SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

I cannot , she whispered silently back. I will not.

You must , said the Holy Spirit.

The officer’s face was dark, his brown eyes boring into her from across the tiny R.C.M.P. station. "I saw what you did to those kids."

She squinted her eyes shut and ran her tongue over her sharp teeth. For all the long years since her—encounter—with the departed Mr. Mackenzie, which she shuddered to think of, she had never felt as powerless. The decades now hung heavily on her shoulders, and this year, 1930, might well be her last.

It is time to acknowledge the truth , said the Holy Spirit.

What truth?

hat there is no God.

Never!

The mountie sat in a wooden chair that looked as though it had been at the station since the Boer War. His left leg was crossed over his right, his left hand pinching the brim of his upside-down Stetson as it lay in his lap. The clock spitting its loud ticks and tocks into the silence between him and Margaret showed half past three. In the tiny village of MacDonald, large enough to house the isolated residential school and a train station to take Saskatchewan wheat to the markets of Winnipeg and Toronto, but little more, they were likely the only two not asleep. Surely he didn’t need to guard her? Why, then, was he here, staring at her so? Was it because he was an Indian?

And the small, wooden crucifix that hung above the dark leaded window seemed to pierce her through the forehead. She had always avoided them, at the residential school. Stayed in her classroom in the basement, where she refused to have one put up. The sign had always made her feel weak; when the nuns, half-breeds and savages swarmed about her wearing them, the sight even hurt her as if she had swallowed a clutch of sewing needles. But she had never deserted her Lord. She knew He must be testing her.

She waited for an answer, now, in the warm cell as the hissing radiators blocked out the chill of a Saskatchewan autumn. But none came. Perhaps this was something different. But what? Her faith would remain strong. Only then would she be delivered, she knew.

But now, a doubt gnawed at her. How did she know the voice she had heard, through the years as her thirst for what she called her "Communion" grew insatiable, was that of the Holy Spirit? What if it were—

"I know what you are," said the mountie. "What you can do to people. So don’t ask to leave. I made sure to throw the keys away outside. No one, not even me, will be able to find them until morning."

She looked him up and down. The anger in him was palpable, it hit her like a gust of prairie wind before a storm. His short-cropped hair was black as coal, his skin brown, the line of his nose showing her was one of them, an Indian. Resentment wafted out from him, in ways he probably didn’t even realize, sitting there in his red serge, blue trousers and dust-covered boots. Since the Holy Spirit had begun guiding her, people’s feelings, and sometimes even their thoughts, were as clear as the pages of a diary to her. She was also a shrewd guesser.

"I remember you," she said.

He flinched.

"Bobby," she said. " Robert ."

"Not the name I was born with."

She nodded. "But it’s the one we gave you. The one you still use, I’d wager."

He smoothed his necktie. "You can call me Constable Courchene. Or just Officer. "

She closed her eyes a moment. "Slow to read, but always a good shot. You brought the school ducks and geese from the marsh."

He said nothing, but swallowed, trying to keep his face a mask, clearly. She smiled. She wasn’t reading his face.

"You were from…Manitoba."

He shifted, turning away from her on his chair. "Winnipeg."

"Yet you came back here, to Saskatchewan." Her mind raced, trying to keep him talking so she could—perhaps—win him over, find another way out of the cell. "This place must have been important to you."

He spat. The act, of an officer doing that in his own station, knocked her back as if a physical push. "Someone has to keep an eye out for those kids. Sure as hell most of them didn’t really run away from the school, like you and the rest of teachers used to say."

"But of course they did. They couldn’t handle the rigours of school life. Not like you—"

"Shut up! Maybe another officer wouldn’t look too hard, and take your word for it. But I know better. And after seeing what you did to that girl tonight—we all will."

The thought twisted within her. His feelings writhed like mud in disturbed water, unseen by him but clear to her. She should have been able to play on that, push him in the direction she needed.

But that cross, above his head, bolted to the wall like a radio antenna, damped her ability to sense what he was feeling, made her weak. Ordinarily, if pressed, she could have wrenched on the wood-and-iron door of her cell and snapped the bolt; she was strong enough, having fed just this night before they caught her. But the sign, especially with Courchene sitting beneath it, sapped all her strength.

Why? she pleaded silently. Why does it hurt me so? I have been faithful.

To what? replied the Holy Spirit.

To you.

Indeed. Which is the problem.

Her fingers traced the long-vanished wound on her neck. She had been a young woman, then. Seventeen. Enough education to teach, and just about to start with a class of bright young boys and girls at MacDonald School—years before Indian Affairs came along and turned it into a place to teach the Indian to be "civilized," dragging the Anglican nuns and church authority with it. By then, of course, it had been clear that the thirst and strength Mackenzie had imbued her with meant she could never venture outside during daylight hours. And that thirst sometimes spoke to her, taught her, showed her visions of another place. She had always believed them glimpses of Heaven, sent by the Holy Spirit. For what she was driven to do—to feed off animals, and even people, like a wood tick—would otherwise be monstrous.

You should know now that none of this was true, said the Holy Spirit.

"Funny you remember that , and not all the times you hit me for speaking Ojibwe," said the mountie.

She snapped her hand away from her neck and glared at him. "It was for your own good."

He cleared his throat. It squeaked a little as he raised his voice. "That? And the times you locked me in that dark little room because I couldn’t read?"

"You never applied yourself. You pretended to be stupid."

His eyes glistened and his right hand caressed the pistol in his holster. "I was neither stupid nor pretending. All the kids knew what went on in that place. Now I see, tonight, how much worse it was for some of them. That girl you attacked—I saw her neck!—ran away while we were dealing with you. But my partner is out looking for her. Even without the bodies she uncovered, you’re going to prison. But we’ll get her story. And people will know."

Margaret clenched the bars of her cell and sucked her breath in so hard it hissed.

The glistening in his eyes became tears. He stood up and opened the flimsy curtains on the east-facing window behind his chair. "But you’re never going to see the inside of a courtroom. Not when that sun comes up."

When he stood, the Holy Spirit spoke to her again. Keep him on his feet. Make him come closer to you.

"Why?" she asked out loud.

"Because you deserve it," said Courchene.

"What? I didn’t hear—"

She meant to coax the voice of God to repeat itself, but again, speaking out loud, she provoked the constable.

" Maybe I should apply a ruler to that hand ," he said, raising his voice as he repeated the phrase she had used on students as a matter of course. She shrank back from the terrible purpose in his tone.