The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  Oh, he wanted more, of course he did. The fine tilt of her eyelids, each alien twist of her thinking, her skin beneath his fingers, her tomfoolish jokes: he wanted more and more. And she was a good, strong woman: raucous, but honest. A decent wife for any man. Still, he’d hardly been seeking such permanence. All the years at sea, gathering what fortune he could. And now he had his treasure, the Hesperus, and the world spread before him. He flew before the winds of his fate. He didn’t tack against it, as someone had once put it to him.

  In any case, the winter storms came howling down the island’s coastline off the Pacific, until it was not hard to persuade himself he had to stay. If only till the spring. So he’d promise to do right by her, he told Hunt, in the gloomy month of December, and then he said it again. But still the old man was silent, until Harry shivered at the duplicity of his own tongue, and some deeper shame came upon him. There was something, after all, when he thought on it. Something he sensed in himself that day before his future father-in-law. It felt like what? Respite? The thought of setting out upon the ocean suddenly felt too much to cope with. Running before a wind. Always running. And now to have an end to it! To feel peace. He thought on Grace until he was certain that his words were true. He would do right by her. Yes. He’d support her—and, yes, he’d do right by all these people here.

  So he stood fast under the eagle gaze of George Hunt. He did his utmost not to jitter, remembering Grace’s words to him: “My father is a big man, but not a bad man. Don’t shake like fish in a boat. Look him right back.”

  At last, Hunt spoke up. “You’ve heard of my labours here?” He gestured down at the papers on his desk.

  “You write about the Indians.”

  Hunt glared up through the thorny twists of his eyebrows. Then he reached and brought down a book from off the shelf above the desk. He held it up to Harry, made almost as if to hand it to him. But then he threw it down on top of the papers. The candle spluttered, showing a rough leather binding, black in the flickering light.

  “Written of them?” Hunt said. His voice was like a gathering wind, blowing up toward a squall. “Whole books. On us, mind! For what is my family if it ain’t Indian?”

  Harry said nothing. He had heard plenty from Grace already about the man’s book that he had penned with some famous scientist out of New York. It puffed up his bride-to-be like a cock turkey when she spoke on it. He’d even had a leaf through, though he hadn’t taken a whole lot of sense from it. The Indians’ ways and doings, rituals and clothing, how they built their canoes and the like. Truth was, it made Harry all the more nervous in his presence. Six and a half feet of trader, Indian chieftain, writer of books … even scientist.

  “Our skin is brown,” said Hunt, “and we are a family of substance.”

  “I don’t have no prejudice like that,” Harry said, and carefully.

  Hunt leaned forward, his chair groaning, to better look at him. Harry directed his eyes floorwards. The silence dragged. It took an effort of will to remain still.

  “There ain’t much choice of men hereabouts,” Hunt said at last. “Most of them dead.” He was silent again. Then he said, “Well, if you’ll squarely face the seriousness of what you is asking. And if she herself is willing.”

  Harry floundered through the rituals, feeling the fool in his Indian finery, a button blanket wrapped about him, a bear-fur hat upon his head. Afterwards, they went to the Reverend Crosby at the mission as well, and he gave a blessing, if sourly, to their union. The priest didn’t rightly approve of mixed-race weddings and, especially, as the man said quite openly, ones that had their inception in damned heathen idolatry.

  Grace’s joy, the goodwill of the people toward him, then George handing him the management of the family store: all brought him almost to believe that this small place on the edge of nowhere might become a home.

  But it did not answer. Grace was all things she should be, if she had a voice sometimes to scare a whale from the water. Still, he felt as if he dreamed his way about the village, as if he was living in some in-between place, as if—were he to shake himself hard enough—in that shaking he would wake suddenly to find himself alone, the Hesperus heeling far over, a moment from broaching in massive seas.

  And what did these people want with him? Truly? Taciturn white man no one knew from whatever Adam they believed in. No member of any of the lineages they so obsessed over. It was as George said: there weren’t men enough left no more. He was new stock, and George didn’t think much of that stock anyhow. Harry had seen that well enough the morning before, when they’d had their disagreement.

