HARDLY HEATHENS

Hardly Heathens

The teacher was late. Ricky Doucette leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed upon shimmering dust particles aswirl within a shaft of sunlight angling into the room— like billions of stars of a micro-Cosmos. Oblivious to muted classroom chatter, he slipped deeper into supernal thought.

Why is Mr. Alvarez teaching this religion class, he wondered; a layman who doubles as their Spanish teacher when the parochial faculty is filled with Marist Brothers?

Sainte-Beuve Academe is part of an old and stately Cathedral complex in Quebec City, renowned as a prestigious boarding school. Ricky was in his sophomore year of a full scholarship. Though grateful, he knew the opportunity wasn’t a charitable grant awarded the poor, nor meant to introduce ‘his kind’ to pious enlightenment.

Rather, his parents were cajoled into enrolling him after it became public knowledge the Montreal Canadiens had secured his future contract, even though only thirteen at the time. No doubt the faculty relished the publicity, let alone of having landed this budding superstar for its varsity team.

I wish I could be living at home, he sighed. His thoughts digressed to his parents whom he adored and delighted in pleasing. His father was a humble sawmill laborer with limited education, yet upheld a stalwart pride of roots tracing to one of the original French settlers. He also ignored the social stigmas that came with taking ‘a no-good injun squaw’ for a wife, despite her being a revered royenah, the entrusted matriarch of the Souriquois in northern New Brunswick.

Ricky’s reflexive grin disappeared, his daydreams shifting to more resentful memories of when he and his family were often maligned as half-breeds, snubbed as rural riffraff living in a four-room shanty near Chaleur Bay in far-eastern Quebec. Ignoring the ridicule, their family grew stronger bound by unconditional love and an unwavering self-esteem. Like his father, Ricky was proud of his Acadian roots, but favored his mother’s Native ideologies.

Ricky recalled those poignant moments when listening to her tribal stories. On many a wintry night, he and his father would sit by the warming hearth in silence, captivated by her solemn features aglow from the firelight as she recounted tales of when the first settlers came ashore.

“White men came as strangers," she said, "yet my people welcomed them in peace under the ‘tree of the great long leaves’,”, the sovereign symbol used to denote her ancestors’ vast and powerful confederacy at the time.

“If not for my peoples’ compassion, and of sharing food and shelter, the fledgling invaders would have perished during the first winter.” She’d then retell how the Jesuits soon followed, hell-bent on converting the New World pagans.

“But they did more harm than good. Soon, the white man corrupted tribal customs and ignited much fighting. My people were used and despised, even murdered for no more reason than being ‘a primitive heathen’.”

“Ha, and they called us primitive,” she’d challenge, her posture stiffened with dignity and pride. "Our League of Nations may be no more, but our primitive wisdom has never faltered. It shall always survive, secreted by the 'nemgayo dyan ju— those of the higher will who keep it silent.'”

Ricky's genteel grin resumed, trusting instincts that opened his heart to her words. Though born Catholic by paternal default, he and his father chose to embrace many of her Native allegories as insightful truths. They were convinced much of her traditional lore mirrored several fundamental constants fostered by ancient creeds as well as modern world theosophies. Ricky also believed his mother's contention that to achieve piety, one need not convene at a communal place, a building, or a shrine to practice faith.

‘Mahog ga kootchik na ho tah,’ he remembered her teaching. She said that by virtue of birth alone, man is already a divine being; a sacred state of existence that segregates him from other life-forms; infused with a soul, a will, and an intuitive intellect to know right from wrong. All he need do to attain divine harmony is: be it— pure and simple.

Ricky was suddenly jarred from his sentient mind-state when Mr. Alvarez rushed into the room.

“Sorry I’m late, boys. I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said, dropping his briefcase atop his desk. “Open your text books to Chapter Twelve; the lesson on Parables,” he ordered, needing a minute to neaten test papers hastily collected from a previous class.

“Okay. Before we begin today’s lesson, let me tell you about a funny thing that happened to me over the weekend. A couple of those nut-case Jehovah Witnesses rang my doorbell and tried preaching how they were the only ones to be saved.”

“What a bunch of dim-witted fools, heh, heh,” he embellished with false laughter. “You’d think by now they’d get a clue, eh? Well let me tell ya, I set those misguided pagans straight. You should have seen the look on their faces when I booted their butts down my driveway, heh, heh. How can they be so dumb? Everyone knows it’s only Catholics that'll be saved.”

All but one approved with nods and scattered laughter. Ricky’s face remained expressionless watching Mr. Alvarez strut his stuff, dismissing his teacher to be nothing more than a papal parrot— a Pied Piper plying his own zealot’s tune upon student lemmings.

How is Alvarez any different than the ‘stupid prophetic butts’ he sent scurrying down his driveway?

And saved? Saved from what, Ricky challenged— and to blindly presume exclusion of the planet’s diverse billions? Each likely a devotee of some form of “ism” rooted in Gnostic ground they consider just as sacred, many of which were cultivated millenniums before the word Catholic was even invented?

His mother’s beliefs seemed all the more absolute when recalling yet another profound, but simplistic precept she had taught him.

“Ki choonah quahog nah hotay,” he mumbled to himself— ‘there can be no religion higher than truth.’

Humph, to each his own. I guess that must make me a dumb misguided heathen then— hardly, he scoffed. Ricky remained respectfully attentive but closed his book for the duration of class— and then his mind to Mr. Alvarez forever.