Indian Horse (5 page)

That night I fell asleep to my grandmother’s voice. She told me stories of the Star People who had come to our people in the Long Ago Time and brought teachings, secrets of the cosmos and the basis of our spiritual way. When I woke halfway through the night she was still talking, but her voice was weaker. The old story took me off into sleep again. When morning came she looked tired. Worn away. We were hungry. We stood shivering in the snow. She followed the shore of the river with her eyes.

“There was a trail your great-grandfather cut that led from those rapids through the bush to the railroad tracks south of here,” she said. “Can you see it?”

I squinted at the impenetrable wall of trees. There was nothing to indicate a trail. But I closed my eyes. I could hear the hiss of the river coursing past the rocks. I hauled in a deep lungful of air and raised my head. I felt snowflakes land on my upturned face.

“Saul,” I heard from the trees.

When I opened my eyes, I could see a slight bellying in the snow. It arced southward to a break in the trees so slight it was nearly invisible. “There,” I said.

We plowed through the knee-deep snow around the marshes that bled into the river. The roofs of beaver houses showed far back in the reeds. We walked all that morning. My grandmother stopped every now and then to lean against a tree and catch her breath. I could see how old she was. Her skin looked pasted to her bones, made so leathery by the deep freeze that it looked as though it might snap off in chunks.

“Over that next ridge,” I said and pointed. “There’s a long gap that leads around a beaver lodge lake. The railroad tracks are on the other side.”

“You can see it?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. She clutched my arm.

The sun was square in the sky when we made the foot of the ridge. My grandmother drew me close and pulled her canvas shawl over me. My feet were blocks of ice. The rope that held my canvas boots on had broken, so she took the rope fastening hers and tied them back around my ankles. Then she dug through the snow for clumps of moss to tie around my hands as mittens.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Got my gumption to keep me warm,” she said. “We have to keep moving.”

We made the railroad tracks within an hour or so. By then the wind had shifted and picked up intensity. It blew snow right into our faces. It drifted up between the ties. Lifting my legs over the ties was hard work, and at one point I fell over and lay there, too tired to get up. I felt her lift me. My eyes were heavy and my skin burned. I felt her stumble as she carried me, and I could hear her wheezing with the effort. I don’t know how long we walked that way. After a while her steps grew shorter and she weaved. Then she fell too. When I opened my eyes I could see slats of painted wood behind her. We were on the platform of the railroad depot at Minaki. All around us was whirling snow and the white expanse where the tracks ran west to Manitoba and east into the frozen heart of the bush.

“We’ll rest a minute,” she wheezed. “Then we’ll find Minoose.”

I tucked my head in against her chest. She held me and we lay there in the darkness shivering. I could feel her tremble. Wrapped in the cracked canvas of an old tent, I huddled in the arms of the old woman and felt the cold freeze her in place. I understood that she had left me and I lay there crying against the empty drum of her chest.

After a while I heard shouts and the clump of feet. The wind bit into my face as the canvas shawl was pulled away.

“Jesus. There’s a kid here.”

Somebody lifted me up and I felt the old woman’s arms fall away. I reached out to her, shouting in a mixture of Ojibway and English. She stayed slumped in the corner, her hair coated with snow. Her hands were cupped as though she was still holding on to me. I wanted to pull her to her feet so we could keep on walking. But instead I was borne away. A car door opened and I was lifted inside and set on the seat with a blanket thrown over me. The heat and the exhaustion pulled me under in a hot, red current.

If our canoe hadn’t hit that boulder we would have made it to Minaki. We would have found Minoose and sheltered there, and my grandmother would have found a way to keep me with her. Instead, she was gone. Frozen to death saving me, and I was cast adrift on a strange new river.

11

They took me
to St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. I read once that there are holes in the universe that swallow all light, all bodies. St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world. Everything I knew vanished behind me with an audible swish, like the sound a moose makes disappearing into spruce. We’d driven two days to get there. Two nuns and three of us kids crammed into the back seat of a battered old Chev. A little girl who cried most of the way, and another boy. We spent the trip without talking, taking turns at the window watching the land flow by. It seemed boundless. Every curve in that road, every crest of a hill, even the cut of the trees against the night sky held me spellbound. I barely slept.

