Black Apple

by Joan Crate

  Rose Marie was caught off guard. “Oh.”

  “Once you’re in Black Apple, you might meet a man who is interested in you, or who pretends to be. He might be a handsome, charming young man you think is sincere, but more than likely he only wants”—Sister Cilla cleared her throat—“to take advantage.” She turned even brighter. “Most men are like that. Not all, but most. Do you know what I mean, Rose Marie?”

  She could only stare.

  “Listen, you can’t trust any man who wants to court you. Don’t let him get too familiar. By that I mean . . . well, don’t let him interfere with you. Dear, oh law.” She paused. “No kissing. No hands under clothing. You don’t want to be ruined, and you certainly don’t want a baby.”

  “Oh my, no!” She felt the suitcase slide from her grip and topple over on the floor. She hardly noticed Sister Cilla duck out the room. Instead, she tried to recall the prayer she had scribbled sometime between last night and this morning. Hail, Holy Mother of Heaven and Earth.

  Then she picked up the suitcase and started down the stairs.

  Waiting for her at the bottom was Sister Lucy, supported by Sister Cilla, her cheeks still pink.

  “Why, Sister Lucy,” she said, scarcely believing the old woman was standing before her in the main entrance, so feeble had she become in the past year. “Sister Lucy, you look pretty good,” she said loud enough for Sister to hear.

  “Our dear daughter,” the old woman cooed, touching Rose Marie’s face.

  “Sister Lucy wanted to come,” Sister Cilla explained. “Dear, oh law, I couldn’t say no.” Sister Cilla turned to the sound of Mother Grace making her way down the hall. “I couldn’t say no to her, Mother Grace.”

  Slow and heavy footfalls on the stairs, lighter ones close behind. “Sister Margaret. Sister Joan.”

  Sister Simon came up quickly behind Mother Grace, and Sister Bernadette scampered from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Rose Marie, you must keep in touch,” Mother Grace said. “Write to us once a week, at least. There are stamped envelopes in the side pocket of your suitcase.”

  “Yes,” all the sisters chorused.

  Sister Bernadette helped her into a black raincoat, and Sister Simon motioned to the gumboots by the door. Just as Mother Grace had predicted, both coat and boots were too large; she was lost in them.

  It was Sister Bernadette who moved first, rushing up and throwing her short arms around her. Rose Marie felt the cool cotton of Sister’s summer habit on her chin and smelled bleach and onions. Then all the sisters gathered round, pressing hard bones and jiggling flesh, their damp cheeks and warm hands against her. She had never experienced such a display of affection in all her years at St. Mark’s. She couldn’t stop her chest from heaving, a wail trickling from her lips.

  One moment, it seemed the universe was ordained and orderly.

  Then, it shattered.

  * * *

  In the car, Sister Cilla’s white knuckles locked on the steering wheel as she accelerated down the gravel road from the school. Behind them, a plume of dust billowed. Smoke, Rose Marie thought. Her past burning away.

  At the highway, Sister Cilla turned right in front of a transport truck and slowed to a snail’s pace. Down the hill they rolled, the truck braking behind them, its air horn blasting.

  “We’re here,” Sister Cilla announced a few minutes later as the car lurched to a stop outside a dingy gas station and adjoining café slumped against the highway. Far behind them, St. Mark’s stood, a thumbprint on the vast horizon.

  Once Sister Cilla had helped Sister Lucy out of the car, she turned to Rose Marie. “I have something for you.” Her hands fumbled at the nape of her long neck. From under her collar, she pulled a silver chain with a small silver cross. “My brother gave this to me when I took my vows. I want you to have it, Rose Marie. For luck. Here, let me fasten it for you.”

  The bus pulled in then, and as Rose Marie climbed up the Greyhound steps behind an elderly Indian couple, she turned to wave good-bye to the sisters. They had grabbed hold of each other a few feet from the bus doors, and Sister Cilla seemed to wrap Sister Lucy like a wire around a windblown bale of hay. At the end of her sharp nose, a drop formed, then another, each spilling onto Sister Lucy’s wimple.

