Kiss of the Fur Queen (18 page)

With a lingering handshake, the priest took his leave of Gabriel, nodded pleasantly at Jeremiah, and strode off smiling into the white light of noon.

“There,” said Gabriel, turning towards Mrs. Bugachski’s boarding house, “we’ve gone to church. Now we can fly north and face the music.” He snuck a peek at the seven-digit number in his hand, then slipped the little white card into a back pocket. Already, he could taste warm honey dripping.

The night before TransAir flight 273 was to leave for Oopaskooyak, Thompson, and points north, Gabriel made a phone call. The rectory was busy — out-of-town guests, apologized a tight-voiced Father Vincent Connolly. In response, the ever wily Cree boldly offered him tea at his residence, actually the home of lawyer Stuart H. Everett and his wife, Diane. There, in his basement room, while the Everetts watched
Bewitched
upstairs, Gabriel Okimasis got to know the mouth-watering Father Vincent Connolly in a way that had him yodelling
“weeks’chiloowew!”
by nine that evening.

B
ored as a weathervane on a windless day, Christ loomed silvery white. Gabriel felt he could almost reach through the airplane window and pluck the corpse, crucifix, spire, and all. One seat ahead, Jeremiah leaned forward to assess how far the village had grown to the north in the three years since his last trip home. The treeless south, where their aunt Black-eyed Susan Magipom and her terrible husband, Happy Doll, used to fight like Tasmanian devils, appeared desert-like by comparison. In fact, not a single log shack remained. Over the pilot’s shoulder, true to Gabriel’s hallelujahs, he spied the new airstrip awaiting their arrival.

In the seat across from Gabriel’s, Kookoos Cook sprawled snoring off seven nights of drinking Five Star whisky, smoking cigarettes, and jigging to the jukebox. The Smallwood Lake Motel, the Legion, the liquor store, all had closed their
doors until further notice, for Kookoos Cook had drunk the little mining town dry.

Now descending over the yellow-brown ribbon road that snaked from the lake through the village to the airstrip, the boys could see a half-ton truck bumping along to meet the plane. It quite amazed Jeremiah — never had he dreamed a truck would one day grace his home reserve. Like ants to a picnic, knots of people followed on foot. How close to the treeline their hometown was. In fact, if the inhumanly tall Magimay Cutthroat wore five-inch heels, so local theory went, the surrounding forest would look like a lawn.

As the aircraft banked for its final approach, Jeremiah counted the crisp new houses that lined the road; plywood bungalows in pastel shades, as indistinguishable as peas in a pod, they could have been cakes at a bake sale for giants. There were tricycles and bicycles, as unimaginable as trucks in the old days, careering between the bungalows with four, five, twenty-one children balanced circus-like on their seats, backs, handlebars. Men perched on a roof installing a television antenna while Crazy Salamoo Oopeewaya argued with God right beside them. What was Crazy Salamoo Oopeewaya saying today? That television was the Weetigo finally arrived to devour, digest, and shit out the soul of Eemanapiteepitat?

The aircraft landed in flawless Cree. So much dust rose that, for one dark minute, according to Jane Kaka McCrae’s subsequent confabulations, Eemanapiteepitat resembled Hiroshima on that dreadful day. Only through the haze, as through the Fur Queen’s breath, could the brothers discern
the small crowd clustering like mosquitoes around the little plywood terminal. When Gabriel pointed out the outhouse that had claimed the third of Annie Moostoos’s reputed nine lives, the thrill inside their throats expanded to the size and texture of chipmunks. But for the vomit-inspiring reek of stale cigarettes and third-rate liquor from across the aisle, the moment would have been perfect. Fortunately, just then, the red Twin Otter Beechcraft shuddered to a stop.

“That’s them. That’s them over there!” And there, to be sure, the kingly world champion and his short, brown wife were, stepping off the terminal’s flimsy little stairway and up to the wire-mesh fence, there to smile with a vengeance.

Annie Moostoos came trundling behind their parents, her solitary tooth a virtual pearl for, as the brothers would be informed within the hour, she had soaked it in Javex — “for days, weeks!” — especially for their arrival. Now approaching her eightieth year, for all anyone could remember, she was still as vibrant as “ten young caribou tied in a knot.”

Eemanapiteepitat now attacked the plane en masse, for ever since the first
p’mithagan
had landed on Mistik Lake in 1929, the population had never been able to resist swarming like bees to machines that flew, even kites. The dark green truck rattled up, the door popped open, and Father Bouchard alighted; by which time, Gabriel had banged his uncle’s pomegranate-like proboscis awake, the pilot had flung the passenger door open, and the gaggle of gawkers stood exposed as a picture.

