The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  Within a week, Stella and Amos were man and wife. Within two weeks, Jacob and the bridegroom left to rejoin their regiment and go overseas. Two months later, Stella was sitting in the office of the helpful doctor who was telling her that for a substantial fee he would get rid of her baby. But although she still didn’t want a child, she couldn’t bring herself to go through with the abortion. Seven months later, Oscar was born, and four months after the birth of his son, Amos was killed in action during the battle for Hill 70 near the town of Lens in northwestern France. It was August 1917.

  PART 1

  APRIL TO JUNE 1930

  Chapter 1

  THE JOURNEY

  1

  Mary Waabooz, lovingly known as Old Mary to her friends and relatives, the oldest member of the Rama Indian Reserve, had died, and the people crowded into her modest house late in the evening were singing the reassuring old gospel hymns in the language of their ancestors. The light of a solitary coal-oil lamp at the head of the open coffin threw a shadow down over her body, softening the gaunt features of her face, making her look decades younger and bringing a look of peace to someone who had spent the last weeks of her life in agony. It did the same for the other old people in the room, ironing out the creases on their foreheads, erasing the wrinkles on their dark brown, leathery cheeks, and concealing the slack flesh on their necks. There was a smell of decay mixed with sweetgrass in the room. The mood was one of calm and acceptance. There was no weeping. Old Mary had outlived three husbands and two grown children and her time had come. And yet her death still hurt. It was like an ancient tree, a landmark in the history of the community, unexpectedly crashing to the ground, leaving a massive empty space in the lives of the people.

  Jacob Musquedo, his hair as black as ever despite his sixty-seven years, sat quietly near the door, anxious to leave. Stella, who had grown into a massive middle-aged woman of some two hundred and fifty pounds and who had prepared the body for burial earlier in the day, stared morosely at the flame of the lamp. Only Oscar, now thirteen years old, his hair pulled back and twisted into one thick black braid and with black watchful eyes set in his dark, high-cheek-boned face, sang along with the others. He was there mainly because he wanted to be close to his mother whom he loved but who did not love him. He was also there because he had been a friend of Old Mary and had often gone to her house on winter evenings to eat hot fried bannock, to drink tea with sugar and condensed milk, and to listen to her talk about the world of her youth.

  “When I was a little girl,” she used to say, “we believed in Giche Manitou, the Creator, and not in the God of the Christians. We believed in Madji Manitou, the evil spirit, and not in the devil of the Christians. We believed that all things, animals, stones, water, and everything visible and invisible possessed souls, just as humans did. We believed that a monstrous seven-headed serpent with eyes the size of dinner plates inhabited the lakes of the Chippewa homeland in Muskoka. We believed that Mother Earth was Turtle Island and that it had come into being from a grain of sand carried by a muskrat to the surface of the sea without beginning or end. We believed that the Milky Way was the handle of a bucket holding up Turtle Island. We believed that the first humans emerged from the dead bodies of animals and were first cousins of the animals.”

  Oscar always felt a tremor of fear run down his spine when Old Mary’s eyes began to glisten and she went on to tell tales of witches, shape-shifting bearwalkers, cannibalistic Windigos, and other evil beings that owed their allegiance to Madji Manitou and who roamed the Earth doing harm to humans. He much preferred her accounts of the battles his people had fought over the years. He became a war chief when they drove the invading Iroquois from their hunting grounds; he became Pontiac when Chippewa warriors captured British fort after British fort at the end of the Seven Years’ War; he was at the side of his great-grandfather fighting the Americans in the War of 1812; and he was with his father and grandfather fighting the Germans in the Great War. In every one of these engagements, he saw himself as the hero battling impossible odds to impress his mother and gain her admiration and affection.

  At eleven-thirty, Jacob signalled to Oscar that it was time to depart, and grandfather and grandson went around the room, taking their leave of the mourners sitting in chairs pushed back against the walls. But Stella, when they came to her, refused to take their outstretched hands and looked away. They murmured their goodbyes anyway and went quietly to the door, picked up their packs, left the property, and started down the gravel road to the railway station.

