Black Apple

by Joan Crate

  For Augie, Peggy, and too many others

  PART ONE

  1

  Baby Bird

  PAPA OPENED THE DOOR slowly. “What do you want?” he said in English.

  “I’m Father Alphonses,” a white man’s voice said. Then came a stream of sound. Rose, cross-legged on the floor while Mama braided her hair, made out just a few of the words. “School,” “must,” “law” louder than the rest.

  Mama stopped braiding. “Lie down with Kiaa-yo,” she hissed, pushing Rose towards the nest of hides. Mama stood, pressing herself against the wall where the men couldn’t see. Catching Rose’s eye, she signalled her to pull the hide over her head.

  Under the fur, Rose couldn’t make out the words anymore. Kiaa-yo threw out his arms and legs, making crying sounds, so Rose pushed up the soft cover with one hand and put a finger in his mouth, letting him suck.

  “You’d better leave,” Papa said.

  “We’ll bring in the RCMP,” one of them yelled back.

  She peeked out, and that’s when it happened. Oh, Papa with his what can I do? look stepped backward into the house, no longer fierce, his colours breaking apart like the reflection of the moon in runoff water.

  The men barged in, but Mama stepped forward and stood in front of them.

  “Mrs. Whitewater, I’m here to escort your daughter to St. Mark’s Residential School for Girls,” said the man with the white stripe at his throat. “This is Mr. Higgins, the Indian agent. Now if you’ll just get—ah, there she is.” He pulled the hide back on Rose and Kiaa-yo.

  Mama started coughing. The lard man pushed her aside. Oh, now Mama was changing just like Papa, her colour draining.

  She ran to Mama, let her mother hold her against her soft body, rocking gently.

  “Rose,” Mama whispered, “my little Sinopaki.”

  “No packing necessary. All her clothing will be provided,” the man with the white stripe said, but Mama wouldn’t let her go, and Rose wouldn’t let go of Mama. The man grasped Rose’s arm with cold fingers, but she pulled away. Kiaa-yo screamed.

  Run!

  She flew to the door, where Papa slumped against the wall. He was mad and scared and just like sand spilling out of an old cloth bag. But suddenly he stood up straight and stepped in front of her. He stopped her from reaching the door.

  “Papa?”

  He opened his lips, but the words caught in his mouth. Nothing came out but spit. He didn’t say it, but Why did I stop you? splattered over his face.

  * * *

  “Hurry up, Rose,” the lard man behind her yelled.

  Walking between these strangers, these bad men, she gulped and burned. They had come to her house, and now they were taking her away. She wanted to run, but her feet were wobbly and all wrong.

  Mama and Papa had told her that men might be coming, but they hadn’t said she would have to go all alone, that they would stay behind. These a-ita-pi-ooy were stealing her. People eaters. She cried into her hands, snot-slimy. Ahead, the stripe man was a black smear against the old carriage road.

  A machine sat on the side of the road. Car. She had seen cars before, had even been in a big one called a “truck” with her mama, Mama’s sister Aunt Angelique, and her new husband, Forest Fox Crown. The truck growled and chewed the ground. It charged way too fast, making trees uproot and fly by the windows. No, she wouldn’t get in this car.

  The lard man came up behind her, opened the front door, and wedged himself behind the wheel. The stripe man pulled the back door open and pushed his cold hand against her shoulder. “Get in, Rose.”

  Oh, and she had to. She scooted along the seat as far away from him as she could get. The car smelled bad. Not tree, water, moss, meat, blood, or berry. Like the stink that blew in from that mining town to the west, that Black Apple.

  He climbed in the front next to the lard man and turned to her. “By the way, I’m Father Alphonses. This is Mr. Higgins,” his voice way too loud.

  Mr. Higgins said nothing. He acted like he couldn’t see her anymore. The car snorted and they jerked down the road, trees and bushes whooshing by.

  “Papa,” she cried.

  “Quiet, Rose,” Father Alphonses said.

  “Jesus Bloody Christ!” Mr. Higgins shouted as the car bounced and they all shot to the roof. “Excuse me, Father, but these shit roads are wrecking the undercarriage. Excuse me for saying so.”

