by Joan Crate
She climbed on the bed and started jumping. The bedsprings shrieked, and she did too. She bounced hard and high. Reaching out, she grabbed the end of the crucifix that hung over the door. Yanking it off, she flung it against the opposite wall. Her feet hit the bed’s metal frame, and she crashed to the floor. “God damn, God damn!” she screamed.
“What’s going on up there?” Sister Margaret hollered.
Rose Marie got up and climbed back on the bed. Jumping, bedsprings screeching, she pulled the small palm crosses from above the bed. She broke the dry fronds to pieces and threw them around the room. She kept jumping on the bed until the springs sagged and the mattress slumped, belly down, to the floor.
“Should I come up there with my stick?” Sister Margaret bellowed.
She crawled under the saggy mattress and lay in the shadows. Everything hurt. Her eyes were burnt-out holes; her ears itched with tears; her forehead, skinned fingers, scraped knee, and stubbed toe throbbed.
“Mama,” she whispered. She closed her eyes, becoming very young again—her before-being-born self. “Na-a,” she moaned, the word she had once called silently to Mama’s body, her whole wide world. “Na-a,” now to the hard floor, the stale school air, all the sharp corners of this dead sister’s room, the stark space around her, sinking through her, a world of emptiness. “Na-a, please come back from the Sand Hills. Come back and take me with you.”
I’ve come to get you, Papa had said as he knelt beside her in front of the school. With Mama gone, he and her baby brother were all she had left. He had told her he had come to get her, and it was exactly what she wanted, everything she had hoped for.
But he had lied, lied, lied!
PART TWO
16
Womanhood
ON A PLEASANT day in June, Mother Grace watched the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in the schoolyard. From the shadowed doorway, she could discreetly observe the girls, and she spotted Rose Marie walking with her friend Anne.
Anne Two Persons, at average height, was taller than tiny Rose Marie by about four inches. Mother Grace had always considered Anne nondescript, not pretty and not plain, almost invisible, in fact, though on the few occasions she had seen Anne laughing, it was as if a mask had been pulled from her face. Once she had been sure that Anne was boldly imitating Sister Joan’s stern stride, but when she looked back, she thought perhaps she had been mistaken. Sister Margaret liked her well enough, though she unfailingly declared at the start of each new school year, “The Indian’s on that Anne Two Persons like a brand.”
Mother Grace set her cane against the door and kneaded her left shoulder. She would have chosen a different girl to be Rose Marie’s best friend, if it were up to her. Someone more pious, more studious, more—well, évoluée. Yet the two were inseparable and had been since virtually their first day at St. Mark’s, six years before. Anne kept Rose Marie from being alienated, as special children so often are. As she herself had been, to a degree. Indeed, the Lord knew best. She glanced towards the bottom of the steps, where a clatter of voices had started up.
“I was the one who said it first,” Maria Running Deer insisted. “I said, ‘I’ll do the folding,’ but Sister Margaret didn’t hear me, and Becky said, ‘Sister Margaret, I’ll fold. Pleeeeease,’ even though she knew I wanted to, and I never get folding. I always get ironing, and—”
“I never heard you!” Rebecca Old Bear cut in.
“Did so!”
“I did not!”
Vieilli, yet another shrill argument. Retrieving her cane, Mother Grace realized she was simply too tired to make her authority known. As she looked back to Rose Marie, she allowed herself a small surge of pride. While Rachel Useful was becoming alarmingly voluptuous, while poor Susanna Big Snake grew taller and knobbier by the day, Rose Marie’s small frame simply softened. She had to admit that she had detected a despondency in the girl during some of their private lessons that term. Perfectly natural. The difficulties around les règles, maybe. Hormones, or whatever they called them these days. Surely the dormitory nuns mentioned something to the students about the changes of womanhood. It wasn’t her role.
She met with Rose Marie once a week, for what she termed “advanced catechism,” no longer just catechism. Beginning next year, she planned to increase their lessons to twice a week. Rose Marie learned quickly, and she knew more about the sacraments and obligations than most of the sisters. Gone was the wildness that had tainted her first years at the school. The girl’s future was in the Church, she was almost certain. She pressed her fingers to her mouth to stop from smiling. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Rose Marie must come to that conclusion herself.
