Black Apple

by Joan Crate

  * * *

  By the end of October, both Rose Marie and Anataki were feeling not so sick, not so lonely anymore, though Taki was skinny as a bone, and Rose Marie still got hot and squirmy when she had to sit still in her desk for long. And she had trouble falling asleep at bedtime because she was afraid of seeing backwards all night long, and not just in bits. Kids, ones who weren’t really there, thin and grey, sometimes crept through the dormitory. Sometimes that awful sister too. At least they left again.

  Anataki’s before life had been different from hers, so her stories were always fun to listen to. Fas-cin-ating—a new word she had learned from Sister Joan. “Girls, I think you’ll find the saints’ lives fas-cin-ating.” Then she droned out the most boring story of some guy who did nothing but pray or a crazy lady who lived behind a brick wall on purpose.

  In the moon of first flowers, Taki’s family always moved to the United States of America, on the other side of the invisible line. “My papa and uncle tend a buffalo herd that Great-Grandfather rescued during the last days of the great ii-nii.”

  Rose Marie knew that word. Buffalo. Her papa had once drawn a picture of one of the big animals in the dirt but she had never seen a real live one.

  “Great-Grandfather and his family drove the ii-nii to the south country with lots of water and that soyo-toi-yis grass the buffalo love to eat. That was long ago when the second big change began. My relations watch over the herd, taking the sick and old ones for food. Spring, summer, and fall, that’s what we eat: buffalo meat, buffalo stew, soup made from buffalo bones. I used to get sick of all that buffalo.” She widened her eyes. “I miss it now. Sooooo good!”

  Some days Rose Marie even liked class. Some things Sister Joan taught were kind of interesting, like how to spell Rose Marie with big and little letters, other places in the Dominion of Canada that she hadn’t known about, and even Moses up that mountain with the voice of God. As she listened, her body turned into a lake, the surface gently rippling, the centre calm. On those days, she could make herself sit still, her hands folded, toes touching the floor, and listen to Sister Joan. She could hold a pencil in her hand, print A, B, C in her notebook and 1, 2, 3 on the blackboard. Usually she was the first one to answer Sister Joan’s questions, like If I have four chickens and three run away, how many do I have left? Sister would look at her with what might have been a smile if she hadn’t made her lips disappear. “Good, good,” she’d say, as if it wasn’t really good at all.

  Other days her tummy was all squirmy inside. Awful, horrible things had started to grow there. “Fire worms,” she told Taki. “And they’re getting worser.”

  One day she couldn’t sit still any longer. When Sister Joan turned her back on the class to print the date on the board, Rose Marie got up from her desk and crept to the door. Sister Joan turned and rushed over, yanking the back of her school uniform.

  “You will stand in the corner, Rose Marie,” she said, dragging her to the back of the room.

  Everyone turned to watch, so Rose Marie scrunched up her nose at them.

  In the corner, she lowered her head and closed her eyes. Summer sun, but not too hot. She ran to her creek and jumped from stone to stone, the water a fish dance of deep-down green and surface flash. The fire worms in her tummy slowed down. She splashed in the cold water, then hopped to the bank. The fire worms shrank. By the time she was skipping around the woodpile, her outside skin was perfectly cool, her tummy still.

  “Rose Marie, you will now stand on one leg,” Sister Joan shouted from the front of the class.

  The eyes of all the kids were on her again. As she raised her leg, fire worms wriggled inside. She slammed her foot down, bang, and tried to bang, bang, bang them out.

  Sister Joan’s footsteps. “All right, young lady.” Her hand hooked Rose Marie’s arm and pinched. “I’ve had just about enough of you.” Sister marched her out of the classroom and down the hall. She took her big key ring from around her waist and unlocked a door. The broom closet. “Get in there and stay in there.” Spit flew from Sister Joan’s mouth and flecked Rose Marie’s forehead. “You asked for this, missy!” She banged the door shut. Click. She locked it.

  Rose Marie stared into the pitch-black until the outline of the door appeared. She picked up a musty string mop and whapped it against the door. She threw a tin of floor wax, the lid flying off. Wind howled and the stinking mop with its string worms whipped around her. She jumped up and down, banging her fists against the walls and crying out, “Papa, Mama, Papa, Mama, come get me!”

