I NEVER thought I could be happy here at school, but who’d have thought Father Sloane would get us a swimming pool. It’s made of cement with a deep end and a shallow end and two diving boards. It’s aqua. The water tastes like bleach.
This afternoon after we got our ironing done Sister said we could go swimming. She handed out red bathing suits. I put mine on and went out to the pool with my towel. The water was ice-cold, but I didn’t mind. I love swimming as much as I love riding and art.
We just got to stay in the pool for a few minutes. Then we had to go inside, because it was the boys’ turn. We looked out the windows and watched them because the pool is just below the girls’ side. Sister Delores was watching them too, from one of our dorm windows. Some of the girls snickered about that. A nun watching boys.
At home we go swimming at Big Rock in the Calico River. It’s about half a mile from our ranch. We walk or sometimes my dad takes us there on the horses after we get the haying done for the day, or he drives us in his pickup truck. He tells Mum to pack a picnic lunch of sweet tea, tea biscuits, homemade butter, wild strawberry jam or huckleberry jam, and slices of cold roast deer meat, or baloney.
Sometimes my dad takes his spear to catch fish. It has three prongs with a long pole. He watches for a long time where there are logs and branches in the river with the spear ready. Then he plunges the spear into the water. He catches trout that way.
Once Mum made a fish trap out of willow switches and twine. She put it in a place where the fish like to rest, under some branches. Her grandmother, Yetko, taught her how to do this when she was just a little girl. Mum says Yetko taught her everything. She was her friend. Yetko saddled up her little horse and took my mother into the hills to pick wild onions, wild celery, flower tea and all kinds of berries. That’s how Mum learned about Indian medicine. They would camp up there alone, sometimes for a week. They never took weapons. My mom said the animals never hurt them.
Mum still knows all about which plants can cure sicknesses. She makes tea out of dried honeysuckle flowers or willow bark to cure headaches. For stomach aches she makes wild strawberry tea. For woman trouble she makes Labrador tea. For really bad sickness she gives a tea made out of deer root. It smells and tastes awful but it cures you. It’s strange to think my mum was a little girl, but I saw a picture of her when she was fourteen. She was so tiny.
My mum only went to grade three. She went to Kalamak too. The nuns strapped her all the time for speaking Indian, because she couldn’t speak English. She said just when the welts on her hands and arms healed, she got it again. That’s why she didn’t want us to learn Indian. When Mum and Dad want to talk without us understanding them, they speak Indian. It sounds soft and gentle, like the wind in pines.