The Shaman's Knife (2 page)

Never in my whole life had my mother been anything but all right. I prayed both to God and, just in case, also to the goddess Sedna, who in our ancient tribal beliefs lives at the bottom of the sea and is sometimes visited there by shamans looking for direction.

For a while I thought about the exchange I'd just had with Lois. Some people, when faced with a choice between a bickering marriage and a conflict-free relationship outside of marriage, head for divorce, I don't know about Lois, but I had never seriously considered that way out. I'm not very profound on the subject, but on one level our marriage still bound me. Maybe it was partly because when I thought of Maxine, I couldn't imagine us married.

I remembered Maxine's younger sister Gloria, somewhat in her cups, her own life a serial disaster of disappearing lovers, mostly white, who just wanted to get her into bed, demanding to know why Maxine and I went along year after year as we did. Maxine had met my eyes and laughed. It may sound simpleminded, but I felt more comfortable evading the issue than going through the torture I'd seen in some others who tried to shuck off the remains of one marriage and head for another in what might seem to be love—but might not work either. If Maxine had been demanding I might have felt differently; but she never campaigned for more than we already had. In that, we were alike. Sufficient unto the day?

I thought of mother and Maxine, the first time they met, years ago. I was in Inuvik with a prisoner locked up and his statement being typed as to why he had killed one of his cousins (he hadn't liked this cousin, and besides they were sleeping with the same girl). Anyway, I had a couple of clear days. Maxine had time off coming to her. We were in her kitchen having coffee, talking about what we might do when she suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, Matteesie, two days! Why don't we go see your mother?”

We'd flown over to Holman. It was a risk. Not a risk on the married side of my life as it might be for a white man who would have to fear some sharp-eyed do-gooder hastening to call and tell the dear little wife at home what a faithless bugger she'd married. That was a different world entirely. The risk was that Maxine was part Indian and my mother was from a generation where relations between Inuit and Indians, especially among elders, had not quite recovered from earlier centuries of territorial warfare, fighting, murder, ambushes, bloody encounters almost every time the twain did meet. The north's distant history was full of such events.

Mother had been wary, at first, as if accepting Maxine only because she was with me. Then Maxine had taken over. After asking Mother's permission, she had mixed flour, salt, baking powder, and water into a stiff dough, fried in lard, browned on both sides—bannock. She had eaten muktuk, the edible part of beluga whale found between outer skin and blubber, with every evidence of enjoyment, while exclaiming as she listened to mother's blow-by-blow account of the successful beluga hunt that had produced enough muktuk for the whole settlement. She had scrutinized carefully and admired the tattoos on my mother's cheeks and chin and upper lip. Braided my mother's long unruly hair that she couldn't get her arms up to do by herself anymore. Tied ribbons around the ends of the braids. Asked my mother many questions and then listened as one should to the elders of a people, treating my mother as I imagined she treated her own grandmother.

There was also the matter of the pipe. Normally Maxine smoked many, many cigarettes. But on that trip she smoked a pipe that, with an excited (for her) call of “Hey, this oughta help!” she'd resurrected from a drawer just before we left her townhouse in Inuvik. Claimed it had belonged to some man who had stayed overnight sometimes with Gloria. She even had boiled the pipe to get rid of germs. “Germs must live to a hell of an age, especially that bastard's!”

There was an almost holy moment, for me, like watching a one-on-one for an Olympic gold medal, when Maxine produced her pipe and accepted some of the ferocious cut plug that my mother smoked. They lit up. Mother inhaled happily. Maxine went pale and her eyes bulged at her first puff but she did not gasp or choke, only wiped her eyes a lot from time to time. Images . . .

Maxine and I are about the same age, middle forties. Years ago, when we had just become lovers, both single, she a probationary bedpan jockey at the lnuvik hospital and I an RCMP special constable in the Inuvik detachment, we laughed a lot and figured our lowly lives were not that bad, especially in the loving part. But we never talked about a future, even then. The Mounties didn't encourage their men to marry and thus become less transferrable. As for Maxine, not long before we met she had almost married a young white doctor with whom she had a summer affair largely on the banks of the Bear river and who, in the grips of some mad delusion, had asked her to marry him. In preparation, he had taken her to his ancestral home in doggedly white Kingston, Ontario, to meet his folks. By the time she told me about it—“This is how crazy I was . . .”—she had made a funny story out of the first silent, strained family dinner in their grand old stone house at a long table with a white linen cloth bearing a puzzling number of silver forks, knives, and spoons. A few nights later she had sneaked out of the sleeping house to escape from Kingston forever by Greyhound bus. Four days later she'd landed in Yellowknife and worked as a waitress to get the money to fly to Inuvik and the hospital job she'd had when we met. She liked being single.

