•
She felt feverish when he brought her home. A spidery light sat low on the horizon as the village slept. The only sign of life was a drunk-eyed dog, part wolf, part something else, scrounging around for animal scraps.
Yasmeen climbed off the Skidoo and hugged Adamie with tenderness. He wasn’t at all in a hurry to leave. He kissed her hood. She thought of asking him in for breakfast, wanting but not wanting to lead him on. She took her time searching through her pockets for the house key, then feigned remembering that she had left the door unlocked.
Bone-tired, adrenalin still pumping, she watched from the doorway as he putted homeward in the half-light. It felt as though they had been away a long time. She draped her wet parka over the furnace to dry and ran the water for a bath.
She peeled off her clothes. When the tub was filled she submerged herself completely except for her head. She focused on the steam rising from her flaccid breasts and examined the rest of her body, its fleshy contours and bulk, the gurgles it made underwater as her muscles slowly let go and relaxed. She didn’t realize she had peed in the bathwater until she smelled its astringent bouquet. It didn’t bother her at all. Actually she was impressed with the impulsiveness of her act. She watched each droplet gather at the spout of the faucet before freefalling, breaking the surface tension of the water with an echoey plick. She bobbed gently, feeling what it was like to be weightless.
She had a flash of home, how it lay in stark contrast to all she had seen on the ride with Adamie, a world of asphalt and smog where people worked in cubicles drowned in fluorescent lighting, manufactured things that went in a repetitive loop or through a speedy conveyor belt until they were fine-tuned, filtered, carbonated, turbo-cooled, radiated and vacuum-packed for human consumption. Leaving their runoff in the sludge of landfill or any one of a thousand mercury-tainted rivers.
She drained the tub and as she reached for the fluffy towel on the rack, the blood rushed out of her head. Translucent blobs floated past her eyes, a sign that if she didn’t sit down immediately, she would pass out. She groped her way to the toilet, sat and waited for the dizziness to pass.
When enough of her strength returned she stood and wiped the foggy mirror with her towel. Light from the bald bathroom fixture made her look overly pale. With her index finger she traced the narrow crevice between her breasts, moving from the bellied curve of one to the other. She probed their moony fullness, noting they were less shapely than when she had first arrived, a consequence, she realized, of not wearing a bra every day. She felt both invigorated and exhausted.
Still shivering despite the bath, she layered on her thickest clothes and wrapped a wool scarf around her neck. She was famished. She switched on the radio and began preparing a meal. She could have devoured an entire caribou, sinews and all, until there was nothing left on the bone. She settled for a bacon omelette and a cup of oolong tea.
The eggs crackled in the hot skillet. She leaned her face over the stove to soak up the heat and began humming to the song on the radio, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” one she didn’t particularly like by a band she wasn’t overly fond of. Afterwards, Joanasi came on to announce they’d just been listening to Bachman Turner Overdrive. He switched over to the weather forecast, which he always read in English. She could tell by his voice that he was fighting a chest cold.
Waiting for the tea to steep she dipped into her dog-eared book of crossword puzzles, though she was more interested in shovelling the food into her mouth than penciling letters into the empty squares.
After the meal she draped a wool blanket over her shoulders and curled into the armchair. She couldn’t settle, the thrill of the outing still whirring through her mind. She pushed away intimate thoughts of Adamie touching her but they haunted her anyway. She kicked off the blanket and changed into different clothes. She waited patiently for ten o’clock and followed a small group of villagers trudging toward the Anglican Church. It was an activity she liked to do on Sundays. She saw how it gave her an advantage with her students who appreciated the efforts she made to integrate. Most times her mind wandered, trying to piece together the convoluted genealogy of the three major families that were the backbone of the community.
As was customary, she left her boots with everyone else’s in the entranceway and entered the simple place of worship in her stocking feet. The church was filling up, but she found a spot next to Qalingo and his family. She smiled at them and waited for the service to begin.
Everyone stood and recited a prayer in unison. Yasmeen glanced at Qalingo’s mother who was wearing the white papoose-hooded parka that most mothers wore, with bright stitching around the cuffs and a tail-like hem, a beautiful coat called an amautik, belted with braided wool. She was rocking from side to side and front to back, trying to soothe her baby. Yasmeen was fascinated by the ingenuity of these coats, the way the enlarged hood allowed an infant to rest against its mother, protected from the elements. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine a child’s tiny ear folded in sleep against her back. She wondered what intense pleasure a baby derived from the warmth of its mother’s skin, the comforting smell of her hair, the rhythms of her blood.
Yasmeen had great affection for women like Qalingo’s mother, whose role seemed so big and so important there were hardly words to express it. The fact that they ensured the continuity of the tribe was reason enough to envy them. They were strong. They had a vital presence and an important mission. Morgan, of course, would have brained her if she knew Yasmeen were even contemplating these thoughts. They’d always agreed that a houseful of children turned women’s lives into a shit show. It poisoned their chances at a decent career. Motherhood was slavery. But here, in this place, in the far reaches of the North, Yasmeen couldn’t imagine a more fulfilling division of labour, a woman breast-feeding a child while her valiant man hunted for their sustenance.
