The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  “Thank you, Oscar. You don’t know how important that is to me. I’ll be able to sleep with that sin off my conscience. Now I’d like to get your help on something else. Before I get started, however, I wanted to tell you how pleased I am that you did something with your life. How many other poor Indian boys abandoned by their mothers after losing their caregiver grandfathers in a fire would have accomplished what you have? Imagine, going on to graduate top of your class at high school, becoming an actor in Hollywood, winning medals for bravery in the war, and becoming one of Canada’s most distinguished diplomats and a leading expert on the United Nations, Colombia, Australia, and South Africa. I am so proud of you!”

  Oscar looked away from the minister. Someone else was saying he was proud of him! Someone else was patronizing him! Someone else was giving him credit for something he had or hadn’t done. The only things he had done well in his life were drinking, womanizing, and fighting. He was now really upset and about to tell him to shut up, even if that meant he would be fired on the spot.

  But before he could get the words out, the minister said, “I understand, Oscar, that you’ve just come back from South Africa, and I need your help on a delicate matter. I just asked the undersecretary to prepare a proposal to put Canada in the lead among the nations of the world in the fight against apartheid — something that would enhance the status of the prime minister when he attends summit meetings. But he was unable to come up with anything, despite his best efforts and those of his experts. Do you think you can help me?”

  Oscar was in no mood to help. “I hope you don’t misunderstand me,” he said, after looking at the minister dubiously for a few seconds, “but are you mainly interested in getting some good publicity for the prime minister or are you truly interested in helping South Africa’s black people?”

  “What a strange thing to say, Oscar. Of course I’m interested in helping the people,” the minister said. “I want you … I want you,” he said, searching for exactly the right way to express his instructions, “I want you to come up with an initiative to ensure the oppressed black people of South Africa know that they are not alone in their misery.”

  “Then I have an idea you might wish to consider,” Oscar said, “It’s something I’ve thought about a lot ever since I came back from Pretoria. The prime minister is on record as saying that South Africa should adopt with its black people the same just and humane policies that Canada follows in its treatment of its Indian population. If you agree, Minister, I’ll organize a visit to a typical Canadian Indian Reserve for a group of influential South African journalists. They’ll see for themselves the results of Canada’s just and humane policies toward its Indian people. I guarantee their reports will cause a sensation.”

  “If I remember right, you brought a group of Australians to the Port Carling Indian Camp for the same purpose a few years ago, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right, Minister, but this time I’ll take them to a more representative reserve.”

  “Then you just go ahead and do it, Oscar, go right ahead. I want to make the prime minister happy.”

  2

  At Pickle Lake airport in northwest Ontario in early January of the following year, Sergeant Penny of the Ontario Provincial Police approached the passengers who had just come off a chartered flight. “Are you the people from South Africa I’m supposed to escort to the Osnaburgh Indian Reserve?” he asked. Oscar detached himself from the others and said that was indeed the case. They were journalists who were going to take pictures and write stories for their newspapers back home, and he was their liaison officer.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Penny said. “Today’s welfare day on the reserve and everyone’s spent the morning in Pickle Lake stocking up on booze. They’re now on the way home on the road and you’re not going to like what you see.”

  “What did I tell you,” Sergeant Penny said during the ten-mile bus ride to the reserve, as the journalists took pictures of men and women sitting half buried in the snowbanks as they drank from open wine bottles and tried to flag down passing cars for rides. Others were staggering along the snow-covered highway carrying cases of beer. Still others were sprawled out drunk on the side of the road.

  “It’s against the law for anyone to drink alcohol in public places, but I don’t have enough men to put a stop to it. And if we ever tried to take their booze from them, we’d soon have a drunken mob on our hands. So we just let them go to it and hope they don’t hurt themselves or each other.”

  The journalists by this time were puzzled: Was this the typical Indian reserve Oscar had promised to show them? Was this the reserve where they would see a model of progressive community development and harmonious race relations?

