The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  He sat on an empty fifty-gallon can to wait. The three electric lamps along the jetty cast dim sodium pools, the generator coughing behind the village. He took off his hat, put it down beside him, and rubbed his fingers over his forehead, then rubbed his fingertips together. The calluses were going soft. He leaned forward, hawked, and spat down between the wooden planks. He was turning into a landsman.

  That same tune in his mind. Round and over and over and round. He hummed quietly to himself. Where I am going, well, you won’t never know … It was his mother used to sing that. But he put such black thoughts away.

  He looked down on his boat. Hesperus, read the name on the prow, as he had repainted it in black and gold a week before. Most of the day he had spent on his knees, polishing the decks and all the timber, from rudder to prow—thirty-six feet, and ten more to the tip of her bowsprit. The deck had a central hatch leading down to the hold, steel-hinged and always locked. There were canned foodstuffs, a tough-sealed sack of rice, and three cases of his trade in there. He had spent a long hour polishing the locks and other metal on the Hesperus with whale grease, till they had fair burned in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  The pilothouse, forward of the stern, was near high enough to stand erect inside, windows to side and front. He’d buffed those windows till they glittered like crystal. He had taken out and polished the pans and plates and cutlery, then he had re-stowed them, piece by piece, in their cupboards and drawers. The machete over the doorway was honed till a leaf would part if dropped on its cutting edge.

  The boom stretched back above the deck almost to the pilothouse. If the mainsail had been patched more than once, but always neatly, now he had it furled clean and tight, as were the jib and spinnaker. She’d been schooner-rigged when he’d purchased her, though with masts of equal length. He’d straightway had the mizzen out and re-rigged her as a sloop. Then he’d placed in an engine where the mizzen base had been, and a damned fine thing it was, rare too, especially this far north along the coast. He’d been down there earlier, but even he, rat-nose keen for muck wherever it might be, could find no stain on her.

  She was quite perfectly prepared for travel. “Mr. Scrub-scrub!” Grace would say. “You a man at the curtain, ready to leave.” It was true. Yes, it was true.

  There was a small wooden plaque above the pilothouse door that was there when he’d purchased the Hesperus in San Francisco, two years before. It read, “For I can weather the roughest gale, that ever wind did blow.” He liked that, though he did not know its origin.

  He looked to shoreward. The fires flickering through the heavily curtained doorways were the only visible light in the village of Fort Rupert. It got deathly dark once the sun was down, excepting when a family had one of their pagan jamborees on the beach. Then some preposterous bonfire would threaten to rain down burning embers upon the whole village, and even the forest—some hundreds of yards away, as, over time, the trees had been felled for their timber—even the forest got filled up with sly-darting shadows.

  He hummed, Fixing to leave … Fixing to go … Where I am going … Well you won’t never know. Ashore till dead? Well, he’d been ashore this whole winter through, and that was long enough. Best slip quietly away and be done with it. Gone. Away. An ocean away. The whole-wide-world-beyondthe-ocean away. That was how it was. How it was going to be. They could have believed nothing else of him. Surely they could not? And wouldn’t it just hand his father-in-law the opportunity to shake his fat head and spout on about how he’d always known it, how he hadn’t never trusted the man, shouldn’t never have given him those privileges he had and so on and so forth and so on and on, as Harry knew old George would. And he’d be right, so he would. Proven right, and properly self-righteous with it, no doubt.

  Whatever George’s rantings and ragings might come to, Harry would be off with a pre-dawn spring tide—in the coming day or two—and there’d be the end of it.

  A woman’s voice called out from the direction of the sea. He rose up from his seat, staring out through the murk as it wailed in the Indian tongue, sounding some ritual lament, before falling away once more into silence.

  Now he could make out the steamer’s bulk as it approached the jetty. He heard the clank-grind of its paddles as they slowed. There were voices behind him and, turning, he saw that people were gathering, some to take the produce that would be coming from the steamer. But there were others as well, men and women who were his family now that he had married into them.

