The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  Hunt had in one hand the staff with the double-headed serpent. Now he jabbed it up at the ancestral pole above them. “You see this? My son raised it. You know its story?” The old man raised his voice so that all the people could hear. “These are the totems of my grandmother. She was a daughter of the chieftains of the northern tribe. My grandmother died drowned, and my mother it was first raised a pole like to this one in her home village. She gave these totems to me. I gave them to my son. My son was a chieftain of the Kwagiulth. As you all do know.”

  He lowered the staff, and moved forward until his face was inches from Crosby’s. Harry hesitated, thinking he ought to be intervening now, but instead held back. “You have heard, perhaps, what happened to that first pole?” George said, his voice low. “White men stole it. They ripped it from the earth of her village while the people was away at their summer hunting grounds. Took it to Seattle. Thieved it from us! So my son made these totems again and he did raise them up. Now you tell me he’d not want burying in the manner of the people?”

  “I know the story, George,” Crosby said. “We all know the story. Men are filled with avarice: white and brown. But it changes nothing. The Indians’ future lies in the arms of Christ. There is no other way.”

  Hunt turned his head away and spat, then wiped his mouth with his forearm. His eyes took on that intensity which Harry had come to recognize and fear. “You’ll not tell me how to bury my son,” he said, his voice low through closed teeth.

  Crosby had known George longer than had he, and would surely see the warning signs. The paralyzed side of the old man’s face began to sag further, his sallow canine becoming exposed as the lower lip fell away. His breath came shorter now, and his right eyelid started to flicker in the manner that foretold the onset of the old man’s dreadful rage.

  But George had no right to be threatening a minister of God this way. Crosby might be foolish in his way, but he represented—didn’t he?— higher truths than beating drums and pagan dancing, and breaking up the bones of corpses.

  “Mr. Hunt,” Harry said then. “Mayhap the Reverend Crosby ain’t entirely wrong. How about giving David a part of a Christian burial, at least. You’ve had your first ceremonies already. What harm in giving your son both options for his afterlife?”

  George seemed hardly to have heard. He tipped his great head forward toward the priest, the breath coming through his nose, like a snorting ox. Crosby took a small step back. “You risk your son’s soul, Mr. Hunt,” he said, “and the wrath of the authorities as well.” Hunt raised a colossal fist before the priest’s face. But, after a moment, he opened his fingers, and instead he pushed Crosby away. The man flew backward to sprawl on the plankway.

  There were gasps, but also a few low cheers from the drunk among the people on the beach. Harry knelt to help Crosby up, but the priest’s acolyte was there before him. The Indian’s face was writ with a fury that seemed entirely out of keeping with his position. The man helped Crosby scramble up, ungainly, to his feet. His cassock caught on the rough plankboard, and a section at its base tore loudly. He clutched it into his hands, and then he was rolling back along the plankway in the direction of the mission, with his attendant following.

  Crosby turned, once he had put some distance between them. “Don’t any of you think that such offences go unpunished,” he said, his voice a bird’s squawk. Some men on the beach jeered, but others swiftly hushed them.

  “You’ve took the souls from us already, you rat bastard!” George Hunt shouted, his spittle flying. Harry knew better than to seek to calm him now. “I’ll eat my son’s flesh before I’d see him consumed in your fucking purgatories!” But the priest was away along the beach and gone.

  George span and stamped, his fists clenched so his knuckles shone pink against the grey pallor of his skin. Pale froth formed at the corners of his mouth and he groaned and growled, inarticulate and feral.

  “Maxu,” Hunt’s wife spoke softly from the darkness of the doorway. Harry wondered if her intervention would but increase his fury. Yet the old man squatted down on his haunches, both hands clutching the staff, his head hanging forward to rest against it, great stuttering breaths coming from him, and his hands trembling against the planks beneath him. At intervals, he let forth low moans, midway between grief and fury, until finally his breathing began to slow. At last, he looked up at his son-in-law.

