Kiss of the Fur Queen (9 page)

But Gabriel was not alone. A dark, hulking figure hovered over him, like a crow. Visible only in silhouette, for all Jeremiah knew it might have been a bear devouring a honeycomb, or the Weetigo feasting on human flesh.

As he stood half-asleep, he thought he could hear the smacking of lips, mastication. Thinking he might still be tucked in his bed dreaming, he blinked, opened his eyes as wide as they would go. He wanted — needed — to see more clearly.

The bedspread was pulsating, rippling from the centre. No, Jeremiah wailed to himself,
please
. Not him again. He took two soundless steps forward, craned his neck.

When the beast reared its head, it came face to face, not four feet away, with that of Jeremiah Okimasis. The whites of the beast’s eyes grew large, blinked once. Jeremiah stared. It
was
him. Again.

Jeremiah opened his mouth and moved his tongue, but his throat went dry. No sound came except a ringing in his ears. Had this really happened before? Or had it not? But some chamber deep inside his mind slammed permanently shut. It had happened to nobody. He had not seen what he was seeing.

“Silent night, holy night,” sang a heavenly choir of angels. The little baby Jesus lay sweetly, all naked, rosy and plump, upon a bed of golden straw. Surrounded by cows and donkeys, shepherds and angels, his parents watched over him with a care that was, indeed, tender and mild.

Resplendent in white starched linen surplice, crimson satin bow exploding like fire from his throat, blood-red cassock falling to the floor, Gabriel Okimasis swayed lightly as he walked, dignified and stately, across the sanctuary, one of God’s own cherubim. Hands held together against his chest, the six-year-old knelt on a prayer stool and bent low his perfect head.

Deep in complicated prayer upon an altar glowing with gold and silver and silk and fine taffeta, Father Lafleur intoned the Latin text of the Christmas midnight service.

“Dominus vobiscum.”

“Et cum spiritu tuo,”
the congregation chanted in reply.

Later, the priest knelt on the altar’s second step, smote his breast three times with his ruby-fingered hand, and intoned, for all assembled there to hear:
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

Well-trained soldiers of the church, all dutifully recited with him. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”

The Okimasis brothers had never discussed this phrase but both had concluded that they were being asked to apologize for something beyond their control. Under these circumstances, however — yards enclosed by steel fences, sleeping quarters patrolled nightly by priests and brothers — they had also independently concluded that it was best to accept the blame; it
was
their most grievous fault.

At the electric organ, Jeremiah launched into “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” There were four verses to this particular carol, he recalled, with his usual precision for facts musical, so by the time the congregation got to the part about the three wise men from the East arriving in Bethlehem with what Gabriel had insisted were boxes of Black Magic chocolates, Holy Communion was about to begin.

After the hymn, Jeremiah could see Father Lafleur bent low over his golden chalice wherein lay pieces of the Body of Jesus Christ, muttering the last bits of prayer to give him the strength to serve it to the faithful. He was surrounded by eight altar boys, all Cree, aged five to twelve. And none among the congregation — other than twelve nuns, two brothers, one other priest, cooks, janitor, and nightwatchman — was over the age of sixteen.

The nuns filed down the centre aisle to the communion rail, there to kneel in a neat row of supplication before the miracle the high priest was about to offer them. As two hundred
Indian children sang, “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,” Father Lafleur, holding the host aloft with his right hand, descended the altar steps and walked slowly to the first nun.

As the priest made the turn, his gaze locked with that of his organist, Jeremiah Okimasis. The little angel, Gabriel, holding the golden paten to catch fragments of Christ’s body from under communicants’ chins, caught this telling exchange between his brother and the priest. He felt something heavy, cold and wet, at the base of his spine, a sensation vaguely like a bog-like squelch.

“Corpus Christi,”
said the priest, and the first nun’s tongue lolled out like a piece of overchewed gum. The nun missed one small morsel of the white host, causing it to come twirling down, snowflake-like, but mumbled “Amen” anyway, somewhat too apologetically for Gabriel’s taste.

He looked at the priest’s hairy white right hand, reached with his paten, and neatly caught the fragment of falling flesh within the sacred vessel’s golden hollow.

Three hundred miles to the north, Father Eustache Bouchard, silver chalice in one hand, round white host in the other, approached the communion rail, where knelt a line of Cree Indian people, not one of whom was between the ages of six and sixteen.