  Mutt and Jeff, she thought. She had seen the cartoon in the newspapers she used to wash windows and bundle up potato peels, and it had always made her chuckle. But not today. Today the contradiction of short and tall, thin and plump, young and old wasn’t funny. Sisters Cilla and Lucy were staying, while she was being shipped away. Lifting her hand for one last wave, she caught something from the corner of her eye. There, under the awning of the café, someone was watching the sisters. Still as a fence post, the narrow shape stood in the shadows, only the hands moving, working something. A straw hat, she guessed.

  “C’mon,” the bus driver called, and she climbed the remaining steps. He pulled a lever and the doors wheezed shut behind her. Immediately she was assaulted by the smell of orange peel, cigarettes, and that unnameable acrid odour she had sometimes detected on Mother Grace’s breath in the morning.

  Three rows behind the driver was an empty seat, and she remembered Mother Grace’s words about sitting near the front. As she neared the seat, the woman by the window plunked her purse down. Just as she started to say, “Excuse me, but is this seat free?” the woman glared at her and jerked her frizzy blond head to the back of the bus.

  Rose Marie gazed down the aisle. A long bench seat made up the last row, just like on the school buses, and, on each side of the seat, a man leaned against the window, sleeping. The elderly couple who had just boarded the bus was sitting in the row just in front. Across from them were two young men. In front of the men, Rose Marie spotted another empty seat.

  “Sit down,” the bus driver yelled, and feeling the burn of the frizzy blond woman’s eyes on her, feeling other eyes staring through Sister Bernadette’s baggy black raincoat, she rustled to the back of the Greyhound. As she drew closer, she saw that everyone sitting there was dark-skinned. Indians, like her.

  Taking a seat, she sensed one head still turned towards her. It wasn’t the frizzy-haired woman, as she expected, but a man on the end seat of a middle row, a white man with a stubbled chin and red hair as dull as a dead fox caught in one of Papa’s traps. He grinned at her with crooked teeth. She turned to the window and took a deep breath.

  A lifetime before, a bus had jolted her from the narrow road that joined Mama, Auntie Constance, and Aunt Angelique’s Reserve to the highway, and deposited her, stunned and queasy, at St. Mark’s Residential School for Girls. How afraid she had been, a small child without a Christian bone in her body. Uncivilized.

  Now, grown up, chosen, and practically a postulant, she felt stunned and queasy all over again as she travelled back to where she had come from, and then beyond. “For three months,” Mother Grace had said. She tried to summon anger about Mother Grace’s cowardice in not telling her of the possibility of being sent away, in not wanting Papa to visit her in Black Apple, and, no doubt, in demanding that Sister Cilla give her the no men lecture. After all, Mother Grace had been going to tell her something yesterday in her office, so why not get Sister Cilla to do it for her? Though, she had to admit, she would much rather have Sister Cilla deliver the horribly embarrassing warning than Mother Grace.

  But she had no energy for anger. She was scared, and if she could just be back at St. Mark’s, she would forgive Mother Grace anything.

  “Hi there, little lady,” a male voice greeted her from behind, and she turned in her seat.

  Did she know that man? Handsome. Perhaps one of Forest Fox Crown’s several relatives? She lowered her eyes, but a dart of flame made her look back up. Oh, he was like Papa, with a spirit too big for his body. Maybe twenty-two years old, maybe twenty-four, though she couldn’t be sure because she had seen young men only when the farmers brought their sons to St. Mark’s to deliver supplies or

  on the rar
e occasions older brothers came on visiting day. She clutched the raincoat tightly around her.

  Fire Indian’s hair was in neither a short residential school cut nor long like Papa’s. In between. He wore a faded cowboy shirt with what was probably a ketchup stain over where his heart would be. A bolo tie made of a beaded circle with an X and a strip of rawhide hung around his neck. He winked, and she felt heat spread through her cheeks. She remembered to breathe—a quick inhalation, then a hiccup. Oh! She turned her eyes to the seat in front. “Put your hand in the fire, and you’ll get burned,” Sister Joan had warned the students many times.

  The handsome man laughed, and it was like a summer blaze. Her skin was dry as late summer bark, would surely catch fire.

  That Dead Fox Man was watching her again, and with him in front and Fire Indian behind, she didn’t know where to turn her attention. She closed her eyes. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are—

  “Come sit with me,” the man behind her said. “My friend will trade places with you—won’tcha, Eugene?”

