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  My doctor, a nice lady called Maggie who also works with street people, told me I got failure to thrive syndrome. Kids need love and food to grow.

  She keeps telling me “bear” is a verb, not just a noun, and people are given the load they can carry. I will know, she says, when it’s too much. She thinks I can carry some extra because my heart is big.

  I’ve been sad ever since I can remember, only it’s a lot better now. First of all, my dad left when I was three years old. Then my mum drank herself to death. She got drunk one night and went to sleep on her back. Then she choked.

  I heard all this from the cousins I met the first time I ran away from the McLeans’ house and hitched rides all the way from Victoria to Cortez Island. I was nine years old then.

  When I was drinking, I was real careful to sleep on my stomach. That way I wouldn’t throw up in my sleep and choke on it like she did.

  They said my late mother was born happy. Her Indian name meant “Laughing all the Time.” She got real unhappy when my dad left because he caught her in bed with her cousin. That happens, eh. No big deal. She only wanted to stay warm, but my dad didn’t like it. The cousins told me he busted the chimney on the wood stove and pushed her down the front steps the day he left. I don’t remember all of that time, only the part about me and my brothers and sisters all crying and my mum crying too.

  The worst part was the foster home and then the McLeans who adopted me. I don’t remember being sad when I lived with my real brothers and sisters. Everyone took care of me then. Even though I was a big baby, they carried me everywhere. My sisters told me that when I met them again.

  At the foster home, the white people rubbed my face in my pyjama bottoms when I wet my bed, and they put me in a hot bath and burned me because I wouldn’t eat the white people food and cried at night and woke up the other kids.

  Indians have got to eat their own food, things like fish and deer meat and wild berries and stuff like that. We get sick when we eat white bread and macaroni. My doctor told me that. And now I’m telling other people. Eat salmon and soap berries and live for a hundred years like our ancestors. She said I was right all along and those foster parents didn’t know nothing, except maybe they just didn’t care about feeding us right because they were in the foster business to make money from feeding cheap food to Indians.

  They had six of us kids in one bedroom. We had to share three to a bed just like at home, but it didn’t feel right there because they had a big house with lots of room for more beds. None of us kids got a bicycle or any toys, and we had to do chores all the time. The foster parents sat back and let us do all the work, except the cooking. The foster mother did the cooking. We could have done way better than her.

  I got bad scars from those burns the foster parents gave me. I had to go to the hospital, and the social services people went and took back the other kids in the foster home.

  The nurses and doctors were nice to me in the hospital. The nurses gave me a teddy bear and all the ice cream I could eat. The hospital smelled bad, and the physio hurt, but at least they treated me nice and said sorry when they put in a needle or made my arms and legs go where they didn’t want to.

  I met my white stepparents in the hospital. The mother came in dressed like a clown at Christmas and sang songs for all the sick kids. She made animals out of balloons, and you would of thought she was a good person because of that. She kept patting my head and saying “Poor little tyke,” and that was real nice.

  I like it when people touch me. That didn’t happen at the foster home except when the boss hit us with the strap. Sometimes all of us had to lean over our beds with our pants down and get the boss’s belt across our bums. He would do that when somebody stole cookies or ate all the lumps in the sugar bowl. Everybody got it because no one would tell who did it. Who would do a thing like that? I still remember the beatings even though I left there when I was five years old.

  My new mother found out from the nurses that I needed a home, and she asked if she could take me to her house. She had three kids of her own, and they were all girls. She said she’d like to have a little boy. I heard her say that. I remember it because I couldn’t believe my ears. Here was this person who had fun all day long, just like my mum did before my dad left, and she wanted me. I thought if I went to her house, I wouldn’t be thinking about my real family all the time, even though I couldn’t remember their faces very well anymore.

  It was her that read the story about the elephant and the mouse to us kids in the hospital. I thought to myself. I’m gonna be the mouse because everything looks so big to me. The mouse turns out to be the smart one, and I said to myself that’s what I’m gonna be. I’m gonna be smart.

