The Cannibal Spirit (40 page)

And gradually I drew the lid up, till it fell away to the ground and my son was once again exposed.

The men was murmuring now. What is he doing? What part of ritual is this? But they still trusted me. Charley put his hand to my arm. I just shrugged him away. All I could see was the nape of my dead son's broken neck, where I had thrust it down into its coffin with my own violent hands.

I was still holding the hatchet. So now I reach in to hold the hair, to lift the skull so that the neck is better exposed. I draw it up. And then I plunge the hatchet down. Again. Twice more. The body of my son flops forward and down into the gravebox, and there are ragged tendrils of skin, far gone in putrefaction, about the rent where my son's head had recently been. The stump of the severed spine, pale spinal cord, folds away into the meat below, like a snake retreating back into a hole.

Oh God, that I am such a man! That I am capable of such acts as these! No, let me tell this tale through. For there in the blackness of the water, it was the first time I saw again what I had done.

The hatchet falls from my hand, gored and foul, and David's slack countenance, where I hold up his severed head, grey and turning already to black in places, long spent of its life.

I go down onto my knees then. A pagan missionary praying to the gods of his brown people. Or to the One True God? Pleading. Forgive me. Despising, maybe? The rain thundering on me and my arms dropping to my sides. The thud of the head as it hits the ground beside me, me falling forward so my own head knocks against the gravebox. Me choking. But shaking myself upright straight after, refusing my own dissolution.

So I pull myself up once more with my one empty hand on the gravebox's lid. I look down into the box at what I have done.

The rumours of the coast have this as well to say of me. That I did then reach for the skinning knife at my belt, drop the severed head, lean over the box. That I did draw up the torso, grip it by the shoulder. That I did slice at the meat of David's neck, cut away a strip of that rank flesh, place it then between my teeth. The smell of ripening death in my nostrils, biting down, sucking as if on dry salmon, stomach clenching, gagging bile to stream with the dead juices of my son, acids blending and burning at my mouth, swallowing down the flesh.

That is what they say of me. White men lick their chops at such thinking. But that the people theirselves have been thinking it as well! That my daughter should suspect it!

So cannibals roam our forests. Brown men consume the flesh of other men. I ain't never seen it happen. And here I am, the only man living directly accused of it. A half-breed white. A fool in his grief. Fool guilty. Fool dispossessed. Not saviour. Not hero. Not even devil. Just fool. I am guilty of all crimes. Such is the way of the man who exists between worlds. All sides may cast their crimes upon him.

Floating out there, face down on the water in the darkness, seeing again those memories, I opened my mouth and the seawater came in. I thought, I can breathe it till the weight in my lungs drags me down.

Instead, I coughed and thrashed and spun till I floated on my back, still hacking, my arms widespread, beating at the water. I spat and gagged. At last my airways cleared and my breathing slowed.

And the rage came into me. But it was a clear rage. A rage that purged. Flames, yellow and hot to burn out the petty reckonings of my despair. I called damnation on the world. I called it on all those what hindered me, on all those what spoke ill words of me—Indians and whites alike. A pox on them all! I was not subject to them. I was not victim to them. To any of these men and women who sought to brand me as their own—or as the enemy.

Above, the sky was clear, the stars brilliant, imposing, weakening the moon's pale claw to nothing. “There are no monsters!” I said. I shouted it over and over.

I woke beside old Francine the next morning feeling chock full of shame, but clear as to the scope and nature of my foolishness. I thought on Harry placing himself in danger for me. On all those others what looked for my welfare. It weren't justice, after all, to let them suffer so, that I might wallow in my pity.

I went straight to the store to speak with Grace. I told her of all I had in me. “My mind had left me,” says I. “But jail ain't helping no one. I know it now. I'll find a ways out of it. See if I don't.” She cast a pretty leery eye on me, and didn't have much to say by return. I know it would have to be by my actions that I would make her see I meant my words.

My first thoughts was to head back to the village where the ritual for which I stood accused had occurred. But Charley says to me that he has already been there and none weren't ready to stand me as witness. I suppose I ought to have knowed it already, but I was quite angered for a time.

