Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  I heard later that the Sacred Heart Convent was a catchall place for nuns that don’t get along elsewhere. Nuns that complain too much or lose their mind. I’ll always wonder now, after hearing that, where they picked up Sister Leopolda. Perhaps she had scarred someone else, the way she left a mark on me. Perhaps she was just sent around to test her Sisters’ faith, here and there, like the spot-checker in a factory. For she was the definite most-hard trial to anyone’s endurance, even when they started out with veils of wretched love upon their eyes.

  I was that girl who thought the black hem of her garment would help me rise. Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing—that was me. I was like those bush Indians who stole the holy black hat of a Jesuit and swallowed little scraps of it to cure their fevers. But the hat itself carried smallpox and was killing them with belief. Veils of faith! I had this confidence in Leopolda. She was different. The other Sisters had long ago gone blank and given up on Satan. He slept for them. They never noticed his comings and goings. But Leopolda kept track of him and knew his habits, minds he burrowed in, deep spaces where he hid. She knew as much about him as my grandma, who called him by other names and was not afraid.

  In her class, Sister Leopolda carried a long oak pole for opening high windows. It had a hook made of iron on one end that could jerk a patch of your hair out or throttle you by the collar—all from a distance. She used this deadly hook-pole for catching Satan by surprise. He could have entered without your knowing it—through your lips or your nose or any one of your seven openings—and gained your mind. But she would see him. That pole would brain you from behind. And he would gasp, dazzled, and take the first thing she offered, which was pain.

  She had a stringer of children who could only breathe if she said the word. I was the worst of them. She always said the Dark One wanted me most of all, and I believed this. I stood out. Evil was a common thing I trusted. Before sleep sometimes he came and whispered conversation in the old language of the bush. I listened. He told me things he never told anyone but Indians. I was privy to both worlds of his knowledge. I listened to him, but I had confidence in Leopolda. She was the only one of the bunch he even noticed.

  There came a day, though, when Leopolda turned the tide with her hook-pole.

  It was a quiet day with everyone working at their desks, when I heard him. He had sneaked into the closets in the back of the room. He was scratching around, tasting crumbs in our pockets, stealing buttons, squirting his dark juice in the linings and the boots. I was the only one who heard him, and I got bold. I smiled. I glanced back and smiled and looked up at her sly to see if she had noticed. My heart jumped. For she was looking straight at me. And she sniffed. She had a big stark bony nose stuck to the front of her face for smelling out brimstone and evil thoughts. She had smelled him on me. She stood up. Tall, pale, a blackness leading into the deeper blackness of the slate wall behind her. Her oak pole had flown into her grip. She had seen me glance at the closet. Oh, she knew. She knew just where he was. I watched her watch him in her mind’s eye. The whole class was watching now. She was staring, sizing, following his scuffle. And all of a sudden she tensed down, posed on her bent kneesprings, cocked her arm back. She threw the oak pole singing over my head, through my braincloud. It cracked through the thin wood door of the back closet, and the heavy pointed hook drove through his heart. I turned. She’d speared her own black rubber overboot where he’d taken refuge in the tip of her darkest toe.

  Something howled in my mind. Loss and darkness. I understood. I was to suffer for my smile.

  He rose up hard in my heart. I didn’t blink when the pole cracked. My skull was tough. I didn’t flinch when she shrieked in my ear. I only shrugged at the flowers of hell. He wanted me. More than anything he craved me. But then she did the worst. She did what broke my mind to her. She grabbed me by the collar and dragged me, feet flying, through the room and threw me in the closet with her dead black overboot. And I was there. The only light was a crack beneath the door. I asked the Dark One to enter into me and boost my mind. I asked him to restrain my tears, for they was pushing behind my eyes. But he was afraid to come back there. He was afraid of her sharp pole. And I was afraid of Leopolda’s pole for the first time, too. I felt the cold hook in my heart. How it could crack through the door at any minute and drag me out, like a dead fish on a gaff, drop me on the floor like a gutshot squirrel.

