The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  I told ma, ma told pa,

  Johnny got a spanking so ha ha ha.

  The boys would be horsing around, playing marbles and kicking a soccer ball, but they would not invite Oscar to join in. He would go inside and ask the teacher if he could attend classes for the rest of term. The teacher would say yes, as he always did when Oscar appeared at his door at this time of year. He seemed to like Oscar, but, with a mocking smile never called him by his name, always addressing him as Chief. The kids called him Chief, as well, but never with a smile. To them, he was the outsider, even if most of them treated him with good-natured tolerance. Several others, big raw-boned members of an old pioneer family, however, called him a dirty Indian and had been bullying him for years. Once when he was a seven-year-old in grade two and fought back, they had ganged up on him, threw him to the ground, and pushed his face into the dirt.

  “Say ‘I’m a dirty Indian,’” they said, “and we’ll let you go.” But Oscar refused to give in, and his tormentors yanked him to his feet, and, as two of them held his arms, a third pulled down his pants to show off his underwear.

  “Wanna see this Redskin’s dick?” the older of the two asked the kids who had gathered around.

  “I would,” Gloria Sunderland, the butcher-shop owner’s daughter said with a smirk. And after the big boys pulled down his underwear, Oscar ran back to the shack at the Indian Camp in tears to tell his grandfather what had happened. He expected Jacob would immediately go up to the school to tell those kids never to touch his grandson again or he would teach them a lesson they would never forget. And if their fathers got mad and came down to the Indian Camp to complain, his grandfather would pull their pants down to let them know how his grandson had felt when their sons had done that to him. After all, Jacob had killed Germans with his bare hands and was a war hero and had the medals to prove it. Dealing with the fathers of a couple of bullies in Port Carling shouldn’t be all that hard.

  But his grandfather took him by the hand and led him to the shore and sat down with him on a piece of driftwood. “I have seen and learned a lot of things in my life,” he said. “To avoid torturing and poisoning myself with feelings of hatred, I banished from my heart the bitterness I once felt toward the people who expelled my people from Obagawanung. I discovered that the best way Indians can survive in the world of the white man is to fit in and wait for better days. I sent your mother to residential school so she would learn to fit in; I joined the army and fought the white man’s war so I would fit in; and to fit in today, I smile and say nothing when youngsters half my age call me Chief at the guest house. That’s why I think you should say nothing when the white children give you a hard time at school. Just remember: keep your heart free from anger, fit in, and wait for a better day and all will be well.”

  Oscar would never forget his grandfather’s words, but as he grew older and listened to Old Mary’s stories about the deeds of the ancestors in past wars, and to the veterans talking in the evenings around the campfires at the Indian Camp about their exploits in the Great War, he grew more and more ashamed of his grandfather for not coming to his defence. If his father were alive, Oscar was sure that he wouldn’t have let anyone push his son around. And he vowed to get even, not just with the two white boys and Gloria Sunderland, but with everyone in the village, no matter how long it took.

  Chapter 2

  THE INDIAN CAMP

  1

  In the dark of the early morning before sunrise, Stella pushed open the door of the shack, stepped across the sill, and stood for a minute just inside, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips. Although she couldn’t see her father and son in the black interior, she could hear their calm, regular breathing. Good! They were asleep, and if she was careful, they wouldn’t wake up as she went to bed. Not that she cared what either one of them thought, especially Oscar, who would say nothing but stare at her reproachfully for coming in so late. Her father, however, would be sure to take her to task for spending the night drinking, and she didn’t want to waste her time arguing with him.

  But despite her best effort to cross the room to her bed quietly, she bumped into the cook stove and hurt her leg. Swearing softly under her breath, she bent over in pain before straightening up and hobbling over to the table in front of the window facing the bay and collapsing noisily into a chair.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jacob, getting out of bed and lighting a coal-oil lamp.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in a saucer and massaging her aching leg.