“They don't want to be before a court saying they was also at the ceremony what is banned,” as Charley says, and I suppose he was right. Still, Mr. Bowser weren't going to be overjoyed when I turned up with just myself and some doubtful-looking old cripple Indian for company.

Charley and me hopped the next boat heading south to Alert Bay, the money in my pocket. Grace came with us, refusing all appeals to stay behind. “You've near to killed him, then had him locked up in the jail, and now you'd refuse me to see him?” says she, and there was no answering that. Poor old Francine got lumbered with opening up the store each morning. Still, I knows she don't give too much time to the tricksy ways of the people in their negotiating, so I weren't overly worried on that score. “Do what is right to come back to us,” says she by way of goodbye, and that was all the words she had, so angry and fretful as I guess she was.

I went first to see Halliday. He had Harry locked up for a month for his misdeeds. There weren't much to say about that. He'd caught him fair and square with a cargo of illegal liquor. The Indian agent smiled on
Charley when he saw him. “You're a strong swimmer,” says he. Charley just shrugged his lumpy shoulders.

“What of the
Hesperus
?” says I.

“She is made forfeit by his actions,” says Halliday. But when I started to protesting on how much of my family's property he had done from us already, he raised up his hand to quiet me. “I am not ignorant of Harry's motivations in acting as he did, George. The law tells me I must auction off all vessels that are taken during such offences. Be assured the auction will be closed and Harry will be but the sole bidder.”

“And the starting price?”

“Affordable.”

I humphs and spits and stomps some, but Charley saw the wisdom of things and drew me off. “He ain't all evil, that one,” says he, as we went through the back of Halliday's office to go visiting with Harry.

Abayah and Annie was keeping him fed. He was resting there on the bunk under the window, right where I had so recently been myself, his head back on the wall, eyes closed and snoring. He had his shirt off, the ropes of his sailor's arms and shoulders resting loose, the one side what had been injured drooping lower than the other, the great hollow depression of his wound striped purple now with lumpy scar tissue, and none too pretty on the eye. Still, he looked a man quite perfectly at peace in that moment. Then Grace spoke out, cursing him for a flat-faced idiot getting chopped up so. His eyes came open and, seeing Grace, he rose up like a duck from the water with a pike at its ass, stood there, shuffling and with his fingers squirming as if he was up before the judge hisself. She had a few comments of her own he needed hearing. So I gave him a few words of my thanks, told him I was sure to be seeing him soon, shared a sympathetical look with him over Grace's shoulder, and we left them to it, eyeing each other, wary, through the bars.

Anyhow, there weren't much as I could say. I didn't want to speak more on my doubts about him, even to say they was gone. I had been so wrong about it all. And he seemed to have pardoned me for the horrors what he saw up there at the House of Shamans.

We stopped overnight with Abayah before the steamer was due the following morning. I went by Annie's. “I have had it told me, by such as know, that I am a fool and, quite probably, mad with it.” To which she added her agreement. “Well, now I am about trying to make amends,” says I. So did we part then, on good terms, though I did not go see her husband—didn't seem much point before whatever was to happen did.

So Charley and me went on down to Vancouver. My lawyer, Mr. Bowser, when he sees me and Charley, did shake his head, and made it clear my chances wouldn't be more than panning for gold in the bath.

I had other thoughts.

A few days later and there I was, waiting outside the court in a fair morning turning to hot, sitting on those steps what I had stood on two short weeks before, when Mr. Bowser made my bail for me. As the city rattled past, so the dust mounted up from off the road like smoke devils.

Charley Seaweed was beside me, ready to state to the court there hadn't been no human corpse present at the hamatsa ceremony for which I stood accused. I confess I was a mite dubious at how useful he might be to my cause: his leathery brown old Indian face, short most of its teeth, what looks more often than not as if it is leering, filthy, at some young saintly missy striding by, his hunched back, what was made all the more fantastical by being dressed up smart in a new grey shirt and black morning jacket.

