The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  There was a light coming from a porthole. Peeping inside, he saw German soldiers sitting around a table playing cards and drinking beer. From time to time, a German who looked like Clem said something that made the others laugh. Oscar was sure Clem was telling the others about beating up his mother and laughing about it and that made him all the more furious. But he would have to change his plans. Setting fire to the boat was now out the question since the Germans would catch him before he could complete the job and turn him over to the constable. He decided to burn down the general store instead. That would teach Clem a lesson since it was owned by his father, James McCrum.

  Oscar began to have doubts about his project as he was carrying his burden from the wharf to the business section. And by the time he slipped into the shadows under a ground-floor window at the back of the general store, he was crying. White people had done bad things, but what he was about to do was just as bad, maybe even worse. And what if he was found out? He would be sent to jail.

  Fighting his fears, Oscar dashed around the general store, checking to see if there was anyone about. All was quiet, and he returned to his place in the shadows. To make doubly sure, he left again, this time running along the lane behind the guest house, the butcher shop, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the hardware store, and the furniture and casket shop. There was no sign of life. He scuttled down the boardwalk in front of the buildings. There was still no one around and he had a free hand.

  He returned to his spot behind the store, waited a minute to catch his breath, and set off again, this time in search of a scrap of lumber to pry open the window. But he couldn’t find anything to do the job. Getting down on his hands and knees, he felt around in the dark on the gravel laneway and came up with a handful of big stones that he hurled at the window, shattering it on impact and startling himself in the process. After waiting a few minutes to be sure no one was coming to investigate, he lifted the can up to chest level and rammed it through the broken window. Once again, the crash and clatter of breaking glass caught him by surprise, but this time he didn’t hesitate. He lit a match and threw it into the opening. A flash of light revealed the can lying on its side with coal oil pulsating out of the spout and flowing out across the wooden floor.

  The match spluttered and died. He lit another one and threw it inside but it met the same end, as did a succession of others that flickered and drowned in the liquid fuel before the oil could ignite. Something was needed to hold a flame long enough to cause combustion. He scurried around to the front of the store and rummaged through a garbage can until he found a week-old copy of the Toronto Daily Telegram. He dashed back, crumpled a page into a loose ball, set it alight, and pushed it through the window. This time the coal oil began to burn.

  Not waiting to see if the fire would spread to the supplies stored in the room, Oscar lurched to his feet and ran for the safety of the shack as fast as he could. At the entrance to the path to the Indian Camp, he stopped, suddenly afraid of entering the dark tunnel. What if Clem, his friends, and the constable had heard the sound of breaking glass and were lying in wait for him? What if a bearwalker was hiding on an overhanging branch, ready to jump on him and steal his soul? What if a witch was to materialize and consume him in a ball of fire? What if the devil was to spring up and carry him off to hell?

  And so what if they were! He had had the guts to get even with everyone who had ever hurt him and his mother and his people! He stepped into the dark confidently, only to hear the snap of dead branch on the path under his foot. In a panic, he plunged down into the black pit and ran as he had never run before, only to trip over a root in the dark and nose-dive to the ground. He struggled to his feet, his face bruised and bloody, and dashed ahead again recklessly in terror. He veered off the path into a tangle of chest-high ferns and burdocks, stumps of long dead and fallen trees, low-hanging branches, and sharp-thorn blackberry brambles that scratched his arms and legs. After thrashing around wildly in the dark for minutes that seemed like hours, Oscar stumbled back to the path, lost his footing again, and fell down, skinning his knees and elbows. He crawled, he scrambled, he limped, and he blubbered in fright, imagining that he was being pursued by all manner of monsters, eager to claim him as one of their own after the evil he had done that night. He pushed himself ahead as fast as he could, but his legs were leaden, his arms were frozen, his breath was laboured, and his body was drenched in sweat. He thought he would never reach home.

  5

  Panting from fear and exhaustion, Oscar threw open the door of the shack and stepped inside. Jacob and Stella looked at him through a fog of cigarette smoke.

