The Shaman's Knife (30 page)

Drum dancing was next. There were five drums, skin stretched tightly over wooden hoops about the size of barrel lids, which the drummers held by a small handle attached to the rim while they beat on the rim or skin with foot-long batons. Two of the drummers were old ladies, the others young men. They started out slowly with a series of mighty booms.

As they gained speed, almost all the young men in the place sprang into action, stamping their feet on the floor in unison with the sound of the drums, thunderous slams of feet as the dancers moved from one side of the floor to another and up to the stage and down the steps, louder and louder until the dancers were sweating and the floor seemed to tremble.

Nearly ten minutes went by with booming drums and hammering boots, until only two of the dancers were left, muscles straining, knees bending faster and faster on each step, competing for the honor of being the last one on his feet—until finally one gave up and the other performed for another minute of gradually slowing boot-banging and then stopped and bowed.

“The best drum dancers in the whole world!” Lewissie called in his deep voice over the thunderous applause.

“And now,” Lewissie said, “we'll have a short intermission while the young men of our community set up the sound system for a different kind of dancing, the modern kind.”

The crowd began to move around, younger people coming forward expectantly while older people moved their chairs back to make room. By then the hall reeked with tobacco smoke and the sweat of overheated bodies.

Davidee shoved through the crowd from the back toward where one of the snooker tables had been covered with a sheet of plywood. On that he set his tape deck, of the type known elsewhere as a ghetto blaster. In smaller spaces, one such machine will make all the noise any group of dancers requires. However, Davidee had with him also insulated wire and two amplifiers of the sort used by stereo owners.

Paulessie, Byron, and Tommy, holding small screwdrivers, joined Davidee to string wires from the ghetto blaster to the amplifiers. Davidee was carrying a Coke bottle with him and sipping from it occasionally. The way he was acting, the Davidee at his worst that I had never seen before, suggested there was more in the bottle than Coke. He shoved the others away peremptorily to inspect the connections.

That brought the first sign of open antagonism. He ripped off a connection that Byron had made, growling some remark as he reconnected the wire.

This byplay was not lost on the audience, which made a murmuring sound of disapproval. Byron limped away and picked up another end of wire, only to be stopped by Davidee telling him to leave it alone and let somebody do it who knew how. Byron said something inaudible to Davidee, who told him plainly, in a tone audible to many, to fuck off. Tommy Kungalik snapped something. Davidee made a threatening gesture at him with the Coke bottle.

That moment passed. Davidee shoved a tape into the machine and threw a switch, and loud music drowned out all else. Young folk surged onto the floor, an instant mass of gyrating bodies, some doing older dances like the twist, others looking like throwbacks to jitter-bugging of even older days, still others making up their dancing techniques as they went along. To anyone not paying close attention, many of the dancers seemed to be going it alone, staying only in the general area of their partners. The dancing was wild and energetic, and the nondancers around the sidelines beat time with their feet or hands. Elvis records, Rolling Stones records, Beatles records, U2 records, a Sinéad O'Connor song, a long, long Neil Young “Everybody's Rockin'” seemed to have been spliced together for that first long set.

The lights had been dimmed so that it was not easy to keep track of everybody I wanted to watch, Davidee mostly, but also those who Debbie had said would be his assailants when they saw the chance. Davidee danced with several different girls, sometimes leaving one in midsong to grab another partner. Once he tried to cut in on Leah, who shook him off and stayed with big Paulessie. Immediately Byron, dancing with Debbie, bumped Davidee. The two glared at one another. Debbie, having left Julie with her mother on one of the chairs against the wall, got between them.

It was not long after Davidee had changed the tape to another long mix of mainly rock and roll and some country music that—in the midst of one wild surging dance that made the whole floor shake, rattle, and roll—some dancers knocked over one of the amplifiers. Their feet tangled instantly in the wires. A chain reaction brought the ghetto blaster to the floor, wrenched-off wires streaming out of it.

It was then that Davidee seemed to abandon altogether what until then had passed for at least minimal self-control. He screamed at Byron, who was trying to untangle one of the wires from around his ankle. Paulessie and Tommy converged and attempted to hold Davidee. Lewissie got between them. Davidee stopped struggling, seemed suddenly to go limp, took two or three deep breaths, and then made a gesture at the tangle of wires and—I had got close to back up Lewissie—said something about fixing the connections and getting on with it.

