The Redemption of Oscar Wolf
Page 4
Caleb and Betsy noticed Jacob’s interest in Louisa and questioned him closely about the life of his people in the south. They found it most interesting when he said most people owned their own houses on his reserve and spent their summers at the Indian Camp on the shore of a river in Muskoka where their kids swam and played in the water while their parents made good money selling handicraft and fish to rich white people. They were most attentive when he told them that he was still a bachelor at the age of thirty-seven.
“That’s not old,” Betsy said, smiling at Jacob. “I was only fifteen when I accepted Caleb’s marriage offer and changed my last name from Amick to Loon. And he’s thirty years my senior. It was the same with my parents. My father’s first wife had died and he was over fifty and my mother was sixteen when they got married. And it was a good marriage.”
By summer’s end, it was understood that Jacob would wed Louisa. The day after the first frost of the season, Betsy simply informed him that her daughter would marry him before they returned to their winter trapping grounds in the fall. Two weeks later, the members of the survey party ended their work for the season and returned to the railway station and from there by train to their homes in the south. Three weeks later, Louisa arrived at the railway station at the Rama Indian Reserve, and one week later she married Jacob.
It would not be a happy marriage. Jacob had mistaken damage for dignity and shyness. He would never discover that the decade Louisa had spent at residential school had crushed her spirit. From the age of six to sixteen, she had listened to teachers say that Indians had been godless savages before the arrival of the white man, and their ancestors, not having heard the Word of the Lord, were burning in Hell. She had been forbidden to speak her Indian language, her name had been replaced by a number, and she had been beaten by the nuns and sexually abused by the priests. She returned to her parents traumatized, having lost her culture and knowledge of life in the bush and knowing only a few words of Ojibwa. Her parents had been anxious to find a husband who could take care of her as soon as possible.
The summer after her marriage, Louisa gave birth to Stella in Jacob’s shack at the Indian Camp, and until her death six years later, she rejected her daughter. At first the other women thought she was just suffering with the sort of melancholy new mothers sometimes have after the birth of a baby but usually shake off after a few weeks. But when months, and then years went by, and Louisa continued to neglect Stella, they knew something was fundamentally wrong. And when she went to bed one day, turned her face to the wall, and starved herself to death, no one was really surprised.
When he came home from the war, therefore, and learned of his daughter’s erratic behaviour, Jacob concluded that she had probably inherited the mental illness that had cut short the life of her mother. He thus made allowances and tried to shield her from herself by chasing away predatory white men whenever he could. His protective instinct extended to her little boy, and he intervened when he found Stella beating him. She once threw Oscar outside naked into the snow, paying no attention to his screams, and it was just good luck that he happened to arrive home at that moment to bring his grandson inside.
When he told his daughter she had to change her ways, she just laughed at him. “I didn’t want that kid when he was born and I don’t want him now. If you love him so much, why don’t you just take him off my hands and raise him yourself.”
Jacob had sought to do just that, but it was not easy. He had no wife to help him, had no special parenting skills, and found it no easier to establish intimate ties with his grandson than he had with his own daughter. Perhaps that was the reason he made Oscar call him Jacob rather than grandpa or even grandfather. To make it worse, Stella was living in his house and it was heartbreaking to see her constantly shoving her little boy away when he was just trying to show her his love. He did what he could, making sure Oscar ate regularly and buying him decent clothes. When he was old enough, he sent him to the day school on the reserve where the white teachers, although hard on the kids, were at least teaching them some reading, writing, arithmetic, and other skills needed to survive in the white man’s world.
To shield him as much as he could from the influence of his mother, Jacob took Oscar out of the school on the reserve each spring when he started work at the guest house and let him attend classes at the school for white kids at Port Carling.
Oscar was now set to graduate from elementary school at the end of June, and since there was no high school on the reserve, he would have to leave at the end of the summer and attend a residential school until he was sixteen. And although his daughter had nothing good to say about the residential school she had gone to, maybe that was just because girls were more apt to become homesick than boys. Oscar would do okay.
4
A fierce wind from the northwest plains that had crossed Lake Huron and Georgian Bay and swept up and over the leafless highlands now came howling down onto the lake, whipping the water into rows upon rows of white-capped breakers that pushed the canoe off course. Oscar stopped singing as he and Jacob fought their way to a protected passageway between a large island and the shore.
