Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  When mass was over, we were ushered out with the same order and precision as we had entered…clack! clack! clack! We went directly back upstairs to make our beds according to a pattern more than likely of Jesuit invention. The dormitory, even though the beds had received a thorough airing, was rank with the smell of piss from the “pisskers’ section.” Once the beds were made we were led downstairs.

  7:25 A.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  For once the prefect did not have to yell to bring about peace and order. The older boys, anxious to eat, assumed the role of enforcement officers, delivering what were called “rabbit punches” to those who persisted in talking, as samples of what was to come if the talker did not at once desist.

  Silently we filed into the refectory, which, from the state of the furnishings and settings, was a more appropriate term than “dining room.” There were sixteen long tables of an uncertain green flanked by benches of the same green. On each table were eight place settings, consisting of a tin pie plate, a tablespoon and a chipped granite cup. In the middle were two platters of porridge, which, owing to its indifferent preparation, was referred to as “mush” by the boys; there were also a box containing sixteen slices of bread, a round dish bearing eight spoons of lard (Fluffo brand), and a huge jug of milk. It was mush, mush, mush, sometimes lumpy, sometimes watery, with monotonous regularity every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The boys would have vastly preferred the Boston baked beans that, along with a spoonful of butter, were served on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.

  Not until we had said grace—“Bless this mush,” some boys said in secret, “I hope it doesn’t kill us”—could we begin. But no matter how indifferent the quality, no boy, to my recollection, ever refused his portion of mush. During the meal there was little conversation except for the occasional “Pass the mush” or “Pass the milk” and the clatter of spoons, which served as knives and forks as well.

  7:55 A.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  After grace of thanksgiving, it was outside to the recreation hall. Except for the lucky ones in Grades 1, 2 and 3, everyone went to his assigned place of work. The seniors, in Grades 6, 7 and 8, went to their permanent occupations: to the barn, to tend horses, cows, sheep, pigs and all their products; to the chicken coop, to look after chickens; to the tailor shop, shoe shop, electrical shop, carpentry shop, blacksmith shop, mill or plumber’s shack. These were jobs of standing and responsibility in the adolescent community. The other boys, from grades that had no status, waited outside the storeroom for the issue of mops, pails, sponges, soap, rags, brooms, dustpans, dust-bane and other janitorial paraphernalia for performing the menial tasks of washing, sweeping, mopping, dusting, polishing toilets, corridors, refectory, chapels, kitchen, dormitory, scullery, every conceivable area.

  “Johnston! Number forty-three!”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I have special job for you,” Father said, handing me a mop, pail, soap and a peculiar, curved oval brush such as I had never before seen. Up to this time in my life the hardest and most detestable forms of work that I had performed were reluctantly carrying either wood or water for my mother. I really didn’t want to work but, if work I must, it was better to begin with something special rather than with some plebeian labour.

  “Come with me!”

  Father Buck led me directly to the toilets, which were so vile with the reek of human waste that I nearly choked and disgorged my mush. Even Father Buck, who must have been aged about twenty-three or twenty-four, gasped as he issued his instructions: “Wash the bowls with this and the walls with this, and the urinals with this, and the floors with this, no?…And make clean and smell good…no? I come back.” I thought that Father Buck staggered slightly as he went out and breathed deeply to cleanse his lungs.

  I too had to go out to avoid being overcome. While I stood outside breathing in oxygen, I developed a stratagem for cleaning up the toilets without collapsing. For self-preservation the job had to be done in stages. Flush the toilets, run outside. Wash the bowls, run outside. Hold breath, wash urinals, run outside. Hold breath, wash partitions, run outside. Spread sawdust on the floor, run outside. Sweep up sawdust, run outside. The toilets may not have completely lost their miasma of dung as I swept up the last pile of sawdust, but they at least looked vastly cleaner. I staggered out, inhaling huge quantities of the “breath of life,” and waited, proud of my labours…almost. “Ach-tung! You finish this, already?” Father asked as if he were astounded.

