Kiss of the Fur Queen Read online

  Champion had never seen such an enormous room, bigger than Eemanapiteepitat church; arctic terns could fly around in here with ease. “Gymnasium,” he had heard the room called by the barber brother, the only word that Champion had found musical in this queer new language that sounded like the putt-putt-putt of Happy Doll Magipom’s pathetic three-horsepower outboard motor.

  Champion would dearly have loved to hide in some dark corner, perhaps even run all the way back to Eemanapiteepitat, except that his father had told him three hundred miles was too far for a boy of six to walk. Biting his lip, he waded through the river of discarded hair and scrambled clumsily into the chair in front of Brother Stumbo, who stood there waiting with his smile, the hair-sprinkled pale blue sheet, and sharp-toothed stainless-steel clippers. As Champion’s weight sank in, the leather upholstery sighed. A split second before Brother Stumbo enveloped him in the sheet, Champion reached up and touched, with wistful affection, the strand of wavy hair around his right earlobe.

  Brother Stumbo had to pause. “Down. Put your arm down.” And though Champion didn’t know what the man was saying, his body language clearly ordered Champion to lower his arm and sit as still as a rock.

  Poised for the slaughter, Champion straightened his back and called forth every ounce of courage so he wouldn’t burst into tears. The bristles of discarded hair made his neck itch. He wanted desperately to scratch but his arms were immobilized. If he started to cry, he wouldn’t be able to wipe away the tears and he would be seen by all these strange boys from other places with a baby’s crying face. He wished that he could look at his hair one last time. He wished he was on Nameegoos Lake with his family. And the caribou. He wished his accordion was strapped to his chest so he could play a melancholy song, he thought mournfully, flailing about for anything that could hold the tears at bay.

  Clip, dip, clip. Champion could feel his hair falling, like snowflakes, but flakes of human skin. He was being skinned alive, in public; the centre of his nakedness shrivelled to the size and texture of a raisin, the whole world staring, pointing, laughing.

  “And what’s your name?” Brother Stumbo’s voice hit the boy’s neck with a moist, warm billow of air that smelled of days-old coffee and Copenhagen snuff. Champion assumed that he was ruminating on some sacred subject known only to men of his high station and remained silent.

  “Name? What’s your name?” the snuffy whiff came at him again. Champion’s nerves began to jiggle, for he was beginning to suspect that he was being asked for something.

  “John? George? Peter? Joseph?” The clipper-happy barber cut four incisions into what remained of Champion’s mop of hair.

  “Cham-pee-yun!” He countered the assault by ramming the three syllables in the spots where the ouches would have been. Not only did he now know that he was being asked a question, he knew exactly what the question was. “Champion Okimasis!” he reiterated, in challenge.

  “Okimasis,” a fleshy voice floated up behind Champion’s ears. “So this is the one named Jeremiah Okimasis.” A face surfaced, one he had not yet seen in this new place, one with eyebrows so black and bushy they could have been fishing lures. The face consulted a sheet of paper.

  Champion’s heart gave a little shudder. But he refused to admit defeat, especially now that there were two of them to one of him. He summoned forth the only English word he knew and, with it, shielded his name.

  “No. Champion. Champion Okimasis.”

  “According to Father Bouchard’s baptismal registry, you are named Jeremiah Okimasis,” chortled the portly, elderly face, now attached to a great black cassock, starched white collar, and silver crucifix that dangled from a chain around his neck. As with Father Bouchard, Abraham Okimasis would have decreed that this man’s word bore the weight of biblical authority and therefore was to be listened to; feeling his father’s eyes looking over his shoulder, Champion would have knelt before the priest and crossed himself but for the pale blue sheet that held him prisoner.

  “Ah, Jeremiah,” said Brother Stumbo as he snipped merrily. “Jeremiah Okimasis. That’s a good name.” Champion felt the tear that, against his best intentions, had escaped from his right eye. “There now, Jeremiah. It’s only Father Lafleur. You mustn’t cry in front of the principal.” His hair now gone completely, Champion had no strength left; 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 wine oozed 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 was seeping 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 his stomach, 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.

  “J
eremiah,” said Jesus, “class will be starting soon.” Champion blinked at the thrice-punctured man, to be assured that he had indeed spoken, and could he please say more? But the victim’s mouth remained unopened, leaving Champion to look elsewhere for the source of these words.

  Champion turned his face upward until the little bones of his neck began to smart. There, way up, hovered the giant, beaming face of Father Lafleur.

