Chapter 3
THE FIRE
1
James and Leila McCrum were not unduly alarmed when they heard the fire bells of the three churches pealing before dawn that Sunday morning. Hotels around the lakes were always burning down, and there was little anyone could do about it. A guest would fall asleep with a lit cigarette or pipe, and the first thing you knew the tinder-dry wood building would be on fire. If there was time, someone would crank the telephone to appeal for help from the party-line operator on duty at the telephone office in Port Carling. She would call around until she found someone to go to one of the churches to pull the rope that rang the fire bell, which, as everyone in the village knew, was the shorter of the two that hung in the foyer; the longer one was to call the people to worship. The members of the volunteer fire brigade would assemble in front of the town hall, the Fire Chief would brief them, and everyone would crowd into cars and trucks and leave to fight the fire.
Since the firemen only had axes, shovels, and buckets as equipment, and since it took sometimes more than an hour over poorly maintained gravel roads to reach the distant hotels, there was often little they could do when they got there. They usually just joined the guests outside on the lawns watching the structure burn, hoping everyone had escaped. Occasionally, they managed to run in and save a few pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac that they kept for themselves if no one was looking. Or, if there were witnesses, they carried their acquisitions outside and set them down out of harm’s way where everyone could see them. If the fire was in the village, however, the bucket-brigade sometimes saved a building and that was good for everyone’s morale.
“It must be quite a fire,” James said. “I’ve never heard the fire bells of all three churches ringing at the same time.”
He got out of bed and went out onto the second-floor balcony of his substantial red brick home, from where, to his horror, he saw flames in the sky above the business section. Pulling on his pants and shirt, he shouted to his wife to stay home where she wouldn’t get hurt. He then thrust his bare feet into his shoes, ran down the stairs, out the front door, and all the way to the blaze, a half-mile away. Only two or three members of the bucket brigade and his son Clem were on the scene when he arrived out of breath and fearing the worst. To his dismay, flames were already shooting out of the roof of his general store and smoke was pouring out of the windows of his guest house next door. The situation looked hopeless.
How could this be? James asked himself. How can a fire, even in a wooden building, spread so fast?
Other volunteers arrived, including two dozen men from the Indian Camp, and they formed a line from the river to the store, passing buckets of water hand to hand to throw on the fire. Without warning, a tremendous explosion blew debris onto the street and scattered the firemen.
“The fire’s got to the gasoline barrels,” Clem told his father. “There’s nothing we can do for the store now. We’ll try to save the other buildings.”
James sat down on the ground across the street and let his son and the members of the bucket-brigade do what they could. Everything was beyond his control and comprehension. Were the fresh fruit and vegetables, tools, nails, spikes, cloth and clothing, coal oil and naphtha, cans of paint, turpentine and varnish, canned goods, barrels of cookies, boxes of raisins, jars of pickles and mustard, sacks of oats and chicken feed, sides of beef and pork, hundred-pound bags of flour and sugar, cases of dynamite and nitroglycerine caps, racks of hunting rifles, boxes of ammunition, axes, hoes, shovels and pickaxes, twine and baling wire, tubs of ice cream and cases of pop, and shelves of comic books and magazines all to be destroyed? What would his customers do? What would the tenants of his other buildings along the business section do? Was his insurance enough to cover his losses? Was he now a ruined man?
2
In the late 1850s, James’s father, Reg McCrum, an Ulsterman and supporter of the Orange Lodge in County Armagh, Ireland, had read advertisements placed in the newspapers by the Canadian government. The District of Muskoka, a place no one in his small village had heard of, had just been opened for settlement, and it was first-come, first-served if you wanted free land. Single men were eligible to receive one-hundred-acre allocations and married men two hundred acres. All you had to do was to clear fifteen acres of the deep and rich land and build a sixteen by twenty foot house during the five years following the date of location and start planting your wheat and oats. Reg quickly married his long-time sweetheart, Wilma Brown, the daughter of a farmer on a neighbouring farm, sold off all his possessions, and left with his bride to become a pioneer in the new world.
But on arrival, they found Indians living on the land promised to them that they had to get rid of. Instead of flatlands ready for ploughing, his father and others like him from the Old Country got scrub hemlock and cedar bush right down to the water’s edge. And after fighting their way through a jungle of underbrush to the white pine, oak, and maple farther back where the good soil was supposed to be, they found that the ground in most places all too often was only acid leaf mould over granite rock.
Before they could plant their crops, they had to cut away the small growth, chop down the big trees, roll the logs up into big heaps, and burn them in the spring. The summers were always too short, the black flies and mosquitoes unbearable, and the snow came early and stayed late. In those early days, they lived in lean-to shelters with mud floors and hemlock branches for roofs. There were no roads, no doctors, and the nearest grist mill was twenty miles away. But despite all the adversity, his parents and the other settlers who had arrived from the Old Country persevered. For had not the preacher who made periodic visits to their small community told them that God had sent them to the New World to build a New Jerusalem? Had the preacher not said that it was the destiny of the settlers to replace the Indians who were in the process of disappearing anyway?
His father had gone on to become the owner of the general store, the guest house, and the boat works, landlord of all the other buildings occupied by the other entrepreneurs in the business section, and the most generous contributor to the Presbyterian Church. What would he have said were he still alive and saw everything he had worked so hard for go up in flames? Thank God he had been carried away with his wife in the great Spanish influenza epidemic in 1917.
3
A fusillade of rifle and shotgun fire broke out as the ammunition in the general store began to explode, and the volunteer firemen, led by the war veterans who thought for an instant that they were back in the trenches, threw themselves to the ground. When the firing subsided, they rose to their feet just as cans of burning paint shot hundreds of feet into the air to land like flaming mortar rounds on the freight shed, on the boat works, on the shore of the Indian River. And as they rushed to put out these fires, the boat works burst into flames.
Someone yelled that Lily Horton, a university student from Toronto, working as a maid for the summer at the guest house, was trapped in her room. But no one moved, afraid of the flames and certain that Lily was already lost. That was when Jacob took action. He didn’t think about what he was doing. Someone he worked with every day was in trouble and he had to save her. It wasn’t any different from what he had done for fellow soldiers in danger during the battles in northern France. He went into the smoke-filled doorway, dropped to his knees, and moved up the stairs, keeping close to the floor where the air was clearer until he reached Lily’s room. He pushed open the door and was met by a blast of heat that singed his eyebrows and scorched his face. But he pressed on, crawling on his hands and knees until he reached the girl lying unconscious by the window where she had gone to call for help. He took hold of her by the arms, pulled her out of the door, down the stairs, and out onto the street. Clem ran across and helped him drag her to the other side. The girl was dead and Jacob was so badly burned that he died within the hour.
4
Oscar had emerged from the water downstream from the business section and sat weeping on the shore as the fire bells continued to peal and the flames from the burning buildings shot higher and higher into the sky. In due course, unable to contain his curiosity, he went, still crying and with water dripping from his clothes, to stand as close as he could to the fire without attracting attention. He saw James McCrum rush up and anxiously confer with