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THE INDIAN CAMP

1

In the dark of the early morning before sunrise, Stella pushed open the door of the shack, stepped across the sill, and stood for a minute just inside, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips. Although she couldn’t see her father and son in the black interior, she could hear their calm, regular breathing. Good! They were asleep, and if she was careful, they wouldn’t wake up as she went to bed. Not that she cared what either one of them thought, especially Oscar, who would say nothing but stare at her reproachfully for coming in so late. Her father, however, would be sure to take her to task for spending the night drinking, and she didn’t want to waste her time arguing with him.

But despite her best effort to cross the room to her bed quietly, she bumped into the cook stove and hurt her leg. Swearing softly under her breath, she bent over in pain before straightening up and hobbling over to the table in front of the window facing the bay and collapsing noisily into a chair.

“Are you all right?” asked Jacob, getting out of bed and lighting a coal-oil lamp.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in a saucer and massaging her aching leg.

“Looks like someone hit you a good one,” he said, holding up the lamp and taking a close look at her. “It was Clem, wasn’t it? That drunk was hanging around the Indian Camp all week until I told him to go away. He laughed like a madman as usual when caught in the wrong but he wandered off just the same.”

“Leave me alone,” she replied, taking another cigarette from its package and lighting it. “I don’t need an old hypocrite like you to tell me how to live my life.”

2

Just after supper the day before, Stella had arrived on the steamer from the reserve in a bad mood. Her breath smelled of wine and she was carrying two suitcases filled with beaded moccasins lined with rabbit fur, porcupine quill boxes, souvenir toy tomahawks, and miniature birchbark canoes to sell to the tourists over the summer. When Jacob asked her how Old Mary’s family was coping after her death, she didn’t bother to reply but sat impatiently chain-smoking cigarettes at the table, looking out the window across the bay. Oscar had then taken a seat beside her and quietly mentioned that he had beat out the class-brain and won a book as a prize for being top student in the graduating class at the Port Carling elementary school. But his hope that she might say something nice to him, or perhaps look at him with an approving smile, was not to be. Shrugging her shoulders and frowning, she had blown out a mouthful of smoke and resumed her vigil without even glancing at him. Finally, late in the evening when it was already dark, and after muttering to no one in particular that she had “something to do,” she had gone out and headed up the path in the direction of the public wharf.

Oscar had slept fitfully throughout the ensuing night, bitten by the mosquitoes that came in through the screenless windows left open to provide some relief from the early summer heat, and worried that his mother would come to harm roaming around in the dark without her father or son to protect her. He now lay on his bed, his blanket pushed to one side, watching the shadows cast by the coal-oil lamp off the arguing adults flicker on the ceiling. His mother and grandfather were the two most important people in his life, and when they hurt each other, they made him feel that he was in some way responsible.

As he dressed on the shore, he thought of the way his mother had ignored him when he told her he had won the book prize. She must have known she was hurting his feelings but didn’t care. But then again, he shouldn’t have been surprised. She had been nasty to him for as long as he could remember, even though he always made a big effort to please her. He had often wondered why that was so. Sometimes he thought the death of his father had unhinged her mind and made her incapable of thinking straight. Other times, he suspected she somehow blamed him for his death. There were even times when he believed she still loved his father so much she was afraid to betray him by showing affection to her son. The possibilities were endless. The result was, however, that she drank too much and had affairs with men like Clem who beat her up.

In fact, Stella loved her son in her own way but was unable to express her true feelings to him. And for that, she blamed her father for turning her into a hardened and coarse human being. She had never forgiven him for leaving her in a residential school when she was a child of six, for not coming to see her, for not letting her go home for the summers, and for not answering the letters she sent him. She blamed him for the beatings and rapes she suffered at the hands of her supposed caregivers, for turning her into a classroom bully, and for the assault she suffered at the hands of the passing motorist when she finally fled the school. She blamed him for making her turn to the streets for her living, for making her stand outside in snow, rain, and scorching heat, her face garishly painted, smiling grotesquely at men cruising by looking over the women as if they were sides of beef. She blamed him for making her haggle with the johns who wanted to pay her fifty cents rather than the going rate for her services. She blamed him for the hangovers that greeted her in the mornings after drinking into the night to forget. She blamed him for having to accommodate the crooked cops who demanded her services for nothing. And most of all she blamed him for inducing her to marry someone she scarcely knew by telling her she would get a widow’s pension should he be killed in action.

