Consumption (5 page)

Emo and Eric worked all that day, filling up an ore car and sliding it back along the tunnel into the darkness and then filling the next one, until a whistle sounded. Then they climbed back into the car and ascended into the night. It had been dark when they had descended and it was dark when they re-emerged. And this is how Emo’s life as a miner proceeded.

During this time, Victoria’s absence was not much discussed, but it was at all times felt. Winnie grew sad whenever the subject of daughters arose and, although she did not speak of it to her husband, she periodically approached the priest to see if he had any news of Victoria. It was her impression that contact between families and children in the south was discouraged; it would only worsen the homesickness that afflicted them. Winnie asked Père Bernard to write a letter to her daughter for her, but he always found an excuse. He would have to find out for certain where she was staying, and would she be able to read it anyway?

After many such visits, Bernard told her that he had heard from the sanatorium and that Victoria was doing well. He did not know how much longer she would have to stay, but the medicines were
working now. There had been an operation, which had been successful, and he would let her know if he heard more.

The following five years unfolded like a fever dream. Victoria’s Cree was soon unaccented, Donelda told her. The three of them laughed on into the night after supper was over, in that melodic language that seemed to begin always on the sides of the tongue and behind the molars, so full of aspirated vowels that it was not so much spoken as it was exhaled. Beatrice grew to standing and then walking and Victoria spent so many hours with her, shepherding the little girl along the wide muddy streets of The Pas, that the first word Beatrice ever said was in Inuktitut—
aka
, no, wrinkling her nose and refusing a piece of bannock.

Within a few months of moving in with Donelda, Victoria had begun to look more like the other girls her age and less like Alexander. It was also as if she had been forgotten by the doctors at the sanatorium. She attended classes run by the nuns, who understood that her illness had been slow to respond and who enjoyed her presence in their classes. She was a pleasure to have around and so no one asked why she was there so long. Victoria became Donelda’s confidante, and together they gossiped in Cree about the complex personalities and motivations of the nuns, about the uneven competencies of the doctors. Within all this tenderness, the memory of that other, more difficult place she had lived faded until the tundra was almost an abstraction, the place on the map above the dashes marked
treeline
. The first year she often had asked if there was news from her parents, but as even the idea of a home other than this place receded in her memory, she stopped asking about her parents and her little brother. She learned to read and do arithmetic in English. She went weeks without thinking in Inuktitut. The nuns discouraged conversation in that language in the classes, and she no longer walked the grounds with the other children, but scampered
home to Donelda, Alexander, and Beatrice, to help with supper and to chatter merrily about the books she had read that day.

In the evenings, Victoria sat up after Donelda had laid Beatrice down and listened to the radio: to the local news, and then to the BBC World Service and Voice of America. She kept a globe in the kitchen. Donelda told her the only way to get smart was to stay interested in the world. She asked Victoria if she ever thought she would see any of these places and Victoria shrugged. She wasn’t completely convinced that Algeria, Malaysia, or Vietnam actually existed as physical locations. It didn’t matter. Even as word-pictures they entranced her.

Alexander was two years older than Victoria. After she came to stay, they became almost like siblings, fighting with and shrieking at one another at violations of privacy and manners. Donelda dispatched them both to their rooms with swats of her broom often enough that it became inevitable that a kind of complicity grew between them.

For four years the freighters ran up the coast to Rankin Inlet to collect the nickel ore and transport it to foundries in Quebec. The Cold War was on and the American military was placing large orders for stainless steel with every steel maker on the continent.

The
Ithaca
, a ten-thousand-ton ore carrier out of Trois-Rivières, shipped the last load of ore of the season in 1965. The ice was late coming in and the mine’s owners had tried to get one more load out before freeze-up. The
Ithaca
was making for the Davis Straight when an arctic low exploded over Hudson Bay, eighty-knot winds throwing freezing rain and the tops of waves off in spumes of spindrift, forcing her to run off south; initially she had sea room, with four hundred miles to the southern coast, but the storm did not ease and, heavily laden, every time she tried to turn she threatened to roll right over on her beam ends. She was driven high up onto the rocks
east of the Churchill River mouth and became a familiar site to travellers flying north, who refuelled in Churchill, her iron hulk rusting slowly on the rocks, the nickel ore within her spilling out steadily and scattering over the beach in the course of subsequent years. When the storm finally abated, that portion of the ship above the surf line was nearly intact. Her bottom was shredded into a thousand evil-looking steel shards, however, and there was no discussion of refloating her. Given the expense of working in the Arctic, she wasn’t even cut up for salvage, but simply left there, becoming an orange-red landmark, jutting out of the sea ice five hundred yards from the beach. In the winter, polar bears slept inside her during the bad weather.