Lewissie and I stood where we were. Byron, Paulessie, and Tommy produced small pliers and began stripping some of the insulation from wires to repair the connections. They and Davidee shot insults back and forth. Many in the vicinity quickly moved back out of range. Davidee now could not miss the fact that the three were pitted against him.

That is when, almost insanely haranguing those around him about their clumsiness with the splicing, he yelled, “Get the hell away from here, I can do it myself!”

He was wearing a small leather belt attachment on which was the sheath of a hunting knife, under his overshirt. I'd noticed the sheath before, thinking it held his pliers and screwdriver. But when his hand came away, instead of the pliers the others had been using, he produced and brandished an ordinary hunting knife.

I can see yet in my memory the way the other three briefly fell back. Some girls screamed. The loudest shriek, full of terror, came from Leah. It was Byron, despite his crippled leg, who reacted first. Balanced on his good leg he lashed out with the other and kicked the knife out of Davidee's hand. As they began to wrestle, Byron grabbed Davidee's belt and yanked.

This shook loose from under his outer clothing another knife, the one with the gyrfalcon-head handle. The shaman's knife that old Ipeelee had forced on him. Now it was bare, unwrapped. It fell a few feet away and slid between churning feet and legs to disappear under the snooker table. The first knife was lying in plain sight, but only those of us closest could have seen the second knife. Only Lewissie and I among those nearby could have known that such a knife existed. From those close by came a scared gasp, a sudden, “Oh-o-o-o-o!”

This was the moment the three had been waiting for. They plunged in swinging their fists, kicking, butting, as Davidee wildly tried to defend himself. His attention seemed to be divided between trying to locate the shaman's knife and trying to fight back, when Byron threw the pliers he had in his hand. They hit Davidee high on his left cheek. Blood flowed instantly from a cut near his eye, streaking down into his mustache.

The audience had cleared a space around the struggling four, but many saw the blood. Some cried out.

Davidee put one hand against his cheek, and when he too saw the blood his eyes were murderous. The attack on him was continuing. Apparently he hadn't seen where the knife with the gyrfalcon-head handle had gone. Shouting imprecations and trying to protect himself against the blows raining on him, he kicked around the clutter on the floor as if looking for it. Then abruptly he turned his back on the fray and strode quickly through the crowd toward the door.

As he passed a few feet from Byron, his fury was concentrated in one shouted, snarling remark which, it turned out later, nobody could hear except Byron.

Byron the calm, Byron the man who had managed by and large to keep the peace with Davidee and his family in order to protect Debbie and their child, now dove under the snooker table and came up with the shaman's knife. Davidee was almost to the door, not looking back, everyone nearby was falling over themselves to get out of his way, when Byron, shouting, screaming curses, limped after Davidee and did what some people later described, with variations, as, “Well, Byron ran and caught up to Davidee and seemed to punch him on the back . . .”

But what Byron had hit Davidee's back with was not his fist, but the shaman's knife.

Still, not everyone knew. Someone cried out, “Turn on the lights!” Someone, obeying, hit the wrong switch and turned them out altogether. The only light for a few seconds was one near the door, so that Davidee could be seen plainly turning and picking up a chair and taking a couple of faltering steps toward Byron with it raised high. Byron grabbed another chair to defend himself. Then Davidee turned and stumbled out of the place.

I was one of very few who followed, so I saw him lurching as if drunk, badly hurt, or both, toward the snowmobile he had parked at the door. He tried to lift one leg to swing himself aboard, but instead fell face-down across the seat. When he did so I could see the black handle of the shaman's knife sticking out of the middle of his back.

Right behind me was Byron. When he ran toward Davidee he was sobbing. I thought he was going to attack again, but while I and everyone else stood back, Byron put one knee on the snowmobile alongside Davidee, who was motionless, started it up, and swung it out of there. Davidee's head and shoulders were hanging over one side of the snowmobile seat, his legs dangling free on the other side. Byron, standing up in front of him with no room to sit down, opened the throttle to a moderate speed and took off . . . where? Not to escape, I thought. There was no place to hide, or to leave behind, ever, what had happened.

