Black Apple

by Joan Crate

  In this school of cold drafts, I too am cold, full of self-doubt. These days I question procedure. I question intent, and most of all, I question myself. I know that running the school with a disciplined routine is necessary to make it a place of order rather than chaos, God’s house rather than the Devil’s workshop. If you were here, you would tell me that the residential schools are hardly houses of God and that we should incorporate some of the Indians’ (many would say both primitive and blasphemous) rituals at the schools as a way to engage them. You are a wise and kind man, dearest, but sometimes, I fear, too kind. I know you favour day schools rather than residential ones, but wouldn’t they impede our mission of making the Indian race God-fearing citizens of the Dominion?

  I wonder: What is my purpose? Comfort me, Pat. I can’t seem to find solace anywhere else, though new students have come to us again this year, and I tell myself there is always promise in that.

  I will admit that one child in particular has piqued my interest: a first-year girl whose name I altered. I suppose it was her expression I noticed: inquisitiveness with a touch of defiance. It reminded me of myself in childhood. If Sister Priscilla hadn’t interrupted with a quotation from Song of Solomon, reminding me that roses too are God’s work, I might have allowed Sister Margaret to replace “Rose” with any biblical name she pleased: “Agar” perhaps, “Gomer,” even “Haggith.” But the bereft gaze of another little girl whose name had been changed just minutes before deterred me and I allowed “Rose” to remain, simply adding a reference to our Holy Mother.

  Sister Cilla’s outburst took me aback. In this time, at this age, Song of Solomon seems to elicit in my heart not joy, but turmoil.

  She put her pen down. Was it unseemly to say more? If she were able to talk to Patrick in person as she had as a novice, the subject would unfold quite naturally. There was nothing, it seemed, they were unable to discuss candidly. Yet writing was different. Putting her innermost thoughts on a page made them tangible. What if Patrick did not follow his usual practice of tossing her letter into his wood stove, and someone else read it? Dear, dear Patrick with his bright eyes and quick mind, his strong body. Ça alors, a strong body no more, she feared.

  The truth is that Song of Solomon is full of the material extravagance that I have sacrificed in the service of God—the silver, gold, and precious stones, not to mention the physical sensuality—and so Sister Cilla’s reference to the book has disturbed me.

  She thought of the thighs compared to jewels, the belly, “a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” Oui, she remembered the verses well, recalled the giggling they had instigated in her dormitory at convent school. Amid the violent history, petty jealousies, the miracles, prophecies and wisdom of the Bible, the Song of Solomon had seemed profane. Yet, as she grew older, she related her ardour for her Lord Jesus Christ to the Song of Solomon. Hélas, her passion for the sacrifice of His flesh, the gift of His holy love!

  At the age of seventeen, she had decided to pledge herself to Him, to become His bride. Jesus alone would be her life’s mate. She waited for graduation, then travelled east to Montreal to enter the Mother House of Les Sœurs d’Amour Fraternelle (translated in English—rather unfortunately, she had always thought—as the Sisters of Brotherly Love).

  As a postulant, she had deeply felt her commitment to Jesus, talking to Him at the end of each day as one would a husband, imagining His hand on her hair, His arm brushing hers as He spoke, the delightful tingle of skin on holy skin.

  “What a day I’ve had,” she would tell Him. “Already I’m fed up with the routine of the Mother House: clean, cook, eat, pray, and, above all, follow orders. Is that serving You, mon amour? Should I be patient?” And she’d laugh, listening for the rumble of His loving voice in her ear. Sometimes she swore she could hear it.

  What a fool she’d been! She recalled her confessor brusquely reminding her that Jesus was her husband only in the fact that she was dedicating herself to His service, the one man in her heart and life. An all-but-forgotten heat spread down her neck. She had been shameful. Perhaps. Yet devoted.

  A year later, she and her companion walked into a university theology class, Portrayals of the Holy Spirit, given by Father Patrick McBain.

  She touched her throat just above the high collar of her habit. An old throat, creped as her mother’s ancient church dress. She had grown old here on the edge of the vast prairie, mountains looming in the west like bad omens. The possibility of another life outside the Church, one that included the sensuous, the fulfilment and praise of the body, gone. Forever and ever.

  I miss you terribly, Patrick. Forgive me my ramblings.