  “Are you sure we’re going to the right place?” someone asked Oscar, as they drove past a woman, no more than eighteen years old, up to her knees in the snow and being sick in the bushes.

  “Of course I’m sure. My mother’s family comes from here and I’ve been here before,” he replied, thinking it preferable not to mention that his previous visit was a quarter of a century ago.

  The bus turned off the highway and passed a cemetery overflowing with coffin-size mounds of snow and dirt on the side of the road leading to the band office.

  “What happened here?” someone asked when the bus driver stopped to let them out to take pictures, “a disaster of some sort? A big fire or bus crash?”

  “No,” said the sergeant, “more than three hundred people have died violent deaths on this reserve in the past ten years, and those are just some of the graves. They lost their traditional way of life and never learned to live in the modern world. They barely get by hemmed in on the reserve, and have nothing to do, day-in and-day-out, year-in and year-out. None of the mines and logging companies that took their lands wants them as workers, and the government gives them tiny welfare payments, just enough to keep them living in squalor. They take their frustrations out on themselves, beating and murdering each other when they’re drinking. They lie down on the railway tracks, hoping to get run over. They sleep in the snow hoping they will never wake up, and sometimes they get their wish. The teenagers don’t even wait until they’re drunk before they kill themselves. These reserves are hell-holes.

  “The suffering of the children bothers me the most,” he said. “They’re sent away each fall at the age of six to residential schools, and are only allowed home for visits at Christmas and during the summer. If the parents won’t let them go, we have to seize them and deliver them to the schools. It’s a part of the job no cop up here likes. Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a community of two thousand people where your hunting grounds have been taken from you and there are no children over the age of six and where every time a baby is born, you have to live with the knowledge that someday the government is going to come and take that child away. And how could you endure knowing that the teachers are beating and raping your sons and daughters and there’s nobody around to tuck them in at night?”

  The band office was a battered building with boarded windows and with graffiti messages scrawled on the outer walls saying White Fuckers Go Home, We Want to Die, and Jeannie Loves Joshua. Runny-nosed children, scarcely larger than toddlers and wearing neither hats nor mittens, stood passively in the snow. A pack of dogs, their ribs visible, circled around the visitors as they went up the steps to the landing.

  “I told the person who called that you wouldn’t be welcome if you came,” Chief Zebadiah Mukwah told the delegation. “We don’t want outsiders coming to take pictures and gawk at our misery. So get back in your bus and leave our territory.”

  “But I’m not an outsider,” Oscar said. “My grandmother, Louisa, came from here. And her mother, Betsy Loon, one of your Band members, is my great-grandmother. We’ve stayed in touch over the years and she’s invited me to come and see her whenever I wanted. I’m the organizer of the delegation and wanted to show them her home.”

  “Well, okay, if you�
�re Betsy’s great-grandson, you might as well stay. Go on over to her place to say hello if you want, but I still don’t want to talk to your delegation.”

  Betsy was sitting in a rocking chair close to the stove standing in the middle of the room when Oscar knocked and entered her one-room shack. Two frost-encrusted single-pane windows and a lit oil lamp resting on an orange crate provided the only light. There was a bucket in one corner with human waste in it and another one on the floor near the door filled with drinking water. Half a loaf of white bread, a few cans of soup, a package of baloney, a can of condensed milk, an open container of margarine, and a jar of strawberry jam sat on the table. A dog came out from under the table growling and showing its teeth, but after sniffing Oscar wagged its tail and returned to its place.

  “It’s me, Granny,” Oscar said, “I’ve come to say hello.”

  Betsy did not move and Oscar thought she was dead. Coming closer, however, he saw her eyes open and focus on his face.

  “Caleb,” she said, “Caleb, is that really you?”

  “No, Granny, I’m Oscar, Louisa’s grandson. I came to see you before the war.”

  “Oh, Oscar,” she said, smiling. “It’s so good of you to visit an old woman like me.”

