SHORTLY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Father Lionel Antoine, responsible for the spiritual direction of the children and the nuns, took an interest in Martha. Lost in her own world, the little girl had not paid him much attention. To her, he was the fat, balding grown-up dressed in black who was constantly dropping into her classroom to stare and smile at the girls and make them feel uneasy. He was the priest who led prayers in the mornings and evenings in the chapel and who conducted the long church services on Sundays. He was also, she noticed, the one person the nuns treated with unfailing deference, and someone the older students made fun of behind his back.
What Martha and the others did not know was that Father Antoine was a lonely and deeply troubled man. That had not been the case when he was a child and adolescent. His parents, now long dead, had lavished love and praise on him when he was growing up, and he was well liked and known in his village as someone with a wry sense of humour, who was a passionate fan of the Montreal Canadians and their star players, Howie Morenz and Sylvio Mantha.
At the dances held every Friday night in the church basement, he had been a favourite of the older ladies, whom he never failed to ask to join him on the floor. He was always among the first to volunteer his services at the suppers and bingos organized by the Church to raise funds for missionary work abroad. An eager reader and passionate lover of books, he had haunted the village library, developing an interest in the history of the Church, in medieval music, in village life in New France and in nineteenth-century French novels. He had even put together an impressive personal library that he never tired of showing off to friends and relatives.
Most important, all his life he had been devout and had obtained consolation from his faith and joy from singing in the choir. He loved the beauty, mystery and ceremony of the Latin liturgy, the harmony and balance of the holy words chanted by the priest, and the scent of incense and the flickering of votive candles. On the day of his confirmation at the age of thirteen, he was overcome by the presence of the Holy Ghost and underwent a life-altering religious experience. He knew from that moment his vocation was to be a priest serving God in a small, rural parish, just like the one he called home.
When he told the village curé, his parents, his friends and relatives, they rejoiced with him. The curé marked him out for special favour, making him an altar boy, obtaining a scholarship for him to go to a classical college boarding school for boys in a nearby town, and using his influence in the Church to have him accepted at a seminary in Quebec City.
His happiness and sense of fulfilment would have been complete were it not for an obsession that disturbed him greatly—as long as he could remember, he had been attracted by prepubescent girls. As an adolescent at his classical college, he did not find his feelings unnatural. He joined in the laughter as his friends repeated the smutty stories they heard their older brothers tell when they went home on weekends.
But when he was in his early twenties at the seminary, he found he could not stop himself from fantasizing about little girls, and only about little girls. He sensed that his feelings were unnatural and sought the advice of an older priest, his confessor.
“My son,” the priest asked him, “have you ever done anything improper with a little girl?”
“Of course not, Father.”
“I would not worry too much. You are probably just going through a phase in your life that you will outgrow. You should pray for strength to resist your weakness, and remember, never, ever, act out your fantasies.”
However, despite much fervent praying, the seminarian’s obsession became stronger, and incidents occurred, all of which were hushed up. In one instance, the parents of an eight-year-old girl walked into the vestry of their church to find him fondling their daughter who was sitting partially undressed on his knee.
The girl’s mother swept the girl up in her arms and the father punched and kicked the seminarian as he fled the room.
“Espèce de maudit salaud! Don’t think that because you’re a member of the Church you can do such things to a little girl! I’m going straight to the police. Tabarouette!”
The police, however, were reluctant to lay charges against a future member of the clergy and asked the bishop to smooth matters over.
The bishop received the angry parents at his official residence.
“I have asked you here this morning,” the bishop said, “because I want to express the remorse of the Church for the actions of the young man. I understand your anger and I must tell you I would feel the same way if I was in your shoes. However, I am a bishop and must think of the well-being of the Church. If you press charges, its reputation would be damaged. As good Catholics, you wouldn’t want that, would you?”
When the parents grudgingly nodded their concurrence, the bishop quickly told them to condemn the sin and pray for the sinner.
“Leave the matter in my hands,” he told them. “I promise you that that young man will never do such a thing again. You can be certain that the Good Lord himself would want it dealt with in this way.”
The parents nervously glanced at Pope Pius XI smiling beneficently at them from a framed photograph hanging on the wall and quietly left the premises.
