Authors: Joan Crate
“This way, girls,” she called, waving at the untidy cluster huddled outside the bus door.
Most of this group looked decent enough, but as they drew close, her nostrils twitched at the scent of bear grease wafting from a couple of heads. The majority wore brightly coloured dresses, some with trousers underneath, and several had shoes on their feet—a good sign with the current shortage at the school—though some girls were in moccasins. Two or three had nothing but streaks of dirt on their feet. A little girl crying her eyes out shuffled forward in a ratty pair of pink bedroom slippers, for heaven’s sake.
“I’ll take care of them, Mother Grace,” a sister called, rushing up from behind her.
As Mother Grace started back to the dining hall to assume her role as supervisor, a classroom door opened and a flock of freshly cropped girls spilled out. Just ahead of her, senior girls in school uniforms dawdled.
“Move on,” she ordered, clapping her hands.
Turning the corner to the staff dining room, she spotted the storklike figure of young Sister Priscilla—now “Cilla,” apparently because she thought it easier for the younger girls to pronounce—hovering over a group of distraught little girls, seemingly torn between whether to comfort or admonish them. Near the entrance to the kitchen, roosting on what appeared to be her own office chair, was Sister Margaret, a Bible in her hands and impatience scribbled over her doughy face.
Coming up beside Sister Margaret, Mother Grace said, “Let’s begin,” with a lightness she didn’t feel. Already, it had been an arduous day, and she yearned to sit down on the very chair Margaret had obviously wheeled, without permission, from her office. But she would not succumb to anger or complaint. After all, Sister Margaret was elderly, beleaguered by lumbago, and as far as she could tell, a paucity of spirit. She, the Mother General, would rise above.
Sister Cilla herded her charges forward, then came up and stood by Mother Grace’s side.
“Your name?” Mother Grace asked each girl. Sister Cilla recorded each response on a sheet of foolscap. At least where possible. Unfortunately, there were always those children whose parents had, for whatever reason, given them Blackfoot names, or “unpronounceable monikers” as she referred to them. Those she replaced with scriptural names.
“Sootaki,” the little girl before her croaked.
“I beg your pardon?” Sister Cilla asked.
“Sootaki.”
Cilla glanced up, and Mother Grace allowed herself a barely audible sigh before tilting her chin towards Sister Margaret. Placing her hands on Sootaki’s shoulders, Cilla steered the girl to the seated nun.
“Anataki,” whispered the very next child.
Sister Cilla looked askance, but Mother Grace gestured again with her chin, and that girl too was dispatched to Sister Margaret.
Mother Grace’s naming system wasn’t without its problems. Since female names were less prevalent than male names in the Bible, the same name was sometimes given to more than one girl at the school—though, to avoid confusion in the classroom, no two girls in the same year shared the same name. Hence the pen, paper, and lists, a bothersome but necessary business.
Sister Margaret leaned towards the two girls in front of her, making Mother Grace’s office chair groan. “I’m going to give you proper names, you little beggars. Let’s see what we have here.” Slowly she flipped through the Bible.
Mother Grace suspected Sister Margaret was making as much of a production as possible out of the simple act of renaming. Sister Margaret had often voiced her objection to the scriptural naming policy, saying how she, the dormitory supervisor, would call out one name and have two or three girls of different ages come running. She advocated adding saints’ names to the roster. “Nice ones,” she’d said, “like Agatha, Bridget, Perpetua, or even Margaret.” Perhaps if Sister Margaret hadn’t brought up her suggestion so often, Mother Grace would have considered it.
“Anne,” Sister Margaret finally announced to the first girl. “Ruth,” she barked at the second. Sister Cilla wrote down the names, and the girls hurried to kitchen, where a sister was handing out nightclothes.
Thankfully, after the first two, the names of the new little girls this year were quite acceptable, though there seemed to be a proliferation of Marys. “Marie,” Mother Grace said to the second one. “Maryanne,” to the third.
* * *
Rose kept her eyes on the nun at the front of the line, the questioner with the glasses and lined face. That nun asked each girl her name, her words sounding different from the way the other nuns said them, turned up at the edges. The questioner wasn’t tall like the young one next to her. Not fat like the one sitting in the chair. But she held her head up, like she was in charge. And her headdress, Rose could see, was different from the others’—black where theirs were white, white where theirs were black. She was chief, all right, the “Mother General” she had heard the other nuns talk about as they scrubbed, shoved, and snipped her.
