Kiss of the Fur Queen Read online

  Father Eustace Bouchard, thirty-five, handsome, strong of body, strong of mind, French-Canadian, Roman Catholic, priest and missionary extraordinaire, stood between the altar and the communion rail, exuding holiness and mouthing words without sound. Cascades of starched, lace-bordered white garment gave off ripples of pungent sweetness. In one hand, he held a weighty black book from whose pink-lined pages he was reading. The other hand was thrust in front of him as if to slap the face of anyone who dared to interrupt. High above him, a naked, bleeding man hung from a wooden beam. Years later, Champion Okimasis would insist that the man was dead, Ooneemeetoo that he was still alive, that morning anyway.

  The burning incense almost choked the breath out of one-toothed Annie Moostoos, who stood across the baptismal font from the muttering priest, the two-week-old Ooneemeetoo clutched to her trembling breasts. For Annie Moostoos had never stood this long before the holy altar of God in all her fifty-nine years. Only the sign of the cross that Father Bouchard wove at one point saved her from collapsing to the floor, she would later swear, thus saving the life of her twelve-pound godson.

  From the pew behind his aunt, Champion Okimasis scrutinized the curious ritual. His parents, who were standing on either side of the untrustworthy Annie Moostoos, were listening to the man in the long white dress with marked deference. The priest dipped his free hand into a hollow place at the top of the pedestal of shining wood. His hand emerged with a handful of water, which he held over the baby’s forehead, apparently intending to give it a good scrub.

  Then his full lips parted, his white teeth glinted, and his tongue formed the words, “Abrenuntias satanae?” The words, meaningless to Cree ears, pierced the infant’s fragile bones and stayed there.

  “But he already has a name,” squawked Annie Moostoos. The strapping priest turned with airy contempt to the tiny widow, confident that one arched eyebrow would render the source of this rash remark immobile.

  Like a bullmoose ramming its antlers into those of some fearsome, lust-filled rival, Annie Moostoos charged ahead. “His name,” she stated, “is Ooneemeetoo. Ooneemeetoo Okimasis. Not Satanae Okimasis.”

  “Annie Moostoos,” the voice sliced through the smoky air as through a bleeding thigh of caribou, “women are not to speak their minds inside the church.” The blast was so potent that the tooth, yellowed by age and the smoke of two million cigarettes, yet so celebrated for its stubborn solitariness, hung in its airless void like an abandoned oracle.

  “Neee, tapwee sa awa aymeegimow,” the disempowered godmother whined to her cousin. Returning to the business at hand, the priest poured the holy water over the baby’s fuzzy cabbage of a head. The water was cold. The child cried.

  “Gabriel Okimasis,” the oblate stated, as if to nail “Gabriel” permanently between quotation marks, “Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” to which the bundle in Annie Moostoos’s aching arms responded with a sudden hush.

  “Amen,” said the parents. To his dying day, Kookoos Cook claimed to remember floating glumly about in his mother’s womb, mere days before his birth. Jane Kaka McCrae claimed to remember, clear as crystal, the filthy white ceiling high above her cradleboard well before she reached the age of one. Little Seagull Ovary recalled her father lifting her into the air, the tent awash in golden light.

  Gabriel Okimasis, for as long as he was to live, would insist that he remembered his entire baptismal ceremony. Champion Okimasis would accuse him of lying; it was he, he would point out, who had told Gabriel the story. In truth, it was Kookoos Cook, sitting on the pew with Champion on his lap, who would never tire of telling his nephews the yarn, which, as the years progressed, became ever more outrageous, exaggerated, as is the Cree way of telling stories, of making myth.

  FOUR

  On their annual spring migration from the caribou-hunting grounds of the lower barren lands south to Eemanapiteepitat on Mistik Lake — there to await the arrival of the summer fishing season — Abraham Okimasis and his family had stopped for a midday break. There, on a largish island in the middle of a lake that, some say, had once been fished by someone named Weesageechak, the hunter and his wife lounged by their waning cooking fire, sipping steaming cups of muskeg tea after a lunch of fresh-broiled whitefish. The remains of their feast — here a fish’s head, there a morsel of bannock — were strewn across the small round banquet table of freshly cut spruce boughs.