  Smoothing her white cotton head scarf with both palms, she bowed her head. Blessed art thou amongst women.

  “Eugene, trade places with her. C’mon, beautiful, won’tcha—”

  Maopiit! The sharp sound cut away the man’s words. It had come from the seat across the aisle. The old woman had spoken Blackfoot. She must have scolded Fire Indian in Blackfoot, and suddenly he was quiet.

  She had forgotten it, the language of Mama and Papa, Whitewater and Tallow. Her own once-upon-a-time, long-ago words. The Lord, the Lord is—she started, but the neat order of the rosary began to collapse. She turned to the window to cross herself without anyone seeing. Hail Jesus. Hail Mary. Fruit of thy womb. She couldn’t think straight. Something about salvation. Closing her eyes, she listened to her breath, smelled the sour bus air flowing through her. God, please keep me safe. She touched Sister Cilla’s cross at her throat.

  The road uncoiled beside ravines and coulees; deer leapt to reveal blue and green and blue. It had been so long since she had fallen under the spell of the land, and now the wheels spinning along the white line slowly unravelled her memories—including a vague recollection of a small house in the midst of trees that trembled and danced. A-kiitoy-iistsi—was that the right name?

  On and on they drove. Hills turned to mountains with stony fingers the bus slid through. A cluster of mountain sheep watched with shale eyes. On and on. A coyote at the side of the road disappeared in deep grass.

  “Two Raven Pass,” the driver called.

  She might have dozed off. She might have daydreamed or been lost in thought, she wasn’t sure. The bus stopped and people got off, people got on—the chorus of a hymn sung too slowly for too long. She almost forgot Fire Indian behind her and Dead Fox Man several rows in front. After a few hours, she almost forgot St. Mark’s.

  At first she hardly noticed the broken mountain, nearly let it slide away like loose rock. Then she looked right at it, and the breath froze in her lungs. The Mountain That Moved. She knew the story, how its spine had cracked over the mine drilled deep into its belly, how it fell on houses, crushing the spirits of people eating, napping, playing, and working, grinding their lives to dust. It was what she had seen every day of her young life at home, its damaged form glinting from the creek, taking over the sky.

  Fewer passengers now. They stirred, glancing at watches, pulling satchels off the overhead rack, stuffing blankets into bags. She sat forward in her seat, nervous. The bus slowed and turned off the highway, weaving along a gravel road. Shacks of tarpaper and peeling paint were crammed together on a narrow street. BLACK APPLE, a filthy roadside sign spelt out in misshapen letters. Dumbly she watched a large woman with a small boy stumble from a store not five feet from the bus, a bag of potatoes in her hand.

  A siren shrieked, and the boy cried something that sounded like “Shift change, Mummy” as the woman pulled him through a puddle and down a side street. The bus passed a dilapidated building, the words DOMINION HOTEL barely discernible on the blackened wood. Leaning against the building was a clump of men, one yelling something about a “son of a bitch.” Everything, everyone, looked dirty. Oh dear, she did not want to be here.

  As the bus pulled up to the depot, she forced herself to remember Mother Grace’s instructions. She waited for the bus driver to bellow “Blaaack Aaapple” before she rose, then pushed down the aisle ahead of the Fire Indian and his friend Eugene, but well behind the Dead Fox Man with his matted hair and dirty eyes. She stepped carefully down the steps, her heart banging against her ribs, past the driver, who did not take her elbow in his palm as he had with the frizzy-haired woman in front of her.

  With the other passengers, she bunched around the side of the bus and waited until the driver strode through the crowd and unlocked a door near the back wheel. She retrieved her suitcase, then turned to follow the others through the door into the depot. She looked around for Father Patrick, but there was no man with a white stripe at his throat. Pushing her suitcase against her ankles, she sat on a wooden bench.

  At the sound of feet shuffling nearby, she looked up to see Dead Fox Man in his dirty coat, a leer staining his face.

  “Come on, honey,” he drawled.

  She was sure he wouldn’t be the one assigned to pick her up, so she stared down at the small, diamond-shaped tiles on the floor, each one set in a perimeter of grime. She began to count them. Two, three, four . . .