  “Looks like someone hit you a good one,” he said, holding up the lamp and taking a close look at her. “It was Clem, wasn’t it? That drunk was hanging around the Indian Camp all week until I told him to go away. He laughed like a madman as usual when caught in the wrong but he wandered off just the same.”

  “Leave me alone,” she replied, taking another cigarette from its package and lighting it. “I don’t need an old hypocrite like you to tell me how to live my life.”

  2

  Just after supper the day before, Stella had arrived on the steamer from the reserve in a bad mood. Her breath smelled of wine and she was carrying two suitcases filled with beaded moccasins lined with rabbit fur, porcupine quill boxes, souvenir toy tomahawks, and miniature birchbark canoes to sell to the tourists over the summer. When Jacob asked her how Old Mary’s family was coping after her death, she didn’t bother to reply but sat impatiently chain-smoking cigarettes at the table, looking out the window across the bay. Oscar had then taken a seat beside her and quietly mentioned that he had beat out the class-brain and won a book as a prize for being top student in the graduating class at the Port Carling elementary school. But his hope that she might say something nice to him, or perhaps look at him with an approving smile, was not to be. Shrugging her shoulders and frowning, she had blown out a mouthful of smoke and resumed her vigil without even glancing at him. Finally, late in the evening when it was already dark, and after muttering to no one in particular that she had “something to do,” she had gone out and headed up the path in the direction of the public wharf.

  Oscar had slept fitfully throughout the ensuing night, bitten by the mosquitoes that came in through the screenless windows left open to provide some relief from the early summer heat, and worried that his mother would come to harm roaming around in the dark without her father or son to protect her. He now lay on his bed, his blanket pushed to one side, watching the shadows cast by the coal-oil lamp off the arguing adults flicker on the ceiling. His mother and grandfather were the two most important people in his life, and when they hurt each other, they made him feel that he was in some way responsible.

  As he dressed on the shore, he thought of the way his mother had ignored him when he told her he had won the book prize. She must have known she was hurting his feelings but didn’t care. But then again, he shouldn’t have been surprised. She had been nasty to him for as long as he could remember, even though he always made a big effort to please her. He had often wondered why that was so. Sometimes he thought the death of his father had unhinged her mind and made her incapable of thinking straight. Other times, he suspected she somehow blamed him for his death. There were even times when he believed she still loved his father so much she was afraid to betray him by showing affection to her son. The possibilities were endless. The result was, however, that she drank too much and had affairs with men like Clem who beat her up.

  In fact, Stella loved her son in her own way but was unable to express her true feelings to him. And for that, she blamed her father for turning her into a hardened and coarse human being. She had never forgiven him for leaving her in a residential school when she was a child of six, for not coming to see her, for not letting her go home for the summers, and for not answering the letters she sent him. She blamed him for the beatings and rapes she suffered at the hands of her supposed caregivers, for turning her into a classroom bully, and for the assault she suffered at the hands of the passing motorist
when she finally fled the school. She blamed him for making her turn to the streets for her living, for making her stand outside in snow, rain, and scorching heat, her face garishly painted, smiling grotesquely at men cruising by looking over the women as if they were sides of beef. She blamed him for making her haggle with the johns who wanted to pay her fifty cents rather than the going rate for her services. She blamed him for the hangovers that greeted her in the mornings after drinking into the night to forget. She blamed him for having to accommodate the crooked cops who demanded her services for nothing. And most of all she blamed him for inducing her to marry someone she scarcely knew by telling her she would get a widow’s pension should he be killed in action.

  But as much as she blamed her father for all the harm he had caused her, she blamed herself even more. Not long after the birth of Oscar, a sergeant in dress uniform accompanied by the local Presbyterian minister knocked at Jacob’s house on the reserve and handed her a telegram. “His Majesty’s Canadian government regrets to inform you,” she read, “that your husband, Private First Class Amos Wolf, was killed in action somewhere in northwestern France on August 16, 1917. God save the King.”

