Consumption (28 page)

Yvo Nautsiaq found Emo as he walked home from an all-night house party. He thought Emo was dead at first and began weeping as he stood over his motionless body. He rolled him off his left side and when Emo lifted his arm and grunted, Yvo leapt back like he had been electrocuted. He noticed then how one side of Emo’s face had fallen, and concluded—with notable astuteness, given his level of intoxication—that Emo had had a stroke. He picked him up on his shoulders and carried him to his home. When he knocked at the door and hollered for Winnie, she at first refused to acknowledge him, having listened to decades of gossip about the man’s drinking. But she detected something urgent in Yvo’s voice and finally opened the door to see her husband hoisted up on Yvo’s shoulders. He carried Emo into the living room and deposited him on the chesterfield heavily.

Emo’s eyes were open and Winnie leaned over to tell him she was calling the nursing station. He rose up at that, gripping the back of the chesterfield with his good left arm, shaking his head as he roared gutturally. This frightened Yvo again and he shrunk back to the door. Winnie said then that she was going to call Victoria. Emo reached over with his left arm, grabbed the phone jack, and yanked it out of the wall. He lay back, gasping for breath. Winnie’s eyes were wide with fear and she began crying. Emo rumbled at her. This frightened her more and she cried louder. He swung his left arm and hooked it around her waist and pulled her into him.

They lay alongside each other all day. Emo fell asleep after an hour, but Winnie remained awake, wondering to herself what she would do now, what her life would be like if Emo remained unable to walk or speak. When the sun finally set in the southwest, she fell asleep.

When Emo awoke a few hours after sunset he was surprised to be lying with his wife on their chesterfield. The first conclusion he reached was that they had gone drinking the night before, something they hadn’t done in twenty years. Then he remembered Nautsiaq’s
weeping and then he remembered his collapse. He shifted his shoulder under her weight and, as he did so, he realized he could move his right leg again. He kicked it a few times to make sure. It was still weak, certainly clumsier than the left, but he could definitely move it. He lay there, wiggling his toes in his boots, and tried to squeeze his right hand. He felt the fingers moving.

“Oh, thank Christ,” he said aloud, waking up Winnie, who started to admonish him about his language and then stopped as he stroked her face with his right hand. She laid her face down on his chest and began crying again.

Just before supper that night, Victoria and Justine and Marie sat together on Victoria’s bed and looked at the lumpy little bag in front of them. Robertson was away on a rare trip to Yellowknife. Justine had asked Victoria how the miners found what they were after and Victoria thought she would show the girls what raw diamonds looked like. She realized that within the desire to educate her girls about mineralogy she harboured an unexpected motive—she wanted her daughters to be impressed by their father. When she opened the cloth bag and upended it, the cloudy misshapen rocks spilled out on the bedspread. Marie picked up one of the larger ones. “How do they make them shine?” she asked.

“They cut and polish them.”

“How much is this one worth?”

“I don’t know. A lot.”

“As much as a truck?”

“Maybe.”

“Even though it doesn’t sparkle?”

“I think so.”

Pauloosie said goodbye to Penny and waved as he took one fork of the return path and she took another. They were ten miles north of Rankin Inlet. Their dogs looked over their shoulders at the other team growing steadily more distant. Penny’s trail led her into town from the north; Pauloosie’s trail came in from the southwest.

As he pulled onto the ring road, the runners of his komatik began to scrape as they ran over the sand and gravel that had been laid on the snow to render it less slippery. He jumped off the sled then and ran beside the dogs, holding the trace in one hand, lest some Kablunauk’s wayward poodle catch their attention. He led the dogs down onto the ice where the teams were chained. Penny’s team had already settled into the accumulating snow, their tails over their noses. Her sled was standing straight up and neither she nor her gear was visible. He chained his dogs to their line and unpacked his own sled. He put his pack over one shoulder, picked up his rifle with his other hand, and walked toward home.

When he entered the kitchen he did so quietly, because he was happier than he had ever been before. He removed his boots and eased the door shut, enjoying even the little click it made as the lock caught. He shook his head at himself and laughed quietly. When he passed the open door of his parents’ bedroom, he saw Justine and Marie and Victoria sitting in a circle on the bed with a pile of cloudy semi-translucent pebbles in front of them. He stopped. His mother looked up at him, then Justine and Marie did too.

