April Raintree by Beatrice Mosionier Read Free Book Online

was here was turn the other cheek. When I went to sleep, I was feeling very saintly.
    Saturday morning, Mr. DeRosier rapped at my door, telling me I was supposed to go for the eggs. It had been windy all night and I had not slept well in my chilly room. I sleepily got dressed and went to the kitchen. No one was there but I saw a pail by the doorway so I took it. It was still dark outside and it took me a while to find the chicken house. There were deep drifts of snow which had been whipped up by the wind overnight. Another thing I decided was that I didn’t like winter anymore. Not as long as I had to live on this farm. I gathered the eggs, getting nasty pecks from the hens that were too stubborn or overly-protective. As I floundered back to the house, through the snowdrifts, my mouth watered at the thought of breakfast but when I entered the house, no one seemed to be up. I was still cold and very hungry but I didn’t dare touch anything. I washed the eggs and found that a few had broken and many were cracked. I worried while I waited for Mrs. DeRosier. A few hours later, she came down in her housecoat and she looked a whole lot worse without her make-up.
    She started to put some coffee on to perk and noticed the eggs still drying in the trays.
    â€œWhat on earth did you do with these eggs? They’re all cracked. I can’t sell them that way!” I jumped up when she screamed. She picked up a few of them and threw them down on the floor in front of where I was sitting. She went on ranting and raving, not wanting my explanations. Finally, she told me to clean up the mess and she started breakfast.
    When everyone had eaten, she and her two children got ready to go to town. She left me instructions to wash the floors and clean the bathroom after I finished the breakfast dishes. I thought to myself that if Ricky had been a girl, I would have been just like Cinderella. When I finished my assigned chores, I washed out my own room, trying to rid it of the musty smell. I had a few hours to myself before they came back but when they did, Maggie, with her boots on, walked all over the kitchen floor and I had to wash it over again.
    On Sunday morning, we all went to Mass. After the services, while Mr. DeRosier and the two older boys waited in the car, Mrs. DeRosier chatted with some neighbours. I was by her side and she explained my presence, adding that I was a lovely little child and we all got along very well. She wallowed in their compliments on what a generous, goodhearted woman she was to take poor unfortunate children, like myself, into her home. I just stood there meekly, too timid to say different.
    I had looked forward to Monday because I would be going to school on a bus. It was already almost filled and being too shy to walk further I took the first empty seat near the front. I could hear the DeRosier kids tell their friends that I was a half-breed and that they had to clean me up when I came to their house. They said I even had lice in my hair and told the others that they should keep away from me. They whispered and giggled and once in a while, they would call me names. I sat all alone in that seat, all the way to school, staring straight ahead, my face burning with humiliation. Fortunately for me, no one on the school bus was in my classroom. By the end of the first day, I had made one friend, Jennifer. Unfortunately for me, I had to board that school bus again to go back to the farm. I had decided that I wasn’t going to let them see that their taunts really hurt me.
    The months went by very slowly. The kids on the bus tired of picking on me, mostly, I guess, because I wouldn’t react. My tenth birthday passed without celebration. One evening in May, Mrs. DeRosier told me I wouldn’t be going to school the next day because of a family visit. That was my first happy moment since I had arrived. She drove me in to Winnipeg, complaining all the way that these visits would disrupt the routine she