Consumption Read Free Page A

sanatorium they were travelling to was a place she would love more in retrospect, after she was home again and healthy, than during her stay. He told her she was lucky to be alive now, when the infection in her lungs was curable withantibiotics and surgery—only a few years before it had not been so. Many friends of his had died of this sickness in Normandy when he had been a boy; the cattle and the farmers exchanged tuberculosis infection with one another in a constant cycle of blood-streaked coughing and fever. She had spent enough time with Breton priests by this point to think to herself how odd it was that this Frenchman was suggesting that she was lucky not to be more like him.
    After the Superior ocean came more miles of forest, taiga similar to that she had glimpsed on the treeline south of Arviat, but more vigorous, and studded with poles holding wires, and occasionally with roads. Then the land gave way to flatness that reminded her of the barrenlands, marked into squares like the quilts the nuns made in Chesterfield Inlet. She saw men working the land, and the priest told her they were cutting grain, gathering the plant that they turned into the flour with which they made bannock. They stopped for a day in a place called Winnipeg, which she had seen pictures of, more than she had of the Superior ocean, anyway. Or of land as level and brown and dry as tightly stretched and scraped caribou skin.
    The priest took her for a walk around the railway station, across Main Street to Broadway Avenue and into the lobby of the Hotel Fort Garry, which looked like a brighter version of the granite convent of the nuns in Montreal. The desk clerk clicked his tongue at the priest and so he took Victoria outside again and they walked up another street to the Eaton’s store, where the priest bought her a pen and notebook of her own, and a coat and some boots and a sweater and a skirt and leggings. Around them streamed crowds of people on every side. Victoria had lived her life travelling with her family of four, and her uncle’s family of six; counting the summertime congregations on the coast, and the nuns and priests and patients in Chesterfield Inlet, she had seen perhaps one hundred other human beings in her life. There were this many within her field of sight at any moment in the Eaton’s store. Walking down Portage Avenue, there were many times that number streaming pastevery minute. When the priest spoke to her in Inuktitut, people looked at them and did not smile. They spent the rest of that day walking silently around the loud streets, and even as it was becoming dusk Victoria did not stop staring at everything she saw.
    That evening, they got back onto their train. It launched into motion as she was climbing into her bunk after saying her prayers—at the priest’s insistence. She fell asleep to the swaying motion of the train, and all that night she inhabited dreams that were louder and more rapidly moving than anything she had known. She thought to herself, in her sleep, that this was strange, and must be a result of her visit to the city. Then she settled back and enjoyed them, less worried that she was going mad.
    The following day passed in a green and auburn blur of Jack pine and black spruce and tamarack trees, as the train headed north. The farms began to thin out and the grain fields gave way to pasture and then to bush. After the evening meal, the priest told Victoria that the next day they would reach the hospital, where she would remain until she was cured.
    Would there be other people there who spoke her language, she asked?
    There would be.
    Victoria said good night to Père Raymond and crawled into her berth. Behind the black felt curtain she removed her dress and changed into the coarse woollen nightgown the nuns had pressed upon her in Montreal. As she fell asleep she listened to the priest whispering his own prayers, over and over again, the click of his rosary beads in counterpoint to the rattling of