ONE

Voices in the Wind

THEY LIVED IN A THREE-ROOM, two-storey house on a one-acre lot overgrown with trees in Port Carling, a small village in Ontario’s cottage country. The mother, who was Indian, had long been familiar with the dwelling. As a child in the 1920s and 1930s, she had spent time with her extended family in the tiny local enclave known as the Indian Camp where native people from her distant reserve gathered in the summers to fish and to sell handicrafts to tourists. In those early days, she used to cross the street whenever she approached it, for a villager had hanged himself on a backyard apple tree and it was rumoured that his tormented spirit had taken up residence in the long-deserted house.

Certainly the building gave every impression of being haunted. Their glass shattered by stones thrown by schoolchildren over the years, two large windows stared down at passersby on the street like the Windigo, sinister eater of human flesh and evil spirit in Chippewa mythology – at least in the imagination of the impressionable native child who had heard too many tales of monsters at home for comfort. Her fear was that the resident ghost would float out of one of the black and eyeless sockets to seize her and do her in. She never dreamed that one day the house would become her home.

During the Great Depression, the Indian girl, now a young woman, married a white man, a hard-working unskilled labourer, scarcely older than herself. And other than a fondness for home-brew (raisin wine was his favourite), he was a good husband. After their initial shock, for white men did not marry Indians in those days, his parents accepted their Indian daughter-in-law. The war came. The army rejected the husband because of a bad heart. The mixed couple, with their growing brood of half-breed children, drifted from town to town until they arrived in the village of her youth the year after the war ended. Their children were now four in number and the family lived in a tent on wasteland near the dump for the summer and in an uninsulated summer cottage for the winter. Desperate for a home of her own, the mother remembered the abandoned house.

The years had not been kind to it. Now known in the village as “the old shack on the hill,” it had neither indoor toilet nor electricity. Likewise, rainwater leaked through the much-patched tarpaper roof, the wooden pillars that served as foundations were rotting away, and the house leaned perilously to one side. But the unpainted, weather-beaten exterior walls that had turned barnwood-black with age were solid, the walls of the one room occupying the ground floor were clean, and the partitions of deep-brown hemlock studs covered by thin boards separating the two upstairs bedrooms were clean and dry. The mother shrugged off her fears of the Windigo, persuaded the owners to let her purchase the property by making small monthly payments, and moved her family into the new home in the spring of 1947.

The mother may have put the story of the hanged man and ghost behind her, but her son, to whom she had confided the story, had not. Not that he was really afraid. He was, after all, seven years old and had been told by his father that ghosts did not exist. Nonetheless, he was never at ease at night when he had to visit the outdoor privy some distance behind the old house in a grove of sumach trees. In fact, anyone, even someone with a less active imagination than the boy’s, would have found the experience spooky. Flashlights were a luxury the family could not afford, and the boy’s only source of light as he stumbled along the path was from coal-oil lamps inside the house that filtered out through the ancient single-pane windows casting eerie shadows on the ground outside. To make matters worse, the boy was convinced that he could hear ghostly moaning sounds whenever he passed the apple tree where the neighbour had hanged himself. His unease turned to fear on moonlit nights since at times he thought he saw the victim, a rope around his neck, swinging in the obscurity among the branches of the apple tree. And his fear turned to terror on pitch-dark windy ones since the moaning from the restless spirit then seemed to reach new levels of despair.

Once back inside the house, the boy felt brave – at least in the company of his family when it gathered together in the evenings before going to bed. There was safety in numbers in that crowded room serving as kitchen, dining room, and living room. A wood-burning cookstove, a supply of drying wood, and a sink occupied one half of the space. A row of rubber boots was neatly lined up just inside the front door. Behind the stove, screwed into the wall, were rows of clothes hooks holding the coats and hats of the family members. An oilcloth-covered kitchen table, six hardwood maple chairs ordered from Eaton’s catalogue, and an old couch filled the other half. Off in a corner was the icebox with its two standard compartments–one for milk, butter, meat and vegetables and the other for blocks of ice, cut out of Lake Muskoka in the dead of winter and delivered door-to-door throughout the year by a local farmer.

In addition to the boy, a crying baby, a quarrelsome younger sister, a bossy older brother, an overworked mother, and a preoccupied father filled every available space. This did not include a dog and cat who cohabited reluctantly with a baby raccoon the father had rescued and which he was raising with more open affection than he gave to his own children. The clamour was such, the boy reassured himself, that the ghost in the apple tree, if it really existed, would never dare enter the house.

