black pit and ran as he had never run before, only to trip over a root in the dark and nose-dive to the ground. He struggled to his feet, his face bruised and bloody, and dashed ahead again recklessly in terror. He veered off the path into a tangle of chest-high ferns and burdocks, stumps of long dead and fallen trees, low-hanging branches, and sharp-thorn blackberry brambles that scratched his arms and legs. After thrashing around wildly in the dark for minutes that seemed like hours, Oscar stumbled back to the path, lost his footing again, and fell down, skinning his knees and elbows. He crawled, he scrambled, he limped, and he blubbered in fright, imagining that he was being pursued by all manner of monsters, eager to claim him as one of their own after the evil he had done that night. He pushed himself ahead as fast as he could, but his legs were leaden, his arms were frozen, his breath was laboured, and his body was drenched in sweat. He thought he would never reach home.
5
Panting from fear and exhaustion, Oscar threw open the door of the shack and stepped inside. Jacob and Stella looked at him through a fog of cigarette smoke.
“What are you doing out of bed at this time of night?” asked his mother, her words slurred, irritated that a third party had interrupted her never-ending quarrel with her father. “Come over here and let me have a look at you.”
As Oscar approached, she grabbed his arm and slapped his face, bringing tears to his eyes.
“That’s for not being in bed when I came in.”
She slapped him again, this time harder.
“That’s for not being here when I needed you tonight after I drank a little too much with Clem and tripped in the dark and hurt myself.”
“Leave him alone,” said Jacob. “He was here when you came in and went out for a walk. He’s a good boy.”
“Oh, no he isn’t,” his mother said, staring with glassy eyes at her son. “Nobody goes out for walks this late at night unless he’s up to no good. He looks like he’s been in a fight and he stinks of coal oil. What have you been doing anyway? Stealing something? I wouldn’t put it past you.”
She swung at him again, but this time he ducked.
“And stop looking at me like that, you little bastard. You want me to give you more of the same?”
Oscar jerked his arm free, stumbled to the door, and ran outside, his face stinging. It wasn’t Clem’s fault after all! He started running in a panic back up the path toward the village to put out the fire, but soon slowed down and stopped. He’d seen the flames spreading across the floor, and at that very moment they were probably consuming the building from the inside. He turned and walked slowly back to the shack, but hesitated at the door, afraid to go in and face his mother again. He heard the loud voices of his mother and grandfather through the open windows.
“I don’t know what you got against Clem, but he’s a good man,” he heard his mother say to Jacob.
“If you knew him like I do you wouldn’t think that,” Jacob replied. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy when he spent his time spearing frogs and tormenting dogs and cats. I served with him overseas and know for a fact that he was a yellow-bellied coward and ran away from the fighting. He wasn’t a real man and a hero like Amos.”
“Clem’s twice the man Amos ever was,” Stella said. “Marrying him was the worst mistake I ever made. I never should have listened to you.”
Oscar flinched, shocked that his mother would say such a thing about his father. Not wanting to hear her next revelation, he went to the shore and stood at the water’s edge, his eyes full of tears, not knowing what to do next. Without warning, the bells of the Anglican church on the ridge overlooking the Indian Camp began to clang, jarring the silence of the night. The bells of the Presbyterian church answered from a hilltop elsewhere in the village and were soon joined by those of the United church, all delivering angry, cacophonic messages of impending tragedy, telling the people that some evil, foreign presence was abroad setting fires in their beloved community. On Sunday mornings, the three sets of bells conveyed coordinated messages of Christian charity and harmony as they called the faithful to worship. Now they echoed harshly, frantically throughout the village and up and down the river, summoning every able-bodied man and boy within earshot to rise from their beds and rush to fight the common enemy.
Then, off in the distance, Oscar saw a glimmer of light that grew in power until it rivalled the moon in its intensity. The bells continued to peal, now calling, now shouting, now announcing to the world that he, Oscar Wolf, thirteen-year-old Chippewa youth from the Rama Indian Reserve, who had just been honoured by the school principal with a book prize for being the grade eight student with the highest marks of the graduating class at the Port Carling elementary school, had done wrong and had disgraced the memory of his father. They declared to all that slinking around in the night and setting fire to the property of hard-working, innocent people was the work of an outlaw and a thief. They told him that no Native warrior or Canadian soldier would have stooped to such cowardly acts.
Overcome with the impact of his mother’s revelation of her feelings about his father, unable to bear the wickedness of his actions, and afraid the constable was already coming to arrest him, Oscar waded fully clothed into the river. He hoped the water would swallow him up, make his problems disappear and take him somewhere where he could start his life all over again. When the water reached his chest, he stopped and looked back at the yellow light of the coal-oil lamp flickering on the pane of the shack’s front window. Perhaps his mother or grandfather would come out and tell him he was just having a bad dream. When no one came out, he dove deep down into the dark waters of the bay and began swimming under the water and away from the shore, his eyes open but seeing nothing. When he could hold his breath no longer, he rose to the surface and swam farther and farther out away from the shore.
Chapter 3
THE FIRE
1
James and Leila McCrum were not unduly alarmed when they heard the fire bells of the three churches pealing before dawn that Sunday morning. Hotels around the lakes were always burning down, and there was little anyone could do about it. A guest would fall asleep with a lit cigarette or pipe, and the first thing you knew the tinder-dry wood building would be on fire. If there was time, someone would crank the telephone to appeal for help from the party-line operator on duty at the telephone office in Port Carling. She would call around until she found someone to go to one of the churches to pull the rope that rang the fire bell, which, as everyone in the village knew, was the shorter of the two that hung in the foyer; the longer one was to call the people to worship. The members of the volunteer fire brigade would assemble in front of the town hall, the Fire Chief would brief them, and everyone would crowd into cars and trucks and leave to fight the fire.
Since the firemen only had axes, shovels, and buckets as equipment, and since it took sometimes more than an hour over poorly maintained gravel roads to reach the distant hotels, there was often little they could do when they got there. They usually just joined the guests outside on the lawns watching the structure burn, hoping everyone had escaped. Occasionally, they managed to run in and save a few pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac that they kept for themselves if no one was looking. Or, if there were witnesses, they carried their acquisitions outside and set them down out of harm’s way where everyone could see them. If the fire was in the village, however, the bucket-brigade sometimes saved a building and that was good for everyone’s morale.
“It must be quite a fire,” James said. “I’ve never heard the fire bells of all three churches ringing at the same time.”
He
