The Cannibal Spirit (30 page)

We ate fresh chinook salmon, and potatoes fried, and peas from the Spencers' garden. Mighty good did they taste after days in the wilds. Once we was done, Spencer poured whisky and we sat out on the porch.

I told the story of the past few days in as few words as I could muster. Just how Charley and Harry came looking for me on Halliday's orders, how they had liquor-fuelled trouble in Blunden, but had pressed on and found me. I didn't speak on those events up by the House of Shamans, just told them how we had fixed Harry up and returned. I kept off telling him as well of the ins and outs of what did occur with Walewid. There didn't seem a point to it at the moment.

“You've placed yourself in a mire of shite, George,” says Spencer, “and helped nobody in the doing.” I asks him where Halliday had got to, and learned he was away two days before, and that conniving rat-bastard Constable Woolacott with him. Spencer didn't know, or wouldn't say, where.

“What's been said?” I asks, and Spencer was then quite roused.

“Christ, George, what has not been said?” says he, and wants to know if I had heard the charges laid against me.

“That I am accused of participating in a banned ritual,” says I.

“Well, well,” says he, “that's just the start of it.”

“And I am accused of cannibalism,” I says.

“You will, I trust, assure me outright that that is not correct,” says he.

So I says, “That part ain't true.” I tell him how I had been at the ritual, though I don't tell him much else. He shook his head and grumbled to hisself some.

“Now will you tell me what happened exactly at David's funeral? For there's rumours, terrible to acknowledge, all along the coast.” I was reticent at first, but he pressed me. So, I told him how I had taken off David's head and been away into the wilds with it.

What a fury he flied into! He invoked the good Lord almighty more than once. He paced up and down the porch, spluttering and waving those long arms of his about, raving on the family name and savage practices, and on what kind of man I thought myself to be. In fact, on all that I have been deliberating on in the recounting of this tale.

“What will you do?” he says to me at last, once his steam had vented sufficient that he was able to talk near normal once more.

“I am Kwagiulth,” I tell him.

“Perhaps you are,” he says. “But how do you plan on answering the charges laid against you?” I told him I'd not hide from attending rituals of the people. “You'll not help the people by confessing,” he says.

“I don't help them by lying neither,” says I, and I tell him how the white man stole the ways of the people till there weren't nothing left of them to clutch to no more. I told him I had words to say on that, and not just to him.

“Well, well,” says he. “Yet in court you'll do no more than propagate the stories of their savagery,” he says. “But what about your family? Have you given thought for what it might mean for them, should you be thrown into the jail?”

I had been thinking on such things, of course, since we left Teguxste. What was my responsibilities? Walewid and Charley had made it clear to me that, if I was to stand by the things what I had done
before
the people, then I must stand up also
for
the Indian. Bringing Harry back from the dead had made it all the more important to me somehow, like as if the spirits of the people had truly come through my hands to heal Harry. And the killer whale following us out through the rapids. Who can ignore such portents?

If nothing else, I had a debt to pay for that gift I had been given. The gift of Harry's life. My last living son. If I had responsibility to my family, it was all tied up in that which I had toward the people as a whole.

So I told Spencer I would stand up in the court at Alert Bay and say I was not afraid that I had been at the ritual: a ritual which was part of the right ways of the Indian since the beginnings of the world. Those people of which I was a proud member. Let the heavens fall round me after.

“Though, as I hear it,” says Spencer, “the people won't be minded to support you at this time.”

“It is true I ain't so popular right now,” says I. “Be that as it may, I must say my piece.”

After that, we sat for some long time in silence.

At last, Spencer pipes up. “I see you've complex thoughts on the matter,” he says, his voice cold as January. “But I tell you, George, you bring disgrace on the family by the events of David's funeral, not honour, as you seem to imagine it. And disgrace as well on the people of which you claim yourself a part. Owning up to being at a legally forbidden ritual—a ritual at which the Lord God knows what practices were carried out, however coy you might choose to play it—will not do ought but harm.” He slugged whisky and gazed out from the porch, along the beach, toward the fires and the dark houses of the village. “Far as I'm concerned,” says he, “you're on your own in this.”