Upstairs in bed, when the other family members were asleep, he was not so certain. Despite the comforting presence of his brother and sisters in their shared bedroom, the boy was worried. For when the house was silent, he thought he could hear the sounds of the moaning from the afflicted soul through the old building’s exterior walls. Having heard his parents say that death by suicide was unnatural, the boy thought the spectre must be guilt-ridden at having taken his own life.

 

And deepening his anxiety, he was preoccupied by a story of an encounter with supernatural evil told in all sincerity by a cousin of his mother. This cousin, a quiet Indian trapper with dark brown skin and piercing black eyes, often came to the house to spend the evening with the family bearing carcasses of beaver and muskrat as gifts for the mother to cook. On a recent visit, he had been more taciturn than usual and had looked so often at the window and with such a deeply troubled expression, the boy’s mother had asked him what was wrong.

Speaking in a barely audible voice, the cousin confessed that despite being warned repeatedly by the preacher on his reserve that gambling was wicked, he had played cards for money late into the night at the home of a neighbour. Outside, it was a cold, dark, moonless night. Inside, six friends sat around the kitchen table, illuminated by a solitary coal-oil lamp whose thin yellow glow reflected off the glass of the bare windows, devoid of curtains and blinds. Four were playing and two were watching and waiting their turn to join in.

Along one wall in the shadows was a bench and on the bench were the coats of the guests along with a dipper and a pail of fresh, cold drinking water drawn from the well and carried in earlier in the evening by the host. A box of leghold traps was stuffed in the corner together with a pair of snowshoes. The room was comfortably warm, heated by a fire in a huge and ancient box stove centred on the worn linoleum covering the floor. Beside the stove was a wooden box filled with dry white birch firewood. The mellow scent of roll-your-own cigarettes and chewing tobacco blended comfortably with the smell of woodsmoke leaking from cracks in the cast-iron firebox and with the odours that lingered in the room from the family dinner earlier in the evening: fried whitefish, boiled potatoes, and bannock, the traditional Indian flatbread eaten with every meal.

On another wall, barely visible in the dim light, was a large sepia-tinged photograph in a standard military-issue picture frame of the host’s brother, smartly dressed in full military uniform. The Canadian Army had provided similar photographs of new recruits to their families in the Great War – as the First World War was known in those days – and proud parents across Canada had hung them in places of prominence in their homes. There were many such pictures on the reserve. More than a quarter of a century earlier, the young man in the picture and the men playing cards that night – together with almost all the eligible men from the community, including the boy’s great-grandfather – had travelled to the closest town and enrolled in the Canadian Army. From there they were shipped to the huge Camp Borden military base for basic training and then by fast troop transports to England, and on to the trenches of the Western Front.

The culture shock had been enormous. Teenagers and men whose first language was Chippewa and who had spent their lives in the bush or on the lakes as trappers and fishermen were thrown together with white farmers, factory hands, office workers, private schoolboys, and British immigrants, most of whom had never met a native person. In short order, the native soldiers proved themselves as snipers and forward artillery observers, even transmitting coordinates back to the guns in their native languages to foil German code-breakers seeking to intercept Allied battlefield communications. For the duration of the war, at least, the natives were treated as equals, and bonded with their white compatriots.

Many of the native recruits, including the young man in the picture, had lost their lives in showers of mud and steel during the numberless battles of the war in Northern France and in Belgian Flanders. The others, some shattered in body and spirit, had come home to get on with their lives and to grow old. Now the picture of the young Indian soldier, frozen in time but with eyes that met and followed visitors around the house, languished largely forgotten on the wall. And when from time to time the host opened the lid of the stove and threw in a stick of white birch firewood, the paper-thin bark covering would burst into flame with a flash of light that cast the shadows of the players onto the photograph of the long-dead soldier, who looked out at his former comrades-in-arms with deep, brooding melancholy.

The mood in the room was subdued, but there was an ample supply of raisin wine to drink and the card players were enjoying themselves trading jokes in the soft tones of their mother tongue. Suddenly the cousin sensed the presence of something vile and corrupt. He glanced at the window and was horrified to see the devil, horns, tail, and all, peering in and smiling. Satan, the trapper was convinced, was showing his satisfaction at catching sinners whose immortal souls, after the death of their bodies, he would drag, screaming and pleading for mercy, down to hell. And in hell – according to the Bible-thumping preacher who loved nothing better than to frighten his charges in his weekly sermons by quoting from the Book of Revelations – they would suffer fire, brimstone, and untold miseries throughout eternity.

