Indian Horse

“She was lost to me then. I could see that. She was gaunt and drained from days of weeping, a tent of skin over her bones. When Benjamin disappeared he carried a part of her away with him, and there was nothing anyone could do to fill it.” 

Saul’s mother is unable to recover after Benjamin’s capture. After losing her second child, she succumbs to drink, foreshadowing Saul’s own descent into alcoholism.

“It was odd to see the expressions of a grown man on a boy’s face.” 

When Benjamin escapes the school and returns to the family, he is broken. He does not discuss what happened at the school, but he is thin and wary. This, too, presages Saul’s own experience at St. Jerome’s.

“I read once that there are holes in the universe that swallow all light, all bodies. St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world. Everything I knew vanished behind me with an audible swish, like the sound a moose makes disappearing into spruce.” 

This is Saul’s very first description of St. Jerome’s. He pulls no punches in this description. Right away, the reader is primed with the misery that very explicitly follows. As later becomes clear, the school endeavors to erase everything Indigenous from the students, thereby taking their light and identity.

“I learned that I could draw the boundaries of my physical self inward, collapse the space I occupied and become a mote, a speck, an indifferent atom in its own peculiar orbit.” 

Saul learns to endure at St. Jerome’s by isolating himself. He’s only able to survive by becoming as physically and emotionally small as possible. While it helps him make it through alive, it also prevents him from being able to open up to others about his traumatic past later in his life.

“We walked with our hands cupped around our noses, breathing in the smell of those fish, pushing the slime of them around on our faces. We had no knives to clean them, flay them. We had no fire to smoke them over. We had no place to store them, no way to keep them. When they lay gasping on the grass, it was ourselves we saw fighting for air.” 

This anecdote showcases just how wrenched the children are from their identities. Like lovesick teenagers gazing longingly at an ex’s forgotten sweater, they are drawn to the fish, but are powerless to do anything with them. They’ve been stripped of their routines, and are just seeking any small piece of what they once knew to comfort them. And, like the fish, they’ve been torn from their habitat and are drowning at St. Jerome’s.

“I would face the picture of Jesus hung there on the wall, my salvation coming instead through wood and rubber and ice and the dream of a game. I’d stand there, arms held high in triumph, and I would not feel lonely or afraid, deserted for abandoned, but connected to something far bigger than myself.” 

While the nuns and priests attempt to separate the children from their Indigenous identities in order to replace them with Christian ones, Saul embraces hockey instead for a sense of something beyond himself.

‘We need mystery,’ she said. ‘Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility, grandson, is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever.’ 

Saul does not know why he can anticipate players’ moves on the ice, but embraces it as part of his gift as a seer. And his surrendering to the mystery of the ice gives him the power to slow time in order to perfect skills and embrace his gift.

“I’d never heard from my parents. Maybe they couldn’t find me. Maybe their shame over abandoning us in the bush was too great. Or maybe the drink had taken them over as easily as hockey had claimed me. Some nights I felt crippled by the ache of loss. But I knew that loneliness would be dispelled by the sheen of the rink in the sunlight, the feel of cold air on my face, the sound of a wooden stick shuffling frozen rubber.” 

Hockey offers escapism not just from his current pain at St. Jerome’s, but his past trauma and abandonment. 

“There were no grades or examinations. The only test was our ability to endure.” 

The children at St. Jerome’s are more cheap labor than students. They spend only an hour each day on lessons, and are constantly punished in horrible ways. They either die, or learn how to cope to survive. For Saul, this means hockey and repression.

“The game brought us together in a way that nothing else could, and players and fans alike huddled against whatever winter threw at us. We celebrated every goal, every hit, every pass.” 

Saul’s games with the Moose represented his purest experience of the joy and spirit of the game. It created a sense of community, through the families that housed them, to the enthusiasm of the crowd. Though he had lost his family, with the Moose he was surrounded and supported by teammates and supportive fans.

‘You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,’ Virgil said to me after one practice. ‘It’s like watching you walk into a secret place that no one else knows how to get to.” 

Saul’s close relationship with Virgil means that Virgil can intuit that hockey is more to Saul than just a game. But, until Saul comes to terms with his past, he’s unable to open up about his experiences and continues to use the rink as an escape.

“But there were moments when you’d catch another boy’s eye and know that you were both thinking about it. Everything was contained in that glance. All the hurt. All the shame. All the rage. The white people thought it was their game. They thought it was their world.” 

