Consumption (8 page)

When Dr. Balthazar appeared in town, it took weeks before there was a general consensus about what he was doing there. With his heavy-footed step and bearded face, he was more like a prospector than the wire-framed and crewcut federal government doctors they were used to. He was American and clearly young. The assumption among the Bay Boys was that he was a draft dodger. There was sufficient residual diffidence lingering from the influences of both the old Inuit culture and the old British one that no one interrogated him on the point.

Previously, the closest doctor worked at the Church-run hospital in Chesterfield Inlet. The position had been filled by a succession of odd-tempered men drawn by the isolation and potential for ego indulgence. Joseph Moody, the last such man, had left Chesterfield Inlet in
1969
. He had performed general surgery, including Caesarean sections and major abdominal operations, and had strutted through his tenure like Douglas MacArthur wading ashore at Inchon. Inevitably, there had been a book,
Arctic Doctor
, detailing his triumphs.

Balthazar was a different sort of man, deferential and malleable. The nurses at the clinic in Rankin Inlet accepted him quickly and the storied conflicts from Moody’s day were not re-enacted here. The nurses were grateful for that, which is not the same thing as saying they were confident in his ability.

Victoria lay in the treatment room, gasping and terrified, as an Irish nurse, with glinting hair and sardonic manner, examined her. This was a business nobody had prepared Victoria for. The Irish woman’s lips pursed as she appreciated the width and thinness of Victoria’s dilated cervix. When she was finished, she sat down on a stool at the head of Victoria’s bed and addressed her chin. “My dear, you are going to have your baby in the next hour or two. We will deliver you here. There isn’t time to ship you out—you’d likely have your baby in the airplane if we did that.” Then she picked up the telephone to inform the new doctor of her decision.

Balthazar was only just in the door, toque and beard covered in snowflakes, when Victoria felt the urge to push, and she did, and within twenty minutes—Balthazar matching her pant-for-breathless-pant, exhorting her until he was hoarse—her little
irnuq
had crept into the world. What a bushy-haired little wonder he was, his bright black eyes wide open, more serene even than Victoria, who felt exhaustion and pleasure ripple over her like a summer line squall. Twelve hours after that, the nurse sent Victoria and Pauloosie home and they fell asleep together in her parents’ aromatic chipboard house.

Balthazar had confided to Victoria afterwards that he hadn’t much experience in obstetrics. The laconic Irish nurse reckoned that it would have been more worrying if he had delivered many babies and still had become so agitated at what had been a pretty effortless affair. “Effortless,” Victoria had repeated to herself, and wondered what room the Irishwoman had been in. A kind of half-guilty affection bloomed between her and the young doctor.

But Victoria was grateful that neither the Irishwoman nor Balthazar had made her feel ashamed of herself that evening in the nurses’ station, the way she had felt throughout the pregnancy, especially after telling Robertson. When her mother and father were presented with the fact of their grandson, they softened as well, and her mother did not again mention Père Bernard and having to meet his eyes.

A baby changes everything. The moment Pauloosie was in the world, wearing Robertson’s surname, his father became a part of the community. Robertson was the father of an Inuk boy now and possessed a stake in the place that he had not before. And in his doting on the child, the way he walked through town wearing an
amoutie
, his son’s wee head poking up from the back of his hood, it was clear he was also making a claim on the place. None of the white men who had left had acted like this.

Three years after Pauloosie was born, Victoria delivered Justine. Two years after that came Marie. These were happy times. Robertson
had officially become the new Hudson’s Bay store manager, though he had functioned in that capacity for some time already. He went on long hunting trips with his father-in-law and with the younger hunters, and was regarded as reasonably competent, at least for a Kablunauk who hadn’t ever fired a rifle when he arrived. Oddly, it was Robertson who guided Victoria back into the community. As they did their rounds after a hunt, sharing whatever meat he brought in off the land, he was the butt of gentle teasing about his strange-shaped iglus and white man’s ways, which was a welcome that extended also to her.

It was only later that things started going wrong in their marriage. There was a fourth child, a boy. His fate was never discussed by Robertson and Victoria, but lay between them nonetheless.

The pregnancy had been the easiest of them all. When Victoria began labouring at home she had called her mother to come over to stay with the kids and then she picked up her things and walked to the nursing station.

When the nurse called Dr. Balthazar—who by this time had delivered his share of babies—he wanted to know if he could arrange a medevac. No, the nurse informed him, there wasn’t time. Ten minutes later he arrived, with the wild-eyed, unfocused look he commonly wore when called unexpectedly from his apartment. He washed his hands and put on a gown and Victoria joked with him that one of these days he was going to realize that she had easy babies and that he didn’t need to get so worked up. They both looked up as they heard Robertson arriving at the nurses’ station, bantering with the clerks, and at ease.

The first stage was done in an hour, and she felt the baby moving through her with vigour and strength. She loved him already, knew he was a boy. When she had told this to her mother after the ultrasound, Winnie had named him Anguilik, after her own father, who, with this name, would now be reborn. She had touched her head respectfully to her daughter’s belly and whispered, “Welcome back, Father.” The story of how Emo and Anguilik had met, one spring
evening on the ice outside Repulse Bay, when Emo had come north looking for a wife, was part of the family’s mythology. The idea of Anguilik’s return to them delighted everyone except Robertson. But he knew better than to mock these ideas aloud.

