The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “A miracle you’ve woken at all,” says he. I had broken my skull. The ship had moored just hours after I had fallen, so “regrettably,” as the surgeon called it. I had tumbled from a window, so he tells me, so very “regrettably.”

  He’d let out the blood what was clotting between my skull and my brain. The rest had been down to my spirit, says he, what had showed much fortitude. And I did take comfort in that, broken boy, creaking in a bunk.

  There were wires wrapped tight about my head, which were to stay, and I was not to move. He could not give me ought for the pain as yet. I was to stay awake till he was certain I’d not slip back into the coma from which I had just arisen.

  Pain. The creak of wood and rope. The shudder of lantern light. Nausea. My mother then, come aboard to be with me. Seeing her, that fortitude of mine came clattering down swift enough, to show the weepy boy beneath.

  Weeks followed at the hospital down in Comox, a fat Scottish doctor there and his fat nurses, Makah women from the south, and none too soft in their manners.

  When finally we did return, Shaiks of course was long away, and George Hunt was to stay a white man. So said Robert Hunt, though my father was lucky to be alive as well. It was the very seriousness of the injury he had exacted on his son what most likely saved him. The rush to help the lifeless child. But, later, Shaiks had my father against a wall, the knife at his throat. Quiet words spoken. So Annie told me. She had been watching the events as they did occur, from some secret vantage.

  Thus did I come to my crippled face and, I reckon, to the problem in my head what is the cause of my rages.

  All the time I had been pondering on things past, my feet had been leading me further from Teguxste and deeper into the forest. Now the undergrowth was near impassable. Underfoot was branches that came directly out from the bases of the tree trunks, and vines also, and no more bracken. I could not make sense of it.

  Now there was some brightness ahead. I hacked with my machete a few more times and grey light trickled through. I was near to exhaustion. I leaned, gasping, against a trunk, then I stepped ahead. My foot went straight down through the forest floor. I fell forward, dropping my machete as I made a grab for a branch.

  The machete fell away into the depths. In front of me a tree had collapsed to make a clearing in the forest. But there weren’t nothing of reason in it. I was hanging out above a drop of thirty foot or more, down to the great tree’s ruin.

  I had been climbing up—all that while dreaming of faraway times and the greatness that might have been mine—climbing up and away from the ground into the canopy, my feet perched on the sturdiness of the forest’s flora. I have heard tell of it, though never from one what is meant to have such wilderness skills as me. I was like some white prospector, so gone astray he can no longer see his up from his down.

  And now the rain arrived. The wind gusted heavier. I swayed there on the brink of the void, and I crowed with laughter. I called out to my great-uncle and to my mother and to Nakapankam. Here is a fool what knows nothing! The rain beating upon me. A fool in the forest. Meal for a bear, or some deserving forest rat.

  Yet it was like something broke in me with the laughing. I recalled what it was that I was doing there: the weight of my pack and what was inside it. I thought about those men and women what are my history, and where my ancestry was come from. I knew again why I was in the forest. I knew where I was going. So I drew myself together some and spoke on how I had a task and I must follow it to its end, be it bitter or no.

  Back on the forest floor, after some scrambling, slipping, and sliding, I saw in which direction was the incline and followed it. Up is forward, I says to myself. Up is forward.

  Some time later, I was wrapped all about in rhododendron vines, sweat burning at my eyes, feeling like I was never getting free of them. Trussed up good and proper, deep in the wilds and night coming. But I hacked some more and then I was, quite sudden, at the edge of the forest.

  The lake. Some forty years or more since last I seen it. There was bulrushes fifteen feet high down by its margins, swamp hay and cattail. No one had been there in years to cut it back. The lake is a mile long and half that wide, the steep hills behind. That day, there was geese and mallard, shovellers and canvasback ducks out on the water, what made my stomach cramp and my saliva run just seeing them.

  Now the rain stopped. Birds sang in the evening air. I pushed my way through the reed grass round toward the north side of the lake. There was no path now at all. Eaten by the land. Fitting that all should return with time to its original state.

