But there were no brown faces in the room, or for that matter any black or yellow ones. Instead, a mass of anxious eighteen- and nineteen-year-old white high-school boys with a sprinkling of white women the same age milled around clutching their acceptance letters in their hands, looking for the right line to join to register. Those with sunburned faces and red necks, he guessed, were probably the sons and daughters of farmers. Others, with their pale complexions, he supposed might be the offspring of small businessmen, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. One group stood out from the others by the elegance of their clothing, by their perfect tans, and by their self-assurance. Claire, he saw, was one of them, and although she stared directly at him, she gave no hint she knew him.
I don’t want to do this, Oscar thought, looking away. I don’t want to be subjected to constant brush-offs from Claire. I don’t want to be humiliated again by the students who were at the Fitzgibbon’s brunch. I don’t want to spend the next three or four years of my life here with no friends and as the only Native student on campus. I don’t want to spend the money of someone whose store I destroyed. I don’t want to keep up the pretence that I have a religious calling when I’m not sure I believe in God. Clem told me I shouldn’t try to be something I wasn’t by trying to fit into the white man’s world. It’s time I was honest with myself. I’ve got to return to Port Carling and confess my crimes and betrayals to my benefactors and beg their forgiveness. And since they like me so much, they’ll forgive me and I’ll be free to leave and do whatever I want.
But as he walked back to Union Station to take the train back to Muskoka, Oscar had second thoughts. Confessing everything and accepting the consequences of his misdeeds would certainly be the honourable thing to do, but what if Lily Horton’s family was to learn of his confession? They would be forced to relive the grief they suffered when they first learned of their daughter’s death. What if his benefactors were not to forgive him? What if the Hortons and his benefactors were to call the police? The police would charge him with arson, manslaughter, and murder, and he would be sent to jail for many years; he might even be sentenced to death and be hanged in the district jail.
Stretched out on a hard wooden bench in the waiting room in Union Station, with his coat as a rudimentary pillow and unable to sleep, Oscar spent the night reflecting on his options. By the time he bought a ticket for the first leg of the journey to Port Carling, he had persuaded himself that sparing the feelings of the Hortons was more important than spending the rest of his life in jail or going to the gallows. Late in the afternoon that same day, after spending a few more dollars from his diminishing supply of pocket money for a ticket on the steamer from Gravenhurst, Oscar was sitting in the study of the manse, trying to make James McCrum and the Huxleys understand why he was back in the village.
“Yesterday, when I was waiting to register at the University of Toronto, I just couldn’t hand this over,” Oscar said, holding up the envelope containing the money order. “The time has come for me to take control of my future and to pay my own way.”
“I thought something like this would happen,” said Mrs. Huxley, getting to her feet and leaving the room without looking back.
“I’ll take that envelope, young man,” said McCrum, snatching it from his hands. “If you ever return to these parts, don’t forget to drop into the store to say hello. But right now I’ve got some work to do and have to go.”
“I don’t like this turn of events at all,” said Reverend Huxley, “but it might do you good to take some time off before you resume your studies.”
3
Later that night, Oscar was sitting in the doorway of a boxcar, his legs dangling outside, as the freight train he had hopped at Gravenhurst made its way through the northern Ontario night. He was surprised at how well his benefactors had accepted his change of plans. He had prepared mental notes to address all their anticipated objections, but no one had seemed to care. Maybe they thought he knew what he was doing and was big enough to take care of himself. Maybe they hadn’t really forgiven him for drinking with Clem and helping him carry out his crazy act of revenge and didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. More likely, however, without intending to do so, he had released them from some sort of misguided sense of obligation, allowing them to forget him and get on with their lives.
At the same time, he knew he had been freed from the embrace of his benefactors and was able to resume his life where he had left it before his troubles started. He felt the cool, clean wind of early September on his face and imagined that he was thirteen again, after the wake held for Old Mary, looking out through a peephole scraped from the frost in the window of the train racing away from the Rama Indian Reserve toward Muskoka Wharf Station in the middle of the night. Looking up at the northern sky, Oscar remembered his intense joy he felt at being alive when he and Jacob, alone on Lake Muskoka under the Milky Way, paddled through the high waves to the Indian Camp. He remembered believing at that time that the soul of Old Mary, on its way to the Land of the Spirits over the Milky Way, was watching over him. He remembered singing “Shall We Gather at the River” at the top of his lungs and being comforted by the words.
Life had been so simple before the fire, when he was still a believer. He just wished his father was alive so that he could talk to him about God and the Creator and his plans to go to California.
Early the next morning, the freight train slowed to a crawl and pulled into a siding at the Savant Lake railway station, deep in the northwestern Ontario bush. Jacob, he remembered, had once said his grandmother, Louisa, had taken the train from there when she went south to marry him in 1900. Savant Lake, he had also said, was just thirty miles away over a dirt road to the Osnaburgh Indian Reserve. He decided to visit the community to see if any members of Louisa’s family were still alive with whom he could discuss his future. Later that afternoon, he knocked on the door of the first house he came to and asked the people within if they knew the Loon family, telling them the name of his great-grandmother was Betsy. To his surprise and immense pleasure, an old man led him to his great-grandmother who was in good health at the age of sixty-seven.
She cried out in fear when she saw him, thinking he was the ghost of her long-dead husband. After she recovered, she asked, “How is Louisa? I haven’t heard from her since she got on the train to go south thirty- five years ago.”
Oscar was forced to tell her she had been dead for decades. Betsy wept and said she should never have let her daughter go, but Jacob had seemed like such a responsible person. Later, during dinner, she asked Oscar why he had come to her reserve.
“I’m on my way to California,” he said. “And I thought I’d drop in to visit with my relatives.”
“You’re looking for advice from an elder of your family you can trust, aren’t you, Oscar?”
“I am, Granny. I’d like your guidance.”
“Then first of all, tell me, why do you want to travel the world? Why don’t you stay at home with your family on the reserve?”
“My mother doesn’t want me, my grandfather is dead, and the white people who were taking care of me no longer want to have anything to do with me.”
“There’s more to this story than you’ve told me,” Betsy said. And when Oscar, with much prodding, told her about setting the fire that killed his grandfather and precipitated the break with his mother and led some white people to feed, clothe, and educate him for five years, she laughed and laughed until the tears flowed down her cheeks. And when he described how he had drunk too much dandelion wine and helped Clem blow a great crater in the highway and Dump Road to exact his revenge against the Port Carling village council, she found the strength to laugh some more.
“I