Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel-feet have trod,
With its crystal tide for ever,
Flowing by the throne of God.
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river,
Gather with the saints at the river,
That flows by the throne of God.
On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silvery spray,
We will walk and worship ever,
All the happy, golden day.
As Oscar sang, tears of exultation flooded his eyes and he became conscious of the presence of someone, of something otherworldly, and he looked up at the stars and saw the outline of a smiling face. Old Mary, he recalled, had once said that the old people believed that humans were composed of three parts: a body that rots in the dirt after death; a shadow that watches over the grave of the corpse as well as the members of the dead person’s family and closest friends; and a soul that travels westward over the Milky Way to reside in the Land of the Spirits. The Land of the Spirits, she said, was ruled over by Nanibush, the right hand and messenger of the Creator, whose power ran through all things.
It’s Old Mary, he thought. Her shadow followed me here from the wake, and now her soul on its final journey is watching over me as I sing out here on the lake in the middle of the night. And the soul of my father, Oscar remembered, travelled on that same road to the Land of the Spirits after he was killed in France.
Oscar sang louder, shouting out the words of the hymn to the starlit sky.
3
Oscar’s passionate singing irritated Jacob, but he said nothing. If his grandson found some comfort from attending church and singing Christian hymns, good for him. Personally, he found their messages of love and forgiveness, if you were lucky enough to be counted among the chosen, hypocritical. His service in northern France as a soldier had led him to equate Christianity with cities in rubble, the suffering of civilians, and the massacre of soldiers. A lukewarm Christian before he went overseas, he had returned with a renewed attachment to the Indian beliefs he had embraced as a boy and abandoned as a man many years before. Like many other things in his life, he kept his beliefs to himself.
Puffing hard on his pipe, Jacob thought of the disrespect his daughter had shown to him and to Oscar at the wake. He was not angry — becoming upset would do no good — but he was worried about her. When he had come back from the war, neighbours on the reserve had told him that in the years he had been away, Stella did not seem to care for anyone or anything. She drank, she ran around with any low-class white man who took her fancy, often disappearing for weeks at a time, leaving her baby with Old Mary to look after. She would return smelling of alcohol, her hair a mess and her body covered in bruises when she had run out of money and needed to cash her pension cheques. She laughed too loud, they said, and she became involved in brawls whether she was sober or drunk. She was unpredictable; no one knew what would set her off. She was more than willing to take on anyone in a fight, man or woman, old or young, big or small, with fists, feet, and fingernails; a piece of cordwood would do if she was losing. She was, they said, just plain crazy.
Jacob suspected the neighbours might well be right. At the turn of the century, he and three other men from the Rama Reserve were working for two white men from Toronto, surveying the hunting and trapping territories of the Ojibwa people who lived on the headwaters of the Albany River, deep in the northwestern Ontario bush. One morning, a birchbark canoe paddled by a Native glided toward them out of the early morning mist.
“Bojo, Bojo,” the visitor, who spoke their language, called out to the men on the shore eating their breakfast. “Do you think the white men would give me work? I was born here and know the best fishing spots.”
The man was in his early sixties with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and thick, powerful arms. He had taken the trouble, Jacob saw, to apply for work with his shoulder-length hair neatly cropped and he was dressed in what were probably his best clothes: black fedora, knee-high buckskin moccasins decorated with coloured beads and porcupine quills, a bandanna knotted around his neck, and a shirt loosely tucked into pants held in place by a red and white sash.
“We’re not here to fish. But come ashore and have something to eat with us and then I’ll go ask them if they can use you.”
“Tell him he can start right away,” the white men said when Jacob passed on the request. “We can use someone who knows the local landmarks.”
Jacob quickly made friends with the stranger, whose name was Caleb Loon, and passed the summer working alongside him by day and spending his evenings with him and his family. He enjoyed Caleb’s company and liked his wife, Betsy, a large, dark-skinned, heavy-set, good-humoured woman in her early thirties who was invariably dressed in a plain calico dress pulled over a pair of men’s pants and knee-high moccasins. He was happiest in the company of their daughter, Louisa, who was big-boned and tall like her mother and already a woman at the age of sixteen. She spent the evenings staring inscrutably into the fire as if she was thinking about matters so profound that she could never share them with anyone. While obviously too young for him, she was exactly the sort of girl he had always wanted to marry. Good looking when the flickering light of the campfire shone on her solemn face, she was, in his view, just like one of those unspoiled and unsullied Indian maidens who lived at the time of the ancestors.
Caleb and Betsy noticed Jacob’s interest in Louisa and questioned him closely about the life of his people in the south. They found it most interesting when he said most people owned their own houses on his reserve and spent their summers at the Indian Camp on the shore of a river in Muskoka where their kids swam and played in the water while their parents made good money selling handicraft and fish to rich white people. They were most attentive when he told them that he was still a bachelor at the age of thirty-seven.
“That’s not old,” Betsy said, smiling at Jacob. “I was only fifteen when I accepted Caleb’s marriage offer and changed my last name from Amick to Loon. And he’s thirty years my senior. It was the same with my parents. My father’s first wife had died and he was over fifty and my mother was sixteen when they got married. And it was a good marriage.”
By summer’s end, it was understood that Jacob would wed Louisa. The day after the first frost of the season, Betsy simply informed him that her daughter would marry him before they returned to their winter trapping grounds in the fall. Two weeks later, the members of the survey party ended their work for the season and returned to the railway station and from there by train to their homes in the south. Three weeks later, Louisa arrived at the railway station at the Rama Indian Reserve, and one week later she married Jacob.
It would not be a happy marriage. Jacob had mistaken damage for dignity and shyness. He would never discover that the decade Louisa had spent at residential school had crushed her spirit. From the age of six to sixteen, she had listened to teachers say that Indians had been godless savages before the arrival of the white man, and their ancestors, not having heard the Word of the Lord, were burning in Hell. She had been forbidden to speak her Indian language, her name had been replaced by a number, and she had been beaten by the nuns and sexually abused by the priests. She returned to her parents traumatized, having lost her culture and knowledge of life in the bush and knowing only a few words of Ojibwa. Her parents had been anxious to find a husband who could take care of her as soon as possible.
The summer after her marriage, Louisa gave birth to Stella in Jacob’s shack at the Indian Camp, and until her death six years later, she rejected her daughter. At first the other women thought she was just suffering with the sort of melancholy new mothers sometimes have after the birth of