But on his way back to Canada on the eve of the Great War to study theology at Knox College at the University of Toronto, Lloyd visited India, Mesopotamia, the Holy Land, Athens, Rome, Berlin, and London and developed a passion for foreign travel and international relations. He wanted to become a diplomat and make the world a better place and not a clergyman or missionary for which he had no calling. He wrote his father to ask his blessing to change his vocation, but the war intervened and he joined the army. During the fighting, he proved to be a skilled sniper, killing so many enemy soldiers that he lost count. At the end of the war, Lloyd returned to Toronto a decorated hero to find a letter from his father waiting for him.
“I believe in my innermost being that God wants you to bring the gospel to the heathen,” he wrote. “Please make your old father happy and become a clergyman and missionary.”
Lloyd did what he was told and enrolled in Knox College to train to be a minister, but he was plagued by flashbacks of the terrible things he had done in the war, and each night when he went to sleep he dreamed that something impure had taken root in his soul and he loathed himself.
How could someone so tainted with sin become a man of God? he asked himself. How can I find redemption?
He turned to prayer and asked God to forgive him, but felt no better. He looked for answers in the Bible, but had found none. Vague feelings of guilt, worthlessness, and a deep sense that life was cheap and had no purpose overwhelmed him. He went to see one of his professors, who had also been a soldier, and asked for his advice.
“Read the war poems of Wilfred Owen,” the professor said, “and come back and see me. Like the laments in the Book of Job, they contain insights into the workings of Divine Providence. They helped me; maybe they can help you.”
“Dulce et Decorum est” made the greatest impression on Lloyd, but he failed to see in it the workings of Divine Providence. It reminded him of the horrors he had just endured and provided him no way out.
Bent Double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The war poems, Lloyd felt, were the poems of the victims and the innocent and he was neither. He had enthusiastically supported the war, had enlisted as soon as he could, had volunteered to become a sniper, and during his time in the trenches had crawled innumerable times across no man’s land to blow out the brains of dozens, if not hundreds, of German soldiers, men who usually had no inkling that the meals they were eating, the clothes they were washing, or the cigarettes they were smoking would be their last.
“You’re having a breakdown. It’s delayed shell shock,” the professor told him when he reported back. “You have to remember that you aren’t the only one around here who did appalling things in that war. We all did. We had no choice. Now grow up and get over it. You have God’s work to do.”
And as he had always done when faced with critical choices at other times of his life, Lloyd obeyed the voice of authority and continued with his theological studies. But the monster within his soul gave him no rest, and in time he began doubting the existence of the God of his boyhood and youth who now refused to answer his prayers. He nevertheless completed his studies in June 1923 and prepared to leave for China to join his father at the mission station. At the last minute, however, a member of the faculty approached him to say that the minister in Port Carling had retired. The process of finding a replacement would take some months and someone was needed to fill in on a temporary basis to serve the regular congregation and the tourists who attended church during the summer months. Could the newly minted Reverend Huxley help out on a temporary basis?
2
Reverend Huxley interpreted the request as an order and immediately packed, put on his clerical collar, and left for Port Carling. James McCrum and the other church elders were waiting at the wharf when he arrived on a steamer late in the afternoon on the first Sunday of July carrying his battered suitcase. James insisted that he come home to meet his wife and eat a good home-cooked meal. It just so happened that Isabel McFadden, a cousin of James and a teacher at the elementary school, had been invited to the same dinner; Isabel, florid-faced, long-necked, flat-chested, skinny-legged, unmarried, opinionated, and ten years older than the guest of honour, was a granddaughter of a pioneer and loved Port Carling to distraction. She had spent a year in Toronto at teacher’s college after she graduated from high school and had been so homesick that she vowed that once back in Port Carling she would never leave again.
In honour of the distinguished guest, Leila brought out the family silver and porcelain dishes. Dinner was served in the dining room on a damask linen tablecloth spread over the solid top-of-the-line oak table James had inherited from his parents. They had ordered it, together with matching chairs and sideboard, from the Timothy Eaton mail order company in Toronto at the turn of the century. A large coloured print of “Good King Billy,” iconic figure of the Orange Lodge, defeating the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, looked down on the dinner party from one wall. On another was a black-and-white tintype photograph of James’s parents staring at the camera at a country fair in Gravenhurst in the early 1880s. Since it was a hot summer day, the door to the balcony looking down over the river was left open to catch the evening breeze.