In just a few weeks, the girl would move down from the dormitory and take her place on the nuns’ floor. During the summer months, she truly became part of the religious community of St. Mark’s. Oui, all was proceeding as it should. Easing herself down on the cement balustrade, Mother Grace retrieved a bottle of aspirin from her skirt pocket and shook out two. As she swallowed the pills, she already felt lighter, as though she had escaped the rusted machinery of her mortal body.
17
Blue
TWO DAYS AFTER every other girl had piled into a yellow bus and left St. Mark’s for the summer, Rose Marie sat on the toilet staring at the discharge on her underdrawers. Old blood, it looked like. She tugged a piece of toilet paper off the roll and dabbed at her thighs, checking for a cut. Nothing. And no pain. Quickly, she pulled up her underdrawers, washed her hands, and went back to sweeping the hallway. It would probably just go away.
She wondered if Anataki had crossed the border into Montana with her family yet, if they were getting close to their summer camp. She imagined Taki and her brothers on galloping horses, squinting as the midday sun sprayed over their foreheads. She could see them clearly in her mind, sage and wild rosebushes rushing by their feet. Behind them, a little slower and more watchful, Taki’s father and uncle swayed on their horses, and to the southwest, a plume of dust trailed from the old truck her aunt drove down the dirt road. In the back of the pickup, head scarf blowing in the hot wind, Taki’s mother sat among skins, poles, blankets, pots, and pans, her hands dancing from one to the other, trying to keep them from bouncing out.
Longing punched Rose Marie in the belly, and for a moment she stopped sweeping. She would give anything to be with Taki and her relations. Especially her brothers. Taki spoke of them so often, Rose Marie had dreamt of them. As if they were her brothers too. Or cousins. Maybe even boyfriends.
By supper there was more discharge on her underdrawers. It was a mourning of sorts, she decided. Without Taki, she was bereft. Bereft: she liked that word. At Easter, Sister Joan had used it to describe the Madonna’s reaction to Jesus’ death. “Mother Mary was bereft,” she had said. Well, this stain was bereavement’s outward sign, just like the stigmata on the palms and feet of St. Francis of Assisi. Still no pain, so big deal.
The next evening, the blood was gone. Thank God.
* * *
Day by day, she grew more lonely, more—what was the word Maria Running Deer used? Blue. A good word, because she had seen the colour blue slink around Papa, bruising the air when he was worried about Mama, and after she died, when he missed her so much. And the first time Mother Grace told him he couldn’t have her, his daughter, anymore. Sometimes, if he wasn’t feeling well. His cough, for one thing.
This blue soaked into her and dragged her down. Maybe it came from the shadow nun. Oh, she didn’t want to think about that. Dull and dazed, she felt like she was crawling through prairie gumbo. Even the bright summer sky winking through the classroom windows couldn’t wash the film from her eyes, the weight of blue clinging to her legs and arms.
* * *
By the end of that first week, she found herself once more immersed in the summer routine. She slept in the little room on the nuns’ floor, attended evening Compline, and sometimes, if she awoke to Sister Joan’s clanging bell, Matins, though Mother Grace didn’t requir
e it of her. “Girls your age need their sleep,” Mother Grace had said.
“Sure wouldn’t do her any harm,” Sister Joan had muttered.
Once again, she was eating her meals in the dining hall with the sisters, where they were usually joined by Brother Abe and Father William, often Father David too. Sure enough, she slipped back into a slot, just her size, much more easily than she liked to admit.
* * *
Twenty-two days after the students had gone home—St. Benedict’s Day, Father David had announced at Mass that morning—Sister Joan came to fetch her from the garden, where she was thinning radishes. As she followed Sister’s stiff back to the visiting room, her eyes not yet adjusted to the dark interior, a shape rose from one of the chairs, buttercups blooming along its shoulders.
“Oh, Papa!”