  I was nothing. I edged back to the wall as far as I could. I breathed the chalk dust. The hem of her full black cloak cut against my cheek. He had left me. Her spear could find me any time. Her keen ears would aim the hook into the beat of my heart.

  What was that sound?

  It filled the closet, filled it up until it spilled over, but I did not recognize the crying wailing voice as mine until the door cracked open, brightness, and she hoisted me to her camphor-smelling lips.

  “He wants you,” she said. “That’s the difference. I give you love.”

  Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind. I saw that she had tracked the Dark One to my heart and flushed him out into the open. So now my heart was an empty nest where she could lurk.

  Well, I was weak. I was weak when I let her in, but she got a foothold there. Hard to dislodge as the year passed. Sometimes I felt him—the brush of dim wings—but only rarely did his voice compel. It was between Marie and Leopolda now, and the struggle changed. I began to realize I had been on the wrong track with the fruits of hell. The real way to overcome Leopolda was this: I’d get to heaven first. And then, when I saw her coming, I’d shut the gate. She’d be out! That is why, besides the bowing and the scraping I’d be dealt, I wanted to sit on the altar as a saint.

  To this end, I went up on the hill. Sister Leopolda was the consecrated nun who had sponsored me to come there.

  “You’re not vain,” she said. “You’re too honest, looking into the mirror, for that. You’re not smart. You don’t have the ambition to get clear. You have two choices. One, you can marry a no-good Indian, bear his brats, die like a dog. Or two, you can give yourself to God.”

  “I’ll come up there,” I said, “but not because of what you think.”

  I could have had any damn man on the reservation at the time. And I could have made him treat me like his own life. I looked good. And I looked white. But I wanted Sister Leopolda’s heart. And here was the thing: sometimes I wanted her heart in love and admiration. Sometimes. And sometimes I wanted her heart to roast on a black stick.

  She answered the back door where they had instructed me to call. I stood there with my bundle. She looked me up and down.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Come in.”

  She took my hand. Her fingers were like a bundle of broom straws, so thin and dry, but the strength of them was unnatural. I couldn’t have tugged loose if she was leading me into rooms of white-hot coal. Her strength was a kind of perverse miracle, for she got it from fasting herself thin. Because of this hunger practice her lips were a wounded brown and her skin deadly pale. Her eye sockets were two deep lashless hollows in a taut skull. I told you about the nose already. It stuck out far and made the place her eyes moved even deeper, as if she stared out the wrong end of a gun barrel. She took the bundle from my hands and threw it in the corner.

  “You’ll be sleeping behind the stove, child.”

  It was immense, like a great furnace. There was a small cot close behind it.

  “Looks like it could get warm there,” I said.

  “Hot. It does.”

  “Do I get a habit?”

  I wanted something like the thing she wore. Flowing black cotton. Her face was strapped in white bandages, and a sharp crest of starched white cardboard hung over her forehead like a glaring beak. If possible, I wanted a bigger, longer, whiter beak than hers.

  “No,” she said, grinning her great skull grin. “You don’t get one yet. Who knows, you might not like us. Or we might not like you.”

  But she had loved me, or offered me love
. And she had tried to hunt the Dark One down. So I had this confidence.

  “I’ll inherit your keys from you,” I said.

  She looked at me sharply, and her grin turned strange. She hissed, taking in her breath. Then she turned to the door and took a key from her belt. It was a giant key, and it unlocked the larder where the food was stored.

  Inside there was all kinds of good stuff. Things I’d tasted only once or twice in my life. I saw sticks of dried fruit, jars of orange peel, spice like cinnamon. I saw tins of crackers with ships painted on the side. I saw pickles. Jars of herring and the rind of pigs. There was cheese, a big brown block of it from the thick milk of goats. And besides that there was the everyday stuff, in great quantities, the flour and the coffee.