  “Come December,” said Mariesis with an undercurrent of sadness, “Champion will be seven years old.” Like all lovers of long standing, they could read each other’s thoughts.

  “Seven years,” replied Abraham, casting a sweeping glance over the thawing lake before them. “That’s a good time. Myself, when I was seven, I bagged my first moose.” Abraham loved teasing his wife; he had been fourteen when the legendary event had taken place, and she well knew it. A breeze from the south ruffled a strand of her long, black hair. Her heart was too heavy; the hunter’s joke had missed its mark.

  “He will be leaving us soon. Champion. Does he have to go to that school in the south?”

  The question fell upon the hunter’s chest like a cold hand. His weather-worn brown face furrowed and his left hand raked absent-mindedly through a clump of pale green caribou moss, patches of which had begun to peek their way through the melting snow.

  “What Father Bouchard wants, I guess,” he finally admitted, wishing dearly that he had some say in the matter.

  “But couldn’t he wait two years? Until Gabriel can go with him? That school is so far away.”

  “Sooni-eye-gimow’s orders, Father Bouchard says. It is the law.”

  Then the wind changed direction ever so slightly so it carried the laughing voices of their two children, like the tinkle of small bells.

  “Okay. I sing. You dance. Like a caribou,” one little voice chirped.

  “Like an old caribou? Or a young caribou?” echoed the other little voice with a silvery, chiming laugh.

  “A young one, of course!” replied the first voice, sounding bossy.

  Behind Abraham and Mariesis, up the slight rise of land that led from the lake to the forest, Champion was teaching his little brother to move like a young caribou. Gabriel’s salt-and-pepper terrier, Kiputz, sat and watched the two boys, bemused. A large grey rock jutted mightily from immediately behind the happy trio.

  Champion had his little accordion strapped to his chest, as if he had emerged from his mother’s womb with the instrument attached. It had grown a little the worse for wear, however, and could do with a visit to the accordion hospital, Champion had explained craftily to his father earlier that day, meaning to say that he had, perhaps, outgrown it. Abraham had merely smiled, as there was no money for a new instrument.

  “Okay,” Champion said to Gabriel, “I sing” — and he sang — “ ‘Ateek, ateek, astum, astum!’ and you go …” and he demonstrated how to move like a young caribou, his arms high over his head for antlers, his moccasined feet taking elongated, loping strides.

  Three years of age and graceful as a birch sapling, Gabriel tried to imitate his brother. He stuck his little arms up above his head and lifted his left leg so high for the first step that he staggered dangerously. But the leg made it back to the ground safely and he had just begun to raise his right.

  “Your arms aren’t high enough!” Champion yelled. His concentration broken, Gabriel toppled over with a little yelp. “Higher. Higher. And you should bend your wrists. Like this. Antlers are crooked,” said Champion as he marched around the prostrate beginner.

  Tired of being ordered around, Gabriel struggled back up to his feet. “But I shouldn’t even have my arms up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a young caribou doesn’t have antlers, ha-ha!” laughed Gabriel and hopped three silly little circles around Champion so that he would be irritated.

  “Well, this one does!” Champion placed his left hand hard upon the button side of the accordion to play the first chord of his most recent compos
ition, “Ateek, Ateek II,” written in G major, Champion’s favourite key because it made him think of oranges.

  The moment Gabriel heard the music, his body began to glide across the bed of moss as though he were floating on a bouncy summer cloud.

  “Ateek, ateek! Astum, astum!” went Champion’s song in its simple circle of three chords, limpid with honey-coloured sound. “Yoah, ho-ho!”

  Back at the fire, now mere embers from which weak curls of smoke rose, Abraham and Mariesis found, for one disturbing moment, that they did not know whether to look down at the ground, at each other, or up at the sky. Their eyes stung, as though whipped by an icy blast of wind. Finally, the hunter peered into Mariesis’s pupils, which looked like two long, dark tunnels at the far end of which appeared two tiny, waving flames. He could see that she was frightened, that she wanted to cry. He placed one hand over hers, to reassure her that he, at least, would never leave her.

