivers, he simply did not believe her. It would have been a waste of time to write to tell her what she already knew anyway.

  Nevertheless, he began to worry about what might happen to his daughter if he were to be killed in action, finally deciding to marry her off as soon as she turned sixteen to a suitable Chippewa man who could take care of her if that should happen. All the eligible bachelors from the reserve, however, had joined up and were as much at risk of being killed as he was. After much reflection, he came to the conclusion that if his daughter were to marry someone who was killed in action, she would at least receive a pension. And so in the coming year, Jacob studied the young recruits from his reserve doing their basic training with him to find the best possible husband for his daughter. Eventually he settled on Amos Wolf, a hard-working young man of twenty whose elderly parents had passed away when he was still a teenager.

  “I need someone to write to when I’m overseas,” Amos told Jacob, who cultivated him as a friend and mentor. “What if I get killed? Just look at the casualty figures. Who’ll remember me when I’m gone? I’ve no one left at home and I’d really like to have a family before I die, maybe a son to carry on my name.”

  At first Jacob listened with fatherly indulgence as Amos spoke of his fears and hopes. He nodded his head sympathetically when Amos told him in the strictest confidence that although everyone thought he was outgoing and happy-go-lucky, he had always been shy around girls.

  “I don’t know how to talk to them” he said. “They make me feel inadequate. I never get up the nerve to ask anybody out.”

  Then one day in early June 1916, Jacob let slip that he had a daughter just a bit younger than Amos.

  “Her name is Stella. After her mother died, I couldn’t take care of her and she’s been away for years at a good residential school learning to read and write and cook and sew and be a good wife for the right man. I’m going to get her at the end of the month and she’ll be home to stay after that. If you want, I could put in a word for you.”

  Amos asked people on the reserve who had known Stella before she went away to residential school for their opinion.

  “Haven’t heard of her for years,” was the general view. “Her mother was a strange, lost soul who died when her daughter was just a child. No idea what she’s like now, but if she takes after her father, she’s sure to be hard-working and reliable.”

  Later that same month, about to be shipped out to Europe to join his regiment on the front lines, Jacob managed to get family leave. He arrived at the residential school dressed in his military uniform to bring his daughter home to meet Amos.

  “She left last summer and didn’t come back,” the principal said when Jacob asked for her.

  “What do you mean, ‘left and didn’t come back’?” asked Jacob. “Was she in some sort of trouble?”

  “Well, you may not like what I’ve got to say,” the principal said. “She was a model student the first years she was here, but she never received mail from home and she spent her summers at the school rather than with her family. I am afraid she thought you had rejected her and she started to take her frustrations out on the other students and the staff. Matters came to a head last year when she was under the impression you were coming to bring her home for the summer. When you didn’t appear, she left the property without permission and we had to send the police to bring her back. She left again and we thought she had gone home. The police came later to say she had somehow entered someone’s home, trashed it, and attacked the owner. We never followed up, thinking it was for the best since we couldn’t handle her and she would have been charged with assault had she returned.”

  “Where do you think she went?” Jacob asked. “I’ve got to find her and I don’t have much time before I go overseas.”

  “Why don’t you try Toronto,” the principal suggested. “A lot of our female runaways hitchhike or ride boxcars down there and try to find jobs as maids, waitresses, or babysitters. The problem is Toronto is such a big place, it’ll be hard to locate her.”

  But finding Stella was all too easy. When Jacob visited the downtown police station to file a missing person’s report, the cop on duty asked him to wait while he went to look for her name in the files in the registry.

  “Your daughter is not missing, Mr. Musquedo,” he said when he came back. “In fact, she’s well known to us. We’ve had to bring her in for fighting, disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, and for soliciting on the streets. She moves around a lot but the last address we have for her is room 10, the King’s Arms Hotel, on Jarvis Street next to the Salvation Army soup kitchen.”

  “Thank you, thank you just the same,” Jacob answered, not knowing what to say. “I’m leaving for overseas in a couple of weeks,” he told the cop who was no longer listening.

  I should have brought her home for the summers, Jacob thought, as he walked toward Jarvis Street. I should have done something when I got her letter last year. Maybe she wouldn’t have disgraced herself and the family. Maybe there was nothing I could have done to help her anyhow. Nobody can blame me. I did what I thought was right for her,
just like I’m doing for Canada by going off to war. Luckily, I’ve found a good man for her.

  3

  After the initial shock of meeting her father, Stella did not try to hide her disbelief when Jacob said he wanted her to come home with him and settle down before he went overseas.

  “You’re a cold old goat,” she said. “You never wanted me when I was a kid, and now to make yourself feel good, you come around pretending you care about me. So go away and let me live my life as I want. Toronto’s my home now, not the reserve or the Indian Camp. The women selling their asses on the streets, including that bitch I was just fighting with, are my family, not you.”

  Two days later, however, Stella pushed open the door to Jacob’s house on the reserve and walked in carrying her suitcase. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said to her father who was eating his dinner. “You knew the cops would come looking for me after the fight and I’d have to come back to the reserve to hide out for a while.”

  The next day, Jacob invited Amos Wolf to drop by for a cup of tea. And Amos, who had been so well prepared by Jacob that he had already fallen in love with the idea of marrying his daughter before he met her, could not have been happier when he was exposed to her earthy humour, handsome good looks, and worldly self-confidence. There was no need, Jacob thought, to tell him that he had found Stella working the streets of Toronto. Why spoil his illusions when he might well be killed overseas anyway?

  At the request of Amos, Jacob told his daughter that his friend wanted to marry her, but she said no.

  “Why this sudden concern for me?” she asked. “There’s gotta be something in it for you.”

  “Not at all,” said Jacob. “I just want what’s best for you. Besides, the government will send you half his pay when he’s overseas, and if he gets killed you’ll get a pension.”