When we eventually parted I don't remember any long farewell or fervent promises for the future. I had applied and was sent to the RCMP training facility in Regina. A few years later, when I was working in Edmonton, my first posting “south,” I met Lois, naturally fair-haired, lissomely beautiful, and in love with me, as I was with her. A while after that, we married.

I do remember, will not forget, how good it was until in a few years the physical part began to fade. A lot of people handle that, but with us it led to fights, recriminations, accusations that I was getting sex elsewhere, which at first I wasn't.

Next time I met Maxine she was in a journalism course at Arctic College. On graduation she got a job as a free-lance interpreter in English and her tribal tongue, Slavey, mainly in court work but increasingly in radio. When there was a CBC staff opening, she got it. By then I'd made sergeant in the RCMP and we seemed to be ready for each other, but as we were, she in her living space and I in mine.

Landing in Edmonton a little before five and facing a two-hour wait, I phoned the hospital in Yellowknife. I knew the switchboard operator and she knew me. “You want Dr. Butterfield, Inspector,” she said. “I'll find him.” As I waited, I could hear hollowly in the distance, “Dr. Butterfield, pick up a phone, please.”

Quickly, one word, “Butterfield.”

I said my name and that I was in Edmonton on my way to Yellowknife. “I'm calling about my mother, Bessie Apakaq.”

“Ah, yes. You'll want to know all about it? Do you have a few minutes? I guess you do, being between planes. Reason I ask is I have to fly to Fort Reliance and won't be back until late tomorrow. I've been concerned that I wouldn't have a decent chance to talk to you before I left. Right. Okay. So far so good. I'll get right to it.

“To start with, we're pretty lucky so far. From there on, it gets a little technical, if you'll bear with me . . .”

I cherished the phrase
pretty lucky so far
.

“When I say lucky, this or almost any ninety-year-old woman has to be pretty osteoporotic, meaning bones get porous and therefore weak. In ordinary circumstances the kind of thing your mother experienced, let's say falling five feet on her head after being pushed quite hard, might very well crack her dome. Skull fracture. Add to that the greater likelihood of injury to her cervical spine and the arteriosclerotic vertebral arteries encased therein and we could have a very sick old lady . . .”

Some of the medical terms I knew from other cases and my reading in forensics.

“But those things didn't happen,” he went on. “Which is not to say that the concussion she did suffer isn't painful. It is also not entirely free of danger. Her headache now comes from both the superficial trauma, bruising of her scalp, as well as a slight, we now believe, increase in intracranial pressure resulting from the severe bump on her head. This usually settles within one to five days with no residual side effects, and as it is now something like three days from when she was hurt, we are justified, I believe, in thinking that she is through the worst part. If she hadn't improved she would have had to go to Edmonton, probably, for a CT scan to look for a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which would have required intracranial surgery to arrest the bleeding, a perilous undertaking indeed in a lady her age. Are you with me so far?”

“I think so,” I said rather faintly. “As long as I don't have to spell, uh, subarachnoid, is that what you said?”

“Right!” He laughed. A human laugh that made me feel good. “Now, just so you'll know it all, luckily the Sanirarsipaaq nursing station is in the charge of a very well qualified woman who called the doctor in Churchill, got instructions, and did everything right in the twenty-four hours before your mother was moved—had her on what we call a serious head injury routine. Her blood pressure was checked hourly, along with her pupillary reflexes. She had an intravenous to guard against shock and, to deter her falling into a coma, a danger in such cases, she was wakened every fifteen minutes.

“Once on the medivac plane, and after she arrived here, she was wakened hourly and from time to time her eyes were inspected with an ophthalmoscope—a small but penetrating light you've probably had used on yourself if you ever had eye trouble. But the fact is, now her headache is receding and if she is as well tomorrow as we expect, she'll be moved out of the hospital into a convalescent facility we have, Franklin House, which you probably are familiar with.”

