“What’s a trickster, Granny?”
“Every so often, someone comes along and goes through life playing tricks on people,” she said. “Sometimes they fool folks to take advantage of them; sometimes, it’s to help them, like you did with Clem, but usually tricksters don’t realize they’ve been deceiving people until it’s too late. The Creator, the old people used to say, put tricksters on Mother Earth so he could have a good laugh in a sad world from time to time. So as you go through life, Oscar, and find yourself doing all sorts of strange things and getting into trouble, remember: the Creator is just having a good laugh at your expense.”
PART 3
1948 to 1958
Chapter 7
HOME FROM THE WAR
1
“I’ll have a glass of draft beer, please,” Oscar said, tossing a dime onto the bar after dropping into the Port Carling branch of the Royal Canadian Legion to look up old friends and to have a drink. He had graduated from the University of Toronto and was on his way to Ottawa to report for duty as a newly recruited foreign service officer in the Department of External Affairs, known in Canada and abroad simply as “the Department.”
“Sorry, Chief, you can’t drink here. We don’t want the likes of you in the Legion. Besides, it’s against the law to serve Indians. You being so well-educated and all that sort of thing, you shouldn’t have to be told,” said the bartender, a former teammate on the Port Carling hockey team in the old days.
“But I’m a veteran,” Oscar said, “I served overseas. Don’t I get any special treatment?”
“Even if you weren’t an Indian, you’d still not be welcome. So get out before I call the law. Go on down to the Indian Camp; your Indian buddies are all good customers of the bootleggers. They’ll give you a drink if you ask them real nice.”
Oscar looked around the room, seeking support from the dozen or more veterans of the two world wars, all of whom he knew from the time when he lived with the Huxleys. No one spoke up in his defence. Finally, an old soldier, someone who had fought with his father and Jacob at the Battle of Hill 70, said, “Why don’t you just bugger off and let us drink our beer in peace.”
Oscar stood at the bar staring at the old man until he looked away. He looked at the others, one after another, until they turned their backs on him and waited for him to leave.
“Call the cops if you want,” Oscar then said to the bartender. “I’m not leaving until I get a beer.”
“You always thought you were better than everyone else,” the bartender said. “And you’d like nothing better than to have the cops come and throw you in jail. That way you could pretend to be a victim just like you did after the fire. Well, I’m not playing along with your game. You can stay as long as you want but I’m not serving you. You can watch the others drink.”
Oscar picked up his money and left the Legion wondering why the veterans had decided to shun him. He went over the ridge to the Indian Camp, where a half-dozen veterans his age, friends from the old days when he was still a boy on the reserve, were drinking tea with their wives around a campfire while their children played in the water. They gave him the welcome he had expected to receive from the white veterans at the Legion and invited him to visit with them for a while.
“We haven’t seen much of you in years,” someone said. “Not since the Great Fire of 1930, when the white people took you in. Everyone figured your new friends told you to stay away.”
“I did a lot of things in those days I regret to this day.”
“Don’t take it the wrong way; no one ever blamed you. You probably had no choice.”
“I was just trying to survive after Jacob died.”
“We’re actually pretty proud of you. You seemed to land on your feet no matter what happened. You got a high-school education when none of us had that chance.”
“But what happened back in 1935 when you were supposed to go to university to become a preacher?” someone else asked. “Did you have a falling out with the Huxleys?”
“Something like that,” Oscar said “And it hadn’t felt right to keep on accepting help from the white people when times were so tough for everyone. So I handed back the money they gave me for tuition, hopped a freight at Gravenhurst, went to California, and did whatever I could to earn a living.”
Oscar thought it prudent not to mention that he had spent five wild years on the West Coast of the United States trying to find a world where he fit in. He had had his good and bad days. On the good ones, he managed to put aside his memories of the fire and his failed attempts to please his white benefactors at Port Carling. On the bad ones, he suffered through bouts of depression in which he relived the fire and the deaths of Jacob and Lily. Ultimately, he carved out a place for himself in a world of drifters, Mexican-American fieldworkers, down-and-out Okie and Arkie migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Midwest, petty criminals on the fringes of society, and dispossessed American Indians. It was a world where he sometimes picked fruits and vegetables to make a little money, sometimes volunteered in soup kitchens, sometimes drank too much and passed out on the sidewalks, and sometimes slept in hobo jungles and flophouses. He even signed up on a whim with the Abraham Lincoln brigade to fight Falangist, Nazi, and Fascist troops slaughtering civilians in the Spanish Civil War, but the fighting ended before he finished his training.
In the end he found long-term employment. His chance came one night when he and a few of his friends went into San Diego after work to have some fun at a carnival. A barker was standing outside a tent, shouting out to the crowd that for only twenty-five cents they could watch an amateur boxer, Sven, “the Slovenly Swede,” take on all comers.
“And if you want to fight him, big fellow,” he said, looking at Oscar, “I’ll wave the entrance fee and let you try your luck. The winning purse is ten bucks.”
Oscar entered the ring and stripped off his shirt. Someone laced a set of boxing gloves on his hands and he was hit in the head before he could lift his arms. But he was big and strong in those days and in perfect shape from working in the fields. And although he had never had any professional training, he had played defence for the Port Carling hockey team and had never lost a fight. He poked, he jabbed, he danced around ring, and he flattened his opponent with one mighty punch, rendering him unfit to fight again. The carnival management offered Sven’s job to Oscar, who became “Oscar the Killer Injun.”
He made good money until he finally lost a fight and was fired. A member of the crowd who had been coming to see him perform in the ring then approached him. He told Oscar he was the owner of a bar on the waterfront and needed someone who knew how to use his fists to keep order at his place. And so for six nights a week for the next two years, Oscar threw drunken sailors from the nearby naval base out into the street when they became rowdy or belligerent.
The bar was also a hangout for prostitutes, who were always trying to get the sailors drunk and steal their money. Oscar did not approve of this type of behaviour, but in the interest of maintaining good relations with the girls, who were popular with the clientele, he looked the other way when they picked the pockets of their customers. He even came to enjoy their company, especially their ribald sense of humour, but in time he grew tired of them. He was still trying to cope with his depression and was almost happy when war broke out, since it gave him an excuse to return home and make a fresh start in the army.
“And when the government declared war on Germany in September 1939,” Oscar said, “I came back and joined the army, just like my father and grandfather did in the Great War.”
At this point, the other veterans interrupted