Consumption (6 page)

Most days she and Alexander lay together on the rock along the Oiseau River in the summer sun, Victoria reading
The Lord of the Rings
, Alexander resting his head on her bare belly. Propped up among the stones at the water’s edge was his fishing rod, the line hanging slackly and running into the current.

The town was left reeling by the closure of the mine. Johanson and Johnson and all the other Kablunauks boarded an airplane and just disappeared, their wives left adrift. They were not the first to start families in the Arctic and then abandon them, but what was unprecedented was the sense of dislocation the hunters who had become miners knew. They had come off the land and made the disorienting transition from that way of life to the one that involved houses and paycheques and they had negotiated that transition with skill. But now the paycheques abruptly stopped and it was clear to no one what was to be done. Some of the men simply dug their komatiks out of the snow and headed out on the land with their bewildered families. But for most of them the prospect of resuming that way of life was too much. The set of skills necessary to make one’s way on the tundra was extensive and particular. Once they moved into houses, those skills atrophied. Faced with reacquiring them, most simply demurred.

Winnie, who had resisted moving here, now had no enthusiasm for living on the land. Emo thought they could do it again. But for now, he reasoned, they could live in the house, and he could hunt. It was self-deception and he knew it even at the time. Nomads move because they must. Land like this does not tolerate stationary populations of hunters—even small numbers. The
tuktu
continued to avoid Rankin Inlet. For a year, Emo made long forays out on the land, trying to reach them. But when he found them, rather than camp nearby and follow them, he had to shoot one only and return to Rankin Inlet. He and the dogs usually ate a sizable portion of the meat coming home. The arrangement was a losing proposition from the outset.

The mining company did not make good on its threat to evict the miners from the houses, it simply evaporated. The government anticipated the difficulties of the miners and to some degree it stepped in to help them. Food relief arrived on ships the following summer, with a bureaucrat to administer it, and that was it, they were all changed utterly.

Victoria sat in a straight-backed chair at a table in the treatment room off the children’s ward—occupied now by children she had never met. They all stared at her through the window between the ward and the little white room lined with cupboards full of bandages and stainless-steel appliances. She seemed to them a hybrid version of themselves, an Inuit woman in a long, stiff-collared cotton dress, strong and healthy-looking. The phthisiologist had finished examining her and now washed his hands in the sink in the treatment room. He and Donelda nodded to one another.

“Miscarriages are common in TB patients. We see it all the time in the older girls and young women, especially if they’re not responding well to the drugs. But she,” he nodded at Victoria, “has done very well, was cured a long time ago, actually. I’m not sure why this happened but she should be okay.”

Donelda nodded at this, anticipating and dreading the next question.

“Which raises the matter of why she is still here. She finished the medications long ago. And she’s sixteen, after all. Time to go back to her parents.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I’ll ask the matron to write to the priest in Chesterfield Inlet. Why didn’t you initiate this a long time ago?”

Donelda did not, could not answer.

“I suppose it was our responsibility. Poor thing. As if anyone there will still remember her. As if she would even remember what living there in the winter was like.” And then the doctor walked out of the room.

That night, at the kitchen table, Alexander sat rigidly and told his mother, “I’m going to marry her.” Victoria looked at him wordlessly, alarmed and also moved by the display of loyalty.

Donelda replied, “That is not going to happen,” and passed the peas.

“Look, I love her, I’m going to take care of her here. This is where she lives now.”

Donelda would not look at Victoria. “I’ve made up my mind. Victoria is practically your sister. What was I doing, letting you two spend so much time together, anyway?”

With that, Victoria stood up, cutlery clattering, and ran for the kitchen door.

Donelda watched her run out into the night. She hung her head for a moment and then lifted it. She dished potatoes onto Beatrice’s plate.

When the Norseman landed and sent up a great shower of snow from its skis, two families approached the airplane. Victoria recognized her mother and father on the edge of the airstrip, waiting.

