Consumption (26 page)

There were building sites all along the edge of the community now. Wherever there was a clear spot of tundra adjacent to a road, a bulldozer appeared. The pace of construction was such that no one had
the time to try to make their building distinguishable from anyone else’s. The buildings sprouting up were all the same prefabricated white vinyl-sided model shipped in bulk to the port in the summer. Flying into town, the settlement looked like a crystalline fractal, expanding outwards in unpredictable but ordered multiples of identical little units. There was a white vinyl-sided VCR rental store now, and a white vinyl-sided optician’s and a white vinyl-sided adult lingerie and marital aid store. The hospital arose almost without anyone noticing.

Robertson walked every day from his new house on the bay out to the road where the hospital was being built. He watched the pilings being sunk into the rock, the concrete being poured, and the steel floor joists being laid.

In the architect’s drawing it was a beautiful building. Two storeys, with an operating theatre and a delivery room adjacent to each other, a lab, an X-ray department, a library, and a huge outpatient clinic. Happy-looking pencil-sketched children played in the waiting room and there were implausible-looking trees beside the entrance, with bicycles parked alongside.

When construction began, Balthazar had called the Ministry of Health, asking if it wasn’t too late to redirect the money into housing for the people who didn’t work at the mine—or to community health programs. The voice on the other end was astonished at the idea. In the ministry they considered the hospital in Rankin Inlet their principle accomplishment that year and, better yet, done with the private funding. They had never felt so smart. Who was this man Balthazar, anyway? How long had he been working for them?

Robertson was home much more now. The centre of his business was no longer in Yellowknife or Toronto but on his own doorstep, and he was now the one conducting eager-to-please strangers into meeting rooms, or across the tundra and out on the ice. He was called “the fix-it man” by the mine’s leadership and this is what he did. When one of the geologists got drunk at the hotel and got into a fist
fight with the mayor’s son, it was Robertson who smoothed things over, arranging a job at the mine for the newly gap-toothed son.

It was his habit to rise before anyone else in the house. In the early summer the sun was up at three and this morning Robertson was up by five, sitting on the porch steps of their log house drinking coffee. Victoria appeared, her own coffee cup in hand. “Hey,” she said as she sat down beside him. He looked at her in surprise.

“What’s up?” he asked, the smallest bit of alarm in his voice.

“Nothing,” she said soothingly.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I’ll put tinfoil over the window today.”

“It’s nice out this morning.”

“This house is growing on me.”

“I’m glad you changed your mind. When did Pauloosie say he was getting back?”

“Maybe today, if not, tomorrow. Dad thought the weather would be good.”

“Is his ATV working better?”

“I bought him a new one.”

“He liked that?”

“Seemed to,” she said.

“Good. Maybe he’ll decide I’m not a waste of air after all.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

And then Robertson realized that, for the first time in years, he and his wife were joking with each other. He looked at her and then he looked out at the tundra glowing beneath the climbing sun and he thought to himself how beautiful this land was.

Tagak’s wife, Catharine, walked through the frozen meat section of the Northern Store and groaned inwardly at the price of the roasts. Her husband was out hunting again, but he usually had bad luck. His father brought them meat periodically, but there was tension
between Emo and his son on that point. Most of the old man’s spare meat went to Victoria’s family—her Kablunauk husband could not be expected to hunt competently—while Tagak, what was the matter with him anyway?

At that moment Tagak was climbing a ridge on his ATV. He had thought he had seen
tuktu
grazing on the crest, but as he came closer, he realized that it was only black boulders jutting into the sky. He stopped his Honda and let it idle. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. He bent over his lighter, trying again and again to light it in the wind that swirled all around him. He faced north. He faced south. Finally he pulled his arms inside his jacket and tucked his head inside, and in the darkness he lit his cigarette. He became aware that his beard was on fire as he was exhaling that first deep drag. He stood up off his ATV and ran blindly until he tripped on a rock and fell over, face first onto the tundra, and the fire was extinguished as it sizzled into his chin.

Catharine was hefting a forty-dollar roast into her cart when Victoria touched her on the shoulder.
“Kahnaweepie?”
she asked at the same instant that Tagak sat up and thrust his head through the top of his parka, still pulling on the cigarette and rubbing his face.

“Not so good,” Catharine said. “Tagak hasn’t caught a caribou in two months and the assistance cheque barely covers the heating bill.” She held up the roast she had just put in her cart. “And forty dollars for a piece of meat this size.”

“Pauloosie shot two caribou yesterday. I’ll have him bring one over.”

“Thanks. But who wants to be always asking for help?” Catharine shook her head.

“Do you think Tagak would take a job with the mine?”

“Oh, he would, whether he wanted to or not.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Let me talk to Robertson.”

Robertson visited the mine twice a week. After the helicopter set down he met with Vangelis, the site director, and together they reviewed the perception of the mine in Rankin Inlet, the adequacy of the support services, and the plans and needs for shipping the next summer. Robertson kept these conversations short and efficient and this was appreciated by the Greek engineer, who hardly seemed to stop moving.

