Consumption (46 page)

Kat, like almost every other boy he knew, had been raised by his mother and there had never been any hunting or fishing trips in his urban boyhood. To him, rifles were devices from movies with mythic more than practical purposes. He held Lewis’s
.22
to his shoulder just as Lewis had, and aimed at the wall. He sighted along the crude open sight and squeezed the trigger. Click. He tried to pull the bolt back but it was locked. He fumbled with the action before figuring out that he had to rotate the bolt up to unlock it, and then he pulled it back, feeling the firing-pin spring resisting him, and then he slid it forward and locked the bolt. Click.

He laid the rifle across his knees and admired the dull brown wood. He pulled the magazine from it and examined it. He spilled cartridges into his hand from the decades-old box of shells. He could barely make out the word Remington, it was so faded. He put a shell in the magazine. And then another. After ten were in, he couldn’t fit any more. He inserted the magazine into the rifle. He worked the bolt again, and once again, shells flew across the room. Lewis watched him, leaning back against the wall of the little storage cupboard. Kat lifted the rifle and pointed it at Lewis. Lewis grinned.

“Careful, buddy,” he said. They were both very high but in that moment a kind of clarity settled over them, a sense of the triviality of their own disordered lives, made so evident by this device and its power and the way it urged a person to use it. And then Kat’s finger tightened on the trigger.

The loudness of the report startled them both. Two floors above, Beth and Amanda sat up abruptly. Lewis shook his head. “Now we’re going to get it,” he said. Kat said nothing, letting the rifle settle back to the floor, its animated insistence fading now. Then he looked at Lewis, who was looking at his shirt, which was slowly starting to turn red. “Jesus Christ,” Lewis said. Kat did not move. Lewis coughed. He opened his shirt and the two boys looked at the small hole in the centre of his chest. Bright arterial blood pumped out of it unrestrained now by his clothing.

“Look at that,” Lewis said. And then he slipped to the floor and closed his eyes. Kat sat there.

TWENTY-FOUR

ALVAH SIMON HAD DETECTED SIGNS
of imminent breakup for fully two weeks but the ice had not begun to move. It was July already, and the sky hung warm and heavy. The floe edge was so close to shore it looked as if he could hit it with a well-thrown rock. But the ice, right up until the moment it fractured, was resolute and monolithic. There were pools of meltwater collected upon it, and teals and pintails swam in them, pausing in the journey to their high Arctic nesting grounds. All around him, Alvah saw resurgent signs of summer, but still his steel sailboat was stuck fast.

He had read of whaling crews who had frozen in, as he had, for the winter, and had remained stuck the following unusually cool and brief summer. For long anxious moments he wondered if the same thing could happen to him. Admittedly, the consequences would be less absolute—he would walk to town and buy a snowmobile to haul in more food and fuel for his boat. The whalers had had to cut up their boots to make stew, and burn the furniture to heat the vessel. Flying home, however, would have been no more an option for him than it was for them. The boat had not failed him and he could not abandon it.

During those two weeks in which he expected daily to see the ice break apart and fall away, he rose every morning to study the
appearance of the sky, search the air longingly for a suggestion of southerly winds. One of these mornings on which he stood there, smelling the air and squinting into the west, he discerned a figure moving slowly across the rotten sea ice, wending in great arcs to avoid the huge pools of meltwater. Alvah watched the figure for three hours before it got close enough to the boat that he could make out the wild beard and oily parka. The dogs were thin and few, and evidently tired of running through the thick wet snow. The walking man stopped often to let them rest, before urging them forward.

When finally he stood beside the boat, Alvah had grown nervous enough that he had unpacked his rifle and laid it beneath a sheet of canvas in the cockpit. “Hello,” he said when they had taken each other in.

“Hello,” Pauloosie said.

“How may I help you?” He knew it was the boy.

“When the ice melts, are you leaving here?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Would you be prepared to wash?”

Balthazar knocked on the priest’s door. He listened closely but there was no sound inside. The idea of leaving without saying goodbye to Father Bernard, at least, saddened him. He turned from the door and walked to the stairs, half-carrying, half-dragging his heavy bags. He had clunked down a couple of steps when the priest opened his door. “Ah, it’s you,” the priest said.

“I’m leaving. I want to say thank you.”

“Yes, I heard about Marie. I assumed you would do something like this.”

