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THE FIRE

1

James and Leila McCrum were not unduly alarmed when they heard the fire bells of the three churches pealing before dawn that Sunday morning. Hotels around the lakes were always burning down, and there was little anyone could do about it. A guest would fall asleep with a lit cigarette or pipe, and the first thing you knew the tinder-dry wood building would be on fire. If there was time, someone would crank the telephone to appeal for help from the party-line operator on duty at the telephone office in Port Carling. She would call around until she found someone to go to one of the churches to pull the rope that rang the fire bell, which, as everyone in the village knew, was the shorter of the two that hung in the foyer; the longer one was to call the people to worship. The members of the volunteer fire brigade would assemble in front of the town hall, the Fire Chief would brief them, and everyone would crowd into cars and trucks and leave to fight the fire.

Since the firemen only had axes, shovels, and buckets as equipment, and since it took sometimes more than an hour over poorly maintained gravel roads to reach the distant hotels, there was often little they could do when they got there. They usually just joined the guests outside on the lawns watching the structure burn, hoping everyone had escaped. Occasionally, they managed to run in and save a few pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac that they kept for themselves if no one was looking. Or, if there were witnesses, they carried their acquisitions outside and set them down out of harm’s way where everyone could see them. If the fire was in the village, however, the bucket-brigade sometimes saved a building and that was good for everyone’s morale.

“It must be quite a fire,” James said. “I’ve never heard the fire bells of all three churches ringing at the same time.”

He got out of bed and went out onto the second-floor balcony of his substantial red brick home, from where, to his horror, he saw flames in the sky above the business section. Pulling on his pants and shirt, he shouted to his wife to stay home where she wouldn’t get hurt. He then thrust his bare feet into his shoes, ran down the stairs, out the front door, and all the way to the blaze, a half-mile away. Only two or three members of the bucket brigade and his son Clem were on the scene when he arrived out of breath and fearing the worst. To his dismay, flames were already shooting out of the roof of his general store and smoke was pouring out of the windows of his guest house next door. The situation looked hopeless.

How could this be? James asked himself. How can a fire, even in a wooden building, spread so fast?

Other volunteers arrived, including two dozen men from the Indian Camp, and they formed a line from the river to the store, passing buckets of water hand to hand to throw on the fire. Without warning, a tremendous explosion blew debris onto the street and scattered the firemen.

“The fire’s got to the gasoline barrels,” Clem told his father. “There’s nothing we can do for the store now. We’ll try to save the other buildings.”

James sat down on the ground across the street and let his son and the members of the bucket-brigade do what they could. Everything was beyond his control and comprehension. Were the fresh fruit and vegetables, tools, nails, spikes, cloth and clothing, coal oil and naphtha, cans of paint, turpentine and varnish, canned goods, barrels of cookies, boxes of raisins, jars of pickles and mustard, sacks of oats and chicken feed, sides of beef and pork, hundred-pound bags of flour and sugar, cases of dynamite and nitroglycerine caps, racks of hunting rifles, boxes of ammunition, axes, hoes, shovels and pickaxes, twine and baling wire, tubs of ice cream and cases of pop, and shelves of comic books and magazines all to be destroyed? What would his customers do? What would the tenants of his other buildings along the business section do? Was his insurance enough to cover his losses? Was he now a ruined man?

2

In the late 1850s, James’s father, Reg McCrum, an Ulsterman and supporter of the Orange Lodge in County Armagh, Ireland, had read advertisements placed in the newspapers by the Canadian government. The District of Muskoka, a place no one in his small village had heard of, had just been opened for settlement, and it was first-come, first-served if you wanted free land. Single men were eligible to receive one-hundred-acre allocations and married men two hundred acres. All you had to do was to clear fifteen acres of the deep and rich land and build a sixteen by twenty foot house during the five years following the date of location and start planting your wheat and oats. Reg quickly married his long-time sweetheart, Wilma Brown, the daughter of a farmer on a neighbouring farm, sold off all his possessions, and left with his bride to become a pioneer in the new world.

But on arrival, they found Indians living on the land promised to them that they had to get rid of. Instead of flatlands ready for ploughing, his father and others like him from the Old Country got scrub hemlock and cedar bush right down to the water’s edge. And after fighting their way through a jungle of underbrush to the white pine, oak, and maple farther back where the good soil was supposed to be, they found that the ground in most places all too often was only acid leaf mould over granite rock.