Everyone bowed their heads and closed their eyes as James sought God’s blessing for the food they were about to eat. Leila then got up to bring the platters in from the kitchen: roast beef, nicely overdone as everyone liked it, gravy, baked potatoes with sour cream, Yorkshire pudding, and carrots, peas, and salad from the garden. Afterward, as a special treat, there would be home-made vanilla ice cream with wild raspberries.
Isabel, who was seated beside Lloyd, tried to get up to help, but Leila told her there was no need.
“She’s been helping me with the cooking all afternoon,” she said, addressing herself to Lloyd. “She’ll make someone an excellent wife someday.”
During the meal itself, after Lloyd told her he had been raised in China, Isabel, with becoming earnestness, said that ever since she had been a little girl she had been fascinated by China and all things Chinese. “When my thoughts turn to China,” she said,” I think of Confucius and gunpowder.”
“You have surprisingly good knowledge of China,” Lloyd answered politely.
“Why, thank you, Reverend Huxley,” Isabel said. “I’ve always been interested in other peoples and their cultures. When I was at teacher’s college in Toronto, I even got to know a Chinese gentlema
n. He ran a small laundry close to my boarding house and I used to take my things to him for cleaning. Although he didn’t speak English, he always smiled and bowed when I went in. I ate at a Chinese restaurant once, even though my friends told me I would probably be eating cat and dog disguised as chicken. I didn’t like the foreign sauces but the rest of the food was quite good, especially the rice.”
By the end of the summer, without being too sure how it had happened, Lloyd was the new resident minister of the Port Carling Presbyterian Church. And although he didn’t remember asking her, he found himself engaged to be married to Isabel, who had prepared her wedding trousseau many years before, hoping a man like him would come along. After she thoroughly inspected the manse, she concluded that all it needed to make it fit for her habitation were frilly white lace curtains on the windows.
When it took place the following summer, the wedding was a big affair. Reverend Huxley’s parents came from China and stayed with their son at the manse. The entire congregation was invited and all the members of the extended McFadden and McCrum families came. Clem arrived at the church drunk and slept through the ceremony, but nobody minded. The wedding reception was held at the Orange Lodge and was catered for a modest fee by the Women’s Orange Benevolent Association. Everyone had agreeable things to say afterward about the tea and coffee, the tasty egg salad and chicken sandwiches, the orange Jell-O with pieces of fresh fruit encased within, and the flaky crust of the apple and peach pies.
Life would have been good had Reverend Huxley not had ongoing nightmares about the war. In them, he saw himself climbing over the top of a trench in the middle of the night and carefully making his way to a secluded place in no man’s land — a tower in a derelict church, a ruined house, a partially destroyed barn — anything with a view over the enemy’s front line. At first light the next morning, he would begin looking for potential targets, almost always catching someone unawares, someone who thought he would not die that day. He would take one shot — never more than one to avoid giving away his position and drawing down hostile artillery fire — and another German soldier would be dead. For the rest of the day, he would lie concealed under a pile of mouldy hay, under a heap of rubble, under anything that would keep him from the enemy soldiers searching the area for the man who had killed their comrade. That same night, he would creep back to his own lines, call out the password, report to the sergeant, have something to eat, rest throughout the day, and go out after dark to kill again. And when that nightmare ended, it would repeat itself endlessly in his head until dawn.
As the years went by, and as he slept in his bed beside his innocent Isabel in peaceful Port Carling, his eyes in his dreams began to focus on the faces of the men he had killed. During the war he had shot the same man over and over again. The man might well have been smiling, crying, laughing, or scowling; he might have had a fat face or a thin face; he might have been clean-shaven, bearded, or moustached. But he always shot the same man. And he always shot him in the same place, in the forehead. It had always been so easy, so simple to do. He would gently squeeze the trigger, the face in the scope would explode, like a pumpkin or maybe a squash when hit with a round from a Ross rifle. But as he relived those moments in the years after the war in Port Carling, his dreams unearthed details from his memory about each man that he never remembered recording, turning the universal target into individuals with hopes and fears and a wife just like Isabel.
Isabel would shake him awake when he moaned and tossed in his sleep and he would say, “It’s just the war. The war makes me do that.”
On the surface, Reverend Huxley was well-balanced and cheerful, a model husband who loved his wife, who was loved by her in return, a pastor who cared for his parishioners, and who was liked and respected by them in return. But on the inside, he was living an empty existence, pursuing a profession he had never wanted to follow, racked by guilt for crimes he had committed in the war, his soul taken by the devil, preaching a gospel he did not believe in to a people in a community where he did not want to live, and married to a woman he liked but did not love. All because he hadn’t been able to say no to his father, to his professor, to James McCrum, or to Isabel.