  SIX

  Champion-Jeremiah — he was willing to concede that much of a name change, for now — sat with his black-covered scribbler, his stubby yellow pencil, and the mud-caked fingernails he was anxious that nobody see. Twenty-nine other Cree boys and girls his age sat in rows around him, thirty little wooden desks dappled with late-September sunlight filtering through the yellow, brown, and orange leaves of birch and poplar trees. This golden light culminated at the front of the room, the usual domain of the fearsome grade-one teacher, Sister Saint-Antoine. In her place now stood the even more fearsome principal of the school. As he spoke, the oblate scraped a metal-edged wooden ruler across a large paper chart on which was drawn — in complex detail and swirling, extravagant colours — a cloudy place that he referred to as heaven. Champion-Jeremiah suspected that this might be the same locale Father Bouchard called keechigeesigook.

  Heaven had a substantial population of beautiful blond men with feathery wings and flowing white dresses, fluttering about and playing musical instruments that Champion-Jeremiah had never seen before: some resembled small guitars with oval contours and humped backs, others oversize slingshots with laundry lines strung across them. The caribou hunter’s son noted, with stinging disappointment, that accordions were nowhere to be seen. The men with wings played and sang all day long, so Father Lafleur appeared to be explaining, and escorted people from their graves beneath the earth to one side of an ornate golden chair on which sat an old, bearded man.

  Among the people rising from these graves to heaven, Champion-Jeremiah tried to spot one Indian person but could not.

  Taking a chunk of white chalk in hand, Father Lafleur printed “GOD” on the black slate beside the chart, evidently intending that the meaningless word be copied down.

  “But to see God after you die,” he lectured on, pointing to the old man in the chair, “you must do as you are told.” The words swept over the students like a wind. Champion-Jeremiah peered at the image of God and thought he looked rather like Kookoos Cook dressed up as Santa Claus except that his skin was white and that, for some reason, he was aiming a huge thunderbolt down at Earth and glaring venomously.

  Slowly, laboriously, Champion-Jeremiah scrawled the word “GOD” on the left page of his scribbler and finished off his handiwork with a great black period. The word loomed large and threatening; he felt an urge to rub it out.

  “Hell,” the priest yanked Champion-Jeremiah out of his doleful rumination with his stabbing emphasis, “is where you will go if you are bad.”

  Hell looked more engaging. It was filled with tunnels, and Champion-Jeremiah had a great affection for tunnels. A main tunnel snaked from just below the surface of the earth to its very bottom and others ran off to each side in twists and knots and turns, not unlike the Wuchusk Oochisk River and its unruly tributaries. Champion-Jeremiah thought of the tunnels he and Gabriel made every winter in the deep snow of Eemanapiteepitat, then realized that Gabriel would have to make tunnels by himself this winter.

  Skinny, slimy creatures with blackish-brownish scaly skin, long, pointy tails, and horns on their heads were pulling people from their coffins and throwing them into the depths with pitchforks, laughing gleefully. At the ends of the seven tributaries were dank-looking flame-lined caves where dark-skinned people sat.

  Aha! This is where the Indians are, thought Champion-Jeremiah, relieved that they were accounted for on this great chart. These people revelled shamelessly in various fun-looking activities. One cave featured men sitting at a table feasting lustily on gigantic piles of food: meats and cakes and breads and cheeses. In another, women smoked cigarettes and sashayed about in fancy clothing, and in a third, men and women lay in bed together in various states of undress. In another, people lay around completely idle, sleeping, doing absolutely nothing. There appeared to be no end to the imagination with which these brown people took their pleasure; and this, Father Lafleur explained earnestly to his captive audience, was permanent punishment. Champion-Jeremiah was hoping to find an accordion player in at least one cave but, to his great disappointment, there was no place for musicians of his ilk in hell or heaven.

  “And this,” Father Lafleur crowed, “is the devil. D-E-V-I-L. Devil.” He scratched the word on the blackboard at least a foot below “GOD” and finished with such force that the chalk broke and fell to the floor. Excellent student that he intended to be, Champion-Jeremiah copied the word, slowly, painstakingly, on the right-hand page of his scribbler: “DEVIL.” The L took such effort that he completely forgot to add a period.