  Through the high reeds and tule, I spied some distance off a pole rising thirty foot into the air and, at its top, the killer whale. The weather had been cruel to it, the features all worn and bird shit smothering much of what was left. The dorsal fin was still there, anyhow, rising sharp against the sky, and the mouth still grinned, if all its paint was long gone. Wooden planks mouldered in the clearing beneath the pole. Where once there was carven figures standing all about, now I saw only mounds of undergrowth.

  I had come back, at last, to the House of Shamans.

  It was there that I did first become a man of medicine. My friend, Making-Alive, brung me there. He who first suggested I become a shaman.

  He was the brother of Francine, and it was for that reason I did marry her after I lost old Lucy. Poor old bugger, Making-Alive, dead not two years since of the grippe, coughing and retching his life away.

  I once told Making-Alive that I did not believe in such powers. Conjurors and tricksters, says I, liars who cheat the people of their money, brewing up evil, but helpless to save a man from real illness. Making-Alive just laughed. “Many ways to heal a man,” he said. “More than you know, stupid white boy.”

  When at last I followed him up to the House of Shamans, I don’t know what I believed. Did I want to expose their lies? Perhaps it was that I wanted to believe. Or I wanted power, young man as I was. Shamans is chieftains in their own right, all of it tied up together in the peoples’ ways. Thinking through these memories now, here in the museum hall, I reckon I was seeking for my own brown blood—seeking to belong.

  Walking inside the House of Shamans and seeing all those old farts sitting about in the dimness within, I understood that now I’d truly know if their magic was real or not. Making-Alive had told me they’d kill me if my tongue come loose and I spoke of it to others. They’d come in the night to rip out that tongue, or bleed me quiet in the forest. Well, in the days what followed, they did teach me all their tricks, and I thenceforth did keep quiet on it.

  Anyways, standing there in front of that high pole among the ruins, I took off my pack and laid it down on the grass. I barely knew what I should do next. Make a camp. So I got long strips of bark and bracken fronds, scythed the grass short, cut lengths of cattail from along the shore, shaved away their leaves, and I was weaving the stems in lattices, and using cedar string to draw their ends together into mats, before I realized it seemed I was planning a proper stay.

  When I looked up next, the evening was fair and the night would be the same. The storm had blown out the rain, for a day or two at least.

  By twilight I had a fire rustling. The firmament bore heavy down upon me without no clouds to hide it. There was just too many alternatives, among the stars, for them to loom so present whilst I was so split myself. I hunched my shoulders against them.

  The Indian says the stars is the dead. Was David there among them? And Lucy? My lost babies? All those others I have knowed and lost? Are there stars for the white dead too? Must one people’s story be everyone’s? How can it be otherwise? Can all souls, when their bodies shrug them off at last, know to travel to the right places their peoples have constructed for them? Can it be so convoluted? If so, then all the differing tribes and races of man are surely different species as well, if such profoundly different endings be their ultimate lot.

  I have also heard it said that stars are other suns, and maybe worlds spinning round them very like
this one. And that from science! It’s odd to me that so fantastical a story could be born out of the very heart of Reason. Surely a wilder myth than any savage people could imagine?

  I pulled the contents of my pack out onto the cattail mat. At the bottom was the small wooden box. The wood was worn with age, yet it had been cared for, polished with whale fat so that it reflected the fire’s flush by that lonely lakeshore.

  I placed my forehead down on the box. I do not know how long I rested there. I thought that I might cease breathing altogether, and that might be the most beautiful blessing I would ever receive.

  A tuft of down, what looked like it come off the breast of a duck, blew up to rest against the side of the box. I rolled it between my fingers. Blood and down. The shamans’ trick. My heart pounded in my ears, my stomach heaved so that I did actually retch, though there weren’t naught to bring up. I could hardly hold sense of the world around me. So I drew myself up and stamped away outside the circle of the fire’s light to the lakeshore. The lake was black, but the stars threw diamonds across its surface.

