The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  2

  In his final summer at Port Carling, after he had finished high school and before he was scheduled to leave to attend Knox College, Oscar became close friends with Claire Fitzgibbon, a tourist girl from Forest Hill, Toronto, and a recent graduate from an exclusive girls’ private school. They had first seen each other when Oscar was a thirteen-year-old working during the summer on the Amick when it called at the Fitzgibbon’s summer home on Millionaires’ Row to deliver groceries and other household supplies. He was on the top deck and she was standing with her brother on the dock. He looked at her and she looked at him, and both then turned to other things. To Oscar, she was just another overweight white kid, with braces on her teeth, light brown hair, pale blue eyes, and freckles, no different than the dozens of others he had seen over the years walking down the path from Port Carling to the Indian Camp shopping for souvenirs. Claire’s eyes remained on Oscar somewhat longer, for it was not often that she saw someone with such black hair and dark brown skin.

  When Claire went by motorboat with her mother the following summer to stock up on supplies at the newly rebuilt general store in Port Carling, she saw and remembered Oscar. During the next two summers, whenever she went shopping, she could not keep her eyes off the tall, exotic-looking Indian teenager who was stocking shelves in the store. The following summer, she went up to Oscar, who didn’t recall seeing her before, and said she wanted him, and no one else, to carry her groceries to her motorboat. The other students working at the store for the summer noticed and teased him.

  “Looks like you got an admirer, Chief.”

  “She’s too rich for your blood.”

  “Watch out for her old man. He’ll set the constable on you.”

  “You lucky bastard. What have you got that I haven’t?”

  By the summer of the fifth year, Claire had lost her baby fat and was a tall, well-proportioned young woman with dreamy eyes and straight white teeth. She now insisted on doing the shopping by herself, and when she saw Oscar at the store at the beginning of July, she didn’t ask him to carry her groceries to the motorboat, although he did so just the same. One day after work, she was waiting for him outside the store and walked with him back to the manse, where they sat on bamboo chairs inside the screened porch until Mrs. Huxley asked Claire to stay for dinner. Afterward, she and Oscar went back outside and sat on the porch swing listening to Chopin piano music on a windup gramophone and talking for hours about things that were important to them.

  Oscar told Claire his favourite piece of writing was The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It was the story of someone who wakes up one morning to find he has been turned into a giant beetle, and even though he tries hard, he can’t get out of bed to go to work. In the end, the hero accepts his new condition but has trouble communicating with his family and stops talking to them altogether. Sometimes, Oscar said, he felt like that bug.

  Claire told him she was reading everything she could put her hands on by John Steinbeck and listening to the songs of Woody Guthrie to get a better feel for what the people of the Dust Bowl were going through. She hadn’t yet decided exactly how she would do it, but someday, somehow, she would help them and people like them around the world.

  Oscar told her he had promised Reverend Huxley and James McCrum to study to become a missionary to the Indians in northern Ontario, even if he wasn’t sure he had a calling. But if that didn’t work out, he would find some other way to repay them and the other people of Port Carling for the help they had given him after the Great Fire of 1930.

  In the weeks that followed, Claire often came home with Oscar after work and stayed for dinner. In their discussions outside later on, she told him her parents only seemed to like going to dinners and cocktail parties with their friends in Toronto and spending time with the same people on Millionaires’ Row and at the Muskoka Yacht Club. They wasted their time talking about their holidays in Europe and horse racing in Canada and the United States when people were out of work and going hungry. They wanted her to study art appreciation and home economics at university and then quickly find someone to marry from among their set, but she wanted more out of life.

  At first the Huxleys were flattered that the daughter of someone from such a prominent family would spend so much time at their home with Oscar. But Reverend Huxley began to worry.

  “Do Claire’s parents know she’s seeing you?” he asked. “Claire comes from a different world.”

  Oscar said he didn’t know, but that it didn’t matter. “Claire doesn’t care about things like race and social position.”

  “I just don’t want you to be hurt,” Reverend Huxley said.

  By the latter part of August, the two friends had become so close that Claire invited Oscar home to meet her parents, Dwight and Hilda.

  “Sundays are when we hold open house,” she told him. “Everybody knows they can just drop in; no formal invitation is needed. We eat, joke around, and have a good time. Some of my friends from school come right after their morning tennis games. Daddy and Mommy’s friends are always there. I’d like them all to meet you.”

  Oscar was surprised and gratified. His efforts to fit in were being rewarded by an invitation to mix with the cream of Canadian and American society. Assuming Claire had told her parents he was an Indian and that her family and friends had nothing against Indians, he immediately accepted.

  On Sunday morning, a member of the household staff held Claire’s motorboat steady as she and Oscar stepped onto the dock.

  “I think I’ve been here before,” said Oscar, “but I don’t remember when.”

  “I know,” said Claire. “I was going into grade nine and you were working on the Amick when I first saw you.”

  They then walked side by side up a recently raked, stone-lined gravel pathway past beautifully tended gardens of delphiniums, daisies, daylilies, and hydrangeas to the twelve-foot-wide flagstone front steps that led to an immense wraparound veranda.

