Читать книгу James Bartleman's Seasons of Hope 3-Book Bundle - James Bartleman - Страница 17

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 white man.

When Mrs. Huxley, with a pitiless look, told him he had to stop hanging out with his Indian friends if he intended to live under her roof, he cut off the ties with the kids he had grown up with from the reserve. When his classmates called him Chief, he pretended that that pleased him. When his grade nine teacher said that he should cut off his braid, “so as to not stand out,” he pretended the idea was a good idea and he cut off his cherished braid. When he was in grade ten and won a district public speaking contest, he pretended to be happy when the well-meaning chairman of the school board at the award ceremony embarrassed him by telling the crowd that the Huxleys had saved him from a life on the streets by taking him in after his drunken mother had discarded him like an unwanted dog. When he was in grade eleven and had grown into a six-foot three-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound, heavily muscled hockey player and the village crowd called him “Killer Injun” and told him to fight, he fought and pretended he liked beating in the heads of players from rival teams. And when Reverend Huxley arranged for him to enter Knox College in the fall of 1935 to study to become a missionary, he pretended that that was what he wanted to do.

Throughout the early thirties, Oscar was a familiar sight crossing the street each school day from the manse to stand in silence with the other high-school boys waiting for the bell announcing the beginning of the school day to ring. Sometimes, older students who had dropped out of school and gone off looking for work but had come home to visit their girlfriends and families for a few days before heading out again, would come by to gossip with their old buddies.

“You meet the damndest people out there riding the rails,” they would say, reluctantly admitting Oscar into the circle of their intimates. “Some are professional bums who wouldn’t take a job if it was offered to them. A lot of them say they’re from farm families out in the prairies who lost everything in the dust storms to get pity and handouts. Some are perverts on the prowl who take advantage of the kids in the boxcars. Most are just like the guys from around here, looking for work wherever they can get it, as long as it’s honest. All you gotta do to get started is get a bedroll and grub sack and hop a freight. Every so often you jump off and go door-to-door bumming sandwiches in exchange for yard work. Sometimes they’ll offer you some flour and eggs to make hotcakes. Sometimes, there’s work available for a few months in a logging camp or on a farm during harvest time. The pay is lousy, but the food is usually good. Eventually you’ll make your way to the border. That’s where you better be sure you’re well hidden in a boxcar when you cross over, since the railway cops are always on the lookout. Then once you’re on the other side, you gotta pretend you’re an American, for the folks down there don’t like foreigners taking advantage of their goodwill.

“Best place to go is California,” they would say. “Even though the place is overrun with starving Okies and Mexicans, you can usually find work picking cherries, apples, any sort of fruit and vegetables in season. It’s all piecework, and if you’re a good worker you can save a few dollars.”

They would then talk about the good times on the road. About kind-hearted small-town cops who let them sleep overnight in the cells and gave them big breakfasts in the morning as long as they cleared out and didn’t come back. About lonely wives who they claimed invited them in for a little lovemaking when their husbands were away at work. And about drinking cheap wine in hobo jungles and having the time of their lives.

But they had left home as boys and had returned as men with hard eyes as if they had seen things they didn’t want to talk about, or done things for which they were ashamed. While they pretended they could hardly wait to go back on the road, you could tell they just wanted to stay home and get married and settle down like their fathers had done when they were their age back when times were good.

Oscar would then join the others slouching up the steps to the high school as if they were proceeding to their executions rather than to the singing of “God Save the King” and the start of the school day. But Oscar’s reluctance was just an act. It was something designed to help him fit in and stay in the good graces of his classmates, many of whom were just putting in time until the Depression ended and the boys got jobs and the girls found husbands. In fact, Oscar loved school, and year after year was the outstanding student in his class. He was the only one who grasped abstract concepts easily, who had a feel for Latin and French, and who was able to talk intelligently to the English teacher about the books he was reading from the village library.