Vangelis had worked for two decades in the Botswana diamond mines and in Sierra Leone. Robertson liked him, detected in him a sensibility he largely shared, which had to do with the nature of the work and isolation each man had constructed as a sort of shield. In the summer of 1990, the second year of the mine’s operation, Robertson had noticed a perceptible warming of the Greek’s demeanour. He surmised it had to do with better-than-expected progress at the mine, which had won Vangelis the appreciation of his employers. He led Robertson to his private office, a warm den incongruently furnished in hardwood panelling and Iranian carpets. The Greek shrugged as Robertson took it all in. “I spend all my time on the site and I need to have one place to come where it is beautiful.” It was late afternoon and the weather had delayed the helicopter’s departure; Robertson would have to sleep on site. The Greek poured him a tall glass of whisky and they sat down in leather chairs that would not have looked out of place in a private New York club.

“Everyone here seems in good spirits,” Robertson said cautiously, taking a sip of the whisky.

“The mine turned a handsome profit this year.”

“Yes?” Robertson said, though he knew as much already.

“Yes, a very satisfactory one. We were all pleasantly surprised.”

“As I am.”

“The miners all seem pleased as well.”

“The year-end bonuses were generous.”

“I have been asked to talk to you about your own circumstances. Your status is a little ambiguous—you are not an employee, but we feel you are a part of our family.”

“Thank you.”

“And therefore entitled to a share of our good fortune.”

“Oh?”

The Greek passed him a cloth bag. Robertson emptied from it seven large uncut diamonds. They looked like sea glass, opaque and irregular pebbles he would never have remarked upon if he had picked one of them up on a beach somewhere.

“None of those are less than three carats.”

“I don’t know quite what to say.”

“It is only what you deserve.”

There was a pause as Robertson held each of the stones up to the light, admiring them.

Vangelis said quietly, “The rules of accounting are such that they cannot, of course, show up on any income statements.”

“I understand.”

Marble Island lies just north of the mouth of Rankin Inlet, looking out onto Hudson Bay much the way Manhattan looks out onto the Atlantic. It has a melancholy history. Because of its perfectly protected harbour, successive expeditions of explorers and whalers chose to overwinter there in the last three centuries; the Knight Expedition slowly starved to death in 1719, after their vessels were crushed by ice in the lagoon. The crew dragged their stores ashore and thought they would wait for the Hudson’s Bay Company to send a rescue ship. None arrived for three years. When finally a small trading sloop, searching for copper, landed on Marble Island, all that remained were graves and a mound of coal salvaged from the wrecks.

The Inuit regard Marble Island with caution too. The tradition is to climb up past the high waterline on one’s knees in deference to its
ghosts. They must have had their share of calamities, too, on that blasted spot.

In 1990, the crosses that still marked those graves overlooked Emo as he steered the boat in circles within the lagoon, Pauloosie kneeling in the bow, holding his grandfather’s 30–06. The whales had been down now for long minutes. Emo was about to conclude that they had got away when a great streak of white appeared in the centre of the lagoon, sounding a deep resonant gasp, then descended again. The whale’s podmates followed and when the third whale blew Pauloosie had his rifle levelled at the spot. He fired and a cloud of red appeared in the water. The whale he had hit remained on the surface, swimming in tightening circles. When Pauloosie fired again the whale shuddered and stopped moving and began slowly to settle in the lagoon. Emo raced toward it as Pauloosie reached for the harpoon, throwing it with a shout into the water. Both men exhaled in relief when they saw that it had lodged in the sinking whale. Pauloosie made the harpoon line fast on the boat and Emo steered toward shore.

When they had beached the boat, they leapt into the water and began hauling on the harpoon line. The whale had sunk deep in the water now and it was all they could do to move it even a few inches. The leather trace they pulled on stretched tight as the two men staggered backwards, gripping the gravel bottom with their
kamiks
, slipping and heaving.

Slowly the line shortened. When Pauloosie caught the first glimpse of the whale’s snowy bulk he shouted to his grandfather. It was a bull, the biggest he had seen. Emo nodded and kept pulling, and did his best to remain upright. When the animal was within six feet of the beach Emo reached out and laid his hand on its back, grinning. Then the animal gave a great shake of its powerful tail and struck Pauloosie, throwing him into the water on his back. As he struggled to regain his footing, Emo was left with the full weight of the whale on the harpoon tether. He dug in his short legs but was
pulled steadily deeper into the water by the thrashing whale. He was up to his chest when a shot rang out and a parabola of whale brains was sprayed across the still lagoon. Pauloosie set down the rifle and gripped the tether again, pulling until the whale lay motionless and limp on the shore. Emo dropped the tether and, gasping for breath, he stumbled up to the high-tide line and sat down on a rock, looking more wan and exhausted than his grandson had ever seen him.