The Cannibal Spirit (25 page)

“Am I hearing that?” he said. Then the voice became clear to him. “Christ!” he said. “Is that George?”

“Ek.”

“What's he singing?”

“George sing hamatsa song.”

“Where is he?”

“Forest.”

Harry scanned the edges of the trees. “I don't see him.”

“No.”

Harry coughed. Blood sprayed out across his forearms. He cursed softly, and Charley looked at him.

“Die soon,” he said.

“You been saying that for a while. I'm still fucking here, though, ain't I.” The singing grew louder, as if it were just within the tree line. Then it stopped. George called out in Kwakwala.

“What's that?”

“Say, what happen here for rifle shoot?”

“What about the dreamer? He's still in the forest. Warn him!”

“Ek.” Charley made as if to shout down, but now Walewid leapt up from his hiding place, his wolf mask on his head still. He clambered on the fallen pole and called out at length in passion.

Charley translated. “Say George family kill Walewid family. Say revenge. Say George do bad at funeral, make bad name all Indian. Say revenge. Say George come out now, maybe not kill everyone.”

George spoke again, his voice a question. This time, however, Charley called out himself. George called back. Harry watched as Walewid spun and pointed up in their direction. He saw one of the warriors aim his rifle toward them.

“What did you say?”

“Tell George we here, but say we have three rifle watch Walewid men. Say dreamer in forest. George say dreamer not problem. Now George speak Walewid, better all come talk together.”

“He ain't crazed no more?”

“George back.”

Walewid had climbed down again and was talking with his men. After a while, he turned and shouted. George responded.

“Walewid say not believe we three rifle. Say we shoot more if we three rifle. He not stupid Indian. But George say anyways he have rifle too. He say he see Walewid burn canoe. Big insult.” There was a pause. Then, “Walewid now say talk better.”

George spoke, and Charley called in response. “Ask what happen. I say same story I speak him before, by lake. Say you die soon.” George's voice came from the forest, and now its tone was thick.

“George say he come out now. Tell Walewid not fire. Walewid say yes not fire.” Charley pointed near the stream. “Look.”

The undergrowth trembled, and then a figure emerged. It looked some part of the forest itself, as if the wilderness had taken bodily form and stepped down onto the shore. Red cedar branches were tied about it, and upon its head were strapped fern fronds. Its face was painted black and it came in a half crouch, as if it were partway between animal and man. In one hand it clutched a machete and in its other something swung like a pendulum. The figure chanted in a gruff monotone that barely sounded human to Harry's ears.

“Hamatsa come back from wild,” said Charley.

“What's that he's carrying?”

But Charley didn't answer.

NO SENSE
… No sense … Blackness and lightning strikes to burst open my body, and then darkness comes again. Finally, a golden flickering at my eyelids and they come open. A roof. Flames. The burn of heat to my skin. A face. A man with his face black-painted, like he's a demon out of night. His eyes are blue. Wrong for that. Must be a breed. A man I ain't about to believe in, pretending like he is an Indian. The face comes down toward me, eyes close to mine then sweeping down along my body. A sucking at my stomach, like as if I am being drawn on by some furied whirlpool. White flame is in my guts. I would scream if I was able. But I am mute. Something coming out from my stomach, drawn through the cables of my intestines up towards the surface. The tug of teeth at my skin till I feel my stomach coming open. I can see the roof again. The breed man's face comes before me again. Blood all about his mouth. The mouth spitting. Blood, black in the firelight, blood on his mouth and chin, blood over all his teeth. My hands going now for my stomach. It is opened up, bleeding. My guts could spill across the floor were I to move. I have to hold them in. Blue eyes over me. Triumphant. If I move, I lose my entrails.

And now, behind that blue-eyed Devil's face, high above him into the roof, filling all the air, there are the magnificent, holy body of Killer Whale, of Lagoyewilé, twisting up in the smoke and flames, as if it has leapt out from the waters. It hangs, massive, above everything, and I call for it to come crashing back down and crush the Devil with his tearing teeth beneath it. But then I see only the blue eyes as the Devil hisself leans across me. His hair hangs as a curtain all about my face, till I can see nothing else. He is closer now. Closer till his lips will touch mine and I will taste the blood of my own stomach on his teeth.

Darkness.

No sense.

Then pain like a blow from a hatchet through my hand and along my arm. I jerked. I smelled the foul stench of hair and skin burning. My arm had been in the fire whilst I was in my vision.

For that is what it was: a vision. So I do absolutely believe—still now, even here, in the City of Reason that is New York, in this very Cathedral of Reason, the American Museum of Natural History, no less. This place that I have made my choice and I have come to, as might be said, in pilgrimage. This place what is testament to my decision of myself. But even here I do state that what I saw that night beside the lake was more than just the delusions of some battered lunatic, his brain all mashed from rage and loss. No. Those teeth at my stomach, the feel of the blood sliding off the canines of the Devil above me to slither hot onto my cheek, so that, even with my arm burned and half-conscious by the fire, I must wipe in horror at my face till it feels clean again, so that I must feel across the aged muscles of my stomach for a rent, and lie like a baby still inside its mother's womb for fear of the skin tearing. So immediate was that vision, and so violent its impact on me and on my actions after, that I have no choice but to call it such.

The wooden box was open by the fire. I shuffled over on my knees. The syrup-reek of corruption. The nose had sunk back into the face. The skin was black now, and the closed eyelids concave where the eyeballs was melting away beneath. I ran my burnt fingers down across David's face, lightly, for I feared he might crumble in an instant away to nothing.

But still no tears did come, as they had not since first I heard of his passing.

