Consumption (7 page)

“Victoria,” Père Bernard began,
“Je te vois visiter les hommes qui travaillent au magasin, et je pense que tu dois comprendre que tu es devenue très belle, et ils le remarquent. Ces hommes ne penseront pas à tes meilleurs intérêts.”

She nodded as she sat in his kitchen. He left the door to his cabin open when she dropped by, for reasons she didn’t fully understand. Even in the summer, the wind here was cold. People walking by on the road looked in and saw them drinking tea, and waved, and wondered why the priest was leaving his door open and wearing his parka as he sat at his table.

“Je ne suis pas un enfant, Père.”

“Tu as dix-sept ans, bien sûr tu es une jeune filie.”

“Ma mère, elle était mariée depuis un an, à mon âge.”

“Tu es différente de ta mère, Victoria.”

“Evidemment.”

“
C’est très difficile, n’est-ce pos?”

She nodded.

“I understand that you’re lonely, and the men at the Hudson’s Bay Store are friendly, and can talk to you about where you’ve been. But you must be cautious with them. None of them will marry you, they want wives from where they come from themselves. And when they’ve made enough money here, they will leave. Even if they have children here. Even if they’re needed.”

Sitting on the rocks by the ocean flats at the head of the inlet, Victoria wondered what Alexander was doing at that moment. (He was setting a net in the North Basin of Lake Winnipeg, rain just starting to fall in the late afternoon, and the wind rising ominously, clouds darkening in the west. Even in his first year of what would be a lifetime as a commercial fisherman, he could tell it was time to get to shore.) She missed him. She had sent him a half-dozen letters, written on paper Père Bernard gave her, which he had not answered. She hadn’t been surprised. Her letters probably only served to make
him feel guilty, embarrassed that he wouldn’t be replying. She thought he probably missed her most when her letters arrived, and that without any prospect of seeing one another again he wished she wouldn’t write him. She was mostly right.

Victoria missed him hard. She missed having sex with him, she missed lying in the sun with him, and she missed smelling him on herself. She imagined kissing him deeply, hungrily. She felt her throat tickle and she coughed. She coughed again, holding her hand to her lips. Nothing. Not even a fleck. She breathed deeply, feeling for any sensation of infection, unwellness. She felt like she could run twenty miles. Her shoulders sagged with disappointment. The priest could mind his own business. Her mother could mind her own business too. A week earlier she had brought home a month-old copy of the
Winnipeg Free Press
, which she had read by oil lamp light that night, in their kitchen. In the morning she had arisen to her mother lighting the stove with it, pointedly using the whole newspaper when she normally used only a handful of dried moss. Afterwards, Victoria tried to remember the stories she had read the night before, about the Beatles, the war in Vietnam, Trudeaumania. She couldn’t, really. She asked her father if he would buy a radio, and he just stared at her.

“Hello,” the voice said. She turned around and it was Robertson, standing diffidently, twenty feet from the rock she sat on. She stood as she nodded to him.

“Hello.”

“It’s a nice day,” he said, gesturing at the grey, streaked sky, clouds like steel wool scudding low overhead and, in this wind, about as abrasive. The sea behind her was white-capped and purple, the waves building in the rising wind.

“It’s not
that
nice.”

“No, it isn’t.” He grinned. “But in this climate, you take what you can get.”

“I suppose it might be called an
adequate
day.”

“You’re the only person in town who speaks the way you do.”

She shrugged. “It’s the nuns. Do you have any news for me?”

He blinked. “The war in Vietnam is going badly for the Americans. The Viet Cong has never been as bold as this before.”

“How will it end?”

He pursed his lips. “It’s hard to see the Americans losing.”

“Sit down and tell me more.”

“There are student riots in Paris. It seems they are angry about Vietnam too, but I don’t really know why. People are frightened there. They think there could be an insurrection.”

“What’s that?”

“A rebellion. Like in Prague. Except the students seem to want a communist government.” The wind lifted his thinning hair off his scalp and stood it on end.

She was enjoying the sight of his head, outlined by his hair like a pussy willow.

“It looks like the American president might not run for reelection. Because of the war in Vietnam.”

“People are pretty upset about it, huh?”

“It appears.”

“And what else?”

“I forget.”

“No you don’t, you’re embarrassed, all of a sudden.”

“Not really.”

“Okay.”

They both looked at the bay.

By the time they had met three times on the flat rock at the head of the bay, the whole town had noticed. Winnie and Emo had not mentioned it. Victoria introduced a tone of uneasiness into their home, and they reasoned to themselves that maybe she was better suited to be a Kablunauk’s wife now than an Inuk’s. This was too painful an idea for either of them to utter aloud.

One day Victoria was walking back from church when she met Simionie, Peter Irnuk’s son, the one who had accompanied him to the airport the day she returned with the dreadful news. He waved
at her. Unaccustomed to being greeted, she assumed he was gesturing to someone else and she ignored him. He waved again and then walked quickly up to her.

“Qanuipiit?”

“Uh… okay,” she said, switching to Kablunuktitut.

“I mean, you’re back, after being away for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“Is it hard?”

“Not really,” she said, shifting from one foot to the other, her
kamiks
transmitting every aspect of the ground beneath her feet—after six years in leather-soled shoes and boots, it was like removing earwax and suddenly
hearing
.

“Good,” he said.

“I have to get home now,” she said.

“Okay,” he replied.

Despite herself, she found herself smiling a little.

