Excerpt
“Clean after yourself,” father Thomas said with a stern
voice to the Indian youth who kneeled down to pick his plate and
fork, “Kitchen duty” the priest added and pointed to the kitchen
where the youth had to go and help the cook clean his cauldrons;
this was a degrading job for any youth, however some of them
did this occasionally, and today one of them was the skinny tall
youth who was hungry.
Anton looked at the direction of the priest who was walking
around the tables holding a strap in his right hand. All the
children had their heads down focusing on their plates and eating
their food.
On the side of the girls sister Helen was doing her slow
walk in the middle of the eating area and noticing the event
she smiled at father Thomas as if approving his handling of the
youth. Sister Helen a fifty years old nun, originally from Oshawa
Ontario found her way to the nunnery of Oshawa soon as she
reached seventeen years; a troubled, abused youth who found
sanctuary behind the walls of nunnery and three years later she
ended up at the Kamloops Residential School where she has
served for almost thirty years. She still has nightmares of those
days at the tender age of ten when her step dad walked to her
room and sliding in the bed he always said how a good girl she
was while he violated her for a whole week at a time before he
would go back to the mining camp where he worked. Jonathan
Beatty, her mom’s second husband, who her mom met in the local
beer parlour two months after her and Helen’s dad separated.
Jonathan, a miner, working in Timmins Ontario, two weeks in
the mine, one week at home, would always call her sweet girl,
and after her mother had her half a dozen of daily drinks, she
loved her gin, in her daily drunken stupor she would fall in bed
unable to feel whether Jonathan violated her or not; it was during
Libros Libertad 