Consumption (10 page)

When the ribs had been excised, he began sewing the strips of intercostal muscles to one another with long-running silk sutures. When he was finished, Victoria’s chest wall looked as if it had been tattooed with long stripes of black ink that ran in zigzag patterns from her breastbone around to her back. He closed the skin overlying this work and placed two chest tubes into the space between the lung and the chest wall. Then the anaesthetist began pumping air into and out of the right lung. It reinflated quickly and forced air in a bubbling crimson froth out of the chest tubes. As the lung began to rise and fall within the chest wall, the deribbed skin overlying what
had been the lung cavity bulged out and sucked in with each breath from the ventilator.

Soon Victoria was breathing on her own and the anaesthetist pulled the tube out of her throat. She began coughing and then vomited over and over again.

The surgeon’s name was C.W. Henderson, and he wrote a description of the thoracoplasty he had just performed on the hospital chart by hand with a fountain pen. A copy was sent to the Fort Churchill hospital, and had remained on her medical chart ever after, in steadily more tattered and yellowing form. Decades later, these brittle pages would be read over and over again, in the clinic in Rankin Inlet, a man’s chest feeling tight and full of ache for that little girl, splayed open like a char and so alone.

Simionie looked at the hollow in the right side of Victoria’s chest, which bulged out and sucked in with her quietening breath. Her long, black perspiration-laden hair lay over their bodies like wet kelp. At last he moved, to reach out, to run his hands over her collarbones and then into the pocket in her chest wall, lighter in colour and coarser in texture than the skin around it. Her eyes remained shut and her head on her pillow.

He thought that he might be embarrassing her by touching her scar, which she never referred to but never covered. He watched her face more carefully and, at that moment, in that intimacy, it seemed to him that his touch was purely evidence of the tenderness between them. In just a few minutes, after the glow between them faded, it would not be possible again.

The cabin was cold; the stove had only been lit for an hour and their breath smoked in the dim light from the window beside them. The early afternoon sun was just off the horizon, thin and diffused by the dirt on the cabin window, not potent enough to create a proper sunbeam but enough to draw a weak shine from the walls—
in the same way moonlight makes snow seem just a little brighter than it is.

Simionie knew the provenance of her scar and her complicated history with Robertson, how she had practically been driven to him. He had not intervened then or subsequently, at least not overtly, but he had always watched her. As he watched her now.

When she had come back to Rankin Inlet, she had seemed as much a stranger as any of the Kablunauks who came north to work. She was tentative while walking on the ice in
kamiks
, and fell often. She ate seal cautiously and was seen often at the Hudson’s Bay post trying to buy candy. She was also often at the priest’s house, borrowing books and magazines. When the ship arrived in the spring she stood on the shore eagerly and spoke to the sailors comfortably and received gifts from them that the community inspected carefully, albeit from a distance. But although a stranger, she remembered some of their secrets and understood their whisperings. Some thought it would have been better for everyone if she had not come back at all.

When she had climbed down from the airplane he had been struck by how tall she was, and how straight she stood as she looked around for her parents or anyone else she might know. She wore wire-framed glasses too small for her face and her clothes smelled of harsh laundry soap and lye; the high-collared dress she was in could only have been provided to her by a church or a hospital, and no one in the north who is that skinny is healthy. But she spoke their language.

She still stood a head taller than any of the women around her, a full foot taller than her mother. She was at all times visible in any group—she was so beautiful she would have been visible enough in any event—and she did not pursue the favour or friendship of the other women, who considered her arrogant and affected. Loneliness so evident when he first saw her became more evident with passing time rather than less. She was not like her own people.

He had seen this at first glance. The Norseman’s propeller had stirred up dust and flying gravel and everyone standing there turned
away as the prop wash settled, everyone but Simionie, who had just gaped. And now his mouth fell forward upon her chest, and he ran his lips over her ribs, his tongue finding the corrugations of her surgical scar. And she lifted her chest into and against his mouth.

It was a bull Emo shot, two hundred pounds, fat from a winter’s worth of feeding on molluscs and capelin, sifted out of the seabed muck. The bull had kept his head up as Emo approached and was about to conclude that something was amiss when the bullet hit him. When Emo was younger he lay as still as he could at moments like that, his face pushed into the snow, eyes shut, hoping the stalk had not been ruined, hoping and not breathing. And when he lifted his head again, often, he would be looking at outwardly propelled rings in the crack of water—solidifying slush washing up on its edges.

He had learned not ever to stop looking and not to waste any time hoping but rather to wait motionlessly for the instant he was sensed, and then to take whatever shot was afforded him. Sometimes he could hear the bullet slap into the seal’s hide just as it entered the water. The seal was often lost when this happened, bleeding to death beneath the ice, but this time the bullet had caught the bull in the neck and had spun it sideways, away from the ice hole it had been heading toward with velocity. It had died a few feet from its refuge—a steady stream of arterial blood pumping out onto the snow. A small rivulet ran from the seal’s neck into the hole, fanning out in the sea like a tiny red estuary.

