Consumption

Praise for
CONSUMPTION

“Some first novels simply tower over their contemporaries by the scope of their ambition and the power of their vision. Last year, it was Joseph Boyden’s
Three Day Road;
earlier this year, it was Madeleine Thien’s
Certainty;
and now it’s Kevin Patterson’s
Consumption.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“Patterson’s writing is elegant and concise.… It’s the thematic resonance, along with an understated humanism reminiscent of Anton Chekhov (incidentally, another physician), that makes
Consumption
a quietly devastating novel.”

—
The Vancouver Sun

“Gripping, unsettling and written with passion,
Consumption
is a vivid portrait of modern life in the Arctic.”

—
The Owen Sound Sun Times

“This book is a staggeringly beautiful elegy for the traditional life of the Inuit, showing the inevitable loss when cultures collide.… Patterson’s medical knowledge, combined with his incredible gift as a writer, make
Consumption
utterly compelling.”

—
Edmonton Journal

“Kevin Patterson, a doctor practising in the Canadian Arctic, has written a sensitive first novel… [and] paints a vivid portrait of the contradictions of modern Inuit life.… Through tragedy, violence and occasional comic relief, Patterson’s characters are never less than real, complex human beings.”

—
The Calgary Sun

“‘We are living among punishments and ruins,’ the poet Wendell Berry has written. Kevin Patterson brings that wisdom to life in this sweeping parable, which starts in the past and then builds into a moving critique of a modern world that both fattens and consumes its young—not to mention its middle-aged and its old. And Patterson does it with complex, living characters and rifle-shot prose.”

—Steven Heighton, author of
Afterlands

“Kevin Patterson has written a vitally important novel about cultural contact and its consequences in the north. It’s a powerful achievement, both compassionate and informed.”

—Camilla Gibb, author of
Sweetness in the Belly

PART ONE

 

Eskimo Poetry

Here I stand
,
Humble, with outstretched arms
.
For the spirit of the air
Lets glorious food sink down to me
.
Here I stand
Surrounded with great joy
.
And this time it was an old dog seal
Starting to blow through his blowing hole
.
I, little man
,
Stood upright above it
,
And with excitement became
Quite long of body
,
Until I drove my harpoon in the beast
And tethered it to
My harpoon line!

—Recorded and translated from the Inuktitut by Danish ethnographer and explorer Knud Rasmussen in
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921
–
24

ONE

STORMS ARE SEX.
They exist alongside and are indifferent to words and description and dissection. It had been blizzarding for five days and Victoria had no words to describe her restlessness. Motion everywhere, even the floors vibrated, and such motion as was impossible to ignore, just as it was impossible not to notice the squeaking walls, the relentless shuddering of the wind. Robertson was in Yellow-knife, and she and the kids had been stuck in this rattling house for almost a week, the tundra trying to get inside, snow drifting higher than the windows, and everyone in the house longing to be outside.

It was morning, again, and she was awake and so were the kids, but they had all stayed in bed and listened to the walls shake. Nine, or something like that, and still perfectly black. She had been dreaming that she had been having sex with Robertson. She was glad she had woken up. Even the unreal picture of it had left her feeling alarmed—though that eased as the image of the two of them, entwined, had faded. In another conscious moment she was able to blink the topic away and out of her thoughts. As it had been.

She could hear her girls, Marie and Justine, whispering to each other in their bedroom. She couldn’t tell what they were saying. She heard the word
potato
. Pauloosie, her son, her oldest child, was silent. She listened carefully and thought she could hear him turning in his bed. And then the wind wound up and just howled.

As a girl she had not been this restless, waiting out storms with her parents on the land in a little iglu, drinking sweet tea and lying on caribou skins. It had been more dangerous then but less frightening. Storms make an iglu feel more substantial somehow. This house, on the other hand, felt as if it were about to become airborne, and it would have if not for the bolts tethering it to its pilings. It had been made in Montreal, of particleboard and aluminum siding, before being shipped by barge to Hudson Bay, sagging from square with each surge of the sea. Where the door frame gapped away from the kitchen door, snow sprayed through in parabolas. These wee drifts persisted as long as the door stayed closed. After five days they seemed as permanent as furniture. The wind whistling under the house kept the kitchen floor nearly as cold as the stone beneath it.

That stone slid, in its turn, through the town, to the shore, and then under the ice of Hudson Bay, angling shallowly out into the sea basin like a knife slipping between skin and meat. And on top of that water was ice, a quarter-million square miles of it, arid and flat and sucking in the frigid air from the High Arctic like a bellows—blowing it down through Rankin Inlet and into the rest of the unmindful continent. Chicago would be Rome but for this frozen ocean, not that its significance is known to anyone who doesn’t live alongside it.

Rankin Inlet, Repulse Bay, Baker Lake, Coral Harbour, Whale Cove: variations on the theme of shelter from the sea, each of these hamlets lies on the west coast of Hudson Bay, named by whalers seeking safety in the nineteenth century. The smallest is a couple hundred people and the largest of these, Rankin Inlet, is two thousand, almost all Inuit, with a handful of southerners, Kablunauks, among them.