  Her knees turned to jelly. She tumbled to the floor. Ayaoo A Pistotoki, Is Pommokit, she murmured, a prayer she was not even allowed to say. “No Indian language,” the sisters were always yelling. “English only.”

  She lay in the dark. So quiet. She wanted to drift like the specks of dust in the stream of light falling from the door crack. Then she remembered running through the schoolyard with Taki’s hand in hers as they jumped in other girls’ skipping ropes or rammed through game circles, making everyone yell. She laughed right out loud. Not everything was bad. Almost, but not everyone.

  * * *

  In the moon of first snow, Mama and Papa came to the school. Finally. Forest Fox Crown and Aunt Angelique had picked them up in Forest’s truck and driven them to St. Mark’s for visiting day.

  Rose Marie glimpsed them at the back of the chapel during Mass, all four adults sitting together—and baby Kiaa-yo too. Her breath filled with tickles and she bit her hand so she wouldn’t laugh out loud through the weird words that Sister Joan had tried to teach them. That Mother Grace was watching her, so she mumbled along with the big girls. Deus tu conversus vivificabis nos. She didn’t know what the words meant, but she remembered them, and Mother Grace was watching, and if she didn’t try those words, she would burst out laughing. Et cum spiritu tuo.

  After Mass, she forgot that stupid rule about not running in the hall, and she ran to Papa and he scooped her up. She burrowed in his arms of light, and when he put her down, Mama pulled her to her soft bannock belly and held her tight. Turning to her baby brother, she rubbed her nose against his, making him sputter and laugh.

  “My girl, my girl,” Papa said, patting her head.

  Mama whispered “Sinopaki,” her secret name, and she felt good.

  They sat in the downstairs visiting room, Rose Marie on Papa’s knee, while Forest Fox Crown and Aunt Angelique went upstairs to the big girls’ visiting room to see Adele and Esther. Kiaa-yo squirmed and she tickled his tummy. Mama unbuttoned her dress and fed him, which was a Bad Thing to Do, Rose Marie could tell from the gasp on Sister Lucy’s face.

  She slid off Papa’s knee and jumped over his stretched-out legs. Sister Lucy opened her mouth, but she didn’t say anything about no running, no jumping, no having fun, so she kept jumping until Mama was finished feeding Kiaa-yo.

  “Pohk Kiaayo,” Mama crooned, and she handed the baby to Rose Marie. “Pohk Sinopaki.” They belonged to each other, all of them.

  “N’iiko-si,” she whispered back.

  “I don’t know when we’ll be back,” Mama said when Forest Fox Crown and Aunt Angelique came downstairs way too soon. “Depends if we can get a ride.” She looked at Forest, but he was staring down, fingers rubbing his shiny yellow keys.

  “Be good,” Mama said to her.

  “N’iiko-si,” she whispered back. My parents.

  * * *

  That night the wind howled, and the school was shivery cold.

  “That’s because Mother Grace won’t allow Brother Abe to keep the furnace burning at night,” one of the older students had told them in the dormitory as the first-years were changing for bed. It was Leah, a big helper-girl who worked at even more jobs than she had to. She was folding pillowcases on her bed. “There’s only so much money for coal,” she added importantly. “The war’s on, you know.”

  They nodded.

  “My dad’s at the war,” said Martha Buffalo, her voice shivery.

  “My uncle,”
said another girl.

  “My big brother’s in the mine,” added another.

  Sister Cilla strode down the centre aisle to the little girls in the back two rows. “Kneel,” she ordered, and they smoothed their nightdresses over bony knees and knelt on the freezing floor.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” they recited through chattering teeth.

  But Rose Marie had her own prayer.

  “Let me sleep the whole night through.”

  “Let me dream all the cold and rules away.”

  Sister Cilla clapped her hands. “All right, up you get and into bed.”

  They climbed between icy sheets. The winter would be long and harsh, Rose Marie could tell. It might never end.

  8

  Beasts of the Field

  THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of November were uncharacteristically grey. Sister Joan, Mother Grace noticed, was in a foul mood, displeased by the weather as well as her class of fourteen first-year girls.

  She was complaining to Sister Margaret as they walked together down the stairs to Matins. “The more we try to acculturate them, the worse they get. ‘You cannot learn unless you sit still and listen,’ I tell them, but it’s no use. Senseless, most of them.”

