The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  George huddled there, stock-still, his blanket about him, massive as a bear come in out of the forest to the fire’s warmth. After a time, he lifted a hand and ran it slowly across his forehead. He pressed his thumb and forefinger to his temples. Then he closed his eyes.

  Harry sat up. He reached across his sleeping wife to find his tobacco tin. He rolled and licked and placed the finished product in his mouth, then flicked alight a match and drew in the cigarette’s smoke. As it curled back out he saw George’s eyes upon him. They gazed at each other as Harry smoked. Nothing was said, and no emotion, nor any sign even of recognition, could Harry see in his father-in-law’s eyes. They were as cold and black as those of a whale. He remembered George roaring like a furnace in his passion, hectoring and railing at the people on the Island of Graves. There was some part of the man that was distinct from ordinary human life. Something outside of reason. In that moment, Harry felt that his own anger toward him lacked any meaning in the world. As well to hurl an insult at a mountain.

  The following morning George was gone. He had taken his canoe and the paraphernalia for a hunting trip, so Francine had told him.

  “But gone where?” Owadi said. “Why go now?”

  “I was thinking misery at the death of his son had drove him off,” said Harry. “Though none seem over-willing to share their thoughts on the matter.”

  “Ah,” said Owadi. “But very wrong go now. For four days after funeral, family must stay, mourn dead, make ceremony. And then they must make funeral pole and song to sing about the dead. And after, the ceremony for his heir as well. David heir is still a boy, so it was for George to do. Many people, they is angry he go away.” He was silent for a time. “And there was what happen on the island too. Many’s not happy for that.”

  “What happened, Chief?” He’d had no luck in gleaning anything from the people in the days since. He knew something wasn’t right, just by the silence with which his questions had been met, even by his wife.

  “Some people think George and the man, Doctor Boas, make their book and put words inside to say we all cannibal men for real. That we eat people, and is savage all through. They is angry for that.”

  “There ain’t no such words. I read enough of it to see it shows you in a favourable light enough.”

  The old man did not speak for a while. Then he drew his hand in a line across in front of him. He said, “You have many blankets. You a wealthy man, Fat Harry.” Then he stepped away down the stairs.

  Harry sat upon a pile of those blankets. The first shafts of the sun broke through the soiled window, throwing light across his family’s petty fortune. He had lived forty-two years, and had travelled the world and come to be here. A brown-skinned savage chief had told him he was wealthy for the decomposing blankets in his attic. Yet this battered store and all its contents would scarce bring half the value of the Hesperus.

  There’d been warning in Owadi’s words. George had enemies. But that was no news at all; everyone knew it to be true. There must be more to it. Something specific. Yet what that might be, Harry could not know. He’d speak with his wife, though she was away gathering salmonberries, and would not be back till the sun set. Even then, she was more often lip-sealed on matters pertaining to the people. He was and would always remain a white man, whether he pitched his body black and leapt naked with them round the fires in a mask. More reason still to be gone.

  Grace. Her brother was dead, her father fled who knows where or why or what he was doing. Yet there was no denying it, her grief terrified him. At night she was fanatical in her passions, tearing at him with her nails, biting his shoulders until he bled. She clung to him when she slept, as if she knew his thoughts, knew that if she let him go, she’d wake the morning after to find her husband gone as well. Harry lay awake half of each night, fighting a panic he could not understand, groggy and stupid in the morning, terse with her, his irritation growing by the day. There’d been strong words more than once already, always on petty subjects—what food was for lunch, what washing had not been done, why his clothes were not folded as they should be—a sailor’s whining. Issues domestic and ridiculous that made him despise himself. But for the strength of her arms about him, he might have upped and run already.

  All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine with use. As though to breathe were life!

  He’d read that in a book of poems he’d found in the hold of the Hesperus when first he’d purchased her. He had learned it by heart. And he’d not stay here to rust, or to be set upon by a bile-filled cocksucker hell-bent on dominion over all those close to him.

