The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  The old Indian was on his hands and knees in the prow, the lump of his back raised up like a whale’s, and shaking his head from side to side. Where he had been thrown from his feet in the storm surge, he had cracked his temple against the railing, before sliding away forward out of Harry’s sight. Blood flowed still from the wound at his head.

  Meanwhile, the Hesperus was beginning to list.

  “We took a bang to the hull,” said Harry, squatting beside Charley. “I’m going below. See what’s there. You all right?”

  Charley waved him off. “I live,” he said.

  In the hold, some bales of blankets had spilled across the floor, but mostly all was still tightly stowed. A section of the hull about a foot long had been forced inward, low on the port side. Water spurted in through the broken planking. The corners of the spilled blankets twitched in the several inches of water they had already shipped.

  He was half an hour hammering it right, retching with the pain from his shoulder, the sling Charley had fashioned for him hanging loose about his neck, groggy and stupid as well with exhaustion, so that more than once he drove the hammer on to his own fingers. By the time he came back on deck, gasping and seeing ghost images all about him, the storm had diminished and Charley was up and moving about in the pilothouse.

  “No good,” said Charley from the door. “All gone break.” Inside, most of the cupboards and shelves had opened or fallen, throwing out their contents of jars and bottles, boxes and crockery. These had rolled and smashed until the floor was little more than a midden.

  Charley held up a length of filthy bandage. “All gone bad.” He pointed. Amongst the detritus were the shattered remains of the jar of iodine.

  “Christ almighty,” said Harry.

  Charley nodded. “All gone bad,” he said.

  They set fresh water to boil on the stove. Then they washed Charley’s head. The wound was ugly and did not want to stop bleeding, but it was also shallow. His fat skull, at least, was still intact. Harry sewed it closed with canvas twine. The old man sat without comment through the operation.

  “Not get sick,” he said. “Blood same raven.”

  Harry was in a worse state. The wounds in his shoulder and his leg had both reopened from his efforts at the helm and in the hold. His bandages were soaked with blood, and there were no more clean for him to replace them with.

  “Sea water best,” said Charley. “Keep bandage for now, go in ocean. Go on—all you in water.” So he lowered Harry into the water on a rope. He swung in the tide and the salt water ground at his wounds until he could bear no more. After, Charley took off the bandages, washed them in the ocean, placed them to boil in the water on the stove, and then hung them to dry in the sharp breeze, now the rain had finally stopped.

  They brewed coffee and chewed dry salmon. Charley put back the bandages. Then they slept.

  Harry woke shivering in the dawn. He felt chilled, though the day did not seem cold. Charley prepared a breakfast of canned fish boiled in water to a stew, with a little of the bread that had not been soaked during the storm. They sat, side by side against the front of the pilothouse, drinking coffee.

  Harry’s body shook. His mind kept threatening to stray into daydream. So he wrapped his arms tight about himself and stood. He looked out. The inlet stretched away to either side, northwest and southeast, a mile wide. The rapids were still visible on the far side, the foaming waters almost benign from this distance. He was so tired still. He slumped back down beside Charley. “Where now?” he said at last.

  “Teguxste south,” he said, pointing. “But you shake and sick. Go back is better. Find medicine.” Charley put a rolled cigarette into Harry’s mouth. He struck a match, his gnarled fingers shielding the flame from the wind. Then he leaned back and looked intently at Harry. He put his hand to Harry’s forehead. The skin on Charley’s palm was like bark. The old Indian’s nostrils twitched. “You sick,” he said again, his gloomy face more grim than ever. “Maybe die sick. What we do?”

  Harry leaned his head back against the railing. “Find George,” he said. “Maybe he’ll have medicine. Maybe he’ll have a plan. He’s a fucking medicine man, ain’t he?” He hunched his knees up close to his chest. “And if that fey black fucker—demon, dreamer, whatever you call it—and don’t think I’ve forgot you ain’t told me one chunk of the truth of things—if it’s off whispering to Walewid about where we are, then he’ll be on his way for certain, now his brother’s dead. If we are yet ahead of them, we ought to press on.” He squeezed his palms together. “I’ve but a chill. It’ll fade through the morning. See if it don’t.”