  Yours in Christ,

  Grace

  She folded the sheets, then impulsively pressed the letter to her lips before placing it in an envelope.

  * * *

  After typing the students’ names in alphabetized class lists, Mother Grace opened her office door just as the bell rang, signalling the end of the school day. Girls foamed into the hallway.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Esther Fox Crown gushed to her pal Susie Running Rabbit as they rushed past. “I said, ‘Don’t come over here and try to be my friend after what you said about me wearing lipstick. I only tried it on.’ She just looked at me. Then I said, ‘What are you going to do, tell Sister on me?’ ”

  Behind them, Adele pushed down the hall calling to her older sister, “Esther, wait up!”

  A few of the quiet girls strolled by. One of them, the painfully shy Abigail Bull, saw Mother Grace watching, dropped her eyes to the floor, and turned abruptly up the stairs.

  “Watch where you’re going, you little brats,” Bertha Bright Eye shrieked, shoving a second-year girl out of her way. “Come on, let’s sneak outside.” She grabbed Anne-Marie Shot One Side’s arm and steered her down the hall.

  Sister Joan was heading her way, so Mother Grace closed her office door to a crack. She heard Leah Spotted Calf and Prissy Youngman running behind, calling, “Sister, Sister Joan, can we do anything to help?

  “Yes, girls,” Sister Joan answered curtly. “You can wipe down the blackboard for me. This way. Snip, snap.”

  Mother Grace sat down. Girls. So many of them. God help us.

  7

  Fire Worms

  ROSE MARIE TRIED hard to fit in at school that whole windy month of September, but things weren’t right. She felt hot and tingly-itchy sitting in the too-big desk in a colourless classroom, and sometimes she saw that new sister with the bunched-up skirt who always disappeared again. Maybe she was seeing backwards, at what people used to be. It made her want to run, but she wasn’t allowed to run inside the school “under any circumstances,” Sister Joan had said. Sitting in her desk, she squirmed, rocked, and scratched, but she could never get calm. She wanted out, needed out.

  Whenever she could, she peered through the class and dining rooms’ small windows and watched the land and sky. Sagebrush blew across the schoolyard towards the barn they weren’t allowed to go near. Beyond the barn, she could glimpse a patch of that field they couldn’t even talk about, the shade of a bruise, tender to the eyes. Going up from the nuns’ floor to the dorm on the third floor, if she looked at just the right moment, she could catch a glimpse of that field with its crooked white crosses, and they made her want to run even more. She longed to be outside all the time, not just for a few minutes at recess, lunch, and after school. She wanted far away from the too-many kids and nuns. She wanted bushes, grass, and sky, with no one in sight but Mama with Kiaa-yo in her arms, and Papa coming down the trail, his eyes and arms spraying midday sun. Maybe even a friend.

  Somewhere to the east of the old chicken barn they had to stay away from, she figured there was a marsh, because ducks flew low going and coming, and there were a few grey geese too. Maybe muskrat lived there. Maybe frogs. She didn’t know which animal-people were in this flat place, though she had seen gophers around the school, and, in the distance, a few prong-horned antelope, their noses sweeping the eart
h and poking the air, their scents calling Come get me. “Moon of making babies,” Mama called this time.

  The antelopes’ constant grazing warned of a coyote moon and dark months. Oh, if she just walked away from this horrible, crowded place, she would find the land beyond the school with its long rolling yawns and the mountains turned to small blue sighs in the distance. But she wasn’t allowed.

  Until Aunt Angelique’s marriage to Forest Fox Crown, she had been around other kids only when families visited or sick people came to Papa for healing. He was Blessed Wolf, the medicine man. She had no cousins except the two grown-big sons of Auntie Connie, and they had gone east to Coulee to work, disappearing into the coal mines at the time of first melt. Even after Aunt Angelique’s marriage, Esther and Adele Fox Crown had told her, “Your aunt, she’s not our mother, you know. Our mother died.” The second day of school, Adele said, “Don’t hang around us.” She didn’t even try.

  But now there was that one girl. “Anataki,” she started saying to her, whispering the last part of her name so that anyone close by heard only “Anne.”

  As soon as they began sitting together at meals and chasing each other at recess, Ruth and her cousins taunted them. “Midget,” they jeered. “The Name-Stealer and the Midget. What a good pair!” Pretty soon other kids joined in. Rose Marie didn’t know about Anataki, but she was getting pissed off.