Gabriel took a step down the ladder, Jeremiah immediately
behind. Suddenly, with a thunk, Kookoos Cook smashed into Jeremiah, who smashed into Gabriel, whose testicles smashed Father Bouchard’s, who collapsed back to bosom on Annie Moostoos. The event sent all bystanders skittering off with a shriek so piercing Choggylut McDermott’s new colostomy bag was said to spring a leak. And there in the sand lay a club sandwich of humans, a groaning Kookoos Cook its topmost layer.

“Kookoos Cook,” Annie Moostoos squeezed out the one breath left her, “you fuckin’ goddamn bleedin’ caribou arse-hole!” her invective followed by a bell-like poot. Had Annie’s poisonous gases found heavenly release at last? As it would be revealed years later, and then only in the context of myth, the nether-region sotto voce had sprung not from the humble, one-toothed laywoman but from the learned, elevated cleric.

“Your father says you can get work at the store,
nigoosis,”
said Mariesis to Jeremiah, in her exquisite Cree, “now that you’re finished school.”

Jeremiah shivered. How to reply? “But I’m not finished school yet”? Or, “I’m going back to play the music of Chopin like no Eemanapiteepitatite has ever played it”? How, for God’s sake, did one say “concert pianist” in Cree?

Mired tremulously in his father’s embrace, Gabriel sparred dexterously enough with the usual overtures — “hi, how are you, fine, how are you?” — but promptly met an impasse when the hunter asked, “Do you still pray,
nigoosis?”
his Cree impeccable. Gabriel held his breath. He plumbed the pupils of his father’s eyes even as his own widened with terror.

“Eehee,”
he lied,
“eehee, Papa, keeyapitch n’tayamiyan,”
his voice incapable of masking shame or guilt. Supposing this beautiful man could see, in his son’s dark eyes, Wayne’s naked skin flush against his son’s. Supposing this kind old hunter could see the hundred other men with whom his last-born had shared … what? Supposing this most Catholic of men could see his baby boy pumping and being pumped by a certain ardent young Jesuit with grey-blue eyes.

Dust radiating from his frame like a saint’s penumbra, one shoulder graced by a bulging blue mailbag, Father Bouchard strode up to the family cluster and was about to speak when Jeremiah broke in.

“So, Father,” he huffed in as chummy a Cree as he could muster. “I hear you’re thinking of retiring.” All he knew was that he needed a pretext — true, false — to deflect his mother’s too-painful pleas.

“Why?” the priest hobbled on in a Cree so mangled it might have been German, Chinese, and Swahili. “You thinking of taking over my job?” He reached for Jeremiah’s hand.

“Ho-ho!”
Abraham sang out, “I’ll buy the church a piano, throw your tired old
organ
smack in the lake.” Their father’s joke plummetted, for on matters sensual, sexual, and therefore fun, a chasm as unbridgeable as hell separates Cree from English, the brothers were sadly learning.

“About what
mon père
just said,” mused Abraham, as they started down the road to the village. “About Jeremiah taking over? It’s a thought, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely!” thumped Mariesis, maternal pride straining
at the seams of her home-sewn smock, “Our son would look excellent in one of those long black skirts, don’t you think?”

“In the wind, it would inspire nothing but the holiest of thoughts,” concurred the hunter, though only in partial jest. Luggage dangling, the brothers walked ahead, their parents behind, the ebullient quartet trailed by Annie Moostoos, Jane Kaka McCrae, now doddering Little Seagull Ovary, and a chorus of yowling mongrels. Kookoos Cook would find his way home in a couple of weeks, when his twenty cases of Five Star whisky were down to zero.

A mongrel burped. Annie Moostoos kicked it. The animal keeled over and expired.

Jeremiah clung to the image of himself in a cassock, floating through the village, blessing people left and right, listening to the words of small brown boys in dark confessionals, and, in the morning, serving them the body of Christ piled high on a plate. What surprised him was that the notion, far from repelling him, shot a thrill up his spine. If the world, after all, could lionize a singing nun, could it not then, as well, a pianist priest, even an Indian one?

“How do you say …” English, today, tasted like metal to Jeremiah. “How do you say ‘university’? In Cree?” Northern Manitoba sunlight clear as glass, dry as a bone, touched the brothers’ skin, even as its edges were laced by the fragrance of reindeer moss, pine, campfire smoke.