Just as she was thinking all this she spotted Adamie three pews ahead of her. She did a double take. He had on a brown tweed hat and a dressier parka than the one he had worn the day before. It surprised her that he wasn’t home catching up on his sleep. She considered the possibility that he too was still rattled by what had happened between them. She wondered what he was thinking as the minister intoned over the Bible. Were images of Jesus floating through his mind or was he instead remembering their teenage awkwardness around each other? Did he regret her refusal to kiss him? When she craned her neck for a better view she saw that his arm was supporting a greying, arthritic man. The grandfather, she presumed. She remembered Adamie’s lips on the cigarette they had shared. She thought of his accuracy with the rifle and how he had taken special care of her in the cold. She remembered the gentle way he untangled his culture for her, the fable he told in the igloo when it was just the two of them, alone, the piece of his heritage that he had shared like a small cutting of his grandfather’s hair.
TEN
Everyone from infants to elders turned up to celebrate the opening of the new school. To Paulussie’s great surprise, the construction crew put the final touches on in November, three weeks ahead of schedule. The grounds were cleared of broken planks and nails and the protective wire around the site came down. The modern, two-storey structure gleamed like a shiny new chapter in their lives.
A flurry of excitement marked the days leading up to the celebration, women preparing the joyful feast, sewing tassels and fringes on their best embroidered duffel socks, musicians boning up on their country and western, teachers—including Yasmeen—packing supplies into cardboard boxes and oversized containers in preparation for the move. On the day itself, Paulussie sent the kids home at lunch and gave the teachers time off to get ready.
Earlier that morning, Yasmeen took advantage of the fact that all her students had shown up for school, a rare event. She decided to introduce intersecting lines, following up on the previous lesson when they’d gone outside looking for examples of parallel lines and correctly id
entified the tracks in the snow left by truck tires and sled runners. Had they been properly installed, the hydro poles would have also been parallel, they cleverly remarked.
“That’s right,” Yasmeen explained. “Parallel lines always remain the same distance from each other. They never ever meet, no matter how far they extend in space.”
They dressed and headed for the designated area, an open space behind the portable large enough to run around in. Audlaluk and Qalingo roughhoused in the snow while they waited for Yasmeen to arrive with her clipboard and whistle. Elisapie and Salatee hopped up and down, blowing on their palms to keep warm.
Yasmeen corralled them around her and told them to listen up. “The difference between parallel and intersecting lines is simple. Let’s see if you can figure it out yourselves.” Since no one volunteered, she picked Audlaluk and Elisapie. Audlaluk grumbled that he didn’t want to work with a girl.
“For heaven’s sake, Audlaluk,” said Yasmeen. She marked two spots in the snow where they were to stand and told them that when she blew her whistle, they were each to run in as straight a line as possible.
“So what did you notice?” she asked when everyone was back inside the portable. The kids were sitting on their desks with their coats still on. She twirled the chalk between her fingers.
“It was cold,” Salatee whispered into her hand. She tossed her hair forward, making a curtain over her eyes.
“Okay, true, but besides that,” said Yasmeen.
“The lines made an X,” said Elisapie, holding out her hands with the index fingers crossed.
Yasmeen clapped enthusiastically. “That’s right.” She drew a pair of intersecting lines on the board. “These two come together right here.” She circled where the lines met. “They have a common point. They intersect.”
She explained that most lines in life intersected, that if you extended the two and waited long enough, if you were patient, eventually they would meet.
•
The gleaming gymnasium was strewn with banners and streamers and shimmery metallic balloons that said Happy Birthday on them, the only kind the Co-op sold. On stage, fiddlers in chequered shirts wailed through microphones and thumped their heels while dolled-up women in flouncy dresses scurried around the room with their Kodak Instamatics. A crowd gathered, banquet-style, along a flattened-out cardboard box set with macaroni casseroles, bannock, frozen rumps of walrus meat, Jell-O and suvallik, a sour-sweet concoction of fish eggs and berries. It was the North’s traditional table setting: a single piece of cardboard on the floor. When one group finished, another impatient one elbowed in, toothless elders, ladies with babies on their backs, surly teenagers, toddlers with ribbons in their hair. The men took their pocketknives to the blood-red carcass while the women carved out pieces for their children with their crescent-shaped knives. They gnawed and chewed and spat out gristle.
As the feast petered out and the wet scraps were tossed into plastic garbage bags, another haul of instruments collected on stage—accordions, banjos, guitars, black-box amplifiers. A pair of wizened throat singers began a guttural duet of repetitive, hypnotic chanting. They drew it out for as long as they could until they lost the pace and erupted in gales of laughter.
Paulussie pushed his way toward the podium, smiling, blushing, shaking hands with people in the crowd. He wore the new clothes Sarah had bought him, black dress pants and a shirt with a collar that dug into his Adam’s apple. On stage he wiped the sweat off his forehead with a hankie that he scrunched into a ball and stuffed into his back pocket. Fidgeting with his necktie, he waited for the applause to die down. He tapped his finger against the microphone and put his mouth up to it and said, “Testing, testing.” He unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket and thanked every name on his list, beginning with the mayor and dignitaries who had made the construction of the new school possible. When it was over he sighed with relief. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the air and said, “Let the party begin.” A harmonica reeled. People paired up to square dance. The neckerchiefed caller lifted his straw hat. He held it over his heart and bowed to the crowd.
