The following morning, the stories filed by the journalists were front page news in South Africa. The president himself, with barely concealed satisfaction during a hastily convened press conference in Pretoria, expressed his outrage at the inhumane manner the Canadian government treated its Red Indians. “I hope,” he added, “the Canadian prime minister will clean up his own act before he ventures once again to criticize South Africa’s policies of separate development for its white, black, coloured, and Asian peoples.”
The Canadian Press filed a report that was picked up by newspapers across Canada and around the world. Columnists from the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, and the International Herald Tribune, who usually considered developments in Canada too boring to merit their notice, paid attention. In their articles, they said it would be a long time before members of the international community took Canada seriously again when it professed concern for oppressed peoples. Journalists by the dozen hurried to the Osnaburgh Indian Reserve where Chief Zebadiah Mukwah took them on a tour, including a lengthy visit to speak to Betsy at her home, to expose the living conditions of his people. Two days later, after receiving a full report from officials of the Department of Indian Affairs, the prime minister telephoned Minister McCaully and summarily dismissed him for letting himself be hoodwinked by one of his officers. And as soon as Oscar got back to Ottawa, the undersecretary summoned him to his office and fired him.
But the opposition parties during Question Period in the House of Commons combined to attack the government, not for displaying bad judgement in facilitating the visit of a delegation of South African journalists to one of Canada’s most impoverished and troubled reserves, but for allowing such terrible conditions to exist in Canada in the first place. Editorial writers demanded the reinstatement of the minister, church leaders delivered sermons, and schoolchildren waving placards condemning the government’s treatment of Indian Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill. When a national campaign of prayer breakfasts began, the prime minister asked Joseph McCaully to come to see him in his office in the Centre Block and restored him to his former position.
In Johannesburg, Bishop Tumbula read the press reports and chuckled when he saw Oscar’s name. Ambassador Henderson sent a personal message to his patron, the prime minister, proposing that Canada adopt a policy of apartheid along the South African model to deal with the Indians since obviously assimilation was not working; he was fired by return telegram for his pains. In the sunny breakfast nook of her Forest Hill home, Claire smiled as she read the same stories in the Globe and Mail. In Canberra, Reverend Mortimer, Father Murphy, and Captain Fletcher held an emergency meeting of the commission behind closed doors and quietly removed from their final report all reference to Canada and all things Canadian such as residential schools. And back at Port Carling, Reverend Huxley and James McCrum, drinking coffee together in the basement of the Presbyterian church after Sunday services, agreed that there had been a divine purpose to the Great Fire after all.
No one in the Department, however, called Oscar to cancel his dismissal, but he wasn’t upset. When he had proposed taking the journalists to the reserve, he had known he would be fired when their reports were published. He wouldn’t be a martyr, as he had dreamed of becoming when he was a boy, dying for his cause like Tecumseh fighting the Americans in the War of 1812, or John Brown battling to free the slaves at Harper’s Ferry. But he would be offering up what was left of his career as a sacrifice to strike a blow against everyone, everywhere, who continued to deprive Aboriginal people of their dignity. That goal had been accomplished, and he would now leave Ottawa and spend his remaining years at the Rama Indian Reserve surrounded by his own people. He would wear his hair in braids. He would become friends with his mother and Rosa. He would beg the forgiveness of James McCrum for torching his store. He would apologize to Reverend Huxley and his wife for deceiving them. Perhaps in so doing he would finally atone for the harm he had done to others all his life.
Two weeks later, after cancelling the lease on his apartment and packing his few belongings into his car, Oscar left Ottawa to start his new life. It was by now late January, the sky was cloudy with sunny breaks, the snow was four feet deep in the bush, and the snowbanks were so high he couldn’t see over them as he drove through the Algonquin Highlands and into the District of Muskoka. And as he drove, the words to “Shall We Gather at the River” came to him unbidden and repeated themselves over and over again in his head. But rather than being irritated by their insistence to be heard, he felt strangely happy and at peace with himself for the first time in years. It was time, he thought, to return to the embrace of the Christian God and reconnect with the Holy World of Old Mary.
Turning off the highway running through Port Carling, he took the new road that went up and over the ridge to the Indian Camp, hoping to speak to Rosa and his mother before he continued on to the reserve. To his surprise, the path to the shack had not been shovelled, and the building was encased in snow drifts that lay deep on the roof, against the door, and up to the casements of the windows. No one was living there, but he wanted to visit the old summer home of his grandfather just the same.
He parked his car, got out, and struggled through snow up to his waist to the door. Using his hands, he dug down until he found the handle, turned it, and pushed hard. It swung inward, dumping him and a load of snow onto the floor. When he tried to rise to his feet, a blinding light struck him in the face and forced him to lie back, close his eyes, and cover them with his hands. But the light radiated through his hands and eyelids and grew ever stronger, and he felt the presence of something as otherworldly and awesome in its power as the ghostly being he had encountered on first entering the shack after the Great Fire of 1930. Jacob was there in the room with him, he was certain, and not just his shadow. Somehow his grandfather had managed to come back from the Land of the Spirits to forgive his beloved grandson for setting the fire that had killed him and Lily. It was the redemption he had been seeking for more than three decades.
Opening his tear-filled eyes, he smiled when he saw that the sun had broken through the clouds and its radiance was reflecting through the windows off the snow. But when he sat up and looked outside, he saw, to his horror, the Manido of the Lake shimmering like a mirage in the light, laughing at him.