Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway Read Free Book Online Page B

he began to bawl.
    Father Lafleur placed a hand on Champion’s thigh and, like some large, furry animal, purred at him. “There, there. You’ll be happy here with us.” The scent of sacramental wineoozed off his tongue, and incense appeared to rise like a fog off the surface of his cassock. Cold air, like a large, gnarled hand, clamped itself on Champion’s naked head.
    With what looked like a hundred bald-headed Indian boys, Champion found himself climbing up several banks of stairs made of some grey, black-speckled stone. Stairs made him quiver with excitement — wait until he told Gabriel about them. You could slide up and down their pale green iron banisters all day long, he would report, stairs are such a clever, whimsical whiteman sort of thing.
    Uniformly garbed in sky-blue denim shirts and navy denim coveralls, the boys marched out into a long, white passageway that smelled of metal and Javex — everything here smelled of metal and Javex — where lines of Indian girl strangers were marching in the opposite direction. But there was his sister Josephine, hair now cropped at the ears like all the girls, as though someone had glued a soup bowl to her head. He waved surreptitiously at her but, just then, one of the innumerable doors that lined this tunnel swallowed her. Ghost-pale, tight-faced women sheathed completely in black and white stood guarding each door, holding long wooden stakes that, Champion later learned, were for measuring the length of objects.
    The echo of four hundred feet on a stone-hard floor became music:
peeyuk, neesoo, peeyuk, neesoo
. Until Champion became aware that music of another kind entirely wasseeping into his ears. From some radio in one of these rooms? From some
kitoochigan
hidden in the ceiling? All he knew was that this music was coming closer and closer.
    Pretty as the song of chickadees in spring, it tickled his eardrums. Like a ripe cloudberry in high July, his heart opened out. He forgot the odour of metal and bleach, and he forgot the funny shape of his exposed head that had caused such jeering from the boys of other reserves. He looked with hope to see which doorway might reveal the source of such arresting sweetness. His forced march, however, left him with no option but to put words, secretly, to a melody such as he had never heard,
“Kimoosoom, chimasoo, koogoom tapasao
, diddle-ee, diddle-ee, diddle-ee, diddle-ee …”
    Finally, the music splashed him like warm, sweet water, in a cloud of black-and-yellow swallowtail butterflies. He wasn’t even aware that he had stepped out of the queue and was now standing at the entrance to the room.
    On a bench sat a woman in black, the stiff white crown stretched across her forehead, her hawk’s nose and owl’s eyes aimed at a sheet of white paper propped in front of her. Her fingers caressed the keyboard of the biggest accordion Champion had ever seen.
    Except that it didn’t sound like an accordion; the notes glided, intelligent and orderly, not giddy and frothy and of a nervous, clownish character.
    He wanted to listen until the world came to an end. His heart soared, his skin tingled, and his head filled with airy bubbles. He even felt a bulbous popping at the pit of hisstomach, rising up through the narrow opening of his throat, making him want to choke. His lungs were two small fishing boats sailing through a rose-and-turquoise paisley-patterned sky, up towards a summer sun lined with fluffy white rabbits’ tails. His veins untwined, stretched, and swelled, until the pink, filmy ropes were filled to bursting with petals from a hundred northern acres of bee-sucked, honey-scented, fuchsia-shaded fireweed.
    Something soft and fleshy brushing up against his left shoulder made him flutter back down to Earth, unwillingly. He turned to look. What met his gaze, to his great surprise, was the upper body of Jesus, nailed to a silver cross, wedged into a wide black sash.
    “Jeremiah,” said Jesus, “class will be starting