Before they could plant their crops, they had to cut away the small growth, chop down the big trees, roll the logs up into big heaps, and burn them in the spring. The summers were always too short, the black flies and mosquitoes unbearable, and the snow came early and stayed late. In those early days, they lived in lean-to shelters with mud floors and hemlock branches for roofs. There were no roads, no doctors, and the nearest grist mill was twenty miles away. But despite all the adversity, his parents and the other settlers who had arrived from the Old Country persevered. For had not the preacher who made periodic visits to their small community told them that God had sent them to the New World to build a New Jerusalem? Had the preacher not said that it was the destiny of the settlers to replace the Indians who were in the process of disappearing anyway?

His father had gone on to become the owner of the general store, the guest house, and the boat works, landlord of all the other buildings occupied by the other entrepreneurs in the business section, and the most generous contributor to the Presbyterian Church. What would he have said were he still alive and saw everything he had worked so hard for go up in flames? Thank God he had been carried away with his wife in the great Spanish influenza epidemic in 1917.

3

A fusillade of rifle and shotgun fire broke out as the ammunition in the general store began to explode, and the volunteer firemen, led by the war veterans who thought for an instant that they were back in the trenches, threw themselves to the ground. When the firing subsided, they rose to their feet just as cans of burning paint shot hundreds of feet into the air to land like flaming mortar rounds on the freight shed, on the boat works, on the shore of the Indian River. And as they rushed to put out these fires, the boat works burst into flames.

Someone yelled that Lily Horton, a university student from Toronto, working as a maid for the summer at the guest house, was trapped in her room. But no one moved, afraid of the flames and certain that Lily was already lost. That was when Jacob took action. He didn’t think about what he was doing. Someone he worked with every day was in trouble and he had to save her. It wasn’t any different from what he had done for fellow soldiers in danger during the battles in northern France. He went into the smoke-filled doorway, dropped to his knees, and moved up the stairs, keeping close to the floor where the air was clearer until he reached Lily’s room. He pushed open the door and was met by a blast of heat that singed his eyebrows and scorched his face. But he pressed on, crawling on his hands and knees until he reached the girl lying unconscious by the window where she had gone to call for help. He took hold of her by the arms, pulled her out of the door, down the stairs, and out onto the street. Clem ran across and helped him drag her to the other side. The girl was dead and Jacob was so badly burned that he died within the hour.

4

Oscar had emerged from the water downstream from the business section and sat weeping on the shore as the fire bells continued to peal and the flames from the burning buildings shot higher and higher into the sky. In due course, unable to contain his curiosity, he went, still crying and with water dripping from his clothes, to stand as close as he could to the fire without attracting attention. He saw James McCrum rush up and anxiously confer with his son. He saw the men from the Indian Camp arrive and join the volunteer firefighters from the village in their futile battle with the flames. He saw his grandfather enter the guest house and emerge dragging the inert form of a teenage girl. He saw Clem go to help him. He saw his mother go to Jacob, kneel down and say something to him. He saw her get up and look around, obviously searching for him. He saw the angry look on her face as she came up to him and hissed, “It’s all your fault. I hope you get caught,” before hurrying away. He saw the men, with Clem in charge, carry Jacob away to the doctor’s office.

Women and children from the Indian Camp joined him, not finding it strange on this night of surprises that he was soaking wet and distraught. An hour later, he heard the people around him say that Jacob had died a hero. In less than two hours, the entire business section was reduced to smoking ashes. Fire brigades from nearby towns arrived, but left shortly afterward, seeing that the fire had run its course and they were not needed. Tourists who had heard the exploding ammunition and gasoline barrels from their bedrooms and seen the great black smoke plume rising over the village from their cottage docks, arrived in their boats to inspect the damage.

James McCrum climbed up onto the back of a wagon and made an announcement.

“Today, our community has suffered greatly. The business section as we knew it is now gone forever, but I will rebuild it bigger and better, and everyone should be back in operation by next summer. Fortunately, we saved the Amick and I’m going to use it as a temporary store to serve my customers. Lily and Jacob we can’t bring back. Both were the innocent victims of some arsonist’s pleasure, for the fire would not have spread so fast if it had not been deliberately set. I feel so sorry for Jacob’s grandson who is standing over there, grieving his grandfather’s death. I promise that young man today, as God is my witness, that no matter how long it takes, I will find some way of paying him back for his loss!”