  Now, standing together outside the store, Grace sniffed and then, taking hold of his shirt, blew her nose in it. “Must get ready the funeral,” she said.

  He took away his arms from around her. “Yes,” he said. “There ain’t much time.”

  It was noon and the people were gathered in front of the Hunt family greathouse. Most squatted on the beach in family clusters, their formal blankets wrapped closely about them, sewn with buttons in designs of animals and ancestors. They wore hats made of the fur of black bear, or else white man’s billycocks or shovels, and the women in wide-brimmed hats of woven basketry.

  Harry stood in the doorway of the greathouse. With their wrinkled faces and their straight backs, the people looked like the bands of monkeys he’d seen once when he’d docked in Madras, aboard a steamship trading out of Hong Kong. They’d been hunkered in similar fashion, their knees drawn up, perched on the walls around the port, picking in each other’s sandy fur. Weren’t we all from monkeys, far back in the past? He’d heard it said, though it sounded fantastical to him, and he knew the Church would not want such slanders spoken. Anyhow, what did these people know of the spread of civilization? Of the great cities of the world, such as Harry had seen? Of the politics of empires and the powers of the great companies that were the blood flow in their veins? He’d sailed the merchantmen all across the Pacific. History had no role to play in such a benighted place as this.

  He whistled to himself, softly through his clenched teeth.

  Behind him, the fire thundered inside the house, its flames almost to the roof. He had ducked outside to escape the heat though he knew he’d suffer taunts for his weakness later, soft white man. They threw the fire up high and sat close about it, no expressions on their faces even as the leathery cocksuckers were being fried alive. His wife said it was for pride. Pagan ignorance, more like.

  He’d been with his father-in-law through the morning, helping prepare for the funeral. There’d been food to bring in and prepare, blankets to come from the store for handing out during the dinner that evening, dancers to speak with, costumes to dig out of the wooden chests in the greathouse, masks to be taken from the walls and dusted down. The Indians did most of it, and Harry spent much of the morning, in fact, standing around watching. He had been tasked to bring the family women to the island on the Hesperus, so he’d been out and run her engine for a short time.

  Now the men were going about the rituals prior to placing David’s body in its gravebox. He heard the beaters strike time inside. He looked at the day. The sun had burned away the mist, but now clouds swept down the coast from the Pacific, low enough for rain, yet soaring miles into the sky in grey and violet and yellow whorls. He turned back inside.

  The women of the family stood bunched together on the left side of the house, dressed as those outside. The men sat to the right behind the beaters, who were kneeling before a hollow log, hammering rhythm with long wooden staves. Five dancers moved around the fire, stooping low, their bodies cloaked in blankets woven of red cedar bark, masks on their heads of raven and of killer whale. The flames threw shadows, huge and dissolute, across the timber beams and uprights, and these carven images, all claw and beak and tooth, seemed to coil and quiver in the flickering light.

  Harry’s skin sheened, and not only with the heat. His indifferent Christianity still flinched when faced with such barbarism. Yet he found himself stepp
ing farther inside, despite the heat and the darkness; and now his eyes were fastened on his father-in-law.

  George Hunt was standing on the dais behind the fire, wearing the button blanket his mother had made for him years before and was evidently famous up and down the coast for its intricacies. It was black with red braiding, woven in design of the killer whale, the major spirit of Hunt’s mother’s family ancestry. In one hand he held a long staff of black wood, shaped as a double-headed serpent. His eyes were closed.

  In front of the old man was the empty gravebox. Earlier, Harry had helped carry it in with Charley. It was a square box, just less than four feet along each side. All about it were carved David’s crests: the wolf, frog, thunderbird, killer whale, and raven. Charley said George carved it himself more than a year ago, and David hardy enough to refuse its call all this time, though not forever.

  Now one of the elder men placed a hand on George’s shoulder. He nodded, his eyes still closed, and the beaters stopped. The dancers were still. An air pocket in a burning log squealed for a moment, and then it was only the roar and crackle of the fire.

