Just after supper the day before, Stella had arrived on the steamer from the reserve in a bad mood. Her breath smelled of wine and she was carrying two suitcases filled with beaded moccasins lined with rabbit fur, porcupine quill boxes, souvenir toy tomahawks, and miniature birchbark canoes to sell to the tourists over the summer. When Jacob asked her how Old Mary’s family was coping after her death, she didn’t bother to reply but sat impatiently chain-smoking cigarettes at the table, looking out the window across the bay. Oscar had then taken a seat beside her and quietly mentioned that he had beat out the class-brain and won a book as a prize for being top student in the graduating class at the Port Carling elementary school. But his hope that she might say something nice to him, or perhaps look at him with an approving smile, was not to be. Shrugging her shoulders and frowning, she had blown out a mouthful of smoke and resumed her vigil without even glancing at him. Finally, late in the evening when it was already dark, and after muttering to no one in particular that she had “something to do,” she had gone out and headed up the path in the direction of the public wharf.
Oscar had slept fitfully throughout the ensuing night, bitten by the mosquitoes that came in through the screenless windows left open to provide some relief from the early summer heat, and worried that his mother would come to harm roaming around in the dark without her father or son to protect her. He now lay on his bed, his blanket pushed to one side, watching the shadows cast by the coal-oil lamp off the arguing adults flicker on the ceiling. His mother and grandfather were the two most important people in his life, and when they hurt each other, they made him feel that he was in some way responsible.
As he dressed on the shore, he thought of the way his mother had ignored him when he told her he had won the book prize. She must have known she was hurting his feelings but didn’t care. But then again, he shouldn’t have been surprised. She had been nasty to him for as long as he could remember, even though he always made a big effort to please her. He had often wondered why that was so. Sometimes he thought the death of his father had unhinged her mind and made her incapable of thinking straight. Other times, he suspected she somehow blamed him for his death. There were even times when he believed she still loved his father so much she was afraid to betray him by showing affection to her son. The possibilities were endless. The result was, however, that she drank too much and had affairs with men like Clem who beat her up.
In fact, Stella loved her son in her own way but was unable to express her true feelings to him. And for that, she blamed her father for turning her into a hardened and coarse human being. She had never forgiven him for leaving her in a residential school when she was a child of six, for not coming to see her, for not letting her go home for the summers, and for not answering the letters she sent him. She blamed him for the beatings and rapes she suffered at the hands of her supposed caregivers, for turning her into a classroom bully, and for the assault she suffered at the hands of the passing motorist when she finally fled the school. She blamed him for making her turn to the streets for her living, for making her stand outside in snow, rain, and scorching heat, her face garishly painted, smiling grotesquely at men cruising by looking over the women as if they were sides of beef. She blamed him for making her haggle with the johns who wanted to pay her fifty cents rather than the going rate for her services. She blamed him for the hangovers that greeted her in the mornings after drinking into the night to forget. She blamed him for having to accommodate the crooked cops who demanded her services for nothing. And most of all she blamed him for inducing her to marry someone she scarcely knew by telling her she would get a widow’s pension should he be killed in action.
But as much as she blamed her father for all the harm he had caused her, she blamed herself even more. Not long after the birth of Oscar, a sergeant in dress uniform accompanied by the local Presbyterian minister knocked at Jacob’s house on the reserve and handed her a telegram. “His Majesty’s Canadian government regrets to inform you,” she read, “that your husband, Private First Class Amos Wolf, was killed in action somewhere in northwestern France on August 16, 1917. God save the King.”
“Can I come in and pray with you for the soul of your husband,” the minister asked. But Stella slammed the door in his face. Several weeks later, the postman brought a letter informing her that she would receive a pension for life. Rather than being happy, she felt dirty and was filled with guilt for profiting from her husband’s death. Afterward, every time she looked at her baby, she saw herself in her son, and since she deserved to be hurt, he deserved to be hurt, and it was all she could do to prevent herself from picking him up and bashing him against a wall. Her attitude made no sense, but afraid of what she might do to him, she handed him over to Old Mary to look after as often as she could and went to Toronto to forget her troubles by drinking and partying with her old friends from the streets. It had been a relief when her father undertook to raise him for her.
3
Looking out across the bay, lost in thought, Oscar noticed in the moonlight the outline of the Amick moored to the government wharf. Clem was its captain, and as Oscar and everyone else in the village and the Indian Camp knew, he spent most of his free time drinking and carousing on board with his buddies.
That’s how my mother got those bruises, Oscar thought. Clem lured her on board, tempted her to drink too much, and beat her up in one of his drunken rages.
A wave of anger swept over him. He thought of the bullies who pulled down his pants when he was a little boy and of Gloria Sunderland who laughed at him. He thought of the Canadian government that sent his father to his death and of the settlers who took Obagawanung from his grandfather and his people. He thought of the teachers and kids who called him Chief at school, of the white people who gave him no respect because he was an Indian, of his grandfather who wouldn’t stand up for his rights and who just wanted to fit in, and above all he thought of Clem who had hurt his mother. He was thirteen, the age Old Mary said Chippewa boys became men and warriors in the old days. He was going to show the white people they couldn’t push this warrior around any more!
But he had no idea how to get even. And so, remembering the account of the battle for Hill 70 which he had read about in the book on the Great War he had borrowed from the library, he substituted daydreaming for action. It was August 1917, and he was a sergeant of the 48th Highlanders of Canada in a trench on the front lines waiting to attack the Germans dug into Hill 70. If the Canadians could take the objective, the Allies would break through the enemy lines and win the war. The artillery barrage, which had been going on for hours softening up the enemy positions, came to an abrupt halt and the commanding officer signalled to Oscar to lead the charge. Oscar raised his rifle to signal the others to follow him and crawled up and over the top. There was a moment of silence, and then the enemy opened fire with everything it had: artillery, mortars, machine guns, pistols, rifles, and canisters of poison gas. Men were falling all over the place. Some were running in a panic into barbed wire entanglements. Others were being blown to pieces and body parts were raining down. But he, brave Sergeant Oscar Wolf, was plunging ahead heedless of the danger, anxious to take his revenge against the Canadian government for sending his father to his death, against the bullies who had pulled down his pants, against everyone who had ever called him Chief, and against Clem for being mean to his mother.
All at once, his way was blocked by fire coming from a German machine-gun nest raking no man’s land, killing and wounding everyone in its path. To escape the deadly onslaught, he dove into a shell crater, sliding headfirst into a deep pool filled with decaying corpses. He rose to his feet and spit out the foul-tasting, putrid water and looked up to a scene from John McCrae’s “Flanders’s Fields,” which they recited during Remembrance Day ceremonies at school every November 11. Birds were flying across a brilliant blue sky among puffs of smoke from exploding artillery shells, and yet all was quiet. But Oscar had no time to spare staring up toward the heavens. There was a battle going on and the Canadian Corps needed him.
He clawed his way up the muddy side of the crater, and as he peered
