Consumption (22 page)

Their friendship had not been immediate. The priest had known of the man for some time before he began appearing in the morning in the hallways, lumbering to the showers and yawning and scratching without modesty. And Bernard had shared the town’s reservations about him, or had no reason to dispute them. But, as their arrangement went on, he had become fond of Balthazar in a way that he had not anticipated—a union of two equally anti-social introverts with an obligation to safeguard the welfare of the town. In the winter, they were usually the only two residents of the dormitory for months at a time. Bernard had propped his door open, and the music poured out into the empty building for all, that is, no one, to hear. It felt daring to both of them to play music at such volume in a public place. Balthazar was in his late forties, and Bernard had to have been sixty, anyway. But that night, they felt like twenty-three-year-olds, intoxicated by dangerous scratchy music and Armagnac.

When the record was finished, the priest rose to pour them another and to cut up the cheese. “Robertson built his wife a new house, a real château, have you seen it?”

“No.”

“Apparently, it was a surprise even to her. The only log house I’ve ever seen north of the treeline.”

“Well, there’s the old hospital the priests built in Chesterfield.”

“Well, yes. And isn’t that a treat to heat?”

“Did Victoria like it?”

“She’s refused to move in.”

Balthazar looked at him quizzically.

“Well, why do you suppose he built it for her in the first place?”

“He wants her to love him.”

“Of course.”

“I see.”

There was a short silence as they both thought about Robertson’s position in that marriage. Both Balthazar’s and the priest’s sympathies
usually gravitated to Victoria, but this night they couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man.

Balthazar decided to change the subject. “What else happened while I was away?”

“The schoolteacher, Emo’s friend, was out on the tundra all summer, up by the Back River, camping alone. The hunters checked up on her. I think they enjoy her spirit.”

“Certainly Emo does.”

“Well, that would be gossiping. How does your book go?”

“Well, it isn’t really a book, Bernard, you know that. It’s just some thoughts I’ve written down.”

“Did you work on it this summer?”

“Not too much. I meant to. But I got distracted.”

“By what?”

“I saw my niece a few times. She told me where to find these records.”

“You two are close, yes?”

“Not exactly. But we seem to be more patient with each other than any other two people in my family.”

“The Inuit understand this better than southerners do. How children are supposed to be raised by their aunts and uncles and grandparents too.”

“Well, I’m not up to
raising
her, exactly.”

“But perhaps that would change, if only you did, a little.”

“My brother and his wife aren’t doing well. I think they’re going to split up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Keith, but I’m sorry for your niece, mostly.”

Then Bernard put on
Slim’s Jam:
tenor saxophone and oblique 1940s references to marijuana.

They both leaned back, eyes half-closed as they listened to the music, the priest laughing into his Armagnac. When it was done, the needle scratched its way rhythmically around the centre of the record until Balthazar rose and lifted it off. They had listened to all the music he had bought that summer. “So, Bernard,” he asked as he
poured more brandy into their glasses, “do you think it’s harder for people to keep marriages together than it used to be?”

Bernard did not open his eyes and Balthazar thought that the priest had fallen asleep. Then he answered, still without moving his eyelids. “If people are different, then their marriages will be different too. Marriage has changed, the people in them have changed.”

“Up here too?”

“Everywhere is the same as everywhere else—that’s the lesson of the end of the twentieth century. You’re talking about your brother and his wife, no doubt.”

“Yes. My niece ran away from them, to me. She wanted to live with me until they figured things out.”

“What did you say?”

“I avoided the issue.”

“Tsk.”

“You disapprove?”

“I’m not criticizing you, Keith.”

“They fight like they hate each other.”

“That’s an old story.”

“Yeah.”

“And so is relatives helping out.”

“That part isn’t so much the case now.”

Robertson and Victoria sat together on the steps of their old house. The girls were inside doing their schoolwork and Pauloosie was sharpening a knife. Victoria smoked a cigarette, which she had not done in front of him in twelve years.

“It’s just that I love this house. You should have talked to me about getting a new one. I’ve raised my children in this house and—I just don’t know what you’re trying to do here.”

Robertson rubbed his knees. “Victoria, there is nothing you will let me do for you.”

“I think we’ve been living alongside each other, rather than with each other, for way too long.”

“So can we fix that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll never be an Inuk, you know. Is that the problem, at the end of the day?”

She shook her head and drew on her cigarette, tears welling like water off an icicle: hanging and then the long drop. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

The Appetite for Destruction tour pulled into Madison Square Garden for three shows, October 7, 8, and 9, 1988. Amanda bought tickets with Emma, a friend from school, and together they spun a story for their parents about taking in a dance performance. Emma and Amanda met at the mall. They changed in one of the washrooms in the food court, trading their jeans for miniskirts and applying makeup so heavily their skin took on the texture of sparkly Play-Doh. Then they took a bus to the Port Authority and walked to the Garden. They were both so excited they skipped as they walked, recovering their composure only as the Garden hove into view.