Seeing the direction he took, I made a logical guess. He was heading for the nursing station on the outskirts of the settlement.

The uproar subsided into stunned silence. People crowded out of the rec hall and stood around me in subdued groups. Those who knew what had happened were talking and those who did not were listening. In one of the groups I saw Leah, Erika, Margaret, Maisie, and Debbie. When Debbie saw me looking at her, she ran, holding Julie in her arms and crying out Byron's name.

One big unanswered question buzzed around me like a persistent deerfly: How had Ipeelee come into possession of the shaman's knife?

 

It didn't take much thought, what I did next. There was no doubt that Davidee was hurt, maybe badly, depending on the damage the knife had done internally. I did not envy the woman at the nursing station. Normally her cases would be cuts and bruises from boozy fights or accidents, people with acute appendix pains or blinding headaches, people in off the tundra with frozen limbs, pregnant young girls or women who had ignored her urging to fly out to Inuvik or Yellowknife where their confinements could be monitored. Or who had not come to her at all.

At that moment I saw Bouvier cruising up to the rec hall in the van, staring in astonishment at the milling crowd, his hunt for Andy obviously in vain. I ran to the driver's side door as he wound down the window. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

I told him. The short form, mainly Davidee, the shaman's knife, Byron, and that I was not sure how serious the wound might be.

“You go to the nursing station,” I said.

“That where Byron took him?”

“That's what I figure.”

“Is Davidee likely to cause a lot of trouble there?”

“Don't think so.” A full stab in the back with what Jonassie had told me was a five-and-a-half-inch blade . . . depended what it hit.

“We'll have to pick up Byron but there's no hurry about that part.” Pause. What else? A statement. “You haven't found Andy.”

“Right.”

I could see Erika Hall running toward us, her eyes wide with shock and excitement at what she had witnessed, and perhaps, to be charitable, only secondarily concerned with how it would look in print.

“You go with Bouvier,” I told her.

She ran to the other door and they drove off, Bouvier honking his horn to make a way through people heading in the same direction. Some were hurrying but most, visible in the glow of the few lights holding back the cloud-blackened Arctic night, moved slowly, like a crowd leaving somewhere after a game, the excitement to be reflected upon, regretted or savored, but the result unchangeable. Heading for the nursing station . . . what else was there for them to do? This was not a place where you could go home and listen to the radio to find out what happened.

As I stood watching for a few seconds, among the walkers I could see Margaret and Maisie close together. Sarah and Agnes were with a larger group, Lewissie and his wife Jane nowhere to be seen, Jonassie the same. Leah and her mother were among those still milling around the entrance to the rec hall.

I moved out of the light from the entrance and soon found myself alone, all the signs of excitement behind me. Rather than risk being seen going directly toward the shore, I walked quickly to the right and down the slope where there was no road, through the ankle-deep snow. Passing behind the hotel, I wished I had brought a flashlight, but maybe it was just as well—the light would have been seen, someone might have followed. I wanted Andy to myself.

The dark line of overturned boats showed plainly against the snow. I stopped at the end one. I thought I could see recent footprints in today's noon snow. I leaned over almost double to peer in, but could see nothing.

“Andy,” I said.

No answer.

“It's Matteesie,” I said.

Still no answer, no stirring from under the boat.

“Davidee has been stabbed with the shaman's knife,” I said. “It happened at the dance. He's badly hurt.”

His unbelieving voice came from only feet away. I still couldn't see him. He was hiding as deeply in the shelter of the boat as he could get. “You're just trying to get me to come out.”

I could hear his teeth chattering.

“I wouldn't do that.”

He crawled out on his hands and knees.

“We have to talk,” I said. “We'll go to the detachment. You're safe now. I promise.”

He stood up, his tiny body shivering uncontrollably. I realized he still didn't know what had happened, how Davidee probably was no longer a threat to him. We walked out of there behind the hotel, behind the rec hall, past the door to the rink where the ice-scrapings were piled all winter. He stayed close to me as if trying to make one shadow out of two. We walked up the slope between the rec hall and the detachment and crossed a few yards of open space before I unlocked the door and turned on the light.