  “And you!” he said. He rose slowly to his feet. He spoke coldly now, and slow, if loud enough for all to hear. “You think yourself a part of this family? You turncoating, weaselous fuck. You’re no more of a Christian than am I! And your sham marriage rites with that limpdick priest? You think I respect them? You think I trust you with what is mine?”

  Now Francine stepped in front of her husband. She spoke hard, low words to him, until his face unscrewed some of its tension. There were sniggers down on the beach, and Harry’s name was spoken. He felt as if the morning mists slunk in through his ears to roil inside his head, until he could not see, did not know what he should do, what he should think.

  Then a hand touched his face. A voice said, “Come take us the island.” It was Grace. He blinked and she was there before him. George was gone, and Francine, and everyone else. He turned and looked at the beach.

  George was making his way through the people toward the waiting canoe in which David’s gravebox was now placed. “Hamatsa,” said one, and another chanted, “Hap hap hap!” Then many others took it up. They gathered in around the old man, until only his head was visible above them. A few looked back toward him. Harry knew himself a stranger.

  His wife smiled a little, and whether it was in reassurance, or in that mocking Indian humour, he could not now be certain.

  THERE WAS SHADOWS ON MY HANDS as they rested upon David’s skull, like ghosts come crawling. I had a task to perform and it was terrible to me. My child dead, and perhaps ritual is all that holds a man from the darkest pits of torment in such times. It was the great test of me, which skin I chose to wear. White son of a Christian father buried back of the family store in ground hallowed by the mission. Or Indian son of a mother what raised him heir to her crests and to her ancestors.

  Well I chose her blood that day, and I done so since David chose that path as well. But also since I took my mother’s crests and those of my own first wife’s clan as well, rather than join the church congregation every Sunday, as so many did. And now as many must.

  I stood there thinking this: I am George Hunt, and I am Kixitasu, and Maxulagilis, and Yagwis too, and No-oqoela, and Laqoagila; and in the Winter Dances I am Qomogwe, for the king beneath the sea, and many names more beside. I spoke them all to myself and then I pressed down until I felt my son’s skull begin to quiver, and then it did collapse under the pressure of my fingers. Even as his skull broke, so his neck snapped and his whole head slumped forward to rest against his chest.

  Do you wonder that I let tears fall even now? Indians put the dead to their boxes quick as possible. The neck is broke to be sure they are dead, for tales get told of voices from the graveyards, weeping in the night, and of men showing up what none know if they is living or they is ghosts. So do we make certain the dead remain dead.

  I guess it’s the white blood in me what meant that, once the deed was done, my mind churned and I did not know where I was or even, maybe, who. Next thing, I was standing outside the greathouse with the sun on my face, and the Reverend Crosby—that shit-faced, limberdick cocksucker— was about me.

  I had heard that there was rumours being spoke against me in the village. When that man showed his face, I put two and two together and made a sum of which he was part. So, from the outset, I was not minded to hear what he might say. Then he comes to lecturing on David, and I heard also the threat behind his words. My rage came out and then fool Harry pipes up supporting Crosby!

  Well, all things in good order. I did harangue Harry, even as that blackrobed blackheart streak of piss To-Cop was dragging Crosby from off the ground. I do regret that now.
I know Harry was but shaken from witnessing what I done to David. It must have raised the wind up him something serious. Godless savagery. Barbarian practices. All true enough, no doubt. Still, I don’t suppose Harry saw my actions as more than the rage of the moment, and did forgive me after. Ain’t we all monsters in our darkest hours?

  After Crosby had been sent off, I got to the canoes and Charley was there to silence those drunks what was guffawing their support overloud.

  Charley whispered to me, “We’s with you all the way, but you make it right again with Fat Harry when you’ve a chance. He’s your last son. Don’t you forget it.” Then he says, “But that bastard priest carries a shitsack of trouble with him. You best take care with him.” And he was not wrong.

