The Shaman's Knife (20 page)

Then Father Lovering did a nice thing. After his own few minutes of talking about my mother as a representative of the women and ways that had carried Inuit out of dark ages and many hardships into the present, he asked others for their memories.

This being Easter Sunday, some of the more devout spoke of the resurrection of Christ. While no doubt well meant, this topic proved less than successful in linking the gladness of Easter Sunday with the long life of a woman to whom Easter had been as pagan a rite as our tribal beliefs were to many. Others, some almost my mother's age, spoke simply and lovingly in celebration of our people, using anecdotes, some funny, to illustrate what they were trying to say. One old man, Adam, nearly ninety himself, and rather garrulous, told a story of a night when both he and my mother, as children, had had what he called “our first shamanistic experience.”

“We were two families,” he said. “The hunting had been good and our families were very good friends so we built a double-size igloo where we could talk and eat and play games, for this was not long before the dark days and the hours of daylight were very short. You have heard many stories of hardships. This is not one of them. We had much food, much oil for the lamps and for cooking, so we were happy. This one night we all were playing games and laughing and talking when the snowblock in the entrance began to shake. Nobody was scared. Then there was a sharp knock and there was just a sort of haze at the entrance and a man no one knew appeared. He told us about the spirits who help him, ticking off their names on his fingers. Then he got down by the entrance place and pointed to his back and everybody in the igloo piled on his back, first one man, then a second man, and so on. Soon both families in the double igloo, Bessie and I and other children as well as adults, were piled one on top of the other against the stranger and then he stood up and shook everybody off, and the door shivered again and he was gone. My father shoved the snowblock out of the entrance and ran out to look for tracks that would show us where the stranger had gone. There were no tracks. That's what I remember.”

After old Adam stopped speaking, a long silence grew in which many, I among them, tried to make that into a story that somehow would have an end. Then I realized that he was simply saying someone had been there, had played with them, and had disappeared without leaving a mark, and that was the end—the idea that they had been visited by a friendly spirit, and “there were no tracks.” I noticed that Father Lovering did not look pleased with that story. I glanced at Jonassie. He winked.

Some near the front picked up handfuls of snow and tossed them into the grave. Jopie pointed to a yellow backhoe that I'd noticed standing off out of the way on the edge of the hill. “When we go, the backhoe will bring stone and earth and cover the grave,” he said. The stone would be to discourage animals trying to get at the body. As the throng moved down the hill Jopie and I shook many hands and hugged many people. Jopie said that when spring flowers came, he would gather some and put them on our mother's grave.

In Jopie's home later we feasted on musk-ox, caribou, muktuk, fresh bannock. There was a pull-out bed in the living room for me. The next morning, Monday, not too early, Jopie and his three shy sons, whom someday I will get to know better, drove me to the airstrip in the musk-ox co-op's van. I flew to Inuvik where I caught the late-afternoon 727. I got back to Sanirarsipaaq around eight that Monday night in broad daylight, a fine clear evening. Bouvier met me, but we gave a lift into town to two friends of the mayor who didn't have transport, so we didn't have a chance to talk much. He dropped me at the hotel and went on with the other two. “We can talk in the morning,” I said. “See you then.”

 

Maisie apparently had been out for a walk alone. She was just entering the hotel when Bouvier dropped me, and she waited to hold the door for me. “Hi, Matteesie,” she said quietly. I replied, “Hi,” and while I got my parka off reflected on how hi had so quickly replaced all other forms of greeting in the Arctic. For natives it was the very easiest English word of all time. You could be bilingual with only one word, two letters. Hi! Also, there were inflections. Thomassie Nuniviak's little boy Ernie in Inuvik was twenty-three months old and so far had never felt the need to learn another word. Once I saw Ernie haul a stool over so he could stand behind his father, who was cutting caribou steaks for dinner. Thomassie had shot the caribou the day before. Ernie, watching his Dad's hand on the knife, kept saying, “Hi? Hi? Hi?” meaning “Will you cut me a little piece please, Dad?” Which Thomassie did, from the tenderloin; he gave me a piece of the raw caribou, too.

Anyway, Maisie and I leaned against the wall a few inches from each other while removing our boots under the sign that read, “Leave boots here, this means you!” She lined hers up neatly, heels to the wall, and when I put mine alongside hers the bulk made my mukluks seem much bigger, but they weren't. Their toes and the toes of Maisie's classy leather snowboots lined up precisely the same distance from the wall. I'm a size eight.

She slipped into sealskin slippers. I kept my felt boot-liners on. Up the stairs and a few steps to the left she opened the door into the small apartment that she and her mother shared. It was at the opposite end of the corridor from my room and directly above the dining room.

The end of the room nearest the door was carpeted and furnished with a chesterfield, lounge chairs, end tables, floor lamps. They were grouped around a low square table that I judged to be walnut, and also judged to be a sawed-off onetime dining table from some period in Margaret's life. The top was scarred. The corners might once have been square, but had been rounded off. The legs swelled from ankle-size near the floor to rounded calf-size just under the edge of the table's top. Plain and yet somehow a beauty.