  George Hunt came plodding down the jetty, the people parting to make way for him, his huge, grey-bristled head hunched low into his shoulders. When he glanced Harry’s way, however, his eyes lacked utterly the rancour of the dispute that had arisen between them earlier. Instead, those eyes were empty now, black pits sucked dry of sentiment. Harry stepped nearer to the gunnels anyway, away from harm, humming quietly all the while.

  Steam exploded, men called out, and the steamer docked. There beside the rail was a youngish Indian woman, her fat moon face ruddy from the sea, tears streaking the sea salt on her cheeks into broken rivulets. George stepped forward. He mumbled a greeting to her, and she bowed her head, her hands clenched upon the worn wooden handrail.

  George crossed the gangway to the boat. Harry waited, uncertain whether he had a part to play in this drama. The woman’s hands reached out. The old man took them in his. The two of them stood, heads close together, as the men worked around them to unload the goods from deck to shore.

  Harry was jostled by those who had come to heft from off the steamer the blanket bundles and boxes of fish oil, dried fruits and meat, letters and parcels, tins of salmon, vegetables, cooking oil, and fifty-gallon cans of gasoline for the generators. He had himself been waiting on stock for the Hunt family’s trading store, of which he was manager, playing out the role he had been given by his Indian family. A man called to him from the deck of the steamer. Harry stepped up the gangway.

  “There’s seven cans, when I ordered thirteen,” he said, after nosing briefly through the paperwork. He spat and cursed. Yet, all the time, he watched as well his father-in-law and the young woman. What was occurring? What should be done?

  Then Harry saw the roughwood coffin lying on the deck near by the woman’s feet and he understood.

  The steamer blew two short whistles to tell that it would shortly leave. Charley Seaweed appeared at Harry’s side and took hold of his arm. “Fat Harry,” he said, “now help we take David home.” Charley called two of the village men over. The four of them put themselves each to one corner and hefted the coffin. They lifted it high to their shoulders and eased it down the gangway toward the jetty.

  As they did so, George Hunt reached out and placed his hand on the wooden box that held the remains of his son, David. The great, scar-stippled fingers, just a few inches from Harry’s eyes, pressed down upon the lid a moment.

  The rain came down now through the almost windless air, heavy and straight and no one taking notice. Harry blinked, the coffin heavy on his shoulder. The orange lamplight reflected in the drops that clung to his eyelashes. He’d left his hat on the fifty-gallon can where he’d sat to wait on the steamer’s arrival.

  People lined the jetty. Word must have gone out in that swift, silent way Harry did not understand. The village had come to see the body of one of their chieftains returned. Now, blanket-shrouded men and women moved toward him, tattered stovepipe hats and frowning faces, the jetty boards creaking beneath their presence. The weight of the coffin lightened as others put their shoulders to it.

  Through his water-hazy vision, Harry saw George helping David’s wife, whose name was Abayah, from the boat.

  The work of the jetty had stilled and all stood solemn now as the body was carried past. Women took to wailing and one man called from far back along the jetty, “Hap hap hap!”: the cry of the cannibal dancers. He’d heard it often enough during the past winter months, when all their heathen rituals carried on through endless, rain-drenched days and nights.

&
nbsp; They carried the coffin through the crowd and onto the wooden plankway that ran along the bank above the beach. They passed before the cedarplank house fronts, the people following in a column. Firelight flickered from entranceways. Ancestor poles rose into the darkness: silhouettes of beak and claw and wing and fin. It seemed to Harry as if the images of thunderbird and whale, of raven, eagle, and of bear, gazed down on him as on some charlatan hawking false oils and charms. He whistled his tune softly to himself. Ready to leave … Ready to go.

  Someone stumbled behind them on the planking. A swift-hushed laugh fell flat, and now they were outside the family greathouse. Harry placed one hand on the tall pole that rose in front of the building. Behind him, he heard the shuffling of the people through the hiss of the rain. The doorway was painted as if it were the yawning jaws of a killer whale. Harry’s motherin-law, Francine, was standing there, stout against the light behind.