Robertson bought his hunting cabin from the long-time store manager, whose drinking habit no longer allowed him to undertake protracted trips on the tundra, restricting him to the store and to his house across the road from it. The old Scotsman lurched back and forth over the course of the day, the week, and steadily he grew more wobbly. The people had grown familiar with the life cycle of the Hudson’s Bay men, and they recognized this terminal phase. The only question was whether he would grow yellow and die here, or survive long enough to get on the freighter the next summer and die in the south someplace, unknown, the subject neither of sympathy nor gossip.

But in the store manager’s dissolution, Robertson blossomed. He did the work of his superior without comment or complaint, and he did not allow the other Bay Boys to express the disdain that would otherwise have come so easily to their lips. In this, the store continued to work well, and the town observed that too. Robertson was considered one of the fairest and most competent store managers they had seen, even though he wasn’t experienced. The priest considered
his involvement with Victoria to be inappropriate, but this criticism was not widely felt. Robertson did not beat her, and he was only a few years older than her himself. The townspeople told him they wanted him to stay and, increasingly, they mentioned this to Victoria. She just shrugged when people referred to her friendship with Robertson. He had a radio. And let her listen to it.

“There was no hope there and that was why I left. The northern cities, Birmingham, Manchester, they just looked to me like they were collapsing. Every month there was another mill closing, a thousand more men out of work with no expectation of finding another job. The coal miners, the steel workers, all in the same situation. It sounds hysterical to say out loud, but over there you could get the idea that the world was coming to an end. Every year worse than the one before it.” Robertson paused to take a sip of his whisky. There was a storm blowing off the bay, and the windows rattled. She listened to him, unable to fully imagine the place he was describing, but now better able to imagine this man before her.

“The pubs were where you saw it the clearest. There was this place down the street from my parents’ house. The Flagging Stallion. Used to be, it was busy at lunch and then not again until supper-time, and then all night it was packed. By the time I left, it was jammed by eleven in the morning, and stayed that way until eight or nine, when everyone was just too tired to keep drinking. More fights too. Fights all the time, and women, drunk as sailors, vomiting outside. Nobody had anything better to do.”

The flat light to the southwest slipped in under the clouds and lit the cabin briefly. She watched him in the orange light. He looked puzzled and almost angry.

“I’m not saying that it was anyone’s fault. The world changes and people have to too. But all that change, in such a short period of time. It was so hard on those people.

“My sister Ethel got pregnant. The guy was an out-of-work millwright. They moved to Australia. Then my brother Harold, he had been a machinist, moved to London, and got a job delivering sandwiches. I hadn’t really considered leaving until then, but suddenly it was clear to me: it was time to go. I heard it was easy to get a visa to Canada. I landed and started moving, asking around for jobs as I went, and never stopped until I ended up here. It seems kind of like a dream to me. It’s still a little hard to believe.”

“Simionie Irnuk came to talk to me today,” Robertson said, watching the sun set through his cabin door one night in June, nearly midnight and the sky riotously purple and orange. She turned the radio off and straightened her clothes. It was almost time to go home.

“What did he say?”

“He asked me if I loved you.”

“What did you say?”

“That that sounded like a good idea.”

“You didn’t.” She laughed.

“I did.”

“You shouldn’t play with him.”

“I wasn’t.”

Victoria looked at him again, and she saw the face of her new lover soften. She breathed in deeply then, and felt her chest catch. She touched his ear, and he caught her hand in his and kissed it.

“Good night,” she said.

All he could do was nod.

When she became pregnant, she recognized the sensations. She told Robertson one night when they were sitting on the step of his cabin, watching the aurora borealis. In the darkness, she could not see his expression. He nodded and did not speak. Subsequently both of them avoided mentioning her pregnancy, though they
continued to spend evenings together whenever he got away from the post.

Neither were Emo and Winnie eager to discuss their daughter’s condition. Their connection with her felt too tenuous, and if what they assumed was true, that the Kablunauk was the father, then it seemed inevitable that their affiliation with her would diminish further. And she, their only daughter. Winnie wept quietly to herself about the matter. Emo felt panicked whenever he thought about it, whenever Winnie alluded to it, so he simply refused to discuss the subject. When Victoria returned home from her spells out at the Kablunauk’s cabin, she worried for the sanity of her parents, who were so much more jumpy than she remembered from her childhood.

Even when Victoria was eight months along, her belly hugely swollen on her long, thin consumptive’s frame, she refused to participate with Robertson or anyone in any conversation that had to do with reproduction. She attended Père Bernard’s masses with her mother and father on Sunday mornings and she smiled and waved at the people who greeted her. She did not mention Robertson, nor did she bring him to church with her, and she did not discuss the fact of her having to leave to urinate twice during the service, nor her wide-gaited and comic waddle. Eventually she became too large for her parka and had to buy a zippered nylon coat from the Hudson’s Bay store. Still, she was unable to close the zipper, and so she had her mother sew a panel she could zip to the front of her coat to afford her otherwise exposed belly some shelter. Her coat was navy blue, and for reasons known only to Winnie the zippered panel was crimson. By the end, Victoria looked like a drake mallard waddling the slippery paths through the hamlet and still refusing to discuss her circumstances. When Elizabeth Makpah, who sat across the aisle from Victoria’s family at church, accosted her in the Hudson’s Bay store and bluntly asked what her plans were, Victoria had replied that they would have potatoes tonight, with a caribou roast. Maybe a can of corn.