Margaret said, “You never seen a table before? Not for sale. Have a seat.”

My opening guess that the table once had been a dining table was fairly accurate. That's not what we were here to talk about, but that's what we did proceed to talk about. I knew then that I should have arranged this meeting for the detachment instead of in these home surroundings. This was too bloody cozy altogether. Still . . . she told about the table.

It was the table from her first dining room suite in Lexington, Kentucky, she said. “It was full-size then and with six nice chairs and a husband to go with it, some of which, the chairs not the husband, I still have downstairs.” Margaret liked talking. When she started moving from one city to another, she said, naming the places, well, the table had been cut down to its present height. That was when Maisie was just a child.

It was when Margaret was pointing to a small gouge near one corner and recounting the story of Maisie, just a toddler, falling into it and driving one of her baby teeth right back into her head, that I seized a small break and said, “I think we better get to the point.”

“Ah, hell,” Margaret said. “Just when I was getting into my life story. Oh, well . . . we'll get back to that sometime when Maisie isn't around to listen to the bedsprings jangling.”

“Mo-ther!” Maisie said.

But Mother suddenly had her edge back. “Well, you don't think you're the only female who from time to time likes to see what a guy is really like, do you? What there is under that bulge in his jeans?”

Maisie looked pained. I thought it might be a hard life for a striking-looking but not especially self-assured tomboy-type young woman to have a mother who had sashayed her own way through forests of panting males, taking and rejecting, and learning a good deal from both.

“Just tell it the way you told me,” Margaret instructed. “I mean, the way you
just
told me, not the version you told me first.”

“Okay,” Maisie said, glaring. “If you'll shut up.”

Margaret held her lips together with a thumb and forefinger.

“All right!” Maisie said, looking directly at me briefly and then dropping her eyes in some confusion. “I liked Dennissie. From when I got here six months ago with what my mother calls a degree in Calgary Stampeder football players, which isn't fair, I only knew one and didn't sleep with him, I worked in the kitchen, first with a real crumbum who eventually took off, and then with Dennissie. The first guy was white and a pain in the ass—which he liked to put his hands on when I wasn't looking—and liked to say ‘fuck' a lot, you know the type, stuck in some time warp, and Dennissie was the exact opposite.” She smiled at some memory.

“In what way opposite?” I asked.

“He was fun to work with, always nice to Thelma, his granny, and he was really witty.” She glanced at her mother. “Like when Steve Barker used to come in here for coffee almost every afternoon, and look like he was dying to get Mother to bed, she would butter him up, and Dennissie would mimic them both, with a little bit of Sadie thrown in, Sadie on the phone hunting for Steve . . . We'd be laughing out there in the kitchen fit to kill, even Thelma laughing at the same time she'd be whispering, ‘Dennissie, stop! Stop!'”

“Besides that, he was good-looking,” Margaret supplied.

I thought of the body and the foulness in his bedroom at the end.

“Yeah, he was good-looking. And I won't deny that him being an Inuk made him . . . well,
more
good-looking, to me, different? Don't laugh.”

Nobody was laughing. We were all just sitting. Monday night at home in Sanirarsipaaq.

“I mean so different from guys I'd known that he was like from another planet! Honest to god, until he started talking about maybe I should come home with him some night and listen to his music he'd never made a pass at me, even verbally . . .”

“All that fun they had in the kitchen is really an early part of making a pass, but she didn't know it at the time,” Margaret explained in an aside to me, as if I didn't know.

Maisie ignored that. “So one night I thought, what the hell, he wants me so much, I'll go with him. But when we got there I was so nervous. I didn't really major in football players or any other kind of men, but I guess he didn't know that. We tiptoed past Thelma asleep on the couch, just like Dennissie said she would be, and up the stairs to his room, and at the top he put his arm around me like this”—she made a motion with her arm which ended with her hand clasping her breast—“and suddenly I, uh, lost interest! I just thought of Thelma waking up and finding me there and what she'd think . . . I didn't say anything, I just ran back downstairs and went in and shook Thelma.

“Dennissie came down right behind me and stood in the doorway looking I don't know what, amazed, I guess. But laughing, too. I'm saying, ‘Thelma, it's me, Maisie! Just dropped in to say hello!'

“She woke up a little, but not very much, the poor dear. Then I left. Dennissie didn't try to stop me. The next morning when I reminded Thelma about me dropping in and trying to wake her up she said she thought it had been a dream.”

It was a funny story, in a way.

“Did you go back with him some other night?”

Maisie started to cry, sobbing, “No, I wish I had.”

Margaret was looking at me. I was looking at Maisie. Maisie was looking down at her lap, making weeping noises.

“She's been crying in her sleep,” Margaret said, eyes brimming with tears of her own.

“So have you, the last couple of days,” Maisie sobbed. After a minute or two, she calmed down. Margaret got up and put a kettle on and made coffee in the kind of pot where you push a perforated close-fitting round of metal down through the coffee grounds. It sure as hell beat the coffee from the instant jar downstairs. For a while then we just sat. I believed Maisie's story, as far as it went. It was too natural to be untrue, for that one visit anyway. It didn't even conflict with the idea of Dennissie as a ladies' man.