  Harry and the other men manoeuvred the coffin down until they held it in their hands. Then they edged through the entrance as Francine stepped aside. Tears glistened like amber on her elsewise expressionless face.

  The bonfire in the centre of the house was lit, its flames flashing toward the timbers. Rain fizzled faintly as it fell through the smoke vent and onto the burning wood. The men walked round the fire to the far end. They placed the body on the low platform there.

  Harry stood straight and cricked his neck to left and right until the tension gave with a crack. The massive house posts rose up beside him, carved to look like gross, lumbering figures with outsize heads, their mouths open as if voicing surprise. All about the room were the masks and blankets, the giant carven boxes and eating troughs that were the heirlooms of the Hunt family. The fire was the only light in the room, and he squinted to see who might be lurking in the twisting shadows.

  George stood just inside the doorway, his bulk wrapped, shapeless, in a blanket, so that he seemed some dark spirit himself, come down off a pole to brood among the people. Abayah and Francine stood to one side; and now Harry’s wife, Grace, appeared and walked over to join the women. She placed her forehead against Abayah’s. The two of them rested their arms on each other’s shoulders. Their bodies shook.

  Four women shuffled in and passed to either side of George. They made their way to the fire and squatted on the hard-packed earthen floor, cocooned in their blankets so that only their round faces beneath their wide basket hats were visible. They were all of them old, their eyes sunk deep into tough skin. One of them was Charley Seaweed’s dwarfish wife, near as bowed and twisted as was he. One mumbled and then another wailed. The others took up the sound.

  Abayah and Francine came forward now to sit side by side before David’s body. The other men who had helped carry the coffin filed out. Harry made to do the same, but Charley stopped him. “Stay put,” he said. “You only son George now.”

  The words made Harry breathe harder; but he walked across the room to stand beside his father-in-law. Ravines cut through the leather of the old man’s half-paralyzed face, so animate on one side, the flesh hanging limp off the other. It told the tale perfectly of the two men locked inside that heavy body, the one so quick to laughter, the other to black humours and rage.

  The women finished their wailings at last. Francine now spoke throaty, singsong words in the Indian language. Her voice caught at times, and she would cry out, leaning forward where she was sitting and placing her hand upon the coffin. As she spoke, George’s blue eyes flared in his brown face, staring off into the darkness, though there was nothing there.

  After Francine was done, she rested with her hands upon the coffin, her head bowed over it. The other women rose to their feet and shuffled out, with Charley following. The only people now remaining were George and Abayah, Harry and Grace. As she came close, Grace gripped Harry’s upper arm, as if to keep from collapsing, and then they sank down to rest, all of them, upon the ground in front of David’s coffin.

  “A CHIEFTAIN COMES HOME. He has been called by the owl. He is looking for his ancestors, in the ocean, up among the trees, in among the stars. Dead-broken now.” That was how Abayah called to us from the steamer that night.

  I woke before the dawn, the morning of my son David’s final coming home. My wife, Francine, was grunting and snorting in her sleep beside me. I laid a palm on her fat haunch and it shivered some, but she soon quietened into proper restfulness.

  I rolled over and put my feet down off the platform. The tamped earth was cold. My toes searched out my boots and slipped inside. The last embers from the fire threw up vague shadows from the beaks and maws of the masks of our ancestors on the walls. I thought on those ogres and other demons of the forest which such shadows did paint for me when I was still a child.

  I drew my ragged number four mark blanket about me. My joints creaked and cracked as I paced across the floor and through the heavy curtain outside.

  The black was just coming greyer off east. The air was clear enough so that I saw the silhouettes of the mainland mountains starting to show theirselves, if yet the breath streamed out of my mouth in foggy billows at the cold.

  I was up at an old man’s hour, early enough to even beat the others of the village. A dried-out stump I’d hacked into a stool was parked up by the painted timbers of our greathouse. I sat to watch the village rouse itself.

