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HOME FROM THE WAR

1

“I’ll have a glass of draft beer, please,” Oscar said, tossing a dime onto the bar after dropping into the Port Carling branch of the Royal Canadian Legion to look up old friends and to have a drink. He had graduated from the University of Toronto and was on his way to Ottawa to report for duty as a newly recruited foreign service officer in the Department of External Affairs, known in Canada and abroad simply as “the Department.”

“Sorry, Chief, you can’t drink here. We don’t want the likes of you in the Legion. Besides, it’s against the law to serve Indians. You being so well-educated and all that sort of thing, you shouldn’t have to be told,” said the bartender, a former teammate on the Port Carling hockey team in the old days.

“But I’m a veteran,” Oscar said, “I served overseas. Don’t I get any special treatment?”

“Even if you weren’t an Indian, you’d still not be welcome. So get out before I call the law. Go on down to the Indian Camp; your Indian buddies are all good customers of the bootleggers. They’ll give you a drink if you ask them real nice.”

Oscar looked around the room, seeking support from the dozen or more veterans of the two world wars, all of whom he knew from the time when he lived with the Huxleys. No one spoke up in his defence. Finally, an old soldier, someone who had fought with his father and Jacob at the Battle of Hill 70, said, “Why don’t you just bugger off and let us drink our beer in peace.”

Oscar stood at the bar staring at the old man until he looked away. He looked at the others, one after another, until they turned their backs on him and waited for him to leave.

“Call the cops if you want,” Oscar then said to the bartender. “I’m not leaving until I get a beer.”

“You always thought you were better than everyone else,” the bartender said. “And you’d like nothing better than to have the cops come and throw you in jail. That way you could pretend to be a victim just like you did after the fire. Well, I’m not playing along with your game. You can stay as long as you want but I’m not serving you. You can watch the others drink.”

Oscar picked up his money and left the Legion wondering why the veterans had decided to shun him. He went over the ridge to the Indian Camp, where a half-dozen veterans his age, friends from the old days when he was still a boy on the reserve, were drinking tea with their wives around a campfire while their children played in the water. They gave him the welcome he had expected to receive from the white veterans at the Legion and invited him to visit with them for a while.

“We haven’t seen much of you in years,” someone said. “Not since the Great Fire of 1930, when the white people took you in. Everyone figured your new friends told you to stay away.”

“I did a lot of things in those days I regret to this day.”

“Don’t take it the wrong way; no one ever blamed you. You probably had no choice.”

“I was just trying to survive after Jacob died.”

“We’re actually pretty proud of you. You seemed to land on your feet no matter what happened. You got a high-school education when none of us had that chance.”

“But what happened back in 1935 when you were supposed to go to university to become a preacher?” someone else asked. “Did you have a falling out with the Huxleys?”

“Something like that,” Oscar said “And it hadn’t felt right to keep on accepting help from the white people when times were so tough for everyone. So I handed back the money they gave me for tuition, hopped a freight at Gravenhurst, went to California, and did whatever I could to earn a living.”

Oscar thought it prudent not to mention that he had spent five wild years on the West Coast of the United States trying to find a world where he fit in. He had had his good and bad days. On the good ones, he managed to put aside his memories of the fire and his failed attempts to please his white benefactors at Port Carling. On the bad ones, he suffered through bouts of depression in which he relived the fire and the deaths of Jacob and Lily. Ultimately, he carved out a place for himself in a world of drifters, Mexican-American fieldworkers, down-and-out Okie and Arkie migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Midwest, petty criminals on the fringes of society, and dispossessed American Indians. It was a world where he sometimes picked fruits and vegetables to make a little money, sometimes volunteered in soup kitchens, sometimes drank too much and passed out on the sidewalks, and sometimes slept in hobo jungles and flophouses. He even signed up on a whim with the Abraham Lincoln brigade to fight Falangist, Nazi, and Fascist troops slaughtering civilians in the Spanish Civil War, but the fighting ended before he finished his training.