The enterprise lost the last of its luck with the death of that ship. Nickel was found in northern Manitoba and Ontario, as well as in Utah, Mexico, and Brazil—all on rail routes and adjacent to towns where trained miners and mechanics could be induced to live. The Cold War warmed a little too, and the demand for nickel-alloy steel diminished. As the price of ore began a slow descent, the workings of the mine became at the same time steadily more expensive and the investors in the south steadily more agitated.

The closing of the mine was announced to the miners on a fall day in
1966
. They had been aware of the dour moods of the foremen and the office personnel, but they had long concluded these to be their resting states. That so much effort could have been put into moving the heavy equipment here, building the houses for the miners, sinking the mine itself, into hundreds of feet of igneous rock, so deep below the surface that the mine shafts themselves were always warm even in the winter—this seemed miraculous to Emo and was one of the things he remembered most clearly afterwards. The idea that all that stupendous effort could simply be abandoned seemed preposterous whenever any of them paused to consider it.

And so when they were told to return their work clothes, that they could go on living in the houses for now, but they should make some arrangements to move on in the near future, this all came as
an astonishment. As strange as the idea of crawling into the depths of the earth to chip out rocks for the Kablunauks to put on boats and take away was, the idea of stopping this now, and putting back on their hunting furs and taking their families back onto the land, seemed even more laughable. After they were told to go home, Emo walked away from the mine site down to the sea edge, where his dogs were tied up on the ice. He looked up at the sky and at his own neglected dogs and finally at the canvas clothes he was wearing. And then he walked home to make the same bewildered explanation to Winnie that all the men were making to their wives that night.

On the Oiseau River, just north of The Pas, the sun shines through the poplar stands oblique and glowing orange on spring afternoons. The bond that had grown up between Victoria and Alexander eventually moved them to walk out there, without ever much discussing why. It was Victoria’s sixth year in the south, and her sixteenth in the world. They sat down on one of the granite rock faces that lined the river, and the sunshine was almost hot on their faces even though patches of snow still shone through the stands of tamarack and black spruce. The slow-to-dissipate winter cold radiated up and off the rocks and the soil, and the heat fell down upon them from the sky. Their feet were wet from crossing the river and so they untied their shoelaces and lined their shoes and socks together alongside them, warming in the sun, their pale glistening feet freed after a winter’s confinement.

She had stretched her hands behind her as she tossed back her hair, her long neck arching, and when her fingers had touched his, against the rock, she did not pull them away. They sat like that, eyes shut, sunning themselves like tortoises, until she felt his lips sliding along the side of her neck. Then his teeth ran along her collarbone and she bit her own lip, her fingers curling into the granite extrusion. His warm breath flowed over her shoulder and neck and the
soft spot at their juncture. Though it was only his lips that touched her, she raised her hips against nothing but the weight of her own clothes, so frustratingly light and unresisting. Her hands gave way to her elbows, and her neck bent back so far her scalp touched stone. He lifted her glasses from her face.

Alexander was strong, in the manner of certain boys raised without fathers, who adopted that position early and intuitively. He cut wood for the stove every morning before going to school while his mother made breakfast—this had been his responsibility since he was eight. Even when it was very cold he did not complain. In school, however, he was not inspired. He talked of getting a job with the Hudson’s Bay Company and working in the network of stores that supplied two hundred towns in the boreal forest and the Arctic with food and hardware. He imagined himself alone a lot, travelling in the bush and fending for himself. It was the first time Victoria had encountered the romanticized idea of self-sufficiency. Her father, the most self-sufficient man she knew, would never have sought isolation, loneliness. She watched Alexander that afternoon, as he ran his fingers over her abdomen, and thought to herself that this was a dangerous idea.

She saw clearly the prospects he would face, approaching the Hudson’s Bay Company for work. The Bay Boys, above and below the treeline, were English. Her foreknowledge saddened her, and that sadness compounded her affection for him. When they walked out to the Oiseau River that spring, they held hands and listened for others. They spoke about trivialities, about the immediacies of the day, and she deflected any discussion of anything with implications beyond a week. He was older, and inclined to plan. She wouldn’t have it.

When school let out, Victoria and Alexander disappeared into the bush. Every morning, they woke and rose together, picking up fishing rods and—in Victoria’s instance—a bag of books, and headed out to the river. Because the fishing was known to be so poor there, they were almost always alone. And there was rarely
any difficulty carrying their catch home. Donelda teased her son about his lack of fishing prowess, asked him if he needed her to show him how it was done. Victoria spoke up then. “He’s getting better. Pretty soon I’ll have him up to speed.” She reminded them both how she had caught char in the Arctic with just a
kavitok
, a fish spear. Both Alexander and his mother suspected she was mis-remembering a little—that she probably had not fed the whole family, as she suggested. The truth was that Victoria no longer knew which of her memories of the north were accurate and which she had distorted.