  * * *

  One night, just before lights-out, she was the only one at the bathroom sink. She turned on the tap, which was like an all-at-once creek flowing fast, and splashed water on her face. As she turned the water off, she heard someone creeping behind her. She looked up. Ruth! Ruth’s arm smashed her head down on the sink. Dizzy black blotches swam before her eyes. But she leapt. She hit and bit Ruth. Ruth screamed. She grabbed Ruth’s throat and squeezed. Ruth gasped, her mouth opening and closing like a fish drowning in air.

  A yank from behind. Oh! Her hair ripped from her scalp.

  “Get off my relative!” Bertha screamed.

  She wouldn’t let go of Ruth. If she did, the two of them would kill her. She clung to Ruth’s neck, watched her face darken and her eyes bulge. Bertha pulled Rose Marie’s hair harder, ripping another patch from her head. Rose Marie tried to twist Ruth’s head quick, the way Mama twisted the heads of birds she caught in snares, breaking their necks.

  “Stop that!” thundered Sister Margaret.

  Rose Marie could hear Sister wheezing behind. She let go. Ruth staggered and dropped to her knees.

  Bertha punched her in the side of the head. Sister Margaret clamped one hand to the back of Bertha’s neck, the other to hers. She half marched, half dragged them to the dormitory. All the girls stopped moving and stared.

  “Get away from your bed, Susie,” Sister Margaret ordered. “Sister Cilla, bring my stick!” Sister Margaret slammed both Rose Marie and Bertha against a bed. “Bend over.”

  Side by side, they hunched over, palms pressed to the mattress.

  Sister Margaret snatched the stick from Sister Cilla and, without hesitating, swung it with a whoosh against Bertha’s bum. Then Rose Marie’s. Whack and whack and whack. Rose Marie’s bones clattered and screamed. Sister Margaret kept hitting them, one, then the other. Rose Marie bit her lip bloody. She was not going to cry. Beside her, Bertha’s face was tied in a knot. The stick kept whooshing and hammering. The room filled with splotchy black bruises. Bertha started sobbing.

  “Bertha, you may go to your bed now. Kneel down and pray for forgiveness,” Sister Margaret rasped.

  Rose Marie turned her head and poured hate on Sister Margaret. Her bum and legs screamed, her eyes blurred, but she wouldn’t cry.

  “Stay where you are, you little beggar!” Sister Margaret shouted.

  She turned back to the bed, and Sister swung her stick one, two, three times more.

  “Sister Margaret . . .” Sister Cilla said.

  Rose Marie fell into the bed, her body hammered full of rusty nails.

  “Get up!” Sister Margaret hollered.

  “Sister Margaret!” Sister Cilla repeated.

  “This one’s got to learn her lesson.” Sister Margaret swung the stick again.

  “Sister Margaret!” Sister Cilla yelled real loud.

  The stick whistled. The blade of Mama’s chopping knife slammed down on moose meat. Rose Marie screamed. She would whack Sister Margaret back. She would shove Mama’s chopping knife in her guts.

  “Enough!” Sister Cilla reached for the stick and Sister Margaret staggered back, letting her take it. “Go to your bed, Rose Marie.”

  Rose Marie felt like a live fish tossed in a hot pan. Shakily she made her way past the smudge of faces, head high. No tears, see.

  Anataki gave her that coyote look, and Rose Marie forced herself to grin like it was nothing, like she couldn’t care less, like those nuns could do anything at all to her and it wouldn’t change her one bit. The sisters couldn’t see her face, but some of the girls did.

  After that, none of the first-years bugged her. A few big girls picked on her still. She was so small maybe they thought they could get away with it. Then, on the way to class or in the cafeteria line, she would poke them in the bum with her pencil, knock their food tray, or trip them up. She got back at them, all right.

  When a big girl called her “Midget,” she laughed. “Bird Beak,” she jeered, and the other kids giggled. “Knuckle Bones,” she called Leah Spotted Calf. “Duck Waddle,” to that stupid Sarah Keeper. If they were mean, she was meaner. Then sometimes a girl got her back again, hit or pinched her. Tit-for-tat, like Sister Joan always said before she strapped them. So Rose Marie put stones in their shoes or hid their stockings. One morning when she was about to brush her teeth, she saw that someone had spit on her toothbrush. She wondered if this tit-for-tat would ever end.

