Consumption (38 page)

“So you think this is all just in her mind?”

Marie looked at her mother with wide eyes and shook her head desperately.

“Of course I don’t, but sometimes illnesses bring about behaviours that make weight loss worse, and sometimes chemical abnormalities in the brain, like in the rest of the body, can make people thin. The psychiatrists are down there, is the thing, and if there’s nothing they have to add then that’s—”

“I don’t think she needs to see a psychiatrist.”

“It’s just that, as long as she is down there—”

“No. We’re not crazy, here.”

Justine put down her homework and answered the knock on the door. She opened it wide because at first she didn’t see anyone. Then she saw Simionie, standing out of the light.

“I saw you in the window. I thought you were your mother,” he said.

“Do you want her?”

He nodded yes.

“Mom!”

Victoria appeared at the door. “Oh good God,” she said. “It’s you.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “A little skinny, but okay.”

“Come in then, and tell me what you know.”

He walked into the first wooden house he had entered in three months. As he smelled the odour of cooking and laundry, he was overcome.

“Where have you been?” Victoria asked him as he turned away from her and blinked away tears. “Have you seen Pauloosie?”

She walked around him to see his face. He reached for her.

Justine and Marie were right there and she started to push him away but then she saw his expression and she held him.

When Penny’s emaciated dogs started to appear in town, circling warily among those chained up on the Bay ice, there was a discussion among the hunters of what this meant. They soon concluded she had to be dead. The RCMP came out to look at and photograph the animals, and then the animal control officer was called to dispose of them before they attacked someone. It seemed unfair to the other hunters that these dogs, which had been very good dogs indeed, should meet such an end because of the impetuousness of their owner, who had not understood the land as well as she thought she did. But the dogs were bad luck now, so none of the hunters were willing to accept them.

Johanna came home from work to find Penny’s lead, Norbert—at least a hollower, more frightened version of him—sitting beside the entrance to their apartment building, wagging his tail. Penny had brought him into her home sometimes (alarming her Kablunauk neighbours) and he had come looking for succour. Johanna knew what his return meant. She let the dog inside and took him up to her apartment, opening the door and trying to shush him in before any of the neighbours noticed. He looked down the hallway at Penny’s door, whining. Johanna pushed him in. She unthawed a steak in her microwave and let him eat it. She did not stroke him and she held a large wooden pepper grinder in her hands as he ate, and chewed on the inside of her own cheek.

When he had eaten that steak she unthawed another and watched him eat it too. There was a rump roast at the back of the freezer she had forgotten about. He ate that. Then he looked up at her and she looked at him. He walked to her door and pawed at it. She took the key Penny had given her and they walked down the hall to Penny’s door and went in.

Johanna had been watering the plants for months now and the apartment was thick with foliage in a way it had never been when Penny was here. Her things were as she had left them in her hasty
packing. There was a box of rifle ammunition on her kitchen table. Her shotgun lay in its case on the sofa. A box of freeze-dried meals she had deemed excessive (and had longed for, subsequently) sat beside it. Johanna had been picking up Penny’s mail too, and it sat in a large mound in a box she had placed beside the door. Johanna stooped to sift through the mail, looking for letters from Alberta. She found one. Penny’s father. Johanna sat at the kitchen table and copied down the address.

She wrote to him that she thought Penny was probably dead now, that she had been watering her plants and everything but there wasn’t likely any point in paying the apartment rent any more. She could pack up her things if he wanted, and send them to him. Penny lived pretty lightly, she didn’t have much. Once she gave away the food, there would probably be only a few hundred pounds of possessions here. She wrote that she had admired his daughter a great deal. She wished she could shed more light on her decision to go out on the land like she had, so abruptly. She thought she might have been in love with one of the local hunters, who had also gone out on a long trip, and she wondered if she had meant to join him. Everyone in town thought he was dead too. On the other hand, maybe she had meant only to make a slightly longer trip than usual and had an accident out there. There was no way of knowing, really.

They had made a canoe trip the summer before, she wrote. Penny had spoken of him, of growing up on the farm with her father and grandfather and of how much she loved those two men. Johanna didn’t know what else to write except that she understood how wonderful his daughter was, understood the extent of his loss. He mustn’t think that she met foul play with this hunter. She knew him a little and was certain nothing like that had happened.