Even Annie would not look up to meet my eye.

Constable Woolacott came for me the next morning, just after dawn. I was sitting out on the porch with Charley, drinking coffee and feeling as if the whole world were rousing itself in my name. We had already seen the police boat moored alongside the
Hesperus
, where it must have come back in the night. So I was not surprised when that mean English prick came stomping up to stand before us.

“You been skulking in the jungle,” says Woolacott by way of greeting. His face—what is visible behind all that grey fuzz of hair and beard—was puckered with the vile depth of his hatred of the Indian. When I did not reply, he says, “Know I have come for you. That you is arrested on charge
of cannibalism and the mutilating of a corpse, and of performing heathen rituals which is banned under law.”

“Well,” says I. “What's to be done with me?”

Then he tells me I'd be kept till the next steamer turned up, and after taken down to Vancouver for trial.

My throat got so tight I could not form words for some time. At last I stutters out, “Vancouver? You'll not try me here?”

“We will not,” says he. “Your crimes were better punished publicly, so all might know the wrongs you've done. Perhaps it will aid in purging the dirtworshipping savagery you people live by.” Charley muttered at that, low and in Kwakwala, sentiments impolitic on the man and his profession.

“I must be tried here,” says I. There was panic in me. I might almost in that moment have turned tail and run for it, back to the forest, if there'd been anywheres to go on this small island.

“All's in place and Vancouver's expecting you,” says he, and when I asked where Halliday might be, he wouldn't tell. “He's away on business” is all he says. “About which you'll hear more soon enough.”

Charley leapt up at that and put his face close by Woolacott's. “Where Hal'day?” says he. “What he doing?”

“None a your fucking business, Charley Seaweed,” says Woolacott. “I represent the law on this shit-riddled coast. Don't forget yourself. I'm like to take you in too.”

I was breathing hard, trying to keep my self-possession. Where was Halliday? Charley had told me the Indian agent was threatening to take the family possessions, so I understood what must be vexing him now. But I could not imagine he could actually carry out such a conscienceless deed. I asked Woolacott, was he planning to keep me here till Halliday came back?

“I'm not,” says he. “You'll be aboard the first steamer south, with me safeguarding you all the way.”

I stood on the Spencers' porch with the dawn sun in my good eye, and I didn't rightly know what to do or say. Woolacott had his hand on the butt of his pistol and was threatening force if I did not come straightway with him. He had with him three Indian bully boys—three, mind you!—
toting axe handles, all hocked up on power and shilling. But there weren't nothing inside me, excepting confusion. So in the end I just followed him meekly away along the beach. Charley made to follow, but Woolacott warned him off.

“His family be obliged to feed and water him. So best you talk with his sister and get something sorted,” says the constable, and his voice was glutted by triumph.

He didn't say nothing more till he had me sealed behind bars in back of the Indian Agency hut. “See how much smart talking there's left in you now, eh?” was all the words he spoke, then he left me to fester on my own.

I paced about some. I looked out the barred window onto the barren space behind the village, the trees felled long ago for timber. It looked a charnel ground to me. Later, I heard Charley's voice raised out front, and Woolacott's in answer. After, Woolacott came in and set down before the bars the iodine Trelawney had given me for my eye, though he held up the phial of laudanum, smiled, and put it in his own pocket.

I sat on the billet below the window, shut my eyes, and looked inside myself for any trace of that rage for which I imagined I'd now be subject. But none of it was there. Instead, I was near overcome by images from the past days. I saw the whale from my visions, but he seemed a thing out of some other universe entire. I saw again the blows by which I severed the dreamer's head. The butcher's feel of it. The air pumping in my lungs. I knew there was savagery indeed in me, brutal murder of which I had shown myself capable.