In time, his classmates began to treat him with wary respect; only Gloria Sunderland, embarrassed because she had laughed when the big boys had pulled down his pants so many years before, never spoke to him. He found it harder to establish good relations with Mrs. Huxley, who had made it clear to him from the outset that she wasn’t fond of Indians and had not been pleased when her husband brought him to live at the manse. He did everything he could to make her like him, handing over his wages to help run the household, cheerfully helping out around the house, escorting her to church on Sundays, sitting beside her in the family pew, getting down on his knees and praying passionately and insincerely at her side, and, with eyes uplifted, joining her in singing the great old hymns, especially “Shall We Gather at the River,” which through some buried memory always brought tears to his eyes.

At first Mrs. Huxley remained immune to his efforts, but one day she heard a knock on the front door followed by the sound of a woman speaking to Oscar.

“I’ve come to tell you that it wasn’t your fault, Oscar, and you shouldn’t blame yourself for Jacob’s death. I’m to blame. I should’ve been a better mother, but I was afraid of what might happen if we got too close.”

It was Oscar’s mother talking nonsense, and Mrs. Huxley moved quickly to deal with her.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wolf,” she said, stepping in front of Oscar and naturally being as polite as a minister’s wife could be. “But you’re not welcome here. Please go away and don’t come back.”

“But Oscar’s my son,” Stella said. “I need him and he needs me.”

“I doubt that very much,” Mrs. Huxley told her, noticing the white flecks of spit on her lower lip and her lopsided smile — sure signs, in her opinion, of alcoholism. “Oscar doesn’t want anything to do with you. And you’ve been drinking and don’t know what you’re saying anyway. You abandoned him just after he lost his grandfather in that terrible fire and we are taking care of him now. He’s a lovely boy who needs the type of care only we can give him, so please go away.”

“Tell her she’s wrong, Oscar,” Stella said to Oscar who was standing behind Mrs. Huxley in the hallway. “Tell her she’s wrong. I wasn’t always a good mother to you when you were small, but you’re my baby. Come home to Mama.”

But Oscar, whose mother had been dead to him ever since she had turned her back on him and boarded the steamer the day of the fire, and who was embarrassed by her display of drunken tears, turned and went upstairs to his room.

“See,” Mrs. Huxley told Stella. “He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t want to live the same awful life you lead. Now please leave before I call the constable.”

That was when Stella became really rude.

“Call the constable if you want,” she said, shouting and using a lot of bad words unfit to repeat. “Stealing my son, and you a minister’s wife! You probably can’t make a child of your own. Call the constable if you want and I’ll tell him what really happened the morning of the fire. You won’t think Oscar’s such a lovely boy then.”

Mrs. Huxley decided that she had heard quite enough and closed the door without saying goodbye, even if it wasn’t good-mannered to do so. There was no point in trying to argue with someone who had had too much to drink. “People like that are liable to say anything,” she told Oscar when she went to comfort him in his room.

Afterward, Mrs. Huxley couldn’t do enough for Oscar, for in rejecting his mother he had proved to her satisfaction that he had left behind his savage nature and was now almost as civilized as a white person. In the mornings, when he came downstairs for breakfast, she would be waiting in the kitchen with a cheery smile to serve him bacon and eggs, fried potatoes and tomatoes, toast and Seville marmalade, Port Carling–style oatmeal porridge mixed with salt and pepper and melting butter, and English tea steeped to perfection. Every Monday, she would lay out on his bed for the coming week freshly pressed pants, shirts, socks, and underwear. In the evenings, when everyone gathered around the radio in the living room to listen to Amos and Andy and Jack Benny, she would make popcorn or homemade fudge and pass the tray to him before handing it to Lloyd. She even felt more comfortable discussing questions of religion with him than with her husband.

To tell the truth, it was a relief to have someone other than her husband to talk to. Although Lloyd must have known that he had told the same boring stories dozens of times, he wouldn’t stop talking about his trip back to Canada on the eve of the Great War, when he travelled through the Middle East and the capitals of Europe. Sometimes, especially after he received letters from friends from the old days who had gone on to become diplomats, he gave the impression he was sorry he had become a minister and didn’t believe in what he preached.

From time to time, Mrs. Huxley woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of weeping followed by laughter coming from Oscar’s bedroom. She asked Lloyd what he thought might be happening. He said Oscar was probably just having bad dreams, and that was to be expected, given what he had gone through.

