No one questioned Oscar’s request. Although the people at Indian Camp were by now mostly Christian, they also believed in ghosts and witches, and they understood that Oscar was afraid that the old shack was haunted. At first, no one would enter, but eventually an old woman, who, behind her back, people said was really a witch and able to cast spells on people she didn’t like, went in and returned with the things Oscar wanted.
“Well, did you meet any ghosts?” someone asked her, joking.
“I did,” she said gravely, but she didn’t provide the details.
8
Oscar pushed off from the shore and began his journey downstream toward the mouth of the river. Smoke still rose from the ashes of the business section, but teams of workers were already at work clearing away the debris, the first steps to rebuilding. The Amick, it seemed, was doing a good business, judging by the number of shoppers on the wharf waiting to go in to make their purchases. All along the shore, summer residents were sunning themselves on their docks or going about their business in their motorboats. Crows and seagulls circled leisurely in the sky, on the lookout for the carcasses of fish and animals to eat. And when he emerged from the river and paddled out onto Lake Muskoka, Oscar saw children playing on the shore below the hidden grave of Jacob’s grandfather. Life was returning to normal.
It was the first time Oscar had travelled on the lake since the trip he had made just two months before with Jacob from Muskoka Wharf Station to the Indian Camp, when a fierce cold wind had rattled the ropes of the flagpoles at the deserted summer homes on Millionaires’ Row. At that time, the Manido of the Lake had been massive and forbidding in the cold light of early dawn. Now, in the bright sunlight and calm waters of the late June morning, it had turned into a sad, helpless old deity, no different than the rock from which it had arisen, out of place in the modern world ruled by the white man.
“Oh Great Manido,” Oscar said doubtfully, throwing a pinch of tobacco onto the water and raising his arms in supplication as his grandfather used to do. “In trying to get even with the white man and gain the love of my mother, I brought about the deaths of Jacob and a white girl. Jacob’s shadow then came to me in a dream, cursing me and telling me that after death there is neither heaven nor hell, nor a spirit world beyond the Milky Way. Send me a sign, Oh Great Manido, to let me know that it was mistaken.”
The deity stared at him, sluggish and indifferent to his appeal. Oscar threw more tobacco into the lake and repeated his prayer, but the statue remained unmoved.
Maybe, Oscar thought, after waiting in vain for a response, the Manido is really just a piece of rock and its powers come from people who want to believe it’s a god. Maybe Jacob’s shadow, which came in a dream with its message of hate and which chased me back to the manse after I went to it seeking forgiveness, is just a figment of my imagination. Maybe all Native devils, shadows, ghosts, and witches are just inventions people made up years ago to scare children. Maybe the Christian God, the Devil, and the saints are man-made imaginings.
In a moment of epiphany, Oscar realized that if neither God nor the Creator nor all the panoply of lesser spirits existed, then he needn’t fear spending eternity in Hell. He wouldn’t have to pay for his earthly sins in the hereafter. He decided at that instant that Old Mary had been wrong, his Sunday school teachers had been wrong, the Presbyterian ministers on the reserve and in Port Carling had been wrong. There was no such thing as Divine Providence. There was no need for him to fear the wrath of God and Jacob’s shadow.
“You don’t exist, you never have. Now leave me alone!” he shouted out angrily at the sky. But as he did so, he understood he would never receive divine help to deal with the sorrow and guilt that plagued his waking and sleeping hours. But when he turned his canoe and began to paddle away, he heard the Manido of the Lake laughing, and when he put his line in the water, he caught a fish.
Later that afternoon, Oscar raised his four-pound pickerel up into the air and received the congratulations of the people who had come out to greet him.
“You take after your father,” said an old man who had known his father before the war. “You’re a lucky young man, since the family of a good fisherman never goes hungry.”
“Did you make an offering to the Manido of the Lake?” someone else asked.
