Consumption (21 page)

A full week later there was a knock at the door. She answered it, expecting to see her father back early from walrus hunting, and saw her husband there, frowning anxiously.

“What?” she asked.

He motioned her to his truck.

“What?” she asked again.

“Just come!” he yelled, startling her. Who knew what this was about? So okay, she would go look at the first pilings of the hospital, or whatever it was that he was so sure she wanted to see.

She climbed in and he took her down to the head of the bay, on the very western edge of town, where she had collected shells as an awkward and lonely seventeen-year-old just returned from the south. There was a new house there, a two-storey affair of raw cedar logs, with a wooden roof and new tiles and doors and triple-paned windows, like nothing else north of the treeline. Robertson pulled to a stop in front of it.

“What’s this?” she asked, wondering whether Robertson’s consortium had built a new government office building, or what.

“It’s your new house.”

Victoria gaped. She bent her neck to see under the sunshades, her mouth still open. They got out of the truck.

“I had to hire every man in town who could be trusted with a Skilsaw,” Robertson said. They climbed up the front steps and he insisted she be the one to open the door.

She took in the shining kitchen cabinets and the hardwood floors and the clean bright paintwork, the skylight in the ceiling. She was speechless. There was a dishwasher and a new stove. Even a maple block island, just like in the magazines. She opened the doors to the pantry and there was her barge order, already stacked inside.

The kitchen gave onto the living room, which featured, of all things, a windowed cast-iron wood stove. There was a large colour television in an entertainment centre and new loveseats and a chesterfield in matching dusty rose arranged around it in a horseshoe. The bedrooms—one for each of the children—were twice the size of those in the old house. When she saw the ensuite toilet in the master bedroom, she stopped and couldn’t go on.

And then she began weeping and couldn’t see anything else anyway.

She ran to the kitchen door and outside. She kept on running down to the bay, away from the truck and that huge house, until she was standing with her feet almost in sea water and shivering with cold. After a long time Robertson appeared on the front steps and walked down to her. They both stared out at the sea.

“I was hoping you would like it,” he said.

“It’s a great house,” she said.

“Do you like it?”

“It just feels like you’re trying to buy something, Robertson. Like that disbursement for the diamond mine.”

He walked away from her and up to his truck. He drove off and she stood there by the sea trying to divine her own future. It was snowing. The tug in the bay began pulling up its anchor to take the empty barge back to Montreal.

When the telephone rang, Balthazar expected it to be the cab company; his duffle bags and suitcases were beside the door and he was still panting from the effort of panicked stuffing.

It was Amanda. “I just called to see how you are doing, I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“It’s going pretty well.”

“When are you going north again?”

“Twenty minutes ago.”

“Why didn’t you call me, Keith?”

“I’m sorry about that. I know you’ve been struggling.”

“I’m not struggling. I’m just pissed off.”

“At who?”

“You, for not returning my calls. My parents, because of the way they’re acting.”

“They’re still having a hard time, huh?”

“You should hear them.”

“I can imagine.”

“Can you?”

“I think so.”

“My mom says you’ve never stuck around long enough to face a problem in your life.”

“I’m not sure how she would know that, since she only met me after she married your dad.”

“She says she has your number.”

“Does she?”

“Dad says he’s not you.”

“Well, that would be difficult to argue with.”

“Mom manages.”

“That sounds rough, honey.”

“It’s awful,” she said, her voice softening almost to inaudibility.

“Is there anything I can do?” Balthazar felt a twinge as these easy and false words came out of his mouth.

“I think we’ve established that there isn’t, really.”

“I’m not going to abduct you, Amanda.”

“You’re not gonna stand up for me to my psycho parents, you mean.”

“There isn’t anything I can do to solve their problems.”

“Well, how about if you just answer the damn phone, sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“It’s awful, Keith. They go at it until two in the morning, fall asleep for a few hours, and then wake up to fight some more.”

“Has anyone hurt you?”

“You keep asking that. Whaddya think? Listening to your parents shrieking at each other all night, d’you think that’s doing me any good?”

“I’m sorry.”

“The thing is, if you and I just went to them and I said that I was gonna live with you until they made some decisions, they might get their act together. It’s not like I’m
four.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are, a little, you know that?”

“I do, actually.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, my taxi is here,” he said, looking out the window with relief.

“Really?
You’re going
now
?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not just making this up?”

“The cab just honked.”

“So you were gonna leave without calling?”

“I guess so.”

“I see.”

“I’m sorry I’m not what you want me to be, Amanda.”

“Let me know when you’re back?”

“I will.”

He hung up and did not lift his head for a long moment. Then he picked up his bags.

