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R O S E H I P S A N D C H A M O M I L E / D o n n a comfort. Comfort is round and cold and hidden, pressed hard against my chest out here in the chill of Sacred Heart garden, where Sister Sarah and I are working, side by side, without a word.
I don’t know why Sister Sarah picked me to help in the garden. Every single girl but me raised her hand. I really wanted to work in the garden, but I knew she wouldn’t pick me. Th e
others raised their hands because they were afraid not to. Sister Sarah has a ruler, just like Father Mullen, and I’ve seen her slap kids’ hands, too, just like Father. But she isn’t mean like he is. She doesn’t have any anger crouched up inside her like Father does, only sternness. And she treats everyone sternly, even herself. I like this about her.
It’s time to dig up the last of the potatoes. Th
at’s what Sis-
ter says, showing me how to follow the plant stem to its roots and the roots to the potatoes. She doesn’t talk and I don’t, either. She digs, and I watch how her fi ngers read the roots.
Th
en I do it, too.
Sister looks almost like she’s praying, kneeling in the garden, digging potatoes. And when I think about it, it does seem like a way of praying, pressing our knees against the cold, black earth.
“See how the plant hides its potato?” Sister says, and I nod.
Guard well Th
y inner door where we reveal our need of
Th
ee.
Sister told the others she picked me because I know how to sit quietly. But out here on the edge of the woods, where you 79
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can see snow-covered mountains above the dark trees, she says something diff erent: she picked me because she knows I have a green thumb. She doesn’t explain what a green thumb is or how she knows I have one, but I think I already know. Having a green thumb means you can feel the whisper of green things, deep down inside you, like a special kind of prayer.
Tiny fl ecks of snow are falling from the sky. Th
ey fl icker
against the trees like little chips of light, and you can tell it’s going to snow hard some day soon. But right now it’s more like play, like the snow and the sky are teasing each other.
Part of me wishes we could stay out here forever, but the other part knows this won’t happen, of course, and that part isn’t even surprised when Sister Mary Kate bursts into the garden, squawking like a giant bird and swirling the falling snow into nervous fl urries.
“Sister! Sister! Th
ey’ve found a moose. Dead. On the high-
way.”
Sister Sarah brushes every last bit of dirt from the potato she’s just picked, moving very slowly, like she never even heard Sister Mary Kate.
“I imagine these things happen,” she says at last.
For some reason this makes me smile. I am not quite sure why Sister saying it’s normal for a moose to die on the highway should make me smile, but it does. I dig deeper into the cold ground, following the spidery roots, looking for another potato, trying to pretend I’m not really listening. But I can’t help thinking about that moose on the highway, the highway that threads up the sides of the mountain and disappears into 80
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R O S E H I P S A N D C H A M O M I L E / D o n n a the clouds. I am wishing as hard as I can that I could run right up into those cloud-wrapped mountains, where I’ve never been before.
Salvaging meat sounds like a frightening thing, the way Sister explains it. She looks at me helplessly, like she wants me to dig something out of the ground that will excuse her from salvaging, but all I can think of is how badly I want to go up onto that highway and see that moose.
“Well, surely it’s an act of Providence,” Sister Sarah says calmly. “We need the meat now.”
Sister Mary Kate tilts her head sideways, thinking. “Why, yes,” she says slowly. “It is an act of Providence, isn’t it?”
Sister Sarah lays a potato in her basket and then carefully reaches down to run her fi ngers over the tops of the tiny yellow fl owers that grow on the edges of the potato garden.
“Chamomile,” she says. “Makes a tea that calms the spirit.
Did you know that, Donna?”
I shake my head.
“It’s a useful thing to remember,” she says, and I nod.
Sister Mary Kate remains standing above us, one hand worrying the other, waiting for Sister Sarah to say something else, but Sister is too busy to notice. She’s laying stems of chamomile into her basket in neat rows of tiny, fl uff y yellow heads.
“Oh, Sister!” Mary Kate cries suddenly, “I’ve never in my life butchered an animal! I mean I wouldn’t even hurt a fl y, I just hate to see them suff er, don’t you know? But Father 81
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Mullen has put me in charge of this poor beast and . . . oh, dear! What am I going to do?”
Sister Sarah stands up slowly, clutching her basket of potatoes and fl owers.
“Preparing meat is no diff erent than gardening. Th is is
how we sustain ourselves,” she says. “It’s all part of God’s plan, Sister. If you work in that spirit, it becomes simple.”
Sister Mary Kate puts her hand to her heart, looks sky-ward, and sighs with relief.
“Oh, thank goodness!” she says, reaching out to help Sister Sarah with her basket. “I knew you would know what to do. Will you come show us then?”
Sister Sarah smiles a very small smile. “Show you? What in the world would I show you? I haven’t the faintest idea how to butcher a moose.”
