A Stranger at Home

by Christy Jordan-Fenton

  We drank tea and I did my best to answer my family’s questions, my father translating everything at first. After a short time, a few of our words came back to me, but I was not able to respond to many of the questions on my own. It was frustrating. After only two years away, I could barely speak my own language. I had tried to preserve my memory of it, but what I had retained was like a clump of dry dirt that turned to dust in my hand. I wanted to laugh and giggle with my sisters, to tell them stories and teach them what I had learned, but my words were too few. I could speak to them only with a phrase or two and my heartfelt smiles.

  “Mamaqtuq,” I said, pointing to my tea—tastes good.

  Everyone smiled, and my mother’s smile was widest of them all.

  My sisters pulled out two dolls that my father had made for them and begged me to play. I shook my head, because I had no doll of my own. At the school I had made a doll from scraps of fabric one of the sisters had given to me, but before I left I gave it to a smaller girl who was not going home.

  My sisters pawed at me for attention. I had no words to tell them why I did not want to play their game. Mabel picked up a caribou-hide ball, and Elizabeth pulled me outside by the arm. We tossed the ball and ran until I forgot how homesick I was for Banks Island and how much I missed my friends from the school. It was so good to be back with my family.

  By suppertime, I was very hungry, but still I could not eat. My mother stared at the table and cried. She worried that I would starve to death, but my father said something to her, then turned to me and spoke in English. “You’ll eat when you’re ready, won’t you?”

  I was as unsure as my mother. The pain in my stomach was growing, and I wondered when my body would know that it was ready.

  Before bed that first night, the family gathered around me as I read aloud from a book that a kind nun had given to me. Mabel was the same age I had been when I fell in love with the stories my big sister Rosie would read to me. Elizabeth was the same age I had been when my love for those stories and my desire to read them led me to the outsiders’ school. I wished Rosie were there to watch our siblings listening as intently as I once had, even though they could not understand the words. My sisters’ eyes grew wide in the dim light as they strained to comprehend what I was telling them. My brother Ernest sat on my lap and looked at the pictures. My father translated for me, and they all marveled that I could now decipher the outsiders’ words. Even my mother was impressed. I could tell by the way she kept looking up from her sewing.

  Just as I was getting to a good part, my father looked up from his seat at the table and told us it was time to go to sleep. My mother tucked my sisters into the bed they shared and my brother got under the covers of my mother and father’s bed. I crawled under the warm blankets beneath where my parents slept and gazed out at the glow of embers from my father’s pipe. A heavy, ocean-like sleep settled over me and I drifted off to the dream time.

  It wasn’t Banks Island, but it was home. Even though I missed my friends at the school, nothing would ever make me go back. I belonged here in this tent with my family. I wasn’t able to hide away on a distant island, but maybe, just maybe, the dark walls would ward off the outsiders’ spell.

  Chapter TWO

  IWOKE LONG BEFORE everyone else.

  At the school the nuns got everyone out of bed at five o’clock, winter and summer, to do the endless chores they required of us. We mopped floors, we scrubbed walls, we emptied the buckets of waste from the latrine, we hauled cords of firewood and stacked them into mountains.

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  I crawled out from under my parents’ bed and sat at the kitchen table. What was I to do with myself while everyone slept? It seemed odd to wake to silence: no screaming nuns, no groaning girls. Only the quiet breaths of my sleeping family.

  And the growl of my stomach. Hunger was nothing new to me, but all I had eaten since breakfast the day before was a small sample of my mother’s food. I had to eat something.

  Bannock, often referred to as frybread, is a common food staple of Aboriginal peoples in North America. Flour, water, and baking powder are mixed into a dough, which is then shaped into a circle and baked or fried, sometimes over an open fire.

  There was also a chill in the tent, so I prepared the cook fire, thinking about what I might be able to make that I could stomach. I knew my parents would have the ingredients for bannock. I had watched them both make it many times. I remembered loving bannock, warm and fresh from the oven and covered with lard. It was just another type of bread, and bread was the only thing I truly liked eating at the school. I was sure I could figure out how to mix it.

  I got a bowl out of one of the chests where we kept our things and set it on the table. Then I rummaged through the supplies until I found a canister of flour. I dumped some into the bowl and added a heap of baking soda. Next I poured in a cup of salt and a couple of tablespoons of sugar. I stirred in a little water and some fat, and started kneading the dough. I wanted to be certain that it was mixed well, so I kneaded for a long time. When I was done, I pressed the heavy dough flat into a pan, opened the cast iron door of the cookstove, and slid it into the cooking chamber.

  I knew it would take a while to bake, but I kept looking in the cookstove anyway. Nothing seemed to be happening. I took out a book of children’s Bible stories and sat at the table to read just one page while I waited.

  “What is burning?” my father said, raising himself on one arm.

  I slammed the book shut and jumped to my feet. How much time had passed? I couldn’t be sure. I hadn’t meant to get so carried away, but one page had led to another and another. Now my breakfast was burning. I leaped to grab it out of the stove, but I burned the tip of my finger and had to pull my hand back. I had forgotten to use a rag to grasp the handle.