  “I’d like you to meet Oscar Wolf,” she said to her parents, who were sitting on white cane furniture sipping gin and tonics and chatting with friends from nearby summer homes. “He’s a good friend of mine and I invited him to join us for brunch.”

  “Why, it’s that young Indian from the grocery store. Claire is always surprising us,” her mother said, gazing unsmilingly at a place just above Oscar’s eyes and ignoring his outstretched hand.

  “How’s business at the store? How’s old McCrum making out?” one of the guests blurted out. But Oscar, taken aback by the frostiness of Mrs. Fitzgibbon’s greeting, ignored the question and the conversation ended.

  “Time to eat,” Claire said after an embarrassing pause, and she led Oscar to the living room where brunch was already being served. A massive granite fireplace dominated the room. The floors were polished maple. Hand-painted light fixtures hung down from fourteen-foot ceilings and a wide circular staircase with a landing and built-in window seat led up to the second floor. Prominently displayed on a panelled yellow birch wall was a large black-and-white photograph of Claire’s parents with President Wilson of the United States taken when the American leader spent his holidays at a nearby summer home before the Great War. On another wall hung a photograph of equal size of Claire’s father dressed in the uniform of Commodore of the Muskoka Yacht Club. Silver cups, awarded to Claire and her brother for winning canoe races at the club’s annual regattas, stood in a line on the mantel.

  A maid handed Oscar a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a large folded starched linen napkin. Oscar tried to open the napkin with one hand after balancing the glass of orange juice on top of his plate with the other. However, his hands trembled and he spilled some juice on the floor. The older guests exchanged small smiles and chuckles among themselves when they thought Oscar was not looking. Claire’s friends, who had come to the brunch from the Muskoka Yacht Club elegantly dressed in their crisp tennis whites and cotton V-neck sweaters with navy blue trim, stared with barely
concealed disdain at Oscar’s clean work pants and plaid shirt and avoided speaking to him. Later that afternoon, when Claire took Oscar back to Port Carling in her motorboat, she seemed upset, but didn’t say why. But the next day, when she went shopping for groceries at the general store, her mother accompanied her, and when Oscar said hello, mother and daughter pretended they didn’t know him.

  That evening, Claire telephoned Oscar to say how bad she felt not having answered his greetings at the store. She had no choice, she said, because her family had threatened to disown her if she saw him again. But that didn’t mean they still couldn’t see each other when university started in the fall. Toronto was a big city and they could find out-of-the-way places to meet and no one would ever need to know.

  Oscar let Claire speak until she finished and then hung up without replying.

  No one from the village, Oscar thought, despite their ingrained suspicion of Indians and occasional racist remarks, would have treated him in such a shabby way. But to be invited and then rejected out of hand by presumably well-educated people, not because of some personal failing but because of his race, upset him. The personal snub from Claire hurt even more because she had been the first friend his own age that he had ever had. She was someone who had shared his love of poetry, novels, and ideas, and someone he had permitted to penetrate the protective reserve he maintained with the people around him. He could not understand how a person so sensitive, idealistic, poised, and self-confident could so readily have obeyed her parents’ wishes. It was always possible, of course, that she had just been pretending to like him and was just having some fun at his expense. He hoped not, because he liked her, and although he had been too upset to speak to her when she called, he fully intended to find some way of getting together with her in Toronto in the fall as she had suggested.

  The other employees of the store who had been present when the brush-off took place felt sorry for Oscar, even if they were not surprised at the outcome. After all, it wasn’t the first time that outraged parents from Millionaires’ Row had put a stop to a budding romance between a daughter and a local boy, although to best of anyone’s recollection it was first time that the local boy had been an Indian. The story of the failed romance between the rich girl and the poor Indian was then repeated from employee to employee, becoming more and more distorted with each telling until a breathless sales clerk, anxious to curry favour, went into the office of James McCrum to give him all the salacious details.

  “You just gotta hear this, Mr. McCrum,” she said. “Everyone in the village is talking about Oscar and the Fitzgibbon girl. And I have it from a good source that they’ve been having a hot love affair all summer long without anyone knowing about it. They apparently got together out on the porch at the manse every night after the Huxleys went to bed and did things they shouldn’t have. Poor Reverend Huxley and his wife didn’t have a clue what was going on under their noses. Sometimes, they went out in her motorboat and anchored it and continued their carryings on. Finally, her parents caught them in the act in the boathouse at their place down on Millionaires’ Row and told him to leave their daughter alone. And apparently there was a lot of drinking going on and someone said she was pregnant.”

  “What a bunch of hogwash,” McCrum told her. “I don’t believe a word of it, and if I were you, I wouldn’t go around spreading rumours about a fine, outstanding boy like Oscar!”

  But he immediately called Reverend Huxley to get his version of events.

  “It was an innocent relationship between a young man and a young woman, and I’m sure nothing untoward happened,” Reverend Huxley told him. “But Oscar did accept an invitation to brunch at Claire’s place and her parents must have told her she couldn’t see him again.”

