The Cannibal Spirit (5 page)

“You got that right,” said Harry.

“Have baccy?” Charley said, and “Mmm!” his lips wobbling, “Nice box!” when Harry handed across his ornate tobacco tin. Charley rolled and lit, passed back the tin, not without reluctance, and then directed Harry toward the trading store at the far end of the village.

He stumbled along past the buildings. There was no one to be seen on that cold day. Outside the store, his future wife was perched in an ancient rocking chair, smoking a long reed pipe. She wore a blue cotton dress that rode up, showing enough of her strong legs to draw his attention. She seemed insensible to the weather. On her head was a wide basket hat, her round face and sharp-slanting eyes imperious beneath.

“You need engine for you boat, Mr. Whiteman,” she said. “Then you face not look like dry halibut now.” She leaned far back in the rocker, until Harry thought she had to topple, and roared, beating her thigh with her palm. Harry laughed along with her.

“I've an engine,” he said, which impressed her right enough, “just nothing to fuel it.”

But there was no spare fuel to be had in Rupert. So he'd sent an order south with the next steamer, and waited.

Now, outside the store, Harry stood to take a breath. So overdue a paint was the building's facade that the exposed planking was grey and cracked and warped. Above, the steep roof grumbled its reminder of repairs. He liked things ordered, but the winter weather had kept him from doing much about the building's exterior.

He mounted the steps. He fumbled in his greatcoat pocket for the key, but the door was already on its latch. Inside were soft movements. He peered in through the grime on the window to see his wife peering back, her treacle skin darker still in the store's gloomy light.

“Ya, Caddie,” she said and pulled open the door. “I make food.”

“David's to be buried on the island.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding slowly, seemingly to herself.

She stepped into the daylight. They stood for a long moment staring into each other's eyes. Then her mouth fell, her cheeks took to quivering, and she walked two small steps to rest against him. He put his arms about her waist, thinking how her body always reminded him of a seal, the layer of fat and the elastic vigour beneath.

“Caddie,” she wept into his chest. “My great brother is dead.”

He found that he was stroking her hair, and was surprised by his tenderness. Over her shoulder the forest was a scant hundred yards away. He wanted to run away into the woods to hide.
You'll never know …

“I have come to ask that I may take your daughter in marriage.” The day he'd gone to speak with George. Nervous like some junior tar sent up before the captain; but near feverish for her—black-eyed coquette always in his vision, whichever way he looked.

She'd be on the jetty each morning when he lifted the door to his boat's hold—wherein he slept—and emerged on deck. There'd be nothing but a blanket wrapped about her, her hair drawn tightly back so that she looked stern, yet girlish too. “Still here, Mr. White Man?” she'd say, or “Scratching balls and yawning, new day is dawning!” or “You dreaming 'bout me down in there, Mr. Caduwudduder?,” tapping on the hull as she said it. She never could speak his surname, even now she was married to him. And she did plague his thoughts each night, as he lay alone in the hammock, if yet his dreams were always darker.

He'd walk the shore and she'd be always nearby when he turned about, until the people took to sniggering, and Charley piped up one day, “Best see to her, or people say you a white man have no cock.”

He would have made advances, but that he'd already met her father.

“What have you in the hold?” George Hunt glared down from the jetty, his frame looming like a grizzly's in silhouette against the bright sky. It was a few days after Harry had first arrived. “More liquor for those already lost?” He was right, of course. The hold was loaded with cases and kegs of New Westminster whisky. It was his third trip up the coast, though he'd not come this far north before.

“I trade what I am able,” Harry said.

“My family's traders also,” said Hunt. Harry said he did not seek to impose himself upon the man's market; that he was grateful for the help afforded him by the people of the village; that he'd take receipt of his fuel when it should arrive, and be on his way.

“See that's all you take,” said Hunt, and stamped away along the jetty toward the shore. Harry'd not risk the wrath of such a man by dallying with his daughter, maddening though she was to the balance of his mind.

