Eye of Flame Read Free Page A

Christ. He had been promised an assistant who had never arrived. He could offer me little, but he needed a teacher, someone who could teach children to read and write.
    I had arrived at Father Morel’s mission in the autumn. My duties, besides teaching, were cooking meals and keeping the small wooden house next to the chapel clean. Father Morel taught catechism, but I was responsible for the other subjects. Winter arrived, a harsh, cold winter with winds that bit at my face. As the drifts grew higher, fewer of the Sioux children came to school. The ones who did sat silently on the benches, huddling in their heavy coverings, while I built a fire in the woodburner.
    The children irritated me with their passivity, their lack of interest. They sat, uncomplaining, while I wrote words or figures on my slate board or read to them from one of Father Morel’s books. A little girl named White Cow Sees, baptized Joan, was the only one who showed interest. She would ask to hear stories about the saints, and the other children, mostly boys, would nod mutely in agreement.
    I was never sure how much any of them understood. Few of them spoke much English, although White Cow Sees and a little boy named Whirlwind Chaser, baptized Joseph, managed to become fairly fluent in it. Whirlwind Chaser was particularly fond of hearing about Saint Sebastian. At last I discovered that he saw Saint Sebastian as a great warrior, shot with arrows by an enemy tribe; he insisted on thinking that Sebastian had returned from the other world to avenge himself.
    I lost most of them in the spring to the warmer days. White Cow Sees still came, and a few of the boys, but the rest had vanished. There was little food that spring and the Indians seemed to be waiting for something.
    I went into town as often as possible to get supplies, and avoided the Indians on the reservation. They were silent people, never showing emotion; they seemed both hostile and indifferent. I was irritated by their mixture of pride and despair, saw them as unkempt and dirty, and did not understand why they refused to do anything that might better their lot.
    I began to view the children in the same way. There was always an unpleasant odor about them, and their quiet refusal to learn was more irritating to me than pranks and childish foolishness would have been. I became less patient with them, subjecting them to spelling drills, to long columns of addition, to lectures on their ignorance. When they looked away from me in humiliation, I refused to see.
     
    I met Little Deer at the beginning of summer. He had come to see Father Morel, arriving while the children and I were at Mass. He looked at me with suspicion as we left the chapel.
    I let the children go early that day, watching as they walked toward their homes. White Cow Sees trailed behind the boys, trying to get their attention.
    “You.” I turned and saw the Indian who had come to see Father Morel. He was a tall man, somewhat paler than the Sioux I had seen. He wore a necklace of deer bones around his neck; his hair was in long, dark braids. His nose, instead of being large and prominent, was small and straight. “You are the teacher.”
    “Yes, I am Catherine Lemaître.” I said it coldly.
    “Some call me John Wells, some call me Little Deer. My mother’s cousin has come here, a boy named Whirlwind Chaser.”
    “He stays away now. I have not seen him since winter.”
    “What can you teach him?”
    “More than you can.”
    “You teach him Wasichu foolishness,” he said. “I have heard of you and have seen you in the town talking to white men. You think you will make them forget who you are, but you are wrong.”
    “You have no right to speak to me that way.” I began to walk away, but he followed me.
    “My father was a Wasichu, a trader,” Little Deer went on. “My mother is a Minneconjou. I lived with the Wasichu, I learned their speech and I can write my name and read some words. My mother returned here to her