The cousin shouted a warning to the others before dashing coatless out the door and fleeing to his own house. He had a distinguished record fighting overseas and was not easily spooked. But he nevertheless swore that he would rather return to artillery barrages, hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, and poison-gas attacks than face the devil again.

The mother looked worried but the father had trouble suppressing a smile as the visitor earnestly and haltingly, for English was not his first language, unburdened himself of his angst. The boy, on the other hand, was shaken, although he did his best to hide his disquiet. Indian relatives had told him that for centuries native fishermen had left offerings of tobacco at a sacred rock that bore an uncanny resemblance to the head of an Indian chief on an island in Lake Muskoka, the largest of the lakes in the district, to appease spirits that inhabited the waters. He knew that his Indian grandfather would not think of fishing without first propitiating the god of the lake. Another relative now deceased was reputed to have had the ability to turn himself into a Bearwalker, a feared supernatural being in traditional native religion. His own mother had told him that a guardian spirit, from a dear uncle on the reserve who had died shortly before he was born, was watching out for him from beyond the grave. The story of the trapper seemed to be a confirmation that an invisible world existed in which good and evil spirits struggled to influence the destiny of the living.

Listening to the solemn words of his mother’s cousin, who was clearly in despair since he was certain a horrible fate awaited him after death, the boy’s throat constricted involuntarily until he nearly choked, and his skin erupted in goosebumps. In his innermost being, in that part of the psyche where logic does not penetrate, he believed the story of his mother’s cousin unconditionally and was afraid the devil would find some reason to come looking for his soul as well. After the guest had departed, however, and as his mother looked on with quiet disapproval, the boy joined his father in laughing at the trapper. What superstition! How could any modern person believe such nonsense!

 

Listening from the safety of his bed to the moaning coming from outside, however, the boy regretted making fun of the trapper and came to the conclusion that what he was really hearing were cries of pain as the devil tormented the soul of the suicide victim. Then, paying closer attention, he believed he could make out other voices in the wind – native voices.

His mother had told him that long before the arrival of the white man, and not far from where their house was located, native people had built on the Indian River – just below the rapids that they called Baisong, or Thunder – a thriving community they named Obajewanung, or Gathering Place, complete with comfortable log cabins and fields of potatoes and corn. When missionaries had pushed into their territory and tried to convert them, they had rebuffed their efforts and remained faithful to their traditional native spirituality and practices. Their success had been their undoing. When the district was opened for settlement late in the nineteenth century, the government of the day, on the lookout for good places to locate settlers, lost no time in sending surveyors to Obajewanung to carve their lands into lots and to order the people to vacate their homes and leave.

The Indians made a desperate appeal to be allowed to remain in their ancestral homes but to no avail. Not having embraced Christianity, they received no support from the churches. In short order they were moved against their will to a rocky, inhospitable island in the Georgian Bay, where they were forced to return to the hand-to-mouth existence of their forebears, living in tents and relying on hunting and fishing rather than on agriculture for survival. The settlers then moved in and occupied their homes and fields. The graves of their ancestors were ploughed over, the names Baisong and Obajewanung were forgotten, and the long narrative of what had recently been the most important First Nation community in Muskoka was ignored when the history of early settlement in the district was compiled.

Tossing and turning, the thought came to the boy that the souls of these long-dead people might have returned from the Indian spirit world and now were pleading with him, as someone with roots in both the native world and that of the settlers, to become their champion when he became a man and to rectify the injustices done to them so many years ago. That did not reassure him. He was as much afraid of wandering souls with noble causes as he was of tormented ghosts and the devil.

The boy tried to push his fears to one side and deal with the issues logically, just as his father would. He wondered if more Indians than whites believed in ghosts, lost souls, spirits, and the devil. If the answer was yes, and he believed in them as well, did that mean he was more Indian than white? Would his father be disappointed in him if that turned out to be the case? Would he call him a “superstitious Indian”?

On the other hand, would his mother be upset if he took the side of his father? Would she think that he was betraying his native roots? She had, after all, been hurt when he had laughed at her cousin’s belief. It was all very confusing, and he did not want to choose between his parents. More than anything else, however, he passionately needed to free himself from his crippling fear of ghosts, spirits, and the devil. Fighting instinct with logic, he told himself fiercely that they simply did not exist. He hoped that his mother and her people would understand.

The sounds of the moaning in the trees and the voices in the wind came to an end.