He rolled the animal over and put the tip of his knife beneath the skin at the base of the animal’s pelvis. He cut away the hide around the seal’s anus and genitals and then extended the cut on either side to the flippers. He rolled the hide off, cutting gently where required, but mostly simply pulling the skin like a sweater up and over its head. The seal, released from its skin, emerged as a pink and steaming tube of muscle, head, and fins.

He ran the knife up the animal’s centreline, and its intestines spilled out onto the snow. He split its sternum and opened its chest without pause. He ran the knife around the edge of the diaphragm and cut away the heart from the pulmonary arteries and veins. He laid it on the snow. The trachea and lungs followed, and then the stomach, intestines, liver, and kidneys. The dogs could smell this now and yowled with impatience.

He removed the fat surrounding the intestines and carefully laid it out on the snow: this was the favoured part of the seal, and was given to babies and to the fragile elderly. Emo wrapped this, as well as the liver, the kidneys, the heart, and the stomach, in waxed brown paper and put them in his pocket. He cut steaks off the animal then, and the brisket, and the rump roasts. Within a few minutes he had reduced the seal to a dozen carefully chosen cuts of meat, ribs, and a spinal column. He wiped his knife in the snow and then on the seal hide and put it back into its sheath. He wrapped everything but the spine in a plastic bag he had brought and put the bag over his shoulder. He picked up his rifle and began walking back to the sled to pull the ice anchor free and let the team eat the remains of the seal.

FIVE

THE MORNING BEGAN
with Pauloosie beating on the kitchen door with a frozen char in an effort to knock the ice off it. He had declared that he would no longer eat Cheerios for breakfast. The banging awoke Victoria and the girls and together they all listened to him go at it and they all rolled their eyes. Eventually, Victoria got up and headed for the kitchen, flipping on light switches as she went. Running a hand through her exuberant early morning hair, she opened the refrigerator and got out the milk, shutting it with her hip as she scooped bowls out of the cupboard. The girls’ current enthusiasm was Weetabix, which sounded to Victoria like an animal in a children’s picture book. She poured their bowls full, and put bread in the toaster and the percolator on the stovetop. “Girls!” she hollered when she saw that it was seven-thirty already. Pauloosie poked his head in from the kitchen porch when he heard her. Victoria waved at him resignedly. He resumed beating his fish.

When Justine and Marie appeared in the kitchen, Marie had a sweater hastily tugged over her head, but Justine looked like an airline stewardess, her hair pulled back, not a stray strand or visible pore anywhere. They sat down wordlessly and began eating their cereal. Victoria poured them both coffee and milk. Marie looked so tired she might fall from her chair at any moment—purple-ringed
eyes and lids drooping, head laid sideways on her hand as she directed spoonfuls of cereal inaccurately toward her mouth.

“Were you reading after you went to bed last night, Marie?” Victoria asked.

The girl nodded, did not look up from the cereal.

“What were you reading?” Victoria continued.

“The Chronicles of Narnia,”
Justine answered when her sister didn’t.

“How late were you awake?”

“Two,” Justine replied.

“It wasn’t two,” Marie said.

“Yes it was.”

“No more reading in bed, Marie. You need your sleep.” The girl was too tired to argue. But that night she would.

Pauloosie came inside, a bitter draft hitting them all as the door closed. He began cutting slivers of flesh from the fish and eating it. Victoria watched him. It was what breakfast had been for her until she was ten—she was not disgusted so much as entertained by the eating habits of her son, although she detected the reproach in his rejection of all things Kablunauk. Marie and Justine assiduously refused to look his way.

What it must feel like for his father.

And then it was eight-thirty and it was time for the kids to get off to school. Victoria bustled them into the porch, where the girls zipped up their nylon parkas and Pauloosie pulled his caribou-skin parka over his head. He spoke often about quitting school, but this was the one point that Robertson was not passive about. Pauloosie would attend school, or he would sleep in the snow. It was a peculiarly southern approach to the matter, and so infuriated Pauloosie even more, but Robertson was unyielding. And then he left on another business trip to let Victoria make peace in the home.

Victoria watched them walk away into the night-darkness, Pauloosie striding quickly ahead of his sisters, and returned to the kitchen to begin washing up. She switched on CBC Radio. The
chain-smoking morning host rumbled on with avuncular charm about Wayne Gretzky’s strategic reimagining of the cross-rink pass. Since television had arrived a few years earlier, she, along with the rest of the town, had become educated in hockey, and the arena that had been built about the same time drew rapt fans every weekend to watch the eleven-year-olds act out everyone’s fantasies of their life being continuous with the world beyond this one.