Stella nodded her assent, opened the car door, and, although unsteady on her feet, followed the chattering white man up the walkway.
“You’re really lucky you ran into me,” he said, taking out a key, unlocking the door, and holding it open as she went in. “The police keep a sharp eye out for runaways on that stretch of road. You wouldn’t have got far before they caught you. How old are you anyway? Eighteen? Nineteen? I thought they let you kids go home for good when you turned sixteen. But I guess they make exceptions for exceptional students. Now just make yourself at home while I make us something to eat,” he said, steering her into the living room and telling her to take a seat on a sofa.
“I make good sandwiches. Want one?
“I see you’re a little shy,” he said when Stella did not respond. “I don’t blame you. You probably think I invited you in to take advantage of you. But I’m not like that. I’m a respectable insurance agent who goes to church regularly and follows the Golden Rule in everything: Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you. That’s been my motto since my Sunday school days. Now please excuse me, while I see what there is in the icebox,” he said, grinning at her as if he was privy to some secret joke.
A minute later, he reappeared with a glass of lemonade mixed with gin and thrust it at her. “Here, drink this while I whip up some lunch. There’s nothing in it that’ll do you any harm.”
Ten minutes later, he reappeared with a platter of tomato and lettuce sandwiches, cold, peeled hard-boiled eggs, and a pitcher of lemonade into which he had poured a half bottle of gin. He sat down beside her.
“Help yourself to the food and some more lemonade,” he said, reaching over and patting her on the knee. “You must be hungry and thirsty after spending time out there in the sun.”
Not having had anything to eat or drink since early that morning, Stella eagerly ate and drank while the white man kept his eyes on her, smiling indulgently.
“My wife, kids, and dog have been away for the past week at the cottage. I get really lonely when they’re not here. Family is really important, don’t you think?” he asked, pouring her another gin and lemonade and edging up against her. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” he added, inserting a hand between her legs. Stella removed his hand and pushed him away. The white man leaned back, took a sip of his drink, and pointed at a series of framed photos in which he and a middle-aged woman were sitting smiling in deck chairs on a beach with two happy teenagers posing behind them.
“That’s me, the little woman, and the kids,” he said. “I’m so blessed to have such a great family. I don’t know what I would do without them.”
A half-hour later, Stella came to lying on a bed with her clothes off and her new friend on top of her doing his best to rape her.
“Come on, Pocahontas,” he was shouting. “I know you like it!”
Stella shoved him aside and sat up, confused and wondering where she was and how she had come to be on this strange bed. And who was this naked white man beside her?
He slapped her, and she remembered getting into a car, drinking alcohol straight from a bottle, becoming dizzy, and being hungry and eating and drinking while this white man tried to fondle her and droned on and on about his wonderful family.
She slapped him back. But she did not stop at slapping him back. She was bigger than he was, and she got off the bed, turned around, and, fueled by the alcohol and years of pent-up rage, she hit him as hard as she could in the face with her fist. As blood gushed from his nose, splattering the sheets, she jerked him onto the floor and kicked him repeatedly in the stomach and groin. Leaving him curled up and moaning, she proceeded to trash his house, hurling to the floor the framed photographs the white man had just shown her, pitching cups, saucers, and dinner plates against the walls, throwing heavy glass ashtrays through the windows, and opening the ice box and emptying bottles of milk and cream, tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, slabs of butter, and cartons of eggs onto the floor.
After retrieving her clothes and dressing, Stella left the house, went down the driveway to the highway, and carried on walking south toward Toronto. Whenever a car stopped to offer a lift, she waved it on, unwilling to repeat her encounter with the crazy white man. An hour later a car drove up behind her and she turned around, ready to tell the driver to keep on going. But this time it was a police cruiser.
“Come over here and let me have a look at you,” the cop said, leaning out the window.
Stella obeyed his order, afraid the white man had reported her to the police for beating him up and making a mess of his house. Instead, he asked her if she was Stella Musquedo from the residential school. When she confirmed her identity, he told her to get in.
“The principal of your school is worried about you,” he said. “He asked us to track you down and bring you back.”
Inside the cruiser, the cop’s mood changed when he smelled gin on Stella’s breath. “Don’t you know it’s against the law for Indians to drink? For minors to drink? For bootleggers to sell to Indians?”
“No one sold anything to me. It’s just your imagination.”
“Don’t give me any of your lip. I’m going to tell the school that you’ve been into the booze and they’ll deal with you.”
Stella didn’t care. The worst she would get would be ten lashes of a belt across the bare legs and she had received that many times before. But once back at the school and being led by a hectoring teacher to the basement to receive her punishment, she once again decided that she had had enough. She shouldered the teacher aside and walked slowly up the stairs, defying him to try to stop her, and left the building. This time, to avoid meeting the cop who had delivered her to the school, she made her way to the railway tracks where a locomotive with a load of boxcars was beginning to pull out of a siding. One of the doors was open, and as she ran toward it, a half-dozen hobos standing inside waved and yelled at her to come join them. She reached up and they hauled her inside and welcomed her to their world. After sharing a bottle of cheap wine with her, they told her their hard luck stories and gave her tips on how to survive in the big city.
“You being an Indian and all that, you won’t have a chance in hell of getting any sort of job. You’re going to have to use your wits to survive, bumming spare change on the streets and knocking on doors for handouts.”
“The Salvation Army’s always good for a meal and place to spend the night if nothing better turns up. But you gotta close your eyes and be polite when they pray for your soul.”
“When I was on the bum in Quebec,” another hobo said, “I used to go looking for monasteries when I was hungry. The monks were always good for an apple and a sandwich. But you had to get there early in the morning before they ran out.”
Stella jumped off the train when it slowed to a crawl approaching the freight yards in downtown Toronto. She had no friends, no money, no knowledge of the city, and she had a splitting headache. But she was free for the first time in her life to do whatever she wanted.
A hard-faced railway cop carrying a truncheon told her to get a move on. “I seen you get off that train. If I ever see you here again, it’ll be the Don Jail for you.”
“Go to hell, you asshole,” she said, and ran off when he came after her. She stopped a passerby to say she was hungry and to ask where she could find a monastery or the Salvation Army.
“Don’t know any monasteries around here. But the Salvation Army’s got a soup kitchen over on Jarvis Street and it’s not a long walk.”
The soup kitchen was closed when Stella reached it and she stood at the door waiting for it to open, asking people