Order of Good Cheer (41 page)

“Sounds good,” Andy said, just as hushed. He stooped at the buffet cupboard for some small plates, and Pauline joined him.

She paused in their chore to squeeze his arm. “Anyway, Andy, sorry about Laura.”

“I know. It's sad.”

“Wednesday, eh?”

“Wednesday what?”

“She leaves Wednesday? Her flight?”

Andy's hands froze on the stack of plates.

“Right.” Right, yes, how stupid of me, it slipped my mind. Wednesday?

“Now she gets to be nearer her daughter.”

“That's right.” That would be, let's see, two more days. Here I was hoping it might be a tad longer.

“Can't blame her on that one.”

“We can't,” he whispered.

“What a complete
knockout
, eh? Is Amelia gorgeous or what?”

“Boo-yes.”

Andy knew now what Pauline's sad, sad look there at the front door had been about. It hadn't been big-eyed sadness for herself and Drew, but for him and Laura.

He rested a moment more, his hand on the plates. And now Pauline had his arm in a firmer squeeze, maybe because of what was on his face.

Andy was glad to see Leonard lean out from the kitchen, arm around his niece, nodding vigorously at him, mouthing,
The moose? The moose?
An hour earlier Leonard, good old Leonard, had taken him by the soft of the inner elbow and in his deep, Tsimshian tones suggested that his niece serve this main
course, under the guise of giving her more training. Maybe he'd seen Andy's edgy state, his sleeplessness, the nerves he couldn't shake, the pressures of hosting, and of Laura, and yard tumble and glacial melt and looming scurvy and his mother, and also maybe a glass of wine too many.

Leonard hissed that it was not only ready, it was all plattered up. Beside him, his niece stood wearing her cousin's chef hat, around which was tied a broad red ribbon decorated with sprigs of pine.

Andy considered getting up and joining the procession in, but didn't. At l'Habitation, the main dish was brought in to great fanfare and shouts of praise, and sometimes even a hymn.

So Leonard's niece bore the silver platter, actually an old tea tray of his mother's, walking slowly. On it the moose nose, a massive and awkward nub, its nostrils pointing up like two cavernous eye sockets atop a brainless and hairless head. Everything about it — the shape, the mud colour, the pocks from plucked bristles — was homely and absurd. Surrounding it, a crudely decorative collar of potatoes, carrots, and parsnips. Following with the tureen of stew, Leonard for some reason hummed “Here Comes the Bride.” He stared fondly at the moose nose, his smile growing.

Leonard's niece's arrival with the platter sparked sounds of delight or disgust or incredulity as it dawned on people what part of what beast this was, and she rather proudly set it down, centre table. Poor Doris knocked her chair back as she rose to her feet to get away. May E looked simply pleased, in her smile no awareness that this wasn't traditional holiday fare. Drew couldn't help laughing at first sight of it.

Others were mostly laughing too as Andy went to the kitchen for his carving utensils and the ladle. He glanced at Laura, who appraised him in a lovely, significant way, eye to eye, no words
needed. Here she was. Andy took an involuntary breath. It was like the last twenty years of his life brightly watching him. He wanted to run, to leave. How was that look of hers even possible? He tested the absurd notion that this night was working magic and she would now not be leaving town after all, but this hope made him feel pathetic. From the kitchen, rooting in the implement drawer, he could hear Leonard answering the moose questions, the where it came from and the how it got here. Returning appropriately armed, Andy confronted the moose with a carving pose just as Chris and his friend came guffawing in from the backyard, having learned of the nose and enamoured with it already, and Amelia followed behind them, brow knit and newly unsure.

Andy began to carve. He decided on thin slices, he didn't know why, it just seemed better than big country chunks. The texture as felt through the handle of the knife resembled the beef tongue he'd had once, but there was an unappealing sponginess to this nose, sponge was the word, no doubt about it, though the bubbles were a little finer.

They would try it, he was pretty sure. In the spirit of the night they'd give it a go. Especially anyone who had learned, like he just had, that this party, this night of Good Cheer, was meant for every one of them.

