The Devil's Making

by Seán Haldane

  ‘As you must, my dear,’ Mrs Pemberton said. ‘I feel it in my heart.’

  ‘You were always a romantic,’ Pemberton said to his wife with a tight-lipped smile. Then to me: ‘I know you’re a man of principle. If you wish me to marry you both, I’ll do it at the drop of a hat. You can always have a church marriage at a later date.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I hear Mrs Somerville has gone and married Mr Quattrini,’ said Mrs Pemberton, as if trying to lighten the sense of doom which hung in the air since Pemberton’s tirade, and which Lukswaas, ignored, had obviously caught: she sat like a rock, looking at the rug.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Pemberton with a rueful expression, no doubt thinking of poor Kathy Donnelly. Then briskly, ‘Have you eaten, Chad?’

  Sandwiches and iced tea – an American habit – were called for. I ate, and talked with the Pembertons. The subject of marriage was put aside and a certain calm could re-establish itself. Lukswaas sat quietly listening and I agonized for her. She must feel like a wild bird caught in a cage. I didn’t want that fate for her.

  Eventually it was time to go to the courthouse. Pemberton, out of magnanimity or resignation, invited me and Lukswaas to walk down with him.

  Lukswaas shook hands with Mrs Pemberton and said in clear English, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Bless you, child,’ said Mrs Pemberton.

  I walked with Lukswaas on my arm, and Pemberton on her other side. People on the path beside Fort Street and then on the board-walks moved aside to let us pass, but with unfriendly expressions.

  At the courthouse, Pemberton signed the papers for Wiladzap’s release, in Superintendent Parry’s office off the vestibule where Lukswaas and I waited side by side, not touching. Pemberton had given me a week’s leave. I explained quietly to Lukswaas in Chinook that I would not have to come to the courthouse for seven days. She nodded. She seemed to accept everything as it came and took it for granted that we would be together. But she caught me looking worried. Without a word, she tapped the signet ring I had put on her left hand, and made as if to take it off. I stopped her and took her hand.

  Then the outer door opened and Aemilia came in. She was wearing a gingham dress, checked blue and white, and a straw hat under which her hair was bunched up. In her ears she had silver earrings, obviously Tsimshian, and on both arms just below the frilly cuffs of her sleeves she wore wide silver bracelets engraved with dense and complex designs.

  Lukswaas exclaimed with pleasure in her own language and she and Aemilia hugged each other. They spoke in Tsimshian, which Aemilia pronounced slowly but with clicks and glottal stops.

  Pemberton came out into the vestibule with Parry and greeted Aemilia, whom he knew. I introduced Lukswaas to Parry, who had not recognized her. Parry inclined his head, but looked embarrassed, and focussed his attention on me. ‘You’ve done a good job. But my God what a mess it has all been! For myself I’ll be thankful when the Indians have left Cormorant Point and made their way North again, though I do regret that the Tyee had to cool his heels in jail for over three weeks. But then it turns out that he speaks English! He could surely have saved his bacon before now.’

  ‘Very complicated matters,’ I said.

  ‘Hobbes, I believe you should release the prisoner,’ Pemberton interrupted. ‘Miss Somerville tells me she has invited him, and you and his sister, to her house for a period of rest, which I’m sure he’ll need.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ I said dutifully. Parry accompanied me to the jailer’s office where Seeds, looking a reformed character in a well ironed uniform, gave me the keys obsequiously.

  I walked down the corridor, ignoring the other prisoners, to Wiladzap’s cell. Wiladzap was waiting, standing squarely in the middle of the floor, his arms folded across his chest. He let them down when he saw me. ‘Hops’, he said simply, and smiled.

  I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. I reached out my hand, and Wiladzap shook it with a firm grip, holding onto it for a moment as if to feel the pulse of my blood, and looking me steadily in the eye. Wiladzaps’ eyes I realized now, were like Lukswaas’s in shape, although he had a dominating way of using them, even now as he said ‘Thank you. You find man who killed McCrory. Good. He died?’

  ‘Yes. He’s dead. He killed himself.’

  ‘Killed self? Too bad.’ Wiladzap looked genuinely sorrowful. Presumably he had expected the killer to go down fighting.

  ‘I’ll tell you more later,’ I said. ‘You come with me.’

  I walked beside and slightly ahead of Wiladzap along the corridor. ‘Bye Chief!’, someone shouted. Wiladzap ignored this. Then someone else said, ‘Lucky dog!’ Wiladzap stopped and looked into the cell the voice had come from. One of my chain-gang, an armed robber.

  ‘Lucky’, Wiladzap repeated. ‘Wiladzap name lucky’. Then he walked on.

  In the hall Pemberton stepped forward and shook Wiladzap’s hand, apologizing in Chinook for his detention, wishing him well in the future. Wiladzap listened, his eyes entirely focused on Pemberton’s face. But I had noticed one flickering glance to where Lukswaas and Aemilia were standing behind and to one side. After this it must have taken extreme control for Wiladzap to pay attention to Pemberton who became quite carried away on his own words, as could happen easily in Chinook, but he listened patiently. Then when Pemberton stopped, Wiladzap kept looking at him and launched into an equally long speech about how his heart had been sick in the jail, very sick, but he knew that Pemberton and ‘Hops’ had been trying day and night to find the real killer of the doctor. He knew the good hearts of the King George men and of their great white Queen Victoria. He knew that in the city named after the great white Queen he would be safe from evil.

