At the store, where Harry and Grace did most of their living, I called to them my presence and sat in the rocker on the porch. Harry came out and leaned on the porch-post to stare at the water. Grace was tra-la-la-ing out back, the first songbird of spring.
The account book was on the table there, where someone must have been working at it earlier. I picked it up and had a poke through. “You’ve not been keeping these as you might,” I says to him, after a time.
“I’ve followed the methods as were used previous,” says he. He folded his arms tight about him.
“Well then, you’ve put the numbers in wrong.” He hadn’t though. Winter’s when the people are at their poorest and trade comes down almost to nothing. I was seeking for a fight.
Harry paced up and down some. That boy’s like an ember on the air sometimes, spinning about, glowing hot, but scarce a sound to be heard. Shouldn’t call him boy, I suppose, him in his forties. But too old for Grace, so I was thinking.
Shortly, he turned to me. “I’ve done all the books as clear and true as is. If you’ve a problem elsewise, then let’s have it.” Found some spunk at last, he had, though at the time it just brought me to anger.
Well, we swapped a few hot words. Harry says I never did trust him, and what reason was there for that? And I says, why should I, coming in off the sea out of the blue yonder? Did he think I didn’t know what his hold was filled with? Well, it was you gave your assent to the marriage, says he. Maybe I was a fool, says I.
It was only Grace who came out front and broke it up. “You two idiots don’t know better than to fight among yourselves, whilst the world’s out there with teeth just waiting to bite you,” says she, or words like them. Harry went away down the beach, whistling some tune over and over to hisself, and I collected the bundle I had come for and slunk off back home. She has the fury of her mother, and they’s the only ones ever could shut me up.
They was small-minded things we spoke to each other, Harry and me, but they set me in a different mood, so that, by the time I perched myself down at my desk in the corner of the greathouse, nearby the door with the curtain thrown back for light and a candle burning, I had to put away two sheets of paper as I sprayed the ink or lost my track of thinking. But, shortly, I got to settled. My old desk, she’s a fine item. I built her myself some years before, fine-planed a single, fat plank of aged and knotted red cedarwood to smoothness, carved old designs what I have seen from caves and rocks, primitive and ancient, about its edges.
The bundle was by my side, wrapped secure in hide. In it was the very suit of armour what stands before me now, here in the museum. I had a letter and the story of it to finish writing for Professor Boas, to go with the bundle by post across the country and on down to New York. I sat industrious for some hours describing details—Boas do love the details—till, at last, I felt a tug at my shirt sleeve. Henry Omxid’s granddaughter, four years old, buckteeth, black eyes always filled up with surprise, was at me to come out and play. It was already past our usual time. So I stretched up my arms, and groaned some. I put the writing I had done with the letter into its envelope and sealed it. I checked that the bundle was secure under my desk. It would go on the steamer due that evening.
Then up and out into the late-afternoon light, and we was away down to the stones on the beach, me to hurl them out beyond the tide, and her bouncing in delight or sulking when each of her own great, serious hurls fetched a pebble but an arm’s length forward, or once, glorious, into the water as it broke so gentle on the shore that afternoon.
When she was called in for supper, I sat on a boulder, watching the weighty clouds to the north as they did gather, ready for the dark to fall so that they might roll down to fall upon us.
Then I heard the steamer’s whistle, and Abayah’s words came floating cross the water. My old ankles twisting on the pebbles after, as I dashed for the jetty. It is terrible waiting so long the waiting turns ordinary, but then quite suddenly it’s happened. He was three years dying, my son.
We brung David’s body to the greathouse, the people following. Francine piped up, voicing the old words a mother speaks to her dead child. “What is the reason that you have done this to me?” she says. “I have tried hard to treat you well since you came to me. What is the reason that you desert me, child? Did I treat you wrong? Maybe I did something to you in the way I treated you. I will try better if you come back to me. Please become well once more in the place you are going. And when you are well come back to me, child. Do not stay away there. Please have mercy on me, your mother.”
