The Umbrella Mender
- Publisher
- Wolsak and Wynn Publishers
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2014
- Category
- Literary
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781928088028
- Publish Date
- Sep 2014
- List Price
- $10.99
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Description
Though a stroke has left her mute, the story Hazel MacPherson has to share is unforgettable. As a talented nurse in the early 1950s, she went north to Moose Factory to help fight the epidemic of tuberculosis that was ravaging the Cree and Inuit peoples. Each week the boat brought new patients from the James Bay, Hudson Bay and Nunavik communities to the little hospital. It was a desperate undertaking, fraught with cultural and language difficulties that hampered the urgent, sometimes reckless, efforts of the medical staff. But Hazel is soon distracted from the tensions of the hospital by an enigmatic drifter named Gideon Judge, an itinerant umbrella mender searching for the Northwest Passage.
From her own hospital bed, the older Hazel struggles to pass on to her grandniece the harrowing tale of her past in the North, including the fate of Gideon and the heartbreaking secrets she left behind.
About the author
Contributor Notes
Christine Fischer Guy’s fiction has appeared in journals across Canada and has been nominated for the Journey Prize. She reviews for the Globe and Mail, contributes to Ryeberg.com and themillions.com and teaches creative writing at the School for Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. She is also an award-winning journalist. She has lived and worked in London, England, and now lives in Toronto.
Excerpt: The Umbrella Mender (by (author) Christine Fischer Guy)
Moose Factory, Ontario, June 1951
they had another hour of light if they were lucky. Lachlan stood beside her and squinted upstream as if by force of will alone the HBC Mercer could be made to appear on the horizon. The hospital dock dipped with the irregular rhythm of every impatient shift of his weight. It wasn’t the first time the survey boat was late, but that wasn’t it: he was not, by nature, an impatient man. The restlessness Hazel knew well, and it was born of a genuine appetite for the work they’d both come here to do. The boat they waited for carried more than a dozen Inuit patients, every one of them with disease-clouded lungs, from Great Whale and a few posts further north.
Yesterday she’d stood at his office door and watched him lift one spectral x-ray film after another to the light box, saw him shake his head in disbelief, heard the repeated catch in his throat. The swaths of gauzy clouds on this lot of chest films, flown in from Great Whale for him to examine, seemed to choke the air out of his own lungs. The rate of tuberculosis infection was worse than he had expected, worse than he’d seen in any other Inuit community, and she knew that this reality would cast doubt on all of his preparations. Even now he’d be recalculating dosages, recounting beds and rewriting requisitions, an endless series of minute adjustments to the running tally in his head. Only the boat’s arrival would slow this constant computation, and then only temporarily. His agitation came off him like smoke.
Hazel had done everything she could do. Extra beds were ready, the kitchen was preparing broth and bread, a dispensary inventory waited on his desk. She was beginning to wonder whether she should check in with Cook when she heard the boat. There it was at the bend in the channel, skimming the north shore of Sawpit Island, mainsail down. The light wind was a hand run the wrong way against the surface of the water and the sound of the boat’s hull skipping across it was a drum roll. She checked her watch. Nine forty-five. It would easily be ten-thirty by the time they were settled in the wards.
Editorial Reviews
"In her haunting debut novel, Christine Fischer Guy transports us to 1950s Moose Factory, where the beleaguered staff of the local hospital are fighting to stem the tide of tuberculosis among the indigenous peoples of the North. At the heart of the novel is Hazel MacPherson, a promising young nurse who finds herself increasingly drawn to the surrounding wilderness, made manifest in the person of a troubled drifter.
"Like her heroine, Fischer Guy is equally at home within the walls of the hospital and without. In language rich with sensual detail, she brings Hazel’s dualized experience into sharp focus, evoking the ghostly beauty of an x-ray one moment, the living presence of the Moose River the next.
"The Umbrella Mender is a gorgeous book – a moving meditation on human frailty, a sensitive portrait of conflicting cultures brought together in an uneasy truce, and a heartbreaking tale of unsanctioned love." – Alissa York, author of Fauna and Effigy
"The Umbrella Mender is a gem of hope, denial and blind faith. Nurse Hazel MacPherson’s travels, both physical and spiritual, haul you toward true North, and do their very best to leave you knowing every inch of the trip as if it were worn under your skin and marked deep in your lungs, the shadowed scar visible only by x-ray. Wonderfully, carefully written, this is a book you will not soon forget." – Russell Wangersky, author of Whirl Away and The Glass Harmonica