I was lonely for the sky, for the feel of it on my face.

The school was a four-storey red brick building with a cupola bearing a tall white cross as its only adornment. There were no trees around it, only ground shrubs. A wagon wheel leaned against a rock beside the large wooden sign that read
St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School.
A gravel driveway curved toward the front entrance of wide concrete stairs with white-washed balustrades and double doors of frosted glass. Two wings of the building thrust back behind. Beyond were sheds and barns and fields speckled with the rubble of furrows poking up through the thin snow. The entire property sat in a clearing at the top of a ridge with bush at its edges.

Inside, the smell of bleach and disinfectant, so strong it seemed to peel the skin off the inside of my nose. The floors were hardwood, sallow from decades of mopping and scrubbing. The walls were a sickly green. At every landing were doors of frosted glass so the light was pale and gave off a feeling of cold even though the radiators pulsed heat outward in waves. The linoleum on the steps was cracked in places but scrubbed to a dull sheen.

The fourth floor was one big room with windows at each side. Between them was a sea of cots, all folded and tucked in exactly the same manner. Regimented, though I didn’t learn that word until much later.

The other boy and I were marched by a gruff priest to the back of this dormitory and ordered to strip and climb into tubs of nearly scalding water. After a minute the priest made us stand and threw handfuls of delousing powder over us. It bit at the corners of my eyes as he sat us in the tubs again to rinse it off. Then a pair of nuns scrubbed us with stiff-bristled brushes. The soap was harsh. They rubbed us nearly raw. It felt like they were trying to remove more than grime or odour. It felt as though they were trying to remove our skin. When it was over they handed us clothing and watched us while we dressed. The wool pants scratched at my skin. They were a size too big and had to be held up with a belt cinched tight. The shirt was stiff and white. The shoes were thin leather with laces and smooth, slippery soles. They made us walk awkwardly. Next, we sat in chairs with towels around our shoulders while the nuns shaved our hair down to nubby crew-cuts with electric clippers. I watched my long, straight hair land on the floor, and when I looked at the other boy he was crying. Huge, silent tears.

Back downstairs, we were made to stand in front of a desk in an office with windows looking out over the fields. We stood there a long time. Then the door opened and a priest and a large, reddish-faced nun stepped in.

“I’m Father Quinney and this is Sister Ignacia,” the priest said. “This is our school. Well, more properly, it’s the Lord’s school, but he’s put us in charge.”

“Saul,” Sister Ignacia said. “That’s a fine biblical name. We won’t need to change that. But we’re going to have to do something about Lonnie Rabbit. I think Aaron is more suitable. From now on you are Aaron Rabbit. Do you understand?”

“But Lonnie is my dad’s name,” the boy said.

“Well, the Lord God is your father now and he wants you called Aaron.”

“But I got a father.”

Sister Ignacia strode out from behind the desk to stand directly in front of Lonnie, who looked down at the floor. “Your father is the Heavenly Father. You will learn that here. Your human father has nothing to offer you anymore.”

“He’s a trapper.”

“He’s a heathen.”

“He’s Ojibway.”

“He is unbaptized and impure of spirit. When you use the word
father
at this school, it is your Heavenly Father you make reference to.”

“I don’t want no other father.”

“You have no choice.”

“I’ll run.”

The Sister smiled. It was chilling because there was no laughter in her eyes. They were a cold, pale blue, like the eyes of a husky, and when she reached behind her and brought a leather paddle into view she had a terrible calm about her. The paddle was blunt and wide and drilled with holes across its face. She cradled it in both palms, and with a blur of motion she twisted Lonnie around by the collar and pushed him to his knees. He screamed as the paddle struck his back. The nun yanked him to his feet as though he were a rag toy and struck him repeatedly behind the knees and on the back of the thighs. It sounded like she was beating a hide. Lonnie squirmed and struggled but her grip was incredible. She kept hitting him until he collapsed. Father Quinney stood with his hands behind his back and watched.

“Obedience is the measure of our worthiness.” She spun Lonnie around to face her. “Here you will learn to be worthy. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” Lonnie said.

