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 began 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.
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