Kiss of the Fur Queen Read online

  “No dominoes, no dominoes, the Cree Indians of northern Manitoba were never taught how to play dominoes, oh dear,” responded Jeremiah Okimasis from where he sat on a pale green carpet of reindeer moss at the opposite end of the clearing. Although Gregorian chant was the order of the day, the nine-year-old musician was softly playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” on the worn, browned keys of his father’s two-sizes-too-big blue accordion.

  Father Gabriel’s congregation consisted of sticks broken off at various lengths and arranged in three neat rows across the meadow. Kiputz, the most devout among the faithful, sat in respectful silence at the end of one row.

  The accordion soloist modulated from the key of G to its relative minor, as one of the more sombre sections of the service was about to unfold.

  Gabriel lowered his chalice and host and genuflected gently, his head bent in humble, wordless prayer on the moss. He raised his right hand to his heart, a butterfly hovering over fireweed. “Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy,” he chanted, and he smote his chest, one smite for each “cowboy.”

  Suddenly, behind him, a squirrel dashed across the open space. Kiputz let loose with his first bark in a whole hour, leapt up and gave chase. “Miximoo, miximoo, miximoo!” being as Cree a dog as ever there was.

  The priest whipped halfway around to glare at the perpetrator. “Kiputz,” he stated coldly, “Kiputz. Shut up!”

  The squirrel had scampered up a nearby spruce tree, the dog running round and round its base, jumping, barking, “Miximoo, miximoo.”

  Father Gabriel whirled from the makeshift altar and took off after his errant parishioner, knocking host and chalice into the dirt with his robe.

  “Kiputz! Kiputz, you’re supposed to be in church, god-damnit!”

  The red-furred rodent teased his pursuer. “Chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga-chiga!” ricocheted through the forest. “Come-and-get-me, come-and-get-me, come-and-get-me, you ugly little creep!” as Kiputz understood it.

  Wars start when two parties haven’t taken the time to learn each other’s tongues.

  “Miximoo, miximoo, miximoo!” Kiputz cursed like a drunken fisherman, which the squirrel translated as “You fucking goddamn son-of-a-bitch-rat-coward, come down off that tree!” The squirrel bared his teeth.

  Leaving the memory of host and chalice, the trio of Mexican cowboys, and Cree Indians forever doomed to ignorance of dominoes, Gabriel had but one thought: to put a stop to this ludicrous canine behaviour. Gabriel loved Kiputz dearly; he didn’t want him getting damaged, much less dying right here before his eyes.

  “Kiputz! Kiputz, stop it!” cried Gabriel, panting. The organist of the Church of the Sacred Meadow deftly segued from the solemn cadences of “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant” to a knee-slapping, finger-snapping, foot-stomping “Do your balls hang low, do they jiggle to and fro, can you tie ‘em in a knot, can you tie ’em in a bow?” The froth of sixteenth notes cascaded down the smoke-stained accordion keys, joined hands at the bottom, and danced merrily in daisy-chain formation round and round the squirrel tree.

  Suddenly, Gabriel felt a rough yank at his throat, for all he knew, the evil Chachagathoo reaching out to snatch him down into her grave. He fell back with a snap. His quilt-built chasuble had got caught, and ripped, on some wayward branch, it was later discovered by a miffed Mariesis. But for now, Gabriel Okimasis lay in the reindeer moss, the sense knocked out of him. All he saw was tiny bluebirds chirping merrily, tying pink silk ribbons in the Fur Queen’s silver crown.

  Jeremiah’s sixteenth notes played on. For six years, they played without pause. Sprouting wings, they lifted off Kamamagoos Island that autumn, honked farewell to Eemanapiteepitat twenty miles to the north, then soared in semi-perfect V-formation over the billowing waves of Mistik Lake, past the village of Wuchusk Oochisk, over the craggy rocks where the Mistik River joins the Churchill River, past Patima Bay, Chigeema Narrows, Flin Flon, and — following the route Abraham Okimasis had raced back in February 1951 — through Cranberry Portage to Oopaskooyak, where they touched down to slake their thirst on the memory of the Fur Queen’s kiss. After a detour of some years at the Birch Lake Indian Residential School twenty miles west of Oopaskooyak, the music curved south until it levelled onto the great Canadian plain and landed, just so, in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, eight hundred miles south of Eemanapiteepitat, in the pink salon of another woman in white fur.

