Read Online Believing Cedric by Mark Lavorato - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mark Lavorato
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her normal life. To the red-lined coulees she called home.
Brandy Weaseltail had grown up on the reserve, just off of the Old Agency Road, which snakes north between the river and the delicate ochre lines of the Belly Buttes. For most of her life, she had believed that every hill in the world was striated with red streaks like the ones that layered the land behind her house, and even now, at sixteen, seeing the lacklustre clay running down the ravines in other places just made her that much happier that her home was tucked between the shoulder blades of those colourful buttes.
Her familyâs house had one room, three windows, and, like most residences on the Blood Indian Reserve, no running water. And because her father usually had jobs for her two older brothersâlike cutting wood, hauling building supplies for his carpentry work, and huntingâthe job of getting water automatically fell to her. Every morning, and sometimes late in the evening, she would walk with two plastic buckets out to the closest spring, which was a little more than a mile away, and would linger there for a long while, visiting everyone else her age in the area who was doing the same. When she left, she would lift the two buckets, one of them being slightly larger than the other, and walk lopsided back to her house, a scale tipped to one side.
She had gone to school for as long as one could on the reserve, which was until grade six. But it hadnât been an easy time. It was a place with bizarre rules and rituals, where, to start with, they were exposed to English for the first time, and forced to speak it, with every Blackfoot word that was uttered getting them a ruthless mouthwashing, faces held over sinks, having to lick their soapy palate for hours until the tallow and lye was finally gone from their lips. Brandy considered English an ugly language, the tone flat, the words strung together without so much as a hint of lolling melody. And if the priest and nuns werenât speaking English, they were speaking an even stranger tongue, one that had either the letter âMâ or âSâ droning or whistling at the end of every syllable, a language that not a single one of the students understood or even, for that matter, knew the name of.
Her parents were Catholic, so she had at least some familiarity with the rites and ceremonies at the school, but what she could never get used to was the severity with which they were practised. There were prayers every morning, before lunch, after lunch, at the beginning of classes, of recesses, and after school; they had to constantly rehearse hymns and songs for the masses that observed a list of saints and holy days that Brandy doubted even the priest could keep track of. And they were strict, the nuns seemingly bent on catching you whispering during class or lingering outside after theyâd rung the bell. If you were caught, they would stand over you, waiting until you shrank under the weight of their stare, their giant black garments flapping in the wind and framing the unnatural white of their faces. There were times that she suspected there wasnât a single thing you could do without getting disciplined for it, and that discipline was increasingly harsh and peculiar. Atonement usually meant some kind of embarrassment, having to act out your punishment in front of the class or the entire school, standing in the corridor facing the wall while the other students scuttled through the hallway behind you. Once, having giggled during prayers, Brandy was sent out to stand in the hall for three full hours, studying the flakes of paint as they peeled away from the walls, even helping to liberate some of the blisters of gesso and letting them fall to the floor where they lay like fish scales gleaming in the flat light. She was there for so long that one of the Sistersâa different woman, a nun who had a quiet kindness to her and even seemed to like Brandy, handing her a pear whenever
Brandy Weaseltail had grown up on the reserve, just off of the Old Agency Road, which snakes north between the river and the delicate ochre lines of the Belly Buttes. For most of her life, she had believed that every hill in the world was striated with red streaks like the ones that layered the land behind her house, and even now, at sixteen, seeing the lacklustre clay running down the ravines in other places just made her that much happier that her home was tucked between the shoulder blades of those colourful buttes.
Her familyâs house had one room, three windows, and, like most residences on the Blood Indian Reserve, no running water. And because her father usually had jobs for her two older brothersâlike cutting wood, hauling building supplies for his carpentry work, and huntingâthe job of getting water automatically fell to her. Every morning, and sometimes late in the evening, she would walk with two plastic buckets out to the closest spring, which was a little more than a mile away, and would linger there for a long while, visiting everyone else her age in the area who was doing the same. When she left, she would lift the two buckets, one of them being slightly larger than the other, and walk lopsided back to her house, a scale tipped to one side.
She had gone to school for as long as one could on the reserve, which was until grade six. But it hadnât been an easy time. It was a place with bizarre rules and rituals, where, to start with, they were exposed to English for the first time, and forced to speak it, with every Blackfoot word that was uttered getting them a ruthless mouthwashing, faces held over sinks, having to lick their soapy palate for hours until the tallow and lye was finally gone from their lips. Brandy considered English an ugly language, the tone flat, the words strung together without so much as a hint of lolling melody. And if the priest and nuns werenât speaking English, they were speaking an even stranger tongue, one that had either the letter âMâ or âSâ droning or whistling at the end of every syllable, a language that not a single one of the students understood or even, for that matter, knew the name of.
Her parents were Catholic, so she had at least some familiarity with the rites and ceremonies at the school, but what she could never get used to was the severity with which they were practised. There were prayers every morning, before lunch, after lunch, at the beginning of classes, of recesses, and after school; they had to constantly rehearse hymns and songs for the masses that observed a list of saints and holy days that Brandy doubted even the priest could keep track of. And they were strict, the nuns seemingly bent on catching you whispering during class or lingering outside after theyâd rung the bell. If you were caught, they would stand over you, waiting until you shrank under the weight of their stare, their giant black garments flapping in the wind and framing the unnatural white of their faces. There were times that she suspected there wasnât a single thing you could do without getting disciplined for it, and that discipline was increasingly harsh and peculiar. Atonement usually meant some kind of embarrassment, having to act out your punishment in front of the class or the entire school, standing in the corridor facing the wall while the other students scuttled through the hallway behind you. Once, having giggled during prayers, Brandy was sent out to stand in the hall for three full hours, studying the flakes of paint as they peeled away from the walls, even helping to liberate some of the blisters of gesso and letting them fall to the floor where they lay like fish scales gleaming in the flat light. She was there for so long that one of the Sistersâa different woman, a nun who had a quiet kindness to her and even seemed to like Brandy, handing her a pear whenever
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