One day our father and his three girls were going over James Bay Bridge in Victoria. We met a jolly-faced old Indian woman with a little fair-haired white boy about as old as I was.
Father said, “Hello, Joey!”, and to the woman he said: “How are you getting on, Martha?”
Father had given each of us a big flat chocolate in silver paper done up like a dollar piece. We were saving them to eat when we got home.
Father said, “Who will give her chocolate to Joey?”
We were all willing. Father took mine because I was the smallest
and the greediest of his little girls.
The boy took it from my hand shyly, but Martha beamed so wide all over me that I felt very generous.
After we had passed on I said, “Father, who is Joey?”
“Joey,” said my father, “was left when he was a tiny baby at Indian Martha’s house. One very dark stormy night a man and woman knocked at her door. They asked if she would take the child in out of the wet, while they went on an errand. They would soon be back, they said, but they never came again, though Martha went on expecting them and caring for the child. She washed the fine clothes he had been dressed in and took them to the priest; but nobody could find out anything about the couple who had forsaken the baby.”
“Martha had no children and she got to love the boy very much. She dressed him in Indian clothes and took him for her own. She called him Joey.”
I often thought about what Father had told us about Joey.
One day Mother said I could go with her, and we went to a little hut in a green field where somebody’s cows grazed. That was where Martha lived.
We knocked at the door but there was no answer. As we stood there we could hear someone inside the house crying and crying. Mother opened the door and we went in.
Martha was sitting on the floor. Her hair was sticking out wildly, and her face was all swollen with crying. Things were thrown about the floor as if she did not care about anything any more. She could only sit swaying back and forth crying out, “Joey–my Joey–my Joey–“
Mother put some nice things on the floor beside her, but she did not look at them. She just went on crying and moaning.
Mother bent over Martha and stroked her shoulder; but it was no good saying anything, she was sobbing too hard to hear. I don’t think she even knew we were there. The cat came and cried and begged for food. The house was cold.
Mother was crying a little when we came away.
“Is Joey dead, Mother?”
“No, the priests have taken him from Martha and sent him away to school.”
“Why couldn’t he stay with Martha and go to school like other Indian boys?”
“Joey is not an Indian; he is a white boy. Martha is not his mother.”
“But Joey’s mother did not want him; she gave him away to Martha and that made him her boy. He’s hers. It’s beastly of the priest to steal him from Martha.”
Martha cried till she had no more tears and then she died.
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