  “Yes,” I replied with a considerable burst of pride.

  “Well! We shall see.”

  Father Buck didn’t have to go into the lavatory to reach the conclusion that, “They not smell good.” I was going to say that the smell was stuck in the walls, in the ceiling, on the floor, in the corners, everywhere, but I didn’t get a chance. Father entered the lavatory and went directly into a compartment. Inside, he bent down in order to run his finger in the back of and under the bowl. He showed me a black fingertip.

  “Sooooo! You like this fight but no like it work. Then you work extra week in these toilets until you learn it like work or until you learn it meaning of clean.”

  It was back to work.

  8:50 A.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  “Put it away tools.”

  From every part of the institution and the grounds boys scurried back to the recreation hall with their equipment.

  8:55 A.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  Line up again. According to the system then in operation half the senior boys went to class, while the other half went to work not only to practise a trade but also to provide the labour needed to run the institution. In the afternoon the seniors switched shifts. The younger boys went to classes the entire day.

  “Number forty-three!”

  There was no answer.

  “Number forty-three!” A little louder.

  Silence.

  “You! Johnston!”

  “Yes, Father!”

  “You are number forty-three! Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “You answer, when I call forty-three!”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Now, you go with this Grade 5 to Father Mayhew’s class.”

  “But Father, I’m supposed to be in Grade 6. I was in Grade 5 last year.”

  “Sooooo! You like it fight, you no like it work, and you like it argue!…sooooo!” And Father Buck fished out of his cassock pocket a black book in which he scribbled something while looking severely at me. “Soooo, you say you in Grade 6. That’s what they all say. Now you be quiet. And no more trouble. You go with this Grade 5.”

  On the way upstairs, Ovilla Trudeau commented with a snicker, “You didn’t think you’d get away with that, did you?”

  “What’s that teacher’s name? I can’t understand dat pries’.”

  “Father Mayhew.”

  After the Lord’s Prayer I went directly to the teacher’s desk.

  “Father. Someone made a mistake. I’m supposed to be in Grade 6. I passed Grade 5 already. I tol’ Father Buck, but he won’t believe me.”

  Father Mayhew just looked at me. “I’m told you’re in Grade 5. There’s nothing that you can do about it.”

  But my appointment to Grade 5, as I learned years later, was not a product of misunderstanding but a coldly calculated decision made “for my own good.” For if I had been allowed to proceed to Grade 6 as I should have been, it would have disrupted the entire promotion and graduation schedule that decreed that all boys committed to a residential school remain in the institution until age sixteen, or until their parents, if living together, arranged an early parole. If I had progressed at my normal rate through the elementary school I would have been ready for “entrance examinations” by age twelve. According to the administration it would not have been appropriate or in the best interests of society to release me or any one of my colleagues prior to age sixteen. The only solution was to have a boy repeat grades until Grade 8 and age sixteen were synchronized. I w
as not the only one to be so penalized.

  Hence I was mired in Grade 5, forced to listen to dull and boring lessons rendered even duller and more boring by my sense of unjust treatment. What unspeakable fate I might have suffered had it not been for a collection of Tom Swift books and other volumes of doubtful merit, it is hard to say. That Father Mayhew turned a blind eye to my reading in class helped enormously; he didn’t seem to mind as long as I didn’t disturb the class and passed the tests. The only time I paid attention was during the reading of The Song of Hiawatha, whose Indian words Father Mayhew mangled and garbled. Inspired by the success of Hiawatha, Father Mayhew next tried to inflict Winnie the Pooh and Anne of Green Gables on us, but we denounced them as insipid so frequently that eventually Father Mayhew stopped reading them.