  Charley muttered something in Kwakwala. Then he nodded. “South,” he said.

  So Harry turned the Hesperus south and followed the mainland. But he did not improve through the morning, and his fever did not fade. In the end, Charley took the helm. Harry dragged out some canvas and lay down to rest.

  And now there came a faint aroma from the bandage on his shoulder. He knew it all too well. That smell like molasses left too long on a stove.

  Damnation, but he was in the grip of trouble now. Jammed between one bad choice and another. Turn about, brave the rapids once more, and make the passage home. In what: three days? Perhaps hope to sight another vessel on the way, one with a surgeon aboard, or at least with some disinfecting agent to delay the rot’s hold upon him.

  Or go on and find his father-in-law. And what then? George was skilled in healing, though it was of the Indian sort. Maybe he had iodine with him. As likely not. If it all weren’t too late already.

  To turn back risked leaving his father-in-law to his fate, whatever that might be, should Walewid track him down. Though Walewid was first and foremost after him and Charley, was he not? But he had said he’d take the skulls of Harry and Charley, and of George as well. The dreamer had seen them come through the rapids, so he’d report that back to Walewid. He’d surely work it out, where George might be. If he had even cottoned to their mission. Though what other fool mission could they be on to take them through the rapids anyhow?

  So they went on and hoped to find George, and the rot might take him, unless George had the salves and skill to save him. Or they turned back, and hoped they got lucky and made it to safety. If he went back without George, then that cocksucker Halliday would confiscate the family’s treasures—Christ only knew what kinds of chaos that would be the starting of—and probably the Hesperus as well. If that happened—well then all his plans would have come to nothing.

  All this thinking exhausted him. Soon enough, he drifted into sleep.

  “Fat Harry.” Charley’s voice drew him back to consciousness. “Fat Harry, look starbud.” Harry was still propped against the gunnels of the Hesperus, a nest of sail canvas beneath him, a waterskin by his side. The air was filled with sea spume from the boat’s passage through the water. It caught in his hair and on his brows and lashes, stinging at his eyes. Yet the breeze and the water were cool against the heat of his fever. He pulled himself up with his good arm and looked out over the side.

  A killer whale rolled up out of the water not twenty yards away. Its tail rose up to hang for a moment, black against the water, the mountains and the forest behind, before it slid away beneath the ocean.

  “Sign!” called out Charley. “Maqenoq, him speak loud! Shout for us hear. Why come inside rapid? Should be he only out on ocean.”

  The killer whale rose again farther ahead. The explosion of its breath threw spume into the air, which drifted above the water until the boat passed through it. Harry smelled fish and brine and something else, sharp but nameless, the very essence of the whale.

  Harry found that tears were pouring down his face. He could not remember when last he had wept, or indeed if he had ever done so before. “Must have got caught up in the tidal surge,” he shouted back to Charley, when he finally found his voice again. “Got drawn through.”

  “Sign,” said Charley again. Then he went back to singing some Indian dirge, a rough-throat
ed jumble of monotonous sound from which Harry could not even pick out the individual words. But in that instant, Harry felt hope come into him, where he had not realized there had been none before. It was such a surprise that he should feel so that he rose up on his feet and went to sit forward. He wasn’t even sure what the nature of that hope might be, what it was he hoped for.

  A half-hour later, they came near a headland. Charley shouted, “See?” Harry looked back and saw the old Indian was pointing toward a small island just beyond the headland’s tip. “Dead man island. Same like Rupert grave island.”

  It came off the port bow, ten cables away, an islet no more than fifty yards across. There were broken statues of men, small rotting shelters, and mouldering boxes in the trees. At its far side, another great branch of the inlet forked away east, as wide as the one in which they currently travelled. The high, grey cloud was breaking up. Sunlight and shadow rolled in fractured segments over the forested hillsides, which fell steeply into the waters of the inlet. Far off he saw the sheer granite mountain ranges of the Interior.

