Consumption (32 page)

Justine was sitting in the living room of what they still called the new house two years after they had moved into it, listening to her Walkman, when her mother came home. She sat down at the kitchen table.

“Is that you, Mom?” Justine called from the living room.

“Yes,” Victoria said.

When Marie returned from the library she came in the kitchen door to find Victoria holding Justine on her lap, the first time she had seen that in years. She ran to her mother and her sister.

“You heard?” her mother asked.

“How did it happen?” she asked, sobbing.

“I don’t know, they’re still looking into it,” Victoria said.

“Was it fast?” Marie asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Another stroke would have been awful.”

Victoria lifted her head. “It isn’t your grandfather, Marie.”

Constable Bridgeford had heard about the exchange of accusations at the mining commission meeting. After Susan Pazniuk called him and asked him to come to the nursing station, he supposed there had been a fight. The sight of Robertson’s slashed-open throat froze him—as much for Robertson’s sake as in grief for the person who had done this. In gentle places, murders are committed by friends, kin, lovers.

The constable sat down on a stool in the trauma room and wound back the film in his camera, listening to the squeal of the flash. The son was an obvious choice. He had been kicked out of the house after the meeting, and was sullen and silent and hardly talked to any Kablunauks in town. Everyone had seen that side of him. And his father a white man.

Or one of the man’s business partners, feeling betrayed, perhaps. But who, in business in the north, was as naïve as that? He’d start with the boy. The statement from Terry Umiak didn’t seem very helpful. And the puddle Robertson had been found beside was a streak of blood and meltwater, making for the sea.

Pauloosie was walking down Water Lake Road with two of his dogs, headed out of town, when Bridgeford stopped the police ATV beside him.

“Good afternoon, Pauloosie.”

“’Lo,” he replied and continued walking. Bridgeford put the ATV back into gear and rode along beside him.

“Pauloosie, I’d like you to set your rifle down on the ground.”

He stopped. “Why?”

Bridgeford set his hand on his pistol and unsnapped the shoulder strap over it. The sound punctuated Pauloosie’s question.

“Pauloosie, set your rifle down.”

The boy stared at the Mountie for a long minute. Then he opened the action of the rifle and revealed it to be unloaded. He leaned it on a stone carefully so that no snow or moss would get in the action. Bridgeford stepped forward and picked it up. “Come with me, please.” The boy looked at him with curiosity.

When Balthazar met the priest in the hallway, Bernard was carrying a teapot up to his room. Balthazar told the old man how Robertson had been found with his throat slashed. As the words settled on Bernard, it looked as if he might collapse.

“Ah,” he kept repeating as the story unfolded, aging a bit with each detail. When Balthazar was done, Bernard looked crumpled and beaten.

He sagged against the wall and dribbled tea out of his teapot. “So many lives,” he said. “What will Victoria do now? And her son, and that youngest girl? Ah.” He shook his head.

Balthazar watched the priest climb the stairs to his rooms, shoulders stooped, and dribbling tea as he went. He considered whether Bernard would be okay, and then he considered whether he himself would be. He closed his door behind him, shrugging off his parka, and sat down in his living room. Out the window the lights of the town twinkled all around.

Later that night the priest knocked on Balthazar’s apartment door. The doctor bade him enter and together they listened to Dexter Gordon play the Horace Silver ballad “Darn That Dream.” When it was finished they listened to the turntable go around and around, needle scratching soothingly, both lost in thought. And then the priest stood, nodded good night to Balthazar, and padded back to his apartment.

At the funeral, Victoria stood beside her father and clutched his arm, supporting the old man, who seemed to believe that he was attending the funeral of his decades-dead brother. He hissed to Victoria that he thought his sister-in-law would be remarried in a month. She nodded sadly. “It’s okay, it’ll be better for the kids,” he said, patting her arm.

As he read the service, Father Bernard looked drawn and tired. Balthazar sat in the back and listened as his friend read out the liturgy in Inuktitut. The priest’s unaccented Inuktitut was a marvel to Balthazar, who, in his twenty years in the north, had accumulated maybe a hundred words. It was as unthinkable that the priest would maintain an apartment in the south as it was, apparently, for the doctor to learn the language of his patients.

Balthazar was struck once again by the old man’s air
of gravitas
as he intoned from his pulpit. It had never been clear to Balthazar how Father Bernard had felt about Robertson. He was fond of Victoria, that much was clear—the two men smelled it upon each other—but Balthazar could not recall the priest ever offering an opinion about her husband. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have opinions about people in the community, or that he was reluctant to express them. In the priest’s grief, Balthazar had seen an affection for the man he had not been aware of. But now Father Bernard stood straight and recited from Job to the assembled, his personal feelings suppressed so as not to impose on those who might have need of him. He was inspiring to watch, Balthazar the atheist thought. That was probably the idea.

When it was time to sing, Balthazar stood with everyone else and hummed as the translated hymns rung out in polyphonic and at times imperfect harmony. Justine and Marie wept quietly and Victoria struggled to hold back her tears. No one from the Ikhirahlo Group was at the church.

Simon Alvah sat in the back row and watched solemnly. He wore a black suit that he had produced, miraculously intact if redolent of kerosene. He bowed his head and prayed aloud in Inuktitut with the rest of the congregation. No one asked him what he was doing there. Pauloosie sat in the same pew, accompanied by Constable Bridgeford and beset by torments everyone present was prepared to offer an explanation for. His mother had not acknowledged him. His sisters had reached out for him when they saw him, only to be pulled past by their mother.

Justine perched on Oiltank Hill overlooking the harbour. In the bay was the year’s last barge, just arrived from Montreal ahead of the ice. A tug was manoeuvring it alongside the wharf. In the afternoon light, the collection of men and forklift trucks gathered there seemed to vibrate in anticipation. Around her were ripening cloudberries growing through sphagnum moss and Labrador tea. Mice scurried through the moss, making small shivers in the green; circling in the sky was a snowy owl, looking to feed on these sensibly hidden creatures. She had been here since just before dawn.

When she had got up, her sister had rolled over and watched her dress. Even in the dark Justine could see Marie’s dulled eyes opening and she shushed her quietly. The younger girl did not speak, and after her sister had gone, she turned away to face the wall, breathing slowly but without ease.

Justine crept out through the kitchen, where the dishes were stacked haphazardly, pots half-full of pointlessly heated soup. She pulled on her shoes and a windbreaker and eased out the kitchen door. The sky was pale in the east, the breaking light illuminating the moss and rocks enough for her to pick her way out to the shore, where she sat down and looked at the water.

What she thought was, This place is falling apart. She was surprised by how shattered she felt. She had not known her father well, had not felt well known by him. Since she had been old enough to reflect on these things, it had always seemed to her that she was next on his to-do list, after Pauloosie, and whatever it was that was happening at work at any given moment, and the ongoing salvage attempt on his marriage, and even Marie. But with his death, she felt her whole world shift from under her.

When he had been living, but absent, his work had been the thing that took him away all the time, and the work seemed to Justine both uninteresting and oppressive. She hadn’t thought about it much, except to resent it. Now, it seemed important to her to
understand whether it was true that he had been corrupt, what role he had played in bringing the hospital to Rankin Inlet, what he had done for the mining consortium. His smell was vanishing from the house, the memory of his tired, sadly smiling face—grey benignity—supplanted by the frozen white grimace she had last glimpsed. His work would endure long after these impressions of him had evaporated, she knew.