She spoke them as a real mother should to a dead child. A blessing poor Lucy was not there to face that grief herself. Lucy: my first wife. Still, Francine loved David as her own, and Grace loved him as a full brother.
But when Francine spoke, the years did fall away to nothing. I felt again my love for poor, dead Lucy as a torment almost more than I could bear. I confess I hardly was thinking about David at that moment at all. The faces of all my dead rose up before me in the firelight: my two babies what died young, my father and my mother, my brother and my sister, and all those others I have knowed; all dead of some disease or other.
We did sit together all the night through beside my David’s body. My poor boy, what I could not save. Not him, nor any of the others I have loved. I was a man of medicine; so called, but not in fact, by all my failures what followed.
That night beside David’s body I don’t know where my head did travel. Black places. Places populated by the spirits of my grief and of my powerlessness, fuelled as well with rage at the scheming of those against me. I did not think the day would ever come again.
THE DAWN CAME TRICKLING through the doorway to the greathouse. Harry was sitting beside the embers of the fire, poking at them with a half-burned stick and wondering what was to follow. Funerals happened quickly among the Indians, usually the day after death. There had been several in the months he had been among them in Rupert. They died so easily, victim to ailments a white man would snuffle with and, like as not, shrug off in time.
The real question was what kind of burial George had in mind: Christian or heathen? The old man was huddled before the coffin, his blanket wrapped about him, his head down on his chest. Abayah and Francine dozed on a platform to one side. Harry’s wife had slipped off somewhere before dawn as he slept.
“Mr. Hunt,” Harry spoke, at last, to the old man’s back. “Should we not be making plans for the day?”
His father-in-law’s head drew up and turned a little, showing the outline of his sharp nose, his thick, grey moustache. “We’ll have the gravebox,” he said. “Tell the people. He’ll go to the island.”
Harry fought down the ire he felt at the man’s curt manner. He had just lost his son. It wasn’t the time for such thinking. It was a time to help. He pushed himself to his feet and walked out into the morning.
Outside, he raised both arms and stretched, then took stock of the day. Mist floated low on the ocean. There was no wind. The sun was still behind the mountains of the mainland to the east. It was cold. The tide was in, and the jetty stretched out into the faintly lapping waters, the pebble beach a narrow line at the bottom of the steep bank. The Hesperus bobbed at its mooring out at the jetty’s end. To left and right, the wooden roofs of the village arced away around the shore. The world smelled of seaweed, salt, and rotting fish.
His eyes followed the great ancestral pole by the doorway up along its length. The Bakwas—the wild man of the forest—then wolf, frog, human, thunderbird, killer whale, and, forty feet above, the great beak of Raven. If he knew by now to name them, still he could not have described their meaning. He placed his hand against the pole’s wood. Rough grain and cold dew. Then he pulled his greatcoat about himself more closely and turned along the beach toward the trading store, at the far end of the village.
Here and there, men and women were already out, a few wrapped in the thick grey or filthy white blankets of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Others wore faded s
hirts or shabby sweaters and pants. Men were folding the nets, left out the night before like always in the faint expectation they might ever dry. Women sat outside the houses, speaking to each other in low tones as they prepared food.
“Yoh,” he greeted them as he passed, feeling the idiot using the Kwagiulth word, but knowing they liked him for it. They nodded, but without their usual humour, sombre to the relative of a dead chieftain, even if Harry was no more than a white man.
He stepped off the plankway at its end and onto the path that ran along above the beach. Two dogs, mange and insect ravaged, nipped and snarled around the rotten head of a halibut. Harry aimed a stone with a well-practised foot. A yelp brought him some faint satisfaction after the hardships of the night.
“Yoh,” a voice called from a shadowed doorway. “Fat Harry.” He stopped. A face appeared, a foot lower than Harry’s own, black close-set eyes in weather-beaten skin, a smile, long on humour, short on teeth.