  “What on earth are you doing?” my father asked me.

  “I’m making bannock,” I told him.

  He crawled out of bed and pulled on his parka. “Well, let’s see,” he said. He pulled the pan from the stove with a thick piece of cloth and lifted out the blackened disc. He tried sinking his teeth into it without much luck. A smile crossed his face. “Olemaun, that isn’t bannock. It’s ban-brick. How long did you knead it?”

  “I worked the dough for a really long time so it would be well mixed,” I said.

  “Ah, that pushes all the air out.” He tilted his head. “What did you put in it?”

  I pointed to the ingredients, which still sat on the table. He picked up the baking soda and started to laugh. “Baking soda? That would be why it tastes so bad. You’re supposed to use baking powder.” He held out the bannock, examining it and clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth to lose the taste. “How much salt did you use?”

  “This much,” I said showing him with my hands and trying to hold back the tears.

  My father walked to the door of the tent and I followed him. I watched as he tossed the bannock out the door. It bounced on the ground and landed at the feet of one of his sled dogs. The dog took one sniff, whimpered, and ran away from it. I wanted to laugh, but a tear fell down my face. My father brushed it away with his thumb. “Come,” he said. “I’ll make you breakfast.”

  My father made the best sourdough pancakes in the world. I wanted to ask that we pray before we ate, but I was so happy to be sharing that moment with him. I had not forgetten what the nuns told me, though: it was my responsibility to save the souls of my family from Hell. I promised myself to bring it up as soon as the time seemed right.

  My mother was angry when she woke. Supplies were expensive and she complained about the flour and salt I had wasted.

  “She was hungry,” my father said. He looked at me. “And it won’t happen again, will it?” he added in English.

  I shook my head. My mother relented, and she and my siblings joined us at the table.

  After we finished the pancakes my father told us to get ready. The supply barge, which came only twice a year—once in the spring a
nd once in late summer—was expected today. With supplies from the barge, the Carpenters, the Wolkis, and the rest of our friends would be leaving for Banks Island. It hit me as though someone had just splashed cold Arctic seawater in my face. We really weren’t going home.

  “Cheer up,” my father told me. “At least here in Tuk you’ll be close to Agnes. You can play with her whenever you choose.”

  Agnes and I had known each other all our lives, but when her mother started to get sick they had left Banks Island and moved to Tuk. I met up with Agnes again at the school, where she was my best friend. The thought of seeing her every day cheered me a little.

  Kamik are a type of soft boot worn by the Inuit. They are also called mukluks.

  I put on my new parka, pulled some beautiful kamik onto my feet (they had also belonged to my mother), and trailed after my family out of the tent.

  I studied the square wooden buildings as we walked down the bare dirt main street of Tuktoyaktuk. Some canvas tents lined the street, as on Banks Island, but quickly they gave way to log cabins and other wooden buildings. Despite my happiness at home with my family, I still felt that I needed to get away from buildings and places where so many people lived so close together. This was still the outsiders’ world. I didn’t want to be here; I wanted to be boarding the North Star and setting out across the Arctic Ocean to Banks Island, to where I was raised.

  By the time we reached the shore, my feet were sore from the soft-soled kamik, and our friends had already packed their tents and possessions onto their schooners, which were lined up along the shore.

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  I had to look away. The scene was more than I could bear.

  In the distance, the massive barge appeared, a stern-wheeler pushing it down the river and across the bay toward the bank. I wanted to cheer like everyone else, but I didn’t.

  Aboard the barge would be drums of fuel, fresh fruit, new dresses from Eaton’s, hunting rifles, mail, and even secret government crates. When the barge docked, everyone would rush toward it, eager to see the goodies aboard. Among the crowd milling around on the riverbank were women waiting for new cooking pots and boys waiting for their first rifle. The anticipation was high. The arrival of the supply barge was like Christmas in the North, but this time for me its coming was bittersweet. Once the supplies were loaded, the schooners would leave for Banks Island without us.

  My mother and father talked with the other adults to pass the time. I saw Agnes through the crowd, holding on to her mother’s arm. I fought my way on to her side and smiled at her. There was so much I wanted to talk to her about.

  Eaton’s: The T. Eaton Co. Limited was once Canada’s largest department store. Their mail order catalogues allowed people in rural communities to buy many things that would have been unavailable to them otherwise.

  “Hello,” I said, my smile turning to a grin. “Don’t you wish we were leaving on those boats too?”

  She turned away from her mother and smiled back at me, but just as she opened her mouth, her mother yanked on her arm and hissed into her ear. I could hear the words, and they were simple enough that I understood.

  “No English,” Agnes’s mother said.

  The smile vanished from Agnes’s face. She turned away from her mother as if she would stand her ground, as if she would speak to me even though her mother had forbidden it. But sick though her mother was, she seemed to be pretty strong. She yanked her daughter away into the crowd, and I struggled not to weep.