Reacting to the violence and humiliation at Devon, the boys refuse to communicate about it, much like Saul himself until he goes through treatment. They have too much pride to be seen as victims, but are not beyond commiserating silently with each other.

“The Moose went from jubilant boys to hard, taciturn men in no time at all.”

Much like Saul’s brother Benjamin, the Moose’s interaction with racism in the rink turns their boyish joy into adult hardness. The joy they experienced playing for their own communities is slowly drained out of them by hostile and violent crowds.

“I would not surrender my vision of the game. I would not let go of my dream of it, the freedom, the release it gave me, the joy the game gave me. It wasn’t anybody else’s game to take away from me.” 

Hockey is the only pure and joyful thing Saul’s life has had to offer since his family’s death. Part of him knows that by marring it with the violence and rage sitting just outside of his playing of the game, it will cease offering him the escape that he needs to avoid facing his past.

‘The players? The good ones? The great ones? They’re the ones who can harness that lightning. They’re the conjurers. They become one with the game and it lifts them up and out of their lives too.” 

Like Virgil, Jack Lanahan has a sense of what the game represents to Saul. He appeals to Saul’s vision of the game as something higher to get him to leave the Moose. It’s clear, though, that hockey represents something almost spiritual for Jack as well, and that he sees Saul’s vision as part and parcel of the supernatural feats performed by high-level players.

‘But someone reached down and put lightning bolts in your legs, Saul. Someone put thunder in your wrist shot and eyes in the back of your fucking head. You were made for this game. So you gotta give this a shot for all of us who’re never gonna get out of Manitouwadge.’ 

Saul’s teammate, Ernie Jack, echoes the sentiments of many before him: Saul has an unnatural gift. But, instead of arguing that Saul play at a higher level for the glory of God, he appeals to Saul’s sense of camaraderie and asks him to go and represent his community and his team.

‘My dad never talks about the school,’ he said. ‘Mom neither. and they don’t say anything about what happened before that. Maybe someone just gave you a chance to rub the shit off the board once and for all.’ 

Virgil’s second-hand experience of St. Jerome’s, through his parents and Saul, allows him to understand Saul’s inability to articulate his pain. But instead of pushing him to open up, he posits that success in the big league will simply wash away Saul’s past. Though intuitive and close to Saul, he too buys into the idea that not everything needs to be spoken about.

“There was nothing wild.” 

Going to Toronto means leaving his community behind, his people, and even nature. He finds the things that give him solace, and an escape from his rage and sadness, being picked off one by one. First, it’s his family, then it’s the old ways, then it’s his teammates, and finally, nature itself. It becomes increasingly hard for Saul to keep a distance between himself and his pain.

“That was the end of any semblance of joy in the game for me. I became a fighter.” 

Having lost everything familiar to him, all that’s left to Saul is the joy of the game. But the indifference of his teammates, and even their rejection of him for his passivity, make it impossible for him to find the joy he once did in the game. So, in fighting, he drops the barrier between himself and his rage, and inhabits all of the negativity that hockey used to block from him.

“But when someone began to sing the song Rebecca had sung we all joined in, the outlaw Ojibway rising into the air. When the song was over, we filed back into the school, past the nuns and the priests who’d gathered at the bottom of the stairs. None of us looked at them.” 

In recounting this tale of a child’s suicide at St. Jerome’s after Saul leaves the Marlboros to return to Manitouwadge, he’s recounting how he and the other children reclaimed their heritage in the face of tragedy. Like the chorus singing their forbidden tongue, Saul is going back to Manitouwadge to reconnect with his community in a time of tragedy.

“The bush had ceased to be a haven. A vacant feeling sat where the beginnings of my history had once been. That part of myself was a tale long dead, one that held nothing for me.” 

Saul, having exhausted all of his avenues of escapism and community, feels he has no choice but to go on the run. Instead of coming to terms with his past, he tells himself that it is meaningless, and he should set out to create a new future in unknown lands.

“I’m not sure when I began to drink myself. I only know that when I did the roaring in my belly calmed. In alcohol I found an antidote to exile.” 

Isolated, and with no sense of escapism, alcohol becomes Saul’s only means of coping, of avoiding confronting his past. 

“I couldn’t run the risk of someone knowing me, because I couldn’t take the risk of knowing myself.” 

Though Saul still isn’t seeking treatment, in leaving Erv and articulating this about himself, he’s finally able to see that his drinking is a means of avoidance. Though the opportunity Erv offers doesn’t pan out, it still serves as a catalyst for him to realize what he’s been running from.