  But he could not leave as yet. Not with her brother dead and her father gone. To lose her husband as well would be too cruel. He’d do what was proper. He’d see her good and safe with her father returned. Then he’d slip away, and she’d be free to find a man more fitting than was he. The Kwagiulth had no issue with remarriage. It even brought prestige to the chiefly among them, as he’d heard it, the women and the men.

  He rolled tobacco and watched the dust dance in the attic’s fractured sunlight.

  Later, Harry rocked on his porch. There were none who’d come to buy that day, though that was not unusual in itself. There were barely a hundred and twenty Kwagiulths left in the village now. Once there’d been more than two thousand.

  The humid air was heavy and everything quiet. Out on the ocean to the north and west, dark clouds were festering and a storm would blow through the night.

  The tide was out and a few women picked cockles farther down the beach, their fat bodies bent forward, their conical hats reminding him of the paddy fields that ranged along the shores beneath the peaks of Hong Kong. It was a sight he’d seen many times aboard ship as they’d made their way toward the dockyards of that vast bay, with all its cacophonies and promises drifting across the water, intoxicants to the men who manned the ships.

  Now Harry saw Halliday and Crosby striding down the beach, along with the priest’s Indian acolyte. Harry realized he was to be their destination.

  “Mr. Cadwallader, a word with you,” said the Reverend Crosby, red-faced and puffing piety.

  “How might you be, Harry?” Halliday smiled. He was dressed in thick broadcloth and cravat, smartly turned out, for all his itinerant vocation.

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Halliday. Reverend Crosby.” He nodded, and to the Indian as well. “Can I invite you in back for some coffee?”

  “There’s not time for that,” Crosby began.

  But Halliday said, “That would be fine,” and they followed Harry inside and through the store.

  Harry reheated the coffee that sat on the small stove in the back room. He was introduced to the unspeaking Indian, whose name was To-Cop.

  He exchanged a few pleasantries with Halliday, yet Harry sensed the strain in the three men.

  They took their brews outside into the backyard and sat about the roughplank table. A low wooden fence separated the private from the common land, which stretched a hundred and fifty yards to the tree line. Just before the trees there was a tended plot with an iron fence about it, and there was laid, in land hallowed by the mission, Robert Hunt, George’s father, in a mausoleum of stone.

  “A good man was Robert,” said Crosby, “and a fine Christian man as well.”

  “I’ve heard that, though he died before I turned up,” said Harry.

  “Of course,” said Halliday. “Though I think on you as a permanent fixture already. There are so few of us in this far reach of the world.”

  “Robert helped in founding the first mission in Rupert, you know,” said Crosby. “Back in ’77.”

  “Harry,” said Halliday, “you’ll guess, I’m sure, that we are not here to pay a social call.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s of George we’d speak,” said Halliday.

  “Ah, well you’ll know he’
s away.”

  “Reverend Crosby informed me such. But you see, Harry, we have a problem.” Halliday drummed his forefinger on the table. At last he said, “There’s charges been made against him, Harry. Charges that need answering.”

  “Heinous charges,” said Crosby.

  Harry saw something almost feral in To-Cop’s eyes, and the priest looked exultant. “What charges?”

  “He is accused under section 114 of the Indian Act,” said Halliday. “Under the 1895 amendment, and under the section of that statute which deals with the mutilation of a dead human body.”

  Harry said nothing. Then he said, knowing himself stupid as he spoke, “Mutilation … a body?”

  “Harry,” said Halliday, “it’s claimed he participated in a ritual of the so-called hamatsa society, which is banned under the act.” His finger drummed louder. “And, whilst participating in the ritual, it is also claimed that Mr. Hunt did devour the flesh of a human corpse.”

  “Hell and damnation!” Harry leapt up. His hands shook and heat came to his face. “Who has said this?”