  Pemberton looked pleased at this. They shook hands again, and Wiladzap was free. He walked straight across to Aemilia and stopped just in front of her. ‘Aemilia,’ he said. He stood straight as a spear but tears burst out of his eyes and began to flow down his cheeks.

  There was a spell in the air. No one in the vestibule moved. Aemilia stood looking at Wiladzap, her grey eyes peaceful. Then Wiladzap reached out one hand to her. She reached out to him. They linked just their little fingers, like children, and stood looking at each other.

  Everyone else began to move again. Parry clattered off to his office. Pemberton smiled at me and Lukswaas and walked to the door. Lukswaas and I moved toward each other and did what we had wanted to do for a long time, embracing each other tightly and rocking on our feet, oblivious of the others. I felt a great calm invade my body and hers.

  When we broke apart, standing hand in hand, Wiladzap and Aemilia were still standing looking at each other, but now both their hands were joined. Aemilia looked across at us. ‘Are you ready to go, Chad? Jones is waiting outside.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The spell was broken, and we all moved toward the door, Aemilia and Wiladzap now talking to each other in Tsimshian.

  Outside in the sunbaked square we climbed into the farm buggy on which Mr Jones was sitting as upright as the most elegant of coachmen. Lukswaas and I faced backward, snuggling close into each other and not talking; Wiladzap and Aemilia opposite us faced forward, and looking each other in the eye talked all the way to Orchard Farm.

  * * *

  The next few days were not exactly easy. They were too intense for that. But when I look back from some time later I think that for all of us – me, Lukswaas, Wiladzap, Aemilia – this was our Happy Land.

  Orchard Farm became transformed into a sort of camp, with open fires outside in hearths built by the Tsalak who visited constantly in small groups, bringing and cooking salmon and other fish. I was unable to understand what was said between Aemilia and the Tsalak, but they seemed respectful of her in varying degrees. I was more directly concerned with their relation to Lukswaas. Sometimes she would wear English clothes and her hair in a tail, sometimes Indian and her hair in braids, as if feeling her way between the two styles. She told me she felt better in Indian clothes, but looked bett
er in English ones. I thought she looked lovely in either. But the clothes were only a symbol of something deeper. Just as Lukswaas was attracted to something in me, she was attracted to something in English life. Conversely I was attracted to her and to something in Tsimshian life. It could become confusing. The only steady times were when we broke away from the farm and walked in the woods or over the fields hand in hand, or when we grappled passionately at night.

  Even our sleeping arrangements were a compromise. (Perhaps George Beaumont could not, as he had told me, live with compromise – but I knew that Lukswaas and I could not live long without it.) Lukswaas enjoyed the neatness and order of an English house, and immediately began teaching herself to use kitchen utensils – Mrs Jones was given leave to stay in her own house for this period – and she experimented with samplers and sewing. But she preferred to sleep outside, since it was summer. Wiladzap could hardly bear to be in a house at all, although he was highly interested in all mechanical things, from kitchen taps and the pump, to the draft regulator of the fireplace. All four of us ended up sleeping every night on paliasses and blankets on the porches, Aemilia and Wiladzap in the front, Lukswaas and I in the back of the house.

  Several times a day Wiladzap and I sat talking or went on a walk together over the fields. Not that Wiladzap was capable of walking for its own sake. For him everything had a goal. I was astonished at how the so-called ‘savage mind’, at least in Wiladzap, was ruled by ideas of purpose. If we walked over the fields it was to be away from the others and for mutual instruction. I taught Wiladzap how to shoot a pistol – he was only experienced with rifles. Wiladzap taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow. I taught Wiladzap what I knew of the economics of trade from the English point of view – a subject which Wiladzap grasped very quickly even when it was presented in a mixture of simplified English and Chinook. Wiladzap taught me various uses of a Bowie knife.

  We also had laborious but always intense conversations among all four of us, about the future. There was no doubt that Lukswaas would stay with me although ‘one day’ I would visit Tsalaks. As Wiladzap said with his usual simple arrogance: ‘You save my life, I give you Lukswaas.’ The case for Wiladzap and Aemilia was more complicated. An Indian woman could be taken as a concubine by a white man and become adapted to white life, although the couple were despised and shunned as exemplars of sheer lust, the coupling of a civilised man and an animal. But it was unheard of for a white woman to live with an Indian man, despite the fact that at least a few such as Wiladzap were in material terms richer than many whites. Then since the Northern tribes, Tsimshian and Haida, were known as skilled traders, and therefore the HBC in cooperation with the Colonial government was keen to restrict their activities, Wiladzap’s future was precarious. In spite of his extreme, naively boastful confidence, he feared on the one hand being cheated and hemmed in by the white traders, and on the other being deserted by his own people.

