As the congregation prayed aloud in Inuktitut, her mind wandered to the time she and Morgan dropped acid and went to the votive chapel of St. Joseph’s Oratory to trip on all the auras. It seemed like a cool thing to try. She was so high that day she almost got down on her hands and knees and prayed alongside the invalids with their canes and crutches and wheelchairs, hoping to be healed. Now that she was with Joanasi and had stopped taking the pill, she hoped her foolishness hadn’t damaged her chromosomes, ruining her chances for healthy babies.
Sarah’s chanting intensified. The service veered into English. “The love of Jesus flows through me. Pray to Jesus. Praise the Lord.”
Yasmeen closed her eyes and prayed for herself too, though she’d always been a skeptic, like her father. Even in his final days he refused to give in. For him it was always “a whole lot of malarkey,” the idea of a benevolent God who’d step in to pardon him for his sins. As for the religious Christians, they were just a blind flock fleeing eternal damnation. Holy rollers, he called them. But what if they were right, thought Yasmeen. Wasn’t it better to err on the side of caution?
Energy built inside the modest church as pockets of the congregation rocked back and forth and side to side, their faces flushed with exaltation. Rapturous, they moaned and wailed in several registers at once. Some had their arms outstretched to a higher being, asking for protection from the hostile spirit of Satan. “Amen,” they cried, “Amen,” each time Sarah invoked Jesus. Yasmeen obsessed about her reproductive organs.
“And, Brother, do you understand?” said Sarah, fire and brimstone rising in her voice. “Do you understand now that there is a better way?”
Paulussie nodded weakly, lifting his face and hands to God. His shirttail, damp with sweat, slipped out of his pants and hung behind him like a loose appendage. “I want the Lord to lead me wherever I go,” he cried out. His hands flailed like a couple of doomed fish twisting in a net. Yasmeen could hardly recognize his voice, its flat, false note.
Robes swishing, Sarah led him to a large font filled with water. She helped him down onto his knees, racing through the blessing. “Just as Peter said unto them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost,’ I say unto you today, repent! Let us raise our hands and say that we are not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Jubilantly, she dunked his head and lifted it out. “We baptize our brother in the name of Jesus.”
The holy rain slithered down his face and neck. Outbursts erupted here and there like little forest fires, rapidly spreading through the church. A young, slender woman with a single braid down her back leapt from her pew, repeatedly pounding her chest. She was breathless and hysterical. Yasmeen thought she saw a wave ripple through her body. The woman scratched her limbs as though vipers were overtaking her. The torture went on for some time—the clawing, the repeated blows to her body, the intermingled sweat and tears—until she crumpled to the floor in a heap, drained of everything, her swollen lips trembling but serene. “Amen, amen, thank you, Lord, a-men.”
Light surged through the high, narrow windows of the church. The congregation nodded. “Thank you Jesus, hallelujah!”
Yasmeen was stunned. Her head was spinning. What was running through Paulussie’s mind, she wondered? How had Sarah managed to convince a man who adored his whisky that if he prayed twice a week on his hands and knees and denied himself the pleasures of the world, he would have eternal life? She thought of how devastated her own mother must have been the moment she realized she couldn’t do a thing to save her husband from the bottle.
Joanasi took Yasmeen by the hand and led her to the front of the church, where the other worshippers were already rejoicing and sipping grape juice from Dixie cups and calling each other brother and sister.
•
Paulussie’s conversion didn’t take. For about a week everything was fine and then Yasmeen got the call. He wanted his firewater. Not tomorrow or the day after, he wanted it right fucking now.
Yasmeen twisted the phone cord around her finger, cutting off the circulation. What was she supposed to do? He’d know she was lying if she told him she was out of stock. Everyone knew that white people always had a stash of it somewhere in the house. And where was Sarah, anyway? Why wasn’t she keeping tabs on him? She wished Joanasi were home, he would have known how to handle it. But he was out hunting with Tommy.
Paulussie rambled on, promising her a day off school, a couple of fish from his freezer. “I’ll pay you—a hundred dollars for a mickey of whatever you have.” When she didn’t answer he upped it to two hundred. “I’ll pay you anything you want, just name your price.” His voice was hoarse. There was a pause and static at the other end while he lit himself a cigarette.
Yasmeen considered hanging up when his crusty voice came back on the line. “Arright Little Lady, are you still there? You are?” He lashed her with obscenities, much of it garbled. “Are you fucking there, you bitch?”
Her silence wasn’t a strategy, she was simply dumbfounded. She couldn’t understand where all his rage was coming from. What had she ever done to him? And where was his newfound Jesus, why wasn’t He kicking in to help him through his troubles? When Paulussie switched into Inuktitut she hung up on him, mid-sentence. In her rattled state she tried to think who to call. She dialed, misdialed, hung up, redialed.
“Slow down,” said Elliot.
“Sorry.” She motored through her story, stopping only once to catch her breath.
“He was here watching the Super Bowl,” Elliot confirmed. “We had a couple of beers. When he left he was in a foul mood, but sober.”
“He called me a dumb fuck.”
“He didn’t mean it. Forget about it.”