  “I’m sorry those people on Millionaires’ Row treated you so badly,” Reverend Huxley said to Oscar after inviting him into his study and asking him to sit down beside him on the sofa. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. We all go through these crises in our lives. Sometimes we just need to put them in perspective.”

  “I’ll know better the next time, if there is a next time,” Oscar said, glancing at the door and waiting for the interview to end. “But there’s no need to worry. No one got hurt.”

  Reverend Huxley rose and took a book from a shelf. “Books and literature can help people overcome bad times in their lives,” he said. “It’s a truism, but I speak from personal experience. This novel, for example, is by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran, and in my opinion the best book written on the Great War. It’s called All Quiet on the Western Front. It allows us to see the war from the other side’s perspective and to understand that we are all people, that we are all human. When you read books like this, you are not an Indian, you are not a white man, and you are not a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or Italian, or rich or poor. You are a human being with the same hopes, the same fears, and the same dreams as everybody else. And when you finish this one, I want you to start on the others I’ve collected over the years. Maybe they’ll change the way you look at things. Maybe they’ll help you put the behaviour of people like the Fitzgibbons in perspective as you go through life. There are lots of people out there just like them.”

  Oscar took and read the book, but it didn’t make him feel any better. And his problem wasn’t just with the Fitzgibbons and people from their social set. After five years of living with the Huxleys, doing well in school, playing hard in sports, and doing everything his benefactors expected of him, he still didn’t fit in. He was still the outsider. And now he was expected to leave for Toronto to study to be a missionary when he wasn’t even sure he believed in God.

  He needed to talk to someone he could trust, someone he could count on to tell him the truth, someone who could let him know whether he should carry on trying to fit in or whether he should drop the whole thing once and for all. That was when he decided to call on Clem McCrum, who had once told him to come see him if ever he could help and who had treated him well when he worked on the Amick the summer after the fire.

  Chapter 6

  THE RUPTURE

  1

  Tired of being polite to the wealthy tourists who shopped on the Amick, Clem quit his job in the spring of 1931, bought a dozen cows, and started up a small dairy operation on his farm. The sign on his laneway read as follows:

  ROCKFACE DAIRY

  RAW MILK FOR SALE

  BRING YOUR OWN JUGS

  Although the sale of unpasteurized milk was illegal, Clem was soon swamped with business from people who said his milk was frothier than pasteurized milk, from mothers who claimed it was full of vitamins to chefs at the big hotels around the lakes who maintained that it made their pastries, cakes, and mashed potatoes taste better. Inspectors from the District Health Board paid him a visit and were displeased to find chickens drifting in from the outside through the open door to the dairy, shitting on the floor, hopping up to grip the rims of the pails of milk with their dirty feet, plunging their heads up to their necks in the liquid, raising their beaks appreciatively and swallowing their fill.

  Clem brushed aside the complaints. “When I was a kid growing up around here, we drank raw milk all the time and nobody got sick.”

  “But times have changed, Mr. McCrum,” the inspectors said. “You must clean up your dairy and pasteurize your milk or we’ll put you out of business.”

  To obey the letter but not the spirit of the law, Clem put up a new sign on the gate.

  ROCKFACE DAIRY

  RAW MILK FOR PET CONSUMPTION

  BRING YOUR OWN JUGS

  His business grew bigger. And as the years went by, he became more and more eccentric, refusing to shave, cut his hair, or take baths on the grounds that someone who sold raw, natural milk should himself be a raw, natural man. Occasionally, to establish a closer connection to nature in all its glory, he would walk naked through the village during violent summer storms and let the warm driving rain purify his body. He stopped washing his clothe
s and wore the same ragged pair of overalls held up by a single brace until they disintegrated and fell off his body. He gave up drinking whiskey, saying it was produced in factories and thus unnatural, and he made and drank his own homebrew out of dandelions and chokecherries. When Stella came to see him in the summers, they would drink too much and stagger downtown, shouting and quarrelling with each other and with anyone they met, making a public spectacle of themselves before curling up and sleeping off their drunks on the steps of the Presbyterian church.

  In the end, however, the people in the village turned against him. In the past, when Clem got drunk and lurched his way through the village, everyone used to laugh and say “That’s just good old Clem having a good time. He means no harm,” and they would stop and joke and laugh with him. When they looked out their windows during thunderstorms and saw him walking naked, they laughed as well. When he fell asleep on the side of the road one winter during a heavy snowstorm after drinking too much and a snowplough buried him alive and he wasn’t rescued until the next day, he became somewhat of a local hero. People would point at him and tell their friends, “That’s the guy who had so much alcohol in his blood, he didn’t freeze to death when he spent the night in a snowbank.”

  Now nobody laughed. “That man is a menace,” tourists from Millionaires’ Row told the leading citizens. “When we park our motorboats at the government wharf, he’s always there drunk and making rude comments. When we tell him to grow up and leave us alone, he becomes angry and you never know if he’s going to hit you. He doesn’t even care if there are children present when he sings his dirty songs.”