It was Reverend Lloyd Huxley of the Port Carling Presbyterian church.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Oscar, after everything you’ve been through,” he said, “but I came down here hoping to speak to your mother, but nobody answered the door and I saw you asleep out here on the water’s edge.”
“My mother’s gone. Gone for good,” said Oscar, getting to his feet.
“Then who’s looking after you?”
“I don’t need anybody to look after me. I’m thirteen.”
“But you’re still a minor. Don’t you have a relative who could take you in?”
Oscar shrugged his shoulders and Reverend Huxley changed the subject.
“The mayor asked me to look into funeral arrangements for your grandfather. Lily’s family is going to take their daughter’s body back to Toronto and bury her there. Do you think your mother would want your grandfather buried back on the reserve? Do you think she’d let the village honour him with a funeral service and burial here in Port Carling?”
“You’d have to ask her yourself, but she’s gone back to the house on the reserve and there’s no telephone there. Maybe the Indian agent could put you in touch. He’s got an office on the reserve.”
“I’ll look up his number. In the meantime, why don’t you move into your cabin or go live with one of your neighbours?”
When Oscar did not reply, the minister tried again.
“Then come home and stay with my wife and me until after the funeral. We’ve got plenty of room and you would be most welcome.”
PART 2
1930 to 1935
Chapter 4
DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL
1
Reverend Lloyd Huxley was born in China in the last decade of the nineteenth century and spent his early years as the only child of missionary parents among wars, rebellions, famines, and human misery in Sichuan Province. When he was a boy, his father told him that death and suffering were God’s will and not to be questioned, and he had believed him. His father told him that it was God’s will that he become a Presbyterian clergyman when he reached adulthood, and he accepted his judgement. His father told him that it was God’s will that he become a missionary after becoming a clergyman and follow in his footsteps in China, and this he also promised to do.
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