“Why don’t you try Toronto,” the principal suggested. “A lot of our female runaways hitchhike or ride boxcars down there and try to find jobs as maids, waitresses, or babysitters. The problem is Toronto is such a big place, it’ll be hard to locate her.”
But finding Stella was all too easy. When Jacob visited the downtown police station to file a missing person’s report, the cop on duty asked him to wait while he went to look for her name in the files in the registry.
“Your daughter is not missing, Mr. Musquedo,” he said when he came back. “In fact, she’s well known to us. We’ve had to bring her in for fighting, disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, and for soliciting on the streets. She moves around a lot but the last address we have for her is room 10, the King’s Arms Hotel, on Jarvis Street next to the Salvation Army soup kitchen.”
“Thank you, thank you just the same,” Jacob answered, not knowing what to say. “I’m leaving for overseas in a couple of weeks,” he told the cop who was no longer listening.
I should have brought her home for the summers, Jacob thought, as he walked toward Jarvis Street. I should have done something when I got her letter last year. Maybe she wouldn’t have disgraced herself and the family. Maybe there was nothing I could have done to help her anyhow. Nobody can blame me. I did what I thought was right for her, just like I’m doing for Canada by going off to war. Luckily, I’ve found a good man for her.
3
After the initial shock of meeting her father, Stella did not try to hide her disbelief when Jacob said he wanted her to come home with him and settle down before he went overseas.
“You’re a cold old goat,” she said. “You never wanted me when I was a kid, and now to make yourself feel good, you come around pretending you care about me. So go away and let me live my life as I want. Toronto’s my home now, not the reserve or the Indian Camp. The women selling their asses on the streets, including that bitch I was just fighting with, are my family, not you.”
Two days later, however, Stella pushed open the door to Jacob’s house on the reserve and walked in carrying her suitcase. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said to her father who was eating his dinner. “You knew the cops would come looking for me after the fight and I’d have to come back to the reserve to hide out for a while.”
The next day, Jacob invited Amos Wolf to drop by for a cup of tea. And Amos, who had been so well prepared by Jacob that he had already fallen in love with the idea of marrying his daughter before he met her, could not have been happier when he was exposed to her earthy humour, handsome good looks, and worldly self-confidence. There was no need, Jacob thought, to tell him that he had found Stella working the streets of Toronto. Why spoil his illusions when he might well be killed overseas anyway?
At the request of Amos, Jacob told his daughter that his friend wanted to marry her, but she said no.
“Why this sudden concern for me?” she asked. “There’s gotta be something in it for you.”
“Not at all,” said Jacob. “I just want what’s best for you. Besides, the government will send you half his pay when he’s overseas, and if he gets killed you’ll get a pension.”
Within a week, Stella and Amos were man and wife. Within two weeks, Jacob and the bridegroom left to rejoin their regiment and go overseas. Two months later, Stella was sitting in the office of the helpful doctor who was telling her that for a substantial fee he would get rid of her baby. But although she still didn’t want a child, she couldn’t bring herself to go through with the abortion. Seven months later, Oscar was born, and four months after the birth of his son, Amos was killed in action during the battle for Hill 70 near the town of Lens in northwestern France. It was August 1917.
Map
PART 1
APRIL TO JUNE 1930
Chapter 1
THE JOURNEY
1
Mary Waabooz, lovingly known as Old Mary to her friends and relatives, the oldest member of the Rama Indian Reserve, had died, and the people crowded into her modest house late in the evening were singing the reassuring old gospel hymns in the language of their ancestors. The light of a solitary coal-oil lamp at the head of the open coffin threw a shadow down over her body, softening the gaunt features of her face, making her look decades younger and bringing a look of peace to someone who had spent the last weeks of her life in agony. It did the same for the other old people in the room, ironing out the creases on their foreheads, erasing the wrinkles on their dark brown, leathery cheeks, and concealing the slack flesh on their necks. There was a smell of decay mixed with sweetgrass in the room. The mood was one of calm and acceptance. There was no weeping. Old Mary had outlived three husbands and two grown children and her time had come. And yet her death still hurt. It was like an ancient tree, a landmark in the history of the community, unexpectedly crashing to the ground, leaving a massive empty space in the lives of the people.
Jacob Musquedo, his hair as black as ever despite his sixty-seven years, sat quietly near the door, anxious to leave. Stella, who had grown into a massive middle-aged woman of some two hundred and fifty pounds and who had prepared the body for burial earlier in the day, stared morosely at the flame of the lamp. Only Oscar, now thirteen years old, his hair pulled back and twisted into one thick black braid and with black watchful eyes set in his dark, high-cheek-boned face, sang along with the others. He was there mainly because he wanted to be close to his mother whom he loved but who did not love him. He was also there because he had been a friend of Old Mary and had often gone to her house on winter evenings to eat hot fried bannock, to drink tea with sugar and condensed milk, and to listen to her talk about the world of her youth.
“When I was a little girl,” she used to say, “we believed in Giche Manitou, the Creator, and not in the God of the Christians. We believed in Madji Manitou, the evil spirit, and not in the devil of the Christians. We believed that all things, animals, stones, water, and everything visible and invisible possessed souls, just as humans did. We believed that a monstrous seven-headed serpent with eyes the size of dinner plates inhabited the lakes of the Chippewa homeland in Muskoka. We believed that Mother Earth was Turtle Island and that it had come into being from a grain of sand carried by a muskrat to the surface of the sea without beginning or end. We believed that the Milky Way was the handle of a bucket holding up Turtle Island. We believed that the first humans emerged from the dead bodies of animals and were first cousins of the animals.”
Oscar always felt a tremor of fear run down his spine when Old Mary’s eyes began to glisten and she went on to tell tales of witches, shape-shifting bearwalkers, cannibalistic Windigos, and other evil beings that owed their allegiance to Madji Manitou and who roamed the Earth doing harm to humans. He much preferred her accounts of the battles his people had fought over the years. He became a war chief when they drove the invading Iroquois from their hunting grounds; he became Pontiac when Chippewa warriors captured British fort after British fort at the end of the Seven Years’ War; he was at the side of his great-grandfather fighting the Americans in the War of 1812; and he was with his father and grandfather fighting the Germans in the Great War. In every one of these engagements, he saw himself as the hero battling impossible odds to impress his mother and gain her admiration and affection.
At eleven-thirty, Jacob signalled to Oscar that it was time to depart, and grandfather and