  “Where dead man island,” Charley said, “there village too.”

  Twenty minutes later, they floated some yards off the ruin of an Indian village. A pebble beach ran down to the water, and behind, thick and tall and filled with shadow, the forest loomed over the broken timber frames of long-abandoned houses.

  Then he saw the upended canoe with the killer whale design along its flanks. He saw the hull staved in so badly it would never be of use again.

  “George canoe,” said Charley quietly.

  “Walewid found him,” said Harry.

  “Hmm,” said Charley.

  “Look at his fucking boat.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What if they’re here, waiting in the forest?”

  “Where them boat?”

  “They could’ve hid the boats so we’d not see them.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What fucking hmm?”

  “Think they no here. Maybe come go. Maybe something else.”

  Harry looked at Charley, the old man’s gnarled fingers scraping at his stubble. “So what’re you suggesting?” he said.

  “I go see.” Charley looked Harry up and down. “You wait boat.”

  They steered in close with Harry at the tiller again, his body shaking now with fever, but clinging to his rifle with his free hand. Charley hopped over the side and waded in. He stood for a while beside the canoe, examining the damage that had been done to it. Then he clambered up the pebbles to a collapsed totem pole about which the canoe had been secured. He squatted down, looking at something. Then he stood and came back down the beach.

  “Think safe,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “George thing here. No one take thing.”

  “So what about the canoe?”

  “Think safe.”

  Harry watched the old Indian on the shore. Then he said, “All right.”

  The day was ending and the tide was near its fullest ebb. They beached the Hesperus beside the canoe, yet near enough to the waterline so that, with a heave, it would float when next the tide was in.

  “I got to see to the outside of the hull first,” said Harry. He put his feet over the gunnels and dropped onto the beach, but his legs had no strength in them and he pitched forward on the pebbles.

  Charley helped him to his feet. He led him up to the remains of George’s camp. “See,” he said. George’s belongings were wrapped in a tarpaulin, which Charley had opened. They lay neatly ordered inside. “George take some thing go forest. Leave thing here. If someone come, then this not be here. Be stole or move about.”

  “Don’t explain the canoe, though, do it?”

  “Hmm,” said Charley. Harry slumped down on the tarpaulin, thinking Charley could wrap “hmm” in nettles and poke it up his crippled ass. The old Indian sat down beside him and drew out Harry’s tobacco tin from his own pocket. He rolled two cigarettes in silence and handed one across. They drew smoke together.

  Nodding toward the canoe, Charley said, “Think George do.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “Know George many year.”

  “But he’d strand himself.”

  “Ek.”

  Harry smoked for a while. “You’re saying he came here to stay. Or to die.”

  Charley just shrugged.

  After they finished smoking, it was Charley who worked on the boat’s hull, Charley who gathered wood and made up the fire, Charley who brewed coffee and cooked food, Charley who fetched a bottle of whisky from the hold and poured part of its contents over Harry’s bandaged wounds, which were black and, at his shoulder, dirty yellow with pus.

  Harry lay propped against the fallen totem pole. He did his best to ignore the stench of decay from his shoulder. He ran his fingers across the worn carving of the owl. Charley sat opposite, watching him and drinking from the whisky bottle. Then he said, “I go look sign George. You stay. Sleep.” Charley hefted the rifle and trudged away along the beach, bent low, his head ranging left and right like a mangy tracker dog snuffling for a trail.

  Out on the quiet waters, mist curled in the breeze like slow-dancing ghosts. It was still only mid-morning, but soon enough Harry was asleep.

  “Fat Harry!” He opened his eyes. Charley was kneeling beside the embers of the fire, a pot bubbling over it. “You father-law not here,” he said. “Track go forest. When come back? Maybe never.” He leaned in closer to look down on Harry’s face. He shook his head and muttered to himself. “Sick bad.” He handed Harry a cup of coffee.