Since the seminarian was so widely read, so ardent in his faith, so passionate about the Church, its music and its history and such a good candidate in every other way, the bishop allowed him to be ordained when the time came. But to ensure he would cause no future scandal, he sent him to an Indian residential school in northern Ontario, where presumably he could do no harm, to cater to the spiritual and moral needs of the children and teaching staff, all of whom were nuns.
Father Antoine was so pleased at escaping arrest and being allowed to accept his calling, he embraced with great energy his new duties—at least for a while. In his daily routine, he celebrated Holy Eucharist, led prayers, delivered sermons, heard confessions and taught catechism to the children, preparing them to take their first communion and, later, for their confirmation. In his free time, he read the books from his library that he had brought with him from home.
Every Saturday, alone in his room, he listened to Hockey Night in Canada, broadcast on the CBC Northern Service from the Forum in Montreal where the home team, with their new generation of superstars such as Maurice “Rocket” Richard, Toe Blake and Elmer Lach, played their home games.
But as the years passed, and as the 1940s became the 1950s, his enthusiasm waned. Some nights he would turn from the book he was reading to think of the life he could have had as a priest in a small Quebec village if he had not been found out. He would imagine himself knocking on the door of a farmhouse on a cool, dark, fall evening. Supper would be over but the family of twelve would not yet have gone to bed. The children would be playing cards on the kitchen table, the mother and her eldest daughter would be drying the dishes, and the father would be listening to the latest agricultural news on the radio.
A child would answer the door and would cry out in pleasure on seeing him. “Mama, papa, c’est monsieur le cure! Venez vite! Venez vite!”
Mama and papa would hurry to the door. “Entrez, s’il vous plaît. Entrez. Quel plaisir de vous voir. Quel honneur vous nous faites de votre visite.”
As they ushered him into their modest home, repeating over and over how honoured they were by his visit, mama would ask him to sit in the parlour but he would say “No, no, no, I would love to join the family in the kitchen. Don’t forget, I am a son of the land and know the best place to be in a farmhouse.”
He would enter the kitchen and pull up a chair to the table, the cards would be quickly cleared away, the radio switched off, and mama would soon be serving him a cup of freshly brewed coffee and a piece of homemade tarte au sucre. He would joke, laugh, gossip and dispense wise counsel throughout the evening as the fire in the big cookstove roared, as grandpapa puffed on his pipe on a nearby rocking chair and chuckled, and as the family dog stretched out in comfort at his feet.
The scene would shift and Father Antoine would be celebrating midnight mass on Christmas Eve before a standing-room-only crowd of the faithful who had defied the arctic temperatures and snowdrifts to come to church. The mood of the villagers would be joyful and passionately spiritual, for Christ the Saviour was born at midnight and they had gathered together, missals in hand and wearing rosaries, just as their ancestors had over the centuries in France and in Quebec, to receive Holy Communion, to pray, and to sing the traditional carols.
Closing his eyes, Father Antoine would hear once again the words of the Huron Carol, composed by the great Jesuit missionary and martyr Saint Jean de Brébeuf, who had been burned at the stake by the Iroquois with a necklace of red-hot hatchets around his neck in the early years of New France. It was his favourite hymn and he never failed to be inspired by its call to Christians “to take heart, for the Devil’s work was done.”
Chrétiens, prenez courage,
Jésus Sauveur est né.
Jésus est né, Jésus est né,
In excelsis gloria!
Outside the door to the church there would be a Christmas tree decorated with holly, wreaths and coloured lights. Inside, there would be a Nativity scene of a miniature village in ancient Palestine, with Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus surrounded by the Three Wise Men and shepherds with their sheep and lambs. A sweet smell of incense and flowers would fill the church, rows of candles would be blazing on each side of the sanctuary and the bells would be ringing.
And he, Father Lionel Antoine, beloved shepherd of his parish, would be there, tending his flock on one of the most important and joyous celebrations of the French-Canadian religious calendar year.
Then the desolate sound of the wind, blowing day and night out of nowhere over the foul-smelling, salt-water mud flats separating the school from James Bay, would bring the priest back to earth. Loneliness would engulf him, and he would put down his book, rise from his chair, and begin wandering aimlessly through the deserted halls. As he passed the dormitories, he would hear the muffled sobs of some frightened, homesick student and would feel a sense of solidarity mixed with envy. Both of them, student and priest, he could not help thinking, were prisoners in exile from their homes serving out harsh sentences. But the child would be free to return home after ten or twelve years while he was condemned to remain in his prison until he retired.