  Charley, always Charley, was standing close by. Now he beckoned Harry over, and two others as well. Harry hesitated. Pagan idolatry. But the other men were already on the platform and all seemed paused, waiting on him. So he crossed the floor, self-conscious, to join them. George seemed insensible to all about him.

  Charley had a claw hammer to hand with which he now drew out the nails of the roughwood coffin in which David’s body lay. At last, Charley pushed off the lid.

  The corpse was naked. Its skin glowed pink in the firelight, but lucid and hollow, the thin lips black, the skin stretched already from the face so that the teeth were visible, brown and broken from the long dissolution of his illness. The shrunken ribs showed up acute, the pelvis sharp, and the man’s genitals near disappeared as the body’s juices had dried away. There was little to show of the man who had once inhabited this husk.

  Together, they lifted the body into a sitting position, Harry with his arms under the corpse’s armpits. It had been dead for several days already, and the rigor mortis must have come and gone. It reeked of putrefaction. He closed his eyes a moment as they hefted the body into the air. Then they shuffled across toward the gravebox. They bent its knees up to its chest and lowered it down into the box. Harry’s elbows were still beneath the armpits, so now he lifted his own arms up and out, and the corpse’s shoulders slumped and its arms fell forward, until just its head showed above the box’s edge.

  Now one of the dancers stepped forward and shouted, “Hap hap hap!” He wore a mask like a raven, but with the beak nearly six feet long, painted black and red and snapping open and closed. Harry moved away into the darkness and stood watching, his back against the far wall.

  George lifted his head and opened his eyes. They were laced with vivid veins. The old man moved around to stand directly behind the head of his son. He knelt a moment on one knee and carefully lay the serpent staff upon the ground. Then he stood once more. He placed his hands on the corpse’s skull. There was no sound at all in the greathouse.

  As they moved across the cranium, shadows played on those stone claws that were the old man’s fingers—fingers that would lift burning coals from fires as if they were pebbles on a beach. He had the hands of a sailor, though he was a man of the land.

  Now George tensed his shoulders. He gripped his son’s skull harder, the thumbs sliding down so they rested at its base. He stood up on his toes and pressed all his weight down through his arms. David’s head bent forward toward his chest. His chin rested there, but still the old man pushed. And then the neck snapped, loud—a gunshot—through the greathouse.

  The head flopped forward further so that now it was beneath the height of the box’s lid, the chin resting impossibly against the lower sternum. George drew back his hands and they fell to his sides. Quickly Charley lifted the gravebox’s lid from the back of the platform and carried it forward. He placed it upon the box, lifted the hammer from the ground, and drove in four long nails to seal it down.

  The beaters drummed again, drowning the hammer’s sound. The dancers spun slow circles round the fire, the hamatsa calling “Hap hap hap!” and the women wailing in unison their real and ritual sorrow.

  The heat and noise beat down upon Harry. He tried to breathe away his nausea. Fucking barbarism! He had to get out. Onto the Hesperus and away. Right now. Cut from these black savages that he’d been fool enough to marry into.

  Charley Seaweed was beside him, gesturing toward the gravebox. Charley tugged at his arm, but Harry pulled away.

  “You white head have pain, eh?” Charley shouted into his ear, against the cacophony of the women’s and the dancers’ cries. “Nasty business. Oh yes.” He pointed to the gravebox. “But you help now.” His grip was merciless, so, instead of running, Harry followed the old Indian’s bent back along the platform.

  “Put hand far side,” Charley said. Harry eased past George, almost cringing to avoid him. He noticed now the old man’s cheeks were wet, though there was nothing of expression in his face. Harry knelt at one corner of David’s gravebox. Charley and the two men each took another corner. Charley nodded. Together they heaved and raised the box to the height of their hips, hunchback Charley deformed but hugely strong, his arms bulging, as though he’d been thirty years aloft in the rigging of a sailing ship.

  They eased forward, Harry and Charley stepping first from the platform. The other men in the room came forward now. Bodies bunched in and Harry felt the load lighten as they walked the box around the fire and toward the entrance.