  The backseat squeaked under her bum. Rose threw all her weight onto her feet, half standing. The car turned suddenly and she tumbled back. The squeaking under her was terrible, the sound of a baby bird crying out for its mother and flapping its bony wings in her throat. The car rumbled onto that great grey road.

  They drove faster, and the bird cried even louder, underneath and inside her. Its mama didn’t hear, couldn’t answer, wouldn’t come. She kept swallowing so she wouldn’t throw up.

  “Clean sheets,” Father Alphonses said, pretend-friendly. “You’ll like that. And there will be other children your age. You’ll learn manners and discipline, but most important of all, Rose, the holy sisters will teach you the Word of God. You will be saved. Do you know what saved means?”

  Bird bones in her throat. She could hardly breathe, so she put her head down on the floor and pushed her feet up over the seat. Closing her eyes, she tried to fly away, but her head throbbed and throw-up pushed from her belly down to her throat. She swallowed it back, one foot against the door handle.

  “Stop that.” Father Alphonses’ voice was full of thistles. “Sit up properly.”

  No, she wouldn’t. Not even if her head burst open on the car floor, a big fat puffball. Behind her eyes, she jumped in Napi’s river and paddled around, water shooting up her nose until she choked and sputtered, and Mr. Higgins said, “What’s she doing back there?” Rose put her face back underwater trying to swim away from those men, but when she came up for air, she was still in the car—they were all still in the car.

  “Sit up, Rose.”

  The baby bird started calling out again and it sounded like Mama, Papa, Mama, Papa over and over, and Father Alphonses said, “Stop that,” so she shut her mouth and held her breath, diving deep to get away from the bird and the men and the thistles.

  The car rumbled to a stop.

  Sitting up, she peered out the window. Aunt Angelique’s Reserve! Oh, they had driven east and she knew where they were. There was the band office, and there, the church, with kids, mamas, papas, grandmas, and grandpas everywhere. She spotted Aunt Angelique’s round red-checked skirt. The youngest two of her six new stepchildren clung to Angelique’s hands.

  “Na-a,” she cried, pressing against the glass. Aunt Angelique didn’t hear, so she pounded her fist and screamed, “Na-a!”

  “Quiet!” Father Alphonses said, reaching over and cuffing her across the head.

  She didn’t care what he did, that stupid mean stripe man with cold hands!

  “Na-a!” she screamed.

  Mr. Higgins pulled up a button on his car door. “I’m going to check with the bus driver, Father. Get her to shut up and stop—”

  She pulled up the button on her door, pushed out, and ran. “Aunt Angelique!”

  Auntie turned. She opened her arms, and Rose tumbled into the aroma of wood smoke and delicious imis-tsi-kitan, her face pressed to Auntie’s soft belly.

  When she opened her eyes and looked around, she saw kids being bustled towards two yellow buses. Boys bunched outside the doors of one bus, girls outside the other. A piece of ice shivered down her back.

  “There you are,” said Father Alphonses.

  “No!” She grabbed the soft flesh at Aunt Angelique’s hips and clung.

  “Ow!” cried Auntie. Rose’s little stepcousins backed up and stared. “Sinopaki, let go.” Angelique pried
Rose’s fingers off and placed her broad hand on the nape of Rose’s neck. “Kaakoo!” she ordered, steering her towards the bus. “You have to go to school.”

  Father Alphonses made a throat sound. He was right behind her. She had nowhere to run.

  “Bye-bye, Sinopaki.” Bending, Aunt Angelique rubbed a thick cheek against her nose. Then she stepped away and grabbed the hands of her own children, her new children who were Forest Fox Crown’s and not really hers at all!

  Eyes on the dirty black-licorice steps, she climbed into the bus. Kids were squeezed in everywhere. That awful Father Alphonses plunked himself down on the front seat, so she pushed to the very back and squished beside a bony girl with big teeth.

  So many kids! She had seen some of them before on visits to the Reserve, had played with a few of them when they had waving arms and flying feet. But today these girls were scrubbed shiny, their hair pulled into tight braids. She touched her own hair. Mama hadn’t been able to finish braiding it. The bad men had come, and now it was unravelling.