Her turn now. “Your name?”
“Ro-ose,” she stuttered. At least that wouldn’t be changed like the Indian names of those two other girls. English names weren’t changed, Mama had said. That’s why her official name was Rose, though her real name was Sinopaki, which meant kit fox.
“Rose,” the chief nun repeated, her eyes behind the glasses sky-bright. Or like a bluebottle fly. “That’s certainly not a biblical name.”
Rose bit her lip against the throb of tears.
The long-bone nun sprang forward.
“I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys,”
she blurted.
The Mother General glanced up at the tall sister. “Ah, yes. Song of Solomon.” She closed her eyes and went inside herself.
Everyone watched, and Rose sucked her lip. The girls behind her started shuffling. The fat name changer moved, making her chair shiver.
Suddenly a new nun grew out of the space beside the shivering chair. Rose blinked, but there she was, young, as young as the tall one nearby, but this one’s skirt was bunched around her waist, showing the bottom part of her legs, her narrow ankles and bare feet. The new nun leaned against the wall, watching them all with a fed-up look, her headdress crooked.
Then Mother General made a throat noise and opened her blue eyes, and when Rose looked back, the new nun was melting away. Gone!
Oh. She wasn’t sure what had happened, and when she looked up at Mother Grace, she saw she wasn’t sure either. Mother Grace blinked like she didn’t even know how long she’d had her eyes closed.
“Rose Marie,” she said, staring strong, right at her, with her sky-fly eyes. Then she raised her chin, glancing at the long-bone nun with her paper and pen, then over to the fat one in the chair. “Rose Marie,” she repeated, louder.
As she stood in line for her nightclothes, Sinopaki, Rose, now Rose Marie, sucked blood from her bottom lip. Her eyes smarted and her head banged. First that nun appearing and disappearing right in front of her, and then her name being changed.
Name changes happened sometimes, she knew. It was normal. Her papa was first Bull Calf,
Matoom onista
, she remembered, named by his parents for his bawling cry. At school, the priests had renamed him “Michel” after a dead one. After that, he ran away from his school. Mama didn’t like Papa saying that in front of her, but he did, he ran away, and after he got caught and was brought back to his school a few times, everyone on his Reserve called him “Piitaa,” because, like an eagle, he was always flying. Still later, after he ran far, far away into Mama’s country, he was given the name “Blessed Wolf
”
after the four-legged who had helped him find food and finally led Grandfather Whitewater to him. The spirit wolf had saved her papa, had given him power. Sure, names got changed. She knew that. But under her skin, she was still Sinopaki
.
* * *
At supper, the ache in Rose Marie’s chest grew big. Clank of dishes on the wooden table. Snatch of white hands and a chipped bowl full of greasy water with floating skin and mushy green.
“Chicken stew,” a sister said.
She could hardly swallow it. The chicken skin was bumpy, there was hardly any meat, and stuff that shouldn’t be cooked was boiled into slime. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and tried to eat, but someone beside her was crying, and the stew came back up to her mouth. She choked.
She tried to chew and not throw up. She tried not to cry.
Finally, Sister Cilla stood, her finger shaking at them. “Tomorrow you’ll have to finish every scrap in your dish. Now back upstairs to the dormitory, first-year girls. It’s time to get ready for bed.”
Up the way-too-many steps they followed Sister Cilla and marched into the room that was almost as big as that gymnasium.
“Go find your bed in the back two rows,” Sister Cilla ordered. “Remember, your number is on the bedpost.”
A clump of squiggles was all
number
meant to Rose Marie, and she was pretty sure that’s all it meant to the other first-year girls. She found her bed because she had bunched her nightdress in a ball at the bottom, the way she liked to put clothes, fur, and other soft things.
“Into your nightdresses,” Sister Cilla called.
Rose Marie looked at the other girls pulling their uniforms over their heads, and she did the same.
Sister Cilla went around and helped the ones getting stuck. “Straighten your arms.” She tugged hard.