Too ashamed to face people who might come up to shake his hand and express their condolences, Oscar returned to the Indian Camp. Afraid of his mother, he hid in the bushes and watched the shack, trying to find the courage to go and try to explain why he had set the fire. She came out and went to the home of a neighbour who later returned with her to the shack. A half-hour later, the neighbour came out carrying the suitcases filled with the handicraft his mother had planned to sell to tourists over the summer. His mother reappeared carrying a packsack and started walking up the path toward the village. She had sold her handicraft to the neighbour and was leaving for the reserve.

Oscar left his hiding place and ran after her, determined to explain himself. Hearing someone behind her, his mother turned. “I want you out of the shack by Labour Day and I don’t care where you go or what you do. And if you ever try to contact me back on the reserve, I’ll tell the cops what you did and you’ll go to jail for a long, long time!”

“But I did it for you,” Oscar said.

“Did it for me! Burned down the entire business section and killed your grandfather for me! I never wanted you and knew from the moment you were born you’d be trouble, and I was right.”

After her initial outburst, Stella said nothing further and walked away deeply troubled and blaming herself for her son’s rampage. Her neglect had turned him into something as monstrous as she was. She wanted even less to do with him than before, because together they would destroy each other. As far as she was concerned, he was now on his own.

5

Oscar watched from a distance as his mother boarded the steamer that would take her to Muskoka Wharf Station to catch a train to the reserve.

Maybe she’ll change her mind, he thought. Maybe she’ll change her mind and say she’s forgiven me and ask me to come on board with her and leave Port Carling and all its problems behind.

But the crew threw off the mooring ropes and pulled in the gangplank, there was a clanging of signal bells, a blast from the whistle, and the steamer left the wharf and headed downriver. Oscar waited throughout the afternoon, hoping desperately that it would turn around and come back for him. When it didn’t, he walked slowly back to the shack and sat down on a stump outside the door. He now accepted that his mother had never, and would never love him, whatever he did to try to win her over. And through his own stupidity, he was responsible for the death of his grandfather, the only person, other than Old Mary, who had ever cared for him. He was now alone and didn’t know what to do.

Friends and neighbours came out of the surrounding shacks and tried to console him.

“Jacob was a courageous man,” some said. “Not many people would have gone into the building to try to rescue the girl. Your mother has gone off and left you, but that’s nothing new. She’s always been doing crazy things.”

”Come home with us,” others said. “Take your meals and live with us as long as you want. You shouldn’t stay by yourself in Jacob’s shack. You’ll miss him too much.”

Not believing himself to be worthy of such kindnesses, Oscar declined the offers, and the neighbours, thinking he needed time to grieve, left him alone.

Clem was the next to arrive.

“You poor little guy,” he said, staring at him unblinkingly with his pale blue eyes and chewing a wad of tobacco. After spitting a stream of yellow juice into the bay and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he said, “You must really be feeling bad. Me and your granddad knew each other really good, you know, and not just here in the village, but overseas as well. We didn’t always get along, but I respected him. He was a brave soldier, not chicken-shit like me. He was one of the best.”

“Where’s your mother?” he asked, “I need to see her.”

“She’s gone,” Oscar said. “And I don’t think she’s coming back.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Clem said. “Probably left you alone to look after yourself. Look, kid, I may be the village drunk, but if I can ever give you a hand, just come see me. You won’t regret it.”

6

Clem had first met Oscar’s mother in the early summer of 1918 after being invalidated out of the army for shell shock — at least that was what the army medics had said, although he had another name for it. He had joined up in 1916, two years after war was declared, after convincing himself that his duty lay in fighting for King and Empire instead of staying at home and being husband to the wife he had married six months before. The army sent him in early 1917 as a member of a group of reinforcements to replace fallen and wounded soldiers in the trenches of northwestern France, where the men of the 48th Highlanders were located. As luck would have it, he ran into Jacob, who was a sergeant by that time, as well as a lot of the guys from the Indian Camp he’d known since he was a kid. Jacob was anxious to do what he could to help the son of his boss back home and asked his son-in-law, Amos Wolf, a smart, tough soldier, to stick close to him during the big offensives. The two men were the same age and they got along okay despite Amos being Indian and Clem not having any use for Indians before the war. Amos told Clem about meeting and marrying Stella, and when he got word she was pregnant, he was really happy.