  All around her the girls were quiet, each pair of eyes stuck to the green seat directly in front. Small girls huddled close to bigger ones. Rose spotted Aunt Angelique’s two oldest stepdaughters sitting in the front row across from Father Alphonses. They turned to look at her, but they didn’t nod or smile. “Your auntie isn’t our real mother,” they had told her at the wedding. “You’re not our cousin.” She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and swallowed down the baby bird still flapping in her throat.

  The bus shuddered and moved away from mamas, papas, grandpas, grandmas, and Aunt Angelique, some of them waving kerchiefs, flying patches of colour that grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared, like fireflies going out. Soon there was just a plume of dust billowing into the too-blue sky.

  She turned to the front. Hills rose and fell, and Rose’s tummy rose and fell too. Cottonwoods and wolf willows thinned until ahead in the distance was nothing but a line of yellow grasses drawn between the road and a big empty sky. Nothing but space. The bus was taking them to nowhere.

  2

  Mother Grace

  PULLING ON BLOOMERS under her white cotton nightdress, Mother Grace winced as splinters of pain jabbed her right shoulder. Automatically she swallowed the curse in her mouth. Cursing was a matter of tone and intent, she had always contended, and though she used the names of the Holy Family frequently, she never took them in vain. Non, she uttered the names of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Virgin Mother as a supplication, a sort of abbreviated prayer for divine blessing, and, when need be, an intervention.

  But pain forced the blasphemies—the ones her father and older brothers had so many years before spit at stillborn calves and broken fences—to form in her voice box and rub it raw. These days it seemed to take all her willpower to maintain a dignified silence and not throw those curses, like small black stones, at her layers of clothing, the splintery wooden ironing board, heavy books, and pestering sisters.

  She had risen early, as she did every year on the first day of school, well before sunrise, when all the sisters were still snoring in their narrow beds. Dressing as quickly as she could manage, she tried to think about what lay ahead. But it was no use. Her mind couldn’t get past the ache seeping through her. Mal à la tête. Rhumatisme. And with everything she had to do.

  Down the stairs and to chapel. She hoped a feeling of piety would overtake her as it sometimes did. But not today. As she entered, she crossed herself with holy water, then climbed the red-carpeted steps to the altar.

  She recalled how grand the carpet had looked twenty-two years before when she first arrived at St. Mark’s, how it made her think of the blood of Jesus Himself. Now it was threadbare, worn under the feet and knees of three generations of students. And no money would be sent in the foreseeable future to replace it. Everything these days went to the war effort, the Second World War, and there was simply no more trimming to be done from the meagre St. Mark’s budget. It was wartime, this terrible war having started just two decades after the first, which, if she remembered correctly, was the war that was supposed to end them all. Dieu, ayez pitié, the government of Canada had forgotten the residential schools.

  She forced herself to kneel. Most holy and adored Trinity, one God in three Persons, I praise you and give you thanks. She went straight to a request to God for guidance, as she did on the first day of every new school year, but halfway through, her insincerity dismayed her and she couldn’t finish. Rising from her knees was difficult, and all she could think about were the aspirins upstairs in the bathroom cabinet and how foolish she had been not to take two before coming down. Now she’d have to go all the way back up, being extra quiet so as not to wake the young, nervous Sister Cilla, always a light sleeper. Or Sister Joan, who in the last few years had taken it upon herself to keep a critical eye on the daily routine of the convent and all its incumbents, particularly her, Mother Grace. She lit a candle to the Virgin, Mother of Divine Providence, and one to glorious St. Mark, who, through the grace of God our Father, became a great evangelist preaching the Good News of Christ. Her prayers were stiff as a hymnbook cover, her spirit dark as the sky glowering through the chapel windows.

  In the kitchen, she made herself a cup of instant coffee. The floors creaked horribly, and she hoped none of the sisters would hear her and come running downstairs: Mother Grace, what are you doing up so early? Why, you mustn’t tire yourself, Mother Grace. Well meaning, but bothersome! Most of the sisters were well meaning. Down the hall to the main entrance she shuffled, inhaling the satisfying smells of disinfectant and floor polish. In a few hours, children would pile through the front door and into the foyer, where framed photographs of past and present sisters, priests, the bishop, and the cardinal of Canada hung. Les sauvages, she had once called the children.