  PART THREE

  Allegretto grazioso

  TWELVE

  Stately as an ocean liner, the woman in the portrait stood, a monument to pearls, pink cashmere, and white fox stoles, her white satin gloves blushing in the aura of the American Beauty rose grasped between their fingers. Beneath the painting, framed against unshuttered French windows, stood the subject herself, leaning against the crook of a Steinway grand piano. As her left hand pounded four-four time on the instrument’s burnished top, her right wove patterns in the air as though conducting an orchestra: “And a-one and a-two and a-three …”

  The resemblance of the portrait to the real thing was accurate enough, although the copy may have been twenty years younger than the original: Lola van Beethoven, piano teacher nonpareil, grande dame of the Winnipeg classical music scene, age sixty-five.

  “And a-two and a-three and a-four,” she half-sung in a quavering dull contralto, her painted lips aquiver with passion while her rooster’s crown of silvery bluish hair somehow remained completely undisturbed. “And stretch that phrase, and a-one and a-two …” The triplet sixteenth notes of Johann Sebastian Bachs D-major Toccata careered their robust, unfettered way from one pink wall of the room to another as the fading light of an early-September evening washed off the painting’s giltwood frame.

  At the keyboard laboured Lola van Beethoven’s charge, grimacing when he judged his performance shoddy in one passage, beaming when he knew he had achieved the right effect in another. Jeremiah Okimasis, fifteen years of age, of rather bookish, intellectual demeanour, had just begun his first year of high school. Infinitely more important to him, however, was the instrument reverberating at his fingertips; for in this metropolis of half a million souls where he seemed to be the only Indian person, it was his one friend.

  Toccata: the word is Italian for touch, the widow van Beethoven had embedded in her newest pupil’s memory that day. Toccata: an exercise in touch — the touch of human fingers on keyboards — which, with persistent practice, can become a touch able to make pianos sing as if with a human voice.

  The rhythmic underpinning of the piece brought to Jeremiah’s mind Saturday nights in Eemanapiteepitat during those too-brief summer months when he and his siblings had been set free from residential school. As his left hand pounded out the rollicking, reel-like beat and his right flung out the reams of triplets, marionette images of Kookoos Cook, Annie Moostoos, Jane Kaka McCrae, his parents, and all the overanimated guests at those steamy wedding bacchanals bounced through his imagination, tugged at his heart — “Come home, Jeremiah, come home; you don’t belong there, you don’t belong there” — the rhythm of his native tongue came bleeding through the music.

  As though tripping on the lump in his throat, he lost his concentration. Lola van Beethoven was about to pounce when, like a trout caught in a net, he resurfaced, flailing, grappling. Effortlessly, he slid into the coda — the largo, a hymn to the heavens — and thereby came back home to the tonic.

  At the front door to the mansion half an hour later, Mrs. van Beethoven cupped her ingenu’s hands admiringly in hers and, being a woman with no use for wasted verbiage, announced, “Five hours a day, six days a week, Jeremiah. Practise, practise, practise.”

  She raised one hand to brush a stray curl back against her patrician brow. “And within five years? Five years, Jeremiah. Boom. The trophy.” A gentle gust of wind blew a whiff of some expensive fragrance up the Cree teenager’s nostrils. “The Crookshank Memorial Trophy.”

  She pressed his hands one final time and, eyes wide with elation,
shut the heavy glazed oak door. Jeremiah was so thrilled that he had been accepted into the indomitable doyenne’s roster of exceptional students that he wanted to run back in and smother her with kisses.

  Down leafy Red Deer Boulevard the young Cree concert-pianist-in-training strode, vinyl briefcase bulging with Bach and Chopin scores, his head a jangle of triplet runs, arpeggios, and trills. Revelling in the prairie breeze, he filled his lungs, astonished that the first week of September could be so hot. Up on Mistik Lake, after all, his relentless ululating father was already battling pre-winter gales and his gloved hands, as they hauled his nets in, would be laced with filaments of ice.