But as much as she blamed her father for all the harm he had caused her, she blamed herself even more. Not long after the birth of Oscar, a sergeant in dress uniform accompanied by the local Presbyterian minister knocked at Jacob’s house on the reserve and handed her a telegram. “His Majesty’s Canadian government regrets to inform you,” she read, “that your husband, Private First Class Amos Wolf, was killed in action somewhere in northwestern France on August 16, 1917. God save the King.”

“Can I come in and pray with you for the soul of your husband,” the minister asked. But Stella slammed the door in his face. Several weeks later, the postman brought a letter informing her that she would receive a pension for life. Rather than being happy, she felt dirty and was filled with guilt for profiting from her husband’s death. Afterward, every time she looked at her baby, she saw herself in her son, and since she deserved to be hurt, he deserved to be hurt, and it was all she could do to prevent herself from picking him up and bashing him against a wall. Her attitude made no sense, but afraid of what she might do to him, she handed him over to Old Mary to look after as often as she could and went to Toronto to forget her troubles by drinking and partying with her old friends from the streets. It had been a relief when her father undertook to raise him for her.

3

Looking out across the bay, lost in thought, Oscar noticed in the moonlight the outline of the Amick moored to the government wharf. Clem was its captain, and as Oscar and everyone else in the village and the Indian Camp knew, he spent most of his free time drinking and carousing on board with his buddies.

That’s how my mother got those bruises, Oscar thought. Clem lured her on board, tempted her to drink too much, and beat her up in one of his drunken rages.

A wave of anger swept over him. He thought of the bullies who pulled down his pants when he was a little boy and of Gloria Sunderland who laughed at him. He thought of the Canadian government that sent his father to his death and of the settlers who took Obagawanung from his grandfather and his people. He thought of the teachers and kids who called him Chief at school, of the white people who gave him no respect because he was an Indian, of his grandfather who wouldn’t stand up for his rights and who just wanted to fit in, and above all he thought of Clem who had hurt his mother. He was thirteen, the age Old Mary said Chippewa boys became men and warriors in the old days. He was going to show the white people they couldn’t push this warrior around any more!

But he had no idea how to get even. And so, remembering the account of the battle for Hill 70 which he had read about in the book on the Great War he had borrowed from the library, he substituted daydreaming for action. It was August 1917, and he was a sergeant of the 48th Highlanders of Canada in a trench on the front lines waiting to attack the Germans dug into Hill 70. If the Canadians could take the objective, the Allies would break through the enemy lines and win the war. The artillery barrage, which had been going on for hours softening up the enemy positions, came to an abrupt halt and the commanding officer signalled to Oscar to lead the charge. Oscar raised his rifle to signal the others to follow him and crawled up and over the top. There was a moment of silence, and then the enemy opened fire with everything it had: artillery, mortars, machine guns, pistols, rifles, and canisters of poison gas. Men were falling all over the place. Some were running in a panic into barbed wire entanglements. Others were being blown to pieces and body parts were raining down. But he, brave Sergeant Oscar Wolf, was plunging ahead heedless of the danger, anxious to take his revenge against the Canadian government for sending his father to his death, against the bullies who had pulled down his pants, against everyone who had ever called him Chief, and against Clem for being mean to his mother.

All at once, his way was blocked by fire coming from a German machine-gun nest raking no man’s land, killing and wounding everyone in its path. To escape the deadly onslaught, he dove into a shell crater, sliding headfirst into a deep pool filled with decaying corpses. He rose to his feet and spit out the foul-tasting, putrid water and looked up to a scene from John McCrae’s “Flanders’s Fields,” which they recited during Remembrance Day ceremonies at school every November 11. Birds were flying across a brilliant blue sky among puffs of smoke from exploding artillery shells, and yet all was quiet. But Oscar had no time to spare staring up toward the heavens. There was a battle going on and the Canadian Corps needed him.