As the years went by, Father Antoine grew bitter, and he shut himself up in his bedroom and adjoining office, emerging only to say mass and teach catechism. He let himself go to seed, bathing infrequently, allowing an unkempt beard to take root on his face and wearing the same clothes for weeks at a time. He gave up reading and even stopped listening to Hockey Night in Canada on the radio, even though the Montreal Canadians year after year were now winning the Stanley Cup.
These changes did not go unnoticed by the nuns. In an effort to cheer him up, they dipped into the budget allocated for the children’s food and sent away for expensive, high-quality meats, butter and vegetables. Soon they were preparing, and anxiously delivering to his office, meals of roast beef covered in rich gravy, meat pies and tomato sauce, homemade bread lathered in butter, mashed, roast, and French-fried potatoes, baked beans and bacon, hot, heavily buttered toast, apple pie with whipped cream, roast chicken and braised Canada goose.
Naturally, with such a rich diet, the good Father became fat. When he became fat, he became remorseful, aware that in the eyes of the Church, gluttony was a venial sin only, but still, something to be ashamed of. He felt even worse when he went one day into the dining hall where the students were eating their evening meal. What a stink. What flies and cockroaches. What minuscule portions. What unappetizing dishes of lumpy mashed potatoes, greased bread, cornstarch pudding and powdered milk. The food was not fit to eat by any civilized being.
For a few moments, he felt a twinge of conscience—what the nuns gave him was so much better. He soon got over it, however, when he remembered that at their homes back on reserve, the children subsisted on a diet of game, lard, bannock and tea—fare, in his opinion, that was vastly inferior to what they received at the school.
The day came, almost inevitably, when he could no longer control himself and he molested a little girl. At first he was afraid because she fled his office in hysterics and told the nuns that he had hurt her. But no one believed her and he realized that he was free to do anything he wanted without fear of sanction. The Indian girls were under his control, and the nuns, even if they were to take the word of a child over his, would never think of calling the police or reporting him to his superiors. He was after all, a priest, and they had been trained to obey priests without question. In any case, the residential school was far from Quebec and if word was to trickle out to his superiors, the worst that would happen, he was now convinced, would be that he would be transferred to another residential school where he could carry on as before.
He thus informed the nuns that in his village, le curé had played a big role, when he was a boy, in helping him deepen and enrich his religious sensibilities. He wanted to do the same for a select group of Indian girls because, he said, more needed to be done to encourage religious vocations for women.
“I will pick them out myself,” he said. “All you have to do is to bring them to me in my office and I will provide them with private spiritual guidance.”
Pleased to see him show interest in his work, the nuns followed his instructions conscientiously and, over the years, sent a steady stream of hand-picked little girls to his office where, after passionately and sincerely professing his fatherly love to each in turn, he sexually assaulted them. Only, he told himself, his actions did not really constitute assault since he was always gentle. He was not, he convinced himself, an ogre, even if his little visitors sometimes cried. He was certainly not a pedophile, since in his way of thinking, pedophiles preyed on little boys and not on little girls.
To the delight of the nuns, Father Antoine emerged from his depression and began to smile again. He had, they concluded, finally adjusted to life at the school and found a reason for living.
One day early in the new year, Sister Angelica told Martha that Father Antoine wanted to see her. The nun knew why, for she had been among the little girls he had summoned to his office when she was a student at the school. At the time, she had accepted what he did to her passively, and being gullible by nature, had believed him when he told her that he loved her. Even though the priest had dropped her when she became a teenager, she remained fiercely loyal and passionately attached to him. She had never told anyone, not even the other nuns, about what took place behind his closed door.
In her opinion, Father Antoine had caused her no lasting harm and so she did not intend to warn Martha about what lay in store for her. Besides, the priest’s attentions, she had come to believe, had constituted a sort of test or rite of passage that you had to go through before you could go on to greater things in life. She wondered, however, if Martha would be up to the challenge.