Oscar thus had his life in order and was happy, at least most of the time, for every so often, whatever he was doing — answering a question in class, reading a book, or eating fudge with the Huxleys in the evenings — he would remember that he was living a lie, even if he was just trying to fit in as his grandfather had wanted.

2

In his final summer at Port Carling, after he had finished high school and before he was scheduled to leave to attend Knox College, Oscar became close friends with Claire Fitzgibbon, a tourist girl from Forest Hill, Toronto, and a recent graduate from an exclusive girls’ private school. They had first seen each other when Oscar was a thirteen-year-old working during the summer on the Amick when it called at the Fitzgibbon’s summer home on Millionaires’ Row to deliver groceries and other household supplies. He was on the top deck and she was standing with her brother on the dock. He looked at her and she looked at him, and both then turned to other things. To Oscar, she was just another overweight white kid, with braces on her teeth, light brown hair, pale blue eyes, and freckles, no different than the dozens of others he had seen over the years walking down the path from Port Carling to the Indian Camp shopping for souvenirs. Claire’s eyes remained on Oscar somewhat longer, for it was not often that she saw someone with such black hair and dark brown skin.

When Claire went by motorboat with her mother the following summer to stock up on supplies at the newly rebuilt general store in Port Carling, she saw and remembered Oscar. During the next two summers, whenever she went shopping, she could not keep her eyes off the tall, exotic-looking Indian teenager who was stocking shelves in the store. The following summer, she went up to Oscar, who didn’t recall seeing her before, and said she wanted him, and no one else, to carry her groceries to her motorboat. The other students working at the store for the summer noticed and teased him.

“Looks like you got an admirer, Chief.”

“She’s too rich for your blood.”

“Watch out for her old man. He’ll set the constable on you.”

“You lucky bastard. What have you got that I haven’t?”

By the summer of the fifth year, Claire had lost her baby fat and was a tall, well-proportioned young woman with dreamy eyes and straight white teeth. She now insisted on doing the shopping by herself, and when she saw Oscar at the store at the beginning of July, she didn’t ask him to carry her groceries to the motorboat, although he did so just the same. One day after work, she was waiting for him outside the store and walked with him back to the manse, where they sat on bamboo chairs inside the screened porch until Mrs. Huxley asked Claire to stay for dinner. Afterward, she and Oscar went back outside and sat on the porch swing listening to Chopin piano music on a windup gramophone and talking for hours about things that were important to them.

Oscar told Claire his favourite piece of writing was The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It was the story of someone who wakes up one morning to find he has been turned into a giant beetle, and even though he tries hard, he can’t get out of bed to go to work. In the end, the hero accepts his new condition but has trouble communicating with his family and stops talking to them altogether. Sometimes, Oscar said, he felt like that bug.

Claire told him she was reading everything she could put her hands on by John Steinbeck and listening to the songs of Woody Guthrie to get a better feel for what the people of the Dust Bowl were going through. She hadn’t yet decided exactly how she would do it, but someday, somehow, she would help them and people like them around the world.

Oscar told her he had promised Reverend Huxley and James McCrum to study to become a missionary to the Indians in northern Ontario, even if he wasn’t sure he had a calling. But if that didn’t work out, he would find some other way to repay them and the other people of Port Carling for the help they had given him after the Great Fire of 1930.

In the weeks that followed, Claire often came home with Oscar after work and stayed for dinner. In their discussions outside later on, she told him her parents only seemed to like going to dinners and cocktail parties with their friends in Toronto and spending time with the same people on Millionaires’ Row and at the Muskoka Yacht Club. They wasted their time talking about their holidays in Europe and horse racing in Canada and the United States when people were out of work and going hungry. They wanted her to study art appreciation and home economics at university and then quickly find someone to marry from among their set, but she wanted more out of life.

At first the Huxleys were flattered that the daughter of someone from such a prominent family would spend so much time at their home with Oscar. But Reverend Huxley began to worry.