  Chieftainship among the Tsimshian had to be maintained by glorious deeds, trading successes, and potlatches. The competition for the eagle name ‘Legex’ which Wiladzap had mentioned after his arrest, absorbed much of his ambition. Aemilia made some attempts to persuade him to settle down and farm with her. We even discussed the possibility of all four of us working Orchard Farm: in an alliance of strength, perhaps we could set our own social rules. We could perhaps buy the farm from the former Mrs Somerville who would not want it now that life as Mrs Quattrini would provide her and her younger girls a finer house in town and one in San Francisco as well. But Wiladzap could not understand agriculture. For him, only slaves carried things and chopped wood, and the idea of trimming trees so that they produced fruit was alien to him. Were not the woods full of berries anyway? Unfortunately the only attraction farming might have had for him, that of money, was in short supply in the depressed economy of the Colony. Aemilia knew, as she told me, that she would have to go with Wiladzap. She even looked forward to meeting old friends at Tsalak. But in time, she said fatalistically, things would get worse for the Tsimshian.

  There had been a reunion between Aemilia and the little boy William. His character had, to my eyes, the same mixture of the happy-go-lucky and the stoical which was evident in Wiladzap. The Joneses had treated him well but he had always sensed there was something special between him and his ‘auntie’ Aemilia. And since he had grown up, in spite of being well protected, with some idea of shame at his own Indianness, he was pleased to find he had a big chief like Wiladzap for a father. All this made Aemilia look happy and light as a girl.

  Aemilia when at Tsalaks had been adopted by a woman of the Raven clan, as a necessary formality since Wiladzap could not marry an Eagle like himself. This adoption would have to be confirmed among the band before they left Victoria. Luckily there was a Raven woman among them who remembered Aemilia’s adoption and could attest to it. Then there was the difficulty that William, although Wiladzap’s son, derived no status from this: all inherited status came from the mother. (New status could be won later). But Aemilia had no particular ‘names’.

  This question of names I did not understand well, since I found most Tsimshian words difficult to pronounce. But it was explained to me that familiar names were not the important ones. Wiladzap, for example, meant ‘lucky in hunting’ – as the telegraph from Fort Simpson had said. Hence Wiladzap’s remark to the prisoner that he was ‘lucky’. Lukswaas, I was touched to hear, meant ‘a sudden shower of rain on a sunny day’. But Lukswaas, as her mother’s daughter, had several hereditary names of great renown. She decided, with a shrewd generosity which resolved Aemilia’s status completely, that she would gift Aemilia her names. Wiladzap, therefore, would gain status by association, and William’s status was assured. In return for this, all Lukswaas would receive, I thought ruefully, was the humble name of Hobbes …

  * * *

  The conversations among all four of us, perhaps partly because they were so difficult using two and three languages and therefore words were chosen and explained carefully, were like windows into our minds – so different, but we liked what we saw through those windows. We once had a long discussion starting from Darwin’s remark, which I quoted, that the difference between the savage and the civilised person is ‘the difference between a wild and a tame animal.’ We agreed that within both the Tsimshian and the English societies there was a range between wild and tame people. And that each could turn upside-down, as it were, and become the other. The most tame people could go wild, and vice versa. Furthermore, the idea of the civilised and the savage could be used in such a reversal of behaviour. Wiladzap was fascinated by how Beaumont, although he only knew him from my and Aemilia’s description, who was the incarnation of the ‘King George’, when he carried out the killing of McCrory did it in imitation (and a bad imitation at that) of a savage. And I proposed, as a counter-example, that when the famous Chief Freezy decapitated his wife on the beach opposite Victoria, he was actually imitating the ways of the white man: instead of killing his wife in a fury, he carried out a staged execution, just as the English did in public hangings. He thought he was being civilised.

  So far as we could see, each civilisation had its refinement and its barbarity. Wiladzap admitted that among the Tsimshian murders were frequent and treacherous. But at least they were always, in the long run, paid for. He was disgusted at the Christian doctrine of hellfire, which he knew of from the missionaries, the ‘Metakatla men’, and which I could explain in more detail. But eventually the conversation turned to the idea of whether in fact animals and humans were different at all. The Tsimshian identified with the virtues of the eagle and the salmon, they incorporated these animal virtues into themselves. Wiladzap said that in a trance he could hear animals speak to him. But Lukswaas pointed out that what the animals said was about the life of animals, not the life of people. The eagle would point out something in distant sight or vision. The salmon would speak from its experience of travelling the seas. But she did not think the feelings she had for me were those of an
animal. Animals could not deliberately change what they did, as she was doing in learning to dress like an Englishwoman and to cook on a stove. Then Aemilia broke in passionately: ‘Darwin thinks that because we have evolved like animals we are animals. But show me the animal that has experienced repentance and remorse!’

  After these words had been translated and clarified, we all fell silent. I thought of my own remorse at having made love to Lukswaas thinking she was Wiladzap’s wife. Perhaps Aemilia was repenting having left Wiladzap for so long. Or Wiladzap repenting not having come to seek her earlier. I do not know what Lukswaas, the most innocent of us all, had to repent or feel remorseful about. But I found myself wondering if she felt remorseful at abandoning her own people, at not going further with them on their voyage.