  11:55 A.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  Father Mayhew closed his book, looking relieved that the morning had finally come to an end. Wearily he made his way to the door, which he opened. Protocol decreed that he had to wait for Brother O’Keeffe to dismiss his class, the seniors, first. Only after Brother O’Keeffe and the seniors had gone out did Father Mayhew issue the order: “Okay!” As he did so, he stepped back to avoid being trampled by a rush of boys who leaped over desks and shoved one another in their anxiety to get out of the classroom. Moments later the “little shots” came down.

  12:00 noon. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  “Line up! Shut up!” The command need not have been shouted, but it was nevertheless bellowed, in the belief that a shout always obtained quicker compliance.

  “Shshshshsh.”

  For dinner there was barley soup with other ingredients, including chunks of fat and gristle, floating about in it. Finding a chunk of fat in one’s soup was like receiving a gift of manna, for it could be used to garnish the two slices of bread that came with the meal if one had lacked the foresight or the prudence to hide a chunk of lard from breakfast for one’s dinner needs by sticking the lard under the table. Barley soup, pea soup (not the French or Quebec variety), green and yellow, vegetable soup, onion soup, for dinner and supper. Barley soup prepared in a hundred different combinations. “Barley soup! Don’t that cook have no imagination?” Barley soup in the fall. “Hope they run outa that stuff pretty soon.” Barley soup in the spring. “How much o’ this stuff they plant, anyways? Hope a plague o’ locusts eat all the barley this summer.” Besides the soup there was a large jug of green tea diluted with milk. Clatter, clatter. “Pass the tea.” Shuffle, scrape.

  12:30 P.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  After grace, except for the team scheduled to clean the refectory and wash dishes that week, everyone congregated near “the store” for the issue of baseball equipment before proceeding to one of the three baseball diamonds to play until 1:10, the seniors to the diamond hard by the chicken coop, the intermediates to the diamond near the horse barn and the juniors to the diamond near the windmill.

  The only ones excluded from playing were the dishwashers, and the team not scheduled to play that day. The latter was required to provide umpiring, score-keeping and cheering services. Otherwise, there was no exemption for anyone. Cripples like Sam Paul were expected to, and did, derive as much fun and benefit from baseball, softball, touch football, basketball and hockey as Benjamin Buzwa and Eddie Coocoo; the stiff-jointed, like Reuben Bisto and David Jocko, were required to pursue fly balls or give chase to grounders with as much diligence if not grace as the more agile, like Steve Lazore and Tony Angus.

  1:10 P.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  This bell was harsher and therefore even more resented than the previous bells, for it put an end to forty minutes of relative freedom and distraction from sorrows. Hence bases, balls, bats, gloves and score-cards were collected—slowly—and returned to “the store” without haste. For the seniors, or the “big shots,” as the intermediates sometimes referred to them, it was time to change shifts; for the rest of us, it was back to the dreary classroom with its dreary lessons…or to look out over the Spanish River, across the far portage at Little Detroit and beyond, into the dim shapes and shadows of the past or the physically distant, of mother and father and grandmother, of sisters and brothers and friends, of aunts and uncles and their friends, of happiness and freedom and affection…somewhere beyond Little Detroit…as distant as the stars.

  4:15 P.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  By now our sole preoccupation, as hunger displaced the shapes and shadows, was food. On our way downstairs one of our colleagues expressed our collective fear: “If I starve to death, it’s going to be their fault; we never have enough but they have lots for themselves.”

  In the recreation hall a line formed bearing in the direction of the refectory, in front of whose doors was set one of the refectory tables. Behind this makeshift counter were two boys, one of whom was lopping off the green tops of carrots with a large butcher knife which he handled like a machete, while the other distributed two raw carrots to each customer. “Collation” they called this lunch. Today it was carrots; tomorrow it would be a wedge of raw cabbage; the day after, a turnip, raw like everything else. As each boy received his ration he was directed to take his collation outside. Despite its lofty name, collation was regarded as little better than animal fodder. Nevertheless, every boy ate the fodder to stave off starvation.

