Now, Edie drank her refill down with what even she recognized was unseemly haste. This time the whisky just felt normal.
The return journey to Autisaq went smoothly and Edie got back for her three o'clock class. She decided to give a lesson about the Time of the Kidnappings. She liked to capitalize the name, give it an authority it didn't possess in any of the history textbooks.
The first qalunaat to kidnap Inuit had been the British adventurer, Martin Frobisher, who brought one unfortunate Inuk back with him to London in 1571. The Inuk man died shortly after, but this didn't dissuade other qalunaat explorers from following suit, dragging numberless Inuit back first to Europe, then to North America, for exhibition or to be given away as gifts to expedition sponsors and other notables. The Inuit almost always died from western diseases within months of arrival and the families they left behind often starved. It got so bad that several European states felt obliged to ban the practice. When she'd finished speaking, Pauloosie Allakarialak piped up:
'Why did they take people from their families?'
'What's your view?'
Pauloosie hesitated before venturing, 'Because they could?'
She smiled. Eight years he'd been at the school and she was finally getting through to him.
After school, she swung by the Northern Store looking for something good to eat. She'd lost her appetite since Joe's death. Perhaps it was the booze, but she felt something in her had changed since returning from Martie's. For the first time in weeks, she no longer felt guilty and defeated. On the contrary, she was angry.
At the counter waiting to pay she ran into Sammy. Their eyes met briefly, awkwardly. He clocked the contents of her basket and a frail smile of recognition spread across his face. It was odd that two people could predict what the other would buy in the supermarket and yet be in so many other ways incompatible. She wondered if he had seen the bottle of Canadian Mist she thought she had hidden carefully under a rack of ribs and a jar of peanut butter. She hoped he hadn't.
'Need company?'
She considered how good it would be to feel him beside her on the sofa then, later, in bed, and she knew he was thinking the same thing. For an instant they stood like that, together, as though they were right back at the beginning and all of the rocky surfaces, the sharp, brittle stones, that had come between them over the years had dissolved. But then there would be the morning. There was always the morning.
'Another night,' she said, reaching out and squeezing his shoulder.
A pained look flitted across his face and he backed away a little, just enough so that her arm fell from him.
'Sure, Edie.' His voice was tinny with fake bonhomie. 'Sure thing.'
She left it until she felt quite drunk before approaching the door to Joe's room. For a while she stood before it, this simple door, leading to the simple, rectangular room. Since his death the house, her home, had become this door and what lay inside. She turned the handle and went in, heart thudding. For a moment she thought she could smell that heartstopping smell, the peculiar spicy stench of dead flesh, but it was only a memory. Closing the door behind her, she stepped into the room and sat down in the chair beside the bedstead.
'Joe, allummiipaa, darling?' The sound of her voice surprised her.
She waited a while but the silence, the sucking airless- ness of the room, left her dizzy. Whatever she had expected to find, dreaded, or perhaps longed for, it wasn't there.
She threw the groceries in the trash, then she sat and waited for the night wind to come down from the mountains. She waited for it to begin its yelling and raging and she went out into it.
The following Sunday she decided to pay a visit to Minnie and Willa. Edie had largely managed to avoid her stepson's mother and brother. It was only now she realized that she had been angry with them for blaming her in some measure for Joe's death and angry with herself, too, because there was a part of her that thought they had a point. But who was really responsible for Joe's suicide? Was it her fault for allowing Sammy to send him out on his own with a neurotic, incompetent and manipulative jerk? Or did Andy Taylor somehow get Joe involved in something, wrapped him up so tight he couldn't see any way of loosening himself that didn't involve taking his own life? What it came down to was, she needed their forgiveness and she needed to know she was worth forgiving.
Minnie was on the sofa, watching TV, a bottle wrapped in brown paper beside her. So it had got that bad, Edie thought, too urgent to wait for a glass. She knew what that felt like.