Martha, oblivious to what awaited her, dutifully made her way to Father Antoine’s office along a corridor lined with reproductions of paintings of Jesus suffering on the cross, and knocked on the door.
“Entrez! Come in!”
Martha turned the handle and pushed open the door. Inside was a desk so enormous she could not see over it, and to one side a small table on top of which were a half-empty glass filled with what looked like red water, several slices of thickly buttered bread and a half-finished plate of meat and potatoes. On the wall behind the desk was a large black-and-white photograph of a group of people, a smiling young priest in the middle, standing in front of a big house. Shelves crammed with books covered the other walls. And sitting in front of the table eating his dinner was Father Antoine himself.
The priest put down his knife and fork, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and examined the little girl carefully from head to foot. Smiling gently, he motioned for her to close the door and come to him.
“Ma petite fille, you are so timid. But you are not here because you did anything wrong. You will not be punished. I have been watching you ever since you arrived and know you had a hard time at the beginning. You have coped well and seem to have a religious nature. I spoke to Sister Angelica who told me she has observed the same thing in you. I want to spend some time with you, and to help you in your spiritual growth.
“Here, come sit with me.”
Martha drew nearer, and the priest, after pushing the table to one side to give himself room, pulled her onto his lap and held her close.
“Did you know, petite Marthe,” he whispered into her ear, “that you are named after a pious and famous woman in the Bible?”
Although Martha had made great strides in learning English, she did not understand what the priest was saying, and if she had, she would not have cared.
She only knew that she had been hauled against her will onto the lap of someone whose body smelled of sour milk, whose breath was stale, whose teeth were dirty, who had bread crumbs on his unshaved chin and who had hairs protruding from his nose and ears.
“Marthe, Marthe,” the priest said earnestly. “I have no friends here and neither have you. You are so sweet and innocent and we can make each other so happy.”
Martha squirmed, trying to escape, and was frightened and uncomfortable when he thrust his hands under her clothing, and with a fixed mirthless smile, did things to her that she knew were not right.
“Now, ma petite Marthe,” the priest said afterwards, as if she were his accomplice rather than his victim, “you are never to say what goes on here between us. I asked you to sit on my lap because I wanted to show you how much I love you.”
He lowered the silent girl to the floor, opened a drawer in the desk, extracted a candy and gave it to her saying, “I keep a supply of these right here and I’ll give you one every time you come to see me.”
Returning to his chair, he sat down and resumed eating his dinner.
Martha made her way to the door, pushed it open, let it close behind her and stood still for a moment. She then hurled the candy to the floor, burst into tears and fled crying to her dormitory where she threw herself on her bed and buried her head in a pillow.
“Well, Martha, what do you think of Father Antoine?” asked Sister Angelica when she came to see her shortly afterwards. “He’s a nice man, isn’t he? Did he speak to you about the love of God? Did he give you a candy? Did he ask you to come back? You’re such a lucky little girl!”
Martha turned her face away and refused to reply.
That night, while not fully understanding what had happened, she felt dirty. And try as she might, Martha was no longer able to use her imagination to escape the reality of life at the school.
The next week, when Sister Angelica came to her after class to tell her Father Antoine wanted to see her again, Martha began to cry.
“I don’t want to go. He did things to me I didn’t like. He scares me.”
Sister Angelica tried to reason with her. “There is no reason for you to be afraid. Father Antoine is a holy man who spends his nights in prayer. He has only the best interests of the little girls in mind when he asks for them!”
When Martha remained unconvinced, she took her by the hand and led her, still whimpering, to the priest’s office and pushed her in the door. In the weeks and months that followed, Martha, who had concluded there was no one who could protect her at the school, walked alone and dry-eyed to meet the priest each time he called for her.
In late June, when Martha returned home to spend the summer with her parents, she was anxious to tell her mother that the people at the school were mean to the kids and that it was an awful place. Her mother, however, despite the reassuring words she had offered to her daughter the preceding August, was well aware that children were badly treated at the school. But her way of dealing with painful matters was to pretend they did not exist. She certainly did not want to endure the mental anguish of listening to her daughter talk about her sufferings. There was nothing she could do to help her daughter anyway. There was no way out for her.