“Do Claire’s parents know she’s seeing you?” he asked. “Claire comes from a different world.”

Oscar said he didn’t know, but that it didn’t matter. “Claire doesn’t care about things like race and social position.”

“I just don’t want you to be hurt,” Reverend Huxley said.

By the latter part of August, the two friends had become so close that Claire invited Oscar home to meet her parents, Dwight and Hilda.

“Sundays are when we hold open house,” she told him. “Everybody knows they can just drop in; no formal invitation is needed. We eat, joke around, and have a good time. Some of my friends from school come right after their morning tennis games. Daddy and Mommy’s friends are always there. I’d like them all to meet you.”

Oscar was surprised and gratified. His efforts to fit in were being rewarded by an invitation to mix with the cream of Canadian and American society. Assuming Claire had told her parents he was an Indian and that her family and friends had nothing against Indians, he immediately accepted.

On Sunday morning, a member of the household staff held Claire’s motorboat steady as she and Oscar stepped onto the dock.

“I think I’ve been here before,” said Oscar, “but I don’t remember when.”

“I know,” said Claire. “I was going into grade nine and you were working on the Amick when I first saw you.”

They then walked side by side up a recently raked, stone-lined gravel pathway past beautifully tended gardens of delphiniums, daisies, daylilies, and hydrangeas to the twelve-foot-wide flagstone front steps that led to an immense wraparound veranda.

“I’d like you to meet Oscar Wolf,” she said to her parents, who were sitting on white cane furniture sipping gin and tonics and chatting with friends from nearby summer homes. “He’s a good friend of mine and I invited him to join us for brunch.”

“Why, it’s that young Indian from the grocery store. Claire is always surprising us,” her mother said, gazing unsmilingly at a place just above Oscar’s eyes and ignoring his outstretched hand.

“How’s business at the store? How’s old McCrum making out?” one of the guests blurted out. But Oscar, taken aback by the frostiness of Mrs. Fitzgibbon’s greeting, ignored the question and the conversation ended.

“Time to eat,” Claire said after an embarrassing pause, and she led Oscar to the living room where brunch was already being served. A massive granite fireplace dominated the room. The floors were polished maple. Hand-painted light fixtures hung down from fourteen-foot ceilings and a wide circular staircase with a landing and built-in window seat led up to the second floor. Prominently displayed on a panelled yellow birch wall was a large black-and-white photograph of Claire’s parents with President Wilson of the United States taken when the American leader spent his holidays at a nearby summer home before the Great War. On another wall hung a photograph of equal size of Claire’s father dressed in the uniform of Commodore of the Muskoka Yacht Club. Silver cups, awarded to Claire and her brother for winning canoe races at the club’s annual regattas, stood in a line on the mantel.

A maid handed Oscar a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a large folded starched linen napkin. Oscar tried to open the napkin with one hand after balancing the glass of orange juice on top of his plate with the other. However, his hands trembled and he spilled some juice on the floor. The older guests exchanged small smiles and chuckles among themselves when they thought Oscar was not looking. Claire’s friends, who had come to the brunch from the Muskoka Yacht Club elegantly dressed in their crisp tennis whites and cotton V-neck sweaters with navy blue trim, stared with barely concealed disdain at Oscar’s clean work pants and plaid shirt and avoided speaking to him. Later that afternoon, when Claire took Oscar back to Port Carling in her motorboat, she seemed upset, but didn’t say why. But the next day, when she went shopping for groceries at the general store, her mother accompanied her, and when Oscar said hello, mother and daughter pretended they didn’t know him.

That evening, Claire telephoned Oscar to say how bad she felt not having answered his greetings at the store. She had no choice, she said, because her family had threatened to disown her if she saw him again. But that didn’t mean they still couldn’t see each other when university started in the fall. Toronto was a big city and they could find out-of-the-way places to meet and no one would ever need to know.

Oscar let Claire speak until she finished and then hung up without replying.

