She reached behind to unclasp her bra, hoping the sway of her breasts would give him some relief. The more effort she put in, the angrier he got, until finally, sulking, he gave up altogether. She massaged his temples and blamed it on the weed, but nothing could call it back. She rolled off and covered them both with an afghan. When she made a move to fondle him he turned on his side, away from her. As though what he really wanted was for night to end, the sooner the better.
NINETEEN
Joanasi bolted awake. He pulled on his briefs. Someone was walking around Yasmeen’s house, he was sure of it. “Just stay here,” he instructed. When she opened her mouth to talk, he shushed her and closed the door behind him.
Since the fire, Joanasi couldn’t sleep through the night anymore, waking four or five times, usually in a bluster over some dream he had had.
The stranger’s voice was familiar. She strained to make it out. It was shouting and Joanasi was shouting back. She tiptoed to the door and opened it a crack, as mouse-quiet as she could be. She didn’t want Joanasi stomping back to their room in a spitting rage.
It was Tommy.
“Suviit?” Joanasi repeated, gruffly.
Jacqueline flashed into her mind. Yasmeen prayed she was all right. She wondered if maybe they had had “the talk,” if she had finally confessed to Tommy that she didn’t plan on sticking around forever. From the sound of it, it was a possibility. He seemed mad enough. Maybe he’d lost it and punched his fist through the wall, or trashed the nursing station, or worse, struck Jacqueline across the face.
Yasmeen eyed the phone by her bed. She figured she probably had enough time to put in a quick call to Jacqueline, the way Joanasi and Tommy were going at it. On the other hand, if Jacqueline was in serious trouble what help could Yasmeen be from her bedroom? What use would she be to her if Joanasi returned and found her plotting something behind his back? After he’d specifically ordered her not to get out of bed.
“Salluputit!” shouted Joanasi. “Sallutuuraaluvutit! You’re a goddam liar!”
The shouting escalated. She trusted Joanasi, but Tommy—he was another story. She knew from experience that he was like a fuse that could go off at any time, without warning.
The front door slammed. It rattled the jewellery and coins on her vanity. She heard Joanasi run the tap in the kitchen and then bang his empty glass down on the counter. Footsteps pounded down the hall. She flew across the floor and dove under the covers. When she got there she realized that in her haste she had left the door ajar. It was too late to get up and close it.
Joanasi appeared in the doorway.
“What’s happening?” she said, with a calm that surprised even her. “Who was it?”
“None of your business.”
She felt the sting of his words like a slap across her face but was relieved that he hadn’t noticed the door. He sat on a corner of the bed as though she were invisible. Preoccupied, he lit a cigarette.
In that moment Yasmeen saw beyond his tough exterior to the vulnerable man that he was. Though no one had instructed her in these matters, she considered it her duty, as his lover, to go and comfort him. He was a man with feelings. He needed her. She wrapped the sheet around her and sat cross-legged beside him, synchronizing her breathing with his. For a long while he ignored her. She waited.
“I’m sorry, Aippaq.”
Her hand reached up protectively. Careful not to stoke his ire she rubbed his back. “What happened out there?”
“Tommy said he knows who caused the fire.” His hand trembled as he lifted the cigarette to his lips.
“Oh,” she said noncommittally. She didn’t understand why Tommy would even care about the church burning down. He’d never given a hoot about religion, least of all Sarah’s.
Joanasi turned to look at her. He looked gaunt, sleep-deprived. “He said it was, it was … he blamed my uncle.”
“Your uncle?”
“Yes, my uncle.” The blood drained from his face. “Paulussie.”
•
“Missing in action,” Elliot announced a few days later. “No one has a clue where Paulussie is. The police turned the place inside out for a couple of days, then figured it was a lost cause.”
Though almost everyone in the village was a cousin to somebody else, it was the first Yasmeen had ever heard about Joanasi being Paulussie’s nephew. Their fathers had been brothers, she discovered. When Joanasi’s father died, Paulussie became like a surrogate father to their family. He fed them from his kill. He provided Joanasi’s mother with hides to sew. After Joanasi told her, he’d let his head fall into her lap. She stroked his hair and reassured him that it must be a mistake. When he realized he had revealed too much, exposed his weakness, he’d wrestled himself from her, snatched his coat and left without a word.
Sam scavenged around for a frozen pizza to pop in the microwave. The teachers had congregated at her place, even Iris, who usually spent evenings locked up in her office doing paperwork. It had been a difficult week. A cloud hung over the village as people went about their usual routines, trying to put the fire behind them. Mostly they wondered about Paulussie. Could he have started it? If so, to what end? Unable to sit around waiting for news, Joanasi set out with a small search party, vowing he wouldn’t return until he found him. He and Tommy made peace but it was fragile. Sarah prayed day and night, waiting for him to turn up. In public, she acted as though everything was fine. She kept insisting that deep down he was a good soul, the father of her kids, that all he needed was the Lord to shine His light on him. She told everyone with stone-faced certainty that he’d be back.