  Mother Grace coughed and Sister Joan looked down the stairs at her, eyes narrowed.

  * * *

  Rose Marie was discontented too. It was the fire worms or never being outdoors, or maybe the winter sun, all wrapped up in bandages of cloud. She scratched and fiddled in her desk, and finally, during counting, she slipped out of class and into the hall.

  “Get back here!” Sister Joan yelled, her head popping from the door, arm waving.

  Rose Marie started running for the big front door.

  “Sister Cilla,” Sister Joan yelled. “Get her!”

  Oh dear, Sister Cilla with her long legs coming down the stairs. Rose Marie sped up, but with a jump and two long lopes, Sister had her by the nape. She tried to shake Sister off, but she held her the way Mama did when she wanted her to “stay still a minute, eh?” The way Aunt Angelique had when she made her take the bus to this stupid old school. Sister Margaret and Sister Joan did it too. They all grabbed her tight by the neck and made her do what she didn’t want to!

  As Sister marched her back to class, Rose Marie looked up from the corner of her eye. Sister Cilla didn’t even seem mad. Her cheeks were pink and she was almost-smiling. Maybe Sister liked chasing her. Maybe all Sister Cilla wanted was to run down the halls as fast as she could and never ever stop.

  At the back of the classroom, Sister Joan made her turn her hands up just like she had with Martha the week before when she couldn’t stop laughing. Sister whacked Rose Marie with the pointer, whacked until her palms were screeching ow, ow, ow! But, unlike Martha, she didn’t cry.

  * * *

  The next day, the sun was just an old yellow scab stuck on the classroom window. Rose Marie wanted to peel it off and find the real sun underneath, bright and warm. She swayed in her desk, trying to calm the fire worms burning her tummy.

  Sister Joan pulled a long skipping rope out of her desk drawer. “Fine!” She marched up the aisle, shoved Rose Marie against the back of her seat, and wrapped the skipping rope around her, tying her to the desk. “There. And if I hear a sound out of you, Rose Marie, I’ll tape your mouth shut too!”

  Fine, she thought to herself.

  When Sister Joan was writing numbers on the board—4, 5, 6—she wiggled the rope loose. By 12, 13, 14, she had slipped out of the coils. Taki gave her a you’re gonna get it look, but she didn’t care.

  * * *

  “Like greased lightning,” Sister Joan hissed to Sister Margaret in the hallway as they headed for lunch. “She dashed out to the schoolyard. Without a coat, of course. What am I to do with the little heathen?”

  Mother Grace, coming out of her office, heard the venom in Sister Joan’s voice and wondered if she should intervene, possibly preventing a rash action on Joan’s part. It wouldn’t be the first time Sister Joan—nor Sister Margaret, for that matter—had overreacted to an unruly child. But both sisters could be difficult, Sister Margaret stubborn and Sister Joan so very defiant.

  I’ll speak to them when I have the energy, she thought as she made her way down the hall.

  Later that day, she sat at her desk writing a funding request to the Oblates, who ran most of the Catholic residential schools, on behalf of Father David.

  A child’s voice pierced her office door, and she dropped her pen. The sound seemed to be coming from the dining room or the kitchen. A student in distress? Probably one of the girls on supper duty had cut a finger while slicing carrots or perhaps burnt herself while lighting the stove. Surely the situation was being taken care of by one of the sisters.

  But the noise persisted. There was something primal in it, some sort of feral outrage that caused a shudder to pass through her entire body. Perhaps an animal had come into the school and been caught by Brother Abraham, a small animal trapped and possibly injured, dangerous even. She should get up. She should hurry down the hall and find out just what was taking place. The cries continued, terrible, rising and falling. She sat unmoving in her chair, chilled to the marrow of her bones.

  She should get up, but she felt poorly. She had a great deal of paperwork to take care of. She simply didn’t have the strength. Nor the motivation. The problem would very likely resolve itself.

  * * *

  Rose Marie lay on her bed, a lump of raw meat. A hammer pounded the left side of her skull just above her eye. Beds scraped across the floor, their springs crying out like small birds. From the high northwest windows, light pulsed, broke apart, and dropped on her, small punches blackening her eyes and jamming her down a dark hole. She fell.