For Siruqsuk, the old woman she had left with six years ago, none of the transforming effects of the sanatorium applied. She had not
become beautiful and tall and she had not learned excellent Cree, and adequate English and French. In the Strait of Belle Isle, with Newfoundland on the port and the equally blasted coast of Labrador to starboard, headed south to Montreal so long ago, the old woman had pitched herself into the sea. Victoria had watched her floating in the water and looking at the boat, growing smaller and dimmer in the fading light. That night she had not gone for supper. In the morning they had asked her if the old woman was feeling all right and she had said she hadn’t seen her.

Peter Irnuk, Siruqsuk’s son, came over to welcome Victoria back to the Arctic, and to ask her what she knew of his mother. In the windy airport, as the Norseman taxied loudly back to the end of the runway to take off again, she explained what had happened, and he turned from her. His son, Simionie, two years younger than Victoria, had come with his father. Simionie did not turn from Victoria, but stared at her, and kept staring, as she picked up her suitcase and walked over to her own parents to begin her reacquaintance with her family.

THREE

AFTER THEY PICKED HER UP AT THE AIRSTRIP
, Victoria’s parents led her to their little house in Rankin Inlet. Victoria looked around wordlessly as they walked into town. She had visited this place as a six-year-old, she remembered, but she did not recall so many buildings here. Even the idea of her parents living in a wooden house surprised her. But, she thought, it would be easier to get used to than what she had expected.

The house, when they reached it, was nearly identical to the one Donelda had lived in, made from the same plans distributed by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs: spruce two-by-fours and plywood, easy to put up, and suitable for building on rock and permanently frozen soil. The mine, the Church, the government all used the same blueprints, and all across the north were the same handful of building types, painted off-white on the inside and, for some reason, always teal green on the outside, the paint peeling quickly in the face of blowing granular snow, as if from a pressure washer.

Tagak was bigger than she had been prepared for: on track to reach six feet and growing steadily on the reliable diet of tinned meat and bannock. Their parents were no longer young, and Victoria could barely talk to them. Her Inuktitut was clumsy and imprecise; even Tagak sounded smarter than she did. She was four inches taller than her father, and gagged when she tried to eat
igunak
, and ran
outside crying after looking up and seeing the horrified expressions of her mother and father. They did not follow. Victoria recovered her composure and went back inside, still shuddering at the taste of the half-rotted walrus meat. No one commented on her display.

There was no school here yet. Some of the children had been sent to the residential school the Church ran in Chesterfield Inlet, fifty miles to the northeast, but Victoria’s parents refused to consider that idea—she had been gone so long already. She took to spending afternoons in the church, visiting with Père Bernard, who had moved here from Chesterfield and whose familiar face comforted Victoria as much as her parents’ did. He loaned her books:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe;
Knud Rasmussen’s
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition; The Power and the Glory
. When she wasn’t visiting the priest, she hung around the Hudson’s Bay store. There were men there who were amused by her comfort with English idiom, and who gave her candies, and trinkets to pass along to her parents. They sometimes made lewd jokes with her, insinuating that a few sticks of licorice merited some recompense, didn’t she think?

One day, she met a new man there, John Robertson—quieter, more serious, and more attentive than the rest. He was the only one of the Bay Boys—the only person in her life now, apart from the priest—who spoke to her as Donelda had, as if she had opinions worth hearing.

She asked him if he had any news from down south—had the Soviets invaded Prague after all? He wasn’t exactly sure, but such a question caused him to dismiss with one mental shrug everything he had been told about Inuit nature by the other Bay Boys.

The morning after, he told her, “It’s as bad as you guessed. There’s a tank division in Prague, and the border is closed.”

“And Dubcek? Has he been arrested?”

“He is in Moscow now. ‘For consultations,’ the Soviets say.”

She shook her head.

“I listened to the BBC World Service on the short-wave last night. You can come listen sometime, if you like.”