  It was the cheese that got to me. When I saw it my stomach hollowed. My tongue dripped. I loved that goat-milk cheese better than anything I’d ever ate. I stared at it. The rich curve in the buttery cloth.

  “When you inherit my keys,” she said sourly, slamming the door in my face, “you can eat all you want of the priest’s cheese.”

  Then she seemed to consider what she’d done. She looked at me. She took the key from her belt and went back, sliced a hunk off, and put it in my hand.

  “If you’re good you’ll taste this cheese again. When I’m dead and gone,” she said.

  Then she dragged out the big sack of flour. When I finished that heaven stuff she told me to roll my sleeves up and begin doing God’s labor. For a while we worked in silence, mixing up the dough and pounding it out on stone slabs.

  “God’s work,” I said after a while. “If this is God’s work, then I’ve done it all my life.”

  “Well, you’ve done it with the Devil in your heart then,” she said. “Not God.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. But I knew she did. And I wished I had not brought up the subject.

  “I see right into you like a clear glass,” she said. “I always did.”

  “You don’t know it,” she continued after a while, “but he’s come around here sulking. He’s come around here brooding. You brought him in. He knows the smell of me, and he’s going to make a last ditch try to get you back. Don’t let him.” She glared over at me. Her eyes were cold and lighted. “Don’t let him touch you. We’ll be a long time getting rid of him.”

  So I was careful. I was careful not to give him an inch. I said a rosary, two rosaries, three, underneath my breath. I said the Creed. I said every scrap of Latin I knew while we punched the dough with our fists. And still, I dropped the cup. It rolled under that monstrous iron stove, which was getting fired up for baking.

  And she was on me. She saw he’d entered my distraction.

  “Our good cup,” she said. “Get it out of there, Marie.”

  I reached for the poker to snag it out from beneath the stove. But I had a sinking feel in my stomach as I did this. Sure enough, her long arm darted past me like a whip. The poker lighted in her hand.

  “Reach,” she said. “Reach with your arm for that cup. And when your flesh is hot, remember that the flames you feel are only one fraction of the heat you will feel in his hellish embrace.”

  She always did things this way, to teach you lessons. So I wasn’t surprised. It was playacting, anyway, because a stove isn’t very hot underneath right along the floor. They aren’t made that way. Otherwise a wood floor would burn. So I said yes and got down on my stomach and reached under. I meant to grab it quick and jump up again, before she could think up another lesson, but here it happened. Although I groped for the cup, my hand closed on nothing. That cup was nowhere to be found. I heard her step toward me, a slow step. I heard the creak of thick shoe leather, the little plat as the folds of her heavy skirts met, a trickle of fine sand sifting, somewhere, perhaps in the bowels of her, and I was afraid. I tried to scramble up, but her foot came down lightly behind my ear, and I was lowered. The foot came down more firmly at the base of my neck, and I was held.

  “You’re like I was,” she said. “He wants you very much.”

  “He doesn’t want me no more,” I said. “He had his fill. I got the cup!”

  I heard the valve opening, the hissed intake of breath, and knew that I should not have spoke.

  “You lie,” she said. “You’re cold. There is a wicked ice forming in your blood. You don’t have a shred of devotion for God. Only wild cold dark lust. I know it. I know how you feel. I see the beast…the beast watches me out of your eyes sometimes. Cold.”

  The urgent scrape of metal. It took a moment to know from where. Top of the stove. Kettle. Lessons. She was steadying herself with the iron poker. I could feel it like pure certainty, driving into the wood floor. I would not remind her of pokers. I heard the water as it came, tipped from the spout, cooling as it fell but still scalding as it struck. I must have twitched beneath her foot, because she steadied me, and then the poker nudged up beside my arm as if to guide. “To warm your cold ash heart,” she said. I felt how patient she would be. The water came. My mind went dead blank. Again. I could only think the kettle would be cooling slowly in her hand. I could not stand it. I bit my lip so as not to satisfy her with a sound. She gave me more reason to keep still.