  Suddenly, a half-dozen dogs burst out into the starlight from behind a house and ran barking toward them, but they fled whimpering back into the darkness when Jacob picked up a rock and hurled it in their direction. His seasonal job as a handyman at the McCrum and Son Guest House at the Muskoka village of Port Carling, close to his summer home at the Indian Camp, started the next morning at eight o’clock. He and Oscar needed to catch the midnight train to Muskoka Wharf Station at Gravenhurst at the bottom of Lake Muskoka and paddle throughout the night if he was to report for work on time. James McCrum, the proprietor, wouldn’t care whether or not there was a death in the family or a pack of dogs blocking his way and would probably fire him if he was late.

  Thirty minutes later, they smelled the creosote of railway ties and off in the distance heard the shriek of a steam whistle. Quickening their pace, they reached the station just before the locomotive, shaking the rails and pulling two dozen passenger and freight cars, its headlight cutting a path through the night, came thundering around the curve of Lake Couchiching. It had left Toronto four hours earlier and was on time.

  With a hiss of air brakes, a cloud of coal smoke, grease, and soot, the train came to a jerking stop. The door at the rear of a coach opened and the conductor, a lantern in his hand, peered out into the gloom in search of passengers. He kicked down the stairs when he saw Jacob and Oscar standing on the platform.

  “Tickets, please,” he said, when they came aboard, holding out his hand to take and punch them. “It’s dark in here,” he whispered as he lighted the way with his lantern and led them into an overheated coach filled with sleeping passengers and reeking of sweat, stale food, and cigarette smoke. Coming to two empty places, he said, “These should suit you fellows. Stow your gear on the racks above your heads. You’ll be getting off at the next stop.”

  Oscar took the seat closest to the window and sat silently in his separate world as the locomotive, panting with enormous gasps of steam like some primeval dragon preparing for combat, its driving rods pounding and its giant wheels straining as they turned, pulled out of the station. Scraping a peephole in the frost covering the inside of the window, Oscar looked out at the starlit countryside as the train picked up speed and hastened forward at sixty miles an hour. He thought back to the wake, to the single mesmerizing coal-oil lamp casting its soft light over Old Mary’s body and the elders in the room who had seen and done so much in their long lives.

  What had the old people been thinking? Were they recalling the days when Old Mary was young and they were young? Remembering the days when the families had returned from their winter hunting and trapping grounds in the spring to spend the summers together at the Narrows where Lake Simcoe emptied into Lake Couchiching? The days when they would talk about births and deaths and finding the perfect person to marry? The days when the ancestors undertook spirit quests, when they gathered sweetgrass for ceremonies, and when they held community feasts? Or, as they looked at Old Mary in her plain pine coffin, were they mourning the loss of their youth and counting the days until his mother appeared at their homes to wash their dead bodies and put them on display in plain pine coffins in their living rooms?

  And what meaning did Old Mary’s death have for him, for Oscar Wolf, his head pressed against the window staring out through the opening in the frost as the train raced through railway crossings empty of traffic, its wheels clicking ever more rapidly on the rails, and its whistle wailing? He was sad because Old Mary h
ad been his friend and was now no more. But at the same time, for some unexplainable reason, her death made him feel more alive than ever and astonished at the wonder of existence.

  “You owe your birth to blind luck,” Jacob once told him when he was a little boy, “since your parents knew each other for only two weeks before your father went overseas and was killed.”

  Oscar at first had accepted his grandfather’s judgement, but as he grew older and started to think for himself, he came to the conclusion that luck had nothing to do with it. Divine Providence was the cause. In contrast to Old Mary, perhaps because he regularly attended church, he believed in the Christian God as well as the Native Creator and felt their presence when he said his prayers before he went to bed and at church during Sunday services. They had put him on Mother Earth for a purpose, he was sure. And although that purpose would only be revealed in the fullness of time, he liked to think he was destined to do great things for his people someday. Maybe he would be a great warrior like Tecumseh, who rallied Indian warriors from across Canada and the United States to save Canada from the Americans in the War of 1812, only to die in the process. Or perhaps like John Brown, the white American who gave his life at the Battle of Harper’s Ferry trying to free the slaves. Maybe, like Tecumseh and Brown, he would sacrifice his life for a great cause someday. Maybe then his mother would treat him with the respect other kids got from their moms.