  “What are you doing out of bed at this time of night?” asked his mother, her words slurred, irritated that a third party had interrupted her never-ending quarrel with her father. “Come over here and let me have a look at you.”

  As Oscar approached, she grabbed his arm and slapped his face, bringing tears to his eyes.

  “That’s for not being in bed when I came in.”

  She slapped him again, this time harder.

  “That’s for not being here when I needed you tonight after I drank a little too much with Clem and tripped in the dark and hurt myself.”

  “Leave him alone,” said Jacob. “He was here when you came in and went out for a walk. He’s a good boy.”

  “Oh, no he isn’t,” his mother said, staring with glassy eyes at her son. “Nobody goes out for walks this late at night unless he’s up to no good. He looks like he’s been in a fight and he stinks of coal oil. What have you been doing anyway? Stealing something? I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  She swung at him again, but this time he ducked.

  “And stop looking at me like that, you little bastard. You want me to give you more of the same?”

  Oscar jerked his arm free, stumbled to the door, and ran outside, his face stinging. It wasn’t Clem’s fault after all! He started running in a panic back up the path toward the village to put out the fire, but soon slowed down and stopped. He’d seen the flames spreading across the floor, and at that very moment they were probably consuming the building from the inside. He turned and walked slowly back to the shack, but hesitated at the door, afraid to go in and face his mother again. He heard the loud voices of his mother and grandfather through the open windows.

  “I don’t know what you got against Clem, but he’s a good man,” he heard his mother say to Jacob.

  “If you knew him like I do you wouldn’t think that,” Jacob replied. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy when he spent his time spearing frogs and tormenting dogs and cats. I served with him overseas and know for a fact that he was a yellow-bellied coward and ran away from the fighting. He wasn’t a real man and a hero like Amos.”

  “Clem’s twice the man Amos ever was,” Stella said. “Marrying him was the worst mistake I ever made. I never should have listened to you.”

  Oscar flinched, shocked that his mother would say such a thing about his father. Not wanting to hear her next revelation, he went to the shore and stood at the water’s edge, his eyes full of tears, not knowing what to do next. Without warning, the bells of the Anglican church on the ridge overlooking the Indian Camp began to clang, jarring the silence of the night. The bells of the Presbyterian church answered from a hilltop elsewhere in the village and were soon joined by those of the United church, all delivering angry, cacophonic messages of impending tragedy, telling the people that some evil, foreign presence was abroad setting fires in their beloved community. On Sunday mornings, the three sets of bells conveyed coordinated messages of Christian charity and harmony as they called the faithful to worship. Now they echoed harshly, frantically throughout the village and up and down the river, summoning every able-bodied man and boy within earshot to rise from their beds and rush to fight the common enemy.

  Then, off in the distance, Oscar saw a glimmer of light that grew in power until it rivalled the moon in its intensity. The bells continued to peal, now calling, now shouting, now announc
ing to the world that he, Oscar Wolf, thirteen-year-old Chippewa youth from the Rama Indian Reserve, who had just been honoured by the school principal with a book prize for being the grade eight student with the highest marks of the graduating class at the Port Carling elementary school, had done wrong and had disgraced the memory of his father. They declared to all that slinking around in the night and setting fire to the property of hard-working, innocent people was the work of an outlaw and a thief. They told him that no Native warrior or Canadian soldier would have stooped to such cowardly acts.

  Overcome with the impact of his mother’s revelation of her feelings about his father, unable to bear the wickedness of his actions, and afraid the constable was already coming to arrest him, Oscar waded fully clothed into the river. He hoped the water would swallow him up, make his problems disappear and take him somewhere where he could start his life all over again. When the water reached his chest, he stopped and looked back at the yellow light of the coal-oil lamp flickering on the pane of the shack’s front window. Perhaps his mother or grandfather would come out and tell him he was just having a bad dream. When no one came out, he dove deep down into the dark waters of the bay and began swimming under the water and away from the shore, his eyes open but seeing nothing. When he could hold his breath no longer, he rose to the surface and swam farther and farther out away from the shore.

