Black Apple (6 page)

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.”

  *  *  *  

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.

T
HE 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.