  Anyhow, I sat up in the prow of the canoe beside the gravebox. Shortly, we were out in that motley flotilla what was making its way across to the Island of Graves. I remember one drunk fool in a sailboat raising a sheet dead against the wind and jeers to follow as he swung about and was near swamped. But all the time I was simmering still and wishing I had been at that shit-eater Crosby’s throat, him representing all those limberdick teachers, doctors, Indian agents, administrators, and condescending do-gooders who would drag the people to their obliteration. That, at least, was as I saw it in that moment.

  “My son, he was Indian,” I muttered out loud. Old Henry Omxid, paddling in front of me, says, “But now he a dead man Indian, George. Like all of them. And that be that. Amen.” And then he looked embarrassed for saying the Christian word.

  So I thought on all the dead, and my rage baked so I could feel the nails of my hand dig into the hard wood of my rod of the Sisiutl, great double-headed serpent coiled under us, and Henry Omxid looked away, studious suddenly in his concentration on his work. I felt again the snapping of my son’s neck beneath my fingers. I was near to roaring aloud.

  Three-quarters of the people have I watched die. Dead of consumption, like David, of grippe, pneumonia, smallpox. Dead of the loss of their land and family and all the old ways of living they have knowed. Dead of disease, whisky, and despair. And David, proud believer, Indian by choice as well as blood, lungs gone hacking, rasping to his ruin. Me lingering on with my rages, though they was never enough to kill me, even as my own son’s soul skeltered off into oblivion.

  I watched the canoe’s wake. I tried to keep my focus. But when I looked up again, Henry’s face swelled up, then twisted into shapes past all sanity, beaked and fanged and clacking open and shut, snapping, then curling back inside itself, round and down, like to some sucking whirlpool of eyes and teeth and tongue.

  I closed my eyes and heard my own groans. I knew I held by a fingernail from fading and being taken hold of by my rage. On this day when it must not happen! When my son must be honoured. Honoured by me. So I reached down into the flume and threw water up into my face, again and again. The world came drifting back and I looked along the boat, almost dreading what I’d see. But all the faces was human now, watching me close, knowing me, nervous. That almost brung me to laughter. These, my people: they know what a crazed specimen they harbour.

  So I pulled it back. But I cannot say that I was full sane again. As I suppose events what later transpired would show.

  HARRY SAT WITH HIS BACKSIDE on the port quarter gunnels of the Hesperus. His boot rested on the long-armed rudder, as he watched his way in among the canoes and other small boats toward the Island of Graves.

  The women were gathered forward of the deckhouse and the mast. There were ten of them sitting there, their basket hats bobbing almost comically as they keened and wailed in unison.

  The island was four hundred yards across and a hundred deep, low and forested, shaped as a shallow horseshoe with a beach at its concave centre. Thatched ceremonial houses lined the shore and there were graveboxes in the trees, where the people were sometimes in the custom of placing their dead. A desiccated body, half devoured by eagles, spilled from one broken box. Clouds had drawn down the light; the wind was growing and rain was imminent.

  Harry stood up so that he could see over the pilothouse roof to the shore, now fifty yards away. He ran the engine faster for a moment and the boat made a run for the beach. He flicked off the engine switch a moment before there came the crunch of pebbles beneath the prow. He ran, sprightly, along the port gunnels, leapt over the side and into the shallows with a line in his hand. He tied off to a mooring stake that was driven deep into the beach some twenty yards from the water’s edge. A man came forward to help the women down.

  David’s gravebox was lifted from the prow of the canoe, George standing close by. The lines of the old man’s face seemed deeper even than before, until he looked another carved totem of some long-dead ancestor among the others lining the forest’s edge.

  Harry had once seen a man pitched overboard in a winter sea who, by a miracle of good fortune, had been holding a line, and clung to it long enough to be dragged close by the hull and hooked back on deck. The man lay there, saturated, as they pounded at his limbs to waken them, but his innards were frozen and Harry watched him drift away, without emotion, as it seemed, into death. Frozen: maybe that was how Harry might describe himself now. His mind was frozen.