He was the one who locked the door behind us. Then he went to the window facing the house where I'd first laid eyes on Davidee and Debbie and their family. The house was dark. He was still there staring out while I made tea and hunted through the scanty rations in the refrigerator, finding bread and margarine and a can of soup. I put the soup into a bowl and into Bouvier's microwave to heat, cleared a place on Barker's desk, laid out bread, margarine, Bouvier's jar of peanut butter, a half package of cheese slices.

At the same time, speaking largely to his back, except once in a while when he turned to glance at me, I told him what had happened: the fight, the appearance of the shaman's knife, the stabbing by Byron.

“Byron?” he asked incredulously, coming to sit down. “Shee-it!”

He wolfed the bread and cheese, gulped the soup. Sitting across the desk from him, I phoned the nursing station. Busy signal. I put down the phone, waited, tried again. Still busy.

Then I turned on the office tape recorder and said to Andy, “Now you're safe. You accept that?”

He nodded.

“So I want the whole story. No more running away, right?”

He nodded again.

“How come your Nikes had blood on the soles?”

He gulped, but after a few seconds answered in a mixture of dialect and English, faltering, “I have to start farther back.”

“We've got lots of time. Now's the time to tell it.”

He let out a long breath, paused, then met my eyes. “Well, one time when Jonassie was away buying stone, but I didn't know that, I went to his house. I did that because sometimes Jonassie has been kind to me when other people weren't. I knocked on the back door. There was no answer. I tried the knob. It was open, so I went in.”

I had to keep remembering he was only fifteen. I wanted to ease him along, let him set his own course, interrupting only when I had to, in short, soft rather than hard questioning—as long as that worked.

“Then what?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but in a few seconds went on.

“Well, I was inside so I looked around. Sometimes when we talked he told me about the old days when it was like one for all and all for one, and if a person came to the door or came to a snow house out on the tundra and had no food to eat or skins to sleep on or boots that were not worn out, it would not be that he was coming to beg [
tuksiaqtuaq
], but he would be treated for a time at least as one of the family to be fed and looked after as long as he behaved himself. I was hungry so I found some caribou dry-meat that I knew he dried himself and while I was chewing that I went around the place looking at his stuff. Just looking. I thought he might come in any time, but didn't think he'd be sore at me as long as I didn't do anything bad.”

“What kind of stuff were you looking at?”

“Well, masks, and a lot of carvings, mostly finished. He introduced me once to a black-haired woman from Winnipeg Art Gallery he said comes nearly every year and buys carvings. Many of the carvings were large and would sell for a lot of money, I think, but I just cruised around in there and began to think I might take a small one if I could find one, and maybe he wouldn't notice.”

“So that's when you found the shaman's knife?”

An instant glance of surprise that I knew, then a nod. “I saw it tucked away at the back of a shelf. The handle was black stone, carved to the head of a bird, I didn't know what bird, something like a hawk [
qilriq
] or an eagle [
tingmiaqpak
] that I have seen in many drawings. I thought that this knife would be easy to sell, and probably Jonassie would never miss it, or I would tell him I had taken it. So I took it. Only later did find that the bird was a gyrfalcon [
kidjgavik
].

“I knew that in the spirit world the gyrfalcon is one of the spirits of death. This is all not long ago, maybe a month.”

“So for a while you had the shaman's knife. How did Davidee get it? Did you sell it to him or he took it from you or what?”

Andy sighed. I could tell this was a bad memory. “One night at the rec hall before he was even supposed to be back here, he was after me for twenty dollars I had borrowed from Dennissie and was supposed to pay him back twenty-five in a week. Dennissie asked me for it and I said I didn't have any money, so a few days later he sent Davidee to collect. I still had no money but Davidee scared me and I showed him the knife and said that it was worth fifty dollars.”

At that he looked exactly like anyone who didn't like remembering a bad deal, his eyes showing the kind of deep regret well known among some used-car buyers.

“I was surprised—he took it from me and gave me twenty-five dollars change! He seemed very excited about the knife, as if he had seen it before, or knew about it, and right away I knew I had not asked enough, but then it was too late. I know it was wrong, but I thought that when I had fifty dollars again I would give it to Jonassie and tell him what happened, but I have never had fifty dollars since.”

I had to push a little, needed to know the rest as fast as possible and get to the nursing station. “Did you ever see Davidee with the knife, or did anybody else know about it?”