Sister Mary Kate’s face crumples, and at the exact same moment I hear a strange scraping sound. For just a second it seems like these two things are somehow connected. But then I realize that the sound is coming from the shed door at the far side of the garden where Mr. Pete, that elderly Indian gentleman, is now standing with a hoe and a rake over his shoulder. I’m not sure if the sound I heard was the sound of the rake or the sound of the creaky shed door opening or the gruff sound Mr. Pete makes as he clears his throat, preparing to spit. Which he does now.
“Over there, Mr. Pete,” Sister Sarah says, pointing to the end of the garden. “Loosen up the far row.”
Sister Sarah looks at me and nods at the tangle of bushes 82
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R O S E H I P S A N D C H A M O M I L E / D o n n a down there. “And pick some of those rose hips, Donna—
just the tips. Good for congestion. Watch out for the thorns, though.”
She walks toward the bushes and I follow, with Sister Mary Kate trailing behind us like a nervous shadow.
“Why don’t you let those boys show you how to butcher the animal, the ones from up North?” Sister Sarah tells her.
“Father Mullen says they’re to earn their keep by hunting for us. Hasn’t he told you this?”
Sister Mary Kate blushes and asks, “Which boys?” but before Sister Sarah can say, she answers the question herself.
“Th
e Aaluk brothers, probably. Th
ey’re members of the Cari-
bou Tribe, aren’t they?”
Sister Sarah gives her a funny little smile. “Yes, I suspect they’d be the ones. Th
ey ought to know how to handle a slain
moose easily enough.”
Old man Pete, at the other end of the garden, snorts suddenly. He and Sister Sarah look at each other. It seems like both of them are trying not to laugh.
I concentrate on picking the rose hips. Th
e thorns
are so
tiny, it’s impossible to watch out for them the way Sister said to. And I’m too busy thinking about that moose, anyhow—
imagining what it would be like to see a real one, high up on a mountain road. I think about how far a person could see, way up there in that wide-open white place, and right now I want, more than anything, to be up in the mountains watching the Aaluk boys butcher that slain moose, watching the whole world spread out before us down below.
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I can feel Sister Sarah looking at me with those prickly old eyes of hers, and it seems like she’s looking right down deep inside of me, somehow, looking at a place where nobody’s ever looked before. I tug at a rose hip.
“And take Donna here,” Sister says suddenly. “And some of the others. And maybe take a few of those young teachers, too. You’ll need the help.”
Sister Mary Kate looks at me, fl ustered, and says, “Yes, but . . .”
“It’ll be good for them,” Sister Sarah says.
Sister Mary Kate puts her arm around me and squares her shoulders as if she’s made an important decision. “Surely not Donna,” she says. “Donna doesn’t want to see a bloody old moose.”
I can’t help it. I reach up quick and grab my Saint Christopher medal and run my fi nger across the numbers as hard as I can. “Yes I do,” I say. “I really do want to see that moose.”
I look at Sister Mary Kate. I think she’s as surprised by what I’ve said as I am.
“Well, ah . . . all right then,” she says.
I plunge my hands into the rose hips, watching Sister Mary Kate bustling off on her mission. My fi ngers are itching, but it’s a good kind of itch, the kind of itch that makes you want to do something. Something important.
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Burnt Offerings
SEPTEMBER 1961
LUKE
—
Mail comes at dinnertime. Father Flanagan brings it, swinging it into the cafeteria in that big brown leather bag of Father Mullen’s. Whistling. We all watch that bag, which seems suddenly bigger than both Father Flanagan and Father Mullen put together. It’s fat with the voices of our folks and the memories of home. Th
ick with the stories we tell ourselves, over
and over, to make the bad things go away and make the good ones stay.
We don’t hardly ever get mail, me and Bunna. Not like Chickie. Chickie’s dad sends her lots of stuff from his store—
hard candy and Sailor Boy crackers and raspberry jam. Sonny gets dried fi sh sometimes, which smells like smoke but tastes almost as good as our dried fi sh. Amiq gets weird stuff , like books and newspapers from this scientist who used to live in Barrow. Th
e newspapers Amiq gets always have stories about
Eskimos in them. We never knew, before this, that Eskimos could be in newspapers.
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Junior’s mail is the best, though. Junior gets tapes with peoples’ voices on them, telling stories. Reel-to-reel tapes like the kind that have movies on them, only smaller. Tapes rolled up so tight with words, you could stretch them all the way from Junior’s village to Sacred Heart and back. Tapes with his auntie talking about how his uncle Patrick’s crew caught a whale and his cousin Daisy—the one who had a baby boy—
jumped for the fi rst time on the sealskin blanket. Junior’s tapes have people singing songs and playing the drums, too.
With Junior’s tapes you can almost see them dancing Eskimo dances. His tapes tell about what the leaders there are doing, too, like how they stopped the government from trying to blow up atomic bombs by Point Hope. One of Junior’s uncles wrote a long letter to the newspaper about it, and Junior is proud. We’re proud, too.
