Chapter One

BEATRICE & THE POTBELLIED STOVE • THE BOARDING SCHOOL • THEIR HISTORY

LIONEL WOKE to a familiar drip. An icicle had appeared in the corner of the window next to his bed one night and had proceeded, over the course of the winter, to find a way through the seam of the frame and into the barrack. In the fading moonlight, he watched as a single droplet of water wound slowly down the icicle’s smooth contours. From there, Lionel knew, it would pass over the frozen and rotting wood of the windowsill, then hold for a moment before dropping with annoying regularity into the small puddle beside his bed.

The steady plinking sound reminded Lionel of the piano that the Brothers who ran the Chalk Bluff boarding school played from time to time. As Lionel lay listening to the monotonous drops, he heard another sound—the faint hint of movement coming from the girls’ end of the barrack.

The girls and boys had once lived in separate barracks, but ever since the girls’ bunkhouse had burned to the ground, they had been housed in opposite ends of the same building. Lionel stared down the long dark hall toward his older sister, Beatrice. He watched as she threw back her heavy covers, pushed the hair from her face, and crept to the potbellied stove that separated the girls’ and boys’ sides of the bunkhouse. Beatrice was three years older than Lionel, but he and everyone else on the Blackfeet Indian reservation knew that she was already beyond her twelve years. Lionel had heard older people say that it was because Beatrice stood watch at their mother’s bedside while she died of tuberculosis in the winter of 1903. others said that Beatrice was just born old, as some people are.

There had never been any photographs of their mother, so Lionel had no way of knowing if the image he carried of her in his head was in any way accurate. when he questioned his sister, she described their mother as having long black hair and strong arms, so that is how Lionel saw her.

“But, it don’t matter no more,” Beatrice would say about their mother’s passing. “She died a long time before that hospital bed. She died years ago, the day they started calling our land this here reservation.”

After their mother’s death, Beatrice and Lionel had been sent to the boarding school, where they had lived for the last six years. The school was run by the Brothers from the church, and while not directly overseen by the government, the proximity of the soldiers’ outpost inevitably led to their involvement in maintaining the peace and some semblance of order. Beatrice complained to Lionel that they were not allowed to leave the reservation without the superintendent’s permission. Lionel often wondered where they would go if they had been allowed, and why this bothered Beatrice so, but it did.

Beatrice’s flannel pajamas were visible as they hung from beneath the layers of sweaters and the heavy wool pants she now wore. The pajamas had been a gift from the army captain of the nearby post, when it was learned that Beatrice and Lionel’s father had also died. No one seemed to know how or why their father died, but Beatrice was given the pajamas and Lionel was given a small army sack jacket identical to the one that the captain wore from time to time. The captain, who Lionel thought was a nice man, had tried to give Beatrice a jacket, but Beatrice refused to wear it no matter how cold it was, so she ended up with the pajamas.

Lionel liked the captain and the ribbon medals he sometimes wore on his jacket. He knew the captain because brushing down the captain’s big bay stallion was one of Lionel’s morning chores. The horse was the small military outpost’s pride and joy. The captain called him Ulysses, and he was thought to be the fastest horse in Montana. Beatrice said that an association of horse enthusiasts came all the way from Billings by train one time just to watch him run.

From his bed, Lionel watched his sister adjust the damper, stir the embers, then add another piece of dusty black coal. He was always amazed that Beatrice was able to move without making a sound. He lost her for a moment in the darkness but heard the distant punctuated sigh of her bunk as she slipped back beneath the heavy woolen blankets to wait for morning.

Lionel lay listening to the breathing of the other children who slept around them under their piles of army-issued blankets. He waited for his sister’s breath to fall into the same easy cadence, but it did not come.

“O’káát!” Beatrice suddenly spoke, telling Lionel to sleep, in the native tongue of their people. And although she spoke softly, it wasn’t a whisper.

“You’re going to get whipped if they hear you’re not speaking in the English,” Lionel warned.

“Nítssksinii’pa,” Beatrice replied.

“They’ll whip ya real good if they hear you been out of bed.”

Beatrice did not answer, and again Lionel heard the slow drip of the icicle. It seemed far away now, but soon transformed into the very present ringing of Brother Finn’s brass bell.