No one from the village, Oscar thought, despite their ingrained suspicion of Indians and occasional racist remarks, would have treated him in such a shabby way. But to be invited and then rejected out of hand by presumably well-educated people, not because of some personal failing but because of his race, upset him. The personal snub from Claire hurt even more because she had been the first friend his own age that he had ever had. She was someone who had shared his love of poetry, novels, and ideas, and someone he had permitted to penetrate the protective reserve he maintained with the people around him. He could not understand how a person so sensitive, idealistic, poised, and self-confident could so readily have obeyed her parents’ wishes. It was always possible, of course, that she had just been pretending to like him and was just having some fun at his expense. He hoped not, because he liked her, and although he had been too upset to speak to her when she called, he fully intended to find some way of getting together with her in Toronto in the fall as she had suggested.

The other employees of the store who had been present when the brush-off took place felt sorry for Oscar, even if they were not surprised at the outcome. After all, it wasn’t the first time that outraged parents from Millionaires’ Row had put a stop to a budding romance between a daughter and a local boy, although to best of anyone’s recollection it was first time that the local boy had been an Indian. The story of the failed romance between the rich girl and the poor Indian was then repeated from employee to employee, becoming more and more distorted with each telling until a breathless sales clerk, anxious to curry favour, went into the office of James McCrum to give him all the salacious details.

“You just gotta hear this, Mr. McCrum,” she said. “Everyone in the village is talking about Oscar and the Fitzgibbon girl. And I have it from a good source that they’ve been having a hot love affair all summer long without anyone knowing about it. They apparently got together out on the porch at the manse every night after the Huxleys went to bed and did things they shouldn’t have. Poor Reverend Huxley and his wife didn’t have a clue what was going on under their noses. Sometimes, they went out in her motorboat and anchored it and continued their carryings on. Finally, her parents caught them in the act in the boathouse at their place down on Millionaires’ Row and told him to leave their daughter alone. And apparently there was a lot of drinking going on and someone said she was pregnant.”

“What a bunch of hogwash,” McCrum told her. “I don’t believe a word of it, and if I were you, I wouldn’t go around spreading rumours about a fine, outstanding boy like Oscar!”

But he immediately called Reverend Huxley to get his version of events.

“It was an innocent relationship between a young man and a young woman, and I’m sure nothing untoward happened,” Reverend Huxley told him. “But Oscar did accept an invitation to brunch at Claire’s place and her parents must have told her she couldn’t see him again.”

“I’m sorry those people on Millionaires’ Row treated you so badly,” Reverend Huxley said to Oscar after inviting him into his study and asking him to sit down beside him on the sofa. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. We all go through these crises in our lives. Sometimes we just need to put them in perspective.”

“I’ll know better the next time, if there is a next time,” Oscar said, glancing at the door and waiting for the interview to end. “But there’s no need to worry. No one got hurt.”

Reverend Huxley rose and took a book from a shelf. “Books and literature can help people overcome bad times in their lives,” he said. “It’s a truism, but I speak from personal experience. This novel, for example, is by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran, and in my opinion the best book written on the Great War. It’s called All Quiet on the Western Front. It allows us to see the war from the other side’s perspective and to understand that we are all people, that we are all human. When you read books like this, you are not an Indian, you are not a white man, and you are not a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or Italian, or rich or poor. You are a human being with the same hopes, the same fears, and the same dreams as everybody else. And when you finish this one, I want you to start on the others I’ve collected over the years. Maybe they’ll change the way you look at things. Maybe they’ll help you put the behaviour of people like the Fitzgibbons in perspective as you go through life. There are lots of people out there just like them.”

Oscar took and read the book, but it didn’t make him feel any better. And his problem wasn’t just with the Fitzgibbons and people from their social set. After five years of living with the Huxleys, doing well in school, playing hard in sports, and doing everything his benefactors expected of him, he still didn’t fit in. He was still the outsider. And now he was expected to leave for Toronto to study to be a missionary when he wasn’t even sure he believed in God.

He needed to talk to someone he could trust, someone he could count on to tell him the truth, someone who could let him know whether he should carry on trying to fit in or whether he should drop the whole thing once and for all. That was when he decided to call on Clem McCrum, who had once told him to come see him if ever he could help and who had treated him well when he worked on the Amick the summer after the fire.