In the end he found long-term employment. His chance came one night when he and a few of his friends went into San Diego after work to have some fun at a carnival. A barker was standing outside a tent, shouting out to the crowd that for only twenty-five cents they could watch an amateur boxer, Sven, “the Slovenly Swede,” take on all comers.

“And if you want to fight him, big fellow,” he said, looking at Oscar, “I’ll wave the entrance fee and let you try your luck. The winning purse is ten bucks.”

Oscar entered the ring and stripped off his shirt. Someone laced a set of boxing gloves on his hands and he was hit in the head before he could lift his arms. But he was big and strong in those days and in perfect shape from working in the fields. And although he had never had any professional training, he had played defence for the Port Carling hockey team and had never lost a fight. He poked, he jabbed, he danced around ring, and he flattened his opponent with one mighty punch, rendering him unfit to fight again. The carnival management offered Sven’s job to Oscar, who became “Oscar the Killer Injun.”

He made good money until he finally lost a fight and was fired. A member of the crowd who had been coming to see him perform in the ring then approached him. He told Oscar he was the owner of a bar on the waterfront and needed someone who knew how to use his fists to keep order at his place. And so for six nights a week for the next two years, Oscar threw drunken sailors from the nearby naval base out into the street when they became rowdy or belligerent.

The bar was also a hangout for prostitutes, who were always trying to get the sailors drunk and steal their money. Oscar did not approve of this type of behaviour, but in the interest of maintaining good relations with the girls, who were popular with the clientele, he looked the other way when they picked the pockets of their customers. He even came to enjoy their company, especially their ribald sense of humour, but in time he grew tired of them. He was still trying to cope with his depression and was almost happy when war broke out, since it gave him an excuse to return home and make a fresh start in the army.

“And when the government declared war on Germany in September 1939,” Oscar said, “I came back and joined the army, just like my father and grandfather did in the Great War.”

At this point, the other veterans interrupted him to tell their own stories; how they too had joined up as soon as war had been declared, and how after their basic training at nearby Camp Borden, they had been among the first Canadian soldiers to be sent overseas to the giant Canadian base at Aldershot in England. Several had participated in the disastrous Canadian raid on Dieppe in German-occupied France in August 1942 and had been prisoners of war until the Allied victory in May 1945. Others had spent four years in England and fought their way ashore with the thousands of other Canadian soldiers in Normandy in June 1944 and participated in the major battles leading to Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Several had been wounded. No one mentioned the ones who had not made it back.

“Since my father and grandfather had been in the 48th Highlanders,” Oscar said, resuming his story during a lull in the conversation, “I joined the same outfit, and after basic training was sent overseas to Britain with my regiment in 1941. In 1943, I went ashore at Pachino with the others in the invasion of Sicily. After we chased the Germans across the Straits of Messina, we landed on the Adriatic coast and drove them out of southern Italy. And like a lot of you guys, I finished the war in May 1945 and came home to go to university. I graduated a few months ago and accepted a job in the Foreign Service.”

“But why the Foreign Service?” the wife of one of the veterans, who had also known Oscar in the old days, asked. “Whatever made you decide to become a diplomat when you could have become anything you wanted — a preacher, a teacher, a doctor — something that would let you serve our people?”

“But being a foreign service officer will let me do that,” said Oscar. “And not just the Native people of Canada, but other people just like ours everywhere.”

Oscar did not say that the process of choosing the diplomatic life as a career had begun one night in Italy in the fall of 1943. He was by that time a sergeant in a company of men advancing in the pouring rain in single file up a steep goat trail behind enemy lines. They were on their way to seize the high ground and cut off the supply lines of a German unit blocking the forward movement of the Eighth Army up the Adriatic coast. It was so dark that each soldier had to hold the shoulder of the man in front of him to avoid stepping off the path and tumbling down the side of the hill and alerting the enemy. Suddenly, the column came to a halt and word was passed back through the ranks from the commanding officer at the head of the column: “Get the Chief! He’s needed up front.”

Oscar squeezed his way forward to where the commanding officer was waiting for him.