  “Can I come in and pray with you for the soul of your husband,” the minister asked. But Stella slammed the door in his face. Several weeks later, the postman brought a letter informing her that she would receive a pension for life. Rather than being happy, she felt dirty and was filled with guilt for profiting from her husband’s death. Afterward, every time she looked at her baby, she saw herself in her son, and since she deserved to be hurt, he deserved to be hurt, and it was all she could do to prevent herself from picking him up and bashing him against a wall. Her attitude made no sense, but afraid of what she might do to him, she handed him over to Old Mary to look after as often as she could and went to Toronto to forget her troubles by drinking and partying with her old friends from the streets. It had been a relief when her father undertook to raise him for her.

  3

  Looking out across the bay, lost in thought, Oscar noticed in the moonlight the outline of the Amick moored to the government wharf. Clem was its captain, and as Oscar and everyone else in the village and the Indian Camp knew, he spent most of his free time drinking and carousing on board with his buddies.

  That’s how my mother got those bruises, Oscar thought. Clem lured her on board, tempted her to drink too much, and beat her up in one of his drunken rages.

  A wave of anger swept over him. He thought of the bullies who pulled down his pants when he was a little boy and of Gloria Sunderland who laughed at him. He thought of the Canadian government that sent his father to his death and of the settlers who took Obagawanung from his grandfather and his people. He thought of the teachers and kids who called him Chief at school, of the white people who gave him no respect because he was an Indian, of his grandfather who wouldn’t stand up for his rights and who just wanted to fit in, and above all he thought of Clem who had hurt his mother. He was thirteen, the age Old Mary said Chippewa boys became men and warriors in the old days. He was going to show the white people they couldn’t push this warrior around any more!

  But he had no idea how to get even. And so, remembering the account of the battle for Hill 70 which he had read about in the book on the Great War he had borrowed from the library, he substituted daydreaming for action. It was August 1917, and he was a sergeant of the 48th Highlanders of Canada in a trench on the front lines waiting to attack the Germans dug into Hill 70. If the Canadians could take the objective, the Allies would break through the enemy lines and win the war. The artillery barrage, which had been going on for hours softening up the enemy positions, came to an abrupt halt and the commanding officer signalled to Oscar to lead the charge. Oscar raised his rifle to signal the others to follow him and crawled up and over the top. There was a moment of silence, and then the enemy opened fire with everything it had: artillery, mortars, machine guns, pistols, rifles, and canisters of poison gas. Men were falling all over the place. Some were running in a panic into barbed wire entanglements. Others were being blown to pieces and body parts were raining down. But he, brave Sergeant Oscar Wolf, was plunging ahead heedless of the danger, anxious to take his revenge against the Canadian government for sending his father to his death, against the bullies who had pulled down his pants, against everyone who had ever called him Chief, and against Clem for being mean to his mother.

  All at once, his way was blocked by fire coming from a German machine-gun nest raking no man’s land, killing and wounding everyone in its path. To escape the deadly onslaught, he dove into a shell crater, sliding headfirst into a deep pool filled with decaying corpses. He rose to his feet and spit out the foul-tasting, putrid water and looked up to a scene from John McCrae’s “Flanders’s Fields,” which they recited during Remembrance Day ceremonies at school every November 11. Birds were flying across a brilliant blue sky among puffs of smoke from exploding artillery shells, and yet all was quiet. But Oscar had no time to spare staring up toward the heavens. There was a battle going on and the Canadian Corps needed him.

  He clawed his way up the muddy side of the crater, and as he peered out over the lip onto the battlefield, silence gave way to the crump of exploding shells and the rattle of machine-gun fire. The slaughter of Canadian soldiers continued unabated, and as he looked on in fear and anger he saw his father lying dead on the ground. But there was no time to mourn his loss. Unless he put the machine gun out of commission, the entire Canadian offensive would come to an end!

