Free Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway Page B

cows and donkeys, shepherds and angels, his parents watched over him with a care that was, indeed, tender and mild.
    Resplendent in white starched linen surplice, crimson satin bow exploding like fire from his throat, blood-red cassock falling to the floor, Gabriel Okimasis swayed lightly as he walked, dignified and stately, across the sanctuary, one of God’s own cherubim. Hands held together against his chest, the six-year-old knelt on a prayer stool and bent low his perfect head.
    Deep in complicated prayer upon an altar glowing with gold and silver and silk and fine taffeta, Father Lafleur intoned the Latin text of the Christmas midnight service.
    “Dominus vobiscum.”
    “Et cum spiritu tuo,”
the congregation chanted in reply.
    Later, the priest knelt on the altar’s second step, smote his breast three times with his ruby-fingered hand, and intoned, for all assembled there to hear:
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
    Well-trained soldiers of the church, all dutifully recited with him. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
    The Okimasis brothers had never discussed this phrase but both had concluded that they were being asked to apologize for something beyond their control. Under these circumstances, however — yards enclosed by steel fences, sleeping quarters patrolled nightly by priests and brothers — they had also independently concluded that it was best to accept the blame; it
was
their most grievous fault.
    At the electric organ, Jeremiah launched into “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” There were four verses to this particular carol, he recalled, with his usual precision for facts musical, so by the time the congregation got to the part about the three wise men from the East arriving in Bethlehem with what Gabriel had insisted were boxes of Black Magic chocolates, Holy Communion was about to begin.
    After the hymn, Jeremiah could see Father Lafleur bent low over his golden chalice wherein lay pieces of the Body of Jesus Christ, muttering the last bits of prayer to give him the strength to serve it to the faithful. He was surrounded by eight altar boys, all Cree, aged five to twelve. And none among the congregation — other than twelve nuns, two brothers, one other priest, cooks, janitor, and nightwatchman — was over the age of sixteen.
    The nuns filed down the centre aisle to the communion rail, there to kneel in a neat row of supplication before the miracle the high priest was about to offer them. As two hundredIndian children sang, “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,” Father Lafleur, holding the host aloft with his right hand, descended the altar steps and walked slowly to the first nun.
    As the priest made the turn, his gaze locked with that of his organist, Jeremiah Okimasis. The little angel, Gabriel, holding the golden paten to catch fragments of Christ’s body from under communicants’ chins, caught this telling exchange between his brother and the priest. He felt something heavy, cold and wet, at the base of his spine, a sensation vaguely like a bog-like squelch.
    “Corpus Christi,”
said the priest, and the first nun’s tongue lolled out like a piece of overchewed gum. The nun missed one small morsel of the white host, causing it to come twirling down, snowflake-like, but mumbled “Amen” anyway, somewhat too apologetically for Gabriel’s taste.
    He looked at the priest’s hairy white right hand, reached with his paten, and neatly caught the fragment of falling flesh within the sacred vessel’s golden hollow.
    Three hundred miles to the north, Father Eustache Bouchard, silver chalice in one hand, round white host in the other, approached the communion rail, where knelt a line of Cree Indian people, not one of whom was between the ages of six and sixteen.
    “Corpus Christi,”
Father Bouchard said to Abraham Okimasis, and placed the paper-thin wafer on his tongue.
    “Amen,” replied the champion of the world.

N INE
    “K ill him! Kill