“Corpus Christi,”
Father Bouchard said to Abraham Okimasis, and placed the paper-thin wafer on his tongue.

“Amen,” replied the champion of the world.

“K
ill him! Kill him! Nail the savage to the cross, hang him high, hang him dead! Kill him! Kill him! …” ten million people roared.

Down went Jesus, down into the gravel, the crucifix crushing him, swirling dust playing havoc with his vision, his lungs, the very air he breathed. Pant, groan, and weep as fiercely as he might, he received no pity. Instead, the Roman centurion raised his whip and lashed God’s sole offspring, lashed and lashed; he would stand back up, he would take up his cross, he would march up Eemanapiteepitat hill. Blood from the victim’s lacerated spine splashed the soldier’s scarlet tunic, his gold breastplate, his leather leggings, and naked thighs.

Slowly, Christ wobbled to his feet. What choice did he have? The crowd jostled, they slavered at his pain: “Kill him! Kill him! Nail the savage to the cross, hang him high, hang him dead! Kill him! Kill him! …” And this was only his first
fall; the script demanded he have two more. The Son of God wailed at fate but dragged the cross around the bend.

And who should he run into but his mother, swathed in della robbia blue and laughing giddily, her hair a blizzard of confetti. Jane Kaka McCrae’s last born, Big Dick, had finally married the lovely Asscrack Magipom — Mariesis Okimasis was so drunk she could barely stand.

“Jane Kaka ran out of wine!” she ululated, then paused to suck dry a Javex jug; like excess milk, red wine streaked her breasts. “At the dance! Can you believe it?” She reeled, her knees buckled, and she collapsed in a heap.

“Not now, Mother, can’t you see I’m busy?” said Jesus.

“And Jane Kaka was so upset she fainted —” Mariesis burped, “right there in the church-hall kitchen. Banged her head against the statue of you, and
poof!
the water in Father Bouchard’s tank turned into Baby Duck, can you believe it?” She fell again. “One week later, and the party’s still raging!”

Crack!
the whip struck the Lord’s round buttocks. Mother or no mother, he could tarry no longer.

One week earlier, Gabriel had felt that same sensation, the stinging pain that brought with it a most unsaintly thrill. But playing Jesus was admired, even praised, by lay and clerical staff alike. It kept the children out of mischief, “supplemented” their religious instruction, and gave the principal food for thought: a course in drama for all altar boys was a virtual fait accompli, so Brother Stumbo had been overheard to say. No, far from being penalized for playing God the Son,
Gabriel’s crime had been to be caught singing
“Kimoosoom Chimasoo”
when he was hanging from the cross and already seven tokens in the red.

In an office whose four walls verily vibrated with cigar smoke the principal had unbuckled his thick black leather belt and slid it off.

With Gabriel’s now six-year-old posterior exposed to the light, the priest had lashed and lashed until, by the third blow, it had turned as red as cherry Jell-O.

“Bleed!” a little voice inside Gabriel had cried. “Bleed! Bleed!” He wasn’t going to cry. No sir! If anything, he was going to fall down on his knees before this man and tell him that he had come face to face with God, so pleasurable were the blows. In fact, he clung to the vision with such ferocity that there he was, God the Father, sitting large and naked in his black leather armchair, smoking a long, fat cigar, little Gabriel’s buttocks splayed across his knees, the old man lashing them with his thunderbolt, lashing them and lashing them until both man and boy gleamed.

“Kimoosoom chimasoo,”
Gabriel’s little Cree voice rang out from the pit of his groin, even as a little English voice beside it pleaded: “Yes, Father, please! Make me bleed! Please, please make me bleed!”

Up the road, Jesus of the bleeding buttocks met the saintly Simon, who helped him bear the cross for two delicious yards until a phalanx of foul-mouthed soldiers clattered up and whipped him off. Next came Veronica, who dabbed once at
the Saviour’s face with a filthy dishtowel before she too felt the wrath of Jeremiah, the centurion.

To save time, Jeremiah had cut Christ’s second fall, his consolation of the women, and his third fall, all without informing Gabriel. The company skipped to the strip.

Off came Gabriel’s clothes at the hands of Jeremiah and his ragamuffin band and onto the prostrate cross went the Cree Son of God, naked but for his underwear, and shivering.