When everyone was changed, Sister went to the centre aisle, pressed her hands together, and looked at them one by one. “Time for our prayer. Repeat after me:
Now I lay me down to sleep
—”
A few of the girls couldn’t speak English well, and everyone talked at different speeds, some fast, some slow. Rose Marie couldn’t get any sound out at all.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,”
Sister Cilla said, crossing herself.
This part Rose Marie knew. Mama had taken her to church a few times when they had visited Auntie Connie and Aunt Angelique on the Reserve. Seeing all the hands rising, falling, and crisscrossing, she had copied them. She had learned how to kneel and fold her hands too, and to lower her head at the right time. Now she closed her eyes like Sister Cilla, but she couldn’t make the too-big room with high-up beds go away. She thought of Papa’s traps, how when they were rusty, they made a hurt sound—and the animals in them too, when they weren’t dead. The beds made the same sound. She opened her eyes and watched Sister Cilla, whose long black dress was a shadow that ate up her whole body. Her long-bone hands were just a little sun-browned, like they were only half there, and there was a gold ring on her finger, like that one Forest Fox Crown gave Aunt Angelique in the moon of sore eyes.
“Let’s try that again, girls.
Now I lay me down to sleep
.”
Rose Marie looked over at the next bed, and the bed after that, and all around her at all the heads with just-chopped hair. Some of the mouths in some of the heads were saying the prayer and some were open holes with sad dribbling out.
Two beds away, one of the girls was shaking. She looked like she was choking, and she sounded like it too. The choking spread to Rose Marie, and she tried to close her mouth to stop the sounds, but they burst out anyway. She pressed her lips together and clamped her hand over them. She didn’t want to cry in front of all these kids and that tall nun. Way at the front of the room, a light hung from a wire over the only door, just one way to escape. Oh, she wanted Mama and Papa, and while gurgles leaked from her mouth, she prayed,
Mama and Papa, come get me
.
“I didn’t hear everyone,” Sister Cilla said. “We’re going to say the prayer over until everyone knows it. Then we will kneel by our beds and pray properly from start to finish.”
Rose Marie’s knees, elbows, and fingers felt itchy-tingly. She bent her legs, straightened them, bounced on her toes, and swung her
head and not-enough hair from one side to the other. The room jarred back and forth like the Indian agent’s mud-coloured car had jarred the sky and ground that morning. She felt dizzy-sick, and the small amount of slimy chicken stew she had swallowed was turning hard and hot in her tummy.
The door smacked open with a bang and Sister Margaret lumbered through, turning to the big girls behind her. “Halt.” She dragged a chair over and lowered herself. “Come on,” she ordered, waving the girls in with an arm packed like sausage in its black sleeve.
Sister Cilla waited for the too-many girls. Rose Marie knew what Papa thought about so many people stuck together, like in the towns, that one called Black Apple near them and the one named Hilltop near her aunties’ Reserve. People packed in without enough space for their spirits to move. The air tightened in that big room that wasn’t big enough. Like a snare around her chest. As she tried to breathe, her fingers came undone and started curling around nothing.
“Stand still,” Sister Cilla yelled.
Run!
Rose Marie’s brain said. She had tried to run away when the men came to take her, but Papa had stood in her way. Now she darted towards the door that led to the hall that led to the stairs that led to the big front door that opened on the whole wide world.
“Stop!” Sister Cilla shouted. “Stop this instant, Rose Marie!”
A breeze blew cold on her neck where her hair used to fall. She would not stop!
Sister Cilla called, “Sister! Sister Margaret!”
“Great heavens!” Sister Margaret gasped, heaving herself up and lumbering towards Rose Marie.
The girl turned, racing down another row of beds, flying past the older girls fishing nightdresses from cupboards and then back towards the door. Oh, and there was Sister Cilla loping on her long-bone legs, skirt flapping like a crow.
Sister Cilla dove. Rose Marie pulled back. Sister crashed into the door, slamming it shut with a crunch-bone sound.
Back up the centre aisle she raced, Sister Cilla limping behind. All the girls were watching her, their faces blurring by. Sister Cilla’s long arm shot out and grabbed air. Rose Marie dove under a bed. Sliding on her belly, she could smell lye soap on her skin. And fear.