Indian Horse (6 page)

Sheila Jack. They’d brought her all the way from Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island. She was twelve. In the old way of her people, she’d been raised by her grandmother and been taught the traditional protocols of the medicine way. Her grandmother was a shaman, and Sheila would take her place one day. When she arrived at St. Germ’s the kids were in awe of her. She walked into the school quietly, humbly, regally almost. It quieted us. We’d never seen anyone so composed, so assured, so peaceful. Something in her bearing reminded us about where we’d come from. We surrounded her like acolytes and that enraged the nuns. They thought Sheila was thumbing her nose at them and they set out to break her. They made her memorize the catechism and recite endlessly at the front of the classroom. If she made a mistake they struck her with a ruler, a strap or a hand and made her start over. She recited during meals, while she worked, while she walked. She wasn’t allowed to speak to us. Her voice was consigned to the repetition of the texts. They woke her up from sound sleep and made her stand in the dormitory and say the words. When she began to mumble to herself we thought she was still at it. Then we began to notice that her words had no meaning. She’d walk the halls of St. Germ’s muttering incomprehensible phrases and then burst out with a wild laugh, hitting herself with stinging slaps to the face before she returned to her vacant-faced mumbles. She lost the composed grace she’d arrived with. She got wild-eyed. Finally, she wandered away into the bush. The nuns found her three days later, knee deep in a bog, reciting, giggling, reciting again. That’s what she was still doing when the car came and took her away to the crazy house.

Shane Big Canoe. They brought him to St. Germ’s wrapped in ropes. When they untied him, he promptly ran away. I remember standing along the rail of the stairway with a dozen or so others when they brought him back. Two burly men from town had wrestled him into Father Quinney’s office. We heard slaps, the whack of fists on flesh, the sound of wrestling and the crash of furniture. Then silence. When they walked him out past us, Shane’s head was down and he didn’t struggle. He plodded like an old man propped up by the elbows. They led him to the basement and locked him in the Iron Sister for ten days. It was called Contrition.

“I wouldn’t want to be him,” one of the kids whispered.

“No one comes back from there the same. Ever,” said another.

“Perry Whiteduck said it’s in the furthest darkest corner and the rats come at night and try to get you.”

“He’s gone. Right?” a girl asked.

“Yeah. He’s in the Indian Yard.”

“He didn’t come back from his second trip there.”

“He said it was so cold you breathe ice fog.”

Shane Big Canoe was thirteen. His family was Metis from Saskatchewan and he was eight hundred miles from home. When he came out there was no more fight in his eyes. He held his raw-boned hands with their big knuckles in front of him, wringing them. He kept his head down, staring at his shoes. They’d find him at nights in the dormitory, huddled tight against the door where a sliver of light showed at its crack. It was the only place he could sleep. Close to that skiv of light, the glow of it on his face.

St. Germ’s scraped away at us, leaving holes in our beings. I could never understand how the god they proclaimed was watching over us could turn his head away and ignore such cruelty and suffering.

13

One afternoon,
during some rare unsupervised time, a dozen of us escaped to the bottom of the ridge the school sat on. A small creek ran along the base of the ridge, curving up out of an inkpot lake and into a larger one. The creek was narrow, maybe three feet across, and shallow. It was a sucker creek. The fish swam up it to spawn in the bigger water and we went down there with burlap bags we’d taken from the barns. We could see the fish pushing up that water. It was thrilling. So much life, so much desperation, so much energy. We stood for a long time and just watched. Then some of us cut saplings and bent them around the inside lip of those sacks. We lowered the sacks into the water and pulled them up dripping and filled with fish. We watched the silvery, brown flash as they flopped out onto the bank, their puckered mouths flapping like wet kisses from fat aunties, their tails flipping and slapping against the ground. We pushed them back into the water and pulled up another sack. We did that four times. The fourth time we stood quietly, each of us lost in our thoughts, as the fish struggled for air, for life, for freedom. When we bent finally and took the fish in our hands to set them back into the water, most of us were crying. We turned as a group and began the long, sloping walk back up the ridge to the school. We walked with our hands cupped around our noses, breathing in the smell of those fish, pushing the slime of them around on our faces. We had no knives to clean them, flay them. We had no fire to smoke them over. We had no place to store them, no way to keep them. When they lay gasping on the grass, it was ourselves we saw fighting for air. We were Indian kids and all we had was the smell of those fish on our hands. We fell asleep that night with our noses pressed to our hands and as the days went by and the smell of those suckers faded, there wasn’t a one of us that didn’t cry for the loss of the life we’d known before. When the dozen of us cried in the chapel, the nuns smiled, believing it was the promise of their god that touched us. But we all walked out of there with our hands to our faces. Breathing in. Breathing in.