Thus, she avoided any mention of the school, and when Martha tried to tell her that Father Antoine was undressing and touching her where he should not, she refused to listen.
“Don’t say that! Don’t say such things! I don’t want to know. Priests don’t do things like that! You’re just looking for an excuse, making up stories not to go back at the end of the summer.” Taking her daughter by the arm, she squeezed it hard saying, “What’s come over you? You used to be such a good girl. Now you don’t care about your family!” Martha was frightened. The loving mother she had known before she was taken away to school had been replaced by an angry woman inflicting pain on her.
“Don’t you know the government is sending us money every month as long as you stay in that school,” said her mother, continuing to berate her. “We are poor people and the money will keep coming every year until you turn sixteen. Don’t you understand we have a debt at the Hudson’s Bay Company store, and that money pays for our flour, baking powder and lard. You’d better get used to the idea, because you’re going to be at the school for many years to come!”
Afraid to talk back, Martha nodded her head to signify she would do as she was told. She had expected her mother would refuse to let her return to the school when she heard how horrible a place it was. Now she was in trouble for complaining and would have to spend years at the mercy of Father Antoine.
Just when it seemed matters could not get any worse, her aunt took her aside.
“Little Joe, my boy, has just turned six and must go to the school this fall. I know, and you know, that kids are not always treated well there. They can be lonely and they can be bullied by the big boys and hit by the nuns. I don’t want him to go but I have no choice. The trader has warned me that the Mounties will come and take him away if I try to hide him. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you keep an eye on him and protect him for me? Don’t let him get lonely. He’s so small for his age and is so attached to me, he couldn’t cope without you.”
Martha had just turned seven, and she knew that there was little she could do to help her cousin. She couldn’t even take care of herself. But looking into the anguished eyes of her aunt, and being by nature compassionate, she promised she would ensure no harm came to Little Joe.
Her aunt hugged her. “I’m so happy,” she said. “You’ve always been a kind and gentle girl. With you looking out for him, I know he’ll be fine.”
A truly terrible year began for Martha and Little Joe. With her mother and aunt looking on, Martha and the boy climbed aboard the float plane that came to take them away at the end of August. This time she knew it was not a Wendigo, and was able to reassure Little Joe that nothing bad would happen during the flight. That would be the last time she would be able to help him.
At the dock, they were met by the same nun who had greeted Martha a year before. Without a word, she took Little Joe’s hand and led him up the hill to the residential school, motioning Martha to follow. At the door was Sister Angelica, waiting to assist her colleague in preparing the boy for his new life. When Martha offered to help, Sister Angelica paid her no attention.
Soon Martha heard the screams of Little Joe as the nuns undressed him, pushed him into the shower, cut off his braids and poured coal oil on his head. She held her head in her hands as she heard shouting, slaps being administered, renewed howling and silence. Later a grim-faced Sister Angelica led him into the dining room. He smelled of coal oil, his hair was shorn, he was dressed in regulation clothing and his face was covered in welts and swollen from crying.
Little Joe rushed to Martha, but Sister Angelica pulled him away, and told him in English that he was never to approach a girl again.
The boy, who did not understand English, said in Anishinaabemowin, “But Martha is my cousin. She is supposed to care for me.”
“Just do as she says,” said Martha in the same language. “She’ll hit you really hard if you don’t.”
Sister Angelica, who understood what had been said and did not like it, turned on Martha.
“Stay out of this! I don’t need your help to deal with this brat. Remember, it is forbidden to speak your heathen language here at the school. Besides, who do you think you are anyway, talking to a boy and interfering with the duties of a nun?”
She slapped Martha across the face, causing blood to spurt from her nose and down across her blouse, and ordered Little Joe to go to the front of the room. There she started to strap him on his hands and wrists.
As the other children watched in fascinated horror, Martha slipped out of her seat, walked slowly and deliberately to the front, caught hold of the strap and tried to stop the punishment.
“He’s just a little boy,” she said to the nun. “My aunt asked me to protect him.”
“Protect him? Protect him? His mother should be grateful for what we’re doing for him.”
With the help of another nun, Sister Angelica dragged Martha roughly from the room and down to the basement. There they tied her hands together and attached them with a rope to the overhead hot water pipes. The two of them pulled off her dress and flogged her with electrical cords until her bowels loosened and she fouled her pants. They then untied her, pushed her into the coal cellar and locked the door.