  “I’ll ask you to hold your blaspheming tongue a little better, Mr. Cadwallader,” said Crosby. “The claims are made by persons who need not be named at this time. But believe me, the claims are there and are written down. Mr. Halliday has those statements in his possession. Statements from actual witnesses as well. Damaging statements, Mr. Cadwallader. Damaging to George Hunt and to all his family.”

  Harry remembered Crosby pushed to the ground the day of the funeral. He wondered what part the priest had to play in this. “But this is lunacy,” he said, aiming his words at Halliday. “You all know George has those biased against him. These is false charges. And he away and not able to refute them.”

  “Which is why we are here, Harry,” said Halliday. “Please, sit.” He did so, his face still hot, indignation in his heart. There was a sneer on the face of To-Cop that he would dearly have loved to wipe away. “He needs finding and bringing back,” said Halliday, “and I’m asking you to do it.”

  “Were easy to say and hard to do.” Harry coughed. He slowed his breathing down. “I heard he goes months sometimes in the forests of the mainland.”

  “You will need help. I know that. But you’re a white man and we’d trust you to do so, as we could not an Indian.”

  “No!” Harry slammed his hand upon the tabletop. “You’re asking me? Are you fucking insane? I’ll not do it, by Christ.” Crosby made to speak, but Harry stared him down. “I’ll not be party to this lunacy.” Yet nausea cramped his stomach now, and his ire wavered.

  Halliday had his hands up, both palms toward Harry. “I’d hoped you might see the necessity of it, Harry,” he said. “I might hope, at least, you’d keep your temper with me and with the Reverend. You are the only right man for this task. I’d have you realize that. You’re his son-in-law, you’ve a boat—and a fine boat she is.” There was that in Halliday’s voice when he said this that Harry did not enjoy hearing. “But know this. I can depute you as a special constable and insist. I have the right in law.”

  “You’d force me to track down and arrest my own father-in-law?”

  “There’ll be no need for such dramatic behaviour. Just find him, tell him what has happened. He’ll come back. George is not a man to shirk an issue. And I will cover your expenses.”

  “So when was this crime meant to have happened?”

  “Six weeks ago, at Big Mountain’s village.”

  “And black doings it was,” said Crosby.

  “George must answer,” Halliday said.

  “For all his many crimes.” Spittle flecked Crosby’s moustache. “And those committed upon the body of his son not least.”

  Harry stared at him. “What’s that?”

  “Reverend Crosby forgets himself,” said Halliday.

  “Am I the only man in Rupert that has not heard these rumours?”

  “We must concentrate on what needs doing now, Harry,” said

  Halliday.

  He thought on Owadi’s words, which seemed prescient, what with Crosby foaming and Halliday obfuscating on the facts. But Harry could not but see the truth of Halliday’s thinking. There was no one to send but him. Halliday was the agent in these parts, and he’d have tasks enough he needed to perform. There was Woolacott, the only constable hereabouts, down at Alert Bay. But sending him would do nothing but stoke further trouble. Woolacott and George had never seen eye to eye. Harry’d watched them at each other’s throats on more than one occasion already. And was he not waiting for George to return before he could be gone? Finding him would expedite his plan.

  Yet he despised these bilge bastards, giving out their orders to him as though he was still aboard a merchantman.

  Harry looked at To-Cop, his black hair with its bowl cut. He wondered what his role was in this. He stepped round to sit on the table near to the Indian. “I see what you’re saying,” Harry said, all the while staring down at To-Cop, “though I’d like to know what limpdick gossiping bastard served up these fantasies.” To-Cop returned his stare and did not flinch from it. The man was not the weak Christian sop he might be expected to be, wearing that garb. He turned to Halliday. “You’ll pay my fuel, and for my time, you say?”

  “We will.”

  “Then I’ll go, though I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Good, good. Just bring him back and let him answer for himself, Harry,” said Halliday. “I am grateful. Have you thoughts on where you’ll go?”