But rather than answer, Oscar walked up to the shack and went in. His bed and that of his grandfather were unmade, just as they had left them the night of the fire. His mother’s ashtray, overflowing with cigarette ashes and butts, remained undisturbed and reeking of stale tobacco on the table. The supplies of tinned foods and packages of spaghetti, macaroni, and rice were in their place. Jacob’s winter coat still hung from a nail on a stud, and his shirts, work pants, socks, and underwear were still neatly folded and stored on shelves in an open-faced orange crate. His wallet, where his grandfather kept his pay, which he always left beside the water pail, was missing, taken by his mother, Oscar assumed. Everything was in order and there was no monster in the shack.
A silent crowd was waiting when he emerged carrying a backpack filled with his clothes to take back to his room at the manse. Everyone wondered why he had refused to enter Jacob’s shack in the morning but did not hesitate to do so in the afternoon. Something must have happened during his visit down the river that had made him change his mind.
Finally, someone asked, “Is Jacob’s shadow still inside the shack?”
Oscar refused to answer.
Chapter 5
FITTING IN
1
When Oscar attended high school at Port Carling in the early 1930s, millions of men across Canada were out of work, people by the hundreds of thousands waited each day at soup kitchens to be fed, and municipalities were going into debt to provide relief payments to hungry families. Port Carling was not spared. Although the lifestyle of the people on Millionaires’ Row did not change during these terrible years of the Great Depression, few people could afford to stay at the big luxury hotels and many of them were forced to close, their owners bankrupt. Teachers, accountants, and white-collar workers, who had no difficulty before the beginning of the hard economic times in finding the money to rent modest cottages for the season or to take rooms at reasonably priced guest houses, stayed away. The number of day trippers from Muskoka Wharf Station fell off to such an extent that the owners of the navigation company were forced to mothball half the fleet and to lay off their crews.
The boat works in the village closed its doors. Carpenters, electricians, and other tradesmen could not find work, and fathers found it hard to feed and clothe their families. James McCrum let it be known that he would provide credit at his store with no interest to hard-up families too ashamed to accept relief. Many people took him up on his offer. The village doctor began to accept eggs, chickens, sides of beef, and vegetables in lieu of money for his services. The older boys in high school began dropping out and leaving home, some to work for five dollars a month at government-run labour camps in the north building roads, but most hitchhiked to Gravenhurst and hopped freight trains heading West to join the army of unemployed in search of a job or a sandwich across Canada and the United States. The Chippewa at the Indian Camp and back home on the reserve, already living at subsistence levels, found it harder to get by. Fewer day trippers meant fewer sales of handicraft, but James McCrum, remembering the heroics of Jacob, treated them like the other villagers and let them run up bills at his store.
The Huxleys, as they had promised, provided for Oscar’s keep. James McCrum ensured he was given one of the coveted summer jobs at his store, stocking shelves, bagging groceries, and, when needed, serving banana splits, sundaes, and cream soda floats in the ice cream parlour.
While still filled with shame and plagued by flashbacks of the fire, Oscar now devoted himself to fitting in as his grandfather had urged him to do when he was a little boy. In so doing so, he hoped he would be able to make amends with the white people he had wronged and appease the shadow, if such a thing existed, of
his grandfather. If the white people wanted him to get an education, he would get an education. If the white people wanted him to become a missionary, he would become a missionary. If the white people wanted him to turn him into a brown-skinned white man, he would become a brown-skinned white man.
When Mrs. Huxley, with a pitiless look, told him he had to stop hanging out with his Indian friends if he intended to live under her roof, he cut off the ties with the kids he had grown up with from the reserve. When his classmates called him Chief, he pretended that that pleased him. When his grade nine teacher said that he should cut off his braid, “so as to not stand out,” he pretended the idea was a good idea and he cut off his cherished braid. When he was in grade ten and won a district public speaking contest, he pretended to be happy when the well-meaning chairman of the school board at the award ceremony embarrassed him by telling the crowd that the Huxleys had saved him from a life on the streets by taking him in after his drunken mother had discarded him like an unwanted dog. When he was in grade eleven and had grown into a six-foot three-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound, heavily muscled hockey player and the village crowd called him “Killer Injun” and told him to fight, he fought and pretended he liked beating in the heads of players from rival teams. And when Reverend Huxley arranged for him to enter Knox College in the fall of 1935 to study to become a missionary, he pretended that that was what he wanted to do.