“You said you didn't go back another night,” I said.

I was looking straight into those blue, blue eyes, and thinking about the latent footprints Pelly had mentioned, ones he'd thought might be a woman's, made while the floor was still clean.

The silence was not long at all, a second or two.

“No, I didn't,” she said, and I was sure she was lying. I waited, giving her a chance to amend, or whatever. No amendment. Until I had more from Pelly, I decided to leave it at that, for now. I looked at Margaret, who showed no sign. So I switched.

I said to Maisie, “Did Dennissie talk much about other people he dealt with, like Davidee, Hard Hat, and so on?”

Immediately, her eyes were on mine. “Sometimes, but not in detail. He and Hard Hat had something going on, some business thing, I don't know what. After Davidee started showing up with Dennissie, usually at night, I met him and thought he was a creep, one of those good-looking guys who could turn it on like a tap. It seemed to me that Davidee arriving sort of pushed Hard Hat into the background. I asked Dennissie about that once and he just clammed up. But one other time when I saw them together they were arguing, I thought about money. I knew Dennissie well enough that I asked. He looked worried but said no, that it was something about a date that Davidee wanted him to arrange.”

A shot in the dark. Sometimes shots in the dark hit something: “With you?”

“Not me! God, no. Davidee never looked at me twice. He likes people he could dominate, which ain't me.”

“About one of Dennis's girlfriends, then?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “there was one girl that Davidee was really gone on, Dennissie said . . . oh, hell, I got no right. . .”

“If it would help solve the murders, you got a right.”

She thought about that. “This was a girl that Dennissie I think took home with him more than anybody else. He never told me in so many words but I got the idea she was somebody special to him and that right after Davidee met her he was always pestering Dennissie to set her up for him. Maybe that's what they were arguing about.”

“Who?”

Reluctantly, she said, “Leah Takolik.”

That was one of the names on Annie's list. I thought of the one small bloody footprint that Pelly had pointed out. I had sort of lost track of Hard Hat in this part of the conversation, but I didn't want to interrupt what Maisie was saying. Forget Hard Hat for now. Suppose Davidee had something on Dennis, and used it in a way somehow connected to Leah. How do Dennis and Thelma get killed out of all that?

Anyway, no harm in trying it on.

“Did Dennis ever make deals with other guys, like to double-date and go to his place?”

“Not that I ever heard about. I can't imagine it, I mean Dennissie just had this one small room. Two people could probably keep fairly quiet so as not to rouse poor Thelma, but not four!” Then she thought of something; her expression slowly changed. “Well, maybe something like it, I don't know.”

“What made you change so fast from absolutely no to maybe?”

“One night when we were going snowmobiling Dennissie was so mad after talking to Davidee that he kicked his own snowmobile and hurt his foot. That was the night he told me that Davidee really had the hots for Leah. But that was all he said.”

“The hots,” Margaret mused, pouring coffee. “I rather like that.”

So Dennis would kick his snowmobile angrily over something Davidee said or did. But really stand up to him?

I let that sit there. “When you went home with Dennis that one time, did he open his door with a key?” I stressed the word
one
, and watched. I'm sure she got it, but she didn't react.

“No. I don't think they ever locked the door. Thelma told me that once. Said, ‘What have we got that anyone would want to steal?'”

“Do you know Leah fairly well?”

“Pretty well. I like her. When these kids up here get together sometimes, the girls, they giggle a lot. Always remind me of that song, whatever it's from, ‘three little girls from school are we, fresh from the ladies' seminary,' or however it goes, and they talk about this boy or that and how they are in sex. But Leah isn't a giggler. Gives me the idea she doesn't do something without thinking, including sex. Of course, sex up here is treated as a really natural thing to do, no stigma for sleeping around, and so on, right?”

Drily I said, “I think we know what you're talking about.”

“Speak for yourself,” Margaret said.

“I know that Leah liked Dennissie a lot,” Maisie went on. “I don't think she had other guys, too, like a lot of girls do. It wasn't like what anybody in the south would call having a steady, just that not many guys have the kind of setup that Dennissie had, fairly private, with Thelma sleeping like the dead the way she did . . . Aw, hell.”

She stopped and shook her head. Tears began to well up again. “Matteesie,” Margaret said. “I think that's it, eh?”

I was ready. “Okay.” The Leah-Dennis thing was interesting, with a little Davidee a question mark on the side. I thought I had opened a door, just a crack, but couldn't guess where it might lead. Why didn't I press harder when I thought Maisie was lying? That was instinct. All I could have done was hammer away. I had a feeling that the next time I brought it up, I would know more. Maybe from Annie. Maybe from Pelly. Maybe from Maisie herself.

The next morning, Tuesday, I beat Bouvier to the detachment. On the way I could see and hear the settlement coming to life, the yells of the sliders, girls in brighter, maybe Easter-bought, anoraks and pants. I remember once reading a piece in which a writer said he wished he had four lives. I forget what they were, but the idea surfaces in me once in a while, at times when one life, in the Arctic, would do me fine. Maybe as a hunter, with a son or two I could teach.