We listen with the machine in the library and afterward Junior fi lls those tapes back up again with his own words—
stories about Sacred Heart. Our stories. Junior tells how the dorms look and what kind of food the cafeteria has. He tells them things like how the river is frozen here and how we just learned to skate last week. We skated mostly on our butts, all right, which is exactly how Junior tells it.
Stories can make you laugh so hard it hurts sometimes and make you remember the good things so much it makes your throat get tight.
Today is going to be a good day and a good story for Junior to tell—the story about our fi rst time hunting at Sacred Heart 86
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B U R N T O F F E R I N G S / L u k e
School. And it starts right here in this shower room, where me and Bunna are shivering because even though we aren’t dirty, they make us take showers all the darn time, which is dumb because everyone knows that when you wash every speck of dirt off your body, it makes you get cold easier, especially now, with winter coming—and when you get cold, you get sick.
You can’t be a good hunter if you’re cold and sick all the time, and you can’t catch animals when you smell like soap, either.
But the moose we’re going after today already got caught—
caught by a truck. And now it’s lying dead on the side of the Sacred Heart road, and Father Mullen says I’m the hunter, so I gotta show them how to skin it. Truth is, I never even seen a moose before.
I step out of the shower the same time as Bunna, and the cold air hits us like ice water. We almost knock each other over grabbing at our towels. Bunna can’t hardly stop shivering.
“Alapaa!”
He says it without thinking, then gets real scared, looking around quick like he expects something bad to happen. Like maybe Father Mullen’s gonna step out from one of the stalls with his ruler and slap our butts. Tell us how we’ll never get to Heaven because we aren’t good Catholics.
All of a sudden I’m thinking about our little brother Isaac again, and my breathing gets trapped inside my chest.
“He’s gone to a good Catholic home,” Sister Sarah said.
Th
ese are the only words she said that time, and they were not good words. Not the words that Mom wanted to hear, either.
Mom cried when she found out about Isaac, and when Jack 87
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tried to hold her, she hit him, and the next thing we knew, Jack was gone.
I told Mom I’d fi nd Isaac, but I don’t know how.
“It’s okay, Luke, it’s okay,” Sister Mary Kate said. “You have the faith of Abraham, remember that.”
But it’s not okay and I don’t want Abraham’s faith. I want my brother. Abraham’s the one who tied up his own son and got ready to give him to God as a burnt off ering, but then God gave him an old sheep to burn instead. Abraham’s son was named Isaac, too, just like our brother. Only God never stopped them from taking our Isaac away the way he stopped Abraham from burning his Isaac. Which is why I got no use for God. I fi gure if he’s gonna do stuff like that for one Isaac and not for another, then he isn’t fair. And if he’s going to do it to a little kid like our Isaac, then God is just plain mean, like Father Mullen, because Isaac been waiting his whole life to get big enough to learn how to hunt, and now he’s gone, so he’ll never learn anything. Not even how to skin a dumb old moose. Which me and Bunna are supposed to know how to do.
Bunna’s thinking about it, too. Standing there with his teeth chattering, he says, “How we gonna skin a moose? We never even seen one before.”
“Never mind,” I say.
“Never mind” is what Mom always says when she doesn’t want to think too hard about something.
Bunna loo
ks at me. “But how we gonna fi gure it out?” he says. He says it like he knows I have the answer.
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I don’t, but I don’t say this to Bunna. Bunna expects me to just take care of it somehow, like I’m supposed to take care of everything, which makes me think about Isaac, again, his face pressed against the back window of the car, disappearing into the trees that time, and about me and Bunna running away through those same trees and getting caught, and Father saying it’s our job to go out there and hunt for them. Somehow I’m always supposed to take care of it, but how?
And all of a sudden, I’m mad. Mad enough to hit somebody. Hit Father Mullen, maybe. Hard.
Instead, I box at Bunna—Bunna, wrapped in his towel, his hair standing up every which way. Bunna ducks and laughs and tries to box back.
You can’t get mad when you box. Th
at’s what Father Mul-
len says. When you box, you have to put all your feelings away, because if you let your feelings get in the way, you might make mistakes.
Father Mullen never makes mistakes.
Father is perfect when he boxes, like a dancer moving just right to the beat of the drum. Like the dancers I can see when Junior plays his tapes, dancers moving to the sound of the drums until the beat of the drum and the movement of their bodies turns into one thing, one perfect thing. I never fi gured out a word for that thing, but I see it in the way Father Mullen moves when he shows us how to box, boxing all by himself against a boxer nobody else can see. After a while that boxer gets so real, you could almost see the outline of his shadow, right there next to Father, throwing feints. Trying to fool him.
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My Name Is Not Easy Page 8
