The Cannibal Spirit (29 page)

Still, digging out a skull from a grave is one thing, killing a man and severing his head with a machete in the mud and darkness—well, ain't that just something else entire? I wonder if I will tell Boas this part of my story. He would love to hear it. But I can't be sure what he'll think of me after. Perhaps it is my own head needs measuring.

If it ain't simple killing a man, it ain't so simple neither to bring a man back from the point of death. A man what has his blood filled up with corruption. Harry lying in my arms, his breath a faint mist, the particles of his soul
dispersing, my grizzly paws at his neck. “My supernatural power restores life. My supernatural power makes the sick walk. I have the strength of the Cannibal Spirit. No one can stop me.” Such are the words of my shaman's song. Voicing a few choice words and hoping for the best of it. There on the beach at old Teguxste, I sat by Harry through the rest of that night, crooning my song to him, on and on, holding him up betimes and feeding him the brew we had made from the chokecherry plant. I had to stroke his neck to make him swallow, so far gone was he. Charley stripped out the green inner bark from the devil's club he had taken from the forest, and put it to boil as well. I sent him off for spruce, cedar, hemlock, and alder bark to add to the concoction too.

It is said by the people that souls have no bones, they have no blood, for they are just like smoke or shadows. They have no house besides the body in which to reside. When that house is razed, so the soul goes out and is blown away to nothing. Harry burned. I used the rest of the peat moss to soak water and bathe his body as it raged with the fever. I did battle to safeguard the house of his soul.

Those soldiers of Blunden Harbour had pretty soon drunk theirselves to unconsciousness. The fight had been took out of them by Charley's prestidigitating. They'd done no more since than grumble and gossip and throw the occasional high comment our way. So by the time the grey, clammy dawn found its way across the waters, it was just me and Charley and the unspeaking Walewid left. He had barely moved those past hours in his watch over us.

Through the night and through the day following, I passed hemlock rings over Harry, I sang the songs of the shaman, I cleaned out his wounds, and, once I'd seen there wasn't no more of rottenness in there, reapplied the dressings. I fed him the brews. I worried at him, trying to make him show some sign of wakefulness. I whispered to him that he was my son. I spoke soft words in his uncomprehending ear like I might to a child. I trawled through my memory for anything else that might serve to help him.

Charley clucked and pottered. He wouldn't let off till he had applied some of the remedies to my own face. The men of Blunden Harbour slowly
came awake in ones and twos, farting, muttering, going off to take a shit. Their interest in the matter seemed muted now. Even Walewid had rolled hisself up in a blanket and snored like some bull elephant seal.

The men ignored me, wandering along the beach and in amidst the broken houses. Harry was insensible. Even Charley slept, making noises to match Walewid. But still I played out the role of shaman. Chanting, calling on the Killer Whale Spirit, the Cannibal, other spirits of the wood and water, hurling logs on the fire and calling up its flames, running hemlock and cedar up and down Harry's body and pacing about him in ritual parade. It was for me that I kept on. To shore up that failing belief what I believed had proved fatal to so many I had sought to save. I must believe for Harry to live. So was the impulse what drove me.

And then, sometime after Walewid had coughed and hawked and grumbled hisself up again, early in the afternoon of the day, as I imagined it—for the cloud had come down low above us, and all was flat and grey and seemed outside of time—at last Harry took to spluttering. I rolled him to his side. He coughed black bile, though he did not waken. After that, he breathed much heavier, drawing in great gulps of air, wheezing when he exhaled once more. I pulled blankets over him, for he came to shivering now. Sweat began to pour off him, where before his skin had been cold to the touch and dry. There was the faintest trace of blood come into his face. I cooed and whispered in his ear. He mumbled, as in a dream, but did not wake up.

When I looked up, Walewid was staring over at me. There weren't no expression on his face, but he gave me a small nod. Then he stood and called out to his men, cursing them all for idling idiots and telling them to pack up their gear into the canoe and make ready for the off.

Charley was beside me. He rested his hand on Harry's forehead. “He ain't there yet,” says he.

“Oh, we'll have him back,” says I. And I knew it to be true.

“There'll be a feast,” says I to Walewid. “You will be my guests. I will give away much to you. We will be as family to each other.”

