Consumption (4 page)

Nuns taught the children mathematics and reading and the catechism. These women were mostly young, their minds still supple enough to conceive of the yawning immateriality these lessons would hold for anyone trying to eke out a living on the barrenlands. Victoria ate the lessons up like the vanilla pudding they were fed, a concoction so sweet and smooth it was almost implausible. Victoria and the Nakoolak children in particular were told to eat as much of it as they wanted. But still they did not gain weight and they did not stop sweating at night. By midnight every night, they had to rise to change their sheets, and again at four, the nurses having wearied of getting up to do this for them. Victoria and Faith helped with Abraham’s bedclothes and then they all went back to bed and woke in the morning hardly rested, still damp, febrile, and flushed.

The classes served to distract Victoria from the stubborn course of her illness. She found herself entranced by maps, for instance, her eyes wandering all over the atlases and globes, following the coast line of the Arctic Ocean around the pole to Greenland and Spitzbergen and the long, long swath of Siberia, reaching around almost to touch Alaska. The nuns taught them English and French; the aids taught them Cree, less formally. Together they learned that, as different as this world they lived in was from what they had known, there was a larger one all around, infinitely more varied and strange. It was this realization that changed the way they thought about the sanatorium, made them see even it as a kind of sanctuary too.

Within this strange comfort, little Abraham affected a gravity so complete he was comic. Every time the three non-responders gathered for their after-supper walk around the hospital buildings, he opined that the weather was going to get colder. Faith was the natural leader of the group and when it was time to come inside she led them into the kitchen, where extra helpings of pudding awaited them. Every night they ate until they felt as if they would burst, and then they went to sleep feeling full and happy and healthy—until the night sweats woke them.

For many months the three children existed in a stalemate with their infections. They did not gain weight, but neither did they lose it. The
iqswaksayee
told them every week that things were starting to look up. All of them wondered whether this was good news or bad. Faith joked to Victoria that he was referring to heaven, but not in earshot of Abraham.

The stalemate was broken in February of their first winter. Abraham awoke one night coughing paroxysmally and over the course of fifteen minutes woke all the other children on the ward. One of the older girls went to get the night nurse. When she appeared on the floor, hair askew and halitotic, she turned on the overhead light and revealed his bedclothes to be covered in clots of blood, hanging from his sheets with tentacular adherence. The nurse picked the pallid little boy up in her arms and swept down the hall, blood leaking off them in a steady trickle. He blinked over the woman’s shoulder at his sister until he disappeared.

Emo, Winnie, and Tagak had been travelling by sled for two days and when they finally pulled up at the foot of Rankin Inlet, they were all very tired and cold. Tagak, five, slept in his mother’s arms, who was napping herself, and woke up only when she heard Emo call to the dogs to stop. Emo walked away a few paces, taking in the bay as it stretched around him in the darkness. He could see the wooden
mine head even in the half-light. Against the stars and the moon he saw the enormous pile of crushed nickel ore awaiting shipment the following spring and he could hear the creaking of machinery. He had not been here since the mine had opened; the hunting in the area had been poor since then—a consequence, Emo thought, of so many men living so closely with one another, a state good for neither them nor the animals.

Winnie stood up and stepped off the sled, waking Tagak in the process. In the dim light the three of them watched the mine head and listened to the noise emanating from it. Emo’s father had never had to make such a decision. Emo began testing the snow around them with his
panna
, seeing if it was hard enough for blocks. It was. Winnie started unpacking the gear.

In the morning, Emo dressed and stepped out of the iglu. Winnie lit the stove and put snow in the tea billy. Emo walked over to the mine site.

The mine office was in a low wooden building painted red, with snow drifted around it as high as the windows. Emo walked in through the front door. There was a man inside drinking coffee, who was enormously fat, suspenders stretching over his belly. He was talking on the telephone and ignored Emo for fifteen minutes while he spoke.

When he hung up he asked, “Are you looking for work?”

Emo lifted his eyebrows.

“You can start today. Come with me. My name is Mr. Johnson.”

Emo followed him to the storeroom in the back. Mr. Johnson took his name, making up his own English spelling and shortening it. He gave him an employee number and entered him on the company rolls. He handed Emo a pile of gloves, socks, woollen underwear, canvas overalls, leather boots, and a headlamp. “From now on, you’ll come to work in work clothes. These’ll come off your pay, so take care of them.” He showed Emo where the showers were and told him to wash up. Emo stood under the water, which could be colder or less cold depending on how you turned the tap but was mostly quite cold.

Then Mr. Johnson showed him how to put the clothes on, even the underwear. And when Emo was bundled up, feeling nearly immobile, he led him over to the mine shaft. As they walked, he told him, “You’ll be wanting someplace to live. We have some rooms empty and I’ll show you where they are tomorrow. Are you still living on the land?”

Emo nodded yes, his whole head and neck moving in a single awkward motion.

“Do you have family in town?”