  “Ateek, ateek!” Champion’s bell-like voice wafted to Mariesis’s ears, nudging her, tickling her, coaxing her face back into a wide, if reluctant, smile. Now the couple could hear Kiputz’s silly bark, which never failed to make them laugh, for it was a cross between a yodel, a woman’s shriek, and a gander’s honk.

  A low rumble welled up beneath the children’s voices, almost imperceptible, but enough to provide Champion’s song with a muted ostinato.

  “Thunder? In May?” Mariesis asked herself, incredulous. She looked up at the sky. Not a cloud. Clear blue far as the eye could see.

  Abraham craned his neck to look to the rear of the island. Could the earth be opening up? Could the dreaded Weetigo have snuck up on them? It couldn’t be the thunderbirds, for they swooped down on northern Manitoba only in July and August.

  Without warning, two dozen head of caribou burst out of the forest at the northern end of the meadow, so fast that Abraham and Mariesis didn’t even have time to blink. Only later would they explain to themselves, with some embarrassment, that the thought of losing Champion to boarding school had so befuddled them. And that southeast wind, Mariesis tried to convince Annie Moostoos, with extreme discomfort, had done so much to hide any sound coming from the north.

  “Even if it had been an explosion of the most powerful of German dynamite,” she had said, “we wouldn’t have heard it.” How else could northerners possibly have missed a sound that they should have heard from five miles away?

  The mouths of Abraham and Mariesis hung open, their lower lips trembled, and their throats swallowed once but made no sound. Their eyes were frozen on the rock in front of which, seconds before, Champion and Gabriel had been dancing and cavorting.

  The thunder of hooves now made it seem as though whole mountains of rock were cracking and then crumbling. One hundred, two hundred caribou — it could have been ten thousand, their sound was so massive — had filled the open stretch of land in no time flat, their legs a moving forest, their antlers the surface of a stormy lake. Years could have passed before the hunter and his wife managed to look with horror deep into each other’s eyes.

  “The children!” The only sound Mariesis’s mouth could emit should have come out as a piercing shriek; instead, against such a monolithic rumble, it was small and distant. Everything now moved as though swimming through a sea of honey. Mariesis floated up from her sitting position, intent on plunging headlong into the herd, but her husband clamped both arms around her waist. Hissing like a cornered wolverine, she stabbed her elbows viciously into his belly, which only made him cling with greater tenacity. She flailed and kicked, over and over, screaming.

  “No! No! No! No!” he shouted, over and over and over. But his words had no sound.

  Mariesis couldn’t see. The tears were nothing; it was rage that was blinding her, rage at this man who dared to call himself the father of her children, rage for giving up, so soon, so easily. How could he, this champion of the world? And rage at herself for being caught unprepared.

  In the meadow, by the large grey rock, Champion and Gabriel, too, had been caught by surprise, surrounded by hooves pounding the earth, making pulp of what had been elegant puffs of pale green reindeer moss, sending it flying at their bodies, in their faces, in their eyes. Champion could just make out Gabriel sitting, legs spread on the ground not ten feet in front of him, his tear-stained face bewildered, his mouth open like a little beak expecting food, his arms spread like small wings. He may have been crying, but thunder was the only noise in the world.

  No one has ever been able to explain what entered Champion Okimasis. The earth may have been caving in beneath his feet, the stone exploding, the northern forest gone mad and marching off to war. The sun may as well have fallen from the sky, the early afternoon was suddenly so dark.

  But Champion Okimasis walked. He calmly raised his right foot and then calmly raised his left, eight paces forward in one unbroken line, a thousand caribou swirling around him like rapids around rocks.

  Champion bent down, took Gabriel’s hand in his, and the pair glided off towards the shimmering grey rock, as in a gavotte, Champion would shamelessly ornament the story years later.

  On top of the large rock, Champion sat, legs splayed, Gabriel on his lap, Champion’s arms clamped hard around his waist, Gabriel’s hands gripping Champion’s forearms, Champion’s right cheek pressed to the grey felt back of Gabriel’s parka. Both had shut their eyes tightly as if to blot the noise out with pressure on their eyelids. And there they clung, stiff as wood yet pliant as willow saplings buffeted by autumn winds.

