In the chart provided, summarize each of the stories Saul tells of the children in chapter 12. (Arden Little Light)

Saul tells of the children who didn't obey.... the mute order of the school are the victims of abuse and wanton cruelty at the hands of the nuns. A six-year-old boy, Arden, who wipes his runny nose with his arm instead of a handkerchief, is tied up with his hands behind his back and left that way, day after day. Eventually, he hangs himself. A twelve-year-old girl named Sheila Jack was raised to be a shaman, and draws the admiration of the other students when she arrives. Fearing her influence, the nuns force her to recite the catechism at all hours, until she goes insane and is taken away to an asylum.

Death is common, from despair or abuse. Those who survive are left with “holes in [their] beings.” During a rare unsupervised afternoon, the children go to the river and fish with burlap sacks. They leave the fish to die on the shore, weeping because there is no way to store or clean the fish. For days, they smell their hands and cry, yearning for their lost way of life. Saul continues to watch children die. To survive, he hides all feeling, remaining alone, letting everyone see only a quiet, unfeeling boy.

At this early stage in the novel, Saul spends less time describing his own experiences at St. Jerome’s and more on the children around him. Rather than focusing on one story, Saul lists off individual horrors one by one, ending with the fate of the children driven mad, or to suicide, or killed. The vivid, specific imagery combined with a multitude of victims, some of whom are named, and some of whom are never introduced to the reader, forces the reader to feel the omnipresence of violence at the school. Saul interrupts this deadening litany of evil with a moment of respite, a trip to the lake to catch fish. Where they are closest to tradition, to the bush, and to community, where hope seems closer, Saul is most open about his grief. The stories of death and abuse are individual, but this grief is communal: “there wasn’t a one of us that didn’t cry for the loss of the life we’d known before.”