  Collation was intended, I guess, not only to allay hunger pains, but also to restore flagging energies. It was our first real period of leisure in a day that had begun at 6:15 A.M., but if anyone hoped for or expected an extended period of idleness, as I then did, he was soon set straight by the sight of the accursed bell in Father Buck’s hand.

  “Hey! Father!” an anonymous voice called out. “How come you not eating carrots like us?” To which there was no answer.

  4:30 P.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  “Time for work, boys.”

  For me it was back to the lavatory. But with the five compartments or stalls in continuous occupation, as if most of the boys had suddenly been afflicted with a particularly virulent strain of diarrhea, I could not easily carry out Father Buck’s instruction to “clean good.” Even a lineup of boys outside commanding the occupants to “Hurry up! Ain’t got all day!” could not make the incumbents accelerate the defecatory process. Sometimes threats worked. “Wait till you come out.” Or, if threats and exhortations did not work, there was always “the drench,” carried out by means of a wet rag squeezed over the top of the stall onto the incumbent. But this method of encouraging haste in the patrons only made my job worse.

  4:55 P.M. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  “Line up!…Quiet.”

  After quiet was established the prefects counted heads in each line by waggling a pencil and mouthing numbers.

  “Where’s Shaggy [Joe Missabe]?”

  “Helping Brother Grubb.”

  “Where’s Cabootch?”

  “Working for Brother Van der Moor.”

  The young priest made a notation in his little black book, frowning in worry as he did so. Later, he would check the work schedule and consult the brothers to verify the information given him. Woe betide the student who gave false information; double woe betide the absentee.

  “All right! Upstairs, and no talking.” Father Buck hated talking.

  5:00 P.M. As we filed into the study hall, there was Brother Manseau from Asbestos, Quebec, standing to one side of the doorway, greeting the boys by name—or names. “Ah, Ti Phonse! Ti Bar Poot! Moustaffa! Monsieur le Snowball! Ti Blue!” Brother Manseau was of medium height, almost but not quite dark enough to be regarded as swarthy, with a light five o’clock shadow beclouding his face. His hair was grey and frizzy, swept back from his temples and from a point of recession at about the middle of his head, something like Harpo Marx’s hair.

  To the boys, Brother J. B. Manseau was B. J. or “Beedjmauss” or “Beedj,” from a reversal of his initials, which stood for “Jean-Baptiste.” The “Beedj-mauss” also represented a play on words, which, if pronounced with the proper accent and inflection,
would mean in our tribal language (Anishinaubae or Ojibway), “He comes reeking of the smell of smoke,” a reference to Brother Manseau’s pipe-smoking habit. He did not seem to mind “Hey Beedj!”, just as he never seemed to mind too much a thumbtack on his seat. To my knowledge he never sent a boy to see Father Hawkins for punishment.

  When he had settled down, Brother Manseau reminded us not to disturb him and, as an afterthought, gave us a verbal abstract of the book that he was then reading, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, by Jules Verne. After recommending that we read it, he warned us, “Now I don’t want anybody to disturb me; I don’t care what you do but don’t bother me, otherwise, I kick his ass.” And though Beedj had one short leg, he could deliver a mean kick, especially with the discarded Mountie’s riding boots that he wore.

  No one wanted his ass kicked, or to serve “jug” on Thursday; everyone settled down to do homework, draw, snooze or read, leaving Beedj-mauss to read his book undisturbed.

  5:55 P.M. Father Buck slipped into the study hall almost as noiselessly as a ghost. He nodded for Brother Manseau to close his book, and Brother Manseau promptly disappeared. Believing that study was now over, many of us, in imitation of Brother Manseau, closed our books and put them away.

  “STUDY IS NOT OVER! PUT THESE BOOKS BACK! AND NOT PUT AWAY TILL I TELL YOU!”

  Father Buck looked at his watch. Not until the malefactors had reopened their books and resumed study, or appeared to do so, did the prefect dismiss us. Everything was by the clock, by the book, by regulations.