“Yes, Sister.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“That’s a good boy.” She reached out to lay a hand on his face. He flinched. She smiled again with the same ghastly lack of feeling. “At St. Jerome’s we work to remove the Indian from our children so that the blessings of the Lord may be evidenced upon them.”

“Industry, boys,” Father Quinney said. “Good, honest work and earnest study. That’s what you’ll do here. That’s what will prepare you for the world.”

Sister Ignacia took us each by a hand and, with a firm nod to the priest, led us from the office and out into the school. Her hands like dried birch bark. Her face composed, the slight press of a grin at the edges of her mouth. Beatific. That’s another word I learned much later. As the Sister walked us through the school that first day, she had that saintly look on her face. The whistle of the leather still hung in the air. She was a large woman, tall, and I’d never known such terror.

In what seemed like an instant, the world I had known was replaced by an ominous black cloud.

12

At St. Germ’s
the kids called me “Zhaunagush” because I could speak and read English. Most of them had been pulled from the deep North and knew only Ojibway. Speaking a word in that language could get you beaten or banished to the box in the basement the older ones had come to call the Iron Sister. There was no tolerance for Indian talk. On the second day I was there, a boy named Curtis White Fox had his mouth washed out with lye soap for speaking Ojibway. He choked on it and died right there in the classroom. He was ten. So the kids whispered to each other. They learned to speak without moving their lips, an odd ventriloquism that allowed them to keep their talk alive. They’d bend their heads close together as they mopped the halls or mucked out the barn stalls and speak Ojibway. I learned that ventriloquism eventually, but in the beginning they saw me as an outsider.

I didn’t mind that. I was sore inside. The tearing away of the bush and my people was like ripped flesh in my belly. Every time I moved or was forced to speak, it roared its incredible pain. And so I took to isolation. I wasn’t a large boy and I could disappear easily. I learned that I could draw the boundaries of my physical self inward, collapse the space I occupied and become a mote, a speck, an indifferent atom in its own peculiar orbit. Maybe it was the hurt itself that allowed me that odd grace. Maybe it was the memory of my grandmother’s frozen arms around me or that last glimpse of my parents disappearing into the portage at Gods Lake. I don’t know. But in my chrysalis of silence I turned to Zhaunagush books and language, finding in them a path beyond the astringent smell of the school. The nuns and the priests took me for studious and encouraged me to vanish even further into my self-imposed exile. It was easy.

You couldn’t be a kid under that regime. There was no room for any kind of creativity to flourish. Instead, to survive, we mimicked the cloister walk of the nuns, a relentless mute march from prayer to chapel to physical labour.

Arden Little Light was a skinny Oji-Cree kid with a bad limp from where a trap had sprung closed on his ankle. His family lived so far back in the bush they couldn’t get him out to a hospital. So the break in his bone had healed all ragged and calcified, leaving a ring beneath his skin like the bumps on a sturgeon’s back. He always had a runny nose and he wiped it with the sleeves of his shirts. The nuns tried to get him to use a hankie, but he was a bush kid and he couldn’t break the habit. They tied his arms behind his back. He sat in the classroom with snot running down his face. When he cried and made a goopy pool on the floor, they stood him up and strapped him and sat him back down after scraping at his nose with a coarse rag. As we bent our heads to our books we could hear him huffing, trying desperately to suck the snot back. But it was a medical condition and there was no relief. They began standing him at the front of the chapel, the classroom, the dining room with his hands wrapped behind him, making us witness the seeping track of the snot that bled down his face and neck into the collar of his shirt. He was six years old. He was from a people who had forged survival out of the bush as hunters, trappers, fishermen. That way of being was tied directly to the power they felt everywhere around them, and he’d been born to that, had learned it like walking. The nuns found him hanging from the rafters of the barn on a cold February morning. He’d wrapped his own hands behind his back with twists of rope before he’d jumped. They buried him in the graveyard that crept up to the edge of the bush. The Indian Yard. That’s what the kids called it. Row on row of unmarked graves. Row on row of four- and five-foot indentations like a finger from Heaven had pressed them down. Dips in the earth. Holes they fell into.