mouse in the soup, you know, say it is more meat and will boil until it is clean. I believe him.â Sevengunsâs eyes seemed to be looking off into the past and seeing all that he was describing. âI am so hungry that I look in my bowl for that mouse, but I eat the soup anyway. I eat everything I can get, and I am still empty here.â He patted his stomach. Then he looked at me, as if he expected me to make a comment.
I felt a dull aching in my own gut to hear this story. âI have been to that school,â I said. âI could tell it was an unhappy place.â
The old man nodded again. âEvery day, we get up, and it is dark, you know, and the prefect make us stand on a cold floor while he walk around and look for wet bed. If someone wet the bed, he get a beating right there. We stand and wait, and my feet are so cold on that floor. We wash, we march to church for prayer, and my stomach is growling. Then we get breakfast: mush or bread. Mostly mush. Sometime we get a cup of milk, mostly on Saturday. They have a few chickens there, you know, but the priest and the prefect and the teachers eat all those eggs.
âWe go to work next. We do all kind of work. Big boys, they work in the barn and they also blacksmith. They build the fence and they plaster the school wall with mud. In summer we tend garden and those priest they want to grow potatoâbut you know potato do not like to grow there and they only grow small and hard like a rock. Sometime we are so hungry we eat a hard little potato right out of the ground with dirt on it and then later we have stomachache from eating them raw. We also have some apple tree over on one side of the school and need to bring water up from the river in the wagon for those tree. That is a good job, go out in the wagon get water.
âThey have bread and butter for lunch, sometime pickle or beet. Big boys steal butter from little boys. When I am a little boy, I still remember that bread my mother bake. She bake bread every morning, you know, and that bread is warm and soft and taste like the sun melt in my mouth. Not this bread. They have hard, cold bread, taste like bird dropping. If you donât have your butter, you cannot eat it, the taste is so bad. Many times, I keep my butter but get a black eye or loose tooth from a big boy who want it.â The old man stirred the fire again, and added a small log.
Through the open door, I could smell the delicious scent of bread baking in the hornos , the beehive-shaped outdoor adobe ovens the Tanoah women still used every day. I wondered if this was what triggered Sevengunsâs memories of food, and of bread in particular.
The old man picked up a chunk of cottonwood root from under the counter. He stood the log on one end, pulled a small knife out of a sheath on his belt, and began carving the soft wood, his eyes focused intently on the work. âWe have lesson in afternoon. I am lucky boy when I get bigger. I am very good at catching things, you know. I can figure out how to make a trap or hook. So they do not make me do lesson many times. I catch the rabbit in winter, catch the fish in summer, and also the walking bird. They get spoiled meat or sometimes canned meat or just bones from the government. They boil that in soup to make it kill the germs. But they do not kill all the germs. Lot of children get sick, many die. Some, they send home sick so they will not die there, but they still die, and we hear about it later, and we are sad to know it.
âThe priest and the teachers, they do not eat the stew. They use the fresh meat that I catch, you know, and we can smell that meat roasting and they give us a cold potato for our supper. I go to bed dreaming of that meat with my belly gnawing on that little cold potato, and I am so hungry that I ache.â
Toward the end of this tale, a Tanoah man wrapped in a sky blue blanket came through the door carrying a parcel, but Sevenguns was so engrossed in both
I felt a dull aching in my own gut to hear this story. âI have been to that school,â I said. âI could tell it was an unhappy place.â
The old man nodded again. âEvery day, we get up, and it is dark, you know, and the prefect make us stand on a cold floor while he walk around and look for wet bed. If someone wet the bed, he get a beating right there. We stand and wait, and my feet are so cold on that floor. We wash, we march to church for prayer, and my stomach is growling. Then we get breakfast: mush or bread. Mostly mush. Sometime we get a cup of milk, mostly on Saturday. They have a few chickens there, you know, but the priest and the prefect and the teachers eat all those eggs.
âWe go to work next. We do all kind of work. Big boys, they work in the barn and they also blacksmith. They build the fence and they plaster the school wall with mud. In summer we tend garden and those priest they want to grow potatoâbut you know potato do not like to grow there and they only grow small and hard like a rock. Sometime we are so hungry we eat a hard little potato right out of the ground with dirt on it and then later we have stomachache from eating them raw. We also have some apple tree over on one side of the school and need to bring water up from the river in the wagon for those tree. That is a good job, go out in the wagon get water.
âThey have bread and butter for lunch, sometime pickle or beet. Big boys steal butter from little boys. When I am a little boy, I still remember that bread my mother bake. She bake bread every morning, you know, and that bread is warm and soft and taste like the sun melt in my mouth. Not this bread. They have hard, cold bread, taste like bird dropping. If you donât have your butter, you cannot eat it, the taste is so bad. Many times, I keep my butter but get a black eye or loose tooth from a big boy who want it.â The old man stirred the fire again, and added a small log.
Through the open door, I could smell the delicious scent of bread baking in the hornos , the beehive-shaped outdoor adobe ovens the Tanoah women still used every day. I wondered if this was what triggered Sevengunsâs memories of food, and of bread in particular.
The old man picked up a chunk of cottonwood root from under the counter. He stood the log on one end, pulled a small knife out of a sheath on his belt, and began carving the soft wood, his eyes focused intently on the work. âWe have lesson in afternoon. I am lucky boy when I get bigger. I am very good at catching things, you know. I can figure out how to make a trap or hook. So they do not make me do lesson many times. I catch the rabbit in winter, catch the fish in summer, and also the walking bird. They get spoiled meat or sometimes canned meat or just bones from the government. They boil that in soup to make it kill the germs. But they do not kill all the germs. Lot of children get sick, many die. Some, they send home sick so they will not die there, but they still die, and we hear about it later, and we are sad to know it.
âThe priest and the teachers, they do not eat the stew. They use the fresh meat that I catch, you know, and we can smell that meat roasting and they give us a cold potato for our supper. I go to bed dreaming of that meat with my belly gnawing on that little cold potato, and I am so hungry that I ache.â
Toward the end of this tale, a Tanoah man wrapped in a sky blue blanket came through the door carrying a parcel, but Sevenguns was so engrossed in both
Similar Books
