Kiss of the Fur Queen (7 page)

Heaven had a substantial population of beautiful blond men with feathery wings and flowing white dresses, fluttering about and playing musical instruments that Champion-Jeremiah had never seen before: some resembled small guitars with oval contours and humped backs, others oversize slingshots with laundry lines strung across them. The caribou hunter’s son noted, with stinging disappointment, that accordions were nowhere to be seen. The men with wings played and sang all day long, so Father Lafleur appeared to be explaining, and escorted people from their graves beneath the earth to one side of an ornate golden chair on which sat an old, bearded man.

Among the people rising from these graves to heaven, Champion-Jeremiah tried to spot one Indian person but could not.

Taking a chunk of white chalk in hand, Father Lafleur printed “GOD” on the black slate beside the chart, evidently intending that the meaningless word be copied down.

“But to see God after you die,” he lectured on, pointing to the old man in the chair, “you must do as you are told.” The words swept over the students like a wind. Champion-Jeremiah peered at the image of God and thought he looked rather like Kookoos Cook dressed up as Santa Claus except that his skin was white and that, for some reason, he was aiming a huge thunderbolt down at Earth and glaring venomously.

Slowly, laboriously, Champion-Jeremiah scrawled the word “GOD” on the left page of his scribbler and finished off his
handiwork with a great black period. The word loomed large and threatening; he felt an urge to rub it out.

“Hell,” the priest yanked Champion-Jeremiah out of his doleful rumination with his stabbing emphasis, “is where you will go if you are bad.”

Hell looked more engaging. It was filled with tunnels, and Champion-Jeremiah had a great affection for tunnels. A main tunnel snaked from just below the surface of the earth to its very bottom and others ran off to each side in twists and knots and turns, not unlike the Wuchusk Oochisk River and its unruly tributaries. Champion-Jeremiah thought of the tunnels he and Gabriel made every winter in the deep snow of Eemanapiteepitat, then realized that Gabriel would have to make tunnels by himself this winter.

Skinny, slimy creatures with blackish-brownish scaly skin, long, pointy tails, and horns on their heads were pulling people from their coffins and throwing them into the depths with pitchforks, laughing gleefully. At the ends of the seven tributaries were dank-looking flame-lined caves where dark-skinned people sat.

Aha! This is where the Indians are, thought Champion-Jeremiah, relieved that they were accounted for on this great chart. These people revelled shamelessly in various fun-looking activities. One cave featured men sitting at a table feasting lustily on gigantic piles of food: meats and cakes and breads and cheeses. In another, women smoked cigarettes and sashayed about in fancy clothing, and in a third,
men and women lay in bed together in various states of undress. In another, people lay around completely idle, sleeping, doing absolutely nothing. There appeared to be no end to the imagination with which these brown people took their pleasure; and this, Father Lafleur explained earnestly to his captive audience, was permanent punishment. Champion-Jeremiah was hoping to find an accordion player in at least one cave but, to his great disappointment, there was no place for musicians of his ilk in hell or heaven.

“And this,” Father Lafleur crowed, “is the devil. D-E-V-I-L. Devil.” He scratched the word on the blackboard at least a foot below “GOD” and finished with such force that the chalk broke and fell to the floor. Excellent student that he intended to be, Champion-Jeremiah copied the word, slowly, painstakingly, on the right-hand page of his scribbler: “DEVIL.” The
L
took such effort that he completely forgot to add a period.

In the largest, most fiery, most fascinating cave of all, on a huge black chair of writhing, slime-covered snakes with flicking tongues, sat the being with the biggest horns of all, the longest tail, the most lethal-looking pitchfork, his head crowned by a wreath of golden leaves. Champion-Jeremiah wished that he could understand what the priest was saying, for this king was absolutely riveting. He narrowed his eyes to slits so that he could peer into the eyes of this shameless, strutting personage to whom, apparently, modesty was unknown. He took careful note of the fact that the king — “Lucy,” the priest called him — was not glaring venomously. King Lucy was grinning, King Lucy was having a good time.

“And the sins that will get you there,” said Father Lafleur in a tone that Champ ion-Jeremiah was sure had a tinge of something not unlike enjoyment, “are called the seven deadly sins.”