  He found himself suspecting that he may mistakenly have gotten off the train at Mars. Or Venus. Here he was, back at school in the very distant south — it might as well have been Florida, or Rio de Janeiro — free, at last, of steel-mesh fences and curfews that chained you to your bed by 9:00 P.M., free of tasteless institutional food, free of nuns and brothers — and priests — watching every move, every thought, every bodily secretion, free to talk to girls.

  Except that there were no girls to talk to. At his school, there may have been a thousand, but they were all white; not one spoke Cree. The exultation at his newfound freedom began to wilt just as he spied an orange-and-silver bus lumbering up the street. He sprinted towards it.

  Sitting bolt upright, staring straight ahead, Jeremiah tried to appear as though he was on his way somewhere — dinner with rock-musician friends, a movie with a busty blonde, for God’s sake, even bingo with his mother would do! — when in fact he had absolutely nowhere to go. All that awaited him was a basement room on the north side of the city, with a bed, a dresser, and a moth-eaten old piano. His landlady allowed him meals in her kitchen, and use of the washroom, but that was all. And what was there for him to do tonight? Play the piano. What was there for him to do tomorrow, Saturday night? Or all the nights of the week? Play the piano. His one consolation was that he would have no trouble meeting his daily practice quota, thereby becoming “the best goddamn piano player in Winnipeg,” the Cree words whispering to him like a coded message from a secret agent. That’s it! He would invent an imaginary friend, who spied on white people but conveyed the information to him in the language only they shared.

  He thanked God that he had learned his father’s lessons on solitude: how time alone could be spent without need for crying, that time alone was time for shaping thoughts that make the path your life should take, for cleaning your spirit of extraneous — even poisonous — matter.

  Jeremiah’s father would depart on any ordinary day to make the rounds of the more distant sections of his trapline, leaving his wife and children at camp with just the right amount of all they needed to survive until he returned. Abraham Okimasis would wade through banks of snow that grew to six feet high, through icy winds that blind and kill, through temperatures that freeze to brittle hardness human flesh exposed for fifty seconds to put food into his children’s mouths. Days, sometimes weeks later, his dogteam would appear in the hazy distance of whichever northern lake the family happened to be living on that winter, his sled filled with furs for sale — mink, beaver, muskrat — the sole winter source of life-sustaining income for the northern Cree.

  Jeremiah’s father would tell his adoring children of arguments he had had with the fierce north wind, of how a young pine tree had corrected his direction on his homeward journey and thus saved all their lives, of how the northern lights had whispered truth into his dreams. And his soul was happy, his spirit full and buoyant, his smile a gift from heaven. Time alone, he said to them with just so many words: The most precious time one human being can have during his too few moments on Earth.

  “Yes, but Father,” he wanted to say from the back seat of a rapidly filling bus, “you never told us how to spend time alone in the midst of half a million people. Here, stars don’t shine at night, trees don’t speak.”

  The smells all mingled into one: of carbon monoxide, seventeen intensities of perfume, aftershave, cologne, breath of steak, chicken liver, onions, garlic, teeth gone bad, minty mouthwash, unkempt clumps of armpit hair overhead. Too much human living in one constricted space. The bus curved onto North Main Street.

  Night had bled dusk dry; light from a thousand neon veins now stained the grey cement of street, of sidewalk, of rundown buildings. Traffic slowed to a laboured crawl. The sidewalk began to writhe. Strands of country music — tinny, tawdry, emaciated — oozed through the cracks under filthy doorways. The doors opened and closed, opened and closed. From their dark maws stumbled men and women, all dark of skin, of hair, of eye, like Jeremiah, all drunk senseless, unlike Jeremiah. Had the music student not looked upon this scene somewhere before? On a great chart with tunnels and caves and forbidden pleasures? He leaned forward to see if he could catch a glimpse, beyond the swinging doors, of horned creatures with three-pronged forks, laughing as they pitched Indian after Indian into the flames.

  “You goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitch!” a woman of untold years screamed, as she landed with a crunch on the hood of a parked car and slid to the curb. “You can’t do this to me,” she shrieked. “This is my land, you know that? My land!” Precariously, she pulled herself up by clinging to a parking meter; her coat white, yellowed with age, polyester fur.

  A tattooed, beer-bellied, bearded, greasy-haired white Cyclops stood at an open doorway and roared: “And this is my bar, you know that? My bar! Come back in here one more time and I’ll rip the fuckin eyeballs right outta that fuckin ugly heada yours!”

