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 clothes 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