Black Apple Read online

  She went to her office. She would hide the photos of Father Damien and Sister Mary of Bethany. She would forget all about them and the dismal lives they represented. Pulling open the bottom drawer of her file cabinet, she shoved the wretched pair to the back. Things needed to change at the school, and she would do everything she could to make sure that this time it was a change for the better.

  Clang, clang, clang! Mother Grace almost jumped out of her skin. It was Sister Joan, of course, marching along the upstairs hall, ringing her hand bell as if this were Armageddon and she the seven angels in one righteous body awakening the dead. Lord, give me patience, Mother Grace prayed. Give me strength. She waited in her office until she heard the sisters climb downstairs and enter the chapel for Matins. Then she went to join them.

  * * *

  At breakfast, Mother Grace rose from her seat at the first table. “Father David, Brother Abe, Sisters: Our charges will soon be arriving. We will once again embark on our mission of saving the souls and educating the Indian children of this great land.” She looked around at the faces. Sister Margaret didn’t even attempt to hide her look of disdain, her mouth turning down at the corners where it collided with her many chins. Sitting beside her on the left—the goat to Margaret’s sheep—Sister Joan stared at her with an expression that she no doubt thought to be one of world-weary wisdom. Only Sister Bernadette and young Sister Cilla looked as if they were fully awake, focused and ready to meet the day.

  “Sister Joan, please lead our prayer,” she said in order to wipe the smug expression off the woman’s face. As Joan droned on, Mother Grace tried to uncover the hope buried deep in her breast, bring it forth to serve God, and do her duty as the superior of the school. “Amen,” she chimed in with the others.

  It shouldn’t be so terribly difficult, this duty. The Church was doing the Indian race a great favour in bringing them the Lord and an education. She herself had loved convent school, which for all intents and purposes was similar to residential school. Her school had provided her a wonderful opportunity, it had changed her young life, and she persisted in thinking of her arrival there as the result of a series of preordained events.

  L’Académie l’Annonciation in Montpetit was the same school her mother had gone to, and Maman had spoken of it so often and so fondly to her that she found the surroundings familiar from her very first day. She was thirteen years and six months old when she first entered the school, but already work-weary, already mûre, ready to be plucked from the world and placed in the winepress of the Lord, as Sister Francis of Assisi had so aptly put it.

  The serene atmosphere of l’Annonciation, its routine and the relatively small number of chores, were a welcome change from the noise and gruelling work she had been accustomed to on the farm. At the two-room schoolhouse in Tête Rouge, a half hour away by horseback, she had missed as many days as she had attended. Like her two older brothers, she was needed at home. L’Annonciation had freed her from a life of drudgery.

  “Let me take your dish, Mother Grace.” Sister Bernadette snatched her bowl from under her. “It’s going to be a busy day.”

  Already the others were scuttling about, filling basins in the kitchen, some heading down the hall to set up chairs in the gymnasium. She’d better fetch the lists from her office to keep the proceedings orderly.

  3

  St. Mark’s

  ON THE BUS, Rose was half asleep, her head lolling on the sharp shoulder next to her, when the girl abruptly shook her off.

  “St. Mark’s,” the girl breathed, her eyes widening, body tensing.

  Rose squinted out the front window, trying to see, but suddenly girls were leaning forward, bobbing up and stretching on tiptoes, hands clutching their neighbours’ fingers and arms.

  “Stay seated!” Father Alphonses roared above the din.

  As the girls sat down, Rose caught sight of a stout building rising above a yard of packed dirt. The peaked roof fell over the brick walls like a frown. The bus turned, and she glimpsed a smaller building behind what must be the school—a barn maybe—its red paint ragged. And beyond that, for just a split second, a field bathed in shadow, small crosses leaning from lumps of soil. And then the brick building blocked out everything else.

  “You will disembark from the bus row by row,” Father Alphonses instructed, “starting with the first row.”

  Rose let the bony, big-toothed girl shove in front of her, and she followed her sloppy leather shoes—boy’s shoes, she realized, and way too big—off the bus.

  The school was colourless inside, the walls and ceiling white, the staircase and doors dark.

  “Snip, snap!” a white lady in a long black robe yelled, clapping her hands.

  She trailed the line of girls down a hall and into a room bigger than even the Band Council chamber on the Reserve. It overflowed with kids, whole bunches of girls sitting on wooden chairs, more pouring through the doors. She followed the slapping heels of the toothy girl’s shoes down an aisle of chairs, stopping when they stopped.

  “Sit,” another white lady in a black robe ordered. They all sat down on squeaky chairs. “Quiet!” The lady walked down the aisle, stopping by each of them. When she stood over Rose, she grabbed her hand and pressed a piece of paper in it. “Your number. Stand up when it’s called.” She moved on to the toothy girl.

  Rose held on to the paper in that big hot room of kids shuffling and crying. The sounds pushed her into a corner of herself, and she closed her eyes. Sunshine. A few hornets buzzed around her, and she ran to her creek and jumped in, spraying her legs giggly cold. She hopped onto the bank and ran to the trap shack, where Papa sat on a stump, scraping rust from steel.

  A steel trap clamped her shoulder. “That’s you, Rose. Your number.” Father Alphonses leaned over and snatched the scrap of paper from her palm. He pointed to a line of girls.

  Numbly she followed. Someone pushed her head in a basin of water and scrubbed her scalp with sharp fingers, not soft like Mama’s. Her face was scraped with a wet cloth. Another lady combed her wet hair, then chopped it with a pair of scissors. It thunked to the floor like something dead.

  More fingers on her, unbuttoning the dress Mama had made, red with green, black, and white diamonds stitched on the front, her very favourite, and she said, “No,” pushing the hand away, but it grabbed her hair and yanked the dress from her shoulders, pulling it down.

  “Arms up.”

  The dark, heavy dress that was pushed over her head smelled of damp corners and dirty feet.

  Rose crunched her eyes shut. There, behind her eyes, the sun had already set and the sky was dark.

  4

  The Naming

  MOTHER GRACE COULDN’T stop the frown forming on her face. The school floors, scrubbed with ammonia over the summer, then waxed and buffed into penitence the previous week, were now covered in dusty footprints. The white school walls, washed by the two youngest sisters over a six-day period, were pocked by dirty handprints. And all around her—chatter, wailing, and the harsh sounds of an unchristian language. Hardly even the semblance of order! She turned as she heard what she hoped was the last bus of the day rumble into the schoolyard. Pulling open the front door, she kicked the door stop in place, her old knees scowling.

  “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 rol
e 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.