  “I will boil him from your mind if you make a peep,” she said, “by filling up your ear.”

  Any sensible fool would have run back down the hill the minute Leopolda let them up from under her heel. But I was snared in her black intelligence by then. I could not think straight. I had prayed so hard I think I broke a cog in my mind. I prayed while her foot squeezed my throat. While my skin burst. I prayed even when I heard the wind come through, shrieking in the busted bird nests. I didn’t stop when pure light fell, turning slowly behind my eyelids. God’s face. Even that did not disrupt my continued praise. Words came. Words came from nowhere and flooded my mind.

  Now I could pray much better than any one of them. Than all of them full force. This was proved. I turned to her in a daze when she let me up. My thoughts were gone, and yet I remember how surprised I was. Tears glittered in her eyes, deep down, like the sinking reflection in a well.

  “It was so hard, Marie,” she gasped. Her hands were shaking. The kettle clattered against the stove. “But I have used all the water up now. I think he is gone.”

  “I prayed,” I said foolishly. “I prayed very hard.”

  “Yes,” she said. “My dear one, I know.”

  We sat together quietly because we had no more words. We let the dough rise and punched it down once. She gave me a bowl of mush, unlocked the sausage from a special cupboard, and took that in to the Sisters. They sat down the hall, chewing their sausage, and I could hear them. I could hear their teeth bite through their bread and meat. I couldn’t move. My shirt was dry but the cloth stuck to my back, and I couldn’t think straight. I was losing the sense to understand how her mind worked. She’d gotten past me with her poker and I would never be a saint. I despaired. I felt I had no inside voice, nothing to direct me, no darkness, no Marie. I was about to throw that cornmeal mush out to the birds and make a run for it, when the vision rose up blazing in my mind.

  I was rippling gold. My breasts were bare and my nipples flashed and winked. Diamonds tipped them. I could walk through panes of glass. I could walk through windows. She was at my feet, swallowing the glass after each step I took. I broke through another and another. The glass she swallowed ground and cut until her starved insides were only a subtle dust. She coughed. She coughed a cloud of dust. And then she was only a black rag that flapped off, snagged in bob wire, hung there for an age, and finally rotted into the breeze.

  I saw this, mouth hanging open, gazing off into the flagged boughs of trees.

  “Get up!” she cried. “Stop dreaming. It is time to bake.”

  Two other Sisters had come in with her, wide women with hands like paddles. They were evening and smoothing out the firebox beneath the great jaws of the oven.

  “Who is this one?” they asked Leopolda. “Is she yours?”

&nb
sp; “She is mine,” said Leopolda. “A very good girl.”

  “What is your name?” one asked me.

  “Marie.”

  “Marie. Star of the Sea.”

  “She will shine,” said Leopolda, “when we have burned off the dark corrosion.”

  The others laughed, but uncertainly. They were mild and sturdy French, who did not understand Leopolda’s twisted jokes, although they muttered respectfully at things she said. I knew they wouldn’t believe what she had done with the kettle. There was no question. So I kept quiet.

  “Elle est docile,” they said approvingly as they left to starch the linens.

  “Does it pain?” Leopolda asked me as soon as they were out the door.

  I did not answer. I felt sick with the hurt.

  “Come along,” she said.

  The building was wholly quiet now. I followed her up the narrow staircase into a hall of little rooms, many doors. Her cell was the quietest, at the very end. Inside, the air smelled stale, as if the door had not been opened for years. There was a crude straw mattress, a tiny bookcase with a picture of Saint Francis hanging over it, a ragged palm, a stool for sitting on, a crucifix. She told me to remove my blouse and sit on the stool. I did so. She took a pot of salve from the bookcase and began to smooth it upon my burns. Her hands made slow, wide circles, stopping the pain. I closed my eyes. I expected to see blackness. Peace. But instead the vision reared up again. My chest was still tipped with diamonds. I was walking through windows. She was chewing up the broken litter I left behind.