When Victoria had left her mother to waddle over to the nursing station, Winnie had been weeping already, and Victoria had hugged her for a long time—until the strength of the contractions grew to the point that they could not be ignored. Winnie’s father, dead twenty years, had been the informal leader of his little band; the young people no longer spoke of him, but everyone over forty remembered his name. Victoria’s son was eagerly awaited. At the grocery store the week before, she received more congratulations and inquiries into her health than she had with the other three put together. She was uncomfortable with this for two reasons: she had grown accustomed to her near invisibility in the town; also, she was old enough to remember the presumption that babies generally do not survive, that they haven’t even begun to decide whether they’ll stick around until their fontanelles have closed up together with the easy exit skyward.

And then the baby crowned, and his head emerged and Balthazar grinned at her. The nurse inhaled sharply. Robertson spun his head to where the nurse pointed, as did Balthazar. The baby’s head had retracted back inside Victoria to his ears. “Turtle sign,” Balthazar and the nurse whispered at the same moment. The nurse pulled Victoria down to the very edge of the bed and, lifting her knees back to her chest, pushed on her abdomen as Balthazar gripped the baby’s head and heaved. Robertson blanched. The nurse called for help then and, when the second nurse arrived, hissed “shoulder dystocia” to her. The new nurse gripped Victoria’s other leg and pressed likewise upon her, as Balthazar desperately fumbled.

When a baby’s shoulders are too large to clear the mother’s pelvis, there are ten minutes to act and only ten minutes. The umbilical cord is squeezed closed in the birth canal and the child cannot expand his chest enough to breathe, and grows steadily more blue
until he is delivered, whole and in time—or in parts. Bringing the knees to the chest is the first move, hanging the buttocks off the end of the bed is the next—these change the relevant angles favourably. When this does not work, the physician can twist the baby around in the birth canal, in the aptly named “corkscrew” manoeuvre. When this does not work, sometimes fracturing the child’s collarbones will allow the shoulders to roll in enough to be delivered. By this stage, all measures are desperate. In a city hospital, with an anaesthetist standing in the next room, and a surgeon right there, a Caesarean section can be life-saving. But ten minutes goes fast.

Blood ran from Victoria in a steady stream; she grew paler and paler, and the child, the grapefruit-sized ball of his head just poking from her, grew bluer and bluer until he was almost the colour of an aubergine. No operation was possible there, and when the sequence of relevant steps pursued methodically did not work, Balthazar became frozen with grief, moving more slowly not less, and what happened was, the baby died.

When her son had finally been pulled from her, Victoria held out her arms and Balthazar, weeping, placed the dead baby in them. She put the baby to her breast, shuddering and whispering, “Eat, baby. Please eat…” Tears ran steadily down her cheeks and off her chin and onto the baby’s head. Robertson stroked her hair, whispering, “Shhhh, Victoria, you’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” His relief that she had survived, to continue to tend to him and his other children, struck her at that moment as inconceivably self-absorbed. With her last bit of strength she hissed at him, “Get out of here!”

His head flew back with a snap.

When he did not immediately move, she shrieked, “
GET HIM OUT OF HERE!
” And he rose from his position hunched on the father’s stool and left the room, under the gaze of the horrified nurses and the doctor, himself paralyzed with grief and shame.

When Balthazar visited her a few hours later, Robertson had not returned. “Victoria,” the doctor began. “I did not act as quickly as I
ought to have…” But she did not have enough energy to assuage his guilt and turned away from him on her stretcher. “It’s no one’s fault,” she said. And until much later, when she knew him better, she believed that.

Victoria’s parents and the priest and the other mothers in the hamlet attributed the death of her son to, variously, God’s will or Victoria’s excessive pride. But it wasn’t fated that her boy should die. Her boy was meant to grow up strong and handsome. He was supposed to have married Faith Nakoolak’s oldest daughter, who was not born either, as a consequence of the frayed strands of fortune. Faith was meant to have survived, and so was Victoria’s boy. They were supposed to live, and be happy. He was to have been Victoria’s favourite child, and this would have been apparent, though she would have denied it. He was also supposed to have been Robertson’s son in a way that Pauloosie could never be. He was supposed to have been the child that held them all together.

In dying, he ruptured Victoria from Robertson, flaked her away from him like a leaf of shale. Robertson was attentive enough when Victoria returned home the next day. He had sent the kids to neighbours, and had cooked a meal. But the truth was Victoria’s intuition had been right—he was relieved that his wife was safe, had not much wanted another child. Alongside Victoria’s grief, he was outrageously unperturbed. He would not grieve for the little boy, his own son, her own grandfather. And each time he assured her stupidly that “everything was going to be okay,” he made it more and more certain that they never would be. Made it more and more clear that he really was as foreign, and as selfish, as he seemed.

Everything changed in a moment, for them. Like a summer frontal system crossing the sun.

FOUR

VICTORIA REVVED HER SNOW MACHINE
as she rounded the broad curves of the Little Meliadine River. The storm that had confined them all to the house for an endless stretch had been over for five days and, ever since, a high-pressure system had hung over the tundra with air as clear and incisive as cut glass. The snow machine sounded like an electric kitchen appliance grinding rocks. It whined and howled and chattered and flung her along over the snow so fast her tears froze.