His arms enclosed her, wrapping her in a memory of metal traps, fresh meat, and the mixed feel and smell of his medicine bag: hide, plant, stone, feather, tooth, and bone. She was caught up in a rush of old sensations—the touch of Mama’s hand on her forehead, the baby’s chamois skin, katoyiss scent pricking her nostrils, moose stew, the creek gurgling, the wind singing, and raven wings whooshing through it. For the briefest of moments, her Sinopaki self fit into her St. Mark’s uniform and she was whole. She clung to Papa, did not want that feeling to leave, did not want him to leave her ever again.
Then Papa shifted away from her, and just as quickly as it had come on, the feeling vanished. She was left with nothing but Papa’s buckskin vest in her fingers and a poke of anger in her belly.
She looked up at him. “Where have you been?”
“Just got in yesterday at Angelique’s. Took me more than two days to get there. Today I caught a ride with Sam First Rifle.”
Sister Joan cleared her throat, her face scratched with impatience. “This visit wasn’t planned, but Mother Grace is allowing you half an hour,” she said, checking her watch.
Papa backed up to the row of chairs against the wall and sat down. She sat beside him.
“It turned out Sam was delivering hay to a farm two miles south. Horse and cart, eh?” He shook his head, eyes twinkling. “Those big horses, Clydesdales. Two real old ones. They walked so slow, we were going backwards. I thought I’d get here yesterday.”
She laughed, her anger gone.
Sister Joan leaned back in her chair, surveying them. Obviously she wasn’t going to leave them alone.
Rose Marie grabbed Papa’s hand. “How is my brother?”
“He’s good. Growing like crazy. Going to be bigger than his papa.” He raised his hand to her shoulder. “Up to here, I’d say. He’ll be bigger than his big sister too. He’ll call you his little-big sister.”
She smiled, but there it was again, that blue, the sense of being alone, even with Papa beside her.
“Always, my girl, I miss you every day.”
There was sadness in his eyes as he spoke, and she wondered if it had always been there. Was sadness part of the world and its people, a secret grief you never even learned of until you were all grown up, or at least starting to be?
“Once we’re out of St. Mark’s, we can make our own lives,” she and Taki were always saying. But now, sitting in the visiting room, she couldn’t imagine what that life would be. Could she live like her mama and papa had in the bush, hunting, trapping, picking, and digging for food? Like Grandfather Whitewater and Grandmother Tallow before them? Would she ever be a wife, a mother? All she could imagine were the walls of the colourless school and her body dissolving into them.
“That Reserve’s where my relatives are, Sinopaki, but it doesn’t feel like home to me anymore; for one thing, you aren’t there. But Kiaa-yo—Joseph—is only six. He needs looking after when I’m hunting or doing healing. I need my relations.”
She nodded dully.
“Tomorrow I’m going west to our old house, see if it’s still standing. Then on to visit Whitewater and Tallow. I’ll get some plant medicine while I’m there.”
She knew that the healing ceremonies Papa performed were “heathen.” That’s what Sister Joan had said. And the Sun Dance was “shameful in the eyes of God. A grisly profanity!” Moments after she made that pronouncement, Sister jumped up, grabbed the pointer from the blackboard ledge, and smacked Susanna over the head to make her “stop giggling like a baboon, missy!”
“Mumbo jumbo” is how Sister Margaret referred to the ceremonies. “Witchcraft” was what went on at powwows, the dancing “disgraceful.”
But Papa was a dancer, the best wolf dancer ever. She thought of her life without dancing or feasts, forever surrounded by the dark wood and white paint of the school. There would be only boring church ceremonies in her life, and no feasts—just the thin dry crackers, often burnt, that Sister Bernadette baked for Eucharist.
Papa talked about the winter, about getting caught in an ahki-tsimii storm during the eagle moon. He showed her his fingers, the tips of two of them white. “Froze a bit. Can’t feel ’em still, but that might come back.” He kept talking as if his stories could fill all the time lost between them.
She nodded, her thoughts limp rags hanging in the airless room. Maybe happiness came for only a minute or two, just as she had felt it when Papa had hugged her. Maybe sometimes for an hour, like when she and Taki held hands and walked around the schoolyard or whispered in bed after lights-out. Just small bright pockets in the gloom.
