The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “I’ll not lie for being Kwagiulth,” says I.

  “Though what you did was Tlingit,” Charley says, “if it were anything at all.”

  But, I pointed out, he was talking about David’s funeral, not the ritual for which I was arrested.

  “Well that is how it works in eyes of the people,” says Charley. “You will need witnesses to support you, if you is to have any chance at escaping justice. Who’ll travel as far as Vancouver to help the likes of you?” He tells me Spencer ain’t necessarily wrong in wondering who I thought I was helping in admitting to the charges. I’d but propagate the view of Indian savagery to an even wider audience, which weren’t any part of what he had been discussing in Teguxste.

  But in my mind it ain’t savagery, which is the very point, says I. In Vancouver they won’t give two shits, says he, and at that we left it. Old mother Charley tells me I must use the medicine on my eye, and then off he went.

  Well, I did barely know my left from my right by then. All the things what I had been planning on and thinking through so swiftly come undone. But the pain was brutal enough in my head and eye—had been, in truth, all these days past—that I took heed of Charley’s words. I was distracted enough with my thinking, though, that I pulled off the bandage, opened up the bottle of iodine, and poured it direct over my wounded eye.

  I was still cursing an hour later when I heard the sound of the steamer’s whistle, as it would be rounding the headland and coming into the harbour.

  I was dabbing my eye with water and feeling sorry as a salmon on a slab, when Woolacott shortly showed himself through the bars of my cage.

  “Steamer’s in,” says he, and warned me to be ready on his return.

  “Let me out. I’ll go stretch my legs,” I tell him.

  “Shut your garret,” says he, and off he went.

  “George,” comes a low voice then, from the window at back of the cell. Charley’d brought paper and pen, and was wanting to know if he should be along with me aboard the steamer. Lacking all funds as we was, the option didn’t really arise, however.

  I sucked on the pen for a bit, mind blank as to what needed saying on the page. In the end I laid out how David was dead and I was to be tried. I asked Boas if there was any funds owed me that he might send on. It was painful in the writing, letting someone know of David’s passing. I reckon the letter probably sounded a bit plaintive by the end. But I was in a hurry to finish, not knowing when Woolacott would be back. So I pushed the paper back through the window soon as it was done, along with Boas’s letter with the address at the top for Charley to show the telegraph office.

  “I’ll be needing Spencer’s money,” I says to Charley, “for bail and lawyers and such.”

  “He won’t like it none,” says Charley, and I knew it. But I pointed him towards Annie, once she’d calmed down, as his best way of making inroads.

  Soon, Woolacott was back, with two other men alongside. One was a bully-boy from earlier. The other was a man I did know well enough. He was the man what had accompanied Crosby that day of David’s funeral on the beach. The man the sight of which made me start to put twos and twos together, and to make numbers what added up rather better than any had before. His name was To-Cop.

  “So it’s you what’s got this whole shitstorm raging, then, is it?” I says to him, as Woolacott was cuffing my hands together through the bars.

  “I do my duty as a deputy,” To-Cop says without emotion. But I could see in his eyes a spark what spoke of something more.

  Now I did comprehend more fully the conspiracy there was against me. To-Cop worked with the missionaries, had grown up amongst them, and even wore the black apparel betimes, as he had been the day of the funeral, though I ain’t convinced he is rightly a priest. More pertinent, though, was that he had been present at the ritual for what I was charged. More than present.

  “We both know things about that day,” says I to To-Cop. “You ain’t exactly untarnished yourself.” He only smiled, as Woolacott pulled me to my feet, my hands secure behind my back.

  I asked Woolacott to pick up my medicine, but he would not. “The prison warden will see to what you need,” he says. He took me by the arm and led me out, To-Cop and the other man following.

  It was dark by then. The steamer’s lamps sparkling on the water as it bobbed by the cannery jetty up the far end of the village. Nearer, firelight flushed from the doors of houses, and one bonfire on the beach threw up great amber flames, and red sparks churning, what shone then dimmed and disappeared, as if exhausted at the efforts of their brief existence. The people was lined up to watch in silence the prisoner’s progress among them. I felt the spirit in me ebbing away.

  When we was halfway through the village, we passed those few what had come off of the steamer.

  “Father?” says one, and I strained to see in the dim light. It was Abayah. Seeing David’s widow there, so unexpected, was almost too much to bear. I hung my head down without speaking, feeling such shame at my predicament that I could not bring myself to look her in the eyes.

  “What is this?” she spoke up in English.

  “Come on,” says Woolacott, “quickly now,” and he tried to pull me on. He seemed anxious.

  Abayah clutched at me, and she wept. “Where do they take you?” says she.

  I tell her I am to Vancouver for trial, and near was I to weeping myself.

  “Have you not heard?” she says, but Woolacott sought to quiet her.

  “Get away home,” says he, and pushed her.

  “Whatever you do to me,” I says to him, “you will not ever put your hands to my daughter.” I spoke quietly, but Woolacott moved back. Some spirit to resist was there still in my blood.

  Then Abayah tells me what had happened in Rupert. She tells how Halliday, Woolacott, and some deputies had taken, by force, the family’s treasures just the very day before, and how Halliday had gone away with them after in his boat.

