Black Apple by Joan Crate Read Free Book Online Page A

and legs screamed, her eyes blurred, but she wouldn’t cry.
    “Stay where you are, you little beggar!” Sister Margaret shouted.
    She turned back to the bed, and Sister swung her stick one, two, three times more.
    “Sister Margaret . . .” Sister Cilla said.
    Rose Marie fell into the bed, her body hammered full of rusty nails.
    “Get up!” Sister Margaret hollered.
    “Sister Margaret!” Sister Cilla repeated.
    “This one’s got to learn her lesson.” Sister Margaret swung the stick again.
    “Sister Margaret!” Sister Cilla yelled real loud.
    The stick whistled. The blade of Mama’s chopping knife slammed down on moose meat. Rose Marie screamed. She would whack Sister Margaret back. She would shove Mama’s chopping knife in her guts.
    “Enough!” Sister Cilla reached for the stick and Sister Margaret staggered back, letting her take it. “Go to your bed, Rose Marie.”
    Rose Marie felt like a live fish tossed in a hot pan. Shakily she made her way past the smudge of faces, head high. No tears, see.
    Anataki gave her that coyote look, and Rose Marie forced herself to grin like it was nothing, like she couldn’t care less, like those nuns could do anything at all to her and it wouldn’t change her one bit. The sisters couldn’t see her face, but some of the girls did.
    After that, none of the first-years bugged her. A few big girls picked on her still. She was so small maybe they thought they could get away with it. Then, on the way to class or in the cafeteria line, she would poke them in the bum with her pencil, knock their food tray, or trip them up. She got back at them, all right.
    When a big girl called her “Midget,” she laughed. “Bird Beak,” she jeered, and the other kids giggled. “Knuckle Bones,” she called Leah Spotted Calf. “Duck Waddle,” to that stupid Sarah Keeper. If they were mean, she was meaner. Then sometimes a girl got her back again, hit or pinched her. Tit-for-tat, like Sister Joan always said before she strapped them. So Rose Marie put stones in their shoes or hid their stockings. One morning when she was about to brush her teeth, she saw that someone had spit on her toothbrush. She wondered if this tit-for-tat would ever end.
    Anataki knew how to get back at the mean ones too. She had learned from her brothers how to mimic. “Oh my,” she said, flipping her hair like Adele Fox Crown had learned from Esther. “These old-way Indians, they’re not as fabulous as I am.”
    Soon there was much less name-calling of Rose Marie and Anataki. The other girls—well, except sometimes for Bertha and her sisters—mostly stayed away.
      *  *  *  
    Neither one of them, Rose Marie and Taki soon learned, could stomach the school food. In the morning when they lined up for breakfast, Sister Bernadette slapped something called “porridge” in their bowls. Some days it was a thin soup with small lumps that slid over their teeth and down their throats, so all they had to do was spoon and swallow. “Slimeballs,” they called it. Other days the porridge was gooey as prairie gumbo and stuck in their throats until mouthfuls of water pushed it down into a hard wedge in their tummies. “Glue,” Anne named it. Once or twice, Sister Bernadette managed to make it just right —“Baby Bear,” Rose Marie said, remembering the story Sister Cilla had read them one noon hour when every one of the first-years was sick in bed. In the book, the bears were just like people but without any powers. And they wore stupid white people’s clothes. When “Baby Bear” was being served, Rose Marie managed to eat all her porridge and keep it down.
    Anataki wasn’t so lucky. She was almost a head taller and not at all sparrow-boned when school started, but by the middle of October, she was thin, her spine a staircase, her ribs tree branches. It was pancakes with Rogers Golden Syrup, served on the Sabbath, that made Taki’s mouth water. She had a sweet tooth, and Rose Marie always let her