I saw as well a hundred trades I'd made for artefacts up and down the coast, packing them and shipping them—cheques payable to Mr. G. Hunt, Esquire. The pages of stories I had written and promises made and broken in the writing. My family connections hung before me like great spiders' webs, and all of them betrayed by every shipment, every scrape of pen on paper.

Vancouver. There'd be none there to hear the words I had to say. None as counted, or who might listen or care. What point was there in my incarceration, then? It was vainglory. In Vancouver there would only be the assizes to speak before. For the whites, I'd be an Indian guilty of his crimes
by his very nature. To the Indian: a half-breed guilty of betrayals too numberless to count. And then the final insult of David's jerry-built tangle of a funeral. If it were true I weren't in court to answer charges on David's funeral, still in my confused thinking it was all becoming tied together. And if I had any chance to get hold of witnesses to help me, I'd need ones sympathetic to the man I am.

When next I opened my eyes, the shadows spoke of late afternoon, and I had passed the whole day in my thinking, without getting any nearer to a solution.

Charley came at dusk. “Fuck bastard Wol'cot,” he said first in English, what at least made me smile a bit. He'd had to battle hard before Woolacott would let him in to visit. I ate the food Charley had with him—some bread, dried fish, and a paste of salmonberries—and he told me what he'd learned.

Not content with waiting on my arrest, Halliday had been busy distributing evil rumours that I had brung humiliation on the people in all the things I did. And there would indeed be many keen to speak against me, says Charley. Where he was at now, Charley had not been able to discover.

Of the white men in the village, he had learned less. Corker, headmaster at that damned boys' school, was away along the coast, gathering children like some lanky white vulture version of a Dzonokwa. All he wants for is a sack. Reverend Hall claimed he was too busy to talk to Charley, what hurt some, given the years we had spent in each other's company and, in strange point of fact, the sort of rancorous respect we had for one another. He ain't all badness, the Reverend. Not like his crony Crosby, with his spite and his scheming malice. Reverend Hall it was what taught me to read and write, as I have said. Spencer was at the cannery and only boiled his head when Charley came near. My sister was as yet too angry to talk sense.

Charley had a letter with him. I tore it open. The heading stated it came from the American Museum of Natural History, New York. It was dated March, 1900, and addressed to Mr. George Hunt, Post Office Alert Bay, Fort Rupert, B.C.

It read:
My dear George, I did receive your letter and the accompanying artefacts, for which my thanks. My schedule is as yet unfixed, and you have
not yet given a date to when you will join me here in New York to work upon the museum collections. I understand that you may need to work for Mr. Spencer in the cannery in the summer months. Yet I could promise you a better wage should you say you could come immediately. Please write as soon as you are able.

When you visit, I shall be most keen to press you into writing more of the paxala shaman myths and practices, and ideally of your own experiences therewith, of which we have so often spoken in the past. I understand that there is much that must remain a secret even until after our own deaths. Yet I do believe such material to be of the utmost importance to future generations. I, for my part, am willing to work with you in any way on this, to eschew all personal glory that might pertain to the publication of such tracts, and to bestow them somewhere appropriate for those that should come after us.

I send my kindest regards to your wife, to David, whom I do so hope is faring better, and to all your family. With kindest regards, yours very sincerely
…

It was signed,
F.R. Boas
.

Well, I have plenty to tell him on those aspects of healing what I have been conjuring with.

I told Charley to find me pen and paper when next he visited. For I had to write Boas straightways and tell him of my predicament. Then Charley and I talked some more.

“I'll not lie for being Kwagiulth,” says I.

“Though what you did was Tlingit,” Charley says, “if it were anything at all.”

But, I pointed out, he was talking about David's funeral, not the ritual for which I was arrested.

“Well that is how it works in eyes of the people,” says Charley. “You will need witnesses to support you, if you is to have any chance at escaping justice. Who'll travel as far as Vancouver to help the likes of you?” He tells me Spencer ain't necessarily wrong in wondering who I thought I was helping in admitting to the charges. I'd but propagate the view of Indian savagery to an even wider audience, which weren't any part of what he had been discussing in Teguxste.