house late in the evening were singing the reassuring old gospel hymns in the language of their ancestors. The light of a solitary coal-oil lamp at the head of the open coffin threw a shadow down over her body, softening the gaunt features of her face, making her look decades younger and bringing a look of peace to someone who had spent the last weeks of her life in agony. It did the same for the other old people in the room, ironing out the creases on their foreheads, erasing the wrinkles on their dark brown, leathery cheeks, and concealing the slack flesh on their necks. There was a smell of decay mixed with sweetgrass in the room. The mood was one of calm and acceptance. There was no weeping. Old Mary had outlived three husbands and two grown children and her time had come. And yet her death still hurt. It was like an ancient tree, a landmark in the history of the community, unexpectedly crashing to the ground, leaving a massive empty space in the lives of the people.
Jacob Musquedo, his hair as black as ever despite his sixty-seven years, sat quietly near the door, anxious to leave. Stella, who had grown into a massive middle-aged woman of some two hundred and fifty pounds and who had prepared the body for burial earlier in the day, stared morosely at the flame of the lamp. Only Oscar, now thirteen years old, his hair pulled back and twisted into one thick black braid and with black watchful eyes set in his dark, high-cheek-boned face, sang along with the others. He was there mainly because he wanted to be close to his mother whom he loved but who did not love him. He was also there because he had been a friend of Old Mary and had often gone to her house on winter evenings to eat hot fried bannock, to drink tea with sugar and condensed milk, and to listen to her talk about the world of her youth.
“When I was a little girl,” she used to say, “we believed in Giche Manitou, the Creator, and not in the God of the Christians. We believed in Madji Manitou, the evil spirit, and not in the devil of the Christians. We believed that all things, animals, stones, water, and everything visible and invisible possessed souls, just as humans did. We believed that a monstrous seven-headed serpent with eyes the size of dinner plates inhabited the lakes of the Chippewa homeland in Muskoka. We believed that Mother Earth was Turtle Island and that it had come into being from a grain of sand carried by a muskrat to the surface of the sea without beginning or end. We believed that the Milky Way was the handle of a bucket holding up Turtle Island. We believed that the first humans emerged from the dead bodies of animals and were first cousins of the animals.”
Oscar always felt a tremor of fear run down his spine when Old Mary’s eyes began to glisten and she went on to tell tales of witches, shape-shifting bearwalkers, cannibalistic Windigos, and other evil beings that owed their allegiance to Madji Manitou and who roamed the Earth doing harm to humans. He much preferred her accounts of the battles his people had fought over the years. He became a war chief when they drove the invading Iroquois from their hunting grounds; he became Pontiac when Chippewa warriors captured British fort after British fort at the end of the Seven Years’ War; he was at the side of his great-grandfather fighting the Americans in the War of 1812; and he was with his father and grandfather fighting the Germans in the Great War. In every one of these engagements, he saw himself as the hero battling impossible odds to impress his mother and gain her admiration and affection.
At eleven-thirty, Jacob signalled to Oscar that it was time to depart, and grandfather and grandson went around the room, taking their leave of the mourners sitting in chairs pushed back against the walls. But Stella, when they came to her, refused to take their outstretched hands and looked away. They murmured their goodbyes anyway and went quietly to the door, picked up their packs, left the property, and started down the gravel road to the railway station.
Suddenly, a half-dozen dogs burst out into the starlight from behind a house and ran barking toward them, but they fled whimpering back into the darkness when Jacob picked up a rock and hurled it in their direction. His seasonal job as a handyman at the McCrum and Son Guest House at the Muskoka village of Port Carling, close to his summer home at the Indian Camp, started the next morning at eight o’clock. He and Oscar needed to catch the midnight train to Muskoka Wharf Station at Gravenhurst at the bottom of Lake Muskoka and paddle throughout the night if he was to report for work on time. James McCrum, the proprietor, wouldn’t care whether or not there was a death in the family or a pack of dogs blocking his way and would probably fire him if he was late.
Thirty minutes later, they smelled the creosote of railway ties and off in the distance heard the shriek of a steam whistle. Quickening their pace, they reached the station just before the locomotive, shaking the rails and pulling two dozen passenger and freight cars, its headlight cutting a path through the night, came thundering around the curve of Lake Couchiching. It had left Toronto four hours earlier and was on time.
With a hiss of air brakes, a cloud of coal smoke, grease, and soot, the train came to a jerking stop. The door at the rear of a coach opened and the conductor, a lantern in his hand, peered out into the gloom in search of passengers. He kicked down the stairs when he saw Jacob and Oscar standing on the platform.
“Tickets, please,” he said, when they came aboard, holding out his hand to take and punch them. “It’s dark in here,” he whispered as he lighted the way with his lantern and led them into an overheated coach filled with sleeping passengers and reeking of sweat, stale food, and cigarette smoke. Coming to two empty places, he said, “These should suit you fellows. Stow your gear on the racks above your heads. You’ll be getting off at the next stop.”
Oscar took the seat closest to the window and sat silently in his separate world as the locomotive, panting with enormous gasps of steam like some primeval dragon preparing for combat, its driving rods pounding and its giant wheels straining as they turned, pulled out of the station. Scraping a peephole in the frost covering the inside of the window, Oscar looked out at the starlit countryside as the train picked up speed and hastened forward at sixty miles an hour. He thought back to the wake, to the single mesmerizing coal-oil lamp casting its soft light over Old Mary’s body and the elders in the room who had seen and done so much in their long lives.
What had the old people been thinking? Were they recalling the days when Old Mary was young and they were young? Remembering the days when the families had returned from their winter hunting and trapping grounds in the spring to spend the summers together at the Narrows where Lake Simcoe emptied into Lake Couchiching? The days when they would talk about births and deaths and finding the perfect person to marry? The days when the ancestors undertook spirit quests, when they gathered sweetgrass for ceremonies, and when they held community feasts? Or, as they looked at Old Mary in her plain pine coffin, were they mourning the loss of their youth and counting the days until his mother appeared at their homes to wash their dead bodies and put them on display in plain pine coffins in their living rooms?
And what meaning did Old Mary’s death have for him, for Oscar Wolf, his head pressed against the window staring out through the opening in the frost as the train raced through railway crossings empty of traffic, its wheels clicking ever more rapidly on the rails, and its whistle wailing? He was sad because Old Mary had been his friend and was now no more. But at the same time, for some unexplainable reason, her death made him feel more alive than ever and astonished at the wonder of existence.
“You owe your birth to blind luck,” Jacob once told him when he was a little boy, “since your parents knew each other for only two weeks before your father went overseas and was killed.”
Oscar at first had accepted his grandfather’s judgement, but as he grew older and started to think for himself, he came to the conclusion that luck had nothing to do with it. Divine Providence was the cause. In contrast to Old Mary, perhaps because he regularly attended church, he believed in the Christian God as well as the Native Creator and felt their presence when he said his prayers before he went to bed and at church during Sunday services. They had put him on Mother Earth for a purpose, he was sure. And although that purpose would only be revealed in the fullness of time, he liked to think he was destined to do great things for his people someday.