Minnie took her in momentarily then returned her gaze to the screen.
'Just what we need.' She hawked up and spat on the green speckled linoleum tiles. 'A royal visit.'
Edie bit back her irritation and took a deep breath. Sure, Minnie was angry. So what? It was easy to be angry, she was angry herself, but no one seemed to be able to agree who to be angry with. Perhaps there was no one and the rage that roared in after Joe's suicide, after any suicide, was like an avalanche tumbling from a glacier; all you could do was to bear witness to its terrible energy and hope you would still be alive at the end of it.
'Minnie,' Edie said simply. 'I'm sorry.'
In that moment she didn't know what she was sorry for. Everything maybe. Minnie gave Edie a look so thick with hatred that it felt like a punch to the face.
'You wanna talk to him, Willa's in there,' pointing at the door to Willa's room, then spitting into her hand and rubbing the palm across her face. 'You're wasting your time with me.'
Edie found Willa sitting on his bed beside the open window, smoking dope.
'Your mother's mad at me.'
He shook his head. 'No, she just hates you.'
'Any idea why, aside from the usual?'
Willa took a long toke with his eyes closed. He said: 'Where to begin?'
Silence.
Edie started again. 'Do you remember that time out on Craig when we went spear-fishing? You, me and Joe.' Trying to bring him back to her. 'What are you now, twenty- two, right? So it must have been, what, about seven, eight years ago?'
She'd taken them char fishing. There was an area of deep water just off the coast of Craig. It was a particularly good year, the fish came in so close to the coast you could wade out a hundred metres clear of the beach and almost lift them from the water.
Willa and Joe were just kids, then, of course. Joe went in the water first. Joe was such an enthusiast about almost everything, but he loved spear-fishing in particular and he'd practised till he'd got good at it. As usual, Willa hung back. He never wanted to put the work in, but resented his little brother for his superior competence. She remembered Joe whooping as he brought his harpoon down and called excitedly to his brother to come and keep the fish from escaping while he went for a net. With Willa pinning the fish, Joe kicked his way back to the beach in a fury of excitement, shaping the size of the fish with his hands. She saw Willa lift the spear and bring the creature pinned at its end out of the water. Joe was right. It was huge, a beauty, more than enough to provide supper for all three of them. Then something unexpected happened. As Joe bent over to pick up the net, his back to the sea, Edie watched Willa bring up his free hand and with one great swipe, push the fish from its anchor and plunge the empty harpoon back into the water. Just then Joe turned and leapt back into the sea, the water unfurling into white rags about him, shouting, 'Keep it fast, Willa!' It was only when Joe reached into the sea to grab the harpoon he realized there was no longer any fish to net. He stood up, a look of devastation on his face. It was as if the sea had snatched his whole world. For an instant Joe just looked at Willa and in that instant Edie could see that Joe knew what his brother had done and decided to forgive him anyway.
'I don't remember any fishing trip,' Willa said now. There was defiance in his voice. 'Look, Edie, it was you insisted Joe went out with that qalunaat and I guess you'll just have to live with that.'
Edie saw now she had been stupid to imagine the Inukpuks would forgive her. Neither Minnie nor Willa were ev
er going to want to understand why Joe had died, because they had already decided that Edie was to blame. Sammy had spun a version of the story and the Inukpuks had bought it. Anyone else, she'd think of it as a betrayal. But Sammy wasn't bad, he was just weak. She'd known it when she'd married him and nothing had changed. Some day Willa might find out the truth, but she wasn't going to be the one to tell him.
She turned and picked up her outerwear, then she walked out of the house and went back home. She spent the early part of the evening watching Buster Keaton punch, bludgeon and flee his way out of trouble in The Frozen North, feeling by turns numb and unhinged. Eventually she got up and, fetching the steps from the utility room, clambered up to the high kitchen cupboard and took out the bottle of Canadian Mist.
The Frozen North was on its fourth or maybe fifth loop, and Edie was on her third double when Sammy's face peered around the door.