Emo lifted his eyebrows again and then he nodded for good measure.

“Well, all the more important that we get you into a house then. Kids?”

Head pitching forward and backward. “One. Two.”

“Not sure?”

“One’s in the south.”

“Coming back?”

“Don’t know.”

“Sick?”

“Yes.”

“With what?”

“Teeth problems,” he said, recalling the reaction other people had had to learning there was TB in his family.

“They took her south and you don’t know if she’s coming back because of
teeth
troubles?”

“Yep.”

“Now there’s an argument for regular brushing.”

After Abraham’s death, Faith stopped rising at night to change her bedsheets; Victoria studied her motionless shape as she changed hers, and for a while envied her the rest she was getting. But then she heard her sneeze, and understood that Faith was entirely awake, but did not care to rise long enough to make herself more comfortable.

And when, one morning a month later, Faith did not rise when the lights were turned on, but lay there, cold, and pale and thin, as beautiful as a creek willow in blossom, she was not surprised.

Victoria’s operation was performed the week Faith died. Afterwards, the pills finally did start to work. She slowly stopped perspiring and her hair stopped falling out. After three months, it was decided she no longer had to sleep in the hospital, and so she went to stay at Donelda’s house, where she improved her Cree and helped to raise Donelda’s infant girl, Beatrice. Donelda had another child, a boy of thirteen who seemed as pleased as Donelda to have someone new to speak with. His name was Alexander.

Donelda’s invitation to Victoria to stay with her was like summer breaking in an afternoon. She had packed her little bag and was waiting for Alexander to meet her at the entrance hours before he was scheduled to come.

The house that Mr. Johnson gave Emo was twenty-two feet square and heated with a coal stove that glowed red when it was stoked, the boards around the chimney smoking softly and the potential for house fire high. There were three small windows and linoleum on the floor, two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen that melded into a living room. The rent cost Emo two-thirds of what he made in the mine. Between rent and buying his work clothes, a clock, flour, and oil, he did not receive a paycheque for the first three months he was employed.

But Tagak, now six years old, had grown quickly, putting on weight every month: bannock in the morning, and tea; in the afternoons, frozen char and more tea; and when his father came home at night,
tuktu
, or
nautsiaq
, depending on what Emo had been able to catch on the weekends.

They ate more Kablunauk food than they ever had, because of the same problem as in Chesterfield but worse: too many men in one place scouring the land all around for food. The caribou simply
stayed away, although increasingly they were staying away from every place now. They heard stories about families coming into Baker Lake: children with ribs jutting through their clothes, eyes sunken into their heads, hair reduced to brittle white fuzz.

But there were still seals to be caught, and when the spring came there was char. Winnie erected a drying rack outside the house and hung the split fish in the wind alongside the other women who were doing likewise, chattering and gossiping.

The mine was unlike anything Emo had experienced. The first day, when he had been taken to the tunnel with the rest of his shift, the man walking behind him, speaking with a thick Repulse Bay accent, had said, “It’s okay, it’s dark and noisy, but everything is fine, once you get used to how dark it is.”

They lined up as those in front stepped into a small car that descended into the mine shaft, Emo watching as it returned for another five men and descended again. When it was his turn he balked, his eyes widening. “What’s going on there?” a voice shouted out of the darkness, and the foreman walked forward, a huge, bearded Kablunauk. “Step on!” he shouted at Emo. Emo looked at him, unable to speak, unable to move. The man shoved him bodily onto the car, and Emo shut his eyes.

The man with the Repulse Bay accent whispered, “It will be okay, we will go down now and there will be more light.” The car lurched, and they descended. Emo kept his eyes closed and gripped the side of the car more tightly than he had ever held any harpoon trace stuck even in an
arviaat
, thrashing and pulling. He would have preferred to be in a qayak attached to any number of whales intent on doing him injury than to be where he was. The car descended in a jerking fashion for many minutes and then it stopped.

The mine, he discovered to his surprise, was warm, warmer than anything he had ever known on the surface. “The deeper you go, the warmer it gets,” Eric, the man from Repulse Bay, said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Eric answered. “You get used to it.” He helped Emo
turn on his headlamp and then walked into the mine shaft, Emo following tentatively, bowing his head and squinting.

The work was very hard, gathering up the ore and placing it on the little cars. Kablunauks and some of the Inuit miners who had been there a while operated machinery to move the big rocks. The smaller rocks, however, were gathered up by hand and lifted into the ore carriers. This was Emo’s job, together with Eric. The two worked alongside each other, sweating in the improbable heat and pausing often to rest and drink the tepid, oily water that was provided to them. When the bearded foreman saw them pausing, he shouted at them to resume. His name was Johanson, and he had come from Norway to work here. Eric said that he lived in the town with an Inuk wife, the daughter of a miner from Coral Harbour, and it was thought that he did not treat her well. Not that it was any of their business. But he could certainly yell loud.