“Right. Sure. Easy for you to say.”
“He’s probably already passed out on the floor by now. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Well, would you, uh, mind coming over, anyway? In case he shows up.”
“Sure, kid.”
She hung up the phone and double-checked the lock on the front door. She drew the blinds and turned off all the lights and crouched low to the floor, listening to the twisted wind. It blew for a long time. Where the heck was Elliot, anyway? Why was he taking so long? She checked the jerking second-hand of her watch.
When he got there, she exploded. “What the hell? It’s been at least half an hour!” She yanked him inside and slammed the door. She slammed it so hard the embroidery Annie had sold her fell off its wall hook. She stooped and hung it back up.
“Annie, right?” said Elliot.
She nodded.
“My god, she’s been trying to sell me that thing since last year.”
“I happen to like it. Anyway, that’s not the point. Where were you all this time?”
Elliot winked at her. “Suddenly she wants me.”
“You idiot, I was worried.”
“I thought I’d take a walk and see for myself.”
“You could have let me know.”
“I take it you missed me, then? That’s a good sign.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his green-and-orange Phentex slippers. He stretched them over his feet. “Anyway, I went over there.” He hung his parka over the doorknob but kept his nassak on, the tapestry crocheted hunter’s hat with its wide double band and oversized tassel that a student had made him. “I could sure use a coffee.” He headed for the kitchen.
“Never mind the coffee. What did you find out?”
He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat on it backwards while she stuck two cups of leftover coffee in the microwave.
“So?”
“He let me in for a while. The door was bolted and he had his big chesterfield pushed up against it. To keep Sarah out, apparently.”
“And?”
“And then Sarah showed up. She started ba
nging on the door like a lunatic, scratching and clawing and kicking it with her feet. She kept screaming ‘Devil be gone!’ at the top of her lungs.”
Yasmeen poured the coffee. “And?”
Elliot paused a minute to blow his nose. He lifted his hip off the chair to stuff the tissue into his back pocket and sat down again. “Paulussie waited for her to go away and then he told me to leave.”
“He kicked you out? Seriously? You’re, like, his best white friend.”
“Seriously.”
“Were the kids in the house?”
“I didn’t see them. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.”
“I don’t get it. Barely a week ago we were celebrating his baptism.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “He and Sarah, they don’t see eye to eye. He loves his booze and she loves her God and never the twain shall meet.”
•
A week before the alcohol took its toll, Yasmeen’s father called out from the upstairs landing of their house. It was a crotchety cry of panic. “Samiyah, help me.” He’d fallen again and probably soiled himself. Her mother was downtown running errands. Only Yasmeen was home. She ran upstairs and helped him onto his feet. He’d gotten so thin he was almost weightless. His hair was down to a few snowy wisps. She felt to see if he was dry and lifted him back into bed. It wasn’t a thing a daughter should have to do. She hated him this way, wondered what was so great about the Great Beyond that he wanted to rush to, out of her life, before his time. When you were dead, you were dead and it was final. Everything disappeared in a flash, the pulsing world, flavours, sights and sounds, the shiver you get when a lover touches you in a certain way.
“Do your old man a favour,” he said, looking up at her. A soupy film covered his eyes. All the courage was gone from him. “The bottle, it’s under the bed.” His pointing finger trembled. “Please.”
She turned to leave, unwilling to walk him to the edge of the cliff and push him off. He called her back, begged her. His voice cracked and she could tell he was crying.
“Habibti, please,” he whimpered. He looked her straight in the eye.
“Daddy, don’t.” She propped him up and helped him blow his nose, trying to think what to do. Either way, she failed him.
Everything after that, after she fluffed his pillows and arranged him comfortably in the bed, got jumbled up in her mind. Time filled in, days and weeks and months, until she hardly remembered being in his room at all, hardly remembered reaching for the bottle under his bed. There was just one thing that stayed with her, the last thing he ever said while he could still talk, a sort of riddle about the end being the beginning and the beginning being the end.
SQUALL
SIXTEEN
The snow was blowing hard. Joanasi still wasn’t back from his hunting expedition. At three in the morning, Yasmeen couldn’t wait any longer. She rang Jacqueline, apologizing for the hour. What? No, Tommy’s here in bed with me. Missing? I doubt it. There was a long pause. Yasmeen heard static and muffled talk and then Jacqueline was back on the line with more information, her grogginess waning.
“Tommy told me they split up and took two different routes home, they do it all the time. One usually wants to get back sooner than the other. I’m sure he’s fine, go back to bed. When you wake up, he’ll be there beside you like a warm piece of heaven.”
But Yasmeen didn’t believe he was fine. It wasn’t in Joanasi’s nature to make her panic unnecessarily. The plan had been for him to come back to her place for a shower and then a quiet supper in front of the TV. It wasn’t like him to miss Saturday night hockey.
After she hung up the phone she thought of putting in a call to Pasha but reconsidered. There was no point in alarming her as well. Besides, the few words she could string together in Inuktitut wouldn’t have sufficed. Instead of explaining the situation, she would have triggered more worry. Pasha, like many of her generation, still believed in the Wind Spirit, how it could level everything on earth.