  “I’ve not. I’ll go speak with Francine. And with Charley Seaweed. He’s known George longest. He’d know, if anyone will tell me.”

  “Indeed, I have a suggestion there. I believe Charley Seaweed might accompany you on this mission. He knows the coast as well as any man.”

  “No.” He needed no spy aboard. “I’ll find George myself.”

  Halliday looked at him, his face without expression. Harry kept the gaze a while, but in the end he had to look away.

  “Harry, I think it’s better all round that Charley goes with you. In fact, I insist.”

  “Damnation, man. I’m no child needs cosseting.”

  “Just do it for my sense of well-being, Mr. Cadwallader. Charley knows everyone hereabouts. I’m sure you’ll find him and be back in a few days.” Halliday stood. “You’ll leave immediately?”

  Harry gazed out toward the ocean. The storm was nearer now, indigo and black, vast against the late-afternoon sky. “I won’t till that’s passed by,” he said. “I’ll go in the morning. Who have you told of this?”

  “None as yet, outside yourself. But the village knows, you can be sure. Gossip runs swifter even than the wireless. I saw many of them in conference earlier, outside Owadi’s.”

  “Then you’ll excuse me,” said Harry, “I’m away to see Charley Seaweed.” And he took his fury and his doubt away toward the village.

  The rain beat at the leaking roof, water dripped, and Harry tossed and wriggled until even Grace muttered and turned away from him. So he rose, wrapped in his blanket like a true Indian, and wandered through the store to stare out the window at the raging sky. The panes clattered in the wind. Lightning lit the beach repeatedly, and the pale pebbles shone incandescent in the electric air.

  He fumbled on the table beneath the window and found his tobacco tin. He sat on the edge of the table and smoked. He wondered where George might be, and whether he was subject to the storm, crouched beneath the forest leaves, or hiding in a cave, or in an Indian’s home. He could in truth be anywhere: up or down the coast, or inland among the mountains, lakes and rivers, even lost at sea and swamped in his canoe, though Harry doubted that, so wily a man he was, and weather-wise.

  He was in a pretty situation: sent to track his father-in-law and bring him back to justice. Sent as a white man, yet husband to an Indian. And now, as his wife told him, some of the people whispered he was a stooge to the authorities. Halliday, meanwhile, threatened to depute him, even as he and foul Crosby spoke of trusting h
im for the only white man able for the task.

  He couldn’t even up and run once he was at sea, now that damned idiot of a cripple, Charley, was in tow. Unless he pitched him over the side—and he wasn’t quite prepared for that, however infuriating was the man.

  In truth, Harry was angry at the charges against George. Yet that anger was less than when first he’d heard the charge. Now he wondered somewhat. He knew that George did attend the banned rituals of the people. And, though it wasn’t part of the charge itself, something had occurred out there on the Island of Graves so bad that none would speak of it, at least to him. Owadi had whispered his quiet warnings. That was unusual enough and, in the circumstances, ominous. Crosby had referred to it as well.

  After he’d left Crosby and Halliday in his yard, Harry had walked into the village to find Charley Seaweed. Charley was already apprised of the charges levelled against his cousin. Harry told him of his conversation with Halliday, and how the Indian agent had suggested Charley should come. “Him pay?” Charley asked, and grudgingly Harry told him yes. He had half hoped Charley might decide he wanted nothing of the venture. But the old man just nodded.

  “Have you thoughts on where he went?” Harry asked him.

  “Don’t know. Leave after storm. Have plan then.”

  “Well think quick. I’ll not wait on your ponderings.”

  Francine was away with Grace gathering the berries. When they got back and Harry told them what had occurred, they didn’t seem surprised either, though there was much shaking of heads and whistling through teeth and muttered Indian words. But they had little to say to Harry. Francine nodded when she heard Charley was involved and said to speak to him. Grace just shrugged, though she looked troubled, and even, the first time he’d seen her that way, frail. Harry had given up trying to pry things from his wife. She spoke or she didn’t.