14

I saw kids
die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome’s. I saw young boys and girls die standing on their own two feet. I saw runaways carried back, frozen solid as boards. I saw bodies hung from rafters on thin ropes. I saw wrists slashed and the cascade of blood on the bathroom floor and, one time, a young boy impaled on the tines of a pitchfork that he’d shoved through himself. I watched a girl calmly fill the pockets of her apron with rocks and walk away across the field. She went to the creek and sat on the bottom and drowned. That would never stop, never change, so long as that school stood in its place at the top of that ridge, as long as they continued to pull Indian kids from the bush and from the arms of their people. So I retreated. That’s how I survived. Alone. When the tears threatened to erupt from me at night I vowed they would never hear me cry. I ached in solitude. What I let them see was a quiet, withdrawn boy, void of feeling.

15

Father Gaston Leboutilier
came to St. Jerome’s the same year that I did. He was a young priest with a sense of humour that angered his fellow priests and the nuns, and a kindness and sense of adventure that drew the boys to him. He led hikes in the spring and summer. He took us camping for days at a time and when winter came he brought us hockey. He convinced Father Quinney to let him build a rink, outfit the older boys and start a team. Things changed at St. Jerome’s after that, for one season of the year at least.

“Have you ever heard of hockey?” That was the first thing he said to me. I was sitting on the steps behind the kitchen as the other kids played in the fresh fallen snow.

“No. What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a game,” he said. “Maybe the greatest game. It’s played on ice with skates and it’s very fast, very exciting.”

“Are there books about it?”

“A lot of books. I have some I could lend you. If you like what you read maybe you’ll want to come and watch. We’ve built a rink and it’s almost ready.”

“I don’t like games much.”

He reached out and rubbed my hair. “So serious,” he said. “We need to get you outside to watch. I guarantee you’ll love it.”

He smiled at me and I smiled back.

Father Leboutilier brought me hockey books and answered all my questions. His passion for the game was contagious. I read about heroes like Dit Clapper, Turk Broda, Black Cat Gagnon, “Sudden Death” Mel Hill and Ulcers McCool. Then there were more recent hockey gods, like Beliveau, Mahovlich and Rocket Richard. From the pages of those books I got the idea that hockey had an alchemy that could transform ordinary men into great ones. I will never forget the first time I watched the older boys play. The white glory of the rink. The sun was shining and the sky was pale blue. There wasn’t a hint of wind. The air hung cold and crystalline as the boys pushed themselves around that oval to warm up, the huffing of their breath wreathing their heads. It reminded me of a locomotive, a steam-driven train bracing itself for release from the station.

The game started in a mad scramble. Reserve and bush boys made sudden crazy turns and spins as they chased the puck back and forth, and only the blast of Father Lebou-tilier’s whistle returned things to a momentary calm. The players leaned forward on their sticks, eyes charcoal glints in the sunshine. The excitement in the air was so thick you could smell it. When the priest turned them loose to scrimmage, they broke with the abandon of mustangs. I never once looked at the puck. I kept my eyes glued to the boys, their sheer energy as they hurtled like comets. Father Leboutilier skated loosely along the edges, pointing with his heavy hockey gloves or the blade of his stick. When he skated over to me, rubbing at his nose with the blunt thumb of a glove, his eyes were afire.

“There’s an order to the game, Saul, though it might not be readily visible yet. There’s a genuine rhythm under all this mayhem. When they grasp the rules you’ll start to see it,” he said.