Champion-Jeremiah looked down at the word on the right-hand page of his little scribbler and found the
D
of “DEVIL” not quite perfect. He reached for his eraser. “And these seven deadly sins are called …” Champion-Jeremiah applied the eraser to the
D
, “pride, envy, gluttony …” — erasing was such a waste of time — “sloth, covetousness, anger, and …” Champion-Jeremiah hated making mistakes, “lust.” The word burst forth like a succulent, canned plum. The priest wiped his brow with a rumpled white handkerchief. Champion-Jeremiah seized the moment to look down at his scribbler: “EVIL” was right there at his fingertips.

He thought it rather pretty, especially the way the
V
came to such an elegant point at the bottom, like a tiny, fleeting kiss.

A cold wind came sweeping down over the vast field of gravel that was the boys’ playground, a six-foot, steel-mesh fence holding at bay the surrounding forest of pine and spruce, birch and poplar and willow. If you stood on the monkey bars or flew high enough on the swings, you could see Birch Lake in the distance, down the hill behind the school building, transparent emerald, unlike the opaque blue of Mistik Lake.

“The winds of late October …,” said Champion-Jeremiah to himself, then stopped. His Cree must not be heard or he would fail to win the prize: the boy who acquired the greatest number of tokens from other boys by catching them speaking Cree was awarded a toy at month’s end. Last month, the prize had been an Indian war bonnet; this month it was to be a pair of cowboy guns. Sitting in the gravel with his back against the orange brick wall of the school, Champion-Jeremiah suddenly didn’t care whether he lost or won the guns. “The waves on Birch Lake must be climbing higher and higher and there will soon be ice. Later than on Mistik Lake.” On the gravel between his knees, he placed eight pebbles in one neat row with a rectangle of wood at the end.

“Mush!
Tiger-Tiger,
mush!”
whispered Champion-Jeremiah as he made the pebble at the head of the line jump up and down. In the make-believe windswept distance, the caribou were flying across his invisible ice-and-snow-covered northern lake.

A wisp of snow flew by, the first that Champion-Jeremiah had seen this fall. He half-heartedly tried to catch it, but it’s hard to catch a wisp of snow, even with mittens.

Cree boys small and large — some almost young men — were scattered like leaves across the yard, near and not so near, even way to the other end of the fence, a good quarter of a mile away. Girls had their own yard on the other side of the giant building, out of sight, away from the view of lusty lads who might savour their company, so Champion-Jeremiah was to learn in the nine years he would spend here. Even his sisters
Josephine and Chugweesees were marched away to their own world the minute they got off the plane. He would find a way to visit them someday, as sure as the moon was round.

A whimsical shift in the direction of the wind brought to Champion-Jeremiah’s attention something other than snow. Two floors up, a window was slightly open. There was that lilting melody again, the undulating bass, the rising and falling harmonies so shiny with light that he could wrap them around his fingers, lick his hand, and let the liquid music spill onto his lips, over his chin, down his neck.

He missed his accordion dearly.

His hair had now grown to a downy brushcut. The caribou hunter’s son stood before an old oak desk so mountainous he could barely see over its top. Beside this desk stood a Christmas tree, and behind it sat Father Lafleur, peering over his reading glasses at the tiny lad who stood at stiff attention, like a drummer boy.

“Yes?”

“Yes.” The second English word Champion-Jeremiah had learned. After “no” and then “yes,” he had learned about twenty others. He paused to see if the priest’s furry eyebrows would curve upward. They didn’t. But he was not going to shy away from attempting, for the first time, in public, a complete sentence in English, curving eyebrows or no.

“Play piano?” The two words popped out of the nervous crusader’s mouth like the chirping of a newly hatched bird. Champion-Jeremiah cursed himself for not sounding more
impressive, more stentorian. But then the holy eyebrows formed two crescents, furry caterpillars arching for a meal over the edge of some green birch leaf.

“Ah, you can play the piano,” said Father Lafleur to Champion-Jeremiah, doubtful but taking his time with the terrified child.

Aha! he was about to exclaim with a hearty slap to his desk. The organ! The organ at Father Bouchard’s church, of course!

But Champion-Jeremiah’s chirp beat him to the punch.

“No! Wan play piano!”

“Ah, you
want
to learn to play the piano.” The principal treated every second word as if it were a stepping stone to a sacred shrine.

