Consumption Read Free

skinnier their faces were than she had realized.
    In the cramped waiting room were squeezed Victoria, her parents, Tagak on his mother’s knee, the
iqswaksayee
, Caroline Kapak, the woman hired to interpret the local dialect, and Siruqsuk. Siruqsuk was one of the oldest of the Inuit elders in the area, though she was not accorded the deference usually due the very aged because of the low stature of her family and because of a whispered-about scandal to do with a long-dead husband and her sister.
    Siruqsuk had lived on the margins of several encampments, and was discreetly and grudgingly given food by her nephews when there was enough to share. Victoria had been aware of her for as long as she could remember, though they had not talked often. The
iqswaksayee
spoke in his flat and guttural Kablunuktitut language, and Caroline Kapak translated. “He says he’s sorry but the X-rays show
puvaluq
. You’re both going to have to go with the ship to the sanatorium.” Victoria was wondering if she was going to have to live with Siruqsuk while her parents were away when she realized Caroline was looking at her and the old woman.
    The ship made for the Hudson Strait, and then for the open Atlantic and around to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and, eventually, Montreal. Siruqsuk and Victoria watched from the stern as the ribbon of shore disappeared behind them. Victoria kept a firm grip on her heavy skirts in the wind and the old woman put her stringy arm around the girl’s shoulders. Victoria asked her what she knew about where they were going. Siruqsuk told her there would be plenty to eat when they got there and that the other Inuit in the hospital would take care of them. They could both feel the ship’s engines throbbing through the deck. Then the fog closed in and they went inside.
    When Victoria descended the gangway in Montreal, she was met by Père Raymond, an Oblate who had lived for twenty years in LakeHarbour on Baffin Island and spoke a dialect of Inuktitut that the girl had not heard before. He was kind and attentive, if barely comprehensible. He conducted her into a black and unfathomably fast taxicab, which scattered tall men and women in black clothes like an
amauk
among
tuktu
. L’Hôpital Saint-Paul was built of grey granite and run by nuns, likewise constructed, who spoke only French. Victoria had not realized that anyone but Père Bernard and the nuns from Chesterfield Inlet spoke this language. After he ushered her in, Père Raymond said goodbye self-consciously in Inuktitut and asked her to be patient with the nuns. She looked at him with puzzlement as he left.
    That night, the nuns supervised her prayers and then closed the heavy wooden door to the room she was to sleep in. She lay down in a small, hard bed with a window over it, at eye level if one stood on the mattress. Beyond was the
fleuve
, as they called their big river. The next morning the nuns woke her and brought her once again to Père Raymond, who would accompany her to the train station. She had seen photographs of France in Père Bernard’s church and had listened to him speak of his own home and of the country that lay to the south, and she had formed the impression of a confluent geography dotted with enormous stone churches and emitting a different variety of cheese from every hollow. It was the variation in the land rattling past her window that surprised her most. Each time she fell asleep and woke again, she found herself looking at an entirely different sort of tree, and then there were the cities and the fields of rye and corn in Ontario and the preposterously large “lake,” the Superior one, that sat on their left for most of a day. The Oblate priest maintained unwaveringly that this was fresh water—Victoria gave up on challenging him on the point and concluded that the difference in their dialects was more important than she had thought.
    The priest was mute on the subject of why he had left Lake Harbour. He told Victoria that the