When his gasoline arrived, however, he found the days passed and still he did not leave. He'd stop by the trading store. They would make pretense of discussing the price of various produce, the state of the clouds that day and what it might mean, the passing of a steamer visible out on the ocean. She was shy herself by now, and her humour had quite faded, until they barely looked at each other and could only stutter absurdities, before one or the other would scurry off. Harry felt himself a boy just out of puberty again.

Then one night there came a tapping on the deck above his head, and when he pushed up the trap door, she slipped inside, all chance of sailing without mischance from this landing was lost, and, soon after, he found himself asking a man he feared for the thing that man would be least willing, as he thought, to give.

So Harry spoke the words, but George Hunt said nothing, his huge body squeezed into his chair before the cedarwood desk in a corner of the greathouse, a sheaf of close-written paper laid neatly out before him, his hard eyes on Harry. So Harry squirmed and his feet shuffled like he had no control of them, until he found himself speaking words he would never otherwise have spoken.

“I know I ain't much,” he said. “Indeed, I don't say I'm much of anything at all. But I have my boat and the things I know and, such as I am, I'd promise to do right by her.” He resented George for drawing this from him as soon as it had been said. And was it not about as far from the truth as could be, just waiting as he was for his moment to escape?

But what made him even ask, when he'd had his taste of her already?

Oh, he wanted more, of course he did. The fine tilt of her eyelids, each alien twist of her thinking, her skin beneath his fingers, her tomfoolish jokes: he wanted more and more. And she was a good, strong woman:
raucous, but honest. A decent wife for any man. Still, he'd hardly been seeking such permanence. All the years at sea, gathering what fortune he could. And now he had his treasure, the
Hesperus
, and the world spread before him. He flew before the winds of his fate. He didn't tack against it, as someone had once put it to him.

In any case, the winter storms came howling down the island's coastline off the Pacific, until it was not hard to persuade himself he had to stay. If only till the spring. So he'd promise to do right by her, he told Hunt, in the gloomy month of December, and then he said it again. But still the old man was silent, until Harry shivered at the duplicity of his own tongue, and some deeper shame came upon him. There was something, after all, when he thought on it. Something he sensed in himself that day before his future father-in-law. It felt like what? Respite? The thought of setting out upon the ocean suddenly felt too much to cope with. Running before a wind. Always running. And now to have an end to it! To feel peace. He thought on Grace until he was certain that his words were true. He would do right by her. Yes. He'd support her—and, yes, he'd do right by all these people here.

So he stood fast under the eagle gaze of George Hunt. He did his utmost not to jitter, remembering Grace's words to him: “My father is a big man, but not a bad man. Don't shake like fish in a boat. Look him right back.”

At last, Hunt spoke up. “You've heard of my labours here?” He gestured down at the papers on his desk.

“You write about the Indians.”

Hunt glared up through the thorny twists of his eyebrows. Then he reached and brought down a book from off the shelf above the desk. He held it up to Harry, made almost as if to hand it to him. But then he threw it down on top of the papers. The candle spluttered, showing a rough leather binding, black in the flickering light.

“Written of them?” Hunt said. His voice was like a gathering wind, blowing up toward a squall. “Whole books. On us, mind! For what is my family if it ain't Indian?”

Harry said nothing. He had heard plenty from Grace already about the man's book that he had penned with some famous scientist out of New
York. It puffed up his bride-to-be like a cock turkey when she spoke on it. He'd even had a leaf through, though he hadn't taken a whole lot of sense from it. The Indians' ways and doings, rituals and clothing, how they built their canoes and the like. Truth was, it made Harry all the more nervous in his presence. Six and a half feet of trader, Indian chieftain, writer of books … even scientist.

“Our skin is brown,” said Hunt, “and we are a family of substance.”

“I don't have no prejudice like that,” Harry said, and carefully.

Hunt leaned forward, his chair groaning, to better look at him. Harry directed his eyes floorwards. The silence dragged. It took an effort of will to remain still.

“There ain't much choice of men hereabouts,” Hunt said at last. “Most of them dead.” He was silent again. Then he said, “Well, if you'll squarely face the seriousness of what you is asking. And if she herself is willing.”

