Country of Cold (20 page)

The summer I turned sixteen, my mother, my father, and I all agreed that I should get work, for the usual generationally disparate reasons: maturity, work ethic, learning the value of a dollar—this against pizza, gasoline, and buying my own personal care items and intoxicants. My mother could not have remained uninvolved in such an undertaking, and so when she came home one day with the news that she had been speaking to the owner of the adult video store, Blue Moon Videos, which was in the same strip mall as my father’s dental practice, and that the owner thought he needed some help, I accepted her contribution as inevitable.
Now you just go down there tomorrow afternoon, he’s looking forward to meeting you, don’t be so shy all the time
.

The owner’s name was Bobby Sigrun and he had taken a drubbing in the housecrafts business for ten years
before he had had a moment of truth one morning in the late seventies and saw the direction of the future in small-volume retailing: goodbye macramé, hello Long Dong Silver. He laughed easily and hired me in minutes. Before I knew it I was the general labourer/driver/shop clerk of the Municipality of Dunsmuir’s cultural and moral low point.

When I came home from the Blue Moon with the news that I had been hired, my mother worked hard to contain her enthusiasm. She was so wary of me in those days. She looked up at me from the sofa, where she sat fanning herself in the heat, as I mumbled that I had gotten the job. She started to exult—she had actually succeeded in doing me a favour—and then caught herself. “Well, that’s fine, son.”

My first full day of work, she came by with the bagged lunch that I had forgotten on the kitchen table that morning. She chatted with Mr. Sigrun by the cash register as I unloaded a new shipment of
Shower Room Shenanigans
and winced.

When I got home she asked me over iced tea what I thought of the place. I screwed up my face and shut my eyes, protesting the question:
“I don’t know, Mom.”

“I guess it would be your father you would speak to about those things,” she conceded—imagining perhaps that we did something out in the shop other than stare fixedly at balsa wood and fibreglass laminates.

When my mother met my father he was still in dentistry school and she was teaching in a one-room school north of Dundurn, Saskatchewan. She told me a hundred times when I was growing up that you have to look for men like my father with a flashlight, seeing in his reticence and disposition to preoccupation an enduring and charming strength. My father, possessing the emotional vocabulary of a miniature plastic barnyard animal, would leave the room.

My father and I began eating lunch together at the Riverside Grill, an Arborite-and-aluminum diner located in the mall. Over BLTs and as I listened to accounts of root canals gone awry and rot gone right through to bone, I decided two things: I could not be my father, and I would floss and brush vigorously every remaining day of my life.

In the late afternoon, when I got off work, I would sit in my father’s waiting room until he finished with his last patient and drove us home. He usually ran late, and his receptionist, Rachel Freeman, and I would wait with our jackets on and make jokes about my father’s difficulties with schedules. Mrs. Freeman was thirty-two and had worked for my father for two years. She had moved to Dunsmuir from the city when she married Roddy Freeman, who grew up down the road from us and always seemed to be hitting someone. When they split up she
decided to stay in town because of the job she had gotten in my father’s office. She said that getting that job was about the only luck she had had in the previous couple of years. When my father’s last patient left, we would open the door. A minute later he would bound into the waiting room, apologizing. We would usher him out.

When the Perseid shower comes every summer, my father is distracted even beyond what is normal for him. For days beforehand he studies the weather map, praying for clear skies. The Perseid shower is caused by the collision of the earth with a cloud of dust from old comets that lies in the path of the earth’s orbit. Every year, on the 15th of August or so, the night lights up with silent white streaks. For years, my mother and I sat there with him, watching.

We understood him to be more accessible than he was. We imagined that in loving him as we did, we gained a reliable knowledge of him. The meteor shower, we imagined, interested him because it was beautiful, or because it was unusual, or because it was fire made of burning ice, or something. His interests were as timid as he was, we surmised, and of course astronomy pleased him. He was drawn to odd small things that bordered on insignificance because that was how he was, as well. This was foolishness. To have lived beside him and have never grasped how he struggled with his life—it was a kind of ignorance that makes me twist now, thinking of it.