Johanna folded the letter and then found an envelope in one of Penny’s kitchen drawers. She addressed the envelope and licked it shut. She looked around the dishevelled room and cried for a little while. Then she stood up and took Norbert back to her place.

Tagak sat in his office on the mine site. He spent four days a week here now, and the fifth in town, interviewing prospective employees. He had bought several suits; he was getting rich. He read the morning mail and thought at the same time about his sister and her troubles. His wife had called him again, to say that Victoria looked like she was having a meltdown, that his father was wandering incoherently and aimlessly through town dressed in a housecoat, and that his nieces had everyone worried. Marie looked like she had to have
puvaluq
and the older one like she thought she was a TV actor or something.

The four days a week out at the mine were a not unattractive aspect of the job. Tagak spent them in the company of men who had not known him as a boy, or as an awkward, inadequate young hunter. He had become a friend of the Greek manager, who was sorry about the death of his brother-in-law. Sorrier, it seemed, than Tagak was, though Tagak found himself more interested in and admiring of Robertson now than when the man was alive. The Greek reminded him that the mine was partly Robertson’s work, and the wealth that flowed into the community as a consequence was partly Robertson’s gift.

Gift
would not have been the word Tagak would have chosen. He had known Robertson for many years and had never known him to be noticeably generous with his money, except to Victoria. Tagak lived with a difficult woman too, and thought he could guess at some of the things that had been said in that house. The Greek had mentioned that he had eaten supper there, which had surprised Tagak; his own wife would have told the entire town if she had cooked for the mine manager and Victoria had not mentioned it even to her brother.

He was grateful to Victoria, nevertheless, and by extension to Robertson for having arranged this job, which was the first thing he had ever done well. That was the thing about this life of the
Kablunauks: it was possible to be good at something other than one thing. The young men—Okpatayauk and his friends—romanticized a way of life that would swallow them whole in a second, if they chose to pursue it. They were too thoughtful, too sensitive, too impatient, those young men so knowledgeable of legal terms.

He decided that he would ask his mother and father to move into his home. He knew that Catharine would protest, but ultimately she would understand. Someone—probably Catharine—would say that Victoria, with no husband in that big house, should take them in, but he would reply that they were doing better than Victoria was, which would provide Catharine with a moment’s pleasure. His father had been disappointed in Tagak his whole life. Perhaps he would become more lucid with regular meals, surrounded by children and company. Tagak would like it if, during even one moment of lucidity, his father would say “thank you.” He daydreamed about this scene for a moment and then he picked up his telephone and called his wife back, and initiated the process. In a few days he would call his mother. She would only be relieved.

He had been invited by the Greek to eat supper with him that night. He was making something called dolmades. Tagak had looked this up in his dictionary. There were grape leaves involved. He had not known they were edible. Grapes were available at the Northern Store in Rankin Inlet, and at the cafeteria at the mine; why weren’t the leaves more commonly available, if they were good to eat? Were only special, Greek grape leaves edible or were all grape leaves? This launched another thought: where had he got them? Had a friend mailed him some from Greece? Where exactly was Greece, anyway?

Simionie sat in the RCMP office with a Styrofoam cup of coffee between his hands and Constable Bridgeford across from him.

“The thing is, when people disappear like that immediately after we’ve questioned them about a crime, after we’ve told them to
remain available, we pretty much conclude that they’ve got something to hide,” Bridgeford said.

“I did not kill Robertson.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It’s true.”

“Then why did you disappear?”

“Because I thought you were going to blame me.”

“Well, if you’re so innocent, why not stick around and show us that?”

“How many men left after that murder? Two? Me and Pauloosie. Do you think we both killed him, or do you think we each concluded that you were probably going to blame us one way or the other?”

“Where were you again, that morning Robertson was killed?”

“At my parents’ house. They were there, as you know.”

“And when was the last time you saw him alive?”

“At the mining commission meeting.”

“And did you oppose his work for the mine?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell Okpatayauk about these diamonds he supposedly received?”