friends if he intended to live under her roof, he cut off the ties with the kids he had grown up with from the reserve. When his classmates called him Chief, he pretended that that pleased him. When his grade nine teacher said that he should cut off his braid, “so as to not stand out,” he pretended the idea was a good idea and he cut off his cherished braid. When he was in grade ten and won a district public speaking contest, he pretended to be happy when the well-meaning chairman of the school board at the award ceremony embarrassed him by telling the crowd that the Huxleys had saved him from a life on the streets by taking him in after his drunken mother had discarded him like an unwanted dog. When he was in grade eleven and had grown into a six-foot three-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound, heavily muscled hockey player and the village crowd called him “Killer Injun” and told him to fight, he fought and pretended he liked beating in the heads of players from rival teams. And when Reverend Huxley arranged for him to enter Knox College in the fall of 1935 to study to become a missionary, he pretended that that was what he wanted to do.
Throughout the early thirties, Oscar was a familiar sight crossing the street each school day from the manse to stand in silence with the other high-school boys waiting for the bell announcing the beginning of the school day to ring. Sometimes, older students who had dropped out of school and gone off looking for work but had come home to visit their girlfriends and families for a few days before heading out again, would come by to gossip with their old buddies.
“You meet the damndest people out there riding the rails,” they would say, reluctantly admitting Oscar into the circle of their intimates. “Some are professional bums who wouldn’t take a job if it was offered to them. A lot of them say they’re from farm families out in the prairies who lost everything in the dust storms to get pity and handouts. Some are perverts on the prowl who take advantage of the kids in the boxcars. Most are just like the guys from around here, looking for work wherever they can get it, as long as it’s honest. All you gotta do to get started is get a bedroll and grub sack and hop a freight. Every so often you jump off and go door-to-door bumming sandwiches in exchange for yard work. Sometimes they’ll offer you some flour and eggs to make hotcakes. Sometimes, there’s work available for a few months in a logging camp or on a farm during harvest time. The pay is lousy, but the food is usually good. Eventually you’ll make your way to the border. That’s where you better be sure you’re well hidden in a boxcar when you cross over, since the railway cops are always on the lookout. Then once you’re on the other side, you gotta pretend you’re an American, for the folks down there don’t like foreigners taking advantage of their goodwill.
“Best place to go is California,” they would say. “Even though the place is overrun with starving Okies and Mexicans, you can usually find work picking cherries, apples, any sort of fruit and vegetables in season. It’s all piecework, and if you’re a good worker you can save a few dollars.”
They would then talk about the good times on the road. About kind-hearted small-town cops who let them sleep overnight in the cells and gave them big breakfasts in the morning as long as they cleared out and didn’t come back. About lonely wives who they claimed invited them in for a little lovemaking when their husbands were away at work. And about drinking cheap wine in hobo jungles and having the time of their lives.
But they had left home as boys and had returned as men with hard eyes as if they had seen things they didn’t want to talk about, or done things for which they were ashamed. While they pretended they could hardly wait to go back on the road, you could tell they just wanted to stay home and get married and settle down like their fathers had done when they were their age back when times were good.
Oscar would then join the others slouching up the steps to the high school as if they were proceeding to their executions rather than to the singing of “God Save the King” and the start of the school day. But Oscar’s reluctance was just an act. It was something designed to help him fit in and stay in the good graces of his classmates, many of whom were just putting in time until the Depression ended and the boys got jobs and the girls found husbands. In fact, Oscar loved school, and year after year was the outstanding student in his class. He was the only one who grasped abstract concepts easily, who had a feel for Latin and French, and who was able to talk intelligently to the English teacher about the books he was reading from the village library.
In time, his classmates began to treat him with wary respect; only Gloria Sunderland, embarrassed because she had laughed when the big boys had pulled down his pants so many years before, never spoke to him. He found it harder to establish good relations with Mrs. Huxley, who had made it clear to him from the outset that she wasn’t fond of Indians and had not been pleased when her husband brought him to live at the manse. He did everything he could to make her like him, handing over his wages to help run the household, cheerfully helping out around the house, escorting her to church on Sundays, sitting beside her in the family pew, getting down on his knees and praying passionately and insincerely at her side, and, with eyes uplifted, joining her in singing the great old hymns, especially “Shall We Gather at the River,” which through some buried memory always brought tears to his eyes.
At first Mrs. Huxley remained immune to his efforts, but one day she heard a knock on the front door followed by the sound of a woman speaking to Oscar.
“I’ve come to tell you that it wasn’t your fault, Oscar, and you shouldn’t blame yourself for Jacob’s death. I’m to blame. I should’ve been a better mother, but I was afraid of what might happen if we got too close.”
It was Oscar’s mother talking nonsense, and Mrs. Huxley moved quickly to deal with her.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wolf,” she said, stepping in front of Oscar and naturally being as polite as a minister’s wife could be. “But you’re not welcome here. Please go away and don’t come back.”
“But Oscar’s my son,” Stella said. “I need him and he needs me.”
“I doubt that very much,” Mrs. Huxley told her, noticing the white flecks of spit on her lower lip and her lopsided smile — sure signs, in her opinion, of alcoholism. “Oscar doesn’t want anything to do with you. And you’ve been drinking and don’t know what you’re saying anyway. You abandoned him just after he lost his grandfather in that terrible fire and we are taking care of him now. He’s a lovely boy who needs the type of care only we can give him, so please go away.”
“Tell her she’s wrong, Oscar,” Stella said to Oscar who was standing behind Mrs. Huxley in the hallway. “Tell her she’s wrong. I wasn’t always a good mother to you when you were small, but you’re my baby. Come home to Mama.”
But Oscar, whose mother had been dead to him ever since she had turned her back on him and boarded the steamer the day of the fire, and who was embarrassed by her display of drunken tears, turned and went upstairs to his room.
“See,” Mrs. Huxley told Stella. “He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t want to live the same awful life you lead. Now please leave before I call the constable.”
That was when Stella became really rude.
“Call the constable if you want,” she said, shouting and using a lot of bad words unfit to repeat. “Stealing my son, and you a minister’s wife! You probably can’t make a child of your own. Call the constable if you want and I’ll tell him what really happened the morning of the fire. You won’t think Oscar’s such a lovely boy then.”
Mrs. Huxley decided that she had heard quite enough and closed the door without saying goodbye, even if it wasn’t good-mannered to do so. There was no point in trying to argue with someone who had had too much to drink. “People like that are liable to say anything,” she told Oscar when she went to comfort him in his room.
Afterward, Mrs. Huxley couldn’t do enough for Oscar, for