“I got better,” says Charley. He went aboard the
Hesperus
, calling the soldier in the yellow woman's blouse to come with him. This man was
slow and bleary-eyed today, without the fire in him from the night before. The two of them took to unloading what was in the hold of the
Hesperus
. There was blankets and some clothing. There was tinned foodstuffs. And there was a couple of cases of whisky left as well. Others of the men came to help, and they loaded these goods across from the
Hesperus
into their war canoe.

Eventually, when all was done, they took up the last of their gear and boarded the canoe. Walewid stepped in last. As they was making ready to leave, I hurried over.

“What of that?” says I. I pointed along the beach to where the dreamer's head still lay on the shingle.

“It was taken in war,” says Walewid. “He is gone. He is yours.”

“There will be a feast,” I says to him.

“I will come with my secrets for you,” Charley says.

The men at the rear of the canoe pushed off. They paddled away. They did not look back.

“A deep swamp we have walked out from,” Charley says, “and come up clean.” He laughed and clumped me on the shoulder.

Five days later, we rounded Cormorant Point and came in sight of Alert Bay. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was bearing down so the sea could hardly be looked at. I felt such expectation, such confidence in myself, that I could but barely stop from shouting out across the water to the people in the village: “Prepare yourselves! I have much to tell you!” Like a child I am at times. For what we all had spoken—Charley and me, and even Walewid, on the beach there in Teguxste—had run round and round in my head, getting crafted further into form, until I was almost bursting to speechify.

When we snuck out through the Nakwakto Rapids—those treacherous waters for once proving kindly enough to let us pass without incident— the killer whale did follow us through. Its great dorsal fin rose up like the shadow of fatefulness against the forests behind. It must have seen our hull as alike to itself and so was led back through. Still, you might imagine the ways I chose to read that portent after, on the journey south.

As we came closer to Alert Bay, I gazed on those two cannery buildings, what are the lifeblood of that small town. Now they reared over us, with their high sloping roofs and all those windows in long lines, the sharp angles of the stilts holding it all up above the water, like some great caterpillar on legs what seem too gangling to bear its weight. There weren't but little activity as yet, so early in the year. The thunder of those steam engines, the hammering tin cutters, the explosions of the steam retorts that boom out across the bay all summer. I thought: here is a monster still dozing, waiting to come awake. We must feed it fish till it be satisfied. But Indians don't have to be slaves, feeding the maws of white men. Though, it is mostly Chinese and Japaners what Spencer employs nowadays.

It was Spencer what truly founded Alert Bay. And, after, he took my sister Annie for his wife and become as well my brother-in-law. It was about thirty years back now, and Reverend Hall moving his mission from Rupert some years later, once he'd come to realize the Rupert Indians was proving unpliant to his sermonizing. I used to stand there next to him each Sunday, in my best Sunday smarts, doing the translating. I'd hear the people murmuring to theirselves about how preposterous was the things I was saying, even as Reverend Hall was getting all fired up with the righteousness of his God.

We steered in towards the jetty beside the canneries. We tied off by old Dan Copperhand's fishing sloop, and everyone clustered round to witness our return. So I yelled for help in carrying Harry along to Doc Trelawney's. I could see all knew there was events afoot. The wry looks of many. None responding to my good graces. Still, it did not dint my enthusiasm. Halliday might be awaiting me with his iron cuffs, and I did know that there were those arranged against me for all the wrongs they did consider I had done upon the people, all bundled up into the charges what was arrayed against me. And I would soon come at the heart of what those charges was. Charley had laid out all he knew to me about the charges against me, whilst we was waiting on Harry to be well enough to travel from Teguxste, and I had a pretty good notion by now of what they must be constituted, if yet I did not know for sure. Arrest me, then! Let me stand up in the courthouse here in Alert Bay, in front of all of them, and speak
my piece on who I was, the spokesman that I was for the people. Let them decide: the people, packed in, as I envisaged them, to hear my words. I'd make old Reverend Hall blush for lack of passion when he saw me delivering what it was I'd have to say about the great wrongs done the people, about who it is we are!

