Read Online As Long as the Rivers Flow by James Bartleman - Free Book Online Page A

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.