“I appreciate all you've done for her,” I said, an inadequate line, but deeply heartfelt. “And for telling me about the last few days in such detail. Thank you very much.”

“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “I'm just glad the news is this good, so far.” He hesitated, then I think I heard a sigh as he went on more slowly. “I would be remiss if I didn't add, however, that in a case of this sort, taking into account age, nature of the injury, and so on, there is always the chance that some condition we haven't detected could cause a relapse.”

I took that in. “I'll either be in Yellowknife or the RCMP will know where to reach me, if needed.”

“You mean you might be going to Sanirarsipaaq?”

“Probably,” I said. “Not sure when, depending on mother's condition, but at the same time that I heard about her being hurt, I'd been detailed to Sanirarsipaaq.”

“I'll make sure everybody here has instructions to find you, if anything happens.”

 

When I reached the Yellowknife Inn that night, a message at the desk asked me to call Erika Hall from the
News/North
group of newspapers and news services, giving her home number. Erika's interest I understood. Although the murders by then were becoming old news, as soon as Maxine made the name connection and CBC Inuvik broadcast that the old woman hurt in the Sanirarsipaaq murders was my mother, the story had taken on a different aspect. She wasn't just any elder, she was Matteesie Kitologitak's mother. I'd picked up the Edmonton papers in my stopover there. The
Sun
covered it on the front with a photo of me in fur hat and parka and knee-highs from some other Arctic case, a red caption screaming, “Mother of the north's most famous cop roughed up during Sanirarsipaaq murders.”

Erika Hall and I had known one another for years. Sometimes she'd helped me—reporters occasionally hear things that cops don't. I liked her, would call later, but dropped my bags, told the desk that I'd be back to check in, and took a cab to the hospital.

“Your mother is still dazed sometimes,” the tall young duty intern told me matter-of-factly and went on with more or less a condensed version of Dr. Butterfield's report. “She's improving amazingly fast, for her age, but if she's asleep when you go in, wake her, it won't hurt.”

I didn't have to. When I walked in with the nurse, a small and tidy Inuk who told me she was from Baker Lake and had heard a lot about me, mother was awake. She looked confused for an instant, then with her eye gleaming joyously reached out her arms to me. The nurse smiled approvingly, no doubt a story to be told later, then asked in Inuktitut if she wanted anything.

Mother reached into a glass for her upper denture, then said yes, she wanted her pipe and tobacco.

The nurse smiled politely but shook her head. Smoking in the room was forbidden, she said. Hospital rules. That's why the pipe and tobacco had been taken away . . . But what are sons for? I said, aw, come on. Without much persuasion, the nurse relented. I went into the corridor for a wheelchair and lifted my mother into it—so light now, this woman I could remember long ago walking straight and fast beside me while she carried a caribou carcass as easily as I was now carrying her.

The patients' lounge was nearly empty. We nodded around. I loaded her pipe, puffed on it, got it going, and handed it to her, rewarded by a thousand smiling wrinkles and the gleaming eye. If any passing hospital staffers noticed the clouds of pipe smoke, they looked the other way.

We talked quietly, with long pauses, some about family things, some about the trouble in Sanirarsipaaq. There were brief times when she fell silent and seemed disoriented. During one of those times she muttered something about “the shaman” and distinctly said “the shaman's knife is lost.” When she was lucid again I asked her to explain what she'd meant by the reference to the shaman and a lost knife, but she didn't remember that at all, so I dropped it. There were also times when she moved her head suddenly, forgetting, and winced. After one of those times she had me feel the bump at the back of her head and explained that her braid, that thin braid that used to be a thick rope, and the thick hood of her second-best parka, which she had made herself long ago, had helped cushion the blow when she fell.

It was near one when I got back to the Yellowknife Inn, checked in, and was handed another message from Erika, saying to call her no matter how late, I thought about asking her up for a drink. I could use one, and some company. In the end I voted no to drink and company but did call and while the phone kept ringing I thought of Erika, white, thin, in her midthirties, sexually predatory in a pleasantly friendly kind of way, and originally from Edmonton.

At nineteen, a junior at
News/North
, she had married another reporter. She later referred to him only as “that shit,” but the marriage did produce two sons. About all else I knew was that a year after her husband moved to a job in Vancouver they were divorced and she went back to
News/North
and was raising the children herself.

After the first sleepy hello she was wide awake. “Is your mother going to be okay, Matteesie?”