  Oscar crawled out over the lip of the crater and rushed forward, his rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other. Bullets whizzed by his head. A German soldier poked his head over the top of the sandbags protecting the machine-gun nest and looked at him. It was Clem. Clem was the German soldier who had just killed his father. He would recognize his long, thin, sallow face, his pale blue eyes, his hair-filled nose, his scraggly beard, and his disgusting yellow teeth anywhere! He lifted his rifle and shot him through the heart. Clem fell backward into the emplacement, cursing the day he had beat up Oscar’s mother, incurring the wrath of her son. Oscar lobbed the grenade in after him. There was blood and guts everywhere. Victory was assured, but he, Sergeant Oscar Wolf, the bravest of the brave, had been gravely wounded and would soon be dead.

  4

  A dog began to bark, jolting Oscar out of his fantasy world. Looking around, he hoped no one would come out from the nearby shacks to investigate. It would be hard to explain what he was doing outdoors at that hour when everyone else was in bed sleeping.

  “Be quiet!” someone yelled, and the dog whimpered and was silent.

  Maybe I should just go back to bed and let Jacob handle Clem, Oscar thought. After all, I’m not a warrior like the ancestors who fought the Iroquois for control of hunting grounds in the old days. I’m not a soldier in the Canadian 48th Highlanders like my father was before he was killed. Besides, those wars are over; I’m just a thirteen-year-old kid from the Indian Camp mad at a whole bunch of people.

  But as he stared across the bay at the moonlit outline of the Amick, Oscar thought again of his mother and her laugh of ridicule when he told her about winning the book for being top student in the graduating class. He then thought of the bullies who had pulled down his pants and exposed his dick to Gloria Sunderland. That led him to think again of Clem, who his grandfather said had hurt his mother, and he shifted the anger he felt against his mother and the bullies to his already existing rage against Clem until he lost control of himself and decided to torch Clem’s boat.

  His mind made up, he went to the barrel where Jacob stored the family’s coal oil supply, filled a two-gallon can to the top with the flammable liquid, made certain he had a pocketful of matches, and moved as fast as he could up the path from the Indian Camp to the gravel road leading to the government wharf. Although tall for his age, Oscar had not yet filled in, and he found the can heavy and awkward to carry. After going only a few dozen yards along the path, the wire handle be
gan to cut into his hand, rendering it numb, and when the pain shot up his arm, he stopped, hoisted his burden up to his chest, locked his arms around it, and kept on going. Coal oil slopped out of the open spout, splashing against his shirt, soaking it, irritating the skin of his chest, dripping down onto his pants and running down his legs.

  As he ran, Oscar returned to the world of his imagination, and he was no longer a kid bent on getting his revenge. He was Pegamegabow, the Ojibwa soldier from the nearby Parry Island Indian Reserve on Georgian Bay, the most decorated Native soldier of the Great War and hero to Native people everywhere for killing more than three hundred enemy soldiers with his sniper rifle. He was rushing up through a tunnel of overhanging tree branches on a mission to destroy an enemy machine-gun nest hidden in a floating grocery store moored to the government wharf. He had been shot in the chest and blood was gushing out of a painful open wound, wetting his shirt, soaking his pants, running down his legs, and dripping on the ground. No matter, he would carry on, whatever the odds.

  A few minutes later, Oscar was standing at the top of the ridge that divided the Indian Camp from the white village, examining the lay of the land. Below him, in his imagination, was a German bunker in the shape of a supply boat occupied by members of the German army. That was his objective and he would destroy it. After lowering the can to the ground, he knelt beside it to catch his breath and to slow down his pounding heart. He rose to his feet and, keeping as low a profile as possible to avoid detection in the moonlight, half dragged, half carried the oil can across the bridge to the wharf and set it down on the planks some fifty feet from his target. Leaving it behind, he crept up to the boat like a Chippewa warrior in the old days sneaking up on the enemy.