As Long as the Rivers Flow (7 page)

“Here, come sit with me.”

Martha drew nearer, and the priest, after pushing the table to one side to give himself room, pulled her onto his lap and held her close.

“Did you know,
petite Marthe,”
he whispered into her ear, “that you are named after a pious and famous woman in the Bible?”

Although Martha had made great strides in learning English, she did not understand what the priest was saying, and if she had, she would not have cared.

She only knew that she had been hauled against her will onto the lap of someone whose body smelled of sour milk, whose breath was stale, whose teeth were dirty, who had bread crumbs on his unshaved chin and who had hairs protruding from his nose and ears.

“Marthe, Marthe,”
the priest said earnestly. “I have no friends here and neither have you. You are so sweet and innocent and we can make each other so happy.”

Martha squirmed, trying to escape, and was frightened and uncomfortable when he thrust his hands under her clothing, and with a fixed mirthless smile, did things to her that she knew were not right.

“Now,
ma petite Marthe,”
the priest said afterwards, as if she were his accomplice rather than his victim, “you are never to say what goes on here between us. I asked you to sit on my lap because I wanted to show you how much I love you.”

He lowered the silent girl to the floor, opened a drawer in the desk, extracted a candy and gave it to her saying, “I keep a supply of these right here and I’ll give you one every time you come to see me.”

Returning to his chair, he sat down and resumed eating his dinner.

Martha made her way to the door, pushed it open, let it close behind her and stood still for a moment. She then hurled the candy to the floor, burst into tears and fled crying to her dormitory where she threw herself on her bed and buried her head in a pillow.

“Well, Martha, what do you think of Father Antoine?” asked Sister Angelica when she came to see her shortly afterwards. “He’s
a nice man, isn’t he? Did he speak to you about the love of God? Did he give you a candy? Did he ask you to come back? You’re such a lucky little girl!”

Martha turned her face away and refused to reply.

That night, while not fully understanding what had happened, she felt dirty. And try as she might, Martha was no longer able to use her imagination to escape the reality of life at the school.

The next week, when Sister Angelica came to her after class to tell her Father Antoine wanted to see her again, Martha began to cry.

“I don’t want to go. He did things to me I didn’t like. He scares me.”

Sister Angelica tried to reason with her. “There is no reason for you to be afraid. Father Antoine is a holy man who spends his nights in prayer. He has only the best interests of the little girls in mind when he asks for them!”

When Martha remained unconvinced, she took her by the hand and led her, still whimpering, to the priest’s office and pushed her in the door. In the weeks and months that followed, Martha, who had concluded there was no one who could protect her at the school, walked alone and dry-eyed to meet the priest each time he called for her.

In late June, when Martha returned home to spend the summer with her parents, she was anxious to tell her mother that the people at the school were mean to the kids and that it was an awful place. Her mother, however, despite the reassuring words she had offered to her daughter the preceding August, was well aware that children were badly treated at the school. But her way of dealing with painful matters was to pretend they did not exist. She certainly did not want to endure the mental anguish of listening to her daughter talk
about her sufferings. There was nothing she could do to help her daughter anyway. There was no way out for her.

Thus, she avoided any mention of the school, and when Martha tried to tell her that Father Antoine was undressing and touching her where he should not, she refused to listen.

“Don’t say that! Don’t say such things! I don’t want to know. Priests don’t do things like that! You’re just looking for an excuse, making up stories not to go back at the end of the summer.” Taking her daughter by the arm, she squeezed it hard saying, “What’s come over you? You used to be such a good girl. Now you don’t care about your family!” Martha was frightened. The loving mother she had known before she was taken away to school had been replaced by an angry woman inflicting pain on her.

“Don’t you know the government is sending us money every month as long as you stay in that school,” said her mother, continuing to berate her. “We are poor people and the money will keep coming every year until you turn sixteen. Don’t you understand we have a debt at the Hudson’s Bay Company store, and that money pays for our flour, baking powder and lard. You’d better get used to the idea, because you’re going to be at the school for many years to come!”