He clawed his way up the muddy side of the crater, and as he peered out over the lip onto the battlefield, silence gave way to the crump of exploding shells and the rattle of machine-gun fire. The slaughter of Canadian soldiers continued unabated, and as he looked on in fear and anger he saw his father lying dead on the ground. But there was no time to mourn his loss. Unless he put the machine gun out of commission, the entire Canadian offensive would come to an end!

Oscar crawled out over the lip of the crater and rushed forward, his rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other. Bullets whizzed by his head. A German soldier poked his head over the top of the sandbags protecting the machine-gun nest and looked at him. It was Clem. Clem was the German soldier who had just killed his father. He would recognize his long, thin, sallow face, his pale blue eyes, his hair-filled nose, his scraggly beard, and his disgusting yellow teeth anywhere! He lifted his rifle and shot him through the heart. Clem fell backward into the emplacement, cursing the day he had beat up Oscar’s mother, incurring the wrath of her son. Oscar lobbed the grenade in after him. There was blood and guts everywhere. Victory was assured, but he, Sergeant Oscar Wolf, the bravest of the brave, had been gravely wounded and would soon be dead.

4

A dog began to bark, jolting Oscar out of his fantasy world. Looking around, he hoped no one would come out from the nearby shacks to investigate. It would be hard to explain what he was doing outdoors at that hour when everyone else was in bed sleeping.

“Be quiet!” someone yelled, and the dog whimpered and was silent.

Maybe I should just go back to bed and let Jacob handle Clem, Oscar thought. After all, I’m not a warrior like the ancestors who fought the Iroquois for control of hunting grounds in the old days. I’m not a soldier in the Canadian 48th Highlanders like my father was before he was killed. Besides, those wars are over; I’m just a thirteen-year-old kid from the Indian Camp mad at a whole bunch of people.

But as he stared across the bay at the moonlit outline of the Amick, Oscar thought again of his mother and her laugh of ridicule when he told her about winning the book for being top student in the graduating class. He then thought of the bullies who had pulled down his pants and exposed his dick to Gloria Sunderland. That led him to think again of Clem, who his grandfather said had hurt his mother, and he shifted the anger he felt against his mother and the bullies to his already existing rage against Clem until he lost control of himself and decided to torch Clem’s boat.

His mind made up, he went to the barrel where Jacob stored the family’s coal oil supply, filled a two-gallon can to the top with the flammable liquid, made certain he had a pocketful of matches, and moved as fast as he could up the path from the Indian Camp to the gravel road leading to the government wharf. Although tall for his age, Oscar had not yet filled in, and he found the can heavy and awkward to carry. After going only a few dozen yards along the path, the wire handle began to cut into his hand, rendering it numb, and when the pain shot up his arm, he stopped, hoisted his burden up to his chest, locked his arms around it, and kept on going. Coal oil slopped out of the open spout, splashing against his shirt, soaking it, irritating the skin of his chest, dripping down onto his pants and running down his legs.

As he ran, Oscar returned to the world of his imagination, and he was no longer a kid bent on getting his revenge. He was Pegamegabow, the Ojibwa soldier from the nearby Parry Island Indian Reserve on Georgian Bay, the most decorated Native soldier of the Great War and hero to Native people everywhere for killing more than three hundred enemy soldiers with his sniper rifle. He was rushing up through a tunnel of overhanging tree branches on a mission to destroy an enemy machine-gun nest hidden in a floating grocery store moored to the government wharf. He had been shot in the chest and blood was gushing out of a painful open wound, wetting his shirt, soaking his pants, running down his legs, and dripping on the ground. No matter, he would carry on, whatever the odds.

A few minutes later, Oscar was standing at the top of the ridge that divided the Indian Camp from the white village, examining the lay of the land. Below him, in his imagination, was a German bunker in the shape of a supply boat occupied by members of the German army. That was his objective and he would destroy it. After lowering the can to the ground, he knelt beside it to catch his breath and to slow down his pounding heart. He rose to his feet and, keeping as low a profile as possible to avoid detection in the moonlight, half dragged, half carried the oil can across the bridge to the wharf and set it down on the planks some fifty feet from his target. Leaving it behind, he crept up to the boat like a Chippewa warrior in the old days sneaking up on the enemy.

