Wake The Stone Man by Carol McDougall Page A

been a student at the residential school when she was a kid. Anyway she’d been told to shred these papers, but she brought them here and asked if the library would take them.”
    â€œDo the Sisters know she brought them here?”
    â€œNo, and she asked me not to tell anyone.”
    â€œSo…”
    â€œI’ll have a look through first, make an inventory of what’s there. If there are important papers I think I may have to hand them over to the Sisters of St. Mary’s.”
    â€œI could do that for you.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œHave a look through the boxes. Make an inventory.”
    â€œI couldn’t pay you, Molly.”
    â€œThat’s OK. I could do it on my lunch break. Do a bit each day.”
    â€œThat would be great, if you’re sure you don’t mind. It’s a lot of work.”
    â€œI’d like to do it.” I hesitated. “I had a friend who was there.”
    â€œAt the residential school? What was it like?”
    â€œI don’t really know. Bad I think. She didn’t talk about it much. I think stuff happened there. Stuff people didn’t talk about. I think the church tried to cover things up.”
    Each day at noon I ate my lunch at my desk and unpacked the boxes from the residential school. In a lined journal Mr. Klein had given me I listed everything I found. In the boxes I found journals from the 1940s with the names of students and their places of birth. I found files with correspondence between the Department of Indian Affairs and the Catholic Diocese. Looked like important stuff. I found photos of students standing in front of the school and photos of inside the classrooms. I found newspaper clippings from the local paper. I found letters from parents.
    One afternoon Mr. Klein came downstairs with two mugs of tea and I showed him some of the documents I’d found.
    He looked at two letters — one from a parent saying her child had been beaten, and the response from the school administrator denying any mistreatment.
    â€œSo there’s more correspondence there?” Mr. Klein said. “More letters like these?”
    â€œLots more. And one whole box is filled with lists of all the students. Some of the stuff looks really old. You’re not going to give these papers back to the church, are you?”
    Mr. Klein was quiet for a moment while he read through one of the documents I’d given him. When he looked up he said, “Lets finish the inventory first. Once that’s done I’ll decide what to do with them.”
    Over the next few weeks I continued going through the boxes, and the more I went through the correspondence the more I understood why the church wanted to destroy the records. I started making photocopies of some of the documents for myself. I didn’t tell Mr. Klein, just slipped them in with the papers I was photocopying for the cataloguing project. I took them home to read through when I had more time.
    ***
    One Saturday I took my camera and walked to the residential school. I arrived as the sun was rising. I wanted to catch the changing light. I stood behind the chain-link fence and took photos of the demolition crane in front of a pile of rubble and bricks. I could see the back wall and the narrow interior walls on each floor. The back section of the roof was intact but the front of the roof was gone. It was like looking into a giant dollhouse.
    I took my camera bag off of my shoulder and screwed on my close-up lens. I took shots through the fence of the exposed belly of the school. The sun was just above the horizon and there was a subtle change in light, silhouetting the dark walls of the building against the soft blue-gray of the morning sky behind.
    I walked the length of the fence and found an opening I could squeeze through. Once inside I checked to see if anyone had seen me. There was no one around. I walked through the piles of bricks, shooting everything I saw. I