  What could be smarter than having my new white family coming to the hospital with a new suit for me, and a clean car to ride home in? Before the white parents got me, I thought a lot about my new home. I was gonna live like rich people in the movies: everything shiny and new, lots of clown food in the fridge, no outhouse, and no sharing a bed. I was gonna be a clown prince with all these girls looking after me like before, when my real mother smiled all the time.

  The new stepsisters were real shy. The smallest one acted mad when I got to sit in the front seat on the way home. I was up there getting to know my new stepfather. He squeezed my knee and called me Son. I liked that. My new dad was a lawyer that helped my people, and he was the tallest guy I ever saw. They were all tall, the father, the mother and the new sisters.

  It was those girls that started calling me Mouse. At first I liked it, but then it made me real mad, especially when the kids at school found out.

  Their house was big and had lots of grass and trees all around it. My job was cutting the grass in the summertime, but I didn’t know that for a long time because it was winter when they took me home. I think they should’ve got a horse to do that job. Then everybody would’ve been happy—the new family, the horse, the grass and me.

  I had my own room. There were cowboys on the curtains and the bedspread, and I should of thought about that. The cowboys had me surrounded, if you know what I mean. I never slept by myself in my life before. The first night I asked one of the new sisters if I could sleep in her bed, and she told on me. The new white mother said they didn’t have any of that funny business in their family. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I just didn’t want to be alone in the dark with cowboys pointing their guns at me.

  The first night, we had a big roast of meat with potatoes and vegetables and apple pie with ice cream for supper. Except for the cowboys, things were looking good. I should of known it was all for the guy from the paper who took pictures of everything, the car ride, my room, the first supper, even me standing on a little stool brushing my teeth in my new flannel pyjamas that also had cowboys and Indians on them.

  The white mother sure acted different when it was just her and me.

  The next day, I had to go to school for the first time. It was hard because those guys already knew each other and I was the only Indian. My stepsisters all had names that started with a J. There was Jane, Jennifer and Justine, who got named after a big boss in Ottawa’s kid, even though they didn’t know him except for a handshake in a crowd once.

  The stepsisters went around telling everyone I was called Mouse and I wasn’t a real relation. My people say this prayer when we eat. We hold hands around the table and say, “All my relations.” It means everyone in the world is related to everyone else. I wished my new family understood stuff like that.

  That first day, I watched my McLean sisters in the lunchroom, and they had lots of food, just like the other kids. They had sandwiches made from the roast we had the night before and apples and bananas and cookies. It was a mystery to me, but I figured it out at supper-time. We got spaghetti with meat sauce, only mine was on a little plate and the girls had big heaps of it. I guess the stepmother saw me looking at their plates, so she explained that I was little kid, and from now on I was gonna get little helpings so I didn�
�t get fat because there was one thing she wasn’t going to have in her house and that was a fat Indian.

  Look at all those lazy Indians, she said. Did I want to be like them when I grew up? What’s wrong with that, I wondered? My mind took a hike into the dining room wallpaper, which was green like a forest. I climbed into a tree and waited for my stepfather to tell her she got it all wrong, but he kept on eating his dinner with his face down. I have to say I got his number right away. He did what she said. She was the boss of that house.

  I was putting two and two together and wondering how I was going to grow at all in this kind of a family where the real kids got all the top leaves because they were as tall as giraffes. I guess she never thought that maybe I needed the right kind of food to grow. At the foster home, I hardly ate a thing, just a bit more than my sister. I was so sad. It looked like I was in the same boat all over again. That was the night all my dreams about good times with the rich family went right down the toilet. I wasn’t happy there for more than one minute.

  None of the kids played with me at recess, but I remember one girl, Lucy, came over to where I was sitting on the swing and gave me her cake because all I got from home for lunch was a carrot and two crackers with cheese in the middle. Anyone with half a brain knows Indians don’t like cheese.