Iris crossed her knife and fork neatly on the plate and dabbed the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “What do they figure happened?”
“Nobody knows. The cops told me that if he’s disappeared into the interior no one will ever find him, he’s that good a hunter,” said Elliot. He popped the cap on his beer bottle, frost smoking off the lip.
Yasmeen hardly touched her food. Tommy’s accusation kept cycling through her mind. She replayed all the names Paulussie had called her in his drunken stupor, the night he would have sold his own kids for a bottle of antifreeze. It wasn’t so far-fetched to think that he was responsible. He could have come unhinged. Something could have short-circuited in his brain. It wouldn’t have been the first time something like that happened to someone. She hated herself for going down that road, but she couldn’t help it. Or could she? She could try harder. She would have to if she wanted things to be right again. Turning on Paulussie meant turning on Joanasi too, and he would never forgive her betrayal.
Yasmeen collected everyone’s plates, piling them noisily one on top of the other. “How does anybody know for sure he did it? Why? Because Tommy said so?” Her chair legs screeched across the floor as she got up to carry the dishes to the kitchen.
“And we all know how stable Tommy is,” said Sam. She lit a cigarette, aiming the smoke away from the table.
“Point taken,” said Elliot.
Yasmeen scraped the leftovers into the garbage. “We just have to work harder,” she mumbled under her breath. “We’re not doing any good here if we only teach the southern values.”
“We don’t,” said Elliot. “We adapt the curriculum. We try to show how it relates to their world here. We give them ways to defend themselves against the shit we dumped on them. We show them what’s out there so they can make educated decisions about their futures.” He smiled at her. “I know you’re doing it in your class, too.”
She refused to back down. “And what do we do about the other ones, the ones who’ve already been damaged by those who preceded us?”
“Nothing. Not our problem.”
Yasmeen glowered. “Not our problem?”
“Okay, forget it. I take it back. It was callous of me.”
“Thank you. Anyway, I can’t believe Paulussie would go and
do something like this. It doesn’t add up.”
Elliot held out his beer as a peace offering. “You and me both, kid. There’s nothing I’d like better than to find out he didn’t do it.”
She nodded.
“But I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that very little here adds up.”
•
Yasmeen watched Joanasi transfer gasoline from a large canister into several plastic jugs. He poured it slowly from one to the other, careful not to spill any. She was remembering how he had said her name the first time they met, as though it contained the answer to a riddle he’d been trying all his life to solve.
“I’m quitting my job at the radio station,” he announced, screwing the cap tightly on one of the jugs. He was on a brief stop home to restock before resuming the search for Paulussie. The others, including Tommy, had bailed on him. He was the last holdout.
Yasmeen wondered what he was thinking as he made love to her that night, indifferently, as though somehow in his hazy mind she were another of his many tasks to take care of. All she had managed to say, with little enthusiasm, before he stripped off her clothes, was, “Quitting your job, that’s a huge step.”
He shrugged and said what was the point of working when he could line up with everyone else and collect the government cheque, and go hunting whenever the spirit moved him. “An Inuk has to be out in the cold,” he said. “If I’m not, what am I? Just a voice on the radio, playing white man’s music.” He sounded like someone trying to convince himself.
She wanted to ask what would happen when his babies came and they didn’t have her teaching job to rely on anymore. How would they live, all of them, on welfare? But his mind was somewhere else already, or maybe nowhere at all. He was remote, hardly aware of her. Their lovemaking reminded her of the land, its repetitive sameness. He didn’t bother removing his shirt. He lowered his jeans only partway, enough to get inside her, jerked his hips and didn’t stop until he was done.
TWENTY
Yasmeen stared out the window. With spring on its way everything had begun to change, the quality of the light, the glacial earth shifting incrementally. Days were lengthening. Soon the bay and its many rivers would be a jigsaw of ice and water and Saqijuvik would look again as it had the day she arrived all those months ago.
It felt like a lifetime had passed.
“So, what’s your decision?” said Iris.
Yasmeen pretended not to hear the question. She shuffled through the documents before her on the desk.
It had been weeks since the last search party and Paulussie was still missing. After the police exhausted every lead, they permanently closed the file. The village went back to its regular routine. Over time the giant crater where the church had stood morphed into a playground for toddlers who gathered there until the pinking twilight with their shovels and plastic trucks. Rumours of a new building bristled over the airwaves while Sarah continued nursing the hope that her man would return one day to atone for his sin. By now everyone, including Joanasi, accepted the grim fact that Paulussie had caused the fire.
Iris leaned across the table. “The commissioners are holding a meeting and I have to let the school board know your decision.”
Yasmeen put down the contract. She looked up. She thought of Joanasi and her new life in the village, all her friends from the sewing circle, who assured her that soon she would have the skills to make her own amautik. She thought of Elisapie and Salatee and all her other students who were finally beginning to trust her the way they had trusted all their previous teachers who abandoned them in the end for a job down south.
