Oscar pushed off from the shore and began his journey downstream toward the mouth of the river. Smoke still rose from the ashes of the business section, but teams of workers were already at work clearing away the debris, the first steps to rebuilding. The Amick, it seemed, was doing a good business, judging by the number of shoppers on the wharf waiting to go in to make their purchases. All along the shore, summer residents were sunning themselves on their docks or going about their business in their motorboats. Crows and seagulls circled leisurely in the sky, on the lookout for the carcasses of fish and animals to eat. And when he emerged from the river and paddled out onto Lake Muskoka, Oscar saw children playing on the shore below the hidden grave of Jacob’s grandfather. Life was returning to normal.
It was the first time Oscar had travelled on the lake since the trip he had made just two months before with Jacob from Muskoka Wharf Station to the Indian Camp, when a fierce cold wind had rattled the ropes of the flagpoles at the deserted summer homes on Millionaires’ Row. At that time, the Manido of the Lake had been massive and forbidding in the cold light of early dawn. Now, in the bright sunlight and calm waters of the late June morning, it had turned into a sad, helpless old deity, no different than the rock from which it had arisen, out of place in the modern world ruled by the white man.
“Oh Great Manido,” Oscar said doubtfully, throwing a pinch of tobacco onto the water and raising his arms in supplication as his grandfather used to do. “In trying to get even with the white man and gain the love of my mother, I brought about the deaths of Jacob and a white girl. Jacob’s shadow then came to me in a dream, cursing me and telling me that after death there is neither heaven nor hell, nor a spirit world beyond the Milky Way. Send me a sign, Oh Great Manido, to let me know that it was mistaken.”
The deity stared at him, sluggish and indifferent to his appeal. Oscar threw more tobacco into the lake and repeated his prayer, but the statue remained unmoved.
Maybe, Oscar thought, after waiting in vain for a response, the Manido is really just a piece of rock and its powers come from people who want to believe it’s a god. Maybe Jacob’s shadow, which came in a dream with its message of hate and which chased me back to the manse after I went to it seeking forgiveness, is just a figment of my imagination. Maybe all Native devils, shadows, ghosts, and witches are just inventions people made up years ago to scare children. Maybe the Christian God, the Devil, and the saints are man-made imaginings.
In a moment of epiphany, Oscar realized that if neither God nor the Creator nor all the panoply of lesser spirits existed, then he needn’t fear spending eternity in Hell. He wouldn’t have to pay for his earthly sins in the hereafter. He decided at that instant that Old Mary had been wrong, his Sunday school teachers had been wrong, the Presbyterian ministers on the reserve and in Port Carling had been wrong. There was no such thing as Divine Providence. There was no need for him to fear the wrath of God and Jacob’s shadow.
“You don’t exist, you never have. Now leave me alone!” he shouted out angrily at the sky. But as he did so, he understood he would never receive divine help to deal with the sorrow and guilt that plagued his waking and sleeping hours. But when he turned his canoe and began to paddle away, he heard the Manido of the Lake laughing, and when he put his line in the water, he caught a fish.
Later that afternoon, Oscar raised his four-pound pickerel up into the air and received the congratulations of the people who had come out to greet him.
“You take after your father,” said an old man who had known his father before the war. “You’re a lucky young man, since the family of a good fisherman never goes hungry.”
“Did you make an offering to the Manido of the Lake?” someone else asked.
But rather than answer, Oscar walked up to the shack and went in. His bed and that of his grandfather were unmade, just as they had left them the night of the fire. His mother’s ashtray, overflowing with cigarette ashes and butts, remained undisturbed and reeking of stale tobacco on the table. The supplies of tinned foods and packages of spaghetti, macaroni, and rice were in their place. Jacob’s winter coat still hung from a nail on a stud, and his shirts, work pants, socks, and underwear were still neatly folded and stored on shelves in an open-faced orange crate. His wallet, where his grandfather kept his pay, which he always left beside the water pail, was missing, taken by his mother, Oscar assumed. Everything was in order and there was no monster in the shack.
A silent crowd was waiting when he emerged carrying a backpack filled with his clothes to take back to his room at the manse. Everyone wondered why he had refused to enter Jacob’s shack in the morning but did not hesitate to do so in the afternoon. Something must have happened during his visit down the river that had made him change his mind.
Finally, someone asked, “Is Jacob’s shadow still inside the shack?”
Oscar refused to answer.
Chapter 5
FITTING IN
1
When Oscar attended high school at Port Carling in the early 1930s, millions of men across Canada were out of work, people by the hundreds of thousands waited each day at soup kitchens to be fed, and municipalities were going into debt to provide relief payments to hungry families. Port Carling was not spared. Although the lifestyle of the people on Millionaires’ Row did not change during these terrible years of the Great Depression, few people could afford to stay at the big luxury hotels and many of them were forced to close, their owners bankrupt. Teachers, accountants, and white-collar workers, who had no difficulty before the beginning of the hard economic times in finding the money to rent modest cottages for the season or to take rooms at reasonably priced guest houses, stayed away. The number of day trippers from Muskoka Wharf Station fell off to such an extent that the owners of the navigation company were forced to mothball half the fleet and to lay off their crews.
The boat works in the village closed its doors. Carpenters, electricians, and other tradesmen could not find work, and fathers found it hard to feed and clothe their families. James McCrum let it be known that he would provide credit at his store with no interest to hard-up families too ashamed to accept relief. Many people took him up on his offer. The village doctor began to accept eggs, chickens, sides of beef, and vegetables in lieu of money for his services. The older boys in high school began dropping out and leaving home, some to work for five dollars a month at government-run labour camps in the north building roads, but most hitchhiked to Gravenhurst and hopped freight trains heading West to join the army of unemployed in search of a job or a sandwich across Canada and the United States. The Chippewa at the Indian Camp and back home on the reserve, already living at subsistence levels, found it harder to get by. Fewer day trippers meant fewer sales of handicraft, but James McCrum, remembering the heroics of Jacob, treated them like the other villagers and let them run up bills at his store.
The Huxleys, as they had promised, provided for Oscar’s keep. James McCrum ensured he was given one of the coveted summer jobs at his store, stocking shelves, bagging groceries, and, when needed, serving banana splits, sundaes, and cream soda floats in the ice cream parlour.
While still filled with shame and plagued by flashbacks of the fire, Oscar now devoted himself to fitting in as his grandfather had urged him to do when he was a little boy. In so doing so, he hoped he would be able to make amends with the white people he had wronged and appease the shadow, if such a thing existed, of his grandfather. If the white people wanted him to get an education, he would get an education. If the white people wanted him to become a missionary, he would become a missionary. If the white people wanted him to turn him into a brown-skinned white man, he would become a brown-skinned