So he paused in the carving for a taste of something he'd never tasted before. He hacked off not an exploratory sample but a hearty square, an inch back from the nostril. Some people were watching, others weren't. He lifted it in the pinching tips of carving knife and fork and into his mouth it went. He chewed, tall and brave, a big dumb moose himself, and his teeth crushed it to release a brown rainbow of alien flavours. This nose meat wasn't organ meat but its own unique not-quite-meat. He could
taste its snuffling proximity to fungus and mud and the swampy roots of reeds. He could sense a decade's worth of oddest breath droning lungfully through it, and though his instinct was to ignore exactly this taste, it was what woke him up, this was his medicine.

GRATEFUL TO PAUSE
, and do something simple, he put his hands in the soapy hot water and let them hang there a moment. He liked that he'd insisted on candlelight in the kitchen too. It lent a soft contentment to the room that seemed to go well with this smell of soap and the underwater clunking of dishes. As happened at any party he'd ever been to, people were gathered here in the kitchen, but they spoke more softly and seemed to enjoy the atmosphere too as they watched him work. Enough dirty cups and glasses had to be washed to serve everyone the Napoleon brandy. He was insisting that everyone at least put their pursed French lips to it and have a sip, because he wanted to make a toast or two. And then maybe try to get everyone to sing, or dance, or a game. Some kind of homegrown entertainment. He had a pretty decent guitar in his room. He wondered if anyone played besides Drew, who he knew wouldn't go near that thing tonight, not for a million dollars.

He circulated with a tray of glasses. His mother, Doris, and poor hefty Rita looked dithery and lost, and it dawned on Andy that of course Marie Schultz had been their leader, the planet within whose stern gravitational pull they'd gathered. To look at them now, though they were standing grouped, they stood less chest to chest than back to back, pointing their gaze out into the room. It seemed like they had no focus, and might easily drift away one by one, with no goodbyes, and be gone.

Andy put glasses into their reluctant hands, saying, “Just a sip, just a sip.” Hidden in behind them, but part of their faltering conversation, was the older Native woman, whose name Andy had learned was Gloria Tait. Only Rita, whose past included years of front-line social work, looked at ease with her. Andy wouldn't call his mother a racist, but she would be a little too aware that she was standing there, at a party, in her own house, talking to a Native.

No, he should give her more credit. She was stilted and queenly with everyone; her bigotry was universal. Leaving the women to their talk, he heard his mother say, “Well, of course, home is where the heart is.” Maybe she referred to Gloria Tait leaving her village, or maybe it was about Laura leaving on Wednesday. Or, maybe she was talking about herself. That his mother had stooped to such a humble maxim didn't bother him as much as the question it raised: was she talking about her old house, that is, this house, or the one she would soon be leaving? He understood that the answer could hurt him.

Outside, the promised storm was picking up, mostly the wind, gusts of which could sometimes be heard over the music, except when Chris succeeded in putting Death Cab or Modest Mouse on again,
CD
s he'd smuggled in. Because there was a storm, in the kitchen the clutch of people — Leonard and his niece, Rachel Hedley and Magda, and Laura — decided that the brandy should be warmed, so Andy complied, putting the bottle in a pot of water on the stove. It should be warmed “in
honour
of the storm,” not because of it, Laura added, and Andy liked that. He had the sense she was in the kitchen because he was. He wanted to tell her about storms and tides and show her the yard he'd lost. She knew his yard, she'd see the difference.

Leonard tilted his head at the platter and what was left of the nose. The stew had actually been good, and lots got eaten, same
with the cheese-curd pies, with their cranberry relish. But though people put on a brave front with the nose, Andy had spotted most of it in the garbage.

“So,” Leonard said to the half-nose that was left, “that's Micmac medicine?”

“Yes. I think so.” It was properly pronounced
Meekmah
, but Andy kept mum. You don't tell a Texan about their Alamo. “For the French, anyway.”

At this, Leonard plucked the brandy bottle from the pot, uncapped it, and took a quick pull. Rachel Hedley laughed, “Excuse me?” and Leonard, calmly smoothing back his ponytail and dangling feather, said without looking at her, “No worries, antiseptic.” His niece stood beside him staring into space, perhaps listening but likely not. She had a bovine's contentment, and it looked like any company would do.

