down dead. Really dead this time, from what, Clem didn’t know. Bullet? Piece of shrapnel? What difference did it make? He was dead and he wasn’t coming back. That’s when Clem decided the war was over for him; he crawled into a big shell crater to wait out the fighting. When things quietened down, he joined up with what was left of the regiment and told Jacob he had decided not to kill any more Germans and had hid out during the fighting. Jacob never had any use for him after that, but told him just the same to pretend to be suffering from shell shock and they’d send him home.
“If you don’t do what I say,” Jacob told him, “they’ll shoot you at dawn as a coward and I’ll have to tell your father what you did.”
And so Clem went looking for Stella down at the Indian Camp in early July in that summer of 1918. He found her looking out the open window of Jacob’s shack, went in, and told her that her husband had asked him to come see her if he was killed.
“So what’s his message?” Stella asked after giving him a beer.
“He didn’t give me no message in particular,” Clem told her. “We chummed around a bit and he talked a lot about his son, and I was with him when he was killed.”
“You came all the way down here just to tell me that!” Stella said.
“Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“No, I don’t. He’s dead and I don’t give a damn.”
“Are you sure?”
“Are you deaf or something? If you can’t take no for an answer, give me back my beer and take off.”
When Clem went home the next morning, he noticed for the first time the frilly lace curtains his wife had hung on the windows when he was fighting in France. He walked out, never to return. He realized that he had joined the army, not because his cousins and the other guys in Port Carling had already signed up, not because the Germans were bad and the British good, not because the Orange Lodge had said the Old Country and the Old Flag needed him, and not because his grandfather and father had told him to do his duty. He had enlisted to get away from his wife.
He had married her because she was pretty and liked to have fun and his cousins were getting married and his grandfather had told him it was time to do the same thing. But his new wife, who had agreed with his every action and utterance before their marriage, and who had thanked his parents profusely for buying and furnishing for them a small frame house with a good-sized veranda as a wedding gift, began to complain: “You drink too much. You don’t go to church. You don’t wipe your feet before you come in. You don’t take baths. You stay out late at night drinking. You stink up the house with your pipe. You fart. Your breath smells bad. You burp. You spit your wads of dirty, foul chewing tobacco anywhere. You don’t give me enough money to run the house. You won’t ask your father for a high-paying job in one of your family’s businesses. You won’t help out around the house. You won’t go to church …” and an unending stream of the same.
After a wild night with Stella, however, Clem was determined not to spend his life with someone he had never loved and who nagged him. He wanted to live with someone who preferred acting to thinking, who believed only in her animal nature and not in God or man, who drank until drunk and then woke up and drank some more, who knew more swear words than he did, who would rather make love than eat, who didn’t give a damn about what people thought of her, and who would certainly never think of putting curtains of any kind on the windows of his house.
His grandfather had left him some money and land within the village limits with a sparsely furnished dilapidated old house that had started life as a one-room log cabin built by a settler fifty years earlier. In the ensuing years, the pioneer had kept a cow or two, a few chickens, and a team of horses, and had scratched out a bare living as a teamster hauling logs out of the bush for lumber companies. When hard times came, he sold his holdings to Reg McCrum for next to nothing. Clem shared the money he had inherited with his wife and moved into the old house. As a favour to his father, who said that with most of the men still overseas, he had no one else to do the job, he became the master and storekeeper of the Amick on a temporary basis.
He told Stella he wanted her to come live with him at his new home.
“Bring the kid. I’ll be good to him.”
But she rejected his proposition, saying he wasn’t man enough for her, although she was always glad to see him when he called on her at the shack during the 1920s. And if he didn’t come to see her whenever she was at the Indian Camp, she would track him down and they would drink and fight together.
7
After Clem left, Oscar began to doze and soon lay down on the ground and drifted off into a dreamless sleep. He awoke the next morning before dawn to the strong smell of smoke and ashes in the humid night air, and with the conviction that his grandfather was inside the shack with a message for him. Jacob, he was well aware, was dead, but fatigue clouded his thinking, and so he got up, pushed open the door, and entered the building. But instead of his grandfather, something evil and repulsive lurking in the dark greeted him. He stumbled out, too shocked to be frightened, and went to the shore and sat down, his head in his hands.
He saw himself filling the can with coal oil, carrying it up the path in the dark, sneaking up to the Amick, spying on Clem, smashing the window of the general store, setting the building on fire, and running home in a panic after committing his dirty deed. He heard over and over again the clanging of the fire bells. He saw repeatedly the men battling the blaze, and worst of all, Jacob being dragged out by Clem and dying after his fruitless efforts to save Lily. Again and again, the events played out in his mind until he fell asleep from exhaustion and started to dream. Jacob was standing beside him on the shore and they were both looking out across the bay at the Amick.
“I’m sorry, Jacob,” he told his grandfather, “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I just wanted my mother to love me. You know what a wild imagination I have. I didn’t know what I was doing until it was too late.”
But Jacob, the grandfather who in life had never said an unkind word to him, had become angry and harsh in death.
“It was my shadow cursing you when you entered the shack tonight,” he said. “I am dead but my soul is not on its way to the Spirit World over the Milky Way. The Spirit World does not and never has existed despite what Old Mary told you. And there is no Christian heaven or hell despite what the preachers say. After death, our souls go to a no man’s land where they wander, bitterly conscious of their earthy transgressions, in an emptiness until the end of time. When you die, my grandson, you can look forward to sharing that place with me and Lily. And all of this death and destruction could have been avoided if you only had followed my advice and tried to fit in.”
“Why did you do such terrible things?” Jacob then asked, his eyes as dead as those of the Manido of the Lake. “Why, why, why,” he lamented, reaching down and shaking Oscar by the shoulder. “Why didn’t you try to fit in?”
Oscar awoke with someone shaking him and saying, “Why, why are you sleeping out here in the open?”
It was Reverend Lloyd Huxley of the Port Carling Presbyterian church.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Oscar, after everything you’ve been through,” he said, “but I came down here hoping to speak to your mother, but nobody answered the door and I
