Oscar turned, his mouth open, too paralyzed by fear to cry out for help, and fled through the Indian Camp, back up the trail over the ridge, past the school, and up to the manse. The fiend kept pace with him, moaning and crying out in pain and anger. He pushed open the front door in a panic, slammed it shut behind him, ran up to his room, knelt down, closed his eyes, and began to pray.
“I’m sorry, God, for starting the fire that killed Lily and Jacob. If you could only forgive me and give me peace of mind, I promise I will never do a terrible thing like that again. Besides, it wasn’t really my fault. The boys who pulled my pants down should share the blame. So should Gloria Sunderland who laughed when she saw my dick. And how was I to know that Clem wasn’t to blame for beating up my mother. And please, please tell me that the shadow of Jacob was wrong and that the heaven of the Christians is real, just like my Sunday school teacher used to say. And tell me Old Mary was right when she said the souls of my people travel over the Milky Way to spend eternity in the Spirit World. I am terribly afraid of being punished for setting the fire and killing Jacob and Lily. I don’t want to go to Hell after death or wander forever through time in spiritual emptiness. So please, please send me a sign, any old sign will do, to indicate that you have heard my prayers and have forgiven me.”
But as he prayed, he once again felt he was just mouthing words into the void and he felt as alone and forlorn as ever. However, he refused to give up, and he prayed and prayed all night long, pleading, begging, arguing, and bargaining with God. It was his dark night of the soul, but when the first light of dawn appeared in the eastern sky, instead of spiritual release, he felt as solitary and lost as he had been when he started praying. There was only one thing left he could do: follow the lead of the Indian people who had travelled and lived since the beginning of time on this part of Turtle Island, and seek the guidance of the Manido of the Lake.
When the Huxleys came down for breakfast at seven o’clock, Oscar was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m going fishing,” he said. “I want to bring you a fish to help repay you for what you’re doing for me.”
The Huxleys raised no objections, but after Oscar left the manse, Mrs. Huxley told her husband she was concerned.
“How can someone who has just suffered such a grievous loss go down the river on a pleasure trip? Doesn’t he have any feelings? Don’t Indians mourn the death of their loved ones like decent white people?”
Reverend Huxley interrupted his wife to say she was worrying unnecessarily.
“Different people mourn in their different ways. He’s gone off somewhere important to him to try to come to terms with his loss.”
“I find that hard to believe. I know Indians, and they don’t act like that. I think he might be running away because he did something wrong. Maybe we were in too much of a hurry in deciding to take him in and in encouraging James McCrum to support such ambitious plans for his future. And if he does come back, I’m sure it will only be to sponge off all of us. And what are we to do if that mother of his comes around? She has the reputation of being a wild woman and a drunk. There are limits to Christian charity.”
Friends and relatives crowded around Oscar when he went over the ridge to the Indian Camp to prepare himself for his visit to the Manido of the Lake. They were sorry about Jacob, they said, but it was comforting to know he had died a hero and gone to a better place. Some people wanted to know why Oscar had slept outside the night of the fire, saying they had checked on him from time to time to be sure he was all right.
“You could have stayed with any of us,” they said.
Others asked him how long he would be living at the manse. Someone asked if the Huxleys had a bathtub and if he had used it. What did the Huxleys eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Someone else told him he was lucky to have been taken in by rich white people and asked him if he would be going to the Port Carling high school. “If you do,” the questioner said, “you won’t find it easy to get along with the white kids, but anything is better than being sent to a residential school. Your mother went to one of those schools and that’s why she turned out the way she did.”
Oscar didn’t say much in reply. Reverend Huxley and his wife had asked him to live with them, he told them, and he had agreed. In the meantime, he was going to take Jacob’s canoe and go down the river to do a little fishing and try to make sense of what was happening. But he didn’t want to go inside the shack to get his grandfather’s fishing gear. “Too many memories,” he said. “Can someone go in and get it for me? And his pipe and a package of pipe tobacco as well?”
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