Telling Our Stories:

    "Lexlexey'em"

My Friend Lawrence

During my last years at the Mission, I developed a close friendship with a guy at the school who I will call Lawrence. Lawrence was maybe a couple years older than me. I can’t remember how this close friendship developed but Lawrence became almost like a big brother to me and I was the little brat brother. I constantly harassed Lawrence, but nothing I did could ever get him angry with me. I would often sneak up behind him and jump up on his back. He would laugh and sometimes pretend to get mad, but I knew he wasn’t mad and I would just carry on with my harassment. Things like this was what made the life at the Mission more tolerable.

    Lawrence was a bookworm. He read constantly and continuously. He had a couple of different favourite subjects and he became well versed in them. He must have had subscriptions to magazines or had his family send him copies because he always had the latest versions. The magazines were “True Crime”, “Real West”, and “Western Horseman”. He was always ready to tell me about his most recent revelations about how the real west was in relation to the comic books and the movies. He told me about the real Billy the Kid and how he lived and died, unlike the versions depicted in comic books. He also educated me about real gangs from the past and the lawmen who brought them to justice. He was a passionate history buff of sorts. We’d always be sitting together on a table in a corner of the large playroom as he told me everything he read from the Western Horseman magazine.

    Then, one day, for no reason that was our fault or that we understood, it all came to an end. I was called to the supervisor’s room. What he told me crushed my little heart. He said that effective immediately, I was no longer to have any contact of any kind with Lawrence; no physical contact and no verbal contact. He explained that our close contact and carrying-ons had come to the attention of Father MacIntee, the same priest who was abusing boys in the dormitories night after night. Apparently, in his twisted mind, what he observed was two boys acting out in homosexual manners, so he assumed we were gay. He then instructed the brothers and other supervisors to put a stop to this immediately. Most of this I surmised, as the brother/supervisor could hardly explain why they had to enforce this ridiculous order.

    The next year, Lawrence did not return to the Mission, so I could never find out what really happened. For a long time, I was devastated since I could not even ask Lawrence if they had confronted him also. I still don’t know to this day. I often wonder if Lawrence had thought that I alone had put an end to our close friendship. Perhaps, one of these days, I will ask him how he felt and if he knew what happened. This is just one more example of the evilness that was inflicted on kids that were forced to attend the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

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