“The guys say there’s a German guard post about fifty yards up ahead with a sentry standing in the doorway of a shed watching this trail. Your job is to take care of him as quietly as you can before he cries out. Otherwise his buddies will sound the alarm and we’ll all be in the shit.”

Oscar nodded, removed his pack, set down his rifle, took off the pouches filled with grenades and ammunition attached to the combat webbing around his chest, and set off up the hill armed only with his combat knife with its ten-inch blade. Moving ahead warily, he stopped every few yards to listen for sounds of the enemy and to peer ahead in an attempt to penetrate the veil of black pouring rain. Finally, he saw a glow and the outline of a face as the German soldier on watch sucked on his cigarette. Crouching down, his knife grasped firmly in his right hand, he waited patiently as the face of the German soldier, slumped against the door jamb of the goat shed, lit up periodically as he puffed away, unaware that Oscar was only two yards from him. When the soldier finished his cigarette and tossed it casually outside into the rain, Oscar stepped forward, placed a hand firmly over his mouth, wrapped an arm around his head, twisted it sharply, and slit his throat before he could raise the alarm. He dragged the dying man outside into the rain, took his place in the doorway, and listened to the breathing and snoring of other members of the German squad sleeping inside. After fixing in his mind their numbers and locations, he went back down the trail, quietly provided the password to the soldier on watch, and reported to the commanding officer who sent a team of soldiers with fixed bayonets to deal with the Germans asleep in the hut.

Later that night, hunched over and trembling from delayed shock in the waterlogged trench he and his comrades had dug on the brow of the hill they had just seized, Oscar was still savouring the praise he had received from his commanding officer for killing the sentry. It was not the first time he had carried out such a task and he liked to think he was chosen because he was the one who stepped forward when volunteers were needed for dangerous missions. He was the one who had distinguished himself by acts of bravery, leading the men of his platoon in attacks on enemy tanks and machine-gun nests as his regiment participated in the liberation of town after town from south to north in Italy. But these reasons aside, he had always welcomed the chance to show his solidarity with the men of the 48th Highlanders; they were his brothers-in-arms and his family, and family members helped each other, even at the risk to their lives.

The rain ended and Oscar got to his feet and looked out over the top of the trench at the tracer fire coming from the nearby German lines. As he waited for the enemy counterattack to begin, he remembered the soldier he had killed and the rush of adrenaline mixed with elation that had engulfed him when he slit his throat. He had felt the same way, he recalled, when he had set fire to the general store at Port Carling. A wave of shame swept over him, making him wish he had never been born. There was something despicable, perhaps evil within his soul that made him rejoice in the harm he inflicted on others. The depression that had plagued his life during his years in California was creeping back.

Afraid he wouldn’t be able to participate in the coming engagement and be called a coward, he squeezed shut his eyes; he tried with all his might to fight off the mental anguish. He then remembered that years ago, when he was struggling to come to terms with his paralyzing fear of Jacob’s shadow, he had realized that the gods were but figments of his imagination that he could drive away by an act of will. The guilt he had been carrying around with him for years, he saw, was something similar, a self-inflicted mental wound brought about by worrying about all the stupid things he had done in life. He needed to take control of himself. He needed to stop brooding on the past. If his mind threw up painful memories of the past, he would fight them by telling himself that that was then and now was now. He would remind himself that he had made a contribution to his country as a soldier that more than compensated for the errors of his youth. And should he survive the war, he would do even more for his people and his country.

Thus, at war’s end, after two years of positive thinking, Oscar lined up with hundreds of other demobilized comrades-in-arms to register at the University of Toronto for his first year in the Humanities. This time, his fees and living costs were paid by the Canadian government under a program to help veterans reintegrate into society rather than by benefactors with their own agendas. This time, he felt at home studying with men and women his own age who had experienced war as he had, and who had no time for petty social snobbery. Three years of hard work then paid off when he graduated close to the top of his class and won the gold medal for International Relations and Modern History.

