The Shaman's Knife (12 page)

“Will do.”

I told him about seeing the shaman at the hotel.

“I'd better go see him or he'll think I'm not coming.”

I was halfway to the door when the phone rang again. Bouvier called, “Inuvik. For you.”

“Constable Joyce, sir,” a youngish voice said. “Uh, maybe I overstepped something here, but you know, your call to sort of keep track of this woman, Maisie Johanson?”

“What about her?”

“I was doing some work on the computer, running the name of a guy here we caught with drugs. When that was done, just for something to do I ran Maisie Johanson. Got it on the screen now. Used to live in Calgary? Well, I'll read it to you . . . ‘Charged with assault causing bodily harm—'” He laughed and said, “Sorry, sir, I have to laugh at this . . . ‘Bodily harm, in the savage beating of Calgary Stampeders football player, Jerome Radalafski, whose collarbone was broken in the affray. She pleaded self-defense, that Radalafski had tried to have sex with her against her will, which he'd been charged with, too. This happened during a victory party after a game. While she was defending herself vigorously, by her account, Radalafski fell through a window of the second-story motel bedroom where she'd been taken not knowing they were going to be alone in there.'”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Judge gave 'em both probation.”

 

I would have called Jonassie to tell him that I'd be delayed, but after talking to the judge and to RCMP Cambridge and the constable in Inuvik with his revelation about Maisie's prowess in fighting the good fight for virtue, Maxine phoned from CBC Inuvik. The Davidee case—it had been on the news wires that he was now free to return home. Had he arrived yet? Not that I knew of, I said. Would he move back in with his family? I didn't know; I told her to try me tomorrow.

Anything else new on the case? “We're working on it,” I said, meaning that as a joke because it was the same response that Barker had given her days ago.

She didn't laugh. She had something else in mind, off the subject. “Did you see the piece in
News/North
about a new course for natives as news directors and producers?”

“No.”

“It's going to mean a couple of months each in Ottawa, Toronto, and Edmonton CBC, but the graduates, they say, will go on to greater things.”

My immediate thought was that such a course would be perfect for her; she had done journalism at Arctic College, had done well at CBC Inuvik, was ready for a step up. Turned out that's what she was thinking, too. “I've applied,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed for me.” Then, innocently, “In Ottawa I might even get to meet Lois.”

The next phone call was from Lois. She asked first about my mother. I reassured her, based on what I knew that minute. Then she went on to the murder case. “I wish you'd get everything settled and get back here with me,” she said with a quiet warmth. When she hung up, I was left wondering, as I often did, indecisively but with a nagging concern, about our future.

The mention of my mother made me think of calling Yellowknife again. It must have been a hunch. I couldn't get through to Dr. Butterfield but he'd left a message with his nurse that my mother seemed to be having a delayed reaction that wasn't good, and he would phone me in an hour. He phoned in twenty minutes, said he didn't know for sure yet what was happening but she seemed dazed. “It's too soon to be more specific, but we've moved her out of Franklin House and back to the hospital.”

“Should I come?” I asked. He thought that over, then said, “I'll call you back in the morning,” and left me worrying. I called my older brother Jopie in Holman at the musk-ox meat co-op. Told him she'd had a setback and would he pass it on. Other dozens of our relatives live in or around Holman. Already, it seemed to have been a long day.

In the end, around four, I walked north past the library toward Jonassie's house. He was outside of his back door, dressed in a long smock, fur hat, swinging what looked something like an axe, and wearing a face mask and goggles on his huge grizzled head. He was just starting to hew away at a chunk of stone, the preliminary stage in getting a stone ready for carving. When he swung the heavy mallet above his head and crashed it down on the stone, chips and splinters bounced off his upper body and the mask. Then he noticed me.

“Ah, Matteesie,” he said. “Come in.”

He nodded that huge head at me, pushed up his face mask, and led the way up a few steps and through the cluttered vestibule into his cluttered kitchen, like no other kitchen on earth except maybe that of another master carver. Stones of various shapes and sizes littered a rumpled canvas laid on the floor, along with chisels, files, sandpaper, and other aids to carving. Bits of stone lay here and there on the wooden floor. A pile of white dust had been shoved into a corner by a push broom, which had been left on the spot, leaning against the wall. The stove was gas, not lit. Chairs and table were of unpainted wood, appearing to be hand-hewn. I was curious about where they'd come from. Perhaps done from driftwood, I thought, although not much driftwood got this far north—not like on the shores of the Beaufort Sea where I'd been brought up. Driftwood discharged from the Mackenzie River often had been used there to make our homes or summer shelters.