  Oscar wished his father was alive and he could discuss his thoughts with him. But he had been just a baby when his father was killed and he knew him only from his framed black-and-white picture, in which he sat smiling at the photographer and seemed so happy to be wearing the dress uniform of the 48th Highlanders of Canada. The photograph hung in their house back on the reserve, beside one of Jacob wearing a similar uniform. Oscar often looked at that picture, trying to decide what sort of man his father had been. Lots of his father’s friends from the old days had told him stories of going hunting and fishing with him. How he used to run away laughing at the white game wardens when they tried to catch him. He was a throwback to the old Chippewas, they said, someone who could control his canoe in the most dangerous rapids, someone who was a crack shot, someone who never got lost in the bush, and someone who knew and respected the old ways. Everyone said he had a bad temper and once had got so mad at the Indian agent, whom he had caught trying to cheat the people, that he threw him down the stairs of the band office and broke one of his legs. The RCMP had hauled him up before a judge and he spent six months in jail.

  Jacob told him his father had died a hero when the Canadian Corps launched an attack on the Germans entrenched on Hill 70 in northern France in August 1917. When he was old enough, Oscar checked out a history of the Great War from the library and read and reread the account of the battle until he practically had it memorized. Although he was proud of his father’s war record, he hated the Canadian government for sending him to his death and depriving him of a dad as he grew up. For as long as he could remember, he had wondered whether his father knew he was going to be killed when the picture was taken. Did he think of the newborn son he had never seen when he was dying? Did he regret he would never be able to take him fishing and hunting and do all the things fathers usually did with their sons? Was he sorry he would never be able to help his people before he died?

  2

  The train slowed to a crawl, moved across a bridge spanning the gorge over the Severn River, which flowed northwesterly out of Lake Couchiching into Georgian Bay, and climbed laboriously up a steep grade to enter the District of Muskoka. Twenty minutes later, Oscar and his grandfather were standing on the deserted platform at Muskoka Wharf Station as the sound of the train, with its load of passengers bound for Bracebridge and Huntsville and places farther north such as Timmins and the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, faded away. Nearby, they could hear the groans of the steamers of the Muskoka Navigation Company rubbing their bumpers against government docks as they waited for the beginning of the tourist season and the arrival of day trippers from Toronto.

  A minor official of the navigation company, a returned soldier who had served under Jacob in the war after he had been promoted on the battlefield to the rank of sergeant, had given his old army buddy permission to leave his canoe on the covered wharf over the winter. After confirming it had suffered no damage, Jacob and Oscar picked it up and slid it into the black water. They then took their positions, grandson in the bow and grandfather in the stern with their packsacks between them on the floor, and began their journey to the Indian Camp. There was no wind, but the ice had been off the lake for only a week; the night-time April temperature was well below freezing and each breath of air chilled their lungs. If all went well, they would be at their destination in six hours.

  As Oscar paddled, the words and melodies of the hymns sung around the coffin earlier that night played over and over in his mind. At first he found them distracting, preventing him from concentrating on the things he wanted to think about on this special night on the water. But he soon gave in and sang aloud the words of his favourite hymn.

  Shall we gather at the river,

  Where bright angel-feet have trod,

  With its crystal tide for ever,

  Flowing by the throne of God.

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful river,

  Gather with the saints at the river,

  That flows by the throne of God.

  On the margin of the river,

  Washing up its silvery spray,

  We will walk and worship ever,

  All the happy, golden day.

