Kiss of the Fur Queen (10 page)

“Why not?” Gabriel asked, not moving his gaze from the sight. No response. Gabriel decided to be patient.

Mariesis’s answer finally broke the spell. “Because Chachagathoo was an evil woman. Because she had
machipoowamoowin
. Father Thibodeau, oh, he hated that woman.”

Like all children of Eemanapiteepitat, they had been told since early childhood that they were never to mention the name of Chachagathoo inside the house. And they didn’t. All that they had heard of Chachagathoo was whispers that
trickled through the village, from time to time, like some unpleasant, unwanted news.

When Father Thibodeau passed away, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, he took his reason for hating Chachagathoo to his grave. His had been the first corpse Mariesis Okimasis had seen, when she was six years old, she had told her sons many times over the years: the waxen white mask with its eyes closed, its lips sealed tight, tiny Mariesis Eemoomineet standing in the summer breeze beside the open casket, wanting desperately to pinch the old man’s nose to see if it would honk.

The boys had also heard the word
“machipoowamoowin,”
but not often. All they knew was that it meant something like “bad blood” or “bad dream power.” Jeremiah and Gabriel had once asked their uncle Kookoos about this ominous, disturbing word, but all they got was, “It means that when you dream you dream about things that go
chikaboom chikaboom
in the darkest corner of your mind, and that generally happens when you don’t have no money to make the good home-brew.” Gabriel thought to ask his mother about it, but a better idea poked him in the ribs.

His eye still on the receding flame, he decided to show off the English he had learned in his year at Birch Lake School.

“Do
‘machipoowamoowin’
mean what Father Lafleur do to the boys at school?” Although he wanted to tickle his brother with this light-hearted joke, Gabriel’s question ended with an eerie, spectral chuckle that could have popped out of a bubble in his blood.

Jeremiah’s words, in English, were as cold as drops from a melting block of ice.

“Even if we told them, they would side with Father Lafleur.”

Selecting one of the three Native languages that she knew — English would remain, for life, beyond her reach and that of her husband’s — Mariesis turned to Jeremiah. “What are you saying, my sons?”

If moments can be counted as minutes can, or hours or days or years, one thousand of them trickled by before Jeremiah was absolutely sure Gabriel’s silence would remain until the day they died. And then he said, his voice flat,
“Maw keegway.”
Nothing.

“D
ominoes, dominoes, do the Cree Indians of northern Manitoba know how to play dominoes?” The little-boy voice of Gabriel Okimasis drifted through the radiant August afternoon on one extended note. Gabriel was draped in one of his mother’s famous quilts, tied in a bulky knot at his neck and dragging on the ground a good two feet behind him.

Facing a clump of young spruce trees, a spray of fireweed flaming pinkish mauve at his feet, Father Gabriel raised a host the size of a frying pan — in fact, one of Mariesis’s golden bannocks — above Abraham Okimasis’s World Champion’ship Dog Derby trophy.

“No dominoes, no dominoes, the Cree Indians of northern Manitoba were never taught how to play dominoes, oh dear,” responded Jeremiah Okimasis from where he sat on a pale green carpet of reindeer moss at the opposite end of the clearing. Although Gregorian chant was the order of the day,
the nine-year-old musician was softly playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” on the worn, browned keys of his father’s two-sizes-too-big blue accordion.

Father Gabriel’s congregation consisted of sticks broken off at various lengths and arranged in three neat rows across the meadow. Kiputz, the most devout among the faithful, sat in respectful silence at the end of one row.

The accordion soloist modulated from the key of G to its relative minor, as one of the more sombre sections of the service was about to unfold.

Gabriel lowered his chalice and host and genuflected gently, his head bent in humble, wordless prayer on the moss. He raised his right hand to his heart, a butterfly hovering over fireweed. “Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy,” he chanted, and he smote his chest, one smite for each “cowboy.”

Suddenly, behind him, a squirrel dashed across the open space. Kiputz let loose with his first bark in a whole hour, leapt up and gave chase.
“Miximoo, miximoo, miximoo!”
being as Cree a dog as ever there was.

The priest whipped halfway around to glare at the perpetrator. “Kiputz,” he stated coldly, “Kiputz. Shut up!”

The squirrel had scampered up a nearby spruce tree, the dog running round and round its base, jumping, barking,
“Miximoo, miximoo.”

