the visitor, who spoke their language, called out to the men on the shore eating their breakfast. “Do you think the white men would give me work? I was born here and know the best fishing spots.”
The man was in his early sixties with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and thick, powerful arms. He had taken the trouble, Jacob saw, to apply for work with his shoulder-length hair neatly cropped and he was dressed in what were probably his best clothes: black fedora, knee-high buckskin moccasins decorated with coloured beads and porcupine quills, a bandanna knotted around his neck, and a shirt loosely tucked into pants held in place by a red and white sash.
“We’re not here to fish. But come ashore and have something to eat with us and then I’ll go ask them if they can use you.”
“Tell him he can start right away,” the white men said when Jacob passed on the request. “We can use someone who knows the local landmarks.”
Jacob quickly made friends with the stranger, whose name was Caleb Loon, and passed the summer working alongside him by day and spending his evenings with him and his family. He enjoyed Caleb’s company and liked his wife, Betsy, a large, dark-skinned, heavy-set, good-humoured woman in her early thirties who was invariably dressed in a plain calico dress pulled over a pair of men’s pants and knee-high moccasins. He was happiest in the company of their daughter, Louisa, who was big-boned and tall like her mother and already a woman at the age of sixteen. She spent the evenings staring inscrutably into the fire as if she was thinking about matters so profound that she could never share them with anyone. While obviously too young for him, she was exactly the sort of girl he had always wanted to marry. Good looking when the flickering light of the campfire shone on her solemn face, she was, in his view, just like one of those unspoiled and unsullied Indian maidens who lived at the time of the ancestors.
Caleb and Betsy noticed Jacob’s interest in Louisa and questioned him closely about the life of his people in the south. They found it most interesting when he said most people owned their own houses on his reserve and spent their summers at the Indian Camp on the shore of a river in Muskoka where their kids swam and played in the water while their parents made good money selling handicraft and fish to rich white people. They were most attentive when he told them that he was still a bachelor at the age of thirty-seven.
“That’s not old,” Betsy said, smiling at Jacob. “I was only fifteen when I accepted Caleb’s marriage offer and changed my last name from Amick to Loon. And he’s thirty years my senior. It was the same with my parents. My father’s first wife had died and he was over fifty and my mother was sixteen when they got married. And it was a good marriage.”
By summer’s end, it was understood that Jacob would wed Louisa. The day after the first frost of the season, Betsy simply informed him that her daughter would marry him before they returned to their winter trapping grounds in the fall. Two weeks later, the members of the survey party ended their work for the season and returned to the railway station and from there by train to their homes in the south. Three weeks later, Louisa arrived at the railway station at the Rama Indian Reserve, and one week later she married Jacob.
It would not be a happy marriage. Jacob had mistaken damage for dignity and shyness. He would never discover that the decade Louisa had spent at residential school had crushed her spirit. From the age of six to sixteen, she had listened to teachers say that Indians had been godless savages before the arrival of the white man, and their ancestors, not having heard the Word of the Lord, were burning in Hell. She had been forbidden to speak her Indian language, her name had been replaced by a number, and she had been beaten by the nuns and sexually abused by the priests. She returned to her parents traumatized, having lost her culture and knowledge of life in the bush and knowing only a few words of Ojibwa. Her parents had been anxious to find a husband who could take care of her as soon as possible.
The summer after her marriage, Louisa gave birth to Stella in Jacob’s shack at the Indian Camp, and until her death six years later, she rejected her daughter. At first the other women thought she was just suffering with the sort of melancholy new mothers sometimes have after the birth of a baby but usually shake off after a few weeks. But when months, and then years went by, and Louisa continued to neglect Stella, they knew something was fundamentally wrong. And when she went to bed one day, turned her face to the wall, and starved herself to death, no one was really surprised.
When he came home from the war, therefore, and learned of his daughter’s erratic behaviour, Jacob concluded that she had probably inherited the mental illness that had cut short the life of her mother. He thus made allowances and tried to shield her from herself by chasing away predatory white men whenever he could. His protective instinct extended to her little boy, and he intervened when he found Stella beating him. She once threw Oscar outside naked into the snow, paying no attention to his screams, and it was just good luck that he happened to arrive home at that moment to bring his grandson inside.
When he told his daughter she had to change her ways, she just laughed at him. “I didn’t want that kid when he was born and I don’t want him now. If you love him so much, why don’t you just take him off my hands and raise him yourself.”
Jacob had sought to do just that, but it was not easy. He had no wife to help him, had no special parenting skills, and found it no easier to establish intimate ties with his grandson than he had with his own daughter. Perhaps that was the reason he made Oscar call him Jacob rather than grandpa or even grandfather. To make it worse, Stella was living in his house and it was heartbreaking to see her constantly shoving her little boy away when he was just trying to show her his love. He did what he could, making sure Oscar ate regularly and buying him decent clothes. When he was old enough, he sent him to the day school on the reserve where the white teachers, although hard on the kids, were at least teaching them some reading, writing, arithmetic, and other skills needed to survive in the white man’s world.
To shield him as much as he could from the influence of his mother, Jacob took Oscar out of the school on the reserve each spring when he started work at the guest house and let him attend classes at the school for white kids at Port Carling.
Oscar was now set to graduate from elementary school at the end of June, and since there was no high school on the reserve, he would have to leave at the end of the summer and attend a residential school until he was sixteen. And although his daughter had nothing good to say about the residential school she had gone to, maybe that was just because girls were more apt to become homesick than boys. Oscar would do okay.
4
A fierce wind from the northwest plains that had crossed Lake Huron and Georgian Bay and swept up and over the leafless highlands now came howling down onto the lake, whipping the water into rows upon rows of white-capped breakers that pushed the canoe off course. Oscar stopped singing as he and Jacob fought their way to a protected passageway between a large island and the shore.
For the next hour they paddled through a wide channel lined with oversized boathouses. Great steamer docks proudly adorned with sixty-foot-high flagpoles, their ropes rattling in the wind, protruded aggressively a hundred feet out into the water. Behind the docks, scarcely visible in the starlight, were wide walkways leading up past tennis courts and wide lawns to huge summer houses with upper-floor balconies and wraparound verandas. This was Millionaires’ Row, the preserve of the American and Canadian super-rich whose parents and grandparents had visited the district to hunt and fish in the late nineteenth century. It was still a land of poor bush farmers then and they were able to buy up the shorefront they needed at a cheap price to recreate the country-club life they enjoyed at home.
The waves were as high as ever when they left the shelter of the channel, but the wind was now at their backs and they began to make up for lost time. The cold, however, cut through Oscar’s clothes and his teeth began to chatter.
“Lie