The last time we watched the meteors together I was seventeen. It was the warmest night that year; we sat out on the back lawn in our patio chairs with our clothes clinging to us like Saran Wrap on thawing bacon, perspiration beading on glistening white flesh.

Rachel sat beside my mother, and on Rachel’s other side my father, then me. “And if you follow the pointer stars of Ursa Major, you come to Polaris … right … there.” My mother and I listened idly. Rachel had never heard of the Galilean moons before; my mother and I, a thousand times. He was performing. Even in the heat his enthusiasm was enough to embarrass me.

It was the first time I understood it to be deliberate.

“And when these things were found, they completely shook the Aristotelian worldview, because they were a completely new thing. It suggested that the orthodoxy might be improved upon in some ways, that its account of the universe might conceivably be incomplete. What this meant for the Renaissance, for the rebirth of scientific inquiry, was …” And he waved his arms at all these things up there and I looked over at Mrs. Freeman and she was sitting up, staring first at Jupiter and then at my father, rapt. My mother got up and walked back to the house.

Nothing prepares me for a good meteor shower. A couple of falling stars every half hour, I think, no big deal. But some years it is much more than that, and I am never disappointed afterwards, although sometimes I
expect to be. The beauty of the thing on a dark moonless night away from the lights of town is enough that you’d think that everyone would know about it and talk about it all the time. But they don’t. And it happens anyway, without them.

After he died it took us a weekend to clean out his shop and turn the space into a second garage bay. The stuff in there was returned to the dump from where it had been gathered. By Saturday afternoon it was empty, and by noon Sunday we had finished cleaning and were painting. We even painted the concrete parking pad, with long-handled rollers that streaked across the floor in radiating and coalescing lines. When we were done, you’d have thought we had taken off the roof, the place was so much brighter.

That last year I watched the meteors with him, and saw my mother walk inside, I stared up at the sky, willing him to be happy, to be satisfied with what was before him. It was quiet for a long time and then I stood up, too, and went back to the house. At the side of the porch I stopped and looked up at the sky. My father was pointing out more astronomical minutiae. Rachel leaned close, listening intently. My father’s voice fell away.

That year the shower began with a flash and suddenly a dozen white wakes were seared across the heavens. They appeared high above the western horizon and tracked down to the southeast, disappearing over the
neighbours’ barn almost before you could get a fix on them, and Rachel’s gasp was caught in her throat. Then there were another half-dozen, higher up this time, and slower, moving mostly parallel to one another, like high-altitude aircraft flying in formation. It seemed incomprehensible that they should be so quiet; everything alive seemed to have stopped to watch the meteors. Even the distant highway was silent and the crickets were still, for the first time since the heat had arrived.

This was in 1981.

Carol was a hundred miles off the coast of Southampton Island, headed for Coral Harbour, when the wind came up. It was early in the year and it was still very cold. Ice hung from the rigging like great stalactites. She had wanted to make it out of Hudson Bay and into the North Atlantic before the autumn weather turned, and so she had left Churchill very early in the season. The ice pack had only begun to break up, and large pans still crowded together on the horizon. When the visibility began to worsen, she worried first about the ice.

As the wind mounted it became apparent that she would have to change course. The boat was pounding into the oncoming seas so hard she stopped entirely in the trough of each wave, and Carol briefly lost steerage as a consequence. As she turned the boat off the wind
to run parallel with the sea, the boat’s rolling increased dramatically. She was afraid that the boat might roll right over on her side, so she shortened sail, and it was a little better.

Then the wind mounted further and the rolling became more severe, even with the sails all but doused. It was only possible to head downwind, and downwind was the western shore of Hudson Bay. Carol was being driven toward a lee shore, and she was unable to alter course from it. She tried slowing her progress. She let out a long loop of anchor line, with spare sails and an anchor tied to it; she towed this apparatus, and it slowed her from six knots to three. She looked at the chart. It would take her twelve hours before she hit the lee shore.

All her life, she had felt a nearly constant urge to just launch herself from any height or off any boat. Once when she was pregnant she was on a ferry on Lake Huron and felt herself begin to lift up one foot. She fell back, nauseous with self-contempt and alarm.

