Not long afterward, the police came with rifles and told the people they had to go, and they loaded whatever they could carry in their birchbark canoes and departed. Most would leave for a reserve on a rocky island on Georgian Bay and a life of poverty, but a few, including Jacob and his family, went to the Rama Indian Reserve seventy miles to the south where they had family to help them.
Jacob never forgot the white people standing on the shore cheering their expulsion, nor the huge piles of logs and brush burning on both sides of the river as they paddled away. His father told him the white people were making the point to the Chippewas that they could never return to their homes, that their time was over and that the time of the settlers had come. It was of little comfort to Jacob that the government later created a tiny reserve called the Indian Camp where his people could spend their summer months within the boundaries of the newly incorporated white village of Port Carling. If anything, it made him feel worse, since each time he paddled by the site of his former home he was assailed by thoughts of what his life might have been like if only the white people had shown his people some compassion.
6
An hour later, the sun was up, the wind had died down, and the ground was white with hoar frost. As they rounded a bend in the river, the two paddlers smelled wood smoke in the air and off in the distance they had their first view of Port Carling, a cluster of clapboard houses on both sides of the river, their windows framed with white-lace curtains and their backyards filled with chicken coops, privies, and half-empty woodsheds.
Twenty minutes later, they paddled past the Amick, a steam-powered supply boat owned by Jacob’s employer, James McCrum, moored to the government wharf. When the tourist season began, it would start its rounds delivering groceries, ice, and sundries to its well-off clients on the surrounding lakes. Up the hill, on the road leading off the bridge that spanned the Indian River, was the village business section, a row of one- and two-storey frame buildings with high false fronts to make them appear bigger than they were. On the other side of the bay, visible from the government wharf but cut off from the rest of the village by a ridge, were the two dozen one-room shacks of the Indian Camp where Oscar and his grandfather would spent the next six months.
A few minutes later, they pulled their canoe up onto the shore and Jacob took out a key to unlock the door to the shack he had built after he had married Louisa. The door, however, was ajar. Someone had entered over the winter months, but nothing, it seemed, had been stolen. The beds and mattresses, the linoleum-covered table pushed up against the window facing the lake, the chairs, the old cook stove, the pots and pans hanging from nails on the bare studs, the axe and saw, the woodbox, and the cutlery and crockery in the orange crates scavenged at the village dump and used as cupboards remained as they had been left the preceding fall. The smell of stale ashes, wood smoke, coal oil, and last year’s fried fish meals hung in the air. Sunlight streamed in through the windows devoid of curtains and blinds, but the building was cold and damp.
Oscar followed his grandfather into the shack and quickly checked his precious collection of books, bought with the money he had earned in past summers washing windows and sweeping walkways at nearby tourist cottages. His copies of the lives of Tecumseh and John Brown, and his illustrated copies of Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island were still there, he saw to his relief. So, too, were the two used volumes of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and his collection of books written by veterans on the Great War. Nothing had been touched. He pulled from the woodbox a copy of the Toronto Star dated August 1, 1929, its fading headlines still proclaiming “Stock Market Crash, Dozens Jump to Their Deaths on Wall Street,” stuffed it into the stove, added dry kindling, and lit a fire.
Jacob returned to the canoe, retrieved the lake trout and cleaned and filleted it on the shore, tossing its guts to the seagulls that came swooping in, crying raucously to be fed. By the time he returned to the shack carrying the fillets, Oscar had unpacked the food supplies brought from the reserve and put the kettle on to boil. He picked up the heavy, fire-blackened cast iron frying pan that had been in the family for generations, placed it on the stove, scooped a big tablespoon of lard from its can, and spread it with his fingers over the cooking surface. While he was occupied with these tasks, Jacob rolled the fillets in flour and eased them into the lard that had started to boil and spit. Oscar quickly cut two boiled potatoes into slices and dropped them into the simmering mix. A short while later, grandfather and grandson, wearing their coats at the table, drank their tea and ate their breakfast in silence. Jacob then glanced at his pocket watch and left for the guest house, looking forward to meeting his friends from the village whom he had not seen since the previous fall.
“Don’t worry about making dinner,” he said as he went out the door, “I’ll pick up a few things at the store and I’ll see you when I get back from work.”
Oscar finished his meal, washed the dishes, and took a seat by the window. In a few minutes, he would trudge up the hill through the snow on the north-facing ridge and go down the sunlit slope on other side to the four-room combined elementary and high school, each with its separate entrance. The big boys from the high school would be standing just outside school property by the gate leading to their entrance, their shirt collars turned up against the cold. They would be shifting their weight from foot to foot, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes or chewing tobacco and spitting the wads on the ground as they waited for the bell to ring calling them to class. The big girls would already be inside their classrooms combing and brushing their hair, gossiping and organizing themselves for the day ahead.
In the playground of the elementary school, the girls would be skipping rope and chanting a rhyme they repeated endlessly at this time of the year.
Down by the river, down by the sea,
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.
I told ma, ma told pa,
Johnny got a spanking so ha ha ha.
The boys would be horsing around, playing marbles and kicking a soccer ball, but they would not invite Oscar to join in. He would go inside and ask the teacher if he could attend classes for the rest of term. The teacher would say yes, as he always did when Oscar appeared at his door at this time of year. He seemed to like Oscar, but, with a mocking smile never called him by his name, always addressing him as Chief. The kids called him Chief, as well, but never with a smile. To them, he was the outsider, even if most of them treated him with good-natured tolerance. Several others, big raw-boned members of an old pioneer family, however, called him a dirty Indian and had been bullying him for years. Once when he was a seven-year-old in grade two and fought back, they had ganged up on him, threw him to the ground, and pushed his face into the dirt.
“Say ‘I’m a dirty Indian,’” they said, “and we’ll let you go.” But Oscar refused to give in, and his tormentors yanked him to his feet, and, as two of them held his arms, a third pulled down his pants to show off his underwear.
“Wanna see this Redskin’s dick?” the older of the two asked the kids who had gathered around.
“I would,” Gloria Sunderland, the butcher-shop owner’s daughter said with a smirk. And after the big boys pulled down his underwear, Oscar ran back to the shack at the Indian Camp in tears to tell his grandfather what had happened. He expected Jacob would immediately go up to the school to tell those kids never to touch his grandson again or he would teach them a lesson they would never forget. And if their fathers got mad and came down to the Indian Camp to complain, his grandfather would pull their pants down to let them know how his grandson had felt when their sons had done that to him. After all, Jacob had killed Germans with his bare hands and was a war hero and had the medals to prove it. Dealing with the fathers of a couple of bullies in Port Carling shouldn’t be all that hard.
But his grandfather took him by the hand and led him to the shore and sat down with him on a piece of driftwood. “I have seen and learned a lot of things in my life,” he said. “To avoid torturing and