“Charley,” Harry said.
“What news today?”
“He goes to the island.”
“Walas gigamé!” said Charley, lifting both his hands into the air, the deformity of his back becoming visible as he stepped through the doorway. “David was man of people. Good for George remember.”
“Will you help me pass the word?”
“Em,” Charley nodded. “You don’t worry. I tell people.” He stepped back inside, his oversize head retreating into darkness.
Harry breathed relief. Charley Seaweed might be a cripple and a buffoon, but he would let the village know, and spare Harry his blunders. Fat Harry the American. Kwagiulth by marriage only and, if he understood it right, even then never more than a guardian of the crests and chiefly seats for his future sons, if they should come. And he’d never manage the language, so longwinded was it. He couldn’t even separate the words from the throaty, singsong gibberish they spouted. If he spoke some of the Chinook jargon of exchange, still that made him but a trader in their eyes. And as to their propriety, it was a treacherous maze: he’d been scorned more times than he could think on for some paltry blunder of convention.
It was all inside out and back to front. “Fat” Harry for being so scrawny, when he was master of the Hesperus and ran the store with all its riches. Slim like a wolverine, so Grace would say. More like a weasel, he thought, if he caught sight of himself in a mirror: the sharp angles of his cheeks behind his moustache, the black wells of his eyes. Eyes like an Indian’s, Grace said.
The first shoots were showing on the trees at the edge of the forest. Yes, spring was on them. Fixing to leave … And now David, the brother-in-law he’d never met, was to be buried in the pagan style, heathens whooping and leaping and him caught up in all their depravations. He’d have to delay his departure a few days yet. He couldn’t hardly duck out at such a time. It would be, well, unseemly, however George had riled him with his accusations. It didn’t make a pile of difference, anyhow, when all was said and done. He’d be away on a spring tide and that was that. A few days here or there made no difference.
He thought on the first day he’d come to Rupert. Late October last. He’d borne in with a nor’wester chewing at his cracked face, barely conscious with exhaustion from days spent tacking, without a chart, in waters he’d never sailed, his fuel long finished.
He tied off and, hardly able to lift his legs, climbed up onto the jetty. He had learned from previous stops along the coast that ignoring the newcomer was the peoples’ way, at least until he’d shown the reason for his visit, or if he might have some usefulness to them.
“Just fool be on sea in storm,” a voice said; and there, slouched on the planking, bundled up crooked in a blanket, so that Harry had mistaken him for some shapeless stack of trade goods left forgotten at the jetty’s end, was Charley.
“You got that right,” said Harry.
“Have baccy?” Charley said, and “Mmm!” his lips wobbling, “Nice box!” when Harry handed across his ornate tobacco tin. Charley rolled and lit, passed back the tin, not without reluctance, and then directed Harry toward the trading store at the far end of the village.
He stumbled along past the buildings. There was no one to be seen on that cold day. Outside the store, his future wife was perched in an ancient rocking chair, smoking a long reed pipe. She wore a blue cotton dress that rode up, showing enough of her strong legs to draw his attention. She seemed insensible to the weather. On her head was a wide basket hat, her round face and sharp-slanting eyes imperious beneath.
“You need engine for you boat, Mr. Whiteman,” she said. “Then you face not look like dry halibut now.” She leaned far back in the rocker, until Harry thought she had to topple, and roared, beating her thigh with her palm. Harry laughed along with her.
“I’ve an engine,” he said, which impressed her right enough, “just nothing to fuel it.”
But there was no spare fuel to be had in Rupert. So he’d sent an order south with the next steamer, and waited.
Now, outside the store, Harry stood to take a breath. So overdue a paint was the building’s facade that the exposed planking was grey and cracked and warped. Above, the steep roof grumbled its reminder of repairs. He liked things ordered, but the winter weather had kept him from doing much about the building’s exterior.