Faced with deciding what career path to follow, Oscar thought back to the evenings in the living room at the manse in Port Carling when Reverend Huxley had told stories about his journey back to Canada on the eve of the Great War. He remembered the hint of longing and lost opportunity in the reverend’s voice when he talked about the sons of missionaries who had become diplomats and gone on to help solve the big international problems of the day. Inspired by his newfound confidence, Oscar decided to pursue the career denied to his benefactor, wrote the Foreign Service exams, and was rewarded by being offered a job as a junior foreign service officer. It had all seemed so easy.

But it was just as well for Oscar’s morale that he did not know, and would never know, that he had almost been barred entry into the Foreign Service by the unchanged systemic prejudice against Indians. When the results of the country-wide examinations to select recruits came in, the selection board had been surprised to note that an Indian by the name of Oscar Wolf, a decorated war veteran and student in his final year at the University of Toronto, had scored high enough to merit entrance into the service. Such a thing had never happened before and they consulted the Department of Indian Affairs on the eligibility of Canada’s First Peoples to become civil servants.

“Indians are indeed eligible,” came back the Delphic reply, “as long as they are not Indians. The Indian agent on Mr. Wolf’s reserve should obtain from him a sworn declaration that he renounces his status as an Indian as well as his right to live at any time at present or in future on his reserve. He will thus have the legal status of a real Canadian and be eligible to accept an appointment of Junior Foreign Service Officer in the Department of External Affairs.”

The head of the selection board, afraid that Oscar might make a fuss, called on the undersecretary of state for External Affairs, the top-ranking official in the Department and a personal adviser to prime ministers going back for decades, to seek his views. The undersecretary, a man with a conscience who thought it was high time Canada began to practise at home the values it preached abroad at the United Nations, found a way around the regulations to let Oscar join the Department without renouncing his birthright.

2

When Oscar left the Indian Camp, he decided to call on the Huxleys, but when he went to the manse and knocked on the front door, nobody answered. However, the curtains parted and someone looked out at him. It was Mrs. Huxley and she did not look happy. The curtains closed, he heard footsteps retreating into the interior of the house, and then all was silent.

James McCrum greeted him coolly when Oscar dropped in to see him at the general store.

“What can I do for you today, sir,” he said, glancing up from his desk as if he was meeting Oscar for the first time.

“Just thought I’d come in and say hello,” Oscar said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Don’t have time to talk, Oscar,” he said, returning to his paperwork. “This is my busy season.”

Oscar asked him about Clem.

“Oh, he’s no better or worse than he’s ever been,” McCrum said, not looking up. “Spends his time drinking wine with that crazy mother of yours at his cabin on the Dump Road. He’s still the village drunk.”

Oscar was shocked at the changes in Clem when he went to see him. His face and eyes were yellow, his hair was sparse, his face was thin and haggard, and he limped when he walked.

“It’s been so long, it’s been so long since I seen you last,” he said, wiping away with his hand the brown tobacco juice mixed with spittle that drooled from both sides of his mouth. “Why didn’t you come back to see me, or at least write?” he asked, his eyes filling with drunken tears.

“I’ve got no excuse,” Oscar said. “I should have. I was out west for years. I was in the army, and then at university.”

“You Indian guys were always good soldiers, Oscar. I’m happy for you, I really am. But I’ve had a tough time, Oscar, since I seen you last. Honest to God, it’s been tough. When I was in jail, they sold off all my pigs. I bought some more and when I couldn’t keep up the fences around their pens and when they escaped they slapped the biggest jeezily fines on me you couldn’t never believe, Oscar, again and again and again, until I used up all my money and had to go out of business. I looked for work but no one would give me a job, not even my own father. Then the war came along and our guys took so many German prisoners from downed planes and sinking ships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean there wasn’t enough room in England to hold them. They turned the old TB sanatorium at Gravenhurst into a prisoner of war camp and started shipping them over here. They put out a call to Great War veterans to work as guards and I got taken on. But I felt sorry for those German fellows. I could tell they were homesick by just looking at them and so I started slipping them chewing tobacco to cheer them up, but I got caught and was fired. They said I was fraternizing with the enemy and that wasn’t allowed.

“So they brought me to my knees, Oscar. I needed you, and you weren’t there for me,” he said, reaching for a tumbler of chokecherry wine. “The old ticker’s been acting up and I use this as my medicine.