  Lucy was sad like me because she was a twin and her sister died. “I remember her from before we were born,” she said. “Me too,” I couldn’t believe it. “My sister died at another foster home. She was little like me, and she just stopped eating.” Maybe, I thought, Lucy could be my real new sister, more than the McLean sisters, since we were both twins. But it didn’t work out that way because Lucy moved to another city right after I met her.

  It felt to me like the stepmother went out and got herself an Indian to save herself. I was gonna be her free ticket to heaven. I got homesick right away, but I didn’t know what for because I could hardly remember my real family. I just knew they were out there somewhere, and I hoped they were looking for me. At night, I stood beside the cowboys in my curtains and looked out my bedroom window and wondered if my brothers and sisters were looking at the sky too, trying to figure out which star would bring them to me, like baby Jesus.

  I chose myself the big one that still shines in the morning. My stepfather told me that one was called Venus. He knew all about the stars and stuff like that. The best part of living with the new family was finding out what my stepfather learned from the books he read at night after supper.

  Every time I ran away from home, I followed that Venus star, and it took me to some interesting places, like the river where I made a fort and cooked fish on the beach until the day the fishing police busted me. Another time it took me to the back door of a bakery where there were all these pies waiting for someone to eat them. I ate blackberry pie until I was sick in a bush. That sure tasted better than the food the stepmother gave me to eat. Once it took me to a place down some stairs where men were dancing with men, and this guy dressed like a woman took me home and looked after me real good until the cops came to take me back.

  The stepmother wanted me to be white, and I had a problem with that. In the foster home, the parents were mean, but at least the other kids were Indians too. They were more like real brothers and sisters. We got to laugh at stuff after lights out, and we helped each other with problems. None of the stepsisters were going to help me with their mother, because they were too busy staying out of trouble themselves. They snitched on me when I stole food from the kitchen, and they didn’t let me touch their toys and books. It was like I’d get them dirty.

  The stepmother was always going on about Indians. If my shirt didn’t match my pants, she’d say, “Mouse, we don’t dress like Indians in this house.” One time when she dropped me off at a white kid’s birthday party, I heard her tell the mother to make sure I didn’t steal nothing. I could feel that mother’s eyes on me the whole time, and my stomach hurt so much I couldn’t enjoy the cake.

  One time I got this valentine from that library lady we had. She said I was her special friend, and that didn’t sound at all bad to me. The stepmother made me carry the same lunch kit to school every year, and I was there for a total of seven or so years. Some kids teased me because of my little lunches, and they kicked my box around.

  By grade six, my lunch kit was a real mess. The cowboys were dented in so bad it looked like they’d all been kicked in the ass by a buffalo, and the top was coming off its hinges. I begged the stepmother, but she said, no way. I even thought about not taking a lunch at all, but I was too hungry all the time for that.

  The library lady must’ve figured this out. She saw how sad I was at lunchtime, I guess. When I came to school on Valentine’s Day, there was a shiny new lunch kit on my desk. It didn’t have cowboys on it. It had Charlie Brown and Lucy. When I opened my new lunch kit, I saw it was full up with valentine cards and candies. The library lady didn’t say it was her that left it for me, but I saw her looking at me with this big grin on her face, so I knew. It was Mrs. James.

  That was one of the best days of my life. I was so happy I had wings on my feet. I was so stoked, but that didn’t last long. The stepmother took it away from me and brought it right back to the school. She took me with her, and she made me sit on the steps while she shouted so loud at the principal I heard every word.

  She said I had to learn how to take care of things. Indians didn’t know how to do that. They had to be taught. She said the library lady did a bad thing. The principal got mad right back, but the stepmother didn’t listen. She made me leave it all: the leftover candies—the cards—every last thing.

  I was glad I ate all the jelly heart things on the bus before I got home.

