The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  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 once thought my destiny was to help our people, Granny. Do you think I can still do that if I go to California?”

  “Your future will be decided by the Creator, no matter what you do or where you do it. And he wants you to be his trickster.”

  “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 st
aring 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 him to tell their own stories; how they too had joined up as soon as war had been declared, and how after their basic training at nearby Camp Borden, they had been among the first Canadian soldiers to be sent overseas to the giant Canadian base at Aldershot in England. Several had participated in the disastrous Canadian raid on Dieppe in German-occupied France in August 1942 and had been prisoners of war until the Allied victory in May 1945. Others had spent four years in England and fought their way ashore with the thousands of other Canadian soldiers in Normandy in June 1944 and participated in the major battles leading to Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Several had been wounded. No one mentioned the ones who had not made it back.

  “Since my father and grandfather had been in the 48th Highlanders,” Oscar said, resuming his story during a lull in the conversation, “I joined the same outfit, and after basic training was sent overseas to Britain with my regiment in 1941. In 1943, I went ashore at Pachino with the others in the invasion of Sicily. After we chased the Germans across the Straits of Messina, we landed on the Adriatic coast and drove them out of southern Italy. And like a lot of you guys, I finished the war in May 1945 and came home to go to university. I graduated a few months ago and accepted a job in the Foreign Service.”

  “But why the Foreign Service?” the wife of one of the veterans, who had also known Oscar in the old days, asked. “Whatever made you decide to become a diplomat when you could have become anything you wanted — a preacher, a teacher, a doctor — something that would let you serve our people?”

  “But being a foreign service officer will let me do that,” said Oscar. “And not just the Native people of Canada, but other people just like ours everywhere.”

  Oscar did not say that the process of choosing the diplomatic life as a career had begun one night in Italy in the fall of 1943. He was by that time a sergeant in a company of men advancing in the pouring rain in single file up a steep goat trail behind enemy lines. They were on their way to seize the high ground and cut off the supply lines of a German unit blocking the forward movement of the Eighth Army up the Adriatic coast. It was so dark that each soldier had to hold the shoulder of the man in front of him to avoid stepping off the path and tumbling down the side of the hill and alerting the enemy. Suddenly, the column came to a halt and word was passed back through the ranks from the commanding officer at the head of the column: “Get the Chief! He’s needed up front.”

  Oscar squeezed his way forward to where the commanding officer was waiting for him.

  “The guys say there’s a German guard post about fifty yards up ahea
d with a sentry standing in the doorway of a shed watching this trail. Your job is to take care of him as quietly as you can before he cries out. Otherwise his buddies will sound the alarm and we’ll all be in the shit.”

  Oscar nodded, removed his pack, set down his rifle, took off the pouches filled with grenades and ammunition attached to the combat webbing around his chest, and set off up the hill armed only with his combat knife with its ten-inch blade. Moving ahead warily, he stopped every few yards to listen for sounds of the enemy and to peer ahead in an attempt to penetrate the veil of black pouring rain. Finally, he saw a glow and the outline of a face as the German soldier on watch sucked on his cigarette. Crouching down, his knife grasped firmly in his right hand, he waited patiently as the face of the German soldier, slumped against the door jamb of the goat shed, lit up periodically as he puffed away, unaware that Oscar was only two yards from him. When the soldier finished his cigarette and tossed it casually outside into the rain, Oscar stepped forward, placed a hand firmly over his mouth, wrapped an arm around his head, twisted it sharply, and slit his throat before he could raise the alarm. He dragged the dying man outside into the rain, took his place in the doorway, and listened to the breathing and snoring of other members of the German squad sleeping inside. After fixing in his mind their numbers and locations, he went back down the trail, quietly provided the password to the soldier on watch, and reported to the commanding officer who sent a team of soldiers with fixed bayonets to deal with the Germans asleep in the hut.