  Without ceremony they fumbled and bustled the box through the doorway. “Aaah,” went up the murmur from the people outside, and “Hap hap hap!” as they rose to their feet. Harry glanced toward the beach, eight feet below down a steep bank. Canoes were waiting at the water’s edge.

  Some of the men slid nimbly down the bank and stood at the bottom looking up, their hands raised, almost supplicatory, in support of the gravebox’s descent, and of its carriers.

  Amidst the elbowing crowd, Harry took his first tentative step onto the steep and sodden incline. His second slipped from under him. His feet flew forward. His hands let go the box. His backside hit the ground and he slid down, his greatcoat risen up about his head, to roll across the pebbles and come at last to rest at the feet of the men on the beach.

  As he pulled his mud-caked coat from round his neck, a cheer went up and laughter. “Hah! Fat Harry, you a seal go back to water in a hurry!” “You been drinking you own whisky again, Fat Harry!” “All that fire in house too hot for Harry!” “Fat Harry need gravebox soon!”

  Hands reached down, lifted him to his feet, beat upon his back, tugged his coat back into place, until a smile forced its way onto his face.

  “All right, all right, damn you all for heathen bastards,” he said. When he’d gathered himself, he looked to see what had become of the gravebox. It was halfway to the beach, the men in a double line passing it down the slope, their feet firmly planted. At least he hadn’t brought the whole lot with him. The other people were sliding and jumping toward the pebbles.

  Along the plankway, then, came waddling the short, plump form of the missionary Reverend Crosby, with an Indian acolyte in priestly costume and a bowl-shaped haircut following close behind him. Crosby approached George Hunt, who was standing now close by the family’s ancestral pole.

  “You get back up there,” whispered Henry Omxid behind him. “Help stop trouble.” Harry sighed. He was only surprised Crosby hadn’t shown up sooner; and his father-in-law would be in no mood for conciliation. To jeers and taunts, Harry scrambled back up the bank, hands helping even as a boot connected with his backside to more guffaws and cheery profanities.

  Charley was at the top. “I get box in canoe,” he said. “You go stop George make crazy with Rev’n Crosby. I wait people beach. Keep ’em quiet.”

  “Mr. Hunt,” said the missionary as he halted in
front of George, “I thought better of you than this.” He was more than a foot shorter than Hunt, and was forced to tilt backward, his hands at his waist, to better look up at him. “Of course, I am sorry for your loss. And I understand your son was a breed and honour needs showing to that side of his blood.” He came forward now, so that only George and Harry could hear him. His fat, crimson face crumpled with passion. “But you consign your son to torment in eternity by burying him in this way. We’ve our differences, George. I know it. But in this you must hear me.” He reached out as if to take hold of George’s arm, then stopped himself. “You must,” he said.

  He turned to Harry. “And you, Mr. Cadwallader! What do you here? Are there no words that you could speak to your father-in-law? Is there nothing you want to say? Are you in sympathy with what goes on? You and I are the only white men in this place, whatever your line of business might be.”

  Harry could think of nothing to say by way of a response.

  Crosby turned back to Hunt. “You are a leader in the Indian community. It’s for you to set examples. You’ve made trouble enough, going among the villages, gathering their pagan falsehoods for that book of yours.”

  He paused then and looked expectant, but Hunt just stared at the ground. The priest waved a hand in the direction of the boats. “You make a mockery of all we do here. Help me, George. In God’s name, set an example, man! Half your blood is white.”

  “Today it is brown,” said Hunt, with such a tone that Harry wondered if Crosby knew his peril.

  Crosby grunted in vexation. “Once you helped us,” he said. “You learned to read and write with us! Translated for us at the pulpit. You spoke with faith once.”

  “And I’ve since seen the price of it.” Hunt looked up now at the priest. “Your sermon’s at an end, Crosby. I’ve my son to bury.”

  Crosby’s mouth thinned. “You risk a lot,” he said. “You risk much in this.”

  “That is a threat?”

  “Please. Save David’s soul, and make a statement to the people here. Embracing the Lord is their only hope of survival, George.”