Free Black Apple by Joan Crate Page A

girls rose from their beds, tiptoed to the wardrobes, took off their nightdresses, pulled on uniforms and woollen stockings, tugged their nightdresses overtop, and helped the little ones do the same. Like all the others, Rose Marie tucked her head under her blanket and folded her shivery knees to her chest, but even in the extra clothes, she was cold and couldn’t get to sleep. I’ll get you.
    Everyone had a cough, and some students had to go to the hospital room—the “infirmary,” the sisters called it.
    Rose Marie wasn’t the only one who kept waking at night, tossing and turning, digging into her skinny blankets. Some of the older girls invited younger sisters or cousins into their beds and snuggled them to sleep. All by herself, Rose Marie shivered.
    “Move over,” Anataki grunted one night, then slid into Rose Marie’s bed and wrapped her twig arms and legs around her.
    For the first time since she had arrived at St. Mark’s, Rose Marie slept peacefully the whole night through. She did not look up from her bed to see shadows clot together under the entrance light. Instead, she dreamt back to the shores of Mama’s and Papa’s bodies, and she, a small warm pond between them.
    “I had the bestest dream,” Taki whispered to her the next morning as they huddled under the blanket. It was early, just after Sister Joan had clanged the bell downstairs on the nuns’ floor, and other than the shifting of sleeping girls, the dorm was still quiet. “We were across the invisible line at my relatives’ summer camp in Montana. Mama was cooking supper over the fire, and it smelled so good, and me and my brothers were fighting over whose turn it was to ride and who had to get the water. Sik-apsii is so bossy just because he’s the oldest and Awa-kaasii always thinks he can beat him up, but he can’t, and they don’t even want to let me have a turn on the horse, and the ii-nii started to move and all that dust turned red against the sun.” She stuck her tongue in the space where her front tooth had been and grinned. “It even felt nice and warm.”
    Rose Marie could almost see it—the buffalo hurling into the red horizon. She could hear one brother slap the arm of the other, and Taki shout, “It’s my turn to ride, kiis-to-wawa, ” as she ran for the horses.
    A creak on the stairs. “Oh-oh,” Taki said. In the morning, Sister Margaret always carried her stick, and she whacked it down on the legs of any girls she caught sleeping in the same bed.
    “I’ll wake Susanna and Martha. You get Josephine and Maria!” They leapt up and scampered along the rows of beds, hissing, “Wake up, Sister’s coming!”
      *  *  *  
    The first isi-ksopo blustered in, warm, from the west, and the snow turned slushy. In the schoolyard, girls stamped their heels to make a squishing sound until their feet were soaked from the wet seeping through holes in their boots to the darned lumps in their stockings.
    But as the wind died, a cold front moved in from the north.
    The second Sunday in December, just before Mass, Mother Grace sat in her office, reflecting. Her desk overflowed with correspondence—bills, notices, and catechism lessons—but it seemed to her that God was directing her thoughts elsewhere, summoning her to examine her actions and beliefs. She decided to pray that the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit be strengthened within her: wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord. Those gifts would help her meet the challenges ahead.
    Seven years before she had received a letter from the Mother House appointing her la révérende mère provinciale of Les Sœurs d’Amour Fraternelle. Eight weeks before the appointment, Sister Joan had sent the Mother Superior in Montreal a telegram informing her of the not-unexpected death of ninety-two-year-old Mother Paul Pius at the school.
    Caught up in her own excitement, Sister Grace, so suddenly Mother Grace, wasn’t aware that as weeks had