  “I got a hotel room,” he whispered in her ear. “I got lotsa money.”

  Eight, nine, ten . . .

  Suddenly her upper arm was squeezed. Dead Fox Man yanked her to her feet.

  “No!” she cried, looking around. People stared, but no one seemed ready to help. She shook her arm, frantically trying to break free of his grip. Dead Fox Man tugged her, and she stumbled towards him.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Fire Indian, Eugene close behind.

  “Get away from my sister!” he shouted.

  “She’s not your sister,” Dead Fox Man bawled. “She’s with me.”

  Fire Indian raised a clenched fist, and Dead Fox Man let her go. “Goddamned Indians!” he spat, turning to the door.

  Behind them, the clerk at the counter yelled, “No fighting in here! Go on, yous. Get out of here.” He waved his hand at Fire Indian and Eugene. At her too. He was shooing them away.

  She lowered her head and sat back down. It was Tuesday, she remembered, the day for contemplating sorrowful mysteries. Mary, help me to be humble and obedient to God’s will. She felt sorrowful enough.

  Where was Father Patrick? She glanced around the depot again. The crowd had thinned. Just that morning, Mother Grace had instructed her to get her suitcase and wait until she was approached by “a respectable priest, an attractive elderly man,” but no one fit that description.

  “Where you going? Can we walk you somewhere?” Fire Indian asked, coming over.

  She shook her head. Mother Grace had warned her about strangers.

  “You sure?” His eyes were no longer angry or teasing, but a flicker of orange danced through them.

  “C’mon, Frank,” Eugene said.

  “You got someone coming for you?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. Maybe I’ll see you around, eh?”

  For a moment, a sparrow’s cry seemed to flit in her throat, but she willed it silent, pressed her lips together so the word wait wouldn’t fly out. She was tired, so tired of waiting, her whole life spent working and waiting for her destiny to unfold. What she felt was anxiety, a new word of Sister Cilla’s. “Are you feeling anxious, Rose Marie?” Sister had asked before she boarded the bus. “I suffer from anxiety from time to time myself.”

  One, she counted to herself, looking again at the floor tiles. Two, three, four. For some reason, she was cold. She pulled the raincoat tightly around herself and kept counting. When she looked back up, she was the only passenger left in the depot. And the clerk behind the big desk
had his eyes trained on her.

  “You can’t hang around here all day,” he announced. “No loitering allowed.” His finger pointed to a sign just above him with that very message printed in large red type. “It says ‘No Loitering Allowed,’ ” he repeated slowly, his finger following each syllable.

  “I can read,” she said. “Besides, I’m not loitering.” Lifting her suitcase, she went over to his desk. “I’m waiting for Father Patrick of Our Lady of Sorrows Church. I’m training to be a holy sister.” She lifted her chin slightly, as she had seen Mother Grace do on numerous occasions, particularly when challenged by Sister Joan. Or Papa.

  “Gosh. You just missed his funeral!” The clerk stared at her, his scorn gone. “It was this afternoon. Father Seamus—the priest from Coal River—said the Mass.”

  “Funeral?” She was so shocked she could barely push the word out.

  He eyed her curiously. “You didn’t know he died?”

  “Father Patrick?” Her heart hammered in her chest.

  “Well, yeah,” the clerk said, glancing at the white cotton covering her hair. “Stroke or something like that. He was here for just under a year, but everyone liked him. Except for a few of the muckamucks. You know, the high-and-mighties.” He snorted.

  “What will I do now?” Her assignment, as Mother Grace had called it, was to assist Father Patrick. “The bus,” she cried. “Can I go back?”

  “Long gone,” the clerk told her. “Won’t return till the day after tomorrow.”

  “Please,” she begged, her voice withering to a whisper, “can you at least direct me to the church?”

  34

  The Orphans’ Prayer

  SHE STOPPED ON the muddy street and set her suitcase down. She had packed too many books, and her arm felt as if it were being wrenched from its socket.

  Picking up the suitcase with her left hand this time, she trudged on. Fortunately she was wearing boots—the gumboots Sister Simon wore in the garden—“galoshes,” Sister Joan called them. They were at least two sizes too big and slid back and forth as she walked, chafing her calves.