  Chapter 3

  THE FIRE

  1

  James and Leila McCrum were not unduly alarmed when they heard the fire bells of the three churches pealing before dawn that Sunday morning. Hotels around the lakes were always burning down, and there was little anyone could do about it. A guest would fall asleep with a lit cigarette or pipe, and the first thing you knew the tinder-dry wood building would be on fire. If there was time, someone would crank the telephone to appeal for help from the party-line operator on duty at the telephone office in Port Carling. She would call around until she found someone to go to one of the churches to pull the rope that rang the fire bell, which, as everyone in the village knew, was the shorter of the two that hung in the foyer; the longer one was to call the people to worship. The members of the volunteer fire brigade would assemble in front of the town hall, the Fire Chief would brief them, and everyone would crowd into cars and trucks and leave to fight the fire.

  Since the firemen only had axes, shovels, and buckets as equipment, and since it took sometimes more than an hour over poorly maintained gravel roads to reach the distant hotels, there was often little they could do when they got there. They usually just joined the guests outside on the lawns watching the structure burn, hoping everyone had escaped. Occasionally, they managed to run in and save a few pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac that they kept for themselves if no one was looking. Or, if there were witnesses, they carried their acquisitions outside and set them down out of harm’s way where everyone could see them. If the fire was in the village, however, the bucket-brigade sometimes saved a building and that was good for everyone’s morale.

  “It must be quite a fire,” James said. “I’ve never heard the fire bells of all three churches ringing at the same time.”

  He got out of bed and went out onto the second-floor balcony of his substantial red brick home, from where, to his horror, he saw flames in the sky above the business section. Pulling on his pants and shirt, he shouted to his wife to stay home where she wouldn’t get hurt. He then thrust his bare feet into his shoes, ran down the stairs, out the front door, and all the way to the blaze, a half-mile away. Only two or three members of the bucket brigade and his son Clem were on the scene when he arrived out of breath and fearing the worst. To his dismay, flames were already shooting out of the roof of his general store and smoke was pouring out of the windows of his guest house next door. The situation looked hopeless.

  How could this be? James asked himself. How can a fire, even in a wooden building, spread so fast?

  Other volunteers arrived, including two dozen men from the Indian Camp, and they formed a line from the river to the store, passing buckets of water hand to hand to throw on the fire. Without warning, a tremendous explosion blew debris onto the street and scattered the firemen.

  “The fire’s got to the gasoline barrels,” Clem told his father. “There’s nothing we can do for the store now. We’ll try to save the other buildings.”

  James sat down on the ground across the street and let his son and the members of the bucket-brigade do what they could. Everything was beyond his control and comprehension. Were the fresh fruit and vegetables, tools, nails, spikes, cloth and clothing, coal oil and naphtha, cans of paint, turpentine and varnish, canned goods, barrels of cookies, boxes of raisins, jars of pickles and mustard, sacks of oats and chicken feed, sides of beef and pork, hundred-pound bags of flour and sugar, cases of dynamite and nitroglycerine caps, racks of hunting rifles, boxes of ammunition, axes, hoes, shovels and pickaxes, twine and baling wire, tubs of ice cream and cases of pop, and shelves of comic books and magazines all to be destroyed? What would his customers do? What would the tenants of his other buildings along the business section do? Was his insurance enough to cover his losses? Was he now a ruined man?

  2

  In the late 1850s, James’s father, Reg McCrum, an Ulsterman and supporter of the Orange Lodge in County Armagh, Ireland, had read advertisements placed in the newspapers by the Canadian government. The District of Muskoka, a place no one in his small village had heard of, had just been opened for settlement, and it was first-come, first-served if you wanted free land. Single men were eligible to receive one-hundred-acre allocations and married men two hundred acres. All you had to do was to clear fifteen acres of the deep and rich land and build a sixteen by twenty foot house during the five years following the date of location and start planting your wheat and oats. Reg quickly married his long-time sweetheart, Wilma Brown, the daughter of a farmer on a neighbouring farm, sold off all his possessions, and left with his bride to become a pioneer in the new world.