  Well, be fucked with George Hunt and his barbarous ways. And be fucked with his precious family as well, and with all these savages who sneered at him. He’d be away to sea before any of them could foment more trouble. He could almost turn around right now, while the ceremonies were taking place, and be gone before anyone had noticed.

  He thought on Crosby’s angry words. The man had passed comment on Harry’s presence here as well, which might mean ill for his immortal soul. But there was too much already written up against him in Heaven for him to feel truly threatened by such a threat. Things he wouldn’t think on now, however they did plague his dreams. And anyhow, he had sided with Crosby about the funeral. The man would remember that, once he had calmed down some.

  More, though, was he worried by Crosby’s reference to his line of business. He knew it wasn’t his management of the family store the priest had been talking about. Three cases of whisky were there still within the hold of the Hesperus. He’d sold a few to the villages nearby during the winter, when the weather allowed.

  Well, be fucked with the man as well, priest or no. Be fucked with all of them. He stood for a moment looking at the Hesperus, resting at a shallow angle with its prow on the shingle. But then he turned and followed the procession up the beach behind the gravebox, keeping to the back.

  Grace was away with the other women. The afternoon sun was now lost in cloud and the light came dreary and feeble, if yet it was humid and warm. The wind brought a light rain now, though worse threatened. Harry’s worn felt hat dripped water from its narrow rim, drops bouncing off his nose to make his nostrils twitch.

  They entered the forest on a narrow path. The people were silent, their clothes a soft rustle. They walked the fifty yards inland to the clearing where stood the ceremonial house.

  The low building had no walls, only a rough-hewn plank roof and six thick supports. Effigies of the dead stood randomly about the clearing, seven feet high, their mouths open, their round faces as big as a man’s torso. At its centre was a fire, its flames stroking the long-blackened timbers above. To either side were piled skulls and other human bones. It was truly a place of hellfire. Yet there was in him, as there had been before on visits here, a shortening of his breath, a certain inclination to an almost drunken felicity, but which also contained a craving—hunger even—so that he felt faintly sickened with himself, even as his eyes devoured every detail.

  Beyond the frame house, the trees were garlanded in graveboxes. The dead had been placed at every divide where boughs grew out of the main trunks, hitched up with ropes and tied off to rest among the spirits of the forest. Or some were laid in smaller houses ten feet wide and low, somewhat akin to the mausoleums of white gentry. And there were similarities, for the Island of Graves was held over for the families of chieftai
ns; though nowadays, so his wife said, with so many dead most everyone held some sort of chiefly seat.

  The people clustered in about the fire and so many were there, even in such depleted times, that some were forced to stand outside in the mounting rain. David’s gravebox was placed near the fire on a low dais. The people inside hunkered down on the tamped earth. Harry stood off to one side with his back against a house support. He took off his hat and thumped it, then shook a little rain from his coat.

  George was on the dais with Charley Seaweed and several of the leading chieftains of the people, who were robed in finery, and some carried masks of raven and killer whale under their arms.

  The old men lining up on the dais held themselves pompous and self-important, as ever they were at such moments. He almost snorted a laugh. Yet his humour died again as quickly as it had come. This was death, whatever the rites involved and the people performing them. There was nothing good in that, excepting maybe the ending of suffering at last. But who could wish for death? There was sin in such thinking—was there not?—to wish for death prior to the utter end of all effort to remain alive?

  The rain teemed now. The people who yet remained outside huddled close together, stoic in the onslaught. He looked down on the seated figures before him. They stank of fish, foul sweat, mouldering cloth.

  Now the old chieftains on the dais placed their masks upon their heads, all except the leading chief of the Fort Rupert people, Owadi, bone-thin and tall, who wore a hat made of bear’s fur. Owadi spoke out in the high Kwakwala of which Harry knew nothing at all. The words came cantillating from the old man’s throat, the “lah” with which each phrase was always finished—that much Harry knew, at least—beating its own rhythms against the rain. The men on the dais who were wearing masks turned slowly with the words. They made small steps forward and back, their masks’ fur or feathers swaying with their movement, and one long raven-like beak on its hidden cords snapping open and shut.