  Champion may have had Gabriel’s back to hide behind, but Gabriel had nothing but wind, warm and moist and rank with animal breath and fur and sweat and sinuous muscle, blasting his face. When he opened his eyes, slowly, fearfully, all he could see was antlers, antlers far as the eye could go, jostling, careering, twisting, mangling air. Eventually, the blur without end took on form, but what? Dancers? Spirits? Whirlpools of light and air and shadow? The shapes became one pulsing wave of movement, throbbing, summoning him, beckoning him on. “Come with us, Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel Okimasis-masis-masis, come with us. Come with us, Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel Okimasis-masis-masis, come with us.”

  Champion began to sing, his soprano soaring above the pounding basses and timpani of hooves like the keening of a widow.

  “Ateek, ateek! Astum, astum!” sang Champion, “Yoah, ho-ho!”

  Slowly releasing his hold, Gabriel opened his arms to embrace this immense field of energy. And he began to weep.

  By the campfire, of which only smoulders remained, Mariesis had her face crushed hard against her husband’s chest.

  When the last of the herd was but a low hum, the whisper of the southeast wind was almost jarring.

  First came the sound of Mariesis sobbing, weakly, as if collapsing from the exertion. Then came Kiputz’s excited bark. And last, Abraham’s mellifluous baritone.

  “Ho-ho!” he laughed, “My Champion boy, ho-ho!”

  Mariesis raised her face, shocked, insulted by such uncalled-for exuberance. Abraham’s weather-hewn brown face was lit up like a sun, suffused with an ecstasy she had never seen.

  And then Mariesis saw her sons, perched atop the large grey rock, glowing with triumph, Champion and Gabriel Okimasis, laughing.

  They had never been on an airplane. They had seen them, drifting in the wind like dragonflies. They had seen them berth at Father Bouchard’s old dock, swallowing — or, better, spewing out — Josephine, Chugweesees, Chichilia, and other Eemanapiteepitat children. They envied them their wings, their ability to become airborne; it was said that they could climb above the clouds. So Champion was excited, Gabriel jealous, when the red seaplane arrived late that September morning.

  Abraham wondered out loud, to other long-faced parents on the priest’s old dock, what on earth their son was going to get “down there.” Champion proudly replied that he was only going for a ride, that he would come back the next day to tell them all about “the south.”

  “At least Josephine and Chugweesees wi
ll be with him,” Mariesis sighed wearily.

  Inside, it smelled like gasoline and rubber. The glass in the window felt like plastic: yellowy, scratched, difficult to see through. Still, as the plane floated off and its propellers whirred to life, Champion spied Gabriel on the sandy shore, like a toy soldier, saluting him. For certain, he would be able to tell his little brother when he got back if K’si mantou really lounged lazily among the clouds as if they were giant fluffed-up pillows.

  But there were no clouds that day, merely an eternal blue. And far below, endless lakes that looked like his mother’s doughnut cut-outs, except of rabbits’ heads, caterpillars, and human faces with great big eyes.

  At noon, Gabriel sat across the table from his parents and Chichilia, refusing to cry. Instead, with a temerity that surprised his elders, he ordered his mother to put out some trout arababoo for Champion anyway. The plane would crash and Champion would swim back and be home by sunset, Gabriel insisted. He would be very hungry.

  PART TWO

  Andante cantabile

  FIVE

  Champion Okimasis stood at the head of a line of seven small Indian boys watching the tall, pasty man in black cutting the hair of another small boy. At first, Champion thought the holy brother might take pity and leave some hair, but as the seconds ticked on, this appeared unlikely. The silver clippers made one last ruthless sweep, leaving a pate as shiny as a little moon. With a flourish of his great right arm, the brother gave the boy a gentle shove, swept the pale blue sheet off his shoulders — causing a rainshower of jet-black hair — and said “Next” in a tone as business-like as if he were counting money. Humiliated, the boy slid off the chair, which was much too high for him, and ran off, sniffling.