At which point Brother Stumbo’s whistle announced supper.

Jeremiah and his nine-year-old soldiers hurriedly “nailed” Gabriel to the cross, swung it up, and banged its base into a groundhog hole. Veronica, saintly Simon, and drunk Mariesis in tow, they rushed off, leaving their spruce-branch whips and Jesus hanging in the gathering gloom. Call out as he might — “Come pack! Tone leaf it me here!” in his still dysfunctional English — the Saviour’s pleas went unheard.

Wired haphazardly to the steel-mesh fence behind him and crackling in the dry June breeze, a scrap of cardboard read: “The Okimasis Brothers present ‘The Stations of the Cross,’ with a scene from ‘The Wedding at Cana’ thrown in.”

Squirm by squirm, wriggle by wriggle, Jesus made the base of his pillory chew the groundhog hole. Next, he yanked until the cross fell, pinning him beneath its weight. Then he worked his wrists free of their binding ropes. Finally, praying to the Father that his supper would be saved, he ran.

In the dining room, one hundred boys looked up from apple pie half-eaten. The laughter was explosive, the pointing
fingers worse than nails — Gabriel had forgotten to take off his spruce-root crown of thorns — but his vow of vengeance on one Champion-Jeremiah Okimasis rendered both laughter and fingers meaningless.

“T
here it is!” yelled Gabriel over the roar of engines and propellers. He wanted to run in circles and shriek with joy, but instead jabbed Jeremiah’s stomach hard with his elbow. “There it is! There’s Eemanapiteepitat!”

On the last day of June, the Okimasis brothers were in the red seaplane again, this time approaching Mistik Lake. At last! Mistik Lake with its thousand deep-green islands, its thousand gold sand beaches, its endless water.

Jeremiah strained to see over his brother’s shoulder and his smile grew radiant. He yearned to reach right through the window, scoop up the toy village in the cup of his hand, kiss it tenderly, and put it in the pocket next to his heart. He could already taste the Cree on his tongue.

Late that night, hunters, beasts, and queens glimmered twenty trillion miles below the Okimasis brothers and
twenty trillion miles above them. Gabriel and Jeremiah were the very centre of a perfect sphere, a gigantic bubble of night air, and glass-smooth lake, and stars. Gabriel told Jeremiah that the Okimasis family must look like Winken, Blinken, and Nod floating off towards the moon in a wooden shoe.

The wooden shoe was bearing the brothers, their father, their mother, and their sisters Josephine and Jane across one of the few open stretches of Mistik Lake to Kamamagoos Island, twenty miles south of Eemanapiteepitat, where Abraham had decided they would spend the summer fishing for trout that were the fattest in the world.

The only intrusion upon the vastness of the silence was the sound of paddles dipping and surfacing, dipping and surfacing, ripples of water gurgling sweetly in reply. Abraham sat in the stern of the canoe, thirteen-year-old Jane in the bow. Eleven-year-old Josephine slept on the floor behind Jane while Gabriel and Jeremiah sat idly in the middle with their mother between them. Infinitely happy that he had returned at last, Kiputz lay curled half-asleep in Gabriel’s lap.

Suddenly, Gabriel saw a flame flickering faintly in the far distance.

“Look, a fire!” he exclaimed softly.

“Where?” asked Jeremiah, turning drowsily to look at Gabriel.

“There,” replied Gabriel, pointing to the leeward side at what looked like a candle flame.

It must be Cree fishermen, Jeremiah concluded silently,
camped for the night on one of the islands. The brothers looked with wonder at the distant glow.

From some lonely place beyond the fading flicker, the sweeping arc of a lone wolf’s howl reached out through the miles and came to a perfect landing beside the brothers, touching off a vague shudder that brushed the surface of their hearts, in perfect unison, like the ice-cold hand of someone waking after five hundred years of sleep.

Mariesis had seen such fires before. She had known this lake like an intimate friend, a relation, an enemy, a lover for nearly fifty years — such occurrences were not new to her. She merely kept her gaze straight ahead, as if nothing had happened.

Abraham, too, was looking straight ahead, focused on the three miles to Nigoostachin Island, where they could set up camp for the night.

“That’s the island where Father Thibodeau’s men caught Chachagathoo.” It was their mother’s voice, though as if someone else was giving expression to the words. “Don’t look at it.”