  She rubbed her left hand down her right shoulder and let her fingers bite into the painful flesh. No pleasant shivers of excitement this year. No nostalgia either. Draining the last of her instant coffee, she found herself wondering how long it had been since she’d had a really good cup. Decades, it seemed, prairie water being so alkaline. She set the cup and saucer down.

  Surely it wasn’t dread she was feeling. Weariness perhaps. Ennui. She pulled off her glasses and polished the lenses with a handkerchief from her sleeve. Instinctively, her half-blind eyes fluttered towards the first light of morning creeping through the window above the front door. The shape of a large, dark bird loomed overhead. She gasped.

  Foolish old woman. Just the crucifix, that accursed piece of whittled wood with Jesus’ crude head drooping over his childlike body at an alarming angle, his mouth and eyes gouges of agony. She’d never liked it, but it had been brought by the Benedictine Bishop von Tettenborn all the way from Germany when the school first opened thirty-one years ago, and since Father David often referred to it in his sermons, there was no discreet way to have it replaced by a more pleasing effigy.

  Mother Grace was reaching for her cup and saucer to take back to the kitchen when her eyes were drawn to the photographs that lined the wall. There they were, past and present: the religious community of St. Mark’s. Father David was a good twenty years younger in his photo, with a healthy head of hair and an almost convincing smile. These days, he did little more than sleep, nibble, and complain, the old goat. Brother Abraham—who looked after the chickens and the elderly cow that had remained at St. Mark’s after St. Gerard’s Residential School for Boys, twenty miles to the south, was built eight years ago—had a more recent picture. “Dumb as a doorstop,” she had heard Sister Joan remark about Abe more than once, and there was no denying it, though the man did come in handy, supplying them with fresh chicken and eggs and carrying heavy loads.

  Hélas, Father Damien! His death three years ago had altered things at St. Mark’s, that was certain. In fact, his position at the school had yet to be filled. Since his passing she had, for all intents and purposes, run St. Mark’s without an interfering Oblate so much as looking ove
r her shoulder. It was a state of affairs with which she was not unhappy.

  Down three rows was a photo of the young sister who had died in the girls’ dormitory not a week after Damien’s body was found sprawled beneath the top hayloft of the old barn. Sister Mary of Bethany. Mother Grace pried the photo from its hook. Then she pulled Father Damien’s photo from the wall. For a moment, she felt triumphant. She’d bury the two pictures under a pile of paperwork, and perhaps no one would notice they were missing. Surely it was her right to edit the unseemly from St. Mark’s past. And from her own. Since the deaths of Damien and Mary of Bethany, she had felt a growing deficiency in her daily life; she was no longer satisfied by her role as Mother General of St. Mark’s Residential School for Girls. Sometimes she felt as if she no longer knew her purpose. Or if, indeed, she had one.

  Just that March, she had turned sixty years old. And with her birthday, passed at the school without mention, came regret, came questions, and, oui, desire for fulfilment—something worthy, a call to the future of sorts. As always, she used prayer and meditation to address her moments of uncertainty, yet this new longing remained. Reached in old age, it was very different from her obsession with the pure body and unblemished soul of her Saviour, Jesus Christ, that had filled her as a young woman. She closed her eyes, remembering the glow of her Beloved’s skin touching hers as she had knelt in prayer, His breath and counsel warm in her ear, His eyes watching her as she slept. No, that sort of personal relationship with the Lord was long gone. Nor did she feel the same strong ambition for personal recognition that had begun once she took her final vows. Oui. She had once been sure of an important destiny. But over the years, nothing much had come of it. Surely this time God would provide. Crois en Dieu, she told herself wearily. Aie foi en Jésus. Trust in the Almighty.

  She studied her own photograph on the wall. Not unflattering, she thought, surprised by the serenity of that framed smile. As she turned away, she felt her conscience pinch. Vanity, a venial sin.