  He felt as if he had been unconscious for days, but he saw by the sun that it was only noon, the light thin through the heavy, broken cloud. He sat up, leaning against the broken totem pole, and sipped. His sleep had been filled with nightmares. Raven-headed men, bloody eyes in the darkness of thickets, great fanged maws snapping. Well, he deserved them. “Short life bringers,” the Indians called the white man. Here among the heathens, here on this wild coastline, whisky smuggler as he was, murderer of men, bringer of ruin—yes, he deserved his nightmares.

  He had killed three people in his life. The first was the night of his escape from the orphanage in San Francisco, and he had made his peace with that. The last was Poodlas, and none could deny that he had been protecting his own. Yet the truth was he’d been quick to vent his anger and the darker places of his soul on that poor drunken idiot. There’d been many ways he might have played that scene, but he chose violence. Perhaps he’d pay with his own life now.

  The truth of it was that he felt wrung with shame. And it was not so hard to fathom why. Shame for his anger back at Blunden Harbour. And shame for that other murder of which he was culpable. The second killing. Hong Kong. The door with the Chinese sign that meant Joy. Though he would not dwell on that. He would not step inside those memories. There was death enough already. Death surrounding him here and now— Poodlas, this village, the people gone, the imminence of his own death, as seemed likely now. It was enough for any man to bear.

  He coughed hard and long, leaning on his one good arm, spitting black phlegm into the embers. His head spun until he nearly fell forward into the fire. Charley reached across to hold on to him.

  There weren’t many had looked on him with favour down the years. But Grace had. And, he supposed, in his grim way, so George had as well— at least, in sanctioning his marriage, if he’d not been exactly welcoming thereafter. But even then, George was only reacting to the truth, as he had spied it: that Harry had been planning to run with the spring tide.

  He was here on this dead beach, near dead himself, sent on some fool errand he’d never wanted that had brought him near his own death. Yet there was something still to be done. Some part in the spin of things for him. He had to find George. For Grace. For Francine. For this family that had been straight with him. Across the fire, Charley watched him, his head seeming to emerge directly from his chest in his deformity. Even for cripple Charley. Now he had come thi
s far, Harry would not have these people undone—broken by the likes of Halliday and Crosby.

  “White fuck,” he said, not meaning to speak aloud. When he heard his own voice, sounding as if it came from deep inside a cave, he realized how far his mind had been ranging.

  Charley nodded slowly, as if deep in contemplation of Harry’s statement. He handed Harry the waterskin. “What come next?” he said.

  “My faith were placed in George,” said Harry, lying back and gasping at the air. “Too late to turn back now.”

  Charley shrugged. “George go up in forest,” he said. “I know where.”

  “Then we get after him,” said Harry. “Soon is better, I’d say.” Charley looked at him for a time, and Harry knew the old Indian was sizing up the chances of his making it much farther. “Damn your pig eyes,” Harry said. “Help me get this bandage off. Let’s have a see of what I’ve got left in me.”

  Charley unpeeled the bandage from his shoulder. Harry could not keep from moaning as the scabs came away with the blood- and pus-soaked cloth. A thin yellow liquid seeped from the wound. A crust of dried pus lay beneath the skin, bulging the ragged edges taut against the twine holding them together. The skin was mostly black, and the festering stench made even Charley blink and pull away.

  “Yellow not so bad. Black not good,” Charley said. “Die soon.”

  “You’ve a soft manner,” Harry said. The corners of Charley’s mouth twitched a little. Harry sighed. “But I know it.” He picked up the whisky bottle and poured a quantity down across the wound. He breathed slowly through his nose for a while, then put the bottle to his mouth and drank. “Seems I’m reacquiring the habit,” he said.

  “Good time for start again,” said Charley.

  They looked at the wound on his leg, which somehow had escaped infection. Then Charley washed the bandages in the sea. He put them in a pan upon the fire to boil. The Hesperus was beached at such an angle that its stove could not be used. They reapplied the bandages and then Charley said, “Best go now.”