Black Apple by Joan Crate Read Free Book Online Page B

have one of her two pancakes. Those breakfasts Anataki ate quickly, her eyes shining, syrup dripping from her bottom lip.
    Lunch was usually a slice or two of doughy or stale bread, sometimes fried in the bacon grease collected from Father David and Brother Abraham’s breakfasts, and occasionally served with leftovers from supper the night before. Once in a while there were baked beans.
    Supper was mostly mashed potatoes served the same way as the breakfast porridge, in “slimeballs,” “glue,” and, occasionally, “Baby Bear style.” Chicken stew was a watery broth in which one of Brother Abraham’s scrawny, plucked, but still-clawed hens was boiled overnight with mushed vegetables, or sometimes a fried egg. Aside from the scraps of dry fish doled out on Fridays, there was little meat, and meat was what both girls longed for.
    “Guess what I dreamed about last night?” Rose Marie whispered to Taki in the cafeteria line at breakfast one morning.
    “You got to sleep, finally?”
    “Yeah. And I dreamt up a big bowl of rabbit stew. Mmm.”
    “I love that. Deer stew too.” Taki grinned. One of her teeth was loose, and it stuck out at an angle.
    “Moose,” Rose Marie said as Sister Bernadette ladled a glop of glue in her bowl.
    “Dry meat, the chewy kind.” Taki stared at the lump in her own bowl. “Rosie, I feel sick.”
    “You’re as thin as a stick. You have to eat, even if it is glue.”
    Even when Taki did eat her porridge, it often came back up in the schoolyard at recess.
    “If you don’t eat it, you won’t get used to it. Taki, you’ll starve.”
    “No, I won’t. It’s just the porridge.” Anataki slapped the back of her spoon against the lump in her bowl, watching it bounce. “I can eat potatoes if they’re slimeballs, but not glue. Yesterday I ate my carrots, didn’t I? And the bread.”
    “That’s because the carrots weren’t cooked, and there was jam for the bread.”
    Once a week, Sister Bernadette spooned out a dollop of jam, bright and quivering, beside a slice of bread. Usually it was strawberry jam, but sometimes it was raspberry, sometimes saskatoon—bright red or purple, dancing under the overhead lights.
    Taki smacked her lips and laughed. “I love jam,” she said, her nostrils quivering. “It smells like summer.”
    Once the jam was spooned onto her plate, she always picked up her glass of milk made from yucky powder and held it out, ready to fling at Ruth’s big cousins if they reached over and stuck a finger in her meal. They were still mad about Ruth’s name.
    “Rude,” Rose Marie jeered at Bertha. “Her name should be Rude, not Ruth, because she is—just like you.”
      *  *  *  
    By the end of October, both Rose Marie and Anataki were feeling not so sick, not so lonely anymore, though Taki was skinny as a bone, and Rose Marie still got hot and squirmy when she had to sit still in her desk for long. And she had trouble falling asleep at bedtime because she was afraid of seeing backwards all night long, and not just in bits. Kids, ones who weren’t really there, thin and grey, sometimes crept through the dormitory. Sometimes that awful sister too. At least they left again.
    Anataki’s before life had been different from hers, so her stories were always fun to listen to. Fas-cin-ating —a new word she had learned from Sister Joan. “Girls, I think you’ll find the saints’ lives fas-cin-ating .” Then she droned out the most boring story of some guy who did nothing but pray or a crazy lady who lived behind a brick wall on purpose.
    In the moon of first flowers, Taki’s family always moved to the United States of America, on the other side of the invisible line. “My papa and uncle tend a buffalo herd that Great-Grandfather rescued during the last days of the great ii-nii. ”
    Rose Marie knew that word. Buffalo. Her papa had once drawn a picture of one of the big animals in the dirt but she had never seen a real live one.
    “Great-Grandfather and