Consumption by Kevin Patterson Read Free Book Online

distributed by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs: spruce two-by-fours and plywood, easy to put up, and suitable for building on rock and permanently frozen soil. The mine, the Church, the government all used the same blueprints, and all across the north were the same handful of building types, painted off-white on the inside and, for some reason, always teal green on the outside, the paint peeling quickly in the face of blowing granular snow, as if from a pressure washer.
    Tagak was bigger than she had been prepared for: on track to reach six feet and growing steadily on the reliable diet of tinned meat and bannock. Their parents were no longer young, and Victoria could barely talk to them. Her Inuktitut was clumsy and imprecise; even Tagak sounded smarter than she did. She was four inches taller than her father, and gagged when she tried to eat
igunak
, and ranoutside crying after looking up and seeing the horrified expressions of her mother and father. They did not follow. Victoria recovered her composure and went back inside, still shuddering at the taste of the half-rotted walrus meat. No one commented on her display.
    There was no school here yet. Some of the children had been sent to the residential school the Church ran in Chesterfield Inlet, fifty miles to the northeast, but Victoria’s parents refused to consider that idea—she had been gone so long already. She took to spending afternoons in the church, visiting with Père Bernard, who had moved here from Chesterfield and whose familiar face comforted Victoria as much as her parents’ did. He loaned her books:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe;
Knud Rasmussen’s
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition; The Power and the Glory
. When she wasn’t visiting the priest, she hung around the Hudson’s Bay store. There were men there who were amused by her comfort with English idiom, and who gave her candies, and trinkets to pass along to her parents. They sometimes made lewd jokes with her, insinuating that a few sticks of licorice merited some recompense, didn’t she think?
    One day, she met a new man there, John Robertson—quieter, more serious, and more attentive than the rest. He was the only one of the Bay Boys—the only person in her life now, apart from the priest—who spoke to her as Donelda had, as if she had opinions worth hearing.
    She asked him if he had any news from down south—had the Soviets invaded Prague after all? He wasn’t exactly sure, but such a question caused him to dismiss with one mental shrug everything he had been told about Inuit nature by the other Bay Boys.
    The morning after, he told her, “It’s as bad as you guessed. There’s a tank division in Prague, and the border is closed.”
    “And Dubcek? Has he been arrested?”
    “He is in Moscow now. ‘For consultations,’ the Soviets say.”
    She shook her head.
    “I listened to the BBC World Service on the short-wave last night. You can come listen sometime, if you like.”

    “Victoria,” Père Bernard began,
“Je te vois visiter les hommes qui travaillent au magasin, et je pense que tu dois comprendre que tu es devenue très belle, et ils le remarquent. Ces hommes ne penseront pas à tes meilleurs intérêts.”
    She nodded as she sat in his kitchen. He left the door to his cabin open when she dropped by, for reasons she didn’t fully understand. Even in the summer, the wind here was cold. People walking by on the road looked in and saw them drinking tea, and waved, and wondered why the priest was leaving his door open and wearing his parka as he sat at his table.
    “Je ne suis pas un enfant, Père.”
    “Tu as dix-sept ans, bien sûr tu es une jeune filie.”
    “Ma mère, elle était mariée depuis un an, à mon âge.”
    “Tu es différente de ta mère, Victoria.”
    “Evidemment.”
    “
C’est très difficile, n’est-ce pos?”
    She nodded.
    “I understand that you’re lonely, and the men at the Hudson’s Bay Store are friendly, and can talk