Consumption (13 page)

She set her table with a cloth and a plate and a knife and fork. She lifted the little bird onto her plate and laid the cooked apples alongside it. She ladled the drippings from the bird over it and the wild rice. She poured herself a larger glass of marc. She sat down to eat, pausing to wipe her eyes with every third or fourth bite.

SIX

THE CHURCH HAD BEEN BUILT
across the street from the water reservoir, a giant tank that dwarfed any other structure in town. The church had the good fortune to lie in the wind shadow of the tank, which sheltered it from the prevailing westerlies. In winter it generally sat in a trough surrounded by snow piled high on both sides. Visiting priests, novitiates from America and France, claimed tiresomely that this was evidence of the Lord’s favour upon this blessed building, but Père Bernard was never guilty of such magical thinking. He had built enough iglus on the tundra to understand the effect an obstacle had on airflow and snow deposition.

The day that Justine and Marie were to be confirmed, Winnie proudly led the family up the steps of the church. Bernard stood there in his robe to greet them, watching the sky. As the children removed their windpants and parkas, he consulted Emo on the weather. The old priest’s Inuktitut was unaccented, more sophisticated and illustrative than that of most of the young adults in town. Winnie said that anyone she knew who had attended high school through to completion spoke Inuktitut like a child, with crude and obvious sentences stacked upon one another without music or subtlety.

But old priests such as Bernard had studied the language and practised it with one another and their congregations until they could not only recite the liturgy in this language but capture a soul
with it too. That was the difference, in Winnie’s view, between the way these old men thought and the way the new doctors and schoolteachers thought. It seemed these newcomers had decided they shouldn’t learn the language of this place, should never stay long enough actually to be recognized, to have an effect. They were more interested in the effect the place had on them—as if they really could be much affected by a place whose language they did not bother to learn.

Tagak joined his father and the old priest on the steps. He was married to a woman named Catharine, who, uniquely among the women of the town, liked Victoria. Tagak listened to the older men discuss the weather and did not offer his opinion, which wasn’t sought in any case. Tagak was considered an unlucky and inexpert hunter. This was painful for Emo, but he had given up on trying to sharpen his son’s skills and concentrated on bringing his family food himself.

When Catharine and their two daughters arrived on the church steps, Tagak turned away from the men and led them wordlessly inside.

Bernard had built his church of stone he had pulled off the tundra over the course of three sore-shouldered years. He had recruited a small body of helpers, men he had found eccentric and difficult—but no one else ever showed up on the work site in the morning. He and his taciturn helpers had hauled stone boats full of rocks to the church site and had lifted them up the scaffolding hand by gnarled hand, unassisted by cranes or winches. As the church neared completion, more and more helpers accrued to the team, each one odder than the last. Lifting stones became easier but he’d had to settle more conflicts, calm more anxious outbursts. He came to suspect that half the men helping him would be under psychiatric care, and benefiting from it, had they lived in the south.

From his position on the steps, Bernard saw Simionie Irnuk approaching the church. He was one of the men who had helped
build it. Simionie was not volatile nor given to bizarre declarations, but he was as intense as any of the others, the priest thought. Simionie had profound reservations about southerners, refused to speak Kablunuktitut, and accepted the priest only as a necessary part of the project and because he spoke Inuktitut so well himself. Bernard had not seen him much in the years after the church had been finished. He had concluded that his faith was shaken, or that he was drinking, both conditions the priest had thought he had seen the seeds of in the time they had worked together. As Simionie came up the steps of the church on communion day, trailed by a straggle of the more devout or lonely of the parishioners, the priest nodded to him. Simionie nodded back. They followed the priest inside and Simionie took his place in a pew a few rows behind Victoria and her family.

Victoria saw Simionie walk in the door as she was surreptitiously sucking on a Tic Tac. As her eyes widened, her throat did likewise and the breath mint lodged itself sideways in her larynx. She gasped and turned deep purple as she coughed, the veins in her forehead distending. She inhaled deeply but felt as if she got almost no air and when she tried to speak she couldn’t, uttering instead a whistling sound that originated somewhere between her trachea and her diaphragm. She thought her chest might just burst out of her shirt—but then unconsciousness supervened and she felt abruptly much better.

As her chest struck the pew on the way down, the breath mint flew out of her mouth, high into the air, its trajectory describing a perfect and quite beautiful arc into the priest’s beard. He felt it lodge there, stuck to his chin hairs. As she lay on the church’s stone floor, Victoria got her breath back and gave a huge gasp. Subtly struggling with each other for primacy of position, Robertson and her mother knelt to tend to her, the others crowding in at their backs. When Victoria’s tunnel vision faded and she could take in the cast of dozens hovering over her, she heard herself croak, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

SEVEN

EVERY SATURDAY THAT WINTER
, Penny Bleskie and Emo went out on the land with their dogs. For the first three months he led and after that she did, winding out along the Meliadine River and into the barrenlands. She carried a map, she told everyone, but the truth was that she refused to unfold it, preferring to stop and consult with Emo as often as was necessary to memorize the layout of the country. Penny was from Alberta, and her idea of orienting oneself on the land rested on the idea of dim purple mountains hanging low and always to the west, an obvious and reliable landmark. When she became disoriented on the tundra, which was frequent, she quickly had no idea at all of where she was and which way was north. She had only to lose sight of the sun, or of the river valley or ridgeline they were following, for an instant to become hopelessly lost. The old man helped then, pointing the way without hesitation. Slowly, over the course of these many weeks, she went from having to ask him where they were every thirty minutes to going hours between consultations.