Thrilled that he had finally gotten through to the man, Champion-Jeremiah nodded, almost violently.

“Hmm-hmm,” purred the priest, for he seemed to find the boy’s vociferous nodding entertaining.

Champion-Jeremiah knew he was about to be tested. He knew the answer to his prayer wasn’t going to fall from the sky. He knew he was going to have to work for it when he saw the principal’s lips virtually disappear into one small, hair-thin slit.

“Do you make any other kind of music?” Leaning forward, Father Lafleur tapped his pen on the desk. Such gestures made Champion-Jeremiah nervous — besides, he didn’t understand the question.

“Music,” the man in black boomed, elongating the vowels as if they were some tragic dirge. “Do you make any other
kind of music?” as if the seven-year-old would understand better if he shouted. “Do you sing, perhaps?”

“Sing!” Another word in Champ ion-Jeremiah’s English vocabulary. He jumped on it like Kiputz on a tibia of freshly boiled caribou. That’s it! The idea flashed across his mind like lightning. I’ll sing for him. I’ll
weeks’chiloowew
like Dad.

“Yes. Me sing it. Me sing it liddle song.”

“Then sing for me,” drawled Father Lafleur. Putting lighted match to a thick, brown cigar, he sank back into his giant leather chair, which hissed at Champion-Jeremiah.

Dismissing the hiss as an idle threat, Champion-Jeremiah cleared his throat, wiped his lips with the cuff of his shirt, dropped his hands to his sides, and puffed out his lungs.

“Ateek, ateek! Astum, astum!” The
opalescent gems floated into the air in slow, swooping curves and circles.
“Yoah, ho-ho!”

The priest watched the heart-shaped lips, pink as bubble gum, with wonder and astonishment. The notes of the song climbed up and up and up until they reached the silver angel at the top of the Christmas tree, making her wings shimmer and undulate. For all the priest knew, Jeremiah Okimasis himself had sprouted wings and was flitting about like a warbler or a finch, lending sparkling light to each golden ball, each silver bell, each piece of tinsel.

The priest’s spine began to buzz, ever so vaguely, ever so faintly, but he was unaware that once — just once — his tongue darted out and licked his lower lip.

Champion-Jeremiah saw it.
“Ateek, ateek
…” And he knew
then that he had the principal of the Birch Lake Indian Residential School squarely in the palm of his hand.

When Champion-Jeremiah arrived back in Eemanapiteepitat late that June, Gabriel found himself faced with a dilemma: if he could speak no English and his older brother no Cree, how were they to play together? Fortunately, before the week was out, Champion-Jeremiah experienced an epiphany. At their fish camp on Mamaskatch Island one stormy evening, inside the tent, he tripped over Kiputz, causing him to burst out in a torrent of Cree expletives that shocked his mother. From that moment, he chattered with such blinding speed that people could barely understand him. The family breathed a collective sigh of relief. And shortly thereafter, Gabriel learned English: “yes,” “no,” “yes-no,” and “hello, merry.”

L
ike a seagull surfing the autumn wind, the red seaplane circled above the Birch Lake Indian Residential School. Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis could see the splashes of yellow in the deep green forest that surrounded the sprawling orange-brick edifice and the two enormous gravel-covered, fenced-in yards flanking it. Between them, the boys counted fourteen people in black and white — at this distance, who could tell if they were men or women? — walking single file down the gravel path towards the lake. They resembled a row of penguins the boys had once seen on a
National Geographic
cover at Father Bouchard’s rectory. Descending foot by foot, the plane approached the lake, the water so clear the limestone bottom was visible.

At the dock, the chorus line of penguins — who turned out to be nuns, priests, and brothers — stood jammed together, the clipper-happy barber brother towering over them like his namesake, the famous comic book
Stumbo the Giant
. Father
Lafleur stood with feet apart, hands on hips, his eyes squinting against the brilliant midday sun.

When the pilot opened the passenger door, there stood Jeremiah Okimasis, eight years old, mop of jet-black hair, the riot of multicoloured beads on his caribou-hide jacket sparkling magically, a smile splashed across his chubby, brown face. It had been a summer of good fishing.

The pilot helped him down the little steel ladder and lifted him into the waiting arms of the principal.

“So, Jeremiah,” said Father Lafleur, all sunny and jovial, “you’ve decided to come back for a third year.”