Still, Harry was yet in a ruinous state. If he had been conscious, mostly, these past days, he still didn't have the strength even to raise himself up to sit, let alone to walk. The evening after Walewid had left, Harry came round sudden, spluttering, wild-eyed, calling out as if he had woken in some new world entire—Hell, perhaps, or Purgatory, so shocked did he seem. He couldn't seem to make no sense of his surrounds. He viewed Charley and me as if we was demons summoned up to taunt his sanity. But soon enough he fell back into slumbering. His breath came easier, and I felt then, for the first time since I had buried David's head beneath the earth, that I could sleep as well. I was near collapsing with fatigue.

Charley promised to sit up, and I wrapped up my bones in a blanket and lay by the fire what we had kept roaring. I didn't wake again till the sun was risen. Charley was snoring beside me like a beast. Harry was awake, lying on his side, staring at the embers of the fire.

“So this ain't death?” he said to me.

I put my hand on his head and told him no, it weren't death. It was life. “No snoring Indians in Heaven,” says I, nodding towards Charley.

We didn't talk much in the days what followed. I started a couple times to explain myself about David, but I didn't properly have the words myself as yet, and I saw that Harry didn't want to hear them anyhow. But he seemed content enough in his mind. He looked about like the world was fresh to him, and what few words he did speak was always polite. He voiced how grateful he was that I saved him more than once, till I had to tell him to shut his trap or I'd find some way to undo my methods.

We got him along the cannery jetty to the beach, and then along the plankways of the village, with many hands holding him, all bound up in a blanket like a moth in a cocoon, towards the hospital. The doctor there, Albert Trelawney, drugged him up, and Harry looked a pretty sight sinking down onto that hospital bed, a smile like he was back in his mama's
arms. We had a laugh at that, but I was happy to see him situated safe at last, for all that I had kept him living thus far.

Once Harry was laid abed, Trelawney ministrated some to me as well. He gave me a felt eye patch, which I still am wearing now, and what don't help to soften my appearance much. He asked me how I come to be injured so. Charley piped up, “Wolf!” which was a good one. He ain't but a young man, Trelawney, and not three years out from England, that nervous tic to his plump face. Annie tells me he hadn't never been happy here. Still, he can doctor. His training is from London itself.

I was keen straightways to present myself to Halliday. So I asked Trelawney on the whereabouts of the Indian agent, and I didn't much like it when he told me that he did not know. His eyes went all about the room, anywhere but to my own. There's white man's gossip every bit as noxious as there is Indians'. So off we went to see my sister Annie and her Mr. Spencer.

As we walked down the beach, the people were outside their homes in the early-evening sun. They did mutter at our passing, and no words of pleasantness did they offer us. “We about as popular as a face full of seal shit,” says Charley.

My brother-in-law was waiting for us on his porch. He is a Scotchman, as so many was what came along the coast to make their fortunes in the time of my father. Anyways, great old lanky fella that he is, he waves us inside with no more than a gruff greeting, and not much of good humour on his skeleton face neither.

There is a blanket hung up in that hallway of Spencer's house what is famous among the Tlingit people of my mother's line, an old blanket out of history, come down the generations. My mother brung it south as a part of her dowry. She wore it all her years among the Kwagiulth. Wore it proud in her lineage. When I did look up to see it hanging there, the events of the past weeks came flooding through me of a sudden, till I was near to being overwhelmed by my emotions.

Then my sister—dear, sweet Annie with her stern dresses and her so-serious face—she came out from the drawing room. “My brother,” says she, standing before me with her fingers on my arms. “What happened to
you?” She put a hand to my face. I almost might have wept then, but all I says is that there was trouble what now is over.

“Was that Harry you carried in to Trelawney's?” Spencer says. I tell him yes, but that he was mending well from a knife wound what he had sustained some days before. “Gods, man, what has been happening to you all?” Spencer's voice was filled up as much with ire, so it seemed to me, as with sympathy. Charley told him I had saved Harry's life with shaman medicine, but Spencer just huffed at that and says we'll talk after dinner. I could see something was screwing him up inside, and I guessed it was me. He and I haven't often been of one mind down the years, though I like to think we have respect for each other. I know he don't much approve of my work with Boas, though he had not openly spoke it before.