Consumption (3 page)

The priest was mute on the subject of why he had left Lake Harbour. He told Victoria that the sanatorium they were travelling to was a place she would love more in retrospect, after she was home again and healthy, than during her stay. He told her she was lucky to be alive now, when the infection in her lungs was curable with
antibiotics and surgery—only a few years before it had not been so. Many friends of his had died of this sickness in Normandy when he had been a boy; the cattle and the farmers exchanged tuberculosis infection with one another in a constant cycle of blood-streaked coughing and fever. She had spent enough time with Breton priests by this point to think to herself how odd it was that this Frenchman was suggesting that she was lucky not to be more like him.

After the Superior ocean came more miles of forest, taiga similar to that she had glimpsed on the treeline south of Arviat, but more vigorous, and studded with poles holding wires, and occasionally with roads. Then the land gave way to flatness that reminded her of the barrenlands, marked into squares like the quilts the nuns made in Chesterfield Inlet. She saw men working the land, and the priest told her they were cutting grain, gathering the plant that they turned into the flour with which they made bannock. They stopped for a day in a place called Winnipeg, which she had seen pictures of, more than she had of the Superior ocean, anyway. Or of land as level and brown and dry as tightly stretched and scraped caribou skin.

The priest took her for a walk around the railway station, across Main Street to Broadway Avenue and into the lobby of the Hotel Fort Garry, which looked like a brighter version of the granite convent of the nuns in Montreal. The desk clerk clicked his tongue at the priest and so he took Victoria outside again and they walked up another street to the Eaton’s store, where the priest bought her a pen and notebook of her own, and a coat and some boots and a sweater and a skirt and leggings. Around them streamed crowds of people on every side. Victoria had lived her life travelling with her family of four, and her uncle’s family of six; counting the summertime congregations on the coast, and the nuns and priests and patients in Chesterfield Inlet, she had seen perhaps one hundred other human beings in her life. There were this many within her field of sight at any moment in the Eaton’s store. Walking down Portage Avenue, there were many times that number streaming past
every minute. When the priest spoke to her in Inuktitut, people looked at them and did not smile. They spent the rest of that day walking silently around the loud streets, and even as it was becoming dusk Victoria did not stop staring at everything she saw.

That evening, they got back onto their train. It launched into motion as she was climbing into her bunk after saying her prayers—at the priest’s insistence. She fell asleep to the swaying motion of the train, and all that night she inhabited dreams that were louder and more rapidly moving than anything she had known. She thought to herself, in her sleep, that this was strange, and must be a result of her visit to the city. Then she settled back and enjoyed them, less worried that she was going mad.

The following day passed in a green and auburn blur of Jack pine and black spruce and tamarack trees, as the train headed north. The farms began to thin out and the grain fields gave way to pasture and then to bush. After the evening meal, the priest told Victoria that the next day they would reach the hospital, where she would remain until she was cured.

Would there be other people there who spoke her language, she asked?

There would be.

Victoria said good night to Père Raymond and crawled into her berth. Behind the black felt curtain she removed her dress and changed into the coarse woollen nightgown the nuns had pressed upon her in Montreal. As she fell asleep she listened to the priest whispering his own prayers, over and over again, the click of his rosary beads in counterpoint to the rattling of the train.

After the vigour of Montreal and Winnipeg, The Pas was a forlorn-looking place. By the time the train had come to a stop in the station, Victoria had seen enough to be disappointed by the bush town’s muddy streets and its drab hardware store and bars. Père Raymond and Victoria were met at the station by a female orderly, a Cree woman who introduced herself as Donelda Pierce. The priest stood by the train and did not move when Donelda motioned for
Victoria to follow her. He was continuing north, to Churchill on Hudson Bay. Victoria wanted to stay with him. When he got off the train at his final destination he would be only three hundred miles from her family. He had lived on Baffin Island and would have known how to handle dogs—two weeks travel, once the ice was hard. The priest stepped back onto the train and waved goodbye as it began to pull away.

In the hospital, the children slept in white-painted steel frame beds in great open wards. Every night the lights were turned off abruptly at nine, and no further reading or speaking was allowed. The lights were switched back on at six in the morning. Breakfast was at seven and the ward rounds at eight. The children were expected to be standing beside their beds when the phthisiologist visited them to listen to their chests and examine their fever charts. Every week they were weighed and had their sputa collected; every two weeks their blood was drawn, in a wincing and whimpering morning.

They took their medicines—their weekly injections of streptomycin, and every other day the pills: isoniazid, pyrazinamide, and ethambutol. One of the boys turned bright yellow from these pills; the whites of his eyes looked more like yolks, and his urine, he claimed, was the colour of tea.

The children became, for the most part, healthier. They gained weight, and they became more active, but their homesickness was profound. At night, among the boys especially, the sound of weeping was nearly as steady as that of coughing. Altogether there were twenty-five other children and a dozen adults—on another ward—brought down from the Keewatin Territory, a term she had not heard used to describe her home before. Donelda, who appeared every morning to help feed and dress the youngest children, told her that
Keewatin
was from the Cree—Donelda’s language—and meant “north wind.” Donelda’s people considered Victoria’s home country to be uninhabitable by men. When Victoria first walked with the other children on the grounds, she met adults from areas north and
south of where her father hunted along Hudson Bay. Walking among the unfamiliar trees, an older man and a woman knelt to speak their language to her, but their dialect was different, and she understood little of what they said. It was tantalizing to be among people almost like her family, whose language was almost the one she spoke. When they gave up and walked away, Victoria began sobbing and ran inside.

