songs.”
The constable took Clem aside and tried to reason with him. “You know, Clem, we go back a long way. You used to raise hell when you were a kid, but I thought those days were long over. I’d really be sorry if I had to arrest you. So for your own good, if you gotta get drunk, for God’s sake do it at home and sleep it off in your own bed, otherwise I’ll have to take you in. And put some clothes on if you gotta be out and about in the thunder and lightning. You’re not a pretty sight.”
But Clem just laughed, and he laughed harder when he was arrested and hauled up before the magistrate and fined ten dollars for public intoxication. The wife he had left years earlier resurfaced and told everyone that the day he had walked out on her was the happiest day in her life. She had always thought, she said, there was something wrong with his head, and his wandering around in his birthday suit just proved it. She spoke to her blood relatives, who were also Clem’s blood relatives, and turned them against him. Clem’s own father, infuriated at his son’s public drunkenness and his general lack of decorum, and embarrassed that a member of his family would run after an unruly Indian widow, let it be known that after much prayer and reflection, he had cut him out of his will. Clem carried on as before.
Having noted that Clem’s popularity in the community had fallen, and confident there would be no outcry if they took firm measures, the members of the Muskoka District Health Board found the courage to force him to shut down his dairy business, but he just branched out into hog farming. However, his pigs burrowed under the fences he put up around his pigpens and were always escaping and running through the village, grunting and squealing and uprooting vegetable gardens and frightening children and old women. The magistrate fined him five dollars for violating village ordinances, but after Clem handed over the money, he went home and defiantly opened the gate to the enclosure and let his swine roam the village as before.
“I got the money to pay the fines,” he told anyone who would listen.
That was when the village council decided that enough was enough. It just so happened that the old village dump, which had served the needs of the community and surrounding summer resorts for the previous fifty years, was spilling over with garbage and swarming with rats and other vermin. A new one had been urgently needed for years, but each time officials proposed a new dumpsite, the people who lived in the vicinity came with their friends to meetings of the council to complain and no action was ever taken. Clem’s isolation within the community, however, gave the council the opportunity it needed. It expropriated the necessary land from his holdings, built a garbage dump behind his house, and constructed a road that passed less than twenty feet from his front door to reach it.
As the council had foreseen, no one, not even Clem’s father, protested its action. To ensure everyone knew where the new facility was located, municipal workers erected a ten-by-fifteen-foot sign at the entrance to the new road that helpfully pointed out that new dump was open twenty-four hours a day to accept “Household, Institutional and Construction Waste of all Kinds.” Clem, they expected, would be so disgusted by the sights and sounds of garbage trucks passing by his house that he would give up and leave the village, never to return. That, at least, was the council’s hope.
Clem poured himself a tumblerful of dandelion wine and offered one to Oscar.
“Thanks, Clem, but I don’t think your father and the Huxleys would want me to start drinking.”
Clem listened to his story with a deepening frown.
”Goddamn it, Oscar,” he then said. “Wake up to the fact you’re alive! Its time you grew up and lived your own life. You’re an Indian, for God’s sake. You don’t need anyone’s permission to have a little drink. You don’t belong with those snobs on Millionaires’ Row, and for that matter you don’t belong among the people of this village. The folks around here don’t really trust you. They think you’re a fake. They think there’s something phoney about your attempts to be one of them, as if it was all an act.”
“I don’t think Reverend Huxley feels that way,” Oscar said.
“As far as the Reverend and his friends go,” Clem replied, “you probably could play along with their plans and be one of them someday. But if you do what they say and become a missionary, you’ll spend the rest of your life going to church on Sundays, living in a house with white lace curtains, and spending your time with stuffed shirts who don’t smoke or drink. I’ve known from the beginning you set that fire back in 1930 and have been trying to make amends ever since by sucking up to everyone.”
“Maybe I’ll have a drink of your wine after all,” Oscar said, sitting up straight in his chair.
“I saw you peeking in the window of the Amick just before dawn early that June morning,” Clem said, as he poured a glass of homebrew for Oscar. “The sun wasn’t even up. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. Then all hell broke loose, the fire bells started to ring, and the old general store went up in flames. It had to be you. No one else was around at that time. You musta had your reasons, I thought, and you probably never figured it would spread like that.”
“I didn’t think anyone knew my secret,” Oscar said, after quickly swallowing a half a glass of wine, the first alcohol he had ever tasted.
“Don’t take me for a fool.”
“I wouldn’t do such a thing today.”
“I hope not. I wouldn’t let you off a second time.”
“There are a few things about what happened afterward, Clem, that I’ve wondered about over the years.”
“Like what?”
“Like why your father and Reverend Huxley have been so good to me.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Oscar.”
“Do you think they’ve been helping me because I’m an Indian and they stole the land of my people? Because they feel guilty?”
“What do you mean stole the land? There are only a few old-timers around who remember there was an Indian village here when they came to take up their land grants.”
“Then who’s to blame?”
“Why, nobody’s to blame. People in those days was just doing what they had to do to make a living. Nobody had any choice.”
“Somebody’s got to take responsibility.”
“Okay, let’s look at the matter a little more closely. The young people of today are not to blame because they weren’t around in those days. The settlers aren’t to blame because they just took the land the government gave them. The government in power at that time isn’t to blame because it was following the policies of the governments before them, taking the lands from the Indians to give to settlers to develop. The British aren’t to blame because they had turned over responsibility for the Indians to the Canadians when they pulled out. Christopher Columbus isn’t to blame since the kings and queens over there in Europe sent him over here. So who can you blame? You can’t blame nobody!”
“I still think your father and others are helping me to make amends for what the settlers did to my people,” said Oscar.
“Well, I don’t,” said Clem, “and I know them better than you. And they’ll drop you without a second thought if you ever step out of line. But now that I’ve given you some free advice, I’d like you to help me pay back the people around here who’ve shown me no respect.”
“I once tried to get even, Clem, and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.”
“But this is different, Oscar. I’m not planning to burn down the village.”
“Whatever you say,” Oscar said, his mind now deadened from the wine. “You can count on me.”
“I got dynamite. Ever since everybody turned nasty, I’ve been quietly buying and storing lots of it. Things have come to a head and