She kept nodding at what Papa was saying, but she wasn’t really listening. Everything he did was wrong. All her relations were wrong, and Anataki’s too. Last summer, Taki’s family had to move their camp to the other side of a river because a white man with a rifle came and said he owned the land and he’d shoot anyone on it.
“Kiaa-yo starts school next year,” Papa told her, “but he doesn’t have to sleep there. Only kids from big families that don’t have enough money. They changed everything.”
“What?” She was angry. “I should be at that school with him!”
“Sinopaki—”
“I know, I know. Mother Grace won’t let me.” She rubbed her nose to the back of Papa’s hand and looked up at him. A few sparks, but the bright colours that had escaped his wiry body for as long as she remembered—his giant spirit—had dimmed first with his cough and then Mama’s death. Since his fight with Mother Grace, since he lost that fight, his colours had all but faded away. He was wrong, he was weak, and she was stuck at St. Mark’s forever.
Sister Joan stood up. Papa rose too, and Rose Marie dragged her heavy blue body back to the garden.
* * *
After supper, Rose Marie hurried down the hall from her bedroom to the nuns’ bathroom. Her underdrawers felt hot and wet, and as she pulled them down, she saw blood soaking the bleached cotton. Was this a sign of more loss? Papa, whom she hardly ever saw, gone until next Sunday, then gone again until the Sunday after that. Then the Sunday after that one. If he could get a ride. And if he didn’t leave for the north again. The blood was fresh, darkening only at the edges. As if her life was draining away. Tears boiled in her eyes. Everything, everyone, went away. She was being bled dry.
She pressed toilet paper to the gusset of her underdrawers and washed her hands. She wondered if she should tell someone about this wound. The next day she would see Mother Grace for advanced catechism. She could tell her then. If the blood was simply coming from an arm or an ankle, she would tell Mother Grace for sure.
After evening prayer, she took her washbasin to the bathroom, filled it with cold water, took it back to her room, and scrubbed away the stains on her clothes. As she lay in bed, her wet dress and underdrawers stretched on wire hangers in the closet, she realized she couldn’t tell Mother Grace about the blood.
Despite making her stay at the school against her wishes, Mother Grace was always good to her. And she had saved her from her own rash nature and Sister Joan’s rage by removing her from class and giving her special lessons in her own office. Mother Grace was smart too. She knew everything about t
he Bible, and she could say long words no one else even knew. She even had another language, one that wasn’t against the rules to speak. And she had chosen her, Rose Marie Whitewater, out of all the girls at the school. But if it was love she felt for Mother Grace, it was the same kind she had for the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Love for someone removed and not completely human, not made of flesh, not really. As she searched with her fingers, she found blood was still flowing from there. Just as if she was wounded, and, God help me, she must be.
She rose from bed and crept to the bathroom. In one of the cubicles, she stuffed her underdrawers with more toilet paper. When she heard a noise from the hallway, she froze. The long strides of Sister Cilla. If Sister came into the bathroom, she decided, it would be a sign to tell her about the blood.
Sister Cilla’s footsteps splattered past the bathroom door and down the hall. A door whined open and clicked shut.
Maybe she should run down the hall and knock on Sister Cilla’s door. When Sister answered, she would say, “I think something must be wrong with me.”
But Sister Cilla seemed flustered these days, rushing around with sheets and pillowcases, mad at Sister Margaret, she could tell, then tromping off to help Sister Bernadette unload bedding plants or even the sides of pork Scarecrow Olaf delivered. Half the time, Sister Cilla had a faraway look in her eyes, like she was thinking of something that had nothing to do with St. Mark’s. No, she couldn’t say anything to Sister Cilla.
* * *
When Rose Marie awoke to Sister Joan’s clanging bell, she saw that the blood had not stopped. The toilet paper in her underwear was soaked. And even though she had slept like a stone, she was tired. Tired and heavy, but not sick. She knew that TB caused blood to erupt in coughs through the mouth, not between the legs. It drew fevers and sores as it had with Mama, and it did not come on so fast. TB was a slow, creeping thing. She was not dying. Not yet. As soon as the sisters had gone down to Matins, she’d clean herself up.
