The Devil's Making

by Seán Haldane

  Wiladzap, squatting with his back against the wall, looked up at me, eyes calm.

  I asked him why he had not talked to Mulligan.

  Wiladzap merely said, ‘Mulligan pelton. Cultus pelton.’ Meaning that Mulligan was a worthless fool.

  Since I had intended to warn Wiladzap against Mulligan, I felt relieved.

  Then Wiladzap asked if I had found who killed McCrory. If so, Wiladzap explained, then Wiladzap could go free.

  I said I did not know. My despair probably showed in my eyes.

  Wiladzap, who was studying me closely, said, ‘Spose mesika halo klap man mamook opitsah opitsah doctah, alki nika wind.’ Literally: ‘If you not find man make knife knife doctor, by and by I dead.’

  ‘Alki nika klap,’ I assured Wiladzap. (‘By and by I find’) But now Wiladzap’s eyes too were showing despair.

  * * *

  There was one minor piece of investigation which I had thought of before but had not had the nerve to pursue. I visited the pharmacist who had analyzed the herbs in the alienist’s basket, who was also Victoria’s main supplier of surgical goods – Mr Newton. I asked for a brief private talk. Newton asked his assistant to look after the store, and led me behind misted glass windows into a small room full of boxes and lined shelves of drugs, trusses and surgical corsets. Newton was a lean skeletal man, not at all welcoming. I started by asking him if he sold lambskin sheaths.

  ‘Of course,’ Newton said resignedly. ‘But you didn’t need to request a private interview. You might have asked for the “special supplies depot”.’

  ‘I didn’t intend to buy any. I’m investigating the McCrory murder, as you know, and I believe he may have bought his supplies of sheaths here.’

  Newton actually laughed, with a dry crackling sound. ‘He did indeed. Now you tell me what he used them for.’

  ‘All I know is that he used a lot of them,’ I hazarded.

  ‘He did indeed!’ Again Newton laughed, a startling event as if a shroud suddenly moved on a corpse and shed dust. ‘By the gross! I reckon he went through a dozen a week anyways. And since there wasn’t a Mrs McCrory, it made a person wonder. I even joked with him that maybe he was reselling them – only half a joke really, since doctors have been known to buy supplies from a pharmacist and sell them at a profit.’

  ‘What do you think he used them for?’ But I nearly bit my tongue off after these words escaped, since they would provide fuel for this pharmaceutical humorist.

  ‘For prophylactic purposes, I assume.’ Newton looked at me with a skeletal grin, as if challenging my education.

  ‘Prophylaxis of what?’ I said, rising to the bait in spite of myself. ‘Conception or disease?’

  ‘Darned if I know. Could be either.’

  ‘You mean they’re known to be a precaution not only against conception but against venereal infections.’

  ‘They’re thought to be the latter. I believe they were originally invented for that purpose, but then human ingenuity realized they could be used for unnatural purposes – by which I mean as contraceptics. Do you know the one about the man who went to the doctor and said he’d caught a venereal disease in a public water closet?’

  ‘No.’

  “Funny place to take a woman!”, said the doctor. And there’s another use.’ Newton’s voice had become stealthy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Onanists. Afraid of polluting themselves!’ He cracked into laughter again.

  I walked, not rode, out Cedar Hill Road as the sun was setting pink behind a grey wall of cloud. As I entered the forest the dusk was becoming murky, blurring the details of the trees. I halted, somewhat tired after the four and a half miles of uphill and down, at the place where Lukswaas and I had met before. I waited, but not as I had thought I would. My brain had been crowded with speeches, remonstrations, arguments, well-considered phrases in Chinook … I must tell Lukswaas how dangerous the situation was for Wiladzap. I must say our own relation must be finished – now.