  Woolacott had his hand on his pistol. “Now George,” he says to me, his other hand palm out, evidently catching the gist of our conversation, though he don’t speak Kwakwala, even despite the years he has been resident here. “You just keep your calm,” he says.

  My voice low, I say to him the threat was only to have been carried out if I did not return.

  “We didn’t know you was back till now, did we?” says he.

  I asks him where they have taken everything, but he says, “You don’t need to know, George Hunt.” He draws his pistol as he says it.

  Then Charley was at my side. When he heard what had gone on from Abayah, he was about Woolacott as well. But the man would tell us nothing further. Instead, he had his pistol raised up and pointed square at me. To-Cop and the other was beside him, toting their billy clubs, all spunk and nerves. People was about us, gathering, and the whites of Woolacott’s eyes plain visible.

  Charley stepped in front of me. “Stop!” says he, forceful, to me. “Getting shot won’t help nobody.” He was thinking my rage would certainly come upon me. Instead, I felt nothing more than a wash of defeat.

  That stayed true even when I looked into To-Cop’s animal eyes at Woolacott’s shoulder. Despair had unmanned me. Even in that moment I was surprised at myself that I should wilt and not give way to my rage. What was become of me? Here, when I might with such justice feel anger, that I should instead roll over and lie belly up to the world.

  Now several people had their hands on me—men of the village, I saw. Abayah was there still. She clung to Charley, who pushed in among the men holding me. He whispered close in my ear, “I am your dreamer. I’ll learn the truth of it.” So I allowed myself to be dragged away, along toward the cannery jetty.

  The steamer was the Comox, and old Eddlestone looked down on us from the rail alongside the pilothouse when we came near. “By the blessed tits of the holy whore of Babylon,” says he. “Will you get that felon aboard, ’fore I shove off without all of you mistresses of shite.” It’s like that man has a condition of the brai
n, so foul is he in all he says.

  I was pushed aboard, down stairs, and into one of the small cabins. Woolacott locked me to a pipe which rose alongside the porthole at the far end of the cabin. I saw To-Cop standing outside in the passage, his face dim in the lantern light, but his eyes aflame with triumph. Then the door was thrown shut and I was left alone.

  Of the three days I spent travelling south in Eddlestone’s steamer, shackled the whole time, there ain’t much to say. Woolacott brung me two meals each day, and wouldn’t speak nothing at all. I pissed and shat in a bucket, and there weren’t no ways to wash. The cabin stank—the unemptied bucket in the corner, my unwashed body, my unchanged clothes. My eye wept pale liquid. After glooming and rankling and chewing on everything over and over, in the end my mind just turned empty, as if it waited outside of time for what would follow. There weren’t nothing of scheming to do. Nothing of plans. I was chained up and on my way to the jail.

  The steamer’s whistle woke me, the third morning, the cuffs sharp at the chafes on my wrist. I heard sounds, some cacophony, not of the ship itself but coming, dim, through the hull.

  I peered out of the tiny porthole. At first I could make little of what I saw, weary and stupid as I was. Then the shapes of the mountains, the great expanse of water ahead, and the tapering land close by, told me we was passing First Narrows and entering Burrard Inlet, that is Vancouver Bay.

  Beyond those details, however, I couldn’t recognize nothing. I’ve heard tell of the changes that had come but, when last I was there, Vancouver weren’t yet established. I worked one summer season as a fireman at the Hastings Sawmill, stoking the mill’s steam boiler eleven hours a day and half an hour for lunch, until my shoulders raged injustice and my hands couldn’t barely grip the coal shovel.

  All was very different back then. I lived with three others from the village what had travelled south with me looking for employment, one bed for all of us in a rough-board one-room shack in Gastown, as it was called back then by all what lived there. I was a drinker in those days, ranging through the town, midst the few bars’ hard clientele. A big man and rageful was I—more, if such was possible, in my younger days. Still, I took some sound beatings that summer, and dealt not a few as well, late in the evenings, prompted by all manner of insult, real or otherwise. But I came home that autumn with near five hundred dollars in my pocket.

  All of which is to show that, the last time I had been in that region, there had been not more than a few tens of houses lining the shore.

  Now there was quite hundreds of vessels, steamers, sailing ships, and all number of smaller kinds, moving about on the waters before me. A ninetyfoot sailing steamer passed close by the porthole, high white pilothouse at its centre and a black painted hull. Once it might have been filled with Klondikers. Now, who knew where all the men and women on its decks was bound?

  Ahead, great swathes of buildings lined the shore like jagging teeth, smoke rising everywhere, the thundering of machines and the high whine of buzz saws from the mills, crane arms silhouetted against the sky, and the high chimneys of ocean-going liners amid the thorny angles of what seemed a million sailing masts, all viewed through thick and filthy glass, so that it seemed to me some vision of a future more terrible and strange than any I might previously have imagined.

  I pulled back from the porthole, pain spearing in my head and no clarity of mind by which to embrace such a vision. So I lay back down on the bunk and only listened as we drew in towards the city’s wharves.