  * * *

  Light blasted her awake. She heard the moan of an animal caught in Papa’s trap.

  O Sacred Heart of Jesus, filled with infinite love, broken by our ingratitude, and pierced by our sins, a nun prayed by her bed. She didn’t recognize the voice. When she opened her eyes, she saw it was that new nun, the one who always disappeared again, the one she saw backwards.

  She drifted in and out of sleep, and the nun faded and returned, her voice a thread carried by air currents. Take every faculty of our souls and bodies. The prayer wafted her to a nest of hides she sank into, at home, home at last and not hurting.

  * * *

  Mother Grace floated above. Her papery hand blurred as it reached and touched her forehead. The hammer came down again, slamming her eye shut. Mother Grace and Sister Cilla made her sit up and, oh, pulled off her school dress.

  “No, it hurts!”

  “Sinopaki,” Mama whispered.

  Then that trapped animal again, a little fox moaning until the sky pushed down and stubbed her out.

  * * *

  Taki’s face was next to hers. “Assa, assa!”

  “Get away from her, Anne,” Sister Margaret ordered.

  Other girls passed by her bed, staring with oh my eyes.

  * * *

  Her skull cracked under a weight, and water seeped in. Taki had placed something cold and wet over her eye.

  “Rosie, please don’t make that sound.”

  “Is she all right?” Sister Cilla asked, long fingers crossing her flat chest.

  Taki pulled a scratchy blanket up to her chin.

  “Don’t. It hurts,” she murmured.

  “You talked, Rosie. Sister Cilla, she talked!”

  * * *

  Mother Grace came with a flashlight and stroked her aching hair. “How could she do this to you? Such a bright girl, she always says. Stubborn, but nevertheless—”

  * * *

  The dorm was dark, full of sleeping girls, but someone, something, was stirring. It pulled at her, wanting her to look up, to see.

  Once, at home, when she was supposed to be asleep, she had felt the same need to open her eyes and peer out of her nest of skins. Mama was sewing in a circle of lamplight as she always did the nights Papa
was away in the bush. A fire flickered from the mouth of the stove, lighting Mama and the rising-falling waves of her breasts and baby-belly, the glinting needle poking down and pulling up through the cloth—a warm sleepy song. She was about to settle back in her bed when she noticed something pouring through the air like thin milk, oh, just like the spirits she had seen flowing from birds caught in Mama’s snares, or the spurt of four-leggeds escaping Papa’s traps of steel and pain, leaving their bodies behind.

  Heart drumming, she watched milk curdle into arms and legs. Not forming an animal or a bird but the shape of a lady. She looked over at Mama, who hadn’t even noticed.

  She wanted to call, Mama, watch out, but the lady-shape was filling with colour. A dress—red, blue, and yellow, gathered at the waist with a brass-studded belt that glittered crazily in the lamplight. A face. Like Mama’s, but older, thinner, and there, painted with a white streak down the nose, yellow slashes across the cheeks and a red sun on the forehead. She watched the lady-shape glide across the room to Mama.

  Mama raised her head. She gasped. “My mother!” Then a murmur: “How I miss you.”

  Goose pimples shivered up and down Rose’s arms.

  “Not yet,” Mama whispered, her voice dropping so low that Rose could hardly hear. “I’m not ready. You must go alone.” Mama straightened in her chair, her needle held upright. “Mother, go alone.”

  And sta-ao, the shadow spirit, faded away.

  Here in the cold school, in her hard bed with rusty springs, in her pain, Rose Marie did not want to look up and see sta-ao. “No, no, no.” She crawled under her blanket, her breath fast as sparrows flitting through trees, small black bruises shifting ache from one part of her body to another. But that pull, that look up call. Rose Marie raised herself on an elbow and peered towards the entrance.

  There. She was right under the light, that sister who appeared and disappeared—young and kind of pretty, dressed in the same habit the other sisters wore. She had tied an apron around her waist just like Sister Bernadette, but she had pulled her habit over the apron, making it shorter so that the curvy part of her lower legs showed. The sister, Rose Marie could see, wasn’t tall like Sister Cilla, but taller than Esther who wasn’t really her cousin. Now the sister walked to the door, her skirt swaying from side to side just like Esther’s always did. Oh, and she turned to nothing.