  There weren’t stars, so I knew the day would come grey and flat, but without rain, the clouds being higher than the mainland peaks. The air smelled of salt and rotting fish from the beach, the rank stench of the middens behind the houses blown off inland by the fair breeze coming from the sea.

  The tide was at ebb and, soon enough, the first of the women came out from the other greathouses what stretch off round the curving shore to either side of ours. Shona-ha, Chief Owadi’s wife, raised her old crowclaw hand, and I nodded back with respect enough to keep her happy. She stepped down the steep bank to the pebbles, waddled away with the others toward the ebb, their baskets like snail shells at their backs, and then they bent to the task of gathering cockles.

  Dawn was brighter in the air, and the high clouds raced over the sky, heavy from the east and north. After all there might be rain, if late in the day.

  The first curses, farts, and hawking started from the houses. Henry Omxid stepped out from the building next to mine—cousin, clan-relative, like almost all the people are to me what is left now—naked and wrinkled like an antique toad, his fat belly sagging down over his stick legs. He flapped his arms and beat his hands at his shoulders. He grunted toward me and I told him just how he looked.

  “You can go bugger a walrus,” says he by way of reply, cheered no end at his own fine words. He looked to the sky. “Cold,” he says, in English to make it a curse. “Rain come slow. But come.” Then he turned back inside.

  Others were moving on the beach now. Two men—Pax’alu and his son—was working a net back into a ball where it had laid spread the night through, drying. A few fires was being kindled outside doorways, but mostly smoke belched out the smoke holes up top of the high-sloping timber roofs of the greathouses.

  I could hear Francine rustling about inside now. She’d be making up a cooking fire in the back with the last glowing coals from the night before, cursing me for taking my ease whilst she, unhappy woman, laboured at my coffee.

  Chief Owadi came down the plankboards toward me, stamping warmth into his old legs. The planks groaned as he stepped off their end onto the pressed earth, his black-bear fur hat sliding sideways down his long face, him pushing it back up, then hitching his best blanket tighter about hisself. He greeted me gravely enough as he passed by, though his eyes was elsewhere as he did so. Likes his promenade up and down the beach each morning, so he does, puffed old goose.

  A few of the children—and there is only a few left any more—was scuttling about, most of them naked now that it was March and spring, whatever the cold in the air. Two boys chased by, one with a stick of thin cedar by which he poked at the other, screeching out his tri
umph in spearing the great whale.

  Francine stepped through the curtain. I took the tin cup what steamed with the fine morning brew from her hands.

  Filled up with all those good things about me, I took hold of her ankle. “Whale woman,” says I, shaking her so her calf wobbled. “Plenty of meat for all.” She just kicked out with her other sealskin-wrapped foot so I near lost my coffee, spoke a few words on the foul sight of my balls cooling in the morning air for all to see from under my blanket, and went back inside.

  I gulped a scalding mouthful of coffee. Out along the far end of the jetty, where the water was deep enough still for it to float, my son-in-law Harry Cadwallader’s boat, the Hesperus, was bobbing. Harry. It was my first jarring thought of the day, for Harry and me didn’t see exactly eye to eye, nor never rightly had since he married my Grace.

  Charley would say, “The thing with Fat Harry is he’s a better man than he thinks he is.” But there was darkness in him, I could see it. Something terrible out of his past murking up his mind, like a still pond in which a hooked fish thrashes at the bottom till it has clouded all the water with silt.

  But I had work to be doing today, and I meant to get it done. Francine called me inside. We ate a hot slab of dry salmon with a bowl of eulachon oil, the rotting black paste reeking sweetly in my nostrils. The early fire smoked, the faggots wet still from the night and from the hard rain the day before. It fogged the air till I felt for a time outside of things, the sharp lines of the timber walls, the masks and pillars and platforms twisting and curling, losing all sense of the solid.

  So I shook myself to my feet and says, “I must be to it.”

  The family store is down the far end of the village. I gave all I saw a fair good morning. Most was on the beach now, working the boats—carved canoes, with a few of the white man’s plankboard hulls as well—or they was standing about gossiping.