  My school days were hard; especially when we left Moss Rocks and went to Central and then Vic High. No one was ever mean to me, not like they were to that kid Evelyn that got himself beat up for wearing a dress, but I didn’t have real friends. Sometimes I wished Lucy would come back, but she didn’t. I seen kids looking at me like I was different, and I guess I was. When the guys started to grow in junior high, I never. It made me feel real bad. The stepmother kept rubbing it in too.

  One time I was teaching myself how to fix stuff. I had an old typewriter and a radio I got at a yard sale with a pile of free stuff, and I took them apart in my room. I knew where all the pieces went, only she didn’t believe me. She said my room looked like a nuisance ground. Then she loaded me in the car and took me for a long drive. In the beginning, I liked it because we stopped at a drive-in and had a hamburger for lunch, and then we drove up the Malahat. It’s real steep, and until I got to the lookout, all I saw was rocks and trees. From the top, I could see the whole world, the ocean, the land, the sky, lots of birds and boats in the water. I never seen anything like it before.

  That stepmother talked nice until we got to Cowichan Bay. I hoped she was turning over a new leaf, but that was too good to be true. Cowichan Bay felt real familiar, the ocean and the hill with the stone church on it. I wanted to jump out of the car as soon as I seen it. We drove past the Indian cemetery, and some graves had toys on them for little kids that went to heaven and some had plastic flowers, so I wondered which one might be my late mother and my sister.

  Thinking about her gave me this sad feeling in my stomach. I looked over at the stepmother driving the car with her mean mouth, and I thought she was as ugly as a woman can get. It’s funny because when I saw her at the hospital in her clown clothes, I thought she was nice-looking. It doesn’t take much for a woman to make herself ugly.

  She starts pointing at people’s houses and asking me if I wanted to live in a dump like that. She and my new family were giving me a chance to be a chief. Did I want to be an Indian with cars all over the yard? I wanted to ask her what was the point of growing grass and flowers we can’t eat instead of having spare parts for your car, but I could tell she wasn’t gonna listen anyway, so I just let her talk.

  The truth was, I did want to be an Indian. That was th
e day I really decided. I’d rather be an Indian with cars in his yard than a woman with a big house where nobody laughed.

  I didn’t say one word all the way home, and I guess she thought I was thinking about how I could be a good boy and remember to clean my room and wear socks that matched. Actually, I was thinking how easy it would be to steal her car and get back to Cowichan Bay and wondering who would hide me from her when I got there. I had a hunch I had relatives on that rez, and I was right.

  The first time I took the Volvo for a spin, I got caught by the cops, and they made me wait right there on the street ‘til the stepparents showed up mad as hell. It was three o’clock in the morning. “Do you know what time it is, Mouse,” my stepfather kind of growled at me. Of course I did. I wasn’t so stupid I’d steal a car in broad daylight. I waited until everyone in the house was asleep, then I took the stepmother’s keys from the hook by the door and rolled the car down the driveway. It was dead easy. I must have driven around for about an hour, honking at chicks and enjoying all the bright lights.

  Driving her car was no problem. I’d been taking it in and out of the driveway every time they went out since I was about thirteen years old. The only hard part was reaching the pedals. I guess the cops saw a short guy behind the wheel and wondered. I got busted before I even crossed Cook Street.

  The stepmother was threatening to send me to a shrink for a long time because I wasn’t fitting in. It is hard to fit into a family of tall people when you are short and everyone makes you feel small all the time. The car thing finally tore it, she said. I was acting like an Indian in spite of all her sacrifices. I told her Indians don’t steal cars from white people, they just borrowed them, but she didn’t get it. She made me get in the car, and she drove me over to that guy Catchpole’s house, and I had to answer a lot of questions that were none of his business.

  Dr. Catchpole is the guy I met up with in William Head Prison. I was in for lighting fires, and he was there for what he did to kids like me. Someone finally told. You better believe there was nobody there to bless him with feathers.