Kiss of the Fur Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

Only then did the child admit that it was a living, breathing being. It wailed.
    “Napeesis awa,”
the midwife said tenderly,
“napeesis.”
Mariesis sighed like the cooing of a ptarmigan.
    Champion yawned and drifted across the magic river. Sitting side by side on the shore of dreams, he and his newly arrived little brother watched as, high above their heads, the seven stars of the Great Bear sparkled from a queens tiara. Glimmering faintly through the Milky Way, the monarch waved her wand. A spray of stars exploded across the universe, turned back, regrouped, and made a perfect, inverted dipper above the Okimasis tent. The midwife’s voice intoned:
“Ooneemeetoo. Kiweethiwin. Ooneemeetoo.”
And so the child was named: Dancer.
    Father Eustace Bouchard, thirty-five, handsome, strong of body, strong of mind, French-Canadian, Roman Catholic,priest and missionary
extraordinaire
, stood between the altar and the communion rail, exuding holiness and mouthing words without sound. Cascades of starched, lace-bordered white garment gave off ripples of pungent sweetness. In one hand, he held a weighty black book from whose pink-lined pages he was reading. The other hand was thrust in front of him as if to slap the face of anyone who dared to interrupt. High above him, a naked, bleeding man hung from a wooden beam. Years later, Champion Okimasis would insist that the man was dead, Ooneemeetoo that he was still alive, that morning anyway.
    The burning incense almost choked the breath out of one-toothed Annie Moostoos, who stood across the baptismal font from the muttering priest, the two-week-old Ooneemeetoo clutched to her trembling breasts. For Annie Moostoos had never stood this long before the holy altar of God in all her fifty-nine years. Only the sign of the cross that Father Bouchard wove at one point saved her from collapsing to the floor, she would later swear, thus saving the life of her twelve-pound godson.
    From the pew behind his aunt, Champion Okimasis scrutinized the curious ritual. His parents, who were standing on either side of the untrustworthy Annie Moostoos, were listening to the man in the long white dress with marked deference. The priest dipped his free hand into a hollow place at the top of the pedestal of shining wood. His hand emerged with a handful of water, which he held over the baby’s forehead, apparently intending to give it a good scrub.
    Then his full lips parted, his white teeth glinted, and his tongue formed the words,
“Abrenuntias satanae?”
The words, meaningless to Cree ears, pierced the infant’s fragile bones and stayed there.
    “But he already has a name,” squawked Annie Moostoos. The strapping priest turned with airy contempt to the tiny widow, confident that one arched eyebrow would render the source of this rash remark immobile.
    Like a bullmoose ramming its antlers into those of some fearsome, lust-filled rival, Annie Moostoos charged ahead. “His name,” she stated, “is Ooneemeetoo. Ooneemeetoo Okimasis. Not Satanae Okimasis.”
    “Annie Moostoos,” the voice sliced through the smoky air as through a bleeding thigh of caribou, “women are not to speak their minds inside the church.” The blast was so potent that the tooth, yellowed by age and the smoke of two million cigarettes, yet so celebrated for its stubborn solitariness, hung in its airless void like an abandoned oracle.
    “Neee, tapwee sa awa aymeegimow,”
the disempowered godmother whined to her cousin. Returning to the business at hand, the priest poured the holy water over the baby’s fuzzy cabbage of a head. The water was cold. The child cried.
    “Gabriel Okimasis,” the oblate stated, as if to nail “Gabriel” permanently between quotation marks,
“Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,”
to which the bundle in Annie Moostoos’s aching arms responded with a sudden hush.
    “Amen,” said the parents.To his dying day, Kookoos Cook claimed to remember floating glumly about in