Black Apple (2 page)

Down the stairs and to chapel. She hoped a feeling of piety would overtake her as it sometimes did. But not today. As she entered, she crossed herself with holy water, then climbed the red-carpeted steps to the altar.

She recalled how grand the carpet had looked twenty-two years before when she first arrived at St. Mark’s, how it made her think of the blood of Jesus Himself. Now it was threadbare, worn under the feet and knees of three generations of students. And no money would be sent in the foreseeable future to replace it. Everything these days went to the war effort, the Second World War, and there was simply no more trimming to be done from the meagre St. Mark’s budget. It was wartime, this terrible war having started just two decades after the first, which, if she remembered correctly, was the war that was supposed to end them all.
Dieu, ayez pitié
, the government of Canada had forgotten the residential schools.

She forced herself to kneel.
Most holy and adored Trinity, one God in three Persons, I praise you and give you thanks
. She went straight to a request to God for guidance, as she did on the first day of every new school year, but halfway through, her insincerity dismayed her and she couldn’t finish. Rising from her knees was difficult, and all she could think about were the aspirins upstairs in the bathroom cabinet and how foolish she had been not to take two before coming down. Now she’d have to go all the way back up, being extra quiet so as not to wake the young, nervous Sister Cilla, always a light sleeper. Or Sister Joan, who in the last few years had taken it upon herself to keep a critical eye on the daily routine of the convent and all its incumbents, particularly her, Mother Grace. She lit a candle to the Virgin, Mother of Divine Providence, and one to glorious St. Mark, who, through the grace of God our Father, became a great evangelist preaching the Good News of Christ. Her prayers were stiff as a hymnbook cover, her spirit dark as the sky glowering through the chapel windows.

In the kitchen, she made herself a cup of instant coffee. The floors creaked horribly, and she hoped none of the sisters would hear her and come running downstairs:
Mother Grace, what are you doing up so early? Why, you mustn’t tire yourself, Mother Grace.
Well meaning, but bothersome! Most of the sisters were well meaning. Down the hall to the main entrance she shuffled, inhaling the satisfying smells of disinfectant and floor polish. In a few hours, children would pile through the front door and into the foyer, where framed photographs of past and present sisters, priests, the bishop, and the cardinal of Canada hung.
Les sauvages
, she had once called the children.

She rubbed her left hand down her right shoulder and let her fingers bite into the painful flesh. No pleasant shivers of excitement this year. No nostalgia either. Draining the last of her instant coffee, she found herself wondering how long it had been since she’d had a really good cup. Decades, it seemed, prairie water being so alkaline. She set the cup and saucer down.

Surely it wasn’t dread she was feeling. Weariness perhaps.
Ennui.
She pulled off her glasses and polished the lenses with a handkerchief from her sleeve. Instinctively, her half-blind eyes fluttered towards the first light of morning creeping through the window above the front door. The shape of a large, dark bird loomed overhead. She gasped.

Foolish old woman. Just the crucifix, that accursed piece of whittled wood with Jesus’ crude head drooping over his childlike body at an alarming angle, his mouth and eyes gouges of agony. She’d never liked it, but it had been brought by the Benedictine Bishop von Tettenborn all the way from Germany when the school first opened thirty-one years ago, and since Father David often referred to it in his sermons, there was no discreet way to have it replaced by a more pleasing effigy.

Mother Grace was reaching for her cup and saucer to take back to the kitchen when her eyes were drawn to the photographs that lined the wall. There they were, past and present: the religious community of St. Mark’s. Father David was a good twenty years younger in his photo, with a healthy head of hair and an almost convincing smile. These days, he did little more than sleep, nibble, and complain, the old goat. Brother Abraham—who looked after the chickens and the elderly cow that had remained at St. Mark’s after St. Gerard’s Residential School for Boys, twenty miles to the south, was built eight years ago—had a more recent picture. “Dumb as a doorstop,” she had heard Sister Joan remark about Abe more than once, and there was no denying it, though the man did come in handy, supplying them with fresh chicken and eggs and carrying heavy loads.

Hélas
, Father Damien! His death three years ago had altered things at St. Mark’s, that was certain. In fact, his position at the school had yet to be filled. Since his passing she had, for all intents and purposes, run St. Mark’s without an interfering Oblate so much as looking over her shoulder. It was a state of affairs with which she was not unhappy.

Down three rows was a photo of the young sister who had died in the girls’ dormitory not a week after Damien’s body was found sprawled beneath the top hayloft of the old barn. Sister Mary of Bethany. Mother Grace pried the photo from its hook. Then she pulled Father Damien’s photo from the wall. For a moment, she felt triumphant. She’d bury the two pictures under a pile of paperwork, and perhaps no one would notice they were missing. Surely it was her right to edit the unseemly from St. Mark’s past. And from her own. Since the deaths of Damien and Mary of Bethany, she had felt a growing deficiency in her daily life; she was no longer satisfied by her role as Mother General of St. Mark’s Residential School for Girls. Sometimes she felt as if she no longer knew her purpose. Or if, indeed, she had one.

Just that March, she had turned sixty years old. And with her birthday, passed at the school without mention, came regret, came questions, and,
oui
, desire for fulfilment—something worthy, a call to the future of sorts. As always, she used prayer and meditation to address her moments of uncertainty, yet this new longing remained. Reached in old age, it was very different from her obsession with the pure body and unblemished soul of her Saviour, Jesus Christ, that had filled her as a young woman. She closed her eyes, remembering the glow of her Beloved’s skin touching hers as she had knelt in prayer, His breath and counsel warm in her ear, His eyes watching her as she slept. No, that sort of personal relationship with the Lord was long gone. Nor did she feel the same strong ambition for personal recognition that had begun once she took her final vows.
Oui
. She had once been sure of an important destiny. But over the years, nothing much had come of it. Surely this time God would provide.
Crois en Dieu
, she told herself wearily.
Aie foi en Jésus
. Trust in the Almighty.

She studied her own photograph on the wall. Not unflattering, she thought, surprised by the serenity of that framed smile. As she turned away, she felt her conscience pinch. Vanity, a venial sin.

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.

O
N 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.

M
OTHER 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.