Throughout the early thirties, Oscar was a familiar sight crossing the street each school day from the manse to stand in silence with the other high-school boys waiting for the bell announcing the beginning of the school day to ring. Sometimes, older students who had dropped out of school and gone off looking for work but had come home to visit their girlfriends and families for a few days before heading out again, would come by to gossip with their old buddies.
“You meet the damndest people out there riding the rails,” they would say, reluctantly admitting Oscar into the circle of their intimates. “Some are professional bums who wouldn’t take a job if it was offered to them. A lot of them say they’re from farm families out in the prairies who lost everything in the dust storms to get pity and handouts. Some are perverts on the prowl who take advantage of the kids in the boxcars. Most are just like the guys from around here, looking for work wherever they can get it, as long as it’s honest. All you gotta do to get started is get a bedroll and grub sack and hop a freight. Every so often you jump off and go door-to-door bumming sandwiches in exchange for yard work. Sometimes they’ll offer you some flour and eggs to make hotcakes. Sometimes, there’s work available for a few months in a logging camp or on a farm during harvest time. The pay is lousy, but the food is usually good. Eventually you’ll make your way to the border. That’s where you better be sure you’re well hidden in a boxcar when you cross over, since the railway cops are always on the lookout. Then once you’re on the other side, you gotta pretend you’re an American, for the folks down there don’t like foreigners taking advantage of their goodwill.
“Best place to go is California,” they would say. “Even though the place is overrun with starving Okies and Mexicans, you can usually find work picking cherries, apples, any sort of fruit and vegetables in season. It’s all piecework, and if you’re a good worker you can save a few dollars.”
They would then talk about the good times on the road. About kind-hearted small-town cops who let them sleep overnight in the cells and gave them big breakfasts in the morning as long as they cleared out and didn’t come back. About lonely wives who they claimed invited them in for a little lovemaking when their husbands were away at work. And about drinking cheap wine in hobo jungles and having the time of their lives.
But they had left home as boys and had returned as men with hard eyes as if they had seen things they didn’t want to talk about, or done things for which they were ashamed. While they pretended they could hardly wait to go back on the road, you could tell they just wanted to stay home and get married and settle down like their fathers had done when they were their age back when times were good.
Oscar would then join the others slouching up the steps to the high school as if they were proceeding to their executions rather than to the singing of “God Save the King” and the start of the school day. But Oscar’s reluctance was just an act. It was something designed to help him fit in and stay in the good graces of his classmates, many of whom were just putting in time until the Depression ended and the boys got jobs and the girls found husbands. In fact, Oscar loved school, and year after year was the outstanding student in his class. He was the only one who grasped abstract concepts easily, who had a feel for Latin and French, and who was able to talk intelligently to the English teacher about the books he was reading from the village library.
In time, his classmates began to treat him with wary respect; only Gloria Sunderland, embarrassed because she had laughed when the big boys had pulled down his pants so many years before, never spoke to him. He found it harder to establish good relations with Mrs. Huxley, who had made it clear to him from the outset that she wasn’t fond of Indians and had not been pleased when her husband brought him to live at the manse. He did everything he could to make her like him, handing over his wages to help run the household, cheerfully helping out around the house, escorting her to church on Sundays, sitting beside her in the family pew, getting down on his knees and praying passionately and insincerely at her side, and, with eyes uplifted, joining her in singing the great old hymns, especially “Shall We Gather at the River,” which through some buried memory always brought tears to his eyes.
At first Mrs. Huxley remained immune to his efforts, but one day she heard a knock on the front door followed by the sound of a woman speaking to Oscar.