Father Gabriel whirled from the makeshift altar and took off after his errant parishioner, knocking host and chalice into the dirt with his robe.

“Kiputz! Kiputz, you’re supposed to be in church, god-damnit!”

The red-furred rodent teased his pursuer. “Chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga!” ricocheted through the forest. “Come-and-get-me, come-and-get-me, come-and-get-me, you ugly little creep!” as Kiputz understood it.

Wars start when two parties haven’t taken the time to learn each other’s tongues.

“Miximoo, miximoo, miximoo!”
Kiputz cursed like a drunken fisherman, which the squirrel translated as “You fucking goddamn son-of-a-bitch-rat-coward, come down off that tree!” The squirrel bared his teeth.

Leaving the memory of host and chalice, the trio of Mexican cowboys, and Cree Indians forever doomed to ignorance of dominoes, Gabriel had but one thought: to put a stop to this ludicrous canine behaviour. Gabriel loved Kiputz dearly; he didn’t want him getting damaged, much less dying right here before his eyes.

“Kiputz! Kiputz, stop it!” cried Gabriel, panting. The organist of the Church of the Sacred Meadow deftly segued from the solemn cadences of “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant” to a knee-slapping, finger-snapping, foot-stomping “Do your balls hang low, do they jiggle to and fro, can you tie ‘em in a knot, can you tie ’em in a bow?” The froth of sixteenth notes cascaded down the smoke-stained accordion keys, joined hands at the bottom, and danced merrily in daisy-chain formation round and round the squirrel tree.

Suddenly, Gabriel felt a rough yank at his throat, for all he
knew, the evil Chachagathoo reaching out to snatch him down into her grave. He fell back with a snap. His quilt-built chasuble had got caught, and ripped, on some wayward branch, it was later discovered by a miffed Mariesis. But for now, Gabriel Okimasis lay in the reindeer moss, the sense knocked out of him. All he saw was tiny bluebirds chirping merrily, tying pink silk ribbons in the Fur Queen’s silver crown.

Jeremiah’s sixteenth notes played on. For six years, they played without pause. Sprouting wings, they lifted off Kamamagoos Island that autumn, honked farewell to Eemanapiteepitat twenty miles to the north, then soared in semi-perfect V-formation over the billowing waves of Mistik Lake, past the village of Wuchusk Oochisk, over the craggy rocks where the Mistik River joins the Churchill River, past Patima Bay, Chigeema Narrows, Flin Flon, and — following the route Abraham Okimasis had raced back in February 1951 — through Cranberry Portage to Oopaskooyak, where they touched down to slake their thirst on the memory of the Fur Queen’s kiss. After a detour of some years at the Birch Lake Indian Residential School twenty miles west of Oopaskooyak, the music curved south until it levelled onto the great Canadian plain and landed, just so, in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, eight hundred miles south of Eemanapiteepitat, in the pink salon of another woman in white fur.

S
tately as an ocean liner, the woman in the portrait stood, a monument to pearls, pink cashmere, and white fox stoles, her white satin gloves blushing in the aura of the American Beauty rose grasped between their fingers. Beneath the painting, framed against unshuttered French windows, stood the subject herself, leaning against the crook of a Steinway grand piano. As her left hand pounded four-four time on the instrument’s burnished top, her right wove patterns in the air as though conducting an orchestra: “And a-one and a-two and a-three …”

The resemblance of the portrait to the real thing was accurate enough, although the copy may have been twenty years younger than the original: Lola van Beethoven, piano teacher nonpareil, grande dame of the Winnipeg classical music scene, age sixty-five.

“And a-two and a-three and a-four,” she half-sung in a
quavering dull contralto, her painted lips aquiver with passion while her rooster’s crown of silvery bluish hair somehow remained completely undisturbed. “And stretch that phrase, and a-one and a-two …” The triplet sixteenth notes of Johann Sebastian Bachs D-major Toccata careered their robust, unfettered way from one pink wall of the room to another as the fading light of an early-September evening washed off the painting’s giltwood frame.