  The bus pulled up to a palace afloat on a nighttime sea, glimmering tantalizingly: the four-storey façade of glass and concrete, giant chandeliers, crimson carpet, swirling silver lettering over its entrance — the Jubilee Concert Hall. Like blackflies in June, ticket buyers clustered around the box-office wickets. Between them and Jeremiah’s bus stood a Plexiglas-covered display stand bearing the image of an exotic olive-complexioned man in a black tuxedo, a grand piano at his fingertips.

  Tonight!

  Vladimir Ashkenazy,

  Russian pianist extraordinaire

  with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra

  Piano Concerto in E-minor by Frederic Chopin

  Into the curve of the propped-up piano top drifted, teetering dangerously on white high heels, a reflection of the Indian woman in soiled white polyester.

  A car came by that would have looked at home framed by the Californian surf and sunset: open convertible, white, chrome gleaming. Four teenaged men with Brylcreamed hair lounged languidly inside, crotches thrust shamelessly, and laughed and puffed at cigarettes and sucked at bottles of nameless liquids.

  “Hey, babe!” they hooted smoothly to the polyester Indian princess, “Wanna go for a nice long ride?”

  A brief verbal sparring followed, from Jeremiah’s perspective, in pantomime. Then the princess stepped into the roofless car and the bus pulled forward.

  Gallantly, though not easily, Jeremiah left the episode behind him. Until, one week later, he thought he saw the woman’s picture on a back page of the Winnipeg Tribune: the naked body of Evelyn Rose McCrae — long-lost daughter of Mistik Lake — had been found in a ditch on the city’s outskirts, a shattered beer bottle lying gently, like a rose, deep inside her crimson-soaked sex. Jeremiah would report the image he had seen splashed across Mr. Ashkenazy’s grand piano. But the Winnipeg police paid little heed to the observations of fifteen-year-old Indian boys.

  In Mrs. Slotkin’s basement, all that year, Jeremiah Okimasis practised the piano until his fingers bled.

  THIRTEEN

  “Whachyou thinkin’ about, nigoosis?” Abraham Okimasis stood at the bow of his blue canoe, hauling in a fishing net, yard by laborious yard, from the deep. As the dripping twine and blue-green nylon emerged, the fisherman fanned out its diamond-shaped webs, each holding captive an air-thin sheet of sparkling August sunlight. A trout surfaced, trapped in a convoluted tangle, and Abraham grasped its wriggling spine.

 
“Son?” he repeated. Gabriel’s head came up over the stern in time to see the creature in his father’s hand flailing, its glistening white belly punctured with a handhook, a spurt of blood. “You gonna miss Birch Lake?”

  Gabriel looked into his father’s laughing eyes — was he joking? Who could ever tell? — and wished desperately to ask, “Why would I miss that place?” Instead, his mouth said, quietly, “Mawch.” No.

  “Taneegi iga?”

  “Because …”

  Abraham cast the dying fish into the wooden crate at his son’s rubber-booted feet.

  “That priest there,” he went on, “the guy who runs the place, what’s his name again?”

  “Lafleur. Father Lafleur.”

  “Every time your mother and I ask Father Bouchard how you and Jeremiah are doing down there, he tells us that Father Lafleur is taking care of you just fine, that with him guiding you, your future is guaranteed.”

  Gabriel turned his gaze back to the depthless water. His fingers punctured the glassy surface and ripples shattered the reflection of his face. From his last encounter, two months earlier, he could still feel the old priest’s meaty breath, could still taste sweet honey, the hard, naked, silver body of the Son of God. Of the four hundred boys who had passed through Birch Lake during his nine years there, who couldn’t smell that smell, who couldn’t taste that taste?

  “You know, nigoosis.” The fisherman’s voice skimmed like the love cry of a loon across the silent lake. “The Catholic church saved our people. Without it, we wouldn’t be here today. It is the one true way to talk to God, to thank him. You follow any other religion and you go straight to hell, that’s for goddamn sure.”

  It was at that moment that Gabriel Okimasis understood that there was no place for him in Eemanapiteepitat or the north. Suddenly, he would join Jeremiah in the south. He could not wait!