He’d come fleeing his father, who’d made him go trapping when he wanted to read, and his mother, a midwife who, like Violet, had poured her lifeblood into fixing a community beside itself with loss for a hundred years, ever since the white men came with their Christianity, their laws, their cattle, and their trains. He’d come fleeing the school at Beauval in faraway northern Saskatchewan, the twisted priests and their wandering hands, the other boys, devastated and violent, the mouths that opened inside all of them hungering for a clean return of what had been taken, though the law and the priests transmuted what they took as fast as they could so they would never have to give it back. He’d been given a place at the school as though it were a gift, because they had places to take on a few Métis boys after those provided for by the Indian Act were already placed. They said “gift,” they said “charity,” and then took you far far from home, from the rich urban community of Saint-Boniface to this tiny rural place where you didn’t know anyone, and stuffed your mouth with things you didn’t want to swallow and then held your nose until you did. He’d joined the army to flee those memories. The last thing he needed was another mouth.

“That’s a nasty scar,” said Violet. “It’s turned keloid. You have to massage the lumpy bits, and help them smooth out.” She tried to show him, but his fists were up in her face before he even knew what he was doing. She gasped.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I said it’s okay.”

“None of us is okay,” she said. She gave him a drink of water, put her instruments in the autoclave, and went off to do her rounds.