The Leech Farmer's Debt

Christy was fifty-four years old, and she had learned, somewhere around her fortieth birthday, that the word "favor" was a trap. People said it warmly. People said it like it cost nothing. And then six years went by and a leech farmer called in the debt on the coldest week of the year, in a town at the top of the world, and you found yourself standing in a candying room wondering how your life had come to this.

Not that she regretted the original favor. The original favor had been legitimate. Six years ago, Dee had driven her three hours down a frozen road to the hospital in Iqaluit at three in the morning, without one complaint, when Christy's appendix decided to stage its little rebellion. Dee had waited in the parking lot all night. Dee had brought her a thermos of something that tasted like pond water and pine tar and, Christy would swear on any Bible you put in front of her, had actually saved her life, or at least her comfort.

So when Dee had said, on the phone, in her flat way, "I need a hand with a delivery. You owe me one," Christy had said yes before she'd even asked what the delivery was.

That was her mistake. Never say yes before you hear the details. The details, it turned out, were a specimen cabinet as big as a vending machine, a taxidermist, and a stranger who imported saffron, all converging on a former commercial kitchen in Pond Inlet that Dee used to stage her leech business and, apparently, her side hobby of candying marmalade peel, because of course she did. Christy had known the woman six years and had rarely been alone with her for more than twenty minutes before today, and now she was going to spend a whole afternoon trapped in a room with three people she barely knew, one of whom kept leeches.

The room itself was strange. Copper vats lined one wall, big bulbous things with tarnished seams, and the single window looked out over the frozen inlet, all white and flat to the horizon. The smell was sugar and brine fighting each other for dominance, and losing, and settling into some third smell that was neither. Christy decided not to think about what the leeches ate.

She had arrived early, out of guilt, and had spent twenty minutes moving crates around uselessly, which is what guilty people do when they want to look helpful.

Rhys showed up first. He was fifty-five, lean, with the careful hands of a man who glued dead animals back together for a living, and he came around the corner of the building hauling a sled, and on the sled was the cabinet. Christy took one look at it and felt her stomach drop.

The cabinet was beautiful. Mahogany, glass-fronted, brass fittings, the kind of thing you'd put a prize wolverine mount in. It was also, by Christy's rough visual math, a good two feet wider than the door of the candying room.

"That's not going to fit," she said.

"It fits," Rhys said. "It's been in tighter doors than this."

"Not that door it hasn't."

He stood there a moment, considering the doorway, then the cabinet, then the doorway again, in the manner of a man hoping geometry had changed since he last checked. It had not. He unlashed the sled anyway, out of what Christy assumed was spite toward the universe.

"I'm not taking it apart," Dee said from behind them, appearing in the doorway with the silence of a woman who owned the building. She was fifty-two and built like she'd been assembled from weather. "Rhys. Look at me. You are not disassembling that cabinet in my yard."

"The drawers come out. The top comes off. It's four bolts."

"You'll strip something and then it's my problem. It goes in whole or it stays on the sled."

Christy looked at the sky, which was doing that pale gray thing it did all day up here, and wondered if she could develop appendicitis twice.

Jacob arrived twenty minutes later, at a jog, holding a tin. He was forty-eight, cheerful in the relentless way of a man whose livelihood depended on nobody being annoyed with him, and he announced himself before he was even through the yard.

"Dee! Your saffron! I made it, just barely, the wind came up off the ice and I thought, well, this is how it ends, delivering spices in the Arctic, what a stupid way to die, but here I am!" He thrust the tin at Dee. It was, Christy noticed immediately, badly dented, one side caved in like a chewed beer can.

"The tin's crushed," Dee said.

"The tin is... characterful," Jacob said. "The saffron is fine. Saffron is very resilient. It's the most expensive spice in the world precisely because it endures."

"That is not why it's expensive."

"It is partly why."

Christy, wanting to be useful and knowing better, took the tin from Dee to set it on the counter. The counter was crowded with vats and funnels and a clipboard. There was perhaps four inches of clear space. She set the tin down anyway, because she had been raised to believe surfaces existed for things, and the tin sat there for exactly two seconds, rocked on its dented bottom, and launched itself off the edge like it had been planning this for the whole flight north.

The lid popped on impact. Saffron threads went everywhere. Not a lot of saffron, because saffron comes in small quantities even when it costs more per gram than a used snowmobile, but at that price, thirty dollars' worth of spice scattered across a linoleum floor in a leech-adjacent facility looks and feels like a tragedy.

There was a moment of pure silence.

"I'll pick them up," Christy said, already crouching, her ears burning. "They're threads. They pick up. This is fine."

"Don't crush them," Jacob said, dropping to his knees beside her with alarming speed. "If you crush them they release the oils and the flavor profile changes and then it's not really..."

"Jacob. She's picking them up, not blending them," Dee said.

Rhys, meanwhile, had begun circling the cabinet again like a shark with a furniture problem. "If we take the drawers out we can get it through. Two people, ten minutes."

"You're not disassembling it," Dee said.

"Then how, Dee? Materialize it through the wall?"

"We could take the door off its hinges," Jacob offered, from the floor, holding a pinch of saffron like it was a baby bird. "That buys you maybe an inch. An inch and a half. Every inch matters in these situations."

"That buys us nothing, the problem is the width of the cabinet, not the swing of the door," Rhys said. "Do you know anything about doors?"

"I know about logistics. Import, export, customs..."

"This isn't customs, this is a door."

"An inch and a half," Jacob repeated with dignity, and went back to his saffron.

Christy stayed down on the linoleum, gathering threads one by one onto a folded paper towel, mostly because staying down there meant she was technically busy and couldn't be drafted into holding anything. The floor was cold through her knees. The threads were red and delicate and everywhere, and she picked them up with a care that surprised her, considering they'd belonged to a tin she now hated.