  “I’ve wanted to visit with you for years,” he said. “But I didn’t have the chance until now. I’ve got a delegation of South Africans with me. They’re from a country in far-off Africa. Could you meet them? They want to know how our people live.”

  “Of course, Oscar, whatever you say. I don’t care where they come from as long as you know them. They’re welcome to come in and take pictures if they want, but there’s not much to see and not much room. But first let’s have a cup of tea and talk a little. Tell me what you’ve really been up to since we last met.”

  As the others waited outside in the bus, Oscar made tea and told Betsy things about his time in San Diego, in the army, and in the Foreign Service that he wouldn’t have wanted to put in his letters to her.

  “Now tell me,” Betsy said, after laughing at Oscar’s stories, “What’s the real reason you’ve brought these strangers to the reserve?”

  When Oscar merely smiled and said nothing, she asked, “You don’t know the answer to my question, do you? The Creator is still using you as his trickster to get a laugh.”

  “This time I know what I’m doing, Granny, and for once I know why I’m doing it.”

  Epilogue

  The following morning, the stories filed by the journalists were front page news in South Africa. The president himself, with barely concealed satisfaction during a hastily convened press conference in Pretoria, expressed his outrage at the inhumane manner the Canadian government treated its Red Indians. “I hope,” he added, “the Canadian prime minister will clean up his own act before he ventures once again to criticize South Africa’s policies of separate development for its white, black, coloured, and Asian peoples.”

  The Canadian Press filed a report that was picked up by newspapers across Canada and around the world. Columnists from the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, and the International Herald Tribune, who usually considered developments in Canada too boring to merit their notice, paid attention. In their articles, they said it would be a long time before members of the international community took Canada seriously again when it professed concern for oppressed peoples. Journalists by the dozen hurried to the Osnaburgh Indian Reserve where Chief Zebadiah Mukwah took them on a tour, including a lengthy visit to speak to Betsy at her home, to expose the living conditions of his people. Two days later, after receiving a full report from officials of the Department of Indian Affairs, the prime minister telephoned Minister McCaully and summarily dismissed him for letting himself be hoodwinked by one of his officers. And as soon as Oscar got back to Ottawa, the undersecretary summoned him to his office and fired him.

  But the opposition parties during Question Period in the House of Commons combined to attack the government, not for displaying bad judgement in facilitating the visit of a delegation of South African journalists to one of Canada’s most impoverished and troubled reserves, but for allowing such terrible conditions to exist in Canada in the first place. Editorial writers demanded the reinstatement of the minister, church leaders delivered sermons, and schoolchildren waving placards condemning the government’s treatment of Indian Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill. When a national campaign of prayer breakfasts began, the prime minister asked Joseph McCaully to come to see him in his office in the Centre Block and restored him to his former position.

  In Johannesburg, Bishop Tumbula read the press reports and chuckled when he saw Oscar’s name. Ambassador Henderson sent a personal message to his patron, the prime minister, proposing that Canada adopt a policy of apartheid along the South African model to deal with the Indians since obviously assimilation was not working; he was fired by return telegram for his pains. In the sunny breakfast nook of her Forest Hill home, Claire smiled as she read the same stories in the Globe and Mail. In Canberra, Reverend Mortimer, Father Murphy, and Captain Fletcher held an emergency meeting of the commission behind closed doors and quietly removed from their final report all reference to Canada and all things Canadian such as residential schools. And back at Port Carling, Reverend Huxley and James McCrum, drinking coffee together in the basement of the Presbyterian church after Sunday services, agreed that there had been a divine purpose to the Great Fire after all.

  No one in the Department, however, called Oscar to cancel his dismissal, but he wasn’t upset. When he had proposed taking the journalists to the reserve, he had known he would be fired when their reports were published. He wouldn’t be a martyr, as he had dreamed of becoming when he was a boy, dying for his cause like Tecumseh fighting the Americans in the War of 1812, or John Brown battling to free the slaves at Harper’s Ferry. But he would be offering up what was left of his career as a sacrifice to strike a blow against everyone, everywhere, who continued to deprive Aboriginal people of their dignity. That goal had been accomplished, and he would now leave Ottawa and spend his remaining years at the Rama Indian Reserve surrounded by his own people. He would wear his hair in braids. He would become friends with his mother and Rosa. He would beg the forgiveness of James McCrum for torching his store. He would apologize to Reverend Huxley and his wife for deceiving them. Perhaps in so doing he would finally atone for the harm he had done to others all his life.