'Edie, you OK?' He came over and sat beside her.
'You know what day it is?' she said.
Sammy looked puzzled. 'Sunday?'
'A month.'
Sammy helped himself to a glass of whisky. Some kind of dark energy came over the room. Neither of them said anything. A thought burst into her mind, a horrible, pricking thought, but one that she couldn't altogether dismiss.
'Sammy,' she said, 'you don't think Willa could have have held something over Joe?'
Sammy instantly flung down his glass, stood up and went to the door.
His voice was cracked and tremulous: 'You know what, Edie? Sometimes I'm amazed I ever loved you.'
A few hours later, when she could not sleep, she found herself at Sammy's door. The light was still on, and she went inside.
He was sitting on his cheap sofa, the one that smelled of old beer and rancid seal fat, maudlin with drink. Beside him sat several empty cans of Coors and a half-bottle of Wild Turkey. She went over and for a while they held one another in silence. Then he poured a shot of whisky into a grimy glass sitting on the table and pushed it towards her. She lifted the glass to her lips; the booze burned its way into her stomach. Beside her, her ex-husband sat watching intently.
'I'm sorry,' she said.
He waved her apology away, as though everything had returned to how it had always been and by the simple act of sharing a drink, they had achieved a perfect understanding.
'I came round to tell you something before,' he said. 'About Andy Taylor.'
The evening before the trip, Taylor had asked to go to the mayor's office to make an urgent phone call.
'You know where to?'
'Uh nuh. Family situation, he said. It'll be on the record, though.'
Edie took him in. Even now he was a puzzle to her.
'Sammy,' she said, 'why are you telling me this?'
He smiled thinly. 'I'm not brave, Edie. I know you'd like me to be, but I'm not. Not like you.'
Someone had left a desk light on inside the Town Hall offices and its light cast faint stripes across the empty desks and office chairs. She passed by the conference room where, what now seemed like a hundred years ago, the council of Elders had agreed not to investigate Felix Wagner's death while she and Joe waited outside like scolded school kids.
At the comms room she turned right down a side corridor and headed towards the large grey door at the end, which led into the mayor's office. The office itself was locked. For a moment she sat at the desk of the mayor's personal assistant, Sheila Silliq, just outside Simeonie's office door. Sheila was one of those women who'd willingly given up their sense of being Inuit for a cosy office job and a twice-yearly trip down south to the bright lights of Ottawa. Polite, efficient, and with just the smallest air of superiority.
Beside her desk was a metal shelf and on it sat a number of box files, neatly labelled. Edie found the one marked 'phone log', and scrolled through the sheets to April. Almost no one made calls to anywhere other than the surrounding area, Iqaluit and, occasionally, to Ottawa. The US area code stood out a mile. She scribbled down the number, closed up the records and was putting them back in the cabinet just as the door to the main entrance swung open and Sheila appeared in the corridor, bustling towards her, rosy from the wind outside.
The only thing for it was to go on the offensive. 'Couldn't sleep,' Edie said, trying to appear as though her presence at a desk not hers in the middle of the night was nothing out of the ordinary 'What's your excuse?'
Sheila stared at her, open-mouthed, an expression of bewilderment on her face. 'I left my flask.'
It wasn't until she got back home from the school the following day that Edie allowed herself to look at the number Andy Taylor had called. The area code wasn't one she recognized: nowhere in Nunavut, Ottawa or Toronto. Taylor had told Sammy he wanted to make a private call to his family but, as Derek had discovered, the skinny qalunaat didn't have any close family.
Pulling on her outerwear, Edie hurried to the Northern Store and asked Mike if she could make a long-distance call from the phone in his office. The number picked up on the second ring and a voice in a drawling accent said, 'Zemmer?'
The name sounded familiar, but for now she couldn't put her finger on where she'd come across it before.
'Is Andy Taylor there?'