Afraid to talk back, Martha nodded her head to signify she would do as she was told. She had expected her mother would refuse to let her return to the school when she heard how horrible a place it was. Now she was in trouble for complaining and would have to spend years at the mercy of Father Antoine.

Just when it seemed matters could not get any worse, her aunt took her aside.

“Little Joe, my boy, has just turned six and must go to the school this fall. I know, and you know, that kids are not always treated well there. They can be lonely and they can be bullied by
the big boys and hit by the nuns. I don’t want him to go but I have no choice. The trader has warned me that the Mounties will come and take him away if I try to hide him. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you keep an eye on him and protect him for me? Don’t let him get lonely. He’s so small for his age and is so attached to me, he couldn’t cope without you.”

Martha had just turned seven, and she knew that there was little she could do to help her cousin. She couldn’t even take care of herself. But looking into the anguished eyes of her aunt, and being by nature compassionate, she promised she would ensure no harm came to Little Joe.

Her aunt hugged her. “I’m so happy,” she said. “You’ve always been a kind and gentle girl. With you looking out for him, I know he’ll be fine.”

A truly terrible year began for Martha and Little Joe. With her mother and aunt looking on, Martha and the boy climbed aboard the float plane that came to take them away at the end of August. This time she knew it was not a Wendigo, and was able to reassure Little Joe that nothing bad would happen during the flight. That would be the last time she would be able to help him.

At the dock, they were met by the same nun who had greeted Martha a year before. Without a word, she took Little Joe’s hand and led him up the hill to the residential school, motioning Martha to follow. At the door was Sister Angelica, waiting to assist her colleague in preparing the boy for his new life. When Martha offered to help, Sister Angelica paid her no attention.

Soon Martha heard the screams of Little Joe as the nuns undressed him, pushed him into the shower, cut off his braids and poured coal oil on his head. She held her head in her hands as she heard shouting, slaps being administered, renewed howling and silence. Later a grim-faced Sister Angelica led him into the dining
room. He smelled of coal oil, his hair was shorn, he was dressed in regulation clothing and his face was covered in welts and swollen from crying.

Little Joe rushed to Martha, but Sister Angelica pulled him away, and told him in English that he was never to approach a girl again.

The boy, who did not understand English, said in Anishinaabemowin, “But Martha is my cousin. She is supposed to care for me.”

“Just do as she says,” said Martha in the same language. “She’ll hit you really hard if you don’t.”

Sister Angelica, who understood what had been said and did not like it, turned on Martha.

“Stay out of this! I don’t need your help to deal with this brat. Remember, it is forbidden to speak your heathen language here at the school. Besides, who do you think you are anyway, talking to a boy and interfering with the duties of a nun?”

She slapped Martha across the face, causing blood to spurt from her nose and down across her blouse, and ordered Little Joe to go to the front of the room. There she started to strap him on his hands and wrists.

As the other children watched in fascinated horror, Martha slipped out of her seat, walked slowly and deliberately to the front, caught hold of the strap and tried to stop the punishment.

“He’s just a little boy,” she said to the nun. “My aunt asked me to protect him.”

“Protect him? Protect him? His mother should be grateful for what we’re doing for him.”

With the help of another nun, Sister Angelica dragged Martha roughly from the room and down to the basement. There they tied her hands together and attached them with a rope to the overhead hot water pipes. The two of them pulled off her dress and flogged her with electrical cords until her bowels loosened and she fouled
her pants. They then untied her, pushed her into the coal cellar and locked the door.

“You dirty savage, never, ever interfere with our work again! Let’s hope this teaches you a lesson.”

The next morning, they released Martha from her unlit hole but made her stand, stinking and filthy, in front of the student body, and contritely apologize to the nuns.

“Now let this be a lesson to the rest of you. Disobey us and you’ll get the same.”