For the next hour they paddled through a wide channel lined with oversized boathouses. Great steamer docks proudly adorned with sixty-foot-high flagpoles, their ropes rattling in the wind, protruded aggressively a hundred feet out into the water. Behind the docks, scarcely visible in the starlight, were wide walkways leading up past tennis courts and wide lawns to huge summer houses with upper-floor balconies and wraparound verandas. This was Millionaires’ Row, the preserve of the American and Canadian super-rich whose parents and grandparents had visited the district to hunt and fish in the late nineteenth century. It was still a land of poor bush farmers then and they were able to buy up the shorefront they needed at a cheap price to recreate the country-club life they enjoyed at home.
The waves were as high as ever when they left the shelter of the channel, but the wind was now at their backs and they began to make up for lost time. The cold, however, cut through Oscar’s clothes and his teeth began to chatter.
“Lie down on the floor and cover yourself with blanket,” Jacob told him. “I’ll wake you up when we reach the manido.”
Sometime later, a splash of cold water coming over the gunnels struck Oscar in the face. He woke up to see, in the grainy light of the predawn, the head of a blind chief emerging from the rock on the north-facing outcrop of a deserted island alongside that of a smaller inert guardian companion. As ancient as Turtle Island itself, its face was covered in lichen, its cheekbones were fractured and its nose broken. Inscrutable, it exuded profound sadness and complete indifference to the waves crashing against its base and to travellers who came to pay it homage. The old people said it was, in fact, the Creator himself in another form.
Taking hold of his paddle, Oscar held the canoe as steady as he could in the seething waters, freeing Jacob to light his pipe, and with his arms and hands outstretched, raise it into the air and offer a prayer to the unsmiling deity.
“Oh Great Manido, I beg you to protect two humble Chippewa canoeists from the wrath of the seven-headed water snake that dwells in the depths of this lake. I beseech you to allow us to travel in peace and safety to the Indian Camp. And bring us good luck, Oh Great Manido, as we try to catch a fish for our breakfast on this last leg of our journey.”
He then blew an offering of smoke to the statue and told his grandson to fish while he paddled. Oscar pulled the gear from a pack — an eight-inch silver spoon armed with triple gang hooks at the end of three hundred feet of thirty-pound test copper trolling wire — and fed it slowly into the water until it was only a few feet from the bottom. He gave the line a jerk, making the spoon leap forward, and a fish immediately took the bait. Oscar hauled in the line, hand over hand, keeping tension on the wire to keep it from breaking free. Jacob turned the bow of the canoe into the wind and held the boat steady until his grandson pulled the fish, a two-pound lake trout, over the side.
5
Jacob had treasured Obagawanung when he was a child. It was a holy place where Mother Earth was most alive, where the people were part of the world around them, where the manidos were everywhere in the surrounding lakes and rivers and in the trees, the rocks, the animals, the fish, the clouds, the lightning, and the passing seasons. In the winters, he used go outside at night to listen to them whisper to each another in the mist that rose up from the current. In the spring, he would wait eagerly for the annual visit of the half-breed traders who came from their posts on Georgian Bay in birchbark canoes laden with guns, ammunition, and other supplies to exchange for beaver, muskrat, and wolf pelts. In the summers, he camped on an island in Lake Muskoka picking blueberries with his family, and in the autumns he went hunting with the men for deer and bear. He thought he would spend the rest of his life at Obagawanung, but one day when he was five or six, white men came and surveyed the lands, and the settlers arrived soon after.
Now, only half a dozen rotting log cabin homes, used as pigpens by the farmer son of one of the first settlers, remained of that world. With one exception, the graves of the inhabitants had been picked over by archaeologists seeking specimens of so-called primitive man to put on display in museums or ploughed into the ground by settlers years ago, leaving the shadows of the dead to wander without a home. The grave that was spared was that of Jacob’s grandfather, who had died of grief when told by the Indian agent that his people would have to abandon their homes to make way for the immigrants in search of land coming from across the Great Waters.
In bitter memories that he had shared only with his grandson, Jacob remembered, as if it were just yesterday, helping his father and the other men of the condemned community take his grandfather’s body one moonless night, when no white people were watching, and bury it at the mouth of the river at a secret place on a high point of land overlooking the Manido of the Lake. At that time, there had been no sign of human life anywhere in this part of Lake Muskoka. Now, six decades later, a gazebo had been constructed over the grave and shuttered summer cottages occupied building sites every two or three hundred feet along the indented and rocky shore.
Not long afterward, the police came with rifles and told the people they had to go, and they loaded whatever they could carry in their birchbark canoes and departed. Most would leave for a reserve on a rocky island on Georgian Bay and a life of poverty, but a few, including Jacob and his family, went to the Rama Indian Reserve seventy miles to the south where they had family to help them.