The other Inuit at the sanatorium were mostly Padleimiut, from the inland areas near Churchill, to the south of the land Victoria’s father hunted. Their dialect was nearly as difficult as the priest’s had been. For thank you, they said
mutna
rather than
koyenamee
and the differences went from there. It sounded like they were speaking with gravel in their mouths.

For Victoria, and two other children, the pills did not work. Even after six months she had not put on weight, and Donelda asked her, in her halting Inuktitut, if she was homesick. Victoria said she was, but she was eating as much as she could fit in her belly every mealtime.

She and the two other “non-responders” were examined at particular length every week. Their pills were changed—escalating doses of different antibiotics—and they were X-rayed more often than the others. Her companions in illness were a brother and sister from Salluit, on Southampton Island, where Victoria’s family had gone to hunt walrus two winters previously. The boy was named Abraham and the girl Faith; they were Nakoolaks, a family Victoria had heard of. Their dialect was closer to Victoria’s than anyone else’s in the sanatorium. Faith was sixteen and her brother seven. They had younger twin sisters named Hope and Charity, which Faith had learned to relate to the adults in the sanatorium to elicit a smile. When Victoria learned the names of Faith’s sisters, she only nodded gravely and enquired after their health.

After his daughter had been taken away on the
C.D. Howe
, Emo decided to bring his family back to Chesterfield Inlet until the ice froze. They struck camp two days after the government ship had disappeared over the horizon and began walking south along the coast. Winnie was angry with Emo for having allowed the doctors to take Victoria away, and did not speak to him for the first seventy miles of walking. In the rough clumps of tundra grass and eskers, this had amounted to several days. Tagak and his father had had to content themselves with each other’s conversation.

It was getting late in summer and the rain was beginning. At night it turned into sleet. But it hadn’t snowed yet and so they stayed in their canvas tent, purchased several years earlier with the earnings of a good winter’s fox trapping. The tent was patched in many places and looked like clothing as much as it did shelter. It leaked anywhere the cloth was not absolutely taut.

When the Hôpital Sainte-Thérèse came into view, Tagak pointed to it and his mother and father looked up from the sleet-sodden tundra grass immediately in front of their feet. The three-storey wooden building stood out like a navigational marker, as high as it was wide, visible for ten miles in any direction. That evening they ran out of daylight and had to camp on the tundra in the rain, within sight of the twinkling lights of the hospital.

Emo’s dogs were in Chesterfield Inlet and his winter gear was cached on the edge of the community, near where the dogs were tied up. He had asked his brother to feed them fish he had dried for this purpose. Fish is poor food for fattening dogs, but it was not yet winter and the dogs were not working, and anyway, the caribou hunting was bad. Emo sat at the tent entrance and looked toward town as the last of the sun’s glow disappeared to the southwest. He heard dogs baying and thought he could recognize his own. He missed them. A hunter without his dogs is hardly a man at all.

In the tent behind him, Tagak was trying to lash a leather trace onto a steel harpoon head. The harpoon was for seal and, perhaps, if the season wasn’t too late, for
arviaat
, beluga whale. They had
caught a whale early in the summer, and had shared out the
muqtuq
with the entire hungry community. The food had gone quickly. No more whales came down the coast that summer. But the biggest problem was that there were so few
tuktu
that year, as there had been for the last two years. Emo thought that the mosquitoes, which were even more than routinely ferocious that summer, had killed them. He had advanced this theory to the other hunters and they had dismissed him. But it was still what he thought.

It was not a disaster to have sent Victoria away. There was food on that ship and the girl had not looked right for months, all that sweating every night. He didn’t know if they would send her back, however, and he didn’t know how long she would be away. For ten years the Kablunauks had been coming north in the summer in their ships to find people with
puvaluq
and take them away. He had heard of a few who reappeared, a year or two or three later, fat and with strange clothes. But there had been many many who had not, and no one knew whether they had died or decided to stay in the south. He had also heard that sometimes the children—God help them—were raised by the Cree. Those children were thought to never come back to their parents. This was why Winnie was so angry at him.

It wasn’t the only reason. Emo had decided that after he collected his gear, he would take the family to Rankin Inlet, where the nickel mine had opened. The mine owners were providing wooden homes to Inuit men who were prepared to work there, to live in one place and eat bannock and tinned meat. After the last years of dismal hunting, it seemed to Emo like a fair exchange. Winnie thought otherwise. She thought that their dignity would not be preserved, living in the shacks the mining company had built, tucked close to one another like dog pens. Emo thought it was better than starving. Winnie said it wasn’t. It was therefore a difficult dispute to resolve. But the decision was, in the end, his.

She did not understand how hard he had hunted for the meagre amounts of food he had brought home these last two years. She did
not realize that he didn’t see as well, and couldn’t run as fast as when the deer first began disappearing. If he could just explain to her how hard it was out there, she might see why living in the Kablunauk town made sense. But he was unable to tell her these things. He imagined she would find such words embarrassing. He imagined she hadn’t known all along how hard he had been hunting.