“Not that I know. The next time I heard about the knife was on the night of the murders. I was in the rec hall and Davidee wasn't but some of the others were laughing about something that had happened the night before.”

I thought he might be straying. I didn't have time for digressions. “Something connected to Davidee? What?”

Then what Andy said turned out to be precisely the other side of what Leah had told me about earlier.

“Why they were laughing was that some of them had heard Davidee trying to get Dennis to set up Leah at his house. It was known that Dennis and Leah had gone there before fairly often. The difference this time was that Davidee had offered Dennis fifty dollars to get Leah there the following night and leave the front door open so that when Leah and Dennis were uh . . .”—he looked ashamed—“finished, Davidee would get a turn at her.

“I didn't laugh when I heard that. Leah is one of the people who is good to me. If I think of an angel, I think of Leah. But what the guys were laughing at was two things. Dennis had told Davidee that he already had spoken to Leah and she couldn't come that particular night. But someone had seen Dennis and Leah together that night, going to his house. Because nobody likes Davidee, when he came to the rec hall they laughed at him and told him that he had been made a fool of. I was there to hear all this. Davidee had been drinking but didn't seem real drunk. When everybody was laughing he just listened, looking mad as hell, and then walked out, fast, without a word.”

“Did you talk to him then at all, where he was going, or anything?”

He pressed his lips close together, a hard straight line. “Not then. But the next time I saw him it was just about twelve, maybe a few minutes earlier, the rec hall was supposed to be closed but on booze nights rules were broken. The thing I noticed was that he wasn't wearing the same clothes he'd had on earlier. Probably his other ones had blood on them . . .”

“How would you know that?”

“I didn't, right then. I figured it out later. Anyway, he pulled me off to the side and said he'd been in a fight with Dennissie and it had got rough and now he found that he had lost the knife. He told me to go to the house right away and find the knife and bring it to him and he'd give me fifty dollars. He said it would probably be in the living room, maybe in or around the chesterfield. He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me up tight against him and said, ‘I'll kill you if you ever say a word about any of this.'”

I could imagine it.

“So you went to the house.”

“I didn't know anything about the murders then, not a thing. At the house, that's when I found out. I get up there. The police had just arrived. People were gathering. The old lady I later learned was your mother, Matteesie, had been taken next door to Annie's house, and . . .”

I was feeling more than a little sick by then, about murder, my mother, everything I knew about that night—including some sloppy police work. I didn't want to believe what I now was imagining.

“You mean you went into the house then, nobody stopped you?”

“There was a lot of confusion. I almost got sick from the amount of blood I could see even from the door. I didn't know what had happened but the blood made me think what would happen if I came back to Davidee without the knife. The house was pretty dark inside, bad lights. I heard Barker saying to Bouvier, ‘What the hell do you mean, you didn't bring flashlights?' Anyway, I am small, and when Barker went upstairs and Bouvier went next door to talk to your mother, I slipped in. Some of the blood was dry, but I almost fell stepping into a sort of pool of it. I could see that Thelma was on the couch. I couldn't see well enough to know that she was even hurt. I said, ‘Don't yell, Thelma, it's just me, Andy,' and meanwhile I'm trying to see what's on the floor and I do see a gleam of light and it is the knife. I pick it up and get out just as Barker was coming downstairs.”

“Jesus,” I said. The only thing I could think of.

“Someone outside must have seen me, I don't know, but after all I just lived two doors away, they were used to me.”

Well, I thought, we're getting there, slow but sure.

“So now you had the knife,” I prompted.

“There was blood on it. I ran a little and cleaned it off on some snow and took it back down to the rec hall, where Davidee was pacing around waiting for me, not talking to anybody. When he saw me I went to the toilet and got into one of the stalls. I had been in a stall with him before doing drug deals. He followed me in and I gave him the knife and he gave me a fifty-dollar bill. I told him about cleaning the blood off the knife and he said, ‘Oh, I hit Dennissie and he got a nosebleed.' Then he took some more money from his pocket, mostly twenties and tens, a little with blood on it, not even all dried, and gave it to me and said, ‘Is your man out there?' I knew he meant a dealer, a guy who came in once in a while but wasn't known to the police. I said I thought he was still there.