A Dirty Deed

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Though A Dirty Deed is the sequel to Stenhouse’s Across the Steel
River (2001), readers need not have read the earlier work to enjoy this
one. One July evening in 1952, on the outskirts of the “white”
Alberta community of Grayson, population 500, 12-year-olds Will Sampson
and his friend Arthur, who lives on the neighbouring Blackfoot reserve,
are meteor watching when they see a crying youth in his mid-teens being
pursued in the darkness by three adult males. The boys recognize the
pursuers as rich, mean Old Man Howe; Howe’s foreman Albert Loewen; and
Kratz, the strap supervisor at the Heavy Shield Residential School.
Arthur also recognizes the fleeing teen as Catfish, a student at Heavy
Shield, who, before being caught and beaten, manages to bury some
papers. The two boys retrieve the papers, which turn out to be a Deed of
Land, signed on March 9, 1917, by Clarence Howe (aka Old Man Howe) and
giving title for a quarter section of land to Wilfred Black. Before long
Will and Arthur find themselves involved in solving a mystery connecting
Catfish, Wilfred Black, and Howe, and, as in the first book, dirty deeds
deeply rooted in racial prejudice are at the mystery’s core. While
most of the community’s prejudice is directed toward the Natives, Will
learns that his own family’s poverty causes them to rank just above
the Blackfoot in the local social pecking order. Also, like the first
novel, A Dirty Deed opens with a double-page bird’s-eye-view map of
Grayson and environs. Recommended.