Then one day, Amos said he’d had a dream in which the spirit of one of his ancestors had come to tell him that he would soon be killed and he was to ask Clem to go see his wife when the war was over. The spirit didn’t say why, but Amos thought it was important that she know how he had been killed and have someone to comfort her.

“Why me?” Clem asked. “Why not Jacob? He’s her flesh and blood, and he’s here with you.”

“Listen, white man,” Amos said. “I don’t question messages I get in dreams. If the Creator wants you to do the job, that’s up to him to decide.”

So Clem said okay, not wanting Amos to get mad. A lot of the Indian guys had been turning to their old beliefs during the tough-going. Who was he to say they were wrong? He didn’t believe in churches and things like that anyway. So he agreed, never thinking he’d have to do anything. Not long after that, the big battle for Hill 70 took place and Amos and Clem went over the top with the members of the regiment. They hadn’t gone far when a big shell came down not too far away. When Clem came to, Amos was just sitting there all glassy-eyed. The others probably thought they had been killed and had gone ahead. Clem picked up his rifle and told Amos they’d better get a move on.

But Amos just sat there with a crazy grin on his face. Clem gave him a good shake and tried to pull him to his feet, but he couldn’t budge him.

“Save yourself, Clem,” Amos said. “I’m already dead, just like the spirit told me in my dream.”

“What’s wrong,” Clem said. “Where are you hit?”

“I haven’t been hit, but I’m still dead and I want you to go see my wife like you promised when you get back.”

“That’s stupid talk. Let’s get a move on before you get really dead.”

“I’m already really dead, Clem. I’m really dead.”

And since he was getting nowhere speaking rationally, Clem tried another approach. “If you’re dead, then you can’t be killed again. Grab your rifle and let’s go.”

And that worked. Amos got up all fired up to keep moving only to fall down dead. Really dead this time, from what, Clem didn’t know. Bullet? Piece of shrapnel? What difference did it make? He was dead and he wasn’t coming back. That’s when Clem decided the war was over for him; he crawled into a big shell crater to wait out the fighting. When things quietened down, he joined up with what was left of the regiment and told Jacob he had decided not to kill any more Germans and had hid out during the fighting. Jacob never had any use for him after that, but told him just the same to pretend to be suffering from shell shock and they’d send him home.

“If you don’t do what I say,” Jacob told him, “they’ll shoot you at dawn as a coward and I’ll have to tell your father what you did.”

And so Clem went looking for Stella down at the Indian Camp in early July in that summer of 1918. He found her looking out the open window of Jacob’s shack, went in, and told her that her husband had asked him to come see her if he was killed.

“So what’s his message?” Stella asked after giving him a beer.

“He didn’t give me no message in particular,” Clem told her. “We chummed around a bit and he talked a lot about his son, and I was with him when he was killed.”

“You came all the way down here just to tell me that!” Stella said.

“Don’t you want to know what happened?”

“No, I don’t. He’s dead and I don’t give a damn.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you deaf or something? If you can’t take no for an answer, give me back my beer and take off.”

When Clem went home the next morning, he noticed for the first time the frilly lace curtains his wife had hung on the windows when he was fighting in France. He walked out, never to return. He realized that he had joined the army, not because his cousins and the other guys in Port Carling had already signed up, not because the Germans were bad and the British good, not because the Orange Lodge had said the Old Country and the Old Flag needed him, and not because his grandfather and father had told him to do his duty. He had enlisted to get away from his wife.

He had married her because she was pretty and liked to have fun and his cousins were getting married and his grandfather had told him it was time to do the same thing. But his new wife, who had agreed with his every action and utterance before their marriage, and who had thanked his parents profusely for buying and furnishing for them a small frame house with a good-sized veranda as a wedding gift, began to complain: “You drink too much. You don’t go to church. You don’t wipe your feet before you come in. You don’t take baths. You stay out late at night drinking. You stink up the house with your pipe. You fart. Your breath smells bad. You burp. You spit your wads of dirty, foul chewing tobacco anywhere. You don’t give me enough money to run the house. You won’t ask your father for a high-paying job in one of your family’s businesses. You won’t help out around the house. You won’t go to church …” and an unending stream of the same.

After a wild night with Stella, however, Clem was determined not to spend his life with someone he had never loved and who nagged him. He wanted to live with someone who preferred acting to thinking, who believed only in her animal nature and not in God or man, who drank until drunk and then woke up and drank some more, who knew more swear words than he did, who would rather make love than eat, who didn’t give a damn about what people thought of her, and who would certainly never think of putting curtains of any kind on the windows of his house.