  But as I waited, my body grew taut and swollen like that of a satyr: I could have thrust myself against a tree, or thrown myself onto the nearest bush, although I could think only of Lukswaas. As soon as it was completely dark she appeared, like a piece of the darkness detaching itself and moving towards me. I could not stand still as she approached, I hurried forward and in a few steps caught her and held her, smelling her woodsmoke hair, feeling the rough chilcat blanket under my hands as I stroked instinctively up and down her back. We broke apart and went into the pitch dark down from the path, and fell in the first clear space, she fumbling with her bundle to lay out the blankets, I unlacing my boots and tearing off my clothes. Then I pulled her to me although this time face to face, and we did the same thing as before, again crying out like animals. We lay for a while floating on the sea of night but still joined, then appallingly – although now should have been the moment to talk and reason, with our lust put behind us – we began to move again.

  At last we slipped apart, and I rolled over on my back, putting my arm under her head as she pulled the blanket over our shoulders. We lay quietly. I gazed up into the darkness which had become a purple shifting mist with dots of evanescent light. But before I had gathered my thoughts it was Lukswaas who spoke, asking me if I had yet found the man who had killed the doctor.

  ‘Wake’, I said. (‘No’) I found my voice was almost a groan. As best I could, I explained sadly that I could not find that evil man, although I worked on finding him night and day. But it was difficult because the King George men had so many secrets.

  Lukswaas said that the Tsimshian had many secrets too: it was difficult to hear the ‘tum tum’ of a man, to know what else he was besides a man. She said every man or woman was not only a man or woman, but something else: it could be a bear, a salmon, an eagle, a dolphin. Or even something changeable – a salmon one minute, a raven the next. It was almost impossible to follow a man or woman through these changes, she said. I realized as she spoke that they were ‘transformations’ or ‘metamorphoses.’ The so-called savage mind was that of the ancient Greeks at the time of Homer, before philosophy. The ‘tum tum’ was the equivalent of Homer’s ‘thymos’, the point near the heart where feeling centred. And the ‘wind’ was the ‘psyche’ and the ‘pneuma’ or breath of divine life in the human body.

  Lukswaas went on to say that the man who killed McCrory must have been entrapped in something, like a salmon in a weir of woven cedar strips, or a bear in a pit; he was a man who wanted to be free, to run wild like an animal or like an Indian. King George men were not free to run, she said to me, they were like planks or axes. They had shiny, greedy eyes, wanting always what they could not have. They did not ‘potlatch’ or give, they took to themselves. Yet their uprightness often made her heart happy. The Indian could be too much like a willow branch that bent in all directions. I made her heart happy, she said, because I was straight and strong, and I was also clean and deep, like a whirlpool which pulled her in. Tsalak, the place they had come from, meant a whirlpool. She recognized the whirlpool in me, and the big Coho salmon, old and wise, turning slowly at the bottom. Only I did not feel the movements of the salmon, she said. I did not yet know what it was.

  It took some time for her, with my assistance, to express herself in Chinook where even the word ‘whirlpool’ took minutes to explain, using other words for ‘water’ and ‘turning’. Eventually she came back to the murder of McCrory. She said that he wanted to be an animal, an Indian, but he could not be. His trap must have made him so enraged that he was ready to kill in the way an animal or an Indian – especially a medicine man Indian – could. She said the killer of McCrory must have wanted something from him, in that greedy King George way, which McCrory could not give. But McCrory probably had said he would give it. McCrory was a man who thought he could give to men and women. He was like a Mektakatla man, a missionary. But really he had no power.

  This was abstract to me. I tried to bring Lukswaas and myself back to earth. I asked if McCro
ry had wanted to make love to Lukswaas in the forest.

  Lukswaas said she was not sure. But McCrory had shown her his bird.

  What?

  His bird. Lukswaas felt for my member and stroked it. His bird.

  McCrory had shown her that?

  Yes. It had been big as if he had wanted to make love with Lukswaas. And he asked her if it was bigger than an Indian bird. She had said it was not the bird that went in her nest. He replied that it was a magic bird with power, that could make her very happy. She had picked up her herb basket and walked back to the camp. He had followed. By the time they had reached the camp he had put the bird back into his clothes.

  What had Lukswaas thought of that? I asked.

  No doubt McCrory thought he was an eagle, but he was really a very small bird. Her word for this was ‘waaks’, as in the Indian’s name, which I gathered meant a bunting or wren. I almost asked what Lukswaas thought I was, but she anticipated me by touching me again and telling me I was an eagle. At this my pride and my own ‘bird’ swelled, then it diminished slightly as she told me that the eagle’s strength was not because of its size, but its sharp eye, its straight dive, its finding the mouse.