“You dirty savage, never, ever interfere with our work again! Let’s hope this teaches you a lesson.”
The next morning, they released Martha from her unlit hole but made her stand, stinking and filthy, in front of the student body, and contritely apologize to the nuns.
“Now let this be a lesson to the rest of you. Disobey us and you’ll get the same.”
The following day, Sister Angelica stopped her after class to say Father Antoine had heard that she had been misbehaving and wanted to see her immediately.
Martha burst into tears, and said she did not want to go.
“You ungrateful animal! You upset the school one day, promise to be good, and refuse to see Father Antoine when he asks for you. I once thought you would have a future in the Church but I was mistaken. From now on I’ll be keeping a close eye on you and you’ll pay heavily if you don’t do as you’re told.”
She took Martha by the hand and dragged her to Father Antoine’s office and knocked on the door. When the priest invited them in, she shoved her inside and left her.
Father Antoine came from behind his desk, took her in his arms and hugged her.
“There, there, Marthe, ma petite. I know you have been through a lot of difficulties. You must have missed me over the summer. I missed you. Such a long time. No wonder you have got into trouble with the nuns. Now we are together again and I can help you. You know you are my favourite.”
He led the crying little girl to his chair behind his desk and pulled her up on his lap. This time, he went further than ever before.
“I am doing this because I love you,” he whispered. “I will now tell the nuns to leave you alone. However, you must stop trying to protect the boy and keep what we do here a secret. If anyone was to learn what we are doing, you would be in great trouble.”
He released the sobbing girl who fled back to her dormitory.
Little Joe never adjusted to life at the school. He had learned that first day that Martha was powerless to protect him, and each night he cried himself to sleep and wet his bed. And while crying yourself to sleep was not a punishable offence in the eyes of the nuns, wetting your bed was. Their operating principle was that bed-wetting was anti-social, rebellious behaviour that had to be eradicated by corporal punishment and public humiliation.
The punishment, of course, did not work, since Little Joe had no control over his bladder. Every night, therefore, he wet his bed. Every morning he was beaten by the nuns and forced to stand in front of the other children during breakfast with the urine-soaked sheet over his head. Sometimes he was joined at the front of the dining hall by other boys and girls similarly garbed in wet, stinking sheets, but usually he stood there alone, sobbing quietly.
Martha, cowed into submission when she had tried to intervene and her morale crushed by the ongoing abuse of the priest, gave up trying to help him. Several of the big boys, underfed and always hungry, started bullying him, forcing him to hide food from his plate at meals and give it to them afterwards. If he did not comply, they cornered him in the washroom and beat him.
Martha watched with a sense of resignation as Little Joe grew thin and sickly. Finally one day he did not come to breakfast, did not appear at lunch and was absent from dinner. Martha did not see him alive again.
Several days later, Father Antoine held a funeral mass for him.
“Boys and girls, let us rejoice! The soul of this child has left this vale of tears and gone to a better place! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!”
Six boys, including several who had been stealing his food, carried Little Joe’s tiny wooden coffin out the door to the residential school cemetery. There, he was buried beside the dozens of Native children who had passed away at the school over the years. A wooden cross with his name and date of birth was hammered into the ground at the head of the little heap of earth, and he was forgotten.
Forgotten by everyone, that is, except by Martha and the boy’s family at Cat Lake Indian reserve.
When Martha returned home the following June, she did not know that when Native children died at residential schools, often from pneumonia, tuberculosis, malnutrition and heartbreak, school administrators sometimes did not notify their parents. After all, communications with Indian reserves in the north were difficult. Indians, in any case, were ignorant savages, were used to the deaths of their children and probably did not grieve like civilized white people.
There was also the bother of dealing with so many dead children. In the early days, sometimes up to half of all the children in a class died, and it would have taken an inordinate amount of valuable time, better spent on more important matters, like submitting routine reports on the functioning of the school to the bureaucracy in Ottawa, than in informing their next of kin. Why send messages, when their families would learn the news anyway from the other children when they returned home for the summer?