I still had reservations, but ignored them. “I think so.” At the same time, I had a sudden worrying thought, a cop's thought, that mother was the only witness known to have seen whoever ran from the house, perhaps the murderer. Such a person would certainly realize that any witness could be a threat. I'd have to do something about that. For some reason I thought again of my mother's mutterings about the shaman and a knife he had lost, something that I could not connect to anything.

“First word we had was fractured skull.”

“Yeah. But now it looks like bad concussion and a big headache.”

“I understand she's being moved to Franklin House today if she keeps on improving.” Franklin House was like a hospice for Inuit unlucky enough to be away from their far north homes while taking hospital treatment. “They told me they think she'll be better off convalescing outside of the hospital atmosphere for a week or two. And the hospital is short of beds.”

“They told me,” I said.

“Any chance to go see her at Franklin House with you and maybe do an interview with you both?”

I thought it over. I couldn't see why not. “If she gets upset, I'll just say so and you blow,” I said.

We talked a bit more. When I hung up I called the hospital, got the nurse from Baker Lake, and told her that no one was to be allowed into my mother's room unaccompanied. I went to sleep with the worry somewhat receding. My mother was tough. That I knew from other things that had happened in her long life, some while I'd been there.

First phone call I got in my room that morning was from Maxine, at work, mostly brief and businesslike. I told her about Mother being well enough to move into Franklin House, and said I'd call her later when I knew what I'd be doing next.

The second call was from the Justice Department of the Northwest Territories, housed in a downtown building near the hotel. Justice wanted a taped account from mother because of the very concern that now kept nagging me; that she was the only witness, even though she'd told me she'd hardly seen a thing except someone big hurtling at her, running her down.

When I hung up from that call I made one of my own, to Corporal Steve Barker in Sanirarsipaaq. He did not sound happy to hear from me. He nosed around to find out if Ottawa had sent me to help him out—even though he must be expecting some sort of reinforcement from somewhere, with his holidays imminent and his temporary replacement, the Bouvier whom Maxine had mentioned, fairly new on the ground. He sounded a little more friendly when I told him I'd come mainly because of my mother being hurt. I was certainly going to get in on this case, with or without his invitation or Ottawa's orders, but he didn't have to know that yet.

“You got a suspect?” I asked.

“Well, just a few hunches,” he said, and let that trail off.

“Tell me about your hunches.”

“There's nothing clear enough, yet.”

I said, “For Christ's sake! You must have something!”

He got the implication, which I guess wasn't all that difficult. “I can't tell you what I don't know!”

“This happened Friday, right? Like eighty hours ago? What've you been doing?”

“Maybe you better read my report.”

“I can hardly wait.” I hung up.

I let RCMP headquarters in Yellowknife know where I was, said I'd be over later, then went downstairs to eat breakfast at the street-level restaurant. It didn't have quite the atmosphere of the eating place that used to be there, called the Miners Mess. Still, the mainly male clientele at the long crowded tables was almost entirely native—Inuit, Dene, Metis. There were a few non-natives as well. Some, both white and native, wore business suits. Parkas were hung on hooks or slung over chairbacks. There was a constant filing along the cafeteria line and people carrying trays looking for an empty chair. Some joined people they knew and took up conversations about last night's hockey games, weather, work. They took on sausages, pancakes, eggs, bacon, toast, English muffins, jam, honey, coffee, juice, a few pots of tea. I had the sausages, pancakes with butter and syrup, grapefruit juice, Earl Grey tea. Some men stopped briefly to talk. Some who didn't know me but had read or heard about my mother, asked about her. Two or three wondered if I was headed for Sanirarsipaaq.

It was a pleasantly sunny morning, about minus seven Celsius. I walked to the hospital and rode with Mother in the ambulance the few blocks to Franklin House, where Erika and a lanky young man from Justice, Al Hopkins, were waiting. Mother seemed to have continued to improve overnight. When she was settled in her wheelchair in the lounge with other Inuit nearby sewing, talking, reading, watching a game show on TV, I explained to her why the man from Justice was there (he'd told me he was normally a court clerk), and who Erika was, and that we just wanted to hear her recollections of what had happened.