Jacob never forgot the white people standing on the shore cheering their expulsion, nor the huge piles of logs and brush burning on both sides of the river as they paddled away. His father told him the white people were making the point to the Chippewas that they could never return to their homes, that their time was over and that the time of the settlers had come. It was of little comfort to Jacob that the government later created a tiny reserve called the Indian Camp where his people could spend their summer months within the boundaries of the newly incorporated white village of Port Carling. If anything, it made him feel worse, since each time he paddled by the site of his former home he was assailed by thoughts of what his life might have been like if only the white people had shown his people some compassion.
6
An hour later, the sun was up, the wind had died down, and the ground was white with hoar frost. As they rounded a bend in the river, the two paddlers smelled wood smoke in the air and off in the distance they had their first view of Port Carling, a cluster of clapboard houses on both sides of the river, their windows framed with white-lace curtains and their backyards filled with chicken coops, privies, and half-empty woodsheds.
Twenty minutes later, they paddled past the Amick, a steam-powered supply boat owned by Jacob’s employer, James McCrum, moored to the government wharf. When the tourist season began, it would start its rounds delivering groceries, ice, and sundries to its well-off clients on the surrounding lakes. Up the hill, on the road leading off the bridge that spanned the Indian River, was the village business section, a row of one- and two-storey frame buildings with high false fronts to make them appear bigger than they were. On the other side of the bay, visible from the government wharf but cut off from the rest of the village by a ridge, were the two dozen one-room shacks of the Indian Camp where Oscar and his grandfather would spent the next six months.
A few minutes later, they pulled their canoe up onto the shore and Jacob took out a key to unlock the door to the shack he had built after he had married Louisa. The door, however, was ajar. Someone had entered over the winter months, but nothing, it seemed, had been stolen. The beds and mattresses, the linoleum-covered table pushed up against the window facing the lake, the chairs, the old cook stove, the pots and pans hanging from nails on the bare studs, the axe and saw, the woodbox, and the cutlery and crockery in the orange crates scavenged at the village dump and used as cupboards remained as they had been left the preceding fall. The smell of stale ashes, wood smoke, coal oil, and last year’s fried fish meals hung in the air. Sunlight streamed in through the windows devoid of curtains and blinds, but the building was cold and damp.
Oscar followed his grandfather into the shack and quickly checked his precious collection of books, bought with the money he had earned in past summers washing windows and sweeping walkways at nearby tourist cottages. His copies of the lives of Tecumseh and John Brown, and his illustrated copies of Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island were still there, he saw to his relief. So, too, were the two used volumes of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and his collection of books written by veterans on the Great War. Nothing had been touched. He pulled from the woodbox a copy of the Toronto Star dated August 1, 1929, its fading headlines still proclaiming “Stock Market Crash, Dozens Jump to Their Deaths on Wall Street,” stuffed it into the stove, added dry kindling, and lit a fire.
Jacob returned to the canoe, retrieved the lake trout and cleaned and filleted it on the shore, tossing its guts to the seagulls that came swooping in, crying raucously to be fed. By the time he returned to the shack carrying the fillets, Oscar had unpacked the food supplies brought from the reserve and put the kettle on to boil. He picked up the heavy, fire-blackened cast iron frying pan that had been in the family for generations, placed it on the stove, scooped a big tablespoon of lard from its can, and spread it with his fingers over the cooking surface. While he was occupied with these tasks, Jacob rolled the fillets in flour and eased them into the lard that had started to boil and spit. Oscar quickly cut two boiled potatoes into slices and dropped them into the simmering mix. A short while later, grandfather and grandson, wearing their coats at the table, drank their tea and ate their breakfast in silence. Jacob then glanced at his pocket watch and left for the guest house, looking forward to meeting his friends from the village whom he had not seen since the previous fall.
“Don’t worry about making dinner,” he said as he went out the door, “I’ll pick up a few things at the store and I’ll see you when I get back f
rom work.”
Oscar finished his meal, washed the dishes, and took a seat by the window. In a few minutes, he would trudge up the hill through the snow on the north-facing ridge and go down the sunlit slope on other side to the four-room combined elementary and high school, each with its separate entrance. The big boys from the high school would be standing just outside school property by the gate leading to their entrance, their shirt collars turned up against the cold. They would be shifting their weight from foot to foot, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes or chewing tobacco and spitting the wads on the ground as they waited for the bell to ring calling them to class. The big girls would already be inside their classrooms combing and brushing their hair, gossiping and organizing themselves for the day ahead.
In the playground of the elementary school, the girls would be skipping rope and chanting a rhyme they repeated endlessly at this time of the year.
Down by the river, down by the sea,
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.