When she emerged from the float plane alone, therefore, Martha assumed that the stricken look on her aunt’s face was due to the death of Little Joe. She did not know that her aunt had just realized that her boy was dead.
“I am so sorry, auntie,” she said, and walked toward her silent mother who had likewise just guessed what had happened.
In tears, her aunt rushed wildly at Martha, seized her by the arms and began to shake her.
“How could you? You promised me you would protect him! It’s your fault!”
Martha’s mother intervened. “Don’t blame her. She’s just a child. You gave her too much responsibility!”
The aunt released Martha and asked, “At least tell me how he died. Did he suffer?”
Martha said nothing, not wanting to cause even greater pain by providing the details. Her aunt, however, mistook her reluctance to speak as an indication of a lack of concern, and after giving her niece a nasty look, returned to her home to break the devastating news to her family. Even later, when the other children told the aunt what had really happened, she never forgave her niece—for she had promised to protect Little Joe and had failed to do so.
When Martha climbed aboard the float plane in late August to return to the residential school, she was accompanied by another six-year-old, this time a girl. In the years that followed, as they turned six, a procession of other children accompanied them on the flight. Humiliated and hopeless after the beating she suffered when she had tried to help her cousin, and embittered by the ongoing sexual abuse from the priest, Martha did nothing when she saw Sister Angelica leading the girls to Father Antoine’s office.
As the years went by, the priest became more and more demanding, and Martha coped as best she could by retreating within herself and numbing her emotions. At times she gazed at the photograph on his office wall and wondered who the people were. The young priest in the picture was obviously the son of the happy mother and father who stood on each side of him. But who were the kids in the picture? Were they the brothers and sisters of the priest? Were they cousins or neighbours? Had they just come from church? Had they just had lunch or dinner? What had been served? What had they talked about? Were his brothers and sisters still proud of him? Would the parents have been pleased to know that at this very moment their son was forcing himself upon a helpless child?
One day, however, after she turned twelve, she could take no more. She would kill herself, she told Father Antoine, if he did not leave her alone, and she meant it. The priest, who preferred much younger girls in any case, summoned her no more.
By that time, Martha had become completely disillusioned with life and was desperately lonely, and from time to time would allow a teenage boy to sneak into her bed at night. It was easy to arrange. The nun on duty at her dormitory was hard of hearing and slept soundly from when the lights were turned off until the first bell announcing the start of a new day the next morning. The anxious boy would wait until it was late enough, and slip quietly into the dormitory and join Martha. No one ever reported her, and she was never caught.
Each time she had sex, she thought not of the teenager in bed with her, but of Father Antoine and the nuns. How enraged they would be if they knew she was flouting and undermining their hypocritical moral principles—and under their very noses! She did not even care if she became pregnant, since the worst that could happen would be expulsion from the school—something she would welcome.
In her final years at the school, Martha appeared calm and resigned to serving out her time. She had her moments of laughter and joy, and even if she was not able to forgive Sister Angelica, with the passage of time she came to understand that the nun, like her, was a victim of forces beyond her control. But most of the time, she seethed with pent-up rage, almost weeping when students were punished as she had been by being tied to the overhead steam pipes in the basement, beaten and thrown into solitary confinement in the coal cellar. She could not stand hearing the nuns say, again and again, that the students should be grateful that God had sent emissaries into the middle of nowhere to educate Stone Age savages and to save their souls. She never forgave them for not telling her when her father unexpectedly died of a heart attack.
But it was Father Antoine that she loathed the most. Whenever they passed each other in the halls, he smiled at her and she averted her eyes. Try as she might, she could not shut him out at night when she relived in her nightmares the abuse she had suffered at his hands for so many years. During Sunday mass when he spoke about the love of God, she paid no attention to what he was saying and devised imaginary tortures for him. Sometimes, he was standing in a classroom, his head covered with a urine-drenched sheet as the students jeered. At other times, he was her prisoner and she was lashing him as the nuns once beat her. And if on that Sunday he was preaching about hell, she saw him immersed in fire and brimstone, suffering untold agonies for what he had done to her and to the other girls.
When, a decade after her admission to the residential school, Martha was discharged and sent home, she left with the rudiments of a high school education and with emotional wounds so deep they would never heal. It was no comfort to her that the school closed its doors for good shortly thereafter.