Leonard turned, again businesslike, to Andy. “So, eating a fish alive is a cure for —?”

Andy put a comic finger to his lips, because the sturgeon was still supposed to be a secret. He said, “Global warming.” Somehow he meant it, too, he didn't know quite how, and his smile probably conveyed the opposite, so he added, “I'm almost serious.”

“I know. This is kind of fun.” Leonard indicated with a sweep of his hand the kitchen and beyond, to the whole party.

“It's actually a cure for depression.” Andy shrugged to tell him that he was serious about this one.

“How does that work, exactly?”

“Eating a nose sort of jostles you.” In the good fire of the moment, no problem can live.

“And eating a live, rare —?”

“They aren't so rare, they just aren't caught much around here.” The sturgeon, the noble hermit grandfather of all fish. The one in
the mudroom, Andy knew, was a green sturgeon. Smaller and less tasty than its big white cousin to the south.

“But, that's it?”

“I think so.” And walls come down between one breath and another.

Rachel Hedley was waggling a finger in Andy's face.

“So, am I understanding it right, that Leonard got you a moose, and a sturgeon, and that both are, what, out of season?”

“Well, I don't know if there's —”

Leonard interrupted. “A moose
nose
. The
moose
was hunted, dead, butchered, and on its way to its new home in the freezer. The nose would have been thrown away.”

“Still, the Native, you know, the Native fishery isn't supposed to be —”

“Or used for dog food. Sometimes —”

“— it's supposed to be for Natives only, so —”

“
Some
times —” Leonard tilted himself at Rachel in a way Andy didn't like the looks of.

“— dey freeze the nose and the guts too, eh? Dey freeze the cocks and the tits, and the egg hoops and de shit hoops, freeze 'er up for de dogs, eh? Especially if dey got a friend with doze sled dogs. Cock's a fuckin'
steak
to doze sled dogs.”

“Fine,” said Rachel, unperturbed. “It's bad enough that it's poached, out of season —”

“You'll have to stop saying that.” Leonard drew himself to his full height. He sucked in his gut and out came his chest, and Andy couldn't tell if he was fooling around. It was one of the times Leonard might not know either. “I am a status Indian. There are no hunting
seasons
. We take food for our survival. We take it when we need it.”

“Leonard. Come on. You have a business. You have an
SUV
outside. Those are — Look at those shoes you're wearing.”

“Are you saying I don't have a right to —”

“You know as well as I do you're allowed to hunt and fish but you're not allowed to sell it to white man here”— she jerked her head Andy's way —“and when you say ‘survival' it burns me a little when I think of, oh, I don't know, just a few people in Africa to whom that word actually applies.”

It was an impressive display, and because neither Leonard nor Rachel had raised their voices or twitched even an eyebrow in anger, their audience felt safe to merely nod, or adopt an expression that weighed the questions.

Magda, laughing lightly, said, “Here's a different thing. I'm a vegetarian? So, for me,
everything alive
is ‘out of season.' So pooh-pooh on both of you.”

“Anyway,” said Leonard, smiling easily, nodding to Rachel, “point taken. But please also take my point, which is that I mean ‘survival of culture.' Okay?” He didn't wait for Rachel's response but turned briefly to Magda. “And pooh-pooh taken.”

“But you know,” said Magda, to Andy now, “if that sturgeon is really fifty years old, just think for a second.”

“It's thirty-nine,” said Andy.

“You know how much metal's sitting in that thing? Mercury? What else is up here? Lead? Aluminum!”

Leonard looked at Andy too. “Jesus, she's right.”

Magda said to Leonard, “You don't eat the big old halibut, right?”

Leonard was shaking his head. “We've actually been
warning
customers when they get one over forty, fifty pounds. And they're nowhere near fifty years old.” He laughed. “And neither are the halibut!” He grabbed for the brandy bottle but yanked his hand back because it was too hot.

It was all the out Andy needed. He didn't want his garbage can full of raw uneaten sturgeon in the morning, he really
wouldn't be able to bear that. He pictured the sturgeon's gnomish face and gentle ways. Though wasn't the spirit of sacrifice about love, and loss? Didn't you have to kill and
waste
something?