  But on arrival, they found Indians living on the land promised to them that they had to get rid of. Instead of flatlands ready for ploughing, his father and others like him from the Old Country got scrub hemlock and cedar bush right down to the water’s edge. And after fighting their way through a jungle of underbrush to the white pine, oak, and maple farther back where the good soil was supposed to be, they found that the ground in most places all too often was only acid leaf mould over granite rock.

  Before they could plant their crops, they had to cut away the small growth, chop down the big trees, roll the logs up into big heaps, and burn them in the spring. The summers were always too short, the black flies and mosquitoes unbearable, and the snow came early and stayed late. In those early days, they lived in lean-to shelters with mud floors and hemlock branches for roofs. There were no roads, no doctors, and the nearest grist mill was twenty miles away. But despite all the adversity, his parents and the other settlers who had arrived from the Old Country persevered. For had not the preacher who made periodic visits to their small community told them that God had sent them to the New World to build a New Jerusalem? Had the preacher not said that it was the destiny of the settlers to replace the Indians who were in the process of disappearing anyway?

  His father had gone on to become the owner of the general store, the guest house, and the boat works, landlord of all the other buildings occupied by the other entrepreneurs in the business section, and the most generous contributor to the Presbyterian Church. What would he have said were he still alive and saw everything he had worked so hard for go up in flames? Thank God he had been carried away with his wife in the great Spanish influenza epidemic in 1917.

  3

  A fusillade of rifle and shotgun fire broke out as the ammunition in the general store began to explode, and the volunteer firemen, led by the war veterans who thought for an instant that they were back in the trenches, threw themselves to the ground. When the firing subsided, they rose to their feet just as cans of burning paint shot
hundreds of feet into the air to land like flaming mortar rounds on the freight shed, on the boat works, on the shore of the Indian River. And as they rushed to put out these fires, the boat works burst into flames.

  Someone yelled that Lily Horton, a university student from Toronto, working as a maid for the summer at the guest house, was trapped in her room. But no one moved, afraid of the flames and certain that Lily was already lost. That was when Jacob took action. He didn’t think about what he was doing. Someone he worked with every day was in trouble and he had to save her. It wasn’t any different from what he had done for fellow soldiers in danger during the battles in northern France. He went into the smoke-filled doorway, dropped to his knees, and moved up the stairs, keeping close to the floor where the air was clearer until he reached Lily’s room. He pushed open the door and was met by a blast of heat that singed his eyebrows and scorched his face. But he pressed on, crawling on his hands and knees until he reached the girl lying unconscious by the window where she had gone to call for help. He took hold of her by the arms, pulled her out of the door, down the stairs, and out onto the street. Clem ran across and helped him drag her to the other side. The girl was dead and Jacob was so badly burned that he died within the hour.

  4

  Oscar had emerged from the water downstream from the business section and sat weeping on the shore as the fire bells continued to peal and the flames from the burning buildings shot higher and higher into the sky. In due course, unable to contain his curiosity, he went, still crying and with water dripping from his clothes, to stand as close as he could to the fire without attracting attention. He saw James McCrum rush up and anxiously confer with his son. He saw the men from the Indian Camp arrive and join the volunteer firefighters from the village in their futile battle with the flames. He saw his grandfather enter the guest house and emerge dragging the inert form of a teenage girl. He saw Clem go to help him. He saw his mother go to Jacob, kneel down and say something to him. He saw her get up and look around, obviously searching for him. He saw the angry look on her face as she came up to him and hissed, “It’s all your fault. I hope you get caught,” before hurrying away. He saw the men, with Clem in charge, carry Jacob away to the doctor’s office.