  Woolacott came shortly after I felt the steamer bump against its moorings. “Time to be out this shithole and on to the next,” he says, the first words he had spoke since we left Alert Bay. There was two men with him, black tall hats with silver crests, and silver stars at their chests. “Christ almighty,” says one. “Reeks like the sewer, don’t he? Fucking savage.”

  Woolacott uncuffed me from the pipe, then sealed my hands again, this time behind my back. He led me down the corridor, the Vancouver policemen following.

  At the door, sunlight snuffed out my vision for a time. Woolacott dragged me on blind, until my good eye found its balance. We were at the gangway and I stepped onto it and stumbled down.

  The noise blew against me like a gale. On the wharf, stevedores were shouting, and some took to jeering at me, bound filthy Indian nigger. “Get out of it!” shouted one policeman, and too much was happening for anything to cease for long. Rusting cranes lifted bales from off the steamer, slanting, swinging, dangerous above in the brightness of the sun.

  The water was surfaced with endless thousands of logs girning in the light swell, steam tugs buffeting at them, and a great sign what read Hastings Sawmill. Long low warehouses and sawdust eddies swirling yellow in the sky, but changed so much that no part of it did I recognize.

  Then we was through the unloading and amidst all those many-windowed warehouses in brown brick and stone what line the docks. We was jostled by a hard crowd of sailing men—burned faces and squinting eyes. “I don’t give two fucks for your silver star,” says one to our policemen. He shouldered Woolacott as he went by, Woolacott blustering, as provincial as was his prisoner.

  We were out now onto a thoroughfare of dust and horses. I tripped over a metal track. I heard a claxon bell, and bearing down upon us was a trellis-fronted steel contraption that froze me on the spot, me staring up at it like some squirrel at a diving eagle.

  A policeman pushed me on, and I saw it to be a streetcar, as I’d heard of them, a single carriage and people hanging off and gawping at me. One Chinese boy I saw, plump cheeks and a pillbox hat, dressed up like some toy jack-in-the-box—then gone away past with the electric crackle from the cables above.

  My eyes followed the streetcar. The road did stretch away into the distance as far as I could see through the dust. All along on either side was stone buildings, and a few still constructed of wood, glass fronts to shops, towers and turrets and flat-roofs, and spidering cables criss-crossing the street above. On the pavements: tight buttoned suits, top hats, bowlers, and women in black skirts and white shirts, high wide bonnets and flowers, turning from me with noses raised—people dressed fine as if on their way to church, though it was too busy to be Sunday.

  Yet, as well, there was ill-clad boys lurking on street corners, and a coal dray dragged by two grey mares with coal-coated men aboard, faces black like forest devils. Raggedy men stared at me, grey-tangle beards to their waists and shreds on their bodies, fool’s gold failure in their empty eyes. Six Indian men was huddled on iron steps which run up the side of a building, smoking, bottles in their hands, Salish men by their faces, but dressed in the uncoloured cloth trousers and collarless shirts of industry, watching me without expression.

  The air was full of grit and dust as we passed by a huge building site. Rising at its centre was a building bigger than I had ever saw in life, ten storeys or more, and the hammering of steam shovels, same like I had seen them in the coal pits at Nanaimo.

  Horseshit to dodge, and motor vehicles exploding noise, no more than horse-carts with engines beneath and a wheel by which to steer. Four men was perched high in one, cravats at their necks and arrogance in their chins and the waggle of their moustaches. White men what owned the world.

  I’ve been in Victoria many times before, and seen the docks filled with ships and throngs of people moving through the town. Yet a town is all Victoria is, and that I only realized then, seeing for the first time clearly what a city is and what it does.

  A crowd poured out the arching cavern-mouth of a high brown edifice what seemed, with its twin-peak turrets and steep roof taller than the greatest cedar, almost some German castle from pictures what Professor Boas showed me once of his native land. Canadian Pacific Railways read the sign. Here was the church of all this limitlessness then, and the whistle screams of the engines within like fiends, their voices beating down on me till we was past.

  Woolacott leaned against me a moment, so that the man seemed needing of support as much as might
his captive.

  “Just down here a ways,” says one of our policemen, me a shuffling half-breed, the taunts of frayed children on the street corners, the sun pulsing hot now on my hatless head. What was there of hope among such multitudes?

  Boas told me a tale once of how he took an Indian chief, from off the central plains of America, up atop a high building to look down on New York. Boas said he hoped to show the man what it was he faced in his struggle to keep his own nation intact. The Indian asked him why the people kept walking round and round the bottom of the building. It took Boas some time to persuade the chieftain that they wasn’t doing so, that they was all, in fact, different people. When he finally had convinced him, the old man fell silent and would not speak again that day.

  So did I finally comprehend that old chieftain’s state of mind.

  When we arrived at last outside the police station, and Woolacott pushed me forward up the steps, it seemed a dark and quiet respite inside. Shadows. A cool stone floor. And then words, hollow, as if spoken in a cave.

  “This him, is it?” “Big bastard.” “Smells like shite.” Woolacott muttering by return, his voice low and his tone uncertain. I had not heard him this way before: not