I woke the following morning to the dew soaking through me, and the calls of the ducks out on the lake. I made coffee, the first for many days. I sat beneath the old killer whale pole. I took up a wrap of dry salmon. The smell of it made me near to fainting. My stomach moaned as I chewed.

I see the details of that morning like they is here before me now. I was feeling how it was also such a cloudless morning after rain the night before, clear and cool and empty. Clear to think. Even my burnt forearm throbbed with a clean, pure pain that helped me in my clarity, as if in the burning
there had been some sort of purging, some clearing away of the refuse what had been clogging up my soul.

Tiny pieces of salmon was caught in the calluses of my fingers. I stood and stretched till my age cracked through my shoulders. I walked on bare feet through the grasses to the shore. Away around the lake I heard wood being dragged through brush, a slap of tail on water, cubs chirruping, the industry of beavers. In the sunlight, the water ran through my fingers like streaming gold.

David's head had rotted. I should have laid it in running water till all the fat and brain and blood was washed away. That's the way of it. At least, it was the way of my mother's people for those of chiefly blood: the corpse opened at the pelvis, the entrails pulled out, then held in a fast-flowing river till clean, and after placed in the sun to dry.

The Kwagiulth ain't got no such practice. Their only mummies are those put up on the branches of trees, which by some fortune dry out in the wind, instead of putrefying. I could still see a few broken shapes of boxes, up in the trees close by the lake, where some of the old shamans had chosen to be buried in secret from the tribe, perhaps to lend mystery to their legend, or to those of their sons what might follow them, or some for belief in the power of the place, or in their own immortal souls.

Oh, I know it: the question what begs answering. What can be in a man's mind to have performed such a deed? To have chopped the head from his own son. Perhaps it is there in the story of Shaiks, in the story of the origin of the box. The Tlingit do keep such trinkets. Or once they did, at least. But there ain't no such tradition among the Kwagiulth of taking body parts of family for keepsakes. They used to go headhunting up and down the coast in times past, like many of the tribes, but for trophies and glory, or for revenge. Not like this.

I wonder if I was playing out some history I imagined to be true. Some history of which I craved to be still a part. I know the ways of the people maybe better than does anyone, with all the researching I have done. Truth be, I think now I was concocting my own ritual, piecemeal, from the scatterings of knowledge what was lying about inside my gyrating head that night of the funeral. Also, there was the needing to atone for my
failure as a healer, though how separating David's head from his neck might have helped … well, there ain't much of reason in it, when all aspects is considered.

As I washed my salmon-covered hands in the lake that morning, the vision of the killer whale as it rose up above me in the greathouse of my vision was there in my mind. Of course, I had been seeing myself through the eyes of the sick boy I healed so long ago. And what a diabolical and beastish figure was I, hulking above me, my fangs those of a wolf.

How, with that whole sackful of shams, had I healed the young boy? Perhaps it was that once I did believe in the shaman's ways, as later I did not. But the boy believed that I would make him well. He was healed because he believed his dream of me. Belief, belief, belief.

I saved the boy and, after, failed to save so many. Failed to save David. I performed every ritual on him that I knew or I had ever heard of. Somewhere my faith in my own brown blood was lost. Yet surely it was my actions what mattered. Not my belief. The boy I healed was the one who needed the belief, not me. Maybe David knew I had no faith, and so he could have no faith in me. Then it was my lost faith what failed him. My lost faith in my Indian blood. How had it deserted me?

It was why I had come to the House of Shamans: in recognition of that failure of belief. I saw that then. And there was consequences to such understanding.

Lagoyewilé told me that. “One son is dead. The other is dying. There is consequence to all you do. Remember it.” I leapt up, and ducks flew up off the water in surprise at me. Lagoyewilé had come to me in the night! He had been beside me by the fire. He had spoken to me. Another spirit was there with him. Some demon—beaten, ragged, savage in his intensity.

Lagoyewilé spoke to me. He said there was one as yet needed saving. What was it he said?

But I could not place all the details of the night's vision in their right order as yet. So, first things first, I says to myself. Something, at least, I knew needed doing. I went back to the camp from the lake and made free with the machete, till the base of the killer whale pole was visible all the way to the earth. My fingers tore up the turf. I burrowed like a rabbit till
there was a hole two foot deep. I took up the box and put it there, in the ground. Before the soil went back in over it, however, I did lift up the lid for one last peek.

His face was lost in decrepitude. He was gone. Only the flesh remains, and that is but the rotten nothingness of the world. So I put back the lid, piled over the soil, and placed the turf back over the top.

And there was an end to it. There weren't nothing else. There weren't nothing left to think.

Boas wrote me a letter once.
Get me Indian dreams
. I wrote him one of my own. I fly upwards, as if going to the place where are the stars, for they are showing, though it be still daytime. I see all around the world: the great curve of the Earth, as it is described. Then I want to go down again, but in vain. Instead, I hang there as if from the edge of some impossible high cliff, the vertigo spoiling in me till I cry out with the terror of it.

I lay on my back on the damp grass beside the old pole. Lying there, faced with deciding what came next, I felt that same vertigo I had had in my dream. There was something, some words spoken to me in the night that had intention in them. But I could not grasp hold of them as yet.

Over me, an eagle soared in the sky. He must've been watching to see if I would ever rise again. I had no notion if I ever would.

The clouds, the eagles, ravens loafing towards their daily business, ducks come flapping in to land upon the lake. The day passed over me as I did lie there with my face pointed skywards, beside the ruins of the House of Shamans. There weren't no decisions I had come to about myself. There weren't even a plan fermenting in my mind on what I should do next. I just lay there like some blank page over which a writer sits with his pen in his mouth, head as empty as the page itself. I was done with what it was I'd come to do. Now there weren't nothing left.