The table, also canvas-covered, held work that already had been started. He pointed out some shapes to me, explaining what he saw in them that he would develop. When I stared hard I could see, only crudely yet, what he saw in the stones; a polar bear killing a seal, a hunter dwarfed by a giant Arctic hare (it is not uncommon in such carvings that something people can eat will be depicted as larger than its hunter), a little stone igloo with a sled beside it and tiny shapes of dogs.

In the next room a kettle steamed lightly on a table beside a casual array of mugs and milk and sugar. Jonassie picked up a half-full teapot, filled two mugs, put them in the microwave, and turned the dial. As digital numbers ticked and we waited for the final ping, I remembered my mother many times in camp trying to coax a few twigs or bits of dried grass into enough heat to boil water and make tea.

“Sorry for being late,” I said.

He smiled, watching the microwave's timer. “So now you're on northern time,” he said.

“Right,” I said. In the north, the prudent understand that making a date is mainly to register an intention that might have to be postponed due to other matters, as had happened to me.

He put the two tea mugs on the table where there was canned milk and a bowl of sugar. We sat and stirred. His eyes were boring into mine.

When the tea had been poured and we were sipping, he said, “I have heard on the radio that Davidee has
just been cleared
to come back. That
just been cleared
surprised me. I'm not really up on the ins and outs of the law on paroles, but does that mean that if he was here before now it would not be legal?”

I nodded several times, a habit I have. Overkill. “That's right.”

“But he's been here a lot lately! Off and on for weeks.”

I was really surprised by the “off and on for weeks,” but didn't show it. Like every shaman I'd ever known, Jonassie struck me as someone who ordinarily played cards close to his vest. The shaman character known to us through our tribal beliefs was rarely a gossip, and I'd say
never
one who would go against the customs and instincts of his people; meaning he simply would not volunteer information to police, as he had just done to me. The only variation would be some kind of a ruse, but a ruse in aid of what?

I trod carefully. “I saw him in the air terminal Tuesday, but didn't know who it was because I'd never seen him before or really heard him described. Didn't know about him being half-bald.”

He listened impassively. I wondered how much I could press.

“Can you tell me who saw him, where, and doing what?”

Wrong button. He shook his head. Someone back in Ottawa might contend I could have pushed harder. But you don't get rough with a shaman. There's no, “Okay, wise guy, let's me and you go downtown and see how tough you are there.” I smiled to think of it.

Then he did react, an almost imperceptible flicker of the eyes.

If his mind worked even partly the way I thought it might, he would be wondering why the smile. I didn't explain.

“I know the restrictions you feel you must obey,” I said. “But do you know if Davidee was here at the time of the murders?”

“No,” he said.

“He wasn't here or you don't know if he was here?”

“I don't know if he was here at that time.”

My turn again. The rumor a few days ago that shamanism had something to do with the murders, I simply didn't believe. But in a sense Jonassie had brought that matter up himself in my room at the hotel. Now he was loading his pipe from an oilskin pouch, tamping down the tobacco with a huge callused forefinger. He struck a wooden match, puffed, tamped the hot coal with the same finger, and almost disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

“Did you know that Davidee once aspired to become a shaman? Came to me about it?”

I shook my head, again surprised.

“Even then, and this was some years ago, he just wasn't the type. Bright enough, but with no principles. Still, some of the worse aspects had rubbed off on him. In your files you'll find, or should find, that in a sexual assault case a few years ago, before the rape incident, a girl said he had threatened her with a shamanistic curse of blindness if she didn't, uh, I believe the slang is, come across.”

“I haven't gone through the Davidee files yet because it was only today I found out, and from you, that he'd been around here at all.”

Jonassie dropped the matter cold, but then did go on to something that I later came to believe was his main reason for talking to me. He was almost hidden by his pipe smoke, speaking through it. This was a shaman speaking, simply, not in logic or in any way related to any rules of evidence or intent to enlighten me if I did not find the enlightenment myself.

“On the morning after the murders I was working at my new carving when I went into a sort of daydream, as I sometimes do when I'm working, and in the daydream saw a knife with a handle that was a small carving of a falcon, done in black stone of the kind found around Povungnituk, a knife handle I knew well because I carved it.”