A pause on the line. 'We don't have an Andy Taylor.' The voice sounded wary. 'Who is this speaking?'
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Maybe I got the wrong number. Is this the computer place in . . .' She searched her mind, '. . . Washington, DC?'
'No, ma'am, this is pizza delivery in Houston, Texas.'
Edie ended the call and went back into the store.
'No one in?' Mike put on a sympathetic smile.
Edie shook her head. You had something to hide, it was best to act mute. Something she'd learned from silent movies.
She'd just stumbled on something whose significance she didn't yet understand, but she knew it was significant all right. Not even Andy Taylor was crazed enough to call for takeout from some pizza joint six thousand kilometres away.
* * *
Chapter Seven
A week later, during a break from school, Edie gathered her gear and provisions and walked down to the beach to where her komatik sat. With the exception of the quick trip to Aunt Martie's cabin, Edie hadn't been out in it since Joe's death and it would need some routine maintenance before it was safe to take it out in what was by now still compacted, but ever so slightly softening, late May ice.
Most people used plastic runners these days but to Edie they had the effect of separating her, somehow, from the ground, a feeling she found distracting and unpleasant. The old liver-and-mud paste on the komatik's walrus-ivory runners would need chipping off and a new lot spread on. She preferred to sled old-style.
While the runner paste was freezing and hardening, she'd re-knot the slats with sealskin rope and check over the dog harnesses.
She told herself she was going fishing under the ice at Craig. This was true, but it wasn't the whole truth and she knew that too. Had she really only been interested in ice fishing, there were closer and better spots.
There had been no news of the whereabouts of Andy Taylor since the second and final S&R and Joe's family, Simeonie and even Derek Palliser had seemed almost indecently keen to put both Taylor's disappearance and Joe's suicide behind them. If she had any sense she'd do the same, but Joe's death had stirred in her some compulsion which she was unable to ignore. Call it a hunter's sense, intuition, mother love, whatever, she didn't care. All she felt sure of was that the two deaths and Taylor's disappearance were somehow connected. If Joe hadn't died maybe she would have done as Sammy suggested, toed the line and shut up, but now she felt sure the fates of the two qalunaat offered the key to understanding what had happened to her stepson. Openly challenging Simeonie's authority would make her life extremely difficult, if not impossible, which was why she had kept her intentions so secret that she could hardly even admit them to herself. But she knew that if she didn't get to the bottom of Joe's death, there would be no point in
her going on.
When she'd finished on the komatik, she pulled it along the sea ice to where she kept the dogs chained. She'd already fed the animals the morning before, and wouldn't now feed them again until she pitched camp that night. It was important to keep the team just on the edge of hunger. If they were sated they wouldn't run.
For the past few seasons, her lead dog had been a dusty grey bitch she'd called Takurnqiunagtuq, Happiness. The name seemed ironic now. Joe had always teased her for her sentimental attachment to her sled dogs. She was thinking about it now, as she went among them, squeezing their ribs to gauge the strength of their chests and checking their feet for abrasions that might cause trouble on the trail. Paws and lungs were often the first to go. Candle ice could cut the pads to pieces and when it got really cold some of the weaker dogs would cough blood. She'd had dogs in the past whose lungs had burst like blown bags. But for the most part they were a hardy lot, bred from the fierce, lean Nunavik animals brought up by her grandparents and the larger, more placid Greenlandic dog with its tremendous coat and tiny ears that prevented it losing too much heat.
She picked out fourteen and tied them to the fan harness, leaving two to run alongside as backup. Giving her clothes and gear a final check, she tied a pile of caribou skins tightly over the komatik, called Bonehead to heel and mushed on the sledders with a Ha! Ha!
It was perfect sledding weather. High cloud had kept the temperature at a pleasant -20C, cold enough for the ice to remain hard but not so cold that the sled runners would bounce, and the wind was gusting softly enough not to raise the snow into frost clouds.
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