  Then she grew quiet and motionless, as if sad. At last she said that if I did not find the killer of McCrory, Wiladzap would die.

  To hear this truth yet again, and from her mouth, drove me almost mad. My body grew taut, I thumped my fist on the ground, and said that there was still time, I would find the man. Then that man would die, and Wiladzap would be free. For the moment, I meant it.

  But Lukswaas was still sad. When Wiladzap was free, she said, she and I could not be with each other like this.

  My whole resolution had been to tell her that our meetings were impossible, but I was at a loss for words. I reassured her with gestures, and these became more intimate until we came together again.

  There was now a dull white glow from the moon through the overcast night. We had been in the forest a long time. We got up, naked but blurred. Through all this I had worn her stone on the thong around my neck, and she my gold ring – which perhaps she would hide, I reasoned, during the day. We got dressed. Lukswaas was either no longer sad, or not wanting to be. She remarked lightly that she would like to see me under the sun, not always at night. I cast ahead in my mind for an afternoon I would not be on duty, and said I could meet her the following Monday just after noon.

  We felt our way up the path which seemed to undulate like an inky snake in the blurring light, embraced fiercely – perhaps she, like me, felt both love and hate – and parted. I wended my way slowly back through the forest, the oak woods, and finally down Fort Street to Victoria.

  22

  On the Sunday I walked out to St Marks alone, but for form’s sake I shared a pew with Frederick who seemed chastened and willing to be friends. I muttered to Frederick that I wanted to question Beaumont on the walk over to the farm, so Frederick should hang back. Luckily we had both arrived before Beaumont who, when he did appear, shared our pew, so that I was standing between the two. The scene was déja vu: the three fascinating faces of the Somerville girls under their bonnets, the unctuous voice of Firbanks reading the prayers, the ‘English gentleman’ type sermon from Coulter, hymns of praise stirring me in the familiar way. I suddenly recalled that the last time I had met Firbanks he had threatened to throw me out of his church. But of course he had not done so. And wasn’t I as much of a hypocrite as he? If I believed that Christianity was evil, what was I doing here?

  I noticed that Beaumont had no musical ear – he spoke, or whispered, rather than sang. A strange mechanical fellow. But possibly a murderer? It was only too easy, in the church, to believe that murders were committed by naked savages – out there, in the wilderness. But then it was not easy to believe that the curate was in fact a sexual degenerate. That the fussily conventional Mrs Somerville might have been the mistress of a murdered abortionist. Or that I, upright and respectable in my stiff Sunday collar, had spent the best part of two nights in the past week locked in animal embraces with an Indian woman, in the bushes in the heart of the forest only two miles from this church, under a moon which it would seem had never seen Christ.

  Afterwards there was the same polite exchange of compliments and invitations outside the church. But I noticed a change in Aemilia – an excitability which had not been there before, an edge of nervousness in her greeting. Perhaps she had been numbed, the previous week, by the shock of the news about McCrory. Now she was not quite so much at ease, but certainly not melancholic. As I watched her drive away with her family in their buggy, I thought that if anything she looked cross.

  Frederick Beaumont and I walked together along Cedar Hill Cross Road to our picnic place. Looking sullen, Frederick fell back. Beaumont did not seem to notice. He kept straight ahead, tapping in the dust with a walking stick, in a rhythm which was so precisely in time with his footsteps that he seemed clockwork, a tin soldier.

  ‘I’m still working on the McCrory case,’ I remarked. ‘I’m wondering if you could help me. I hate to pester you with questions, but no one seems to have known the man at all, and I understand you did – to a certain extent.’

  Beaumont’s clockwork pace did not falter, and he spoke straight ahead, although with the usual fixed smile, as if he were looking at someone. ‘What do you mean, old chap?’

  ‘Well, I heard you knew him somewhat.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘A crimp by the name of Sam.’ This of course, was not careful.