I had a strange feeling that he was acting toward me as if I myself were a shaman and would understand about daydreams that could have hidden meanings. I am not sure that he was wrong in that assessment, but what I really understood was that there was an eeriness to his story that I could not read precisely, and that I was transfixed by the eyes looking at me from this huge head and by the words coming to me through smoke that swirled all around him.

“The knife blade itself”—his words came through the smoke—“I found on the road near the rec hall a year ago, this time of year, winter but nearing spring. It was the first sunny-day thaw. Ahead of me I saw a glint, a reflection of sun from this blade below the ice.

“On digging it out I found it was an excellent steel blade five and a half inches long with an unworthy”—he stressed the word—“handle.”

“Unworthy?” I asked.

“Plastic made to look like bone.”

He had asked around looking for the owner. A few weeks earlier there had been some construction workers in on some job or other. They had gone. One of them might have dropped it. Anyway, nobody had claimed it, so he had smashed the plastic handle with his rock-axe and carved the small falcon from black stone as a new handle.

“The falcon,” he said, “as you of course know, is one of the earth spirits that if offended can be dangerous, even cause death.”

I waited respectfully. He did not go on. “I would like to see that knife if you will allow me,” I said.

His face was somewhat shadowed, but there was no doubt about his regretful expression. This was the carver talking, not the shaman. “I had put it on a shelf of carvings that I might sell even though stone and steel together are not in our tradition. On the morning after the murders when I had that daydream about the knife I became very upset even before I hurried to look for it. I could not find it. And then I realized that I hadn't noticed it for a month or more.”

A
memory
: my mother mentioning the shaman, a knife, lost.

“You mean, it had been mislaid, somehow lost?”

“Neither,” Jonassie said. “I do not lose, or mislay.”

“Stolen then?”

“Anyway, gone.” There were no locks on his doors, he said, but he had never lost a carving before. “The people on buying trips from the galleries don't start coming until later, in better weather, so no stranger I know of has been in the house since the last time I saw that knife maybe a month or two ago.”

He sighed. “But it did exist. That was no dream. I had shown it to Lewissie Ullayoroluk in case he knew of a buyer, because he travels a lot. He was away on a hunting trip when I searched for it and couldn't find it. When I told Lewissie on his return that the knife was gone, he immediately told me that he had seen that boy, Andy Arqviq, around here one day, near my house.

“Figuring that I was home, Lewissie had not thought more about it at the time. We figured out the day. I had not been home that day, I was away buying stone. So if Andy had been in my house, he'd been in here by himself.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“No. I do not want to accuse him of theft, even indirectly. I thought he would be around, he often is, but for weeks now I believe he has been avoiding me.”

“But generally speaking, if it was stolen it had to be by someone local?”

He shrugged, simply not inclined to talk more.

Walking away down the slope past the library and through the school kids romping, sliding, shouting, laughing, I thought about the knife all the way. Could it have been connected to the murders? Even used against Dennis and Thelma? There is a saying about a ghost walking over a grave. I shivered.

The day got stranger and stranger. When I got back to the detachment Bouvier was not there but the van was. There was no note of explanation. It was too early for dinner at the hotel. Besides, I wasn't hungry, and the earlier word about Maisie versus the football player was not something I was ready to discuss with Margaret, yet. Then I saw that there was an incoming message on the fax machine. It was from Yellowknife and read; “Forensics has examined bodies, report being prepared. Constable Joe Pelly will arrive tomorrow morning, weather permitting, to complete forensic examination of house where murders occurred. Hi Matteessie, hope you're having fun. (signed) Max McPhee, Duty Inspector.”

I put that on Bouvier's desk along with a note that I would be at Annie's house. Leaving Jonassie and walking down the hill, I had finally stowed the matter of the knife in the back of my mind, on the shelf, to be brought out when required. I'd gone on to think about finding girls who had gone home with Dennis from time to time and might tell me something I didn't know. I'd done a fair job of talking myself out of that; I could talk to probably defensive girls for days and maybe still be a panting virgin as far as real progress went. What I needed was a big, significant break. Now I changed my mind again and was thinking that if anybody could tell me more about Dennis and his girlfriend habits, it would be the people in that same row of houses. Most of them should be home now.