Elliot approached Yasmeen wearing a plaid shirt and Wrangler jeans over a pair of cowboy boots with spurs on them. He hooked her arm and tried dragging her into the middle of the floor, but she shoved him off in protest.
“Sorry, partner, I don’t dance!” She was still steaming over a tiff they had had earlier that morning in the staffroom when, waiting for the Photostat machine to warm up, he told her that he had some interesting information to share.
“Oh?”
“About your student, Elisapie.” He lined his document up on the glass surface. “I found out the story behind her baby.”
“Yeah, she gave it away, I know. You already told me.”
He pushed the start button and watched the radiated light sweep back and forth. “Seems that the father of the child was her own father.” The copier made an unnatural sound before it spat out the page.
“That’s horseshit.” Yasmeen stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes tapered.
“Apparently not.” He lifted the rubber flap and removed his original.
She detected a hint of glee in his voice, the great pleasure he took at having insider knowledge. “I don’t believe you.”
“Take my word for it. He’s in jail down south, but it won’t be long before he’s back.”
“What the Christ? No one would do that to their own kid,” she said.
“Sweetheart, it happens all the time.”
The conversation ended with her walking away from him. And now he was all over her like they were best friends or something.
“Hee-haw, just go with it!” he twanged. Huge rings of sweat were blooming under his armpits. “Think of it as walking to music.”
Reluctantly she took his hand and muttered that he reminded her of Jethro Bodine from The Beverly Hillbillies.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, Elly May.”
Compared to the rest they looked like amateurs, Elliot losing the beat and stepping on her feet as the music sped up and the men began passing the women from partner to partner. Yasmeen kept travelling in the wrong direction, clockwise when she was supposed to be going counter-clockwise, do-si-do-ing when she should have been promenading. She felt like a total klutz. Her feet dragged like boulders.
When she found herself eye to eye with Adamie she relaxed a little. His hair was combed and parted to the side and he smelled like a bar of Irish Spring. The last time she had seen him was that Sunday in church after their ride together. She closed her eyes as he took her hand and swept her around. She thought of how he had almost kissed her on the floor of the igloo. She danced fluidly. The instant she opened her eyes she lost the beat and stumbled into his chest.
The flush-faced fiddlers took a quick break to hike up their pants and gulp back cans of soda. Adamie bowed his head at Yasmeen and walked on to the next partner while Joanasi came to stand in his place. He signalled for Yasmeen’s hand and moved toward her.
•
For the rest of the night, they hardly took their eyes off each other. Yasmeen kept finding excuses not to leave quite yet. First she had to take down the decorations, then she had to sweep up and take the garbage bags out. The to-do list kept growing. She had to make the rounds to be sure that no one was hiding in the bathrooms, even though most of the villagers, including Paulussie, had already gone home. Meanwhile Joanasi dismantled the stage, wrapping extension cords around his arm, helping the musicians pack up their instruments. When it was time to lock up he offered to walk her home and she said, “Okay, I won’t say no.”
A dusting of snow had fallen over the village and a green curtain of electric light rippled across the sky. For no reason—or perhaps because of the northern lights—she broke into the operatic portion of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” forgetting most of the words but stumbling through.
They both laughed at how bad it sounded. She wished he would put his arm around her but he just kept walking alongside, careful not to touch her. They played ‘Fortunately, Unfortunately.’
“Fortunately, it’s the weekend,” she began.
“Unfortunately, I have to work tomorrow,” he continued.
“Fortunately, there might be a storm.”
“Unfortunately, I’ll be stranded at your place.” He grinned and lobbed a snowball at her.
“Meanie!” she shrieked. She removed her hat and swatted him playfully.
By the time they got to her place their eyelashes were coated in ice. Wet snow was sliding off his boots. She shook the crystals of snow from their hats and parkas and laid them to dry over the furnace.
“Iik kiii, it’s freezing out there,” she said.
He followed her into the living room, fiddling with the loose change in his pockets. “You have less stuff than I thought you would.”
“I don’t need much,” she said. “My books, my music. Clothes, of course.”
He jiggled the knobs on her boom box and bent the antenna the opposite way. He walked to the bookcase Tommy had savaged and fingered the tattered spines of her books, randomly reading off their titles. “Did you really read all these?”
“Mostly, yeah.”
He pulled out her copy of The Little Prince. Not the banged up one that had endured all her childhood abuse but the one her father had wrapped up and given her as a high school graduation gift.
“Cute,” he said. “A kid’s book.” He flipped it open to the handwritten inscription on the inside cover. “For my little princess—The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” He wrinkled his nose. “Huh?”
“It’s T.S. Eliot,” she said, “a poet. For years, I thought my dad had written it. Do you want a coffee or something?”
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