There was a light coming from a porthole. Peeping inside, he saw German soldiers sitting around a table playing cards and drinking beer. From time to time, a German who looked like Clem said something that made the others laugh. Oscar was sure Clem was telling the others about beating up his mother and laughing about it and that made him all the more furious. But he would have to change his plans. Setting fire to the boat was now out the question since the Germans would catch him before he could complete the job and turn him over to the constable. He decided to burn down the general store instead. That would teach Clem a lesson since it was owned by his father, James McCrum.

Oscar began to have doubts about his project as he was carrying his burden from the wharf to the business section. And by the time he slipped into the shadows under a ground-floor window at the back of the general store, he was crying. White people had done bad things, but what he was about to do was just as bad, maybe even worse. And what if he was found out? He would be sent to jail.

Fighting his fears, Oscar dashed around the general store, checking to see if there was anyone about. All was quiet, and he returned to his place in the shadows. To make doubly sure, he left again, this time running along the lane behind the guest house, the butcher shop, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the hardware store, and the furniture and casket shop. There was no sign of life. He scuttled down the boardwalk in front of the buildings. There was still no one around and he had a free hand.

He returned to his spot behind the store, waited a minute to catch his breath, and set off again, this time in search of a scrap of lumber to pry open the window. But he couldn’t find anything to do the job. Getting down on his hands and knees, he felt around in the dark on the gravel laneway and came up with a handful of big stones that he hurled at the window, shattering it on impact and startling himself in the process. After waiting a few minutes to be sure no one was coming to investigate, he lifted the can up to chest level and rammed it through the broken window. Once again, the crash and clatter of breaking glass caught him by surprise, but this time he didn’t hesitate. He lit a match and threw it into the opening. A flash of light revealed the can lying on its side with coal oil pulsating out of the spout and flowing out across the wooden floor.

The match spluttered and died. He lit another one and threw it inside but it met the same end, as did a succession of others that flickered and drowned in the liquid fuel before the oil could ignite. Something was needed to hold a flame long enough to cause combustion. He scurried around to the front of the store and rummaged through a garbage can until he found a week-old copy of the Toronto Daily Telegram. He dashed back, crumpled a page into a loose ball, set it alight, and pushed it through the window. This time the coal oil began to burn.

Not waiting to see if the fire would spread to the supplies stored in the room, Oscar lurched to his feet and ran for the safety of the shack as fast as he could. At the entrance to the path to the Indian Camp, he stopped, suddenly afraid of entering the dark tunnel. What if Clem, his friends, and the constable had heard the sound of breaking glass and were lying in wait for him? What if a bearwalker was hiding on an overhanging branch, ready to jump on him and steal his soul? What if a witch was to materialize and consume him in a ball of fire? What if the devil was to spring up and carry him off to hell?

And so what if they were! He had had the guts to get even with everyone who had ever hurt him and his mother and his people! He stepped into the dark confidently, only to hear the snap of dead branch on the path under his foot. In a panic, he plunged down into the black pit and ran as he had never run before, only to trip over a root in the dark and nose-dive to the ground. He struggled to his feet, his face bruised and bloody, and dashed ahead again recklessly in terror. He veered off the path into a tangle of chest-high ferns and burdocks, stumps of long dead and fallen trees, low-hanging branches, and sharp-thorn blackberry brambles that scratched his arms and legs. After thrashing around wildly in the dark for minutes that seemed like hours, Oscar stumbled back to the path, lost his footing again, and fell down, skinning his knees and elbows. He crawled, he scrambled, he limped, and he blubbered in fright, imagining that he was being pursued by all manner of monsters, eager to claim him as one of their own after the evil he had done that night. He pushed himself ahead as fast as he could, but his legs were leaden, his arms were frozen, his breath was laboured, and his body was drenched in sweat. He thought he would never reach home.

5

Panting from fear and exhaustion, Oscar threw open the door of the shack and stepped inside. Jacob and Stella looked at him through a fog of cigarette smoke.