She slid a movie into the VHS player and tried to focus on the lives of fictional characters whose predicaments were settled in a couple of hours. But she couldn’t concentrate. She kept coming back to Joanasi, ruminating over worst-case scenarios, letting their poison work on her. She noticed his jean jacket slung over the back of a chair, its empty sleeves waiting for him.
She paced absently. Noticing his half-smoked joint in the ashtray she picked it up and took a few tokes. Desperate for some noise in the house she turned on a replay of the earlier hockey game. She watched for a few minutes, unable to concentrate, then shut it off again, the announcer’s voice grating on her. The kitchen light drew her like a beacon. She walked toward it and then forgot why she’d gone in there.
She saw the kettle and filled it and decided it was as good a time as any to clean her cupboards. She reached under the sink for her sponge and rubber gloves and went to work scrubbing and rinsing and drying. She rearranged the dishes and mopped the floor. She emptied the fridge of iffy foods, withered vegetables, an expired container of furzed yogurt. Even after all that work, the stove clock had only advanced an hour.
She reheated the water in the kettle and poured it over a teabag, remembering a visualizing technique she had read about. She also recalled Joanasi once telling her how people in the North used their words sparingly, because words, he said, had the power to create what was spoken of. If the words were about something bad, then bad things could happen, he explained. Yasmeen decided if she chanted a hopeful mantra it would keep Joanasi out of harm’s way. If she imagined the oneness of the universe, if she prayed hard enough, if she did it all with reverence, if she solemnly uttered the right words, then somehow he would feel her presence, and she his, and this would be enough to keep him safe. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Concentrating, she willed Joanasi into the doorway of her mind, his hardy silhouette cutting the snow for an igloo while she waited for him on the qamutik. She imagined a squalling storm and their child whimpering in her hood. The apparition, Joanasi, walked toward her and fed her a spear of raw fish from his hand. He licked the oils from his tongue onto the baby’s lips.
When Yasmeen opened her eyes again, the tea had cooled and Joanasi was still missing. It was already dawn and though she clung to a feather of hope, her brain reminded her that life in the Arctic was harsh and unpredictable. Brief. You took what was given. People were specks in the shape-shifting snow, each of them at the mercy of one Great Spirit.
•
On Valentine’s Day Joanasi had surprised her with a special gift, an elegant but chilling sculpture of a mermaid. He told her that he began working on it the day he decided to give himself to her. He held it in his hand while he peeled back the layers of cloth like the delicate petals of a flower. His thumb had a slight tremble. “Do you know who this is?” he asked.
She nodded. It was Sedna. Most of what she knew about his mermaid came from books. She knew she was the Goddess of the Sea, one of the most feared but revered figures in their culture, the one who determined which hunters would eat and which would starve.
“Some Inuit call her Takanakapsaluk. It means ‘the terrible woman down there.’”
He told her about Sedna’s beautiful hair and how every man in the village desired her. How she wanted none of them. He told her about the mysterious suitor who arrived in stylish furs but was really a raven in disguise. “The guy took her away to an island and beat her and ordered her around,” he said. “He warned her that she would never be free again.”
“How violent,” said Yasmeen, without missing a beat.
He continued as though he hadn’t heard her. “Eventually, the father arrived in a kayak to save her. He felt really bad about sending her off with this terrible guy.” He described how she scrabbled aboard while the raven’s dark wing ruffled the sea and sent huge waves smashing over the boat’s edge and how in his panic, the father thr
ew her back into the water. “Then the wind stopped. The waves stopped.”
“I know the rest,” said Yasmeen, happy to report what she knew of his culture. “She grips the side of the boat and begs her father to take her back. Only he slams his oar down on each of her fingers and breaks them one by one. But this woman is tough as nails. She doesn’t give up. She keeps holding on until she can’t anymore, until her father slices off the last of them and then she slips underwater and disappears forever, her hair floating like seaweed behind her.”
“That’s not the end.”
“I know,” she said. “I want you to tell it.”
“What’s the point if you already know?”
“Tell me.”
“Okay, okay.” He took her hand in his, stroking it gently. “The end of the story … her fingers float down to the bottom of the sea and turn into all the food hunters need to feed their families, seals and whales and walruses. Then Takanakapsaluk becomes the underwater queen.”
“The decider of everything,” said Yasmeen.
•
Yasmeen woke with a start. She was surprised that she had fallen asleep. Bed sheets tangled in her fists, she wondered where Joanasi could be. It was already morning and she had begun to fear the worst.
Everything seemed quieter than the night before. The wind had died down and an immense snowdrift had backed against the house. She pulled on her parka and boots and waded through the snow, sinking to her thighs with every step. Her breaths were shallow and she couldn’t get enough oxygen, her heart drumming too fast for itself. Was it a panic attack? She had heard of them, but wasn’t she too young? Paulussie’s upsetting phone call kept coming back to her. Where on earth was Joanasi, why was he doing this to her? She clutched her chest, choking back tears as she walked to wherever she was going. She let the will of the boots carry her forward. They led her to straight to Pasha’s. She burst through the door.
Yasmeen Page 17