  As Oscar sang, tears of exultation flooded his eyes and he became conscious of the presence of someone, of something otherworldly, and he looked up at the stars and saw the outline of a smiling face. Old Mary, he recalled, had once said that the old people believed that humans were composed of three parts: a body that rots in the dirt after death; a shadow that watches over the grave of the corpse as well as the members of the dead person’s family and closest friends; and a soul that travels westward over the Milky Way to reside in the Land of the Spirits. The Land of the Spirits, she said, was ruled over by Nanibush, the right hand and messenger of the Creator, whose power ran through all things.

  It’s Old Mary, he thought. Her shadow followed me here from the wake, and now her soul on its final journey is watching over me as I sing out here on the lake in the middle of the night. And the soul of my father, Oscar remembered, travelled on that same road to the Land of the Spirits after he was killed in France.

  Oscar sang louder, shouting out the words of the hymn to the starlit sky.

  3

  Oscar’s passionate singing irritated Jacob, but he said nothing. If his grandson found some comfort from attending church and singing Christian hymns, good for him. Personally, he found their messages of love and forgiveness, if you were lucky enough to be counted among the chosen, hypocritical. His service in northern France as a soldier had led him to equate Christianity with cities in rubble, the suffering of civilians, and the massacre of soldiers. A lukewarm Christian before he went overseas, he had returned with a renewed attachment to the Indian beliefs he had embraced as a boy and abandoned as a man many years before. Like many other things in his life, he kept his beliefs to himself.

  Puffing hard on his pipe, Jacob thought of the disrespect his daughter had shown to him and to Oscar at the wake. He was not angry — becoming upset would do no good — but he was worried about her. When he had come back from the war, neighbours on the reserve had told him that in the years he had been away, Stella did not seem to care for anyone or anything. She drank, she ran around with any low-class white man who took her fancy, often disappearing for weeks at a time, leaving her baby with Old Mary to look after. She would return smelling of alcohol, her hair a mess and her body covered in bruises when she had run out of money and needed to cash her pension cheques. She laughed too loud, they said, and she became involved in bra
wls whether she was sober or drunk. She was unpredictable; no one knew what would set her off. She was more than willing to take on anyone in a fight, man or woman, old or young, big or small, with fists, feet, and fingernails; a piece of cordwood would do if she was losing. She was, they said, just plain crazy.

  Jacob suspected the neighbours might well be right. At the turn of the century, he and three other men from the Rama Reserve were working for two white men from Toronto, surveying the hunting and trapping territories of the Ojibwa people who lived on the headwaters of the Albany River, deep in the northwestern Ontario bush. One morning, a birchbark canoe paddled by a Native glided toward them out of the early morning mist.

  “Bojo, Bojo,” the visitor, who spoke their language, called out to the men on the shore eating their breakfast. “Do you think the white men would give me work? I was born here and know the best fishing spots.”

  The man was in his early sixties with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and thick, powerful arms. He had taken the trouble, Jacob saw, to apply for work with his shoulder-length hair neatly cropped and he was dressed in what were probably his best clothes: black fedora, knee-high buckskin moccasins decorated with coloured beads and porcupine quills, a bandanna knotted around his neck, and a shirt loosely tucked into pants held in place by a red and white sash.

  “We’re not here to fish. But come ashore and have something to eat with us and then I’ll go ask them if they can use you.”

  “Tell him he can start right away,” the white men said when Jacob passed on the request. “We can use someone who knows the local landmarks.”

  Jacob quickly made friends with the stranger, whose name was Caleb Loon, and passed the summer working alongside him by day and spending his evenings with him and his family. He enjoyed Caleb’s company and liked his wife, Betsy, a large, dark-skinned, heavy-set, good-humoured woman in her early thirties who was invariably dressed in a plain calico dress pulled over a pair of men’s pants and knee-high moccasins. He was happiest in the company of their daughter, Louisa, who was big-boned and tall like her mother and already a woman at the age of sixteen. She spent the evenings staring inscrutably into the fire as if she was thinking about matters so profound that she could never share them with anyone. While obviously too young for him, she was exactly the sort of girl he had always wanted to marry. Good looking when the flickering light of the campfire shone on her solemn face, she was, in his view, just like one of those unspoiled and unsullied Indian maidens who lived at the time of the ancestors.