But then, one day, during a trip to Toronto, he went into the Metropolitan Presbyterian Church in the downtown to wait out a rainstorm. He sat down in a pew and listened to the rehearsal of a massed choir, accompanied by an organ, singing Handel’s Messiah, and when a soprano began to sing “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” he felt a divine presence in the music. He turned to the poetry he had studied at the mission school in China and found spiritual meaning he had not understood before. Soon he was reading Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Newman, and Mansfield. T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” best reflected his new outlook.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Music and literature had replaced the Bible as Reverend Huxley’s sources of spiritual insight. God, in his own way, had answered his prayers, forgiven him, and given him peace of mind. And now, as he walked over the ridge back home after meeting Oscar, he felt elated. Perhaps there had been some divine purpose to the fire and to the deaths of Jacob and Lily. Perhaps it was to give him, Lloyd Huxley, the possibility of atoning for his war crimes by helping a luckless Indian teenager and giving him a chance in life.
3
The funeral service for Jacob, the most imposing held in the village since the ones for Reg and Wilma McCrum more than a decade before, took place at the Presbyterian church on the Tuesday following the fire. At ten fifteen, a church elder entered the vestibule, took hold of the longer of the two ropes hanging from the belfry, and, as he pulled it downward in long fluid movements, the bells began tolling slowly and mournfully the death knell for Jacob, giving notice to the public that the service would soon begin. At ten thirty, two dozen war veterans, twelve white and twelve Chippewa, all wearing their service medals, filed past the Union Jack flying at half-mast on the flagpole near the entrance, entered the church, and took their places. At ten thirty-five, the school principal and a procession of students and teachers marched up and formed a guard of honour on both sides of the walkway leading from the street to the church. At ten forty, the local members of the provincial and federal legislatures arrived in black limousines and were ushered in. At ten forty-five, the mayors and reeves of the surrounding municipalities took their places. At ten fifty, the mayor and councillors of Port Carling went in. At ten fifty-five, James McCrum and his wife, who were paying the funeral costs, entered and took their places at the front in the family pew.
The church was now almost filled to capacity, and the people from the Indian Camp and the villagers, together with a smattering of curious tourists, waited respectfully outside. At ten fifty-eight, a big black hearse arrived and a solemn funeral home employee wearing a black suit, black tie, and white shirt got out and opened the door at the back. Six pallbearers, three Chippewa and three white, all veterans of the Great War, stepped forward, seized the brass handles of the mahogany casket, and at ten fifty-nine, marching in step, carried it to the front of the church and placed it on a catafalque. Another solemn black-clad funeral home employee stepped forward, produced a Union Jack, carefully draped it over the coffin with his white-gloved hands, and placed on top of it Jacob’s medals for valour in the war. At precisely eleven o’clock, Reverend Huxley, who had followed the coffin up the aisle, began the funeral service.
Oscar, who had entered with Reverend Huxley and Mrs. Huxley and taken the place assigned to him beside James and Mrs. McCrum, wept throughout the service. He was crying, everyone assumed, because he missed his grandfather, and that was partly true. But he was also
weeping because the minister said Jacob had gone to a better place, and he now knew that was not the case. He was sobbing because Reverend Huxley said that God had seen fit to take Jacob home, and he knew that he, and not God, was responsible for his death. He was distraught because the Bible reading, chosen and read out by James McCrum, raging at the unknown arsonist like a fiery Old Testament patriarch chastising the Children of Israel, was Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. He was in utter misery because when he closed his eyes during the prayers, he heard only meaningless words. And when he tried to sing “Amazing Grace,” the words left his mouth in a hollow whisper.
He was certain that God was punishing him for causing the deaths of Jacob and Lily and convinced that the appearance in his dream of a fierce, unforgiving Jacob was a message from the beyond, telling him he would go to hell after he died. Frightened, he prayed loudly and passionately, begging God for forgiveness for his sins. He had often heard the minister back on the reserve say in his sermons that the grace of God would wipe clean the slates of offenders and let them begin their lives anew. God always forgave sinners, the minister used to say, if they were sincerely sorry when they asked for it. Perhaps, however, he was not sufficiently sorry for setting the fire. He was certainly sorry for causing the deaths of Jacob and Lily. He was sorry for thinking ill of Clem. But try as he might, he wasn’t sure that he was all that sorry for paying back the boys who pulled down his pants. Nor was he really sorry for punishing the villagers whose fathers and grandfathers stole the land of his people.
The Redemption of Oscar Wolf Page 8