He mounted the steps. He fumbled in his greatcoat pocket for the key, but the door was already on its latch. Inside were soft movements. He peered in through the grime on the window to see his wife peering back, her treacle skin darker still in the store’s gloomy light.
“Ya, Caddie,” she said and pulled open the door. “I make food.”
“David’s to be buried on the island.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding slowly, seemingly to herself.
She stepped into the daylight. They stood for a long moment staring into each other’s eyes. Then her mouth fell, her cheeks took to quivering, and she walked two small steps to rest against him. He put his arms about her waist, thinking how her body always reminded him of a seal, the layer of fat and the elastic vigour beneath.
“Caddie,” she wept into his chest. “My great brother is dead.”
He found that he was stroking her hair, and was surprised by his tenderness. Over her shoulder the forest was a scant hundred yards away. He wanted to run away into the woods to hide. You’ll never know …
“I have come to ask that I may take your daughter in marriage.” The day he’d gone to speak with George. Nervous like some junior tar sent up before the captain; but near feverish for her—black-eyed coquette always in his vision, whichever way he looked.
She’d be on the jetty each morning when he lifted the door to his boat’s hold—wherein he slept—and emerged on deck. There’d be nothing but a blanket wrapped about her, her hair drawn tightly back so that she looked stern, yet girlish too. “Still here, Mr. White Man?” she’d say, or “Scratching balls and yawning, new day is dawning!” or “You dreaming ’bout me down in there, Mr. Caduwudduder?,” tapping on the hull as she said it. She never could speak his surname, even now she was married to him. And she did plague his thoughts each night, as he lay alone in the hammock, if yet his dreams were always darker.
He’d walk the shore and she’d be always nearby when he turned about, until the people took to sniggering, and Charley piped up one day, “Best see to her, or people say you a white man have no cock.”
He would have made advances, but that he’d already met her father.
“What have you in the hold?” George Hunt glared down from the jetty, his frame looming like a grizzly’s in silhouette against the bright sky. It was a few days after Harry had first arrived. “More liquor for those already lost?” He was right, of course. The hold was loaded with cases and kegs of New Westminster whisky. It was his third trip up the coast, though he’d not come this far north before.
“I trade what I am able,” Harry said.
“My family’s traders also,” said Hunt. Harry said he did not seek to impose himself upon the
man’s market; that he was grateful for the help afforded him by the people of the village; that he’d take receipt of his fuel when it should arrive, and be on his way.
“See that’s all you take,” said Hunt, and stamped away along the jetty toward the shore. Harry’d not risk the wrath of such a man by dallying with his daughter, maddening though she was to the balance of his mind.
When his gasoline arrived, however, he found the days passed and still he did not leave. He’d stop by the trading store. They would make pretense of discussing the price of various produce, the state of the clouds that day and what it might mean, the passing of a steamer visible out on the ocean. She was shy herself by now, and her humour had quite faded, until they barely looked at each other and could only stutter absurdities, before one or the other would scurry off. Harry felt himself a boy just out of puberty again.
Then one night there came a tapping on the deck above his head, and when he pushed up the trap door, she slipped inside, all chance of sailing without mischance from this landing was lost, and, soon after, he found himself asking a man he feared for the thing that man would be least willing, as he thought, to give.
So Harry spoke the words, but George Hunt said nothing, his huge body squeezed into his chair before the cedarwood desk in a corner of the greathouse, a sheaf of close-written paper laid neatly out before him, his hard eyes on Harry. So Harry squirmed and his feet shuffled like he had no control of them, until he found himself speaking words he would never otherwise have spoken.
“I know I ain’t much,” he said. “Indeed, I don’t say I’m much of anything at all. But I have my boat and the things I know and, such as I am, I’d promise to do right by her.” He resented George for drawing this from him as soon as it had been said. And was it not about as far from the truth as could be, just waiting as he was for his moment to escape?
But what made him even ask, when he’d had his taste of her already?
The Cannibal Spirit Page 3