  ‘A crimp? You can’t be serious.’ Still Beaumont looked ahead. ‘I don’t know any crimps.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t. But I was questioning him about McCrory and he said he’d seen you together.’

  ‘Impossible! How would a rotten little crimp even know my name?’

  ‘He described you.’

  ‘And where was I seen with our friend McCrory?’

  ‘In the Windsor Rooms.’

  ‘Ah!’ Although his mechanical step did not change, Beaumont for the first time showed some vehemence. ‘One can get away with nothing,’ he said. ‘I should have known better.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A chap can’t spit in a town like Victoria without being observed and reported on. I can’t visit a simple dancehall without being spotted. Just my luck!’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Looking for a girl of course. Have you never done that?’

  ‘Of course…’

  ‘Well, what’s wong with it?’

  ‘I had understood, from something you said last Sunday, that you didn’t know McCrory apart from at Orchard Farm.’

  ‘Did I say that? Well, one doesn’t want to admit one’s low connexions – though they’re hardly a crime, what? Something of a joke, really, his capering around with the Somervilles like a rose in Spring. But of course none of us is what he seems. No doubt you’re not either.’

  ‘How many times did you see him in Victoria?’

  ‘Perhaps your crimp counted them. Too boring really. When I wished to be amused, McCrory was there: he liked slumming it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For his researches, I suppose. Interested in sex, above all, I should think – not in doing it, necessarily, but in finding out about it. Sort of medical Casanova.’

  ‘You mean you don’t think he had a sexual life? A mistress, for instance?’

  ‘Damned if I know. I did meet him a few times at the Windsor Rooms, ’cos he suggested it. He thought I might enjoy it – suggested it as we were riding into town one Sunday evening, from the Farm.’

  ‘Why would he think you’d enjoy it?’

  ‘’Cos I asked him, as a man who seemed to know his way around, though he had not been in Victoria very long, what there was to do there. I manage to go there rarely, since San Juan is so far. I’m too busy fighting the Pig War, you see. Silly business, damned boring, and no society on San Juan really, since they are such a rustic lot.’

/>   ‘So you visited the Windsor Rooms with McCrory.’ I was already tired of going round in circles. It was as if we had been talking an hour, not just a few minutes, Beaumont was so opaque.

  ‘That’s what I said, old boy.’

  ‘And you weren’t a patient of his?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Animal magnetism? Mesmerism? Rubbish!’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Of course. He was a very silly man – a sort of intellectual worm with a digestive system which would reduce all facts to, well, earth.’

  ‘But you liked him,’ I said, playing for time while I considered Beaumont’s unexpected image of the intellectual worm …

  ‘One does what one can. I mean, do I like you? Beaumont was still looking straight ahead. ‘You’re a bit pi, I’d expect. Not really much fun, not the sort of chap I’d choose as a friend really. Yet here we are, strolling along cheerfully enough.’ His pace did not falter.

  ‘When did you hear about McCrory’s death?’

  ‘In the British Colonist. A day or two late. When it reached English Camp. I forget what date it was.’

  ‘What were you doing the day he was killed?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d have to think. Could have been on duty or off – we’re not very busy. Was it a Wednesday or a Thursday? I forget.’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘I went rough shooting on the island. Super grouse.’

  ‘Do you ever come over here by boat on your own?’

  ‘I’ve done it. I’m here now aren’t I? But not often. We have a sort of skiff with a centre board. I’ve rowed and sailed her across but it’s awfully hard work. Better on the way back, with the wind. Not worth it really, since it’s a long walk to Victoria from Telegraph Cove, and it’s not always easy to hire a horse.’

  ‘Where do you put up when you stay the night in town?’

  ‘Hotel Argyle. McCrory recommended it to me, actually. Frightful bore, Mrs Larose, but it’s better than the more expensive one I’d stayed at before, the St George.’

  ‘Ah yes, Mrs Larose,’ I said, giving up my interrogation for now. I went on to describe my arrival in Victoria. I knew that if I continued questioning Beaumont we would arrive quickly at accusation and denial. I decided, on the spot, that I would have to go to San Juan somehow and find out more about this inscrutable machine-man. But now we were, after all, going to spend a Sunday afternoon together.