The following day, Sister Angelica stopped her after class to say Father Antoine had heard that she had been misbehaving and wanted to see her immediately.

Martha burst into tears, and said she did not want to go.

“You ungrateful animal! You upset the school one day, promise to be good, and refuse to see Father Antoine when he asks for you. I once thought you would have a future in the Church but I was mistaken. From now on I’ll be keeping a close eye on you and you’ll pay heavily if you don’t do as you’re told.”

She took Martha by the hand and dragged her to Father Antoine’s office and knocked on the door. When the priest invited them in, she shoved her inside and left her.

Father Antoine came from behind his desk, took her in his arms and hugged her.

“There, there,
Marthe, ma petite
. I know you have been through a lot of difficulties. You must have missed me over the summer. I missed you. Such a long time. No wonder you have got into trouble with the nuns. Now we are together again and I can help you. You know you are my favourite.”

He led the crying little girl to his chair behind his desk and pulled her up on his lap. This time, he went further than ever before.

“I am doing this because I love you,” he whispered. “I will now tell the nuns to leave you alone. However, you must stop trying to protect the boy and keep what we do here a secret. If anyone was to learn what we are doing, you would be in great trouble.”

He released the sobbing girl who fled back to her dormitory.

Little Joe never adjusted to life at the school. He had learned that first day that Martha was powerless to protect him, and each night he cried himself to sleep and wet his bed. And while crying yourself to sleep was not a punishable offence in the eyes of the nuns, wetting your bed was. Their operating principle was that bed-wetting was anti-social, rebellious behaviour that had to be eradicated by corporal punishment and public humiliation.

The punishment, of course, did not work, since Little Joe had no control over his bladder. Every night, therefore, he wet his bed. Every morning he was beaten by the nuns and forced to stand in front of the other children during breakfast with the urine-soaked sheet over his head. Sometimes he was joined at the front of the dining hall by other boys and girls similarly garbed in wet, stinking sheets, but usually he stood there alone, sobbing quietly.

Martha, cowed into submission when she had tried to intervene and her morale crushed by the ongoing abuse of the priest, gave up trying to help him. Several of the big boys, underfed and always hungry, started bullying him, forcing him to hide food from his plate at meals and give it to them afterwards. If he did not comply, they cornered him in the washroom and beat him.

Martha watched with a sense of resignation as Little Joe grew thin and sickly. Finally one day he did not come to breakfast, did not appear at lunch and was absent from dinner. Martha did not see him alive again.

Several days later, Father Antoine held a funeral mass for him.

“Boys and girls, let us rejoice! The soul of this child has left this vale of tears and gone to a better place! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!”

Six boys, including several who had been stealing his food, carried Little Joe’s tiny wooden coffin out the door to the residential school cemetery. There, he was buried beside the dozens of Native children who had passed away at the school over the years. A wooden cross with his name and date of birth was hammered into the ground at the head of the little heap of earth, and he was forgotten.

Forgotten by everyone, that is, except by Martha and the boy’s family at Cat Lake Indian reserve.

When Martha returned home the following June, she did not know that when Native children died at residential schools, often from pneumonia, tuberculosis, malnutrition and heartbreak, school administrators sometimes did not notify their parents. After all, communications with Indian reserves in the north were difficult. Indians, in any case, were ignorant savages, were used to the deaths of their children and probably did not grieve like civilized white people.

There was also the bother of dealing with so many dead children. In the early days, sometimes up to half of all the children in a class died, and it would have taken an inordinate amount of valuable time, better spent on more important matters, like submitting routine reports on the functioning of the school to the bureaucracy in Ottawa, than in informing their next of kin. Why send messages, when their families would learn the news anyway from the other children when they returned home for the summer?

When she emerged from the float plane alone, therefore, Martha assumed that the stricken look on her aunt’s face was due to the death of Little Joe. She did not know that her aunt had just realized that her boy was dead.