“What are you doing out of bed at this time of night?” asked his mother, her words slurred, irritated that a third party had interrupted her never-ending quarrel with her father. “Come over here and let me have a look at you.”

As Oscar approached, she grabbed his arm and slapped his face, bringing tears to his eyes.

“That’s for not being in bed when I came in.”

She slapped him again, this time harder.

“That’s for not being here when I needed you tonight after I drank a little too much with Clem and tripped in the dark and hurt myself.”

“Leave him alone,” said Jacob. “He was here when you came in and went out for a walk. He’s a good boy.”

“Oh, no he isn’t,” his mother said, staring with glassy eyes at her son. “Nobody goes out for walks this late at night unless he’s up to no good. He looks like he’s been in a fight and he stinks of coal oil. What have you been doing anyway? Stealing something? I wouldn’t put it past you.”

She swung at him again, but this time he ducked.

“And stop looking at me like that, you little bastard. You want me to give you more of the same?”

Oscar jerked his arm free, stumbled to the door, and ran outside, his face stinging. It wasn’t Clem’s fault after all! He started running in a panic back up the path toward the village to put out the fire, but soon slowed down and stopped. He’d seen the flames spreading across the floor, and at that very moment they were probably consuming the building from the inside. He turned and walked slowly back to the shack, but hesitated at the door, afraid to go in and face his mother again. He heard the loud voices of his mother and grandfather through the open windows.

“I don’t know what you got against Clem, but he’s a good man,” he heard his mother say to Jacob.

“If you knew him like I do you wouldn’t think that,” Jacob replied. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy when he spent his time spearing frogs and tormenting dogs and cats. I served with him overseas and know for a fact that he was a yellow-bellied coward and ran away from the fighting. He wasn’t a real man and a hero like Amos.”

“Clem’s twice the man Amos ever was,” Stella said. “Marrying him was the worst mistake I ever made. I never should have listened to you.”

Oscar flinched, shocked that his mother would say such a thing about his father. Not wanting to hear her next revelation, he went to the shore and stood at the water’s edge, his eyes full of tears, not knowing what to do next. Without warning, the bells of the Anglican church on the ridge overlooking the Indian Camp began to clang, jarring the silence of the night. The bells of the Presbyterian church answered from a hilltop elsewhere in the village and were soon joined by those of the United church, all delivering angry, cacophonic messages of impending tragedy, telling the people that some evil, foreign presence was abroad setting fires in their beloved community. On Sunday mornings, the three sets of bells conveyed coordinated messages of Christian charity and harmony as they called the faithful to worship. Now they echoed harshly, frantically throughout the village and up and down the river, summoning every able-bodied man and boy within earshot to rise from their beds and rush to fight the common enemy.

Then, off in the distance, Oscar saw a glimmer of light that grew in power until it rivalled the moon in its intensity. The bells continued to peal, now calling, now shouting, now announcing to the world that he, Oscar Wolf, thirteen-year-old Chippewa youth from the Rama Indian Reserve, who had just been honoured by the school principal with a book prize for being the grade eight student with the highest marks of the graduating class at the Port Carling elementary school, had done wrong and had disgraced the memory of his father. They declared to all that slinking around in the night and setting fire to the property of hard-working, innocent people was the work of an outlaw and a thief. They told him that no Native warrior or Canadian soldier would have stooped to such cowardly acts.

Overcome with the impact of his mother’s revelation of her feelings about his father, unable to bear the wickedness of his actions, and afraid the constable was already coming to arrest him, Oscar waded fully clothed into the river. He hoped the water would swallow him up, make his problems disappear and take him somewhere where he could start his life all over again. When the water reached his chest, he stopped and looked back at the yellow light of the coal-oil lamp flickering on the pane of the shack’s front window. Perhaps his mother or grandfather would come out and tell him he was just having a bad dream. When no one came out, he dove deep down into the dark waters of the bay and began swimming under the water and away from the shore, his eyes open but seeing nothing. When he could hold his breath no longer, he rose to the surface and swam farther and farther out away from the shore.