Their seats were high up in the arena. Even before the show started the girls were enthralled by the noise and the smoke and the electric sex in the air. They were a little younger than most of the people around them, but they were pretty, and many smiles were sent their way. Even as the warm-up band was taking their bows, Amanda was consulting her watch and calculating when they would have to leave to catch the last bus home. Then Axl Rose strutted onto the stage and Slash followed him and the two of them launched into the introductory chorus to “Welcome to the Jungle” and that was it, Amanda was standing on her seat and writhing like every other person in the building—eighteen thousand of them—and there was no more discussion of late buses.

A boy stood in front of them, tall and lithe and, in the heat of the show, naked from the waist up. He turned to the girls, and he was very, very high, and he handed them a joint without asking and they each smoked a bit of it, choking and coughing before handing it back. Then they all went back to dancing. Axl Rose threw a chair into the audience and someone was carried out by paramedics. Slash vomited on the stage. The show only got better.

The boy’s name was Lewis and after the concert was over he drove them back to Newark, where he lived too. He dropped Emma off in front of her darkened house. Amanda guided him to her parents’ place and after he pulled to a stop on their cul-de-sac, he leaned over and kissed her as she was reaching for the door handle. She was astonished. But then she kissed him back, for a long time, fumbling, conscious of the saliva building up in her mouth. He kept giggling and she thought he was laughing at her, but it was only that he was so high. Finally she wrote her phone number on his hand, then slipped out of the car and ran up the sidewalk.

Okpatayauk was twenty-nine years old and had lived for two years in the south, studying at the University of Ottawa with a view to becoming a lawyer. His pride undid him. At school in Rankin Inlet he had been considered a sort of prodigy, from Grade Two on, the object of constant praise and pointed comparisons with other students because he read books for enjoyment and listened in class. His first semester at university had almost shattered him. He struggled on for a bit, then gave up and returned home, sullen and angry, and had spent the nine years since working as a casual clerk in the government offices. Over and over again his superiors told him that he could have a bright future in the civil service but for his attitude. People with such attitudes typically respond about as well as Okpatayauk did to this admonition.

He had heard the same gossip everyone else in town had—some of Robertson’s colleagues were too talkative—and found himself
responding to the subject of the mine in a way he had not responded to anything before. He began asking his co-workers if they thought the mine would be a good thing for the Inuit. The prevailing view was that not much of the money from such a venture would find its way into Inuit hands—the lion’s share of any windfall would no doubt drift toward Robertson and the Ikhirahlo Group—and that, anyway, the idea of diamonds under the tundra was a little silly.

Okpatayauk lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Angutetuar, who had a government apartment and was another Inuk who could have a bright future in the civil service. It was either live with her or room with a half-dozen other single men in one of the houses set aside for them. The smell of spilled beer was the least of it. And meanwhile, the Kablunauk Robertson wore wristwatches that cost as much as a truck, he had heard.

And so Okpatayauk formed a committee to oppose the mine. Soon there were thirty people coming to his and Elizabeth’s apartment once a week to talk about what was happening, and to discuss what they might do to stop it. Okpatayauk thought that it was not in his interest, at this stage, to make the protest a race-based matter. He thought that would muddy the issue, and alienate the schoolteachers who had had some experience in forming movements such as this.

He had persuaded the town council to hold a meeting about the mine. Robertson and his colleagues in the Ikhirahlo Group had expected this and had not expended political capital opposing the suggestion. A date was picked and the hockey arena was booked. In the weeks beforehand, posters began appearing in town—on the announcement board at the Northern Store, the church corkboard, and, in an unprecedented act of effrontery, taped to the light posts along the streets. They read,
The Caribou Live There Now. In Two Years, They Won’t
.

Every night of the week before the meeting, Okpatayauk’s committee gathered in his apartment. The members made more posters and the Kablunauks talked about how logging had been stopped in the old-growth forests in British Columbia. The Inuit listened and
spoke less stridently but with more weight. The tenor of their objection: What if we don’t want it to change that much?

Penny did not normally participate in town politics, affecting a kind of macho impatience with anyone who proposed to speak of the land who couldn’t themselves build an iglu worth sleeping in. But the mine, and the people who appeared to be associated with it, struck her as something that needed to be addressed. She thought about the farmland north of Edmonton where she had grown up: thick with oil heads rocking up and down, the mixed farms gone now, leaving behind three- and five-thousand-acre expanses of rape-seed stretching in monotonous yellow to the horizon. In the absence of working livestock, the sloughs had all been filled in. Where hogs were still kept they were housed in enormous sheet-metal natural-gas-heated and dimly lit enclosures, twenty thousand animals jowl by jowl, the odour blasting out like some Dantean wind onto the prairie. She thought of the mine in these terms—as proceeding inexorably to the diminution of the land and the people involved with it.