Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese Read Free Book Online Page A

Zhaunagush books and language, finding in them a path beyond the astringent smell of the school. The nuns and the priests took me for studious and encouraged me to vanish even further into my self-imposed exile. It was easy.
    You couldn’t be a kid under that regime. There was no room for any kind of creativity to flourish. Instead, to survive, we mimicked the cloister walk of the nuns, a relentless mute march from prayer to chapel to physical labour.
    Arden Little Light was a skinny Oji-Cree kid with a bad limp from where a trap had sprung closed on his ankle. His family lived so far back in the bush they couldn’t get him out to a hospital. So the break in his bone had healed all ragged and calcified, leaving a ring beneath his skin like the bumps on a sturgeon’s back. He always had a runny nose and he wiped it with the sleeves of his shirts. The nuns tried to get him to use a hankie, but he was a bush kid and he couldn’t break the habit. They tied his arms behind his back. He sat in the classroom with snot running down his face. When he cried and made a goopy pool on the floor, they stood him up and strapped him and sat him back down after scraping at his nose with a coarse rag. As we bent our heads to our books we could hear him huffing, trying desperately to suck the snot back. But it was a medical condition and there was no relief. They began standing him at the front of the chapel, the classroom, the dining room with his hands wrapped behind him, making us witness the seeping track of the snot that bled down his face and neck into the collar of his shirt. He was six years old. He was from a people who had forged survival out of the bush as hunters, trappers, fishermen. That way of being was tied directly to the power they felt everywhere around them, and he’d been born to that, had learned it like walking. The nuns found him hanging from the rafters of the barn on a cold February morning. He’d wrapped his own hands behind his back with twists of rope before he’d jumped. They buried him in the graveyard that crept up to the edge of the bush. The Indian Yard. That’s what the kids called it. Row on row of unmarked graves. Row on row of four- and five-foot indentations like a finger from Heaven had pressed them down. Dips in the earth. Holes they fell into.
    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