  Two weeks later, after cancelling the lease on his apartment and packing his few belongings into his car, Oscar left Ottawa to start his new life. It was by now late January, the sky was cloudy with sunny breaks, the snow was four feet deep in the bush, and the snowbanks were so high he couldn’t see over them as he drove through the Algonquin Highlands and into the District of Muskoka. And as he drove, the words to “Shall We Gather at the River” came to him unbidden and repeated themselves over and over again in his head. But rather than being irritated by their insistence to be heard, he felt strangely happy and at peace with himself for the first time in years. It was time, he thought, to return to the embrace of the Christian God and reconnect with the Holy World of Old Mary.

  Turning off the highway running through Port Carling, he took the new road that went up and over the ridge to the Indian Camp, hoping to speak to Rosa and his mother before he continued on to the reserve. To his surprise, the path to the shack had not been shovelled, and the building was encased in snow drifts that lay deep on the roof, against the door, and up to the casements of the windows. No one was living there, but he wanted to visit the old summer home of his grandfather just the same.

  He parked his car, got out, and struggled through snow up to his waist to the door. Using his hands, he dug down until he found the handle, turned it, and pushed hard. It swung inward, dumping him and a load of snow onto the floor. When he tried to rise to his feet, a blinding light struck him in the face and forced him to lie back, close his eyes, and cover them with his hands. But the light radiated through his hands and eye
lids and grew ever stronger, and he felt the presence of something as otherworldly and awesome in its power as the ghostly being he had encountered on first entering the shack after the Great Fire of 1930. Jacob was there in the room with him, he was certain, and not just his shadow. Somehow his grandfather had managed to come back from the Land of the Spirits to forgive his beloved grandson for setting the fire that had killed him and Lily. It was the redemption he had been seeking for more than three decades.

  Opening his tear-filled eyes, he smiled when he saw that the sun had broken through the clouds and its radiance was reflecting through the windows off the snow. But when he sat up and looked outside, he saw, to his horror, the Manido of the Lake shimmering like a mirage in the light, laughing at him.

  Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with James Bartleman

  The protagonist in your first novel, As Long as the Rivers Flow, is Martha Whiteduck, a Native woman seeking to regain her sense of self and humanity after a decade of abuse at the hands of her teachers and a priest at an Indian residential school in Northern Ontario in the latter half of the twentieth century. As we follow her touching personal story, we learn that she returned to her reserve broken in spirit, hardly able to speak her own language, and without the skills needed to raise her own children after spending so many years in an institutional setting. We learn that a suicide epidemic among Native youth has been ongoing for decades out of sight and out of mind of mainstream society among the children of residential school survivors. As we get to know Martha better, we learn about the suffering of Native people in modern Canada and their attempts to heal themselves. Do you have a similar social justice theme for The Redemption of Oscar Wolf?

  Yes, I do. Several in fact. My new novel traces the life of a Native person, Oscar Wolf, from boyhood to middle age as he seeks to find redemption for a terrible crime he committed in a fit of misguided rage against white society when he was only a teenager. Many of the underlying themes deal with Native issues, in particular the need to come to terms with the loss of ancestral lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ongoing struggle to achieve equality in a society that looks upon Native people in stereotypical ways. But at its heart, the novel deals with issues common to everyone, whatever their racial or cultural background, such as maternal and spousal love, the desire for revenge, the search for meaning in life, anger against God and the Native Creator, Divine Providence, hubris, pride, hate, miserliness, generosity, and the need for redemption. It could be described as a parable of Native life in mid-century Canada and around the world.