  After a moment, I walked away from the crowd and sat on a rock, watching from afar. My sisters and their playmates amused themselves with their homemade dolls, but no one said anything to me. Perhaps I had been gone for so long they no longer knew who I was. I waited for the children I had once played with to remember me. They didn’t. They had all grown in the past two years, but they still looked the same. Everything about me must have seemed so different to them. I had spent some time that morning gazing into Mother’s one small mirror, taking in my short hair and hollow cheeks, my lean body and my hardened eyes. I was different.

  As she turned to board a schooner, one of the women ruffled my brother’s hair with her hand. The way that everyone touched and the kind manner in which they spoke to each other, expressing sorrow at saying good-bye and happiness for years of shared memories, overwhelmed me and filled me with yearning all at the same time.

  As I watched, the barge and its paddle wheeler came to a standstill against the shore, and the captain appeared on deck. I expected everyone to surge forward and eagerly start unpacking the barge, but as I turned my attention from the boat to the crowd I saw that the majority of the people were now looking back toward the mainland.

  I had to squeeze between a few people to get a look, and I could not have anticipated the sight that met my eyes. Making his way toward the Hudson’s Bay store was a dark man who moved liked a grizzly on its hind feet. His hair sprang from his head in tight, kinky spirals like a strange dark moss, unlike that of the black men I had seen in books, who wore their hair very short. He also had bundles of pelts slung over his shoulder and tied around his waist by a belt.

  I had heard the elders talk in hushed tones about this man, but to me he had always been an abstract idea, like a spirit. To see him now was shocking. My chest tightened.

  As he neared, the crowd took a step backward toward the shore, and I felt them collectively holding their breath. But the man just continued on to the store. My mother pulled me back to the rear of the crowd. “Du-bil-ak,” she whispered to me and my siblings... the devil.

  A mosquito-like buzz arose from the men in the crowd as they turned back to begin unloading the barge. I couldn’t wait to see what was on board. I looked around for the dark stranger who had just shown up, but he could no longer be seen.

  When my mother also noticed that he was gone, she took my sisters tightly by the hand and led us back to our tent, not allowing us to stay and help with the unloading. Elizabeth strained to catch sight of the dark stranger as my mother cut a wide berth around the store. I was curious too, though much less so than she was. He was quite a spectacle, his massive frame towering over the heads of the people in the crowd, but I just wanted him to go away. His arrival had cheated me out of the one day a year that was bigger than Christmas, and out of saying good-bye to our friends.

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  EVERYONE EXPECTED THAT once the dark stranger my mother called the Du-bil-ak had sold his pelts and collected his supplies, he would go away to wherever it was that he came from. Until then, I had to stay close to home. I was not even allowed to go find Agnes. I couldn’t believe how unreasonable my mother was being. Agnes was my best friend in all the world. My only friend.

  I longed to talk with someone who would not look at me with disappointment every time I stumbled to find the Inuvialuktun word I needed, or each time confusion overtook me because I could not understand what was being said. I wanted to ask Agnes if she could eat the food of our people. I wanted to know what she thought of the giant. Instead, I was stuck with my little sisters pestering me while I tried to lose myself in a book, trying to forget that we were not aboard the North Star on our way home.

  Chapter THREE

  IN THE AFTERNOON, my mother came to find me to go fishing with her. I resented that my sisters were allowed to tag along. I wanted to have my mother to myself and tried to ask if we might go alone. I pulled at her sleeve and pointed out the door, then pointed from my sisters to their bed. She shook her head. Spit flew from her mouth as she talked about the Du-bil-ak and pointed toward the village. I guessed that she was scared to leave the girls at home alone. My father had bundled Ernest up in the sled and taken him along on his search for wood, and I was sorry he hadn’t taken Mabel and Elizabeth too.

  We walked to the lake near our home, called Felix Lake. We found a spot on the far shore and my mother and sisters dropped their lines into the water. I just stood there, growing increasingly conscious of the glances from my sisters, who
had noticed that I had yet to drop my own line in the lake. What if I had forgotten how to fish? What would they think of me? My mother nudged me to go ahead; I could stall no longer. I took a deep breath and followed suit, and they lost interest in me.

  My mother was an excellent fisherwoman, and she hauled in one lake trout and then another. She caught more than my sisters and I combined. Normally I was a very competitive person and would have tried to outdo her, but my spirits were low.

  My mother noticed I was acting strangely and asked me what was wrong. I understood her question but could find no words to answer her with, to explain what I was feeling. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. She looked unconvinced, so I jerked at my fishing line and pretended to have a nibble. Just as my mother was about to help me, Mabel squealed with delight. She had caught a fish, and I could tell it was of a fair size by the way she struggled with it. My mother turned to help her. The fish was a ten-pound lake trout. Mabel grinned from ear to ear, holding up the flailing fish for us to see. My mother patted her on the back while Elizabeth oohed and aahed. It was a big fish, but I didn’t think it warranted all that fanfare.