FOURTEEN

WHEN VICTORIA PICKED UP THE TELEPHONE
, she knew it would be Simionie and she felt guilty immediately. Guilty for not having called him in weeks, and guilty for talking to him at all. Yes, she would meet him, she said, wincing even as the words echoed in the telephone receiver.

The cabin was cold and neglected. They sat at the table and drank tea. He leaned over to kiss her.

“I’ve missed you too,” she breathed, her hand on his chest, fingers splayed. He slid his mouth down her neck. She pushed against him gently. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s my cycle.” He kept kissing her, smelling her skin, pulling her to him. She pressed back, just a little harder. He stopped kissing her then and looked at her. She turned to the billy and poured more tea into their cups and stirred in sugar.

“Robertson is home so much more than he used to be. I don’t know what to do. It used to be he didn’t seem to be able to think about anything but business, but with this mine, the amount of money involved is almost frightening. The other day he came home with a bag of uncut diamonds, a thank-you gift from the mine manager. God knows how much they are worth, but it’s just an example of how crazy things are. And then there’s this new house he made me move into, as if a dishwasher and shiny countertops could make me love him.” She felt ashamed about what she was saying but wasn’t able to stop.

“I shouldn’t have said anything about the diamonds. You have to promise not to mention that to anyone.”

Simionie leaned back and looked out the window of the cabin. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “Sure,” he said.

Emo and his grandson walked out in the morning light to the dogs. Pauloosie’s were eager to see him, but Emo’s team was frantic. From a distance, they had not been certain at first who he was, his gait and posture were different. Then they smelled his particular scent in the wind, even though that had changed subtly, and they became airborne, launching themselves to the limit of their leashes, and crashed back down on the ice. They were skinny, and they had been fighting, and their fur was clumped and torn out in spots.

Emo’s face grew bright with shame, but in the wind, it was hard to see this. Pauloosie had fed the dogs while the old man had been sick, but had not taken them out on the land, because Emo had not asked him to. Could not have asked him to. The other men who owned dogs had watched Emo’s team grow thin and they suffered when they saw this but could not bring themselves to intervene. Pauloosie had cut up frozen char and seal and fed the dogs, not saying anything, but food is the least part of what dogs and men need. Chained to one spot for weeks, they were half-mad with agitation and had spent as much energy fighting over that food as they gained from eating it.

Pauloosie began unchaining his dogs and tying them into their harnesses. Emo began attempting the same, but with much less success: his dogs jumped up on him, staggering the old man. To quieten them, he struck them about their heads and shoulders. They cringed at this but did not settle.

Pauloosie’s dogs were the inferior littermates of his grandfather’s, given to him one by one as he had shown himself adept at their care. He took in the proud arcs of their backs, the curled tails held upright and eager, and he glanced over at their sisters and sires,
clawing and climbing up his grandfather’s chest. And then he saw the old man fall. Pauloosie was sprinting across the ice before Emo’s shoulders had even touched the snow. But the dogs were on the old man in an instant, their reflexive response to weakness engaged in a flash of slashing teeth.

Pauloosie sent dogs flying through the air to land in a tangle of whimpering thuds. He pulled his grandfather away from them, the heels of his
kamiks
drawing two perfectly parallel lines in the snow, blood dribbling between them in a third parallel and crimson line.

They had just got clear of the dogs when Pauloosie felt his grandfather struggling. A great flap of skin and hair hung down over his eyes, and Emo pushed up on it to see better. His nose had been caught by a tooth as well and a flap hung down where his right nostril had been. Pauloosie could see the old man’s facial bones, like snail shells through the wounds, and he blinked and looked away. He helped Emo to his feet and the two of them walked to the nursing station, the old man pressing his mitten into his face.

The on-call nurse was accustomed to repairing and stitching up most of the lacerations that came in herself, but the extent and severity of the old man’s injuries took her aback. Reluctantly, she phoned Balthazar. Pauloosie listened to her repeating herself, more loudly, persuading him to come in.

When Balthazar arrived, he looked as if he had just woke up. He read and reread the old man’s thin medical chart for long minutes as Emo bled into the dressings the nurse had laid over his flayed face.

As the doctor finally leaned in to inspect the old man’s wounds, he told Emo that the lacerations were deep and complex and would likely leave a large scar.

“I don’t care very much about scars.”

“That’s fine. We’ll get started then. Were you knocked out at all, sir?”

“I don’t think so.”

Pauloosie shook his head.