  Anataki knew how to get back at the mean ones too. She had learned from her brothers how to mimic. “Oh my,” she said, flipping her hair like Adele Fox Crown had learned from Esther. “These old-way Indians, they’re not as fabulous as I am.”

  Soon there was much less name-calling of Rose Marie and Anataki. The other girls—well, except sometimes for Bertha and her sisters—mostly stayed away.

  * * *

  Neither one of them, Rose Marie and Taki soon learned, could stomach the school food. In the morning when they lined up for breakfast, Sister Bernadette slapped something called “porridge” in their bowls. Some days it was a thin soup with small lumps that slid over their teeth and down their throats, so all they had to do was spoon and swallow. “Slimeballs,” they called it. Other days the porridge was gooey as prairie gumbo and stuck in their throats until mouthfuls of water pushed it down into a hard wedge in their tummies. “Glue,” Anne named it. Once or twice, Sister Bernadette managed to make it just right—“Baby Bear,” Rose Marie said, remembering the story Sister Cilla had read them one noon hour when every one of the first-years was sick in bed. In the book, the bears were just like people but without any powers. And they wore stupid white people’s clothes. When “Baby Bear” was being served, Rose Marie managed to eat all her porridge and keep it down.

  Anataki wasn’t so lucky. She was almost a head taller and not at all sparrow-boned when school started, but by the middle of October, she was thin, her spine a staircase, her ribs tree branches. It was pancakes with Rogers Golden Syrup, served on the Sabbath, that made Taki’s mouth water. She had a sweet tooth, and Rose Marie always let her have one of her two pancakes. Those breakfasts Anataki ate quickly, her eyes shining, syrup dripping from her bottom lip.

  Lunch was usually a slice or two of doughy or stale bread, sometimes fried in the bacon grease collected from Father David and Brother Abraham’s breakfasts, and occasionally served with leftovers from supper the night before. Once in a while there were baked beans.

  Supper was mostly mashed potatoes served the same way as the breakfast porridge, in “slimeballs,” “glue,” and, occasionally, “Baby Bear style.” Chicken stew was a watery broth in
which one of Brother Abraham’s scrawny, plucked, but still-clawed hens was boiled overnight with mushed vegetables, or sometimes a fried egg. Aside from the scraps of dry fish doled out on Fridays, there was little meat, and meat was what both girls longed for.

  “Guess what I dreamed about last night?” Rose Marie whispered to Taki in the cafeteria line at breakfast one morning.

  “You got to sleep, finally?”

  “Yeah. And I dreamt up a big bowl of rabbit stew. Mmm.”

  “I love that. Deer stew too.” Taki grinned. One of her teeth was loose, and it stuck out at an angle.

  “Moose,” Rose Marie said as Sister Bernadette ladled a glop of glue in her bowl.

  “Dry meat, the chewy kind.” Taki stared at the lump in her own bowl. “Rosie, I feel sick.”

  “You’re as thin as a stick. You have to eat, even if it is glue.”

  Even when Taki did eat her porridge, it often came back up in the schoolyard at recess.

  “If you don’t eat it, you won’t get used to it. Taki, you’ll starve.”

  “No, I won’t. It’s just the porridge.” Anataki slapped the back of her spoon against the lump in her bowl, watching it bounce. “I can eat potatoes if they’re slimeballs, but not glue. Yesterday I ate my carrots, didn’t I? And the bread.”

  “That’s because the carrots weren’t cooked, and there was jam for the bread.”

  Once a week, Sister Bernadette spooned out a dollop of jam, bright and quivering, beside a slice of bread. Usually it was strawberry jam, but sometimes it was raspberry, sometimes saskatoon—bright red or purple, dancing under the overhead lights.

  Taki smacked her lips and laughed. “I love jam,” she said, her nostrils quivering. “It smells like summer.”

  Once the jam was spooned onto her plate, she always picked up her glass of milk made from yucky powder and held it out, ready to fling at Ruth’s big cousins if they reached over and stuck a finger in her meal. They were still mad about Ruth’s name.

  “Rude,” Rose Marie jeered at Bertha. “Her name should be Rude, not Ruth, because she is—just like you.”