“Semen-airy,”
grinned Gabriel, the closest he could get, in his native tongue. The word flooded his palate like a surge of honey.

“T
ake
a pair of sparkling eyes, hidden ever and anon …” Gabriel and Jeremiah sang as they leaned, one on each side, over the bow of their father’s blue canoe. Like lightning, their reflections flashed under them — the lake a perfect mirror — as the vessel sliced dark liquid. At the stern, Abraham Okimasis pushed the motor’s steering handle left, the boat veered right — waves grazed pebble-beached Awasis Point — and the fish camp leapt to view. There the dock, fish house, ice house, at a distance behind the spruce-log structures, another trio: white canvas tents poking spook-like through the tops of live spruce, of birch and poplar.

The little motor died. The canoe glided. Then a loon pierced the silence with a cry so close, so raw it made blood sing: “
Weeks’chiloowew!”

Up to Gabriel on the dock flew the crate of gutted fish, Abraham heaving then bending over for the next. A dozen
more sat stacked in the fifteen-foot-long vessel, trout, pickerel, whitefish, no box less than sixty pounds. One by one, Gabriel piled the crates behind him.

The hunter glanced at Jeremiah, who stood by idly, smoking a cigarette. “Not helping, son?”

“He doesn’t do heavy work, Dad,” Gabriel’s disdain unhidden, “it’s bad for his hands.” The air hung thick with the wet smell of fish, of entrails fresh and gleaming.

“Bad for his hands?” frowned Abraham, and toiled on deep in thought. The signs had not escaped him: visit by visit, word by word, these sons were splintering from their subarctic roots, their Cree beginnings. Yet he knew that destiny played with lives; the most a parent could do was help steer. He passed the seventh crate to Gabriel.

Lisztian octaves pounding like hooves inside his head, Jeremiah stepped off the dock and up the slope, past the nest of Achak and Peesim, their pet young eagles, and towards the centre tent. Of what use would it be to explain that lifting sixty pounds of fish a dozen, fifteen, fifty times a day would make mush of his arpeggios and appoggiaturas? And should he be thought a snob, an elitist, an insufferable egotist, too bad. His father had had his chance at a trophy. So would he.

The needle in Mariesis’s hand flashed with such rapidity, such deadly accuracy, that a sewing machine would have blushed to be seen beside it. A gorgeous pelt of arctic fox, whiter than snow, hung from the rafters close by her head. Though destined as trim for hats, gloves, moccasins, the
animal’s extremities remained so defiantly intact that its tail twitched. The carpet of spruce boughs around Mariesis was strewn with scissors, thimbles, spools of thread, squares of multicoloured cloth — quilt-in-progress. So intent was she on catching the last of daylight that Jeremiah’s voice came as a surprise.

“Neee, ballee sleeper chee anima?”
he asked from the door. For how else, in this language of reindeer moss and fireweed and humour so blasphemous it terrified white people, could one express a concept as nebulous as “ballet slipper”?

“I haven’t got a clue what a
ballee sleeper
is but these sure are funny moccasins you city folk wear,” replied Mariesis, snipping the thread from the shoe in her hand. “Want me to make you a pair?”

Jeremiah would have declined but spied the conspicuously plastic bag beside her outstretched legs. For what should be poking out but more of this most bizarre footwear. Had Vaslav Nijinsky come hunting for moose and bear and wild caribou? Had Rudolf Nureyev defected to the frigid waterways of northern Manitoba? What the hell was going on?

“You make the fire,
nigoosis,”
said Mariesis, “and I’ll have supper ready faster than you can say
ballee sleeper, neee.”
With a small, cupped hand, she quashed a pig-like snort and stuffed the worn black slipper into the opaque plastic.

By the time the Okimasis clan sat down to campfire-broiled whitefish and fresh-baked bannock, midnight had almost arrived. The sole illumination a kerosene lamp, the only sound cutlery meeting metal and hot tea being sipped.
Down the slope, on a lake drenched by a great half-moon, the loon cried one last time. Immediately, its song was answered, first by wolves five miles away, then by the hunter’s sled dogs sequestered on a nearby islet.

“So what’s with these … ballet slippers?” Jeremiah’s Cree voice cracked the spell.

“Speak English,
nigoosis,”
said Mariesis. “It takes me back to the first time I heard it, on Father Thibodeau’s radio. That old priest had to translate for us, of course, but people across the ocean were killing each other. A story so terrible, but the words sounded like music, I thought at the time. ‘Great war, great war,’ I used to sing and skip — I was five years old — until my father, your grandfather Muskoosis, told me to shut up, that the words meant death.”