“What are you planning to do next year?” said Yasmeen.
Iris retreated in her chair. “Well, to be frank ….” She removed her eyeglasses and rubbed them with a tissue, looking through each lens before putting them back on. “To be frank, I’ll be resigning at the end of the year. My parents … they’re not getting any younger, you know.”
Her words came as no surprise to Yasmeen, who already suspected months ago that Iris was at her wit’s end. There had been too many episodes, beginning with Tommy and the cancellation of Halloween. The fire, though unrelated to school, was more than she could handle emotionally. Iris, she thought, was no different from every other white whose adventure in the North had an expiry date. Yasmeen sat upright in her chair. “I’ll be staying,” she said firmly.
On her way out she paused outside Paulussie’s office. It was exactly as he had left it the day of the fire, a full ashtray of cigarette butts, the top drawer of his filing cabinet pulled out, his desk cluttered with paperwork and disposable coffee cups and an open tin of Maxwell House. She saw the deflated Happy Birthday balloon he had kept as a souvenir from the official school opening. The room’s aliveness gave the impression he was only home for lunch. She pictured him seated at the kitchen table, jabbing a toothpick into his mouth after a big meal while Sarah criticized him for a trifle. As soon as she imagined it she excised it from her mind—Paulussie, the alcoholic vestige of a monumental fuckup. She wanted to remember a different incarnation, the great hunter eating with his family on a cardboard mat, on his knees, on the floor, relishing the earth’s bounty.
•
“Where were you?” said Joanasi, informing her by his tone that he had been waiting an excessively long time. He was smoking by the window.
“I had a meeting.”
“With who?”
Yasmeen pulled the kamiks off her feet.
“I said, with who?” He came within a hair’s width of her face.
Yasmeen stepped away from him. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You said you’d be here to make supper.” He ground his cigarette into the ashtray and lit another.
“I was with Iris. Why is this even a problem? I have a job, you know, I have responsibilities. I can’t just leave work when the spirit moves me.” She said it, knowing full well that the Inuit teachers worked to a different set of standards. They came and went as they liked. If they slept in, they slept in. People excused and accepted it, but not from the white teachers.
His eyes narrowed. “The bell rang a long time ago.”
“Yes, and as I said, I had a meeting. Anyway, what’s wrong with you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re home all day, why can’t you cook dinner for once?”
He studied the coal of his cigarette, weighing her criticism.
“It also means you don’t trust me. You’re here all day long doing nothing, you don’t even hunt anymore. You get stoned and then your mind starts playing tricks on you, telling you that I’m looking for someone else.”
“I don’t need to hunt,” he said. “And I don’t need to work. I have money coming in.”
“I get it,” she said.
“So you were with Iris?”
“Yes, Aippaq, I was signing my contract for next year.” She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “And as for the rest, you’re imagining things.”
“Okay,” he said, his bluster waning. “You signed?” He lit up like a child getting special privileges.
“Of course I did,” she said. “Now come and help me make dinner.” She went for quick and easy, macaroni and cheese with a tossed salad. They prepared the meal side by side, Joanasi slicing tomatoes, Yasmeen shredding a block of Parmesan. She uncorked the leftover wine and poured two glasses. “Chin, chin.”
“Nalligivagit,” he said. He tapped the rim of his glass against hers.
“I love you, too.” The pasta was boiling vigorously. She lowered the temperature, using a fork to dislodge the bits that had stuck to the bottom of the pot. He popped his favourite Kitty Wells tape into the cassette deck.
“Let’s forget supper,” he said. He switched off the stove and wrestled the fork from her hand. It felt like the old days, his tender words, the longing in h
is eyes. Before she knew it they were in the bedroom.
He set her glass on the nightstand. “Undress for me while I watch,” he said, pulling off his socks. He propped the pillows against the headboard and leaned back, sipping his wine. She knelt to put his toes in her mouth. “No, Aippaq. I said undress.” He jerked his foot away.
She stood.
“Turn around so I can see you from behind,” he said. A familiar edge crept in to his voice. “Yes, there. Like that.” She felt his searing eyes on her. The cool air hardened her nipples. “Now walk over here. Qaigit.” Her pulse quickened. She pretended he was a stranger with a quick temper and rough, callused palms. She thought of them holding a length of rope as she moved slowly toward him. She glanced out the window into the grainy darkness. “It’s just you and me,” he said.
THAW
TWENTY-ONE
Spring was floating in the air. Yasmeen could tell because the students had begun teasing her, mainly the girls. They didn’t want answers to useless questions of math or grammar, they wanted to know the details of her love life. Elisapie drew hearts on her jeans in permanent marker and made up a jingle, You and Joanasi, you and Joanasi, gonna have a ba-by, gonna have a ba-by. Earlier, someone had drawn a heart on the board and written Yasmeen Haddad loves Joanasi Maqaittik in three different colours.
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