As we waited on Bowser turning up, so we did watch those down at the far end of the court's stairs. There was three of them. One was a tall man and thin. His name was Copper Dancer. Beside him was a shorter man by the name of Inviter, as I might translate it. Both was well dressed enough in black suits and cravats that I knew they must be funded by others wealthier than theirselves. They paced and turned, paced and turned. I could see they was made discomforted by the city's overbearing presence. They did not look our way.

There was a third man also present, he dressed in the black gown of the priesthood, and his bowl-cut hair without a hat. To-Cop sat upon the lower step and watched us back, without expression.

It was the morning of the second day of the trial.

The first day I spent listening to those as was arranged against me. I heard tell of the wrongdoings what I had performed at that ritual, as the prosecution and, after, as To-Cop did recount them. To-Cop told how he had been present that seventeenth day of February as a spectator only at the village of the chieftain Big Mountain. He was there to watch a dance of the hamatsa, what is one—as he did describe it—who dances and eats a dead body. I learned how the corpse of a dead old woman was brung in to the greathouse by the hamatsa dancers. I learned how I was called forward by Big Mountain, how I went all about the house singing my sacred song, how I took a long blade and chopped off the corpse's legs and then its head, and did give out portions to all the hamatsa chieftains present, and then how we sat and ate up all the fleshy parts of the body. I heard as well how I stood up, at the end, and advised everyone not to say anything about it, as it was a most serious affair.

Well, it was a day of appealing storytelling, for sure. But there is another version to be told, though it was not to be the one I was to tell in court. There is guilt tied up in it, but of a different sort.

It was February. I had been a long day travelling across a cold and lifeless sea, the sky a grey haze what it can't be seen where the air does finish and the clouds begin. The day was ending and my bones creaking when I pulled my canoe up the pebbled beach at the village of Klawitsis. Chief Big Mountain's village.

The people was at their preparations for a feast. As I walked up among the buildings, I says a word here or there to those I know, and I saw how the piles of blankets stacked up inside the doorways, ready for distributing at the feast, was threadbare and not of those quantities I remember from past days.

“George is here,” old man Seal Singer says. “Hide everything away or he'll leave with his canoe piled up with our treasures.”

“I'll take a couple of your fat daughters as well, Seal Singer,” I says. “You've plenty spare.”

“They're all away south to the cities now,” Seal Singer says, more quiet, and I knew it was to work on their backs among the white men.

I came to the greathouse, and there was the chief inside, Big Mountain, old now, if huge in his body still. “There is witchcraft afoot,” says he.

“I'll find those what are doing it,” says I. “I'll take the game from them.”

That night I slept out beyond the edge of the village among the dead. I lay there among the graveboxes hidden in their wooden mausoleums, and above me in silhouette against the stars was others strung up and lodged on the branches of the trees. Some of the people spied me there, and I knew I was spoken on and wondered at, feared perhaps as well, which was a good thing for my endeavours.

Next day, I strode out through the forest. After some hours, I stopped for a blow, leaning against the trunk of a red cedar, speaking a few quiet words to it: mossy, ragged master. I was wondering at how the years creep in, and me not noticing, to steal from me my vigour.

It was some ways ahead, fifty yards or an hour's hard walking, I didn't know. Lagoyewilé—what is Charley Seaweed, of course, when he's sneaking about doing his dreaming for me—had told me where to go the evening before, as we sat by a fire at the water's edge, the forest hanging over us, a day's paddle still from Klawitsis village.

“Follow the route I tells you,” says he, “and blackheart fucks at the end you will find.”

So I had walked for three hours from the village in the direction what he told me, and then he said I'd see the fire by its smoke.

But there was a rainstorm raging, and the forest bleeding green shadows. So no smoke could I see, nor much of ought else besides. I'd fancied putting a bullet in a deer as I went on, but no animals moved in that sodden wilderness. The only thing in my nose was the fresh-mould smell of rain. No sound was there more than hiss and drip and, dull through the miles of forest, the roar of thunder out on the ocean.