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