This morning she had risen at five and was out on the sea ice with the dogs at six, brushing and feeding them. The only other movement she noticed was Pauloosie’s snow machine, twinkling its way north, out of town. The small number of those who spent a lot of time on the land could recognize one another’s snow machines
and komatiks from a distance. Though they went out partly to escape other humans, it was reassuring to spot a friend in the distance. Another person was so rare out on the land, you studied them carefully and soon knew the particular cadence of a dog team’s trot, the pitch of a rattling exhaust manifold, the faded yellow hue of a snow machine engine cover.

She chained her team with the hunters’ dogs, on the ice in the little bay abutting the town. The dogs were considered dangerous, not pets at all, and better kept away from the children. Serious maulings were common and in one or another of the nearby towns, most winters, a child was eaten after having strayed too close to the animals. There was a lingering sense that dogs were a part of life in the north, and that living so closely with them was both normal and perilous. They were no longer a necessity, but they remained essential to the way the people thought of themselves. And so the dogs were still tolerated. The day was coming when the only dogs that would be allowed in Rankin Inlet would be pets—castrated standard poodles and slobbering St. Bernards that leapt playfully upon couches and laughing six-year-olds. In the meantime, the menacing creatures were pushed steadily farther out to sea. The other advantage of chaining teams on the sea ice was that, in the spring, the tide washed away the winter’s accumulation of dog shit in one lunar heave.

The old man had been an effective instructor. Penny had learned how to kick apart a dog fight and untangle the intertwined traces of writhing and snapping animals. This frightened her the first time she tried it, but when she saw the glint in the old man’s eyes, she never hesitated again.

Within six weeks she had grown bored with making endless loops around town and out to the floe edge and back. She pressured Emo to take her deeper into the tundra. He agreed without comment and on a Saturday two weeks later she found herself following him down the Meliadine River, her dogs panting with pleasure as they padded
their way over the snow. In the mid-afternoon he stopped and let her catch up with him. He told her that if they wanted to get back to town before sunset they would have to turn around then. She told him she had no problem with staying out overnight. She had a sleeping bag on her sled. He nodded and lifted up his snow brake, his dogs surging forward at the same instant.

When the sun began laying itself out along the southwestern horizon, Emo pulled to a stop and a few moments later Penny caught up with him. They hadn’t stopped running all day long and she was euphoric. Her dogs were happy and exhausted, and even Emo’s dogs looked relieved to stop—the first time she had seen that. Emo pulled out his
panna
and began probing the snow. He found a drift he liked and without saying anything at all began cutting out snow blocks. He stood within the circle he assembled and spiralled it up slowly over the course of the next hour. It was growing dark quickly now. Penny untied the dogs from the sleds and stood the sleds on edge, then brought the kit bags from the sleds toward the iglu-in-formation. Emo did not look at her. She watched him as he worked in the dying light, finally reaching over his head and laying in place the top block of the iglu, sealing himself inside.

His
panna
began sawing out an arch at the base of the iglu and his foot followed a moment later, kicking the snow out of the entrance-way Penny passed him their gear and then crawled in after it.

After that first overnight, they met every Saturday morning and travelled as far as they could in a chosen direction before sunset. The following day they made their way back to town. They always made slower time coming home, partly because the dogs weren’t as fresh, but mostly because neither of them wanted to come back.

Pauloosie stopped his snow machine four hundred yards downwind of the
tuktu
, thirty of them chewing away at exposed lichen jutting out of the snow and hardly responding to the racket of the two-stroke
engine or the reflection off the plastic windshield and hood. The sun was bright, doubled again by the glare off the snow. He wore leather pilots’ goggles beneath a wool-lined scalp-hugging cap, and he slipped the goggles up on his forehead as he swung his leg off the machine, keeping it between him and the
tuktu
, crouching now to retrieve the rifle wrapped in a blanket and oilskin in the komatik he dragged behind the snowmobile. He untied the frozen cord around the oilskin, taking off his mitts to pull the knot apart with his fingers. The knot yielded to him just as he lost the ability to move his fingers in the cold. He slipped his hands back into his mitts and breathed quietly as the ache of their revival ran through him. Around his eyes were discs of white skin. Naked, he looked like his face, neck, and hands had been dipped in teak oil, with slices of cucumber, perhaps, over his eyes, where his sun goggles sat.