His grandfather had left him some money and land within the village limits with a sparsely furnished dilapidated old house that had started life as a one-room log cabin built by a settler fifty years earlier. In the ensuing years, the pioneer had kept a cow or two, a few chickens, and a team of horses, and had scratched out a bare living as a teamster hauling logs out of the bush for lumber companies. When hard times came, he sold his holdings to Reg McCrum for next to nothing. Clem shared the money he had inherited with his wife and moved into the old house. As a favour to his father, who said that with most of the men still overseas, he had no one else to do the job, he became the master and storekeeper of the Amick on a temporary basis.

He told Stella he wanted her to come live with him at his new home.

“Bring the kid. I’ll be good to him.”

But she rejected his proposition, saying he wasn’t man enough for her, although she was always glad to see him when he called on her at the shack during the 1920s. And if he didn’t come to see her whenever she was at the Indian Camp, she would track him down and they would drink and fight together.

7

After Clem left, Oscar began to doze and soon lay down on the ground and drifted off into a dreamless sleep. He awoke the next morning before dawn to the strong smell of smoke and ashes in the humid night air, and with the conviction that his grandfather was inside the shack with a message for him. Jacob, he was well aware, was dead, but fatigue clouded his thinking, and so he got up, pushed open the door, and entered the building. But instead of his grandfather, something evil and repulsive lurking in the dark greeted him. He stumbled out, too shocked to be frightened, and went to the shore and sat down, his head in his hands.

He saw himself filling the can with coal oil, carrying it up the path in the dark, sneaking up to the Amick, spying on Clem, smashing the window of the general store, setting the building on fire, and running home in a panic after committing his dirty deed. He heard over and over again the clanging of the fire bells. He saw repeatedly the men battling the blaze, and worst of all, Jacob being dragged out by Clem and dying after his fruitless efforts to save Lily. Again and again, the events played out in his mind until he fell asleep from exhaustion and started to dream. Jacob was standing beside him on the shore and they were both looking out across the bay at the Amick.

“I’m sorry, Jacob,” he told his grandfather, “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I just wanted my mother to love me. You know what a wild imagination I have. I didn’t know what I was doing until it was too late.”

But Jacob, the grandfather who in life had never said an unkind word to him, had become angry and harsh in death.

“It was my shadow cursing you when you entered the shack tonight,” he said. “I am dead but my soul is not on its way to the Spirit World over the Milky Way. The Spirit World does not and never has existed despite what Old Mary told you. And there is no Christian heaven or hell despite what the preachers say. After death, our souls go to a no man’s land where they wander, bitterly conscious of their earthy transgressions, in an emptiness until the end of time. When you die, my grandson, you can look forward to sharing that place with me and Lily. And all of this death and destruction could have been avoided if you only had followed my advice and tried to fit in.”

“Why did you do such terrible things?” Jacob then asked, his eyes as dead as those of the Manido of the Lake. “Why, why, why,” he lamented, reaching down and shaking Oscar by the shoulder. “Why didn’t you try to fit in?”

Oscar awoke with someone shaking him and saying, “Why, why are you sleeping out here in the open?”

It was Reverend Lloyd Huxley of the Port Carling Presbyterian church.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Oscar, after everything you’ve been through,” he said, “but I came down here hoping to speak to your mother, but nobody answered the door and I saw you asleep out here on the water’s edge.”

“My mother’s gone. Gone for good,” said Oscar, getting to his feet.

“Then who’s looking after you?”

“I don’t need anybody to look after me. I’m thirteen.”

“But you’re still a minor. Don’t you have a relative who could take you in?”

Oscar shrugged his shoulders and Reverend Huxley changed the subject.

“The mayor asked me to look into funeral arrangements for your grandfather. Lily’s family is going to take their daughter’s body back to Toronto and bury her there. Do you think your mother would want your grandfather buried back on the reserve? Do you think she’d let the village honour him with a funeral service and burial here in Port Carling?”

“You’d have to ask her yourself, but she’s gone back to the house on the reserve and there’s no telephone there. Maybe the Indian agent could put you in touch. He’s got an office on the reserve.”

“I’ll look up his number. In the meantime, why don’t you move into your cabin or go live with one of your neighbours?”

When Oscar did not reply, the minister tried again.

“Then come home and stay with my wife and me until after the funeral. We’ve got plenty of room and you would be most welcome.”