“I see it already,” I said.

“You do?”

“The lines,” I said. “They create space. The space you have to move into to make it happen.”

“You see that?”

“Yes.”

And I did. I can’t explain how it came to me, but I could see not just the physical properties of the game and the action but the intent. If a player could control a measure of space, he could control the game. The boys on the ice lurched and skimmed, oblivious to anything but the rubber sliding between their sticks. But I could see how a skater might move, where he might go to gain the advantage of space, how he might move the puck along to get it down ice and into the nest of twine that was the net.

There are stories of teachers among our people who could determine where a particular moose was, a bear, the exact time the fish would make their spawning runs. My great-grandfather Shabogeesick, the original Indian Horse, had that gift. The world spoke to him. It told him where to look. Shabogeesick’s gift had been passed on to me. There’s no other explanation for how I was able to see this foreign game so completely right away.

Father Leboutilier invited a small group of boys to his quarters, where he had a television. Few of us had seen one and we were thunderstruck. It was a box filled with apparitions, but once the game started we were too intent to pay attention to anything else.
Hockey Night in Canada
was the personification of magic. Ten men hurtling around a fenced perimeter with glorious speed. Cuts, switches, abrupt stops and misdirections. Hits, bumps, a focused grit and then the sweeping ballet of the open ice, the action funnelling down to a point where it became just the stick, the puck, the pads, the net, the red light and the klaxon sound of the buzzer that sent thousands erupting into glee. It thrilled me.

I begged to play after that. I begged to be taught to skate. But Father Quinney allowed only the older boys to play. I was eight and small. I asked again and again, and finally Father Leboutilier put his hand between my shoulder blades and leaned down to speak with me. His warm hand made me think of my grandmother’s touch.

“There’s nothing I can do, Saul,” he said, quietly. “The rules are the rules. If I were to break them for you, it might prevent everyone from playing.”

“But I want to learn it.”

He smiled and pulled me forward into a hug. I closed my eyes and I almost cried for the memory of my father. He held me a long moment, then let me go.

“Can I look after the ice then?”

“You want to shovel snow?”

“Yes. Anything.”

He looked out at the scramble of boys on the ice. “As long as you can keep up with your studies and your chores, I think I could arrange that.”

16

Cleaning the rink
became my assigned chore and I would rise to do it before anyone else in the school was up. Before the nuns, before the priests, before the cooks even got to the kitchen to start the oatmeal mush and dry toast that was our regular breakfast. I needed no alarm clock. I’d just wake and dress carefully in the dimness and creep downstairs in my stocking feet to the back door, where I kept my thin rubbers. I’d pull on a pair of extra wool socks Father Leboutilier had found for me and clamber into my winter coat and scarf and mitts and step out onto the back stairs. The edge of those mornings always caught at my lungs. The air was so cold and so pure it was hard to breathe. But I’d huff a breath or two and stamp my feet to get the blood moving and then walk slowly around the school and beyond the barn to where the rink stood. It was a purple world with only the varying degrees of light from the moon that allowed me to see. I’d get my shovel from where I’d stashed it in the snow, and I’d begin. I’d start at one side and push the snow to the foot of the boards that faced out to the field. Once the rink was scraped clear, I’d work my way along the length of the boards, pitching the snow piles over. I loved the feeling of my heaving breath and the clouds of fog that swirled around my head. I’d sweat. When I was done I would lean against the boards and examine my handiwork; the smooth grey plate of ice in the dim morning light. The idea of the game hanging in the frost. I was out on that rink every morning, even when the snow fell faster than I could shovel it.

At first I was simply grateful for my proximity to the game. But then I began to stash a hockey stick in the snow beside the boards. Once I’d made sure no one was around, I’d dig it out and run to the barn for a handful of the frozen horse turds I’d buried beside the door. I’d carry them back to the rink and drop them at one end. Then I’d take the stick and nudge one turd out of the heap and practice moving it back and forth, stickhandling, like I’d seen the players on
Hockey Night in Canada
do.