“I’ve come to tell you that it wasn’t your fault, Oscar, and you shouldn’t blame yourself for Jacob’s death. I’m to blame. I should’ve been a better mother, but I was afraid of what might happen if we got too close.”
It was Oscar’s mother talking nonsense, and Mrs. Huxley moved quickly to deal with her.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wolf,” she said, stepping in front of Oscar and naturally being as polite as a minister’s wife could be. “But you’re not welcome here. Please go away and don’t come back.”
“But Oscar’s my son,” Stella said. “I need him and he needs me.”
“I doubt that very much,” Mrs. Huxley told her, noticing the white flecks of spit on her lower lip and her lopsided smile — sure signs, in her opinion, of alcoholism. “Oscar doesn’t want anything to do with you. And you’ve been drinking and don’t know what you’re saying anyway. You abandoned him just after he lost his grandfather in that terrible fire and we are taking care of him now. He’s a lovely boy who needs the type of care only we can give him, so please go away.”
“Tell her she’s wrong, Oscar,” Stella said to Oscar who was standing behind Mrs. Huxley in the hallway. “Tell her she’s wrong. I wasn’t always a good mother to you when you were small, but you’re my baby. Come home to Mama.”
But Oscar, whose mother had been dead to him ever since she had turned her back on him and boarded the steamer the day of the fire, and who was embarrassed by her display of drunken tears, turned and went upstairs to his room.
“See,” Mrs. Huxley told Stella. “He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t want to live the same awful life you lead. Now please leave before I call the constable.”
That was when Stella became really rude.
“Call the constable if you want,” she said, shouting and using a lot of bad words unfit to repeat. “Stealing my son, and you a minister’s wife! You probably can’t make a child of your own. Call the constable if you want and I’ll tell him what really happened the morning of the fire. You won’t think Oscar’s such a lovely boy then.”
Mrs. Huxley decided that she had heard quite enough and closed the door without saying goodbye, even if it wasn’t good-mannered to do so. There was no point in trying to argue with someone who had had too much to drink
. “People like that are liable to say anything,” she told Oscar when she went to comfort him in his room.
Afterward, Mrs. Huxley couldn’t do enough for Oscar, for in rejecting his mother he had proved to her satisfaction that he had left behind his savage nature and was now almost as civilized as a white person. In the mornings, when he came downstairs for breakfast, she would be waiting in the kitchen with a cheery smile to serve him bacon and eggs, fried potatoes and tomatoes, toast and Seville marmalade, Port Carling–style oatmeal porridge mixed with salt and pepper and melting butter, and English tea steeped to perfection. Every Monday, she would lay out on his bed for the coming week freshly pressed pants, shirts, socks, and underwear. In the evenings, when everyone gathered around the radio in the living room to listen to Amos and Andy and Jack Benny, she would make popcorn or homemade fudge and pass the tray to him before handing it to Lloyd. She even felt more comfortable discussing questions of religion with him than with her husband.
To tell the truth, it was a relief to have someone other than her husband to talk to. Although Lloyd must have known that he had told the same boring stories dozens of times, he wouldn’t stop talking about his trip back to Canada on the eve of the Great War, when he travelled through the Middle East and the capitals of Europe. Sometimes, especially after he received letters from friends from the old days who had gone on to become diplomats, he gave the impression he was sorry he had become a minister and didn’t believe in what he preached.
From time to time, Mrs. Huxley woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of weeping followed by laughter coming from Oscar’s bedroom. She asked Lloyd what he thought might be happening. He said Oscar was probably just having bad dreams, and that was to be expected, given what he had gone through.
Oscar thus had his life in order and was happy, at least most of the time, for every so often, whatever he was doing — answering a question in class, reading a book, or eating fudge with the Huxleys in the evenings — he would remember that he was living a lie, even if he was just trying to fit in as his grandfather had wanted.
The Redemption of Oscar Wolf Page 10