It was the first time the priest had rebuked Balthazar. He needed no more rebukes, and he turned away. “Wait. Come in for a moment. Have a cup of tea,” the priest added.

Balthazar set down his bags. He looked at his feet. He left his bags on the stairs and turned around and walked back to the priest’s apartment. Father Bernard smiled faintly. He waited for Balthazar to enter and then he closed the door behind them and walked to his kitchen. Balthazar stood in his living room. Twenty years of friendship and all he wanted was to get out of there. The priest watched him as he put the tea kettle on to boil. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“To New York.”

“Will you come back?”

“No.”

“Will you work down there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So this is it, the end of your career.”

“It appears so.”

“I’m sorry it is under such circumstances.”

“Well. Me too.”

“You could write to me.”

“Thank you. I’ll send you records.”

“I’d like that.”

“How much longer will you stay here?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired too.”

“They will miss you when you go.”

“Some of the old ones, maybe. I will miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too, Bernard.”

“Victoria needs to grieve. When she has finished, she will see more clearly.”

“She sees clearly now.”

“You act as if you’ve never had an unfortunate outcome before.”

“No. I’m not inexperienced in losing patients. Especially Victoria’s family members. I don’t know what’s got into me.”

The priest smile ruefully. “If you had faith, I could prescribe a penance.”

“You make it sound tempting, somehow.”

The priest looked at the kettle. “It is a kind of egotism, self-flagellation such as this. The time for fervour is in the approach to God, not in response to his reversals.”

Balthazar didn’t wait for his tea, walked out of the apartment and to the stairs, where he picked up his bags.

When the west wind rose, at last, and the ice fractured, the sea cleared in an afternoon.

The next morning Pauloosie heaved the last of his dogs out of Alvah’s skiff and onto the beach north of Rankin Inlet. They weren’t quite as skinny as they had been—Alvah had been generous with his tinned meat, and then they had shot a seal that had climbed up onto the ice surrounding the boat. But the dogs remained malnourished, diminished creatures. Pauloosie stepped out of the skiff too and knelt. These were not pets, and were not used to being stroked. They stood around him, uncomfortable with his display of weakness. They stepped back, and then they stepped forward. They sensed he was about to leave and this distressed them. What they had just done, they had done together; they believed that as much as he did. One of them broke down and whined, and then the others joined in. They did not approach any closer. When he stood, they backed farther away. He turned and pushed the skiff off the beach. The dogs looked toward town and began walking as Pauloosie started the outboard motor.

The next day, Simon Alvah and Pauloosie pulled up the anchor and motored out of the Marble Island lagoon. Alvah turned the boat into the wind and, for the first time in a year, he hoisted the mainsail. As it rose, flies that had taken shelter in the folds of Dacron fell out onto the deck and wiggled their little legs in surprise. Alvah tightened the mainsheet and turned the boat to starboard, north. The boat heeled over and began making headway slowly. He unrolled the genoa and tightened the jib sheet. The
Umingmak
picked up speed
and the starboard rail hung lower, almost touching the water. The water behind the stern began to roil. Pauloosie held on to the boat, now at an alarming angle, and opened his eyes wide with fear. Would it roll right over? Alvah assured him they were okay. Pauloosie said, “I know.” And gripped the windward rail tighter.

All that day they charged north, the west coast of Hudson Bay just visible to port, hanging on the horizon like a smudge of brown limning the water. When twilight came, just before midnight, Alvah told Pauloosie he should get some sleep. Pauloosie nodded and went below. He crawled into the sleeping bag Alvah had given him and listened to the water rushing by.

He woke a few hours later and already it was dawn. He stumbled up to the cockpit and saw Alvah sitting there, watching the sun rise. “What time is it?” Pauloosie asked.

“Almost three.”

“Are you tired?”

“Not in the least.”

Pauloosie sat down in the cockpit alongside Alvah. The boat was well balanced and steered herself. “How far have we gone?”

“A hundred miles.”

“Just being blown by the wind.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how much work it is to dogsled a hundred miles?”

Alvah reflected on the question for a moment. “No,” he said.

“A lot more than this.”

“You can run a dog team all winter, though. Do you have any idea what it was like, spending the winter cooped up in this thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose you would, wouldn’t you?”

“Look,” Pauloosie said, pointing ahead of the boat. “Belugas.”

Alvah watched them stream alongside, glowing white in the dim light. “Gorgeous.”

“Tasty.”

They both laughed.