She watched the knotmeter click along. She was twenty-five miles from shore, fifteen, ten. The wind had increased. She could see the low grey hills of
Kivalliq in front of her when she realized that, close in to shore, the wind had lessened. She tried turning and it worked. The wind had slowed enough that she could reach along parallel to the shore. She cut the line she was towing. She continued like this for another six hours, and then the wind fell abruptly and she rounded up further and made for Coral Harbour.

The Harbour Hotel in Wager Bay, on the coast of Hudson Bay, had twenty-two rooms and a bar that smelled always of cigarettes and
muktuk. Muktuk
is whale skin and blubber. In the summer when the people are eating whale, not a room in any building in the hamlet is spared the smell. Kablunauks down south pride themselves on acquiring the taste for pungent Gorgonzola and for garlic—after a whale has been shot, the walls of the Harbour Hotel could be painted with a slurry of Gorgonzola and garlic and you’d think it pleasant, fashionably textured wallpaper.

A month after Mary arrived in Wager Bay, from Ottawa, fresh out of nursing school, she decided three things: she would join the Book-of-the-Month Club; Dan, her most-of-the-time boyfriend since high school, would have to do after all; and she would not allow herself
to be this lonely again. Dan flew up the following summer to stay. She was making more money up there than both of them had together in the south. The first thing he said in the airport was “I smell fish.”

Louisa was the janitor at the nursing station. She was nineteen years old and, apart from Mary, the only constant presence. Other nurses rotated through the place in a succession of flights from marriages gone abruptly awry and patterns of behaviour that required interruption. All these motivations generally gave way, pretty quickly, in the face of minus-fifty and isolation like a lockdown. Mary and Louisa ate lunch together at the Harbour Hotel twice a week, or more often, if Louisa was looking frustrated. Mary, ever the pragmatist, was prepared to eat any number of chiliburgers with Louisa, and listen to her problems forever, if it meant Louisa would keep coming to work. Each dreaded the other’s vacations.

Louisa’s son was Little Billy Tagalak, his father was Big Billy Tagalak and, in Mary’s estimation, a big nuisance. “How is Little Billy, Louisa?”

“His cold is getting better. My mom says no smoking in the house until it’s gone, so everyone is glad his nose isn’t running so much.”

“I’ll have the pork chop, Maurice. And a cup of coffee.”

“A chiliburger please. And a Coke.”

“I think there’s trouble between Billy and Marilyn Taluk these days.”

“There’s trouble wherever Billy goes.”

Louisa nodded. “How’s Dan, is he finding it better here?”

“Lately, yes. He’s starting to meet people, to go out on the land and whatnot.”

“He’s a friendly guy, I guess. Likes meeting people.”

“Yes.”

“It’s good.”

Mary nodded. She drank her coffee and looked out the window at the forming blizzard. Out on the sea ice the blowing snow was already obscuring the horizon. The hunters would have to be just about in already, or they’d be stuck there and getting ready to pitch camp, to wait it out.

“Bronchiolitis will be getting going again soon.”

“I have a feeling it won’t be as bad this year.”

“The fall has been quiet.”

“As good as we could expect,” Louisa said. “Want any pie?” Mary asked.

“Sure.”

Louisa had two brothers out there. The third had disappeared five years before. He was out on the sea ice and people thought he must have fallen through a crack during a storm, trying to get home. Everyone had looked for him for days, but had found nothing. Last year Tommy Toolik had been out trapping fox ten miles
inland and came upon his snow machine and picked-over bones, no sign of what had happened. Everyone was happy the bones were found. There were enough ghosts wandering around the tundra as it was.

The nursing station was a brightly lit prefabricated sheet-metal shed built atop a stone outcropping that surveyed the whole settlement. Beside it was a twenty-foot-tall granite Inukshuk that the federal government gave the Kartuk brothers fifteen thousand dollars to build, from the Community Heritage Monuments Program. Whenever Jack Angoo, the member of parliament, visited, he was quizzed about whether he could get any more monument money. Next year, he promised, a life-size bowhead whale, with a little calf too, maybe. The year after, maybe a granite ice cap.