  “Lagoyewilé!” I shouted. But there weren’t no great spirit of the killer whale out there to help me. I wondered what the boy’s dream about me had truly been, all those years ago, before I did heal him. Eagle down. The sickness coming into my mouth from out the body of the boy. The healing of him. Magic. Believing in it, if that is what I did back then.

  But that great deception! Sucking the sickness from the body of the boy. His limp body in my arms. My lips upon his chest. Fever and rank sweat, and the child properly unwell, eyes rolling in his head, his skin burning.

  Then me spitting out into my palm that bloody ball of illness. The sighs from the people when I hold it up to show them.

  David. Lucy. My baby boy and girl. I tried it on all of them. And on none did it work.

  Back by the fire, I knelt beside the box. The very same box what caused the war between the Tsimshian and the Tlingit. That once contained the chieftain’s head. The box Shaiks gave my mother. That she gave me. That I did give to David at the time he danced his first hamatsa. I prised up the lid. Then my rage came over me and I shut my eyes against the horror of it all.

  HARRY DRIFTED IN AND OUT OF DREAM. He saw again the blade sliding through Poodlas’s upper arm and into the armpit. He went back further in his memories, to that first blade. That first time.

  The Mormon orphanage stood high on Telegraph Hill above San Francisco, with the stink and poverty of Sydney Town all about. He’d spent much of his childhood confined there, once his mother died. It was a big clapboard house with high plank walls surrounding it. There weren’t so many wooden houses of its size left, especially since the fires of 1850. Sometimes, when no one was watching to chastise him for it, he would scramble up through the attic and onto the red adobe tiles of its roof. There he could gaze out to the hovels and patchwork tents where the Australians, come over for the gold rush, made their homes, along with the other poor immigrants out of the Latin Americas, Ireland, and old Europe.

  His father had been one of those last. He was a Welshman, with one gleaming find to his name, sifted from a river in the mountains, with which he’d won his bawdy-singer bride. “He come in that night, first time I seed him, great wad a greasy money in his paws, stinking high as a dead beast. But filled up so full with hisself as I couldn’t resist his twinkling.” So Harry’s mother told it. Women were rare enough in the city back then, she said, that even whores had the men doffing their caps and paying them fat compliments. She was desperate—in those last days of her life—desperate for him to know the details of his origins, pitiful though they might be. His father had taken a knife in his guts before Harry had even come squawking out into the world. So she told it. But he’d heard other stories as well: how he hadn’t died at all, how he’d upped and gone as soon as he’d heard she was bearing his child. As soon as the money was gone.

  Harry sat beside her in the wood shack out back of the other harlots’ cribs, where her employers had put her to die. Rank odours came off her, choked by the grippe, sweat pouring down her body, grunting, coughing to her soon-forgotten end. “I weren’t no soiled dove,” she said, over and again. “You don’t forget it, Harry. I sang for my keeps. I sang.” But it was lies. She spent her days on her back, just like all of them, however sweetly she could croon. She wasn’t evil in her lies, though. She dreamed. She had her stories. She spun them to him. She spun them to herself. But always with a soft hand on his face and a kiss to his forehead. He was nine years old when she shut her eyes and left him.

  He was in the orphanage for five years—his mother’s madam saying how she’d do him right, fetching him straight up the hill from her deathbed and in through its gates. Some agreement she must have kept with the men there. He never heard what was done with his mother’s body. The only time the boys were let out was in groups on Sundays for the trip to church, the two men who ran the place, decked out in black, both of them thin like strutting scarecrows, following their boys, close-eyed, out and back. Otherwise the boys played—or, as often, fought—in the yard, or they studied the scriptures, once they had learned to read, a rider’s crop across their neck if they should dawdle.

  One day there came to the orphanage a kind and Christian soul with a puppet show he’d brought back across the Pacific from Java. The old sailor, face burnt nearly black with the sun, promised Harry the freedom of the oceans, now he was come of age, if he but made his way to find him at the docks. The Jolly Waterman was the place.