“Excuse me,” he said, after taking a drink, “I should’ve offered you a glass.”

“That’s okay, Clem,” Oscar said. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Your mother and I have been drinking all day,” Clem said, “and she‘s sleeping at the moment. She’s a big-hearted woman, makes my meals and shares her pension cheques with me. Just wait a minute; maybe she’ll want to say a few words to you.”

Although he had seen her around the village often enough during his high school years, Oscar hadn’t spoken to his mother since she had come to the door of the manse looking for him when he was living at the Huxleys. He hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with her then, and he wanted nothing to do with her now.

“Don’t go to the trouble, Clem, I’ll see her some other time.”

“But it’s no trouble, Oscar. It’s no trouble at all,” Clem said, getting up and going into the bedroom.

“I’m sorry, Oscar,” he said, coming back few minutes later. “She doesn’t feel well enough to see you. Maybe she’ll be her old self after when she’s had a little more sleep. Why not come back later? Maybe have something to eat with us?”

“I’m sorry, Clem, but I can’t stay. I’ve got to make it to Ottawa today. But before I go, do you have any idea why everyone around here is giving me the cold shoulder?”

“I think they know you started the fire, Oscar. Might even be my fault. I sometimes talk too much when I’m drunk. But they got no proof and they can’t do nothing to you. They aren’t about to make accusations they can’t back up against a war hero.”

Seeing Oscar’s look of alarm, Clem blundered on.

“Actually, I’m not too sure what I said. It was after I got out of jail and found out they had sold off my pigs. I had a lot to drink and went downtown and told anyone who would listen that I had blown up their road because I wasn’t going to let them push me around. I might have said that you had once done something like that. I might have mentioned that you torched the business section to pay back the villagers for stealing the land of your ancestors. The first thing I knew the constable was up at my cabin to take a statement. But I wouldn’t make one. ‘I say lots of wild things when I’m drinking and most of it’s lies,’ I said. And so they dropped the matter. I sure hope I haven’t caused you any trouble.”

“No, Clem, you didn’t mean to cause me any harm. I’ve paid my debt to society through my service in the war and nobody has come after me in all these years.”

“That’s because they don’t have a leg to stand on. The word of a drunk won’t hold up in court. Your problem is the people around here don’t like you as much as they used to. But that don’t matter, because you still got me as a friend.”

Two weeks later, a letter addressed to Oscar Wolf, Foreign Service Officer, Department of External Affairs, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa, and postmarked Port Carling, Ontario, was sitting on Oscar’s desk when he came to work in the morning.

Dear Oscar,

I am sorry I wasn’t home when you dropped by the other day. Isabel said you came to the door and she didn’t answer it. James McCrum has also told me that he sent you away when you went to see him. And everyone in the village is talking about how you were turned away at the Legion. You must feel hurt, but people who rejected you feel betrayed. I am sure you are aware by now that after you left Port Carling in the mid-thirties, a lot of rumours were spread about your possible connection to the Great Fire.

I want you to know that whether or not there is any truth to the rumours, I will stand by you. Everybody makes mistakes in life, sometimes big ones. And I for one made more than my share. I’m certainly not happy at the things I did in the war, killing Germans who were just doing their duty for their country. I hope God forgives me someday for I know I never will. It’s something I’ll carry to my grave.

Please come and see me sometime. We’ll talk and it’ll do the both of us a world of good.

Your Friend,

Lloyd Huxley

P.S. I understand that you have been accepted into the Department as a Junior Foreign Service Officer. I am so happy you managed to accomplish what I never managed to do.

Oscar read the letter and carefully filed it alongside the things most precious to him such as the medal for bravery in action His Majesty King George VI had given him at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, a fading photograph clipped from the Gravenhurst Weekly Gleaner showing the Manido of the Lake against the setting sun on Lake Muskoka, and the pictures that used to hang on the wall of Jacob’s house of his father and grandfather in their 48th Highlanders uniforms, saved from the trash by a neighbour back on the reserve and given to him after his mother had thrown them out.