At the keyboard laboured Lola van Beethoven’s charge, grimacing when he judged his performance shoddy in one passage, beaming when he knew he had achieved the right effect in another. Jeremiah Okimasis, fifteen years of age, of rather bookish, intellectual demeanour, had just begun his first year of high school. Infinitely more important to him, however, was the instrument reverberating at his fingertips; for in this metropolis of half a million souls where he seemed to be the only Indian person, it was his one friend.

Toccata:
the word is Italian for
touch
, the widow van Beethoven had embedded in her newest pupil’s memory that day.
Toccata:
an exercise in touch — the touch of human fingers on keyboards — which, with persistent practice, can become a touch able to make pianos sing as if with a human voice.

The rhythmic underpinning of the piece brought to Jeremiah’s mind Saturday nights in Eemanapiteepitat during those too-brief summer months when he and his siblings had been set free from residential school. As his left hand
pounded out the rollicking, reel-like beat and his right flung out the reams of triplets, marionette images of Kookoos Cook, Annie Moostoos, Jane Kaka McCrae, his parents, and all the overanimated guests at those steamy wedding bacchanals bounced through his imagination, tugged at his heart — “Come home, Jeremiah, come home; you don’t belong there, you don’t belong there” — the rhythm of his native tongue came bleeding through the music.

As though tripping on the lump in his throat, he lost his concentration. Lola van Beethoven was about to pounce when, like a trout caught in a net, he resurfaced, flailing, grappling. Effortlessly, he slid into the coda — the largo, a hymn to the heavens — and thereby came back home to the tonic.

At the front door to the mansion half an hour later, Mrs. van Beethoven cupped her ingenu’s hands admiringly in hers and, being a woman with no use for wasted verbiage, announced, “Five hours a day, six days a week, Jeremiah. Practise, practise, practise.”

She raised one hand to brush a stray curl back against her patrician brow. “And within five years? Five years, Jeremiah. Boom. The trophy.” A gentle gust of wind blew a whiff of some expensive fragrance up the Cree teenager’s nostrils. “The Crookshank Memorial Trophy.”

She pressed his hands one final time and, eyes wide with elation, shut the heavy glazed oak door. Jeremiah was so thrilled that he had been accepted into the indomitable
doyenne’s roster of exceptional students that he wanted to run back in and smother her with kisses.

Down leafy Red Deer Boulevard the young Cree concert-pianist-in-training strode, vinyl briefcase bulging with Bach and Chopin scores, his head a jangle of triplet runs, arpeggios, and trills. Revelling in the prairie breeze, he filled his lungs, astonished that the first week of September could be so hot. Up on Mistik Lake, after all, his relentless ululating father was already battling pre-winter gales and his gloved hands, as they hauled his nets in, would be laced with filaments of ice.

He found himself suspecting that he may mistakenly have gotten off the train at Mars. Or Venus. Here he was, back at school in the very distant south — it might as well have been Florida, or Rio de Janeiro — free, at last, of steel-mesh fences and curfews that chained you to your bed by 9:00
P.M.
, free of tasteless institutional food, free of nuns and brothers — and priests — watching every move, every thought, every bodily secretion, free to talk to girls.

Except that there were no girls to talk to. At his school, there may have been a thousand, but they were all white; not one spoke Cree. The exultation at his newfound freedom began to wilt just as he spied an orange-and-silver bus lumbering up the street. He sprinted towards it.

Sitting bolt upright, staring straight ahead, Jeremiah tried to appear as though he was on his way somewhere — dinner
with rock-musician friends, a movie with a busty blonde, for God’s sake, even bingo with his mother would do! — when in fact he had absolutely nowhere to go. All that awaited him was a basement room on the north side of the city, with a bed, a dresser, and a moth-eaten old piano. His landlady allowed him meals in her kitchen, and use of the washroom, but that was all. And what was there for him to do tonight? Play the piano. What was there for him to do tomorrow, Saturday night? Or all the nights of the week? Play the piano. His one consolation was that he would have no trouble meeting his daily practice quota, thereby becoming “the best goddamn piano player in Winnipeg,” the Cree words whispering to him like a coded message from a secret agent. That’s it! He would invent an imaginary friend, who spied on white people but conveyed the information to him in the language only they shared.

He thanked God that he had learned his father’s lessons on solitude: how time alone could be spent without need for crying, that time alone was time for shaping thoughts that make the path your life should take, for cleaning your spirit of extraneous — even poisonous — matter.