  In the largest, most fiery, most fascinating cave of all, on a huge black chair of writhing, slime-covered snakes with flicking tongues, sat the being with the biggest horns of all, the longest tail, the most lethal-looking pitchfork, his head crowned by a wreath of golden leaves. Champion-Jeremiah wished that he could understand what the priest was saying, for this king was absolutely riveting. He narrowed his eyes to slits so that he could peer into the eyes of this shameless, strutting personage to whom, apparently, modesty was unknown. He took careful note of the fact that the king — “Lucy,” the priest called him — was not glaring venomously. King Lucy was grinning, King Lucy was having a good time.

  “And the sins that will get you there,” said Father Lafleur in a tone that Champ ion-Jeremiah was sure had a tinge of something not unlike enjoyment, “are called the seven deadly sins.”

  Champion-Jeremiah looked down at the word on the right-hand page of his little scribbler and found the D of “DEVIL” not quite perfect. He reached for his eraser. “And these seven deadly sins are called …” Champion-Jeremiah applied the eraser to the D, “pride, envy, gluttony …” — erasing was such a waste of time — “sloth, covetousness, anger, and …” Champion-Jeremiah hated making mistakes, “lust.” The word burst forth like a succulent, canned plum. The priest wiped his brow with a rumpled white handkerchief. Champion-Jeremiah seized the moment to look down at his scribbler: “EVIL” was right there at his fingertips.

  He thought it rather pretty, especially the way the V came to such an elegant point at the bottom, like a tiny, fleeting kiss.

  A cold wind came sweeping down over the vast field of gravel that was the boys’ playground, a six-foot, steel-mesh fence holding at bay the surrounding forest of pine and spruce, birch and poplar and willow. If you stood on the monkey bars or flew high enough on the swings, you could see Birch Lake in the distance, down the hill behind the school building, transparent emerald, unlike the opaque blue of Mistik Lake.

  “The winds of late October …,” said Champion-Jeremiah to himself, then stopped. His Cree must not be heard or he would fail to win the prize: the boy who acquired the greatest number of tokens from other boys by catching them speaking Cree was awarded a toy at month’s end. Last month, the prize had been an Indian war bonnet; this month it was to be a pair of cowboy guns. Sitting in the gravel with his back against the orange brick wall of the school, Champion-Jeremiah suddenly didn’t care whether he lost or won the guns. “The waves on Birch Lake must be climbing higher and higher and there will soon be ice. Later than on Mistik Lake.” On the gravel between his knees, he placed eight pebbles in one neat row with a rectangle of wood at the end.

  “Mush! Tiger-Tiger, mush!” whispered Champion-Jeremiah as he made the pebble at the head of the line jump up and down. In the make-believe windswept distance, the caribou were flying across his invisible ice-and-snow-covered northern lake.

  A wisp of snow flew by, the first that Champion-Jeremiah had seen this fall. He half-heartedly tried to catch it, but it’s hard to catch a wisp of
snow, even with mittens.

  Cree boys small and large — some almost young men — were scattered like leaves across the yard, near and not so near, even way to the other end of the fence, a good quarter of a mile away. Girls had their own yard on the other side of the giant building, out of sight, away from the view of lusty lads who might savour their company, so Champion-Jeremiah was to learn in the nine years he would spend here. Even his sisters Josephine and Chugweesees were marched away to their own world the minute they got off the plane. He would find a way to visit them someday, as sure as the moon was round.

  A whimsical shift in the direction of the wind brought to Champion-Jeremiah’s attention something other than snow. Two floors up, a window was slightly open. There was that lilting melody again, the undulating bass, the rising and falling harmonies so shiny with light that he could wrap them around his fingers, lick his hand, and let the liquid music spill onto his lips, over his chin, down his neck.

  He missed his accordion dearly.

  His hair had now grown to a downy brushcut. The caribou hunter’s son stood before an old oak desk so mountainous he could barely see over its top. Beside this desk stood a Christmas tree, and behind it sat Father Lafleur, peering over his reading glasses at the tiny lad who stood at stiff attention, like a drummer boy.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” The second English word Champion-Jeremiah had learned. After “no” and then “yes,” he had learned about twenty others. He paused to see if the priest’s furry eyebrows would curve upward. They didn’t. But he was not going to shy away from attempting, for the first time, in public, a complete sentence in English, curving eyebrows or no.

  “Play piano?” The two words popped out of the nervous crusader’s mouth like the chirping of a newly hatched bird. Champion-Jeremiah cursed himself for not sounding more impressive, more stentorian. But then the holy eyebrows formed two crescents, furry caterpillars arching for a meal over the edge of some green birch leaf.