In the boardroom at the Rankin Inlet Hotel, Betty Peters stubbed out her cigarette after a sharp look from Robertson. It was the first time the Ikhirahlo Group had met in months. Increasingly, Robertson dominated the workings of the partnership; it remained in his interest to have the affiliation of the group, which included two Inuit, because an individual stirred up individual resentments. Robertson’s success was reaching the point where he was vulnerable to a backlash from the community. There could be no more gestures like the new house.

The small group was formed as a way of corralling local support for government-funded construction projects. The idea was that if everyone in town with enough organizational ability and financial know-how to put together a bid worked together, then when the inevitable contracts were let, they would be in terms that would benefit the whole group. To begin with, it was an informal arrangement, and then, as the pace of development had accelerated, they had incorporated as the Ikhirahlo Group, a name they had chosen one especially cold Thursday night as they had sat in this room in the hotel and drank together.
Ikhirahlo:
very cold. The name had acted as a goad to the people in the town ever since it was chosen. Great that it should be an Inuktitut term, and great that they should include the Killimeet brothers, but just in case there was any doubt that it was southerners making all that money, the name rubbed it in: imperialists complaining about the inclemency of the land they’d stolen. Robertson had regretted the witticism ever since.

His five partners, pleased with profit statements that steadily swelled, let him run things. They had only heard whisperings about the mine but had begun to question him about his role. He
had not told them any details so far because he did not trust them to be discreet. But things had advanced too far now to be derailed.

Robertson closed the door, a rare gesture at group meetings. Melvin Anders and Josie Killimeet stopped talking and looked at him expectantly. Robertson sat down.

“Well, I have very exciting news. The Back River Diamond Company, a subsidiary of Boer Gems, has offered the Ikhirahlo Group a small position in its mine, in exchange for ongoing professional consulting and public relations services. If you all agree, we will own one-quarter of one per cent of the mine, doubling the book value of our corporation.”

His colleagues sat back at that.

“It sounds too good to be true,” Betty Peters said. “What about liabilities, Robertson? Have you thought about that? Say the mine explodes in some environmental catastrophe—would we be on the hook for that? Even a quarter of one per cent worth?”

“The South Africans have insured the whole process through Lloyd’s of London—it’s a comprehensive underwriting. You can have a look at the document if you like.”

“I will,” she said. But she wouldn’t, and everyone there knew it.

“I’ll bring a copy to you tomorrow.”

“So, Robertson,” Melvin Anders asked, scratching his long beard, “what exactly would we
do
, in return for this?”

“Well, I’ve been meeting with them fairly regularly now for several months, and am already advising them on the local political terrain. I’ve promised to continue to do this. Their principal concern is the campaign Okpatayauk and his friends have launched to stop the development.”

“Could they stop the mine from going ahead?”

“Probably not. They already have Orders-in-Council from Yellowknife explicitly permitting them to operate. But the South Africans have been very clear that they have no interest in operating a mine in the face of local hostility. They have some experience
with that and they’ve found it expensive. Plus, with their political situation with apartheid and everything, I think they don’t have much enthusiasm for more negative publicity.”

“So what would happen if opinion goes Okpatayauk’s way?”

“Nothing immediately, I think. But they would downscale their plans and then, if the local sentiment is clearly against them, try to find a buyer.”

“And the problem with that would be?”

“They’re the people who know how to run a profitable diamond mine. They’re who we want up here, for all our sakes. There will be three thousand jobs building this thing and a thousand running it. Imagine that.”

“So how do we get town opinion to go against Okpatayauk?”

Robertson paused. “I have some ideas.”

Balthazar sat in Bernard’s living room, listening to “Saturday Night Fish Fry” on the priest’s 78 rpm record player. Whenever Balthazar was in the city, he picked up records for the priest, whose passion in this arena revolved around late 1940s blues. He had found this one in a shop in Chelsea. He had other presents: a braid of garlic, a wheel of blue cheese, and a case of Armagnac. The priest’s eyes had lit up most at the music.

When the new dormitory had been built behind the church in 1973, Bernard had had to abandon his cabin and move into it. He had rankled at the indignity of living like a seminarian again but had not protested. He was aware of the lack of housing in the community and of the likelihood that any other single man should be given a cabin to himself. And there were upsides to the new arrangement. He did not have to fuss with the toilet or, on the many nights cold enough to freeze all manner of plumbing, the bucket. He also thought he was better off to be surrounded by visiting priests and novitiates to offset a certain isolationist streak in himself. And then,
in the last few years, the health board had rented one of the unused apartments in the building for Balthazar.