Free Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese Page B

our beds at night. We had half an hour to wash, make our beds and prepare ourselves for the march to chapel. There we sat dully in our seats while Father Quinney said a mass in Latin. At the end he pronounced the greatness of the Catholic god.
    “We brought you here to save you from your heathen ways, to bring you to the light of the salvation of the one true God. What you learn here will raise you up, make you worthy, cleanse your body and purify your spirit.”
    When he was satisfied that the message had been pounded into us, we were marched to the dining room for breakfast. The boys and the girls sat on opposite sides of the room. We stood behind our chairs until everyone had their bowl of lumpy, tasteless porridge, slice of dry toast and watery glass of powdered milk. Then one of the priests would say grace, and we would sit and eat in silence. Not one of us could resist risking a beating by sneaking a peek at the nuns and priests at their table, eating their eggs, bacon or sausage. The smell of it would waft over us while we choked down our gruel then sat with our hands at our sides until they were finished eating and we were marched to our work details.
    They called it a school, but it was never that. Most of our days were spent in labour. Even the youngest of us had to work. The girls were kept busy in the kitchen, where they baked bread to be sold in town, or in the sewing rooms, where they made our clothing out of the heavy, scratchy material the school got from the army. The boys mucked out the stalls of the cows and horses, hoed the fields, harvested the vegetables or worked in the carpentry shop, where they built the furniture the priests sold to the people of White River. We spent an hour in the classroom each day to learn the rudimentary arithmetic and English that would enable us to secure manual labour when we “graduated” from the school. There were no grades or examinations. The only test was our ability to endure. Since I could already read and speak English when Father Leboutilier came along, I was given access to books from the town library. But the others had to read from primers and never gained facility with the language. Kids were routinely strapped for giving the wrong answer. In front of the entire class, kids were turned to face the wall, made to pull their pants down to their ankles, bent over with their hands on their knees and whipped raw. Boys and girls alike, except that the girls were allowed to keep their underthings on.
    “I seen more little brown nuts than a squirrel,” Lenny Mink said to me once. “And more dark cracks than the river at spring breakup.” He was funny, that Lenny Mink. He died when they were trying to clear a stump from the end of a field and a tractor chain snapped. Lenny’s head was split wide open in front of all those boys. There wasn’t a funeral. There never was for kids who died. His body just disappeared and none of the priests or nuns said anything about him again.
    We were like stock. That’s how we were treated. Fed, watered, made to bear our daily burden and secured at night. Anybody who shirked or complained was beaten in front of everyone. That was perhaps the biggest crime: making us complicit through our mute and helpless witness. Sometimes older boys or girls would jump in and try to stop a beating, but they would be pummelled and bloodied and led away, never to be seen again.
    We lived under constant threat. If it wasn’t the direct physical threat of beatings, the Iron Sister or vanishing, it was the dire threat of purgatory, hell and the everlasting agony their religion promised for the unclean, the heathen, the unsaved. Those of us who remembered the stories told around our people’s fires trembled in fear at the images of hell, damnation, fire and brimstone.
    I was never sent to the Iron Sister, but I saw it once. Father Leboutilier and I were stashing the hockey gear in the school’s basement. I had an armload of equipment as I walked