  So that night Harry went up the wall, fingers tight on the nailheads that held it together. He perched there a moment on top. Below, the two Mormon men had spied him. They hurled black vengeance if he wasn’t back on the ground that instant, even as one of them worked, frantic, at the locks on the gate. A song his mother used to sing came in his mind. He sang it down to them. “I am fixing to leave, yes I am fixing to go. But where I am going, I just don’t know.”

  He dropped to the far side and ran down the hill through Sydney Town’s tenements, sucking splinters from his palms where they had spiked him as he went over the wall. Chileno whores called out from their rough-board shanties to him, some cackling, showing their brown-tan buttocks as he went by, cooing and blowing him kisses—“Sweet boy,” “Beautiful boy.”

  He scuttled past the doorways of the cheap groggeries—the Bobby Burns, the Tam O’Shanter, the Bird in Hand—hunching his shoulders, remembering the catcalls and violent, clutching paws the men inside had had for his mother. Vagabonds in slouch felt hats, smoking pipes. Australians with the shuffling gait of men who’d spent too long in irons. Maudlin prospectors belching away the paltry earnings they’d drawn from the hills. Those who had made more plied the salons and gambling houses round Portsmouth Square, down in the rich heart of the city.

  He came out at the bottom of the hill and raced along Montgomery Street. There were no street lamps; what light there was came beaming out from the hotels and businesses—the Nianto Hotel, Bubb Grubb and Company, Frenchies’ Irons and Hardware. He passed dogs fighting for dropped morsels in the thick mud, passed drunks rolling and squealing on the ground, passed Chinamen with big barrels of rank-smelling dried fish for sale. Men in tall hats and long beards stalked the streets as well, up on the plankboard walking ways. Page boys his own age hurled insults, jeering at his tattered clothing, and a flag on a pole proclaimed the city for the United States of America.

  He turned on California Street toward the front. The corner of Battery Street, and the brick warehouses, many-windowed and five storeys tall. Then down the wharf until there, halfway along, a swinging wooden sign showed a red-faced, smiling jaunty: The Jolly Waterman.

  The kind and Christian soul was inside, hanging off the bar by one arm, liquor-crazed amid the crowd of cursing, jostling stevedores and sailors at their drink. Harry stood at the doorway, half in, half out, until a clout at his ear threw him forward inside. Fearful, lacking option, Harry stood before the man. Remember me?

 
The man squinted at him, then took hold of Harry by his hair. He dragged him through the crowd, and a few cheered him on, and most ignored them. Then up the stairs at the back. Harry had learned enough from those who worked the orphanage to know what was coming. So he hung limp in the drunkard’s grip, until it loosened as the man fumbled outside a door in the upstairs hallway, the sounds of the bar still loud around them.

  Harry twisted suddenly loose. He slipped the knife from the man’s belt, where he had seen it earlier. The man cursed and stumbled, rickety with alcohol. The boy drove the blade up into his face, both hands about the handle. It jarred along the cheekbone and slid in through the man’s left eye. The eyeball split and darkened. The lens and the mucus inside slid down the blade, and the blood following. The two of them slumped against the unlocked door. It fell open under their weight. The boy lay halfway inside the dark room, atop the man’s body, until at last it ceased its shuddering.

  Afterwards, he walked among the men downstairs. The knife was stowed in his belt, the dead man’s money in his pocket, the corpse hidden in the locked room, no one taking notice of the blood upon his face and on his thin body. He was not the only one stained in gore that night, or any night, from the fighting that did not cease along the wharf each evening, once the drinking was begun.

  He walked outside and stood by the quayside. The still waters mirrored the brilliant firmament. The vast forest of ships’ masts broke the horizons about him. He knew then the call of the world’s oceans indeed, just as he understood the horror that lurked around every corner of a boy’s life.

  A day had passed since their passage through the Nakwakto Rapids. Harry had brought the Hesperus through the heavy water on the far side. He’d lain up in a cove he’d come upon by fortune in the blinding rain. He had dropped anchor and staggered forward to see what had become of Charley.