Harry floundered through the rituals, feeling the fool in his Indian finery, a button blanket wrapped about him, a bear-fur hat upon his head. Afterwards, they went to the Reverend Crosby at the mission as well, and he gave a blessing, if sourly, to their union. The priest didn't rightly approve of mixed-race weddings and, especially, as the man said quite openly, ones that had their inception in damned heathen idolatry.

Grace's joy, the goodwill of the people toward him, then George handing him the management of the family store: all brought him almost to believe that this small place on the edge of nowhere might become a home.

But it did not answer. Grace was all things she should be, if she had a voice sometimes to scare a whale from the water. Still, he felt as if he dreamed his way about the village, as if he was living in some in-between place, as if—were he to shake himself hard enough—in that shaking he would wake suddenly to find himself alone, the
Hesperus
heeling far over, a moment from broaching in massive seas.

And what did these people want with him? Truly? Taciturn white man no one knew from whatever Adam they believed in. No member of any of the lineages they so obsessed over. It was as George said: there weren't men enough left no more. He was new stock, and George didn't think much of
that stock anyhow. Harry had seen that well enough the morning before, when they'd had their disagreement.

Now, standing together outside the store, Grace sniffed and then, taking hold of his shirt, blew her nose in it. “Must get ready the funeral,” she said.

He took away his arms from around her. “Yes,” he said. “There ain't much time.”

It was noon and the people were gathered in front of the Hunt family greathouse. Most squatted on the beach in family clusters, their formal blankets wrapped closely about them, sewn with buttons in designs of animals and ancestors. They wore hats made of the fur of black bear, or else white man's billycocks or shovels, and the women in wide-brimmed hats of woven basketry.

Harry stood in the doorway of the greathouse. With their wrinkled faces and their straight backs, the people looked like the bands of monkeys he'd seen once when he'd docked in Madras, aboard a steamship trading out of Hong Kong. They'd been hunkered in similar fashion, their knees drawn up, perched on the walls around the port, picking in each other's sandy fur. Weren't we all from monkeys, far back in the past? He'd heard it said, though it sounded fantastical to him, and he knew the Church would not want such slanders spoken. Anyhow, what did these people know of the spread of civilization? Of the great cities of the world, such as Harry had seen? Of the politics of empires and the powers of the great companies that were the blood flow in their veins? He'd sailed the merchantmen all across the Pacific. History had no role to play in such a benighted place as this.

He whistled to himself, softly through his clenched teeth.

Behind him, the fire thundered inside the house, its flames almost to the roof. He had ducked outside to escape the heat though he knew he'd suffer taunts for his weakness later, soft white man. They threw the fire up high and sat close about it, no expressions on their faces even as the leathery cocksuckers were being fried alive. His wife said it was for pride. Pagan ignorance, more like.

He'd been with his father-in-law through the morning, helping prepare for the funeral. There'd been food to bring in and prepare, blankets to come from the store for handing out during the dinner that evening, dancers to speak with, costumes to dig out of the wooden chests in the greathouse, masks to be taken from the walls and dusted down. The Indians did most of it, and Harry spent much of the morning, in fact, standing around watching. He had been tasked to bring the family women to the island on the
Hesperus
, so he'd been out and run her engine for a short time.

Now the men were going about the rituals prior to placing David's body in its gravebox. He heard the beaters strike time inside. He looked at the day. The sun had burned away the mist, but now clouds swept down the coast from the Pacific, low enough for rain, yet soaring miles into the sky in grey and violet and yellow whorls. He turned back inside.

The women of the family stood bunched together on the left side of the house, dressed as those outside. The men sat to the right behind the beaters, who were kneeling before a hollow log, hammering rhythm with long wooden staves. Five dancers moved around the fire, stooping low, their bodies cloaked in blankets woven of red cedar bark, masks on their heads of raven and of killer whale. The flames threw shadows, huge and dissolute, across the timber beams and uprights, and these carven images, all claw and beak and tooth, seemed to coil and quiver in the flickering light.