Fairly quickly she warmed to the idea. She spoke in Inuktitut. I translated. I could sense that Al Hopkins from Justice, although white, hardly needed the translations. When I asked how come, he told me that his parents had been schoolteachers in Gjoa Haven. He'd learned in schoolyards and on the street and at the weekly all-Inuktitut service at the church to speak Inuktitut fluently. Later he had gone to high school in Iqaluit, earned a scholarship to Lakefield College School in Ontario, and intended to go back to school in Alberta and study law. He taped both the Inuktitut and the English (in case the tape had to be used later in a court where lawyers wanted to split hairs about meanings in either language). Erika was also taping and making notes.

All this took place under the shyly watchful eyes of other Inuit waiting for operations or to give birth or, like my mother, convalescing after a stay in hospital. Franklin House is all Inuit, including the cooking (or lack thereof, in cases where some older ones, from habit, might prefer their fish or caribou raw and frozen). For people from settlements and hunting families far to the north Franklin House helps smooth the heavier aspects of culture shock and loneliness for home and family. All seemed to listen, but unobtrusively, as my mother got to the part about hearing screams and shouts and other sounds of fighting next door to where she'd been staying in Sanirarsipaaq. She told how she had pounded on the wall and when that brought no results, had gone outside and was slipping and sliding across the hardpacked snow and ice to see what was happening when someone burst out of the door and knocked her down and ran over her.

I had a sudden idea. “A man?” I asked.

All the earlier reports had said, or seemed to assume, a man, but in the north men and women often wore the same type of clothing. She started to answer, then paused, shrugged, and said she thought so, but wasn't certain.

She demonstrated with waving hands that the running person was just a silhouette against the light from the doorway, so she really hadn't been able to see clearly.

I asked what happened next. She shook her head hazily, didn't know. Erika took up the slack. “According to the story we had, a man who lives out that way was coming home and saw her lying there outside the open door. He didn't know how long she'd been there. He went into the house a few steps and saw a lot of blood then ran next door to your relative's house, Matteesie, where she'd come from, and called police. Then he helped your mother to her feet and back home. When the duty Mountie got there and went inside the house he found the young guy dead, badly beaten, in his upstairs bedroom. The guy's grandmother was on a sofa downstairs, everything covered with blood. She died before she could be moved.”

I told my mother this in Inuktitut. Then she took over again, quickly skipping over the next time period until she used the word for a medical evacuation which is the same in both English and Inuktitut,
medivac
. When she said that and I repeated it in my translation, her eye flicked briefly from me to other members of the audience, touching her head and murmuring, “
Aannipaa
,” the word for “hurts,” and paused to light her pipe before she went on.

In that way, from her account and interjections from others, the bare bones of what was known so far emerged. My mother had been staying in Sanirarsipaaq with a great-niece, Annie Kavyok, one of my more educated relatives, an Arctic College graduate in social work. Her work in that line for the government of the Northwest Territories meant she qualified for one of the subsidized houses that the government was building in settlements throughout the Arctic.

Mother had gone to Sanirarsipaaq on Annie's invitation for a gathering of elders for feasting and drum dancing and throat singing as well as modern dancing for the younger folk—the usual community celebration to mark the end of what we called the dark days, the five or six weeks in December and January when the sun never got above the horizon. Then she'd stayed on, enjoying the rapidly lengthening days and the company of Annie Kavyok, who had never married but had borne two kids, not an unusual situation among some of our people.

That Friday the plane had brought the weekly liquor and beer orders for those considered by Sanirarsipaaq's alcohol committee—Corporal Steve Barker, chairman—to be respectable enough to order booze from outside. That same night, while no doubt a lot of the newly arrived alcohol was being consumed, Annie had gone to a meeting at the rec hall and left my mother with her young ones, a girl thirteen and a boy fourteen. Mother digressed there to say, with frowns and grimaces, that she would have gone to the meeting herself, the kids were old enough to stay alone, if the meeting had been for bingo or almost anything except yet another palaver about what to do with Annie's committee on drunks, drugs, single-parent families, and so on, stuff about which she'd heard too much already. In what appeared to be a favorite, well-honed complaint, she noted that in her early days drunks were entirely seasonal, corresponding to when the people she was with visited the trading post to deal furs for guns, ammunition, tea, sugar, flour and the like. Usually someone around the settlement had a store of
immiugaq
(home-brew). Now booze came in by weekly planeload and everybody got drunk. Her face said she didn't like that at all.