Consumption by Kevin Patterson Page B

claim on the place. None of the white men who had left had acted like this.
    Three years after Pauloosie was born, Victoria delivered Justine. Two years after that came Marie. These were happy times. Robertsonhad officially become the new Hudson’s Bay store manager, though he had functioned in that capacity for some time already. He went on long hunting trips with his father-in-law and with the younger hunters, and was regarded as reasonably competent, at least for a Kablunauk who hadn’t ever fired a rifle when he arrived. Oddly, it was Robertson who guided Victoria back into the community. As they did their rounds after a hunt, sharing whatever meat he brought in off the land, he was the butt of gentle teasing about his strange-shaped iglus and white man’s ways, which was a welcome that extended also to her.
    It was only later that things started going wrong in their marriage. There was a fourth child, a boy. His fate was never discussed by Robertson and Victoria, but lay between them nonetheless.
    The pregnancy had been the easiest of them all. When Victoria began labouring at home she had called her mother to come over to stay with the kids and then she picked up her things and walked to the nursing station.
    When the nurse called Dr. Balthazar—who by this time had delivered his share of babies—he wanted to know if he could arrange a medevac. No, the nurse informed him, there wasn’t time. Ten minutes later he arrived, with the wild-eyed, unfocused look he commonly wore when called unexpectedly from his apartment. He washed his hands and put on a gown and Victoria joked with him that one of these days he was going to realize that she had easy babies and that he didn’t need to get so worked up. They both looked up as they heard Robertson arriving at the nurses’ station, bantering with the clerks, and at ease.
    The first stage was done in an hour, and she felt the baby moving through her with vigour and strength. She loved him already, knew he was a boy. When she had told this to her mother after the ultrasound, Winnie had named him Anguilik, after her own father, who, with this name, would now be reborn. She had touched her head respectfully to her daughter’s belly and whispered, “Welcome back, Father.” The story of how Emo and Anguilik had met, one springevening on the ice outside Repulse Bay, when Emo had come north looking for a wife, was part of the family’s mythology. The idea of Anguilik’s return to them delighted everyone except Robertson. But he knew better than to mock these ideas aloud.
    When Victoria had left her mother to waddle over to the nursing station, Winnie had been weeping already, and Victoria had hugged her for a long time—until the strength of the contractions grew to the point that they could not be ignored. Winnie’s father, dead twenty years, had been the informal leader of his little band; the young people no longer spoke of him, but everyone over forty remembered his name. Victoria’s son was eagerly awaited. At the grocery store the week before, she received more congratulations and inquiries into her health than she had with the other three put together. She was uncomfortable with this for two reasons: she had grown accustomed to her near invisibility in the town; also, she was old enough to remember the presumption that babies generally do not survive, that they haven’t even begun to decide whether they’ll stick around until their fontanelles have closed up together with the easy exit skyward.
    And then the baby crowned, and his head emerged and Balthazar grinned at her. The nurse inhaled sharply. Robertson spun his head to where the nurse pointed, as did Balthazar. The baby’s head had retracted back inside Victoria to his ears. “Turtle sign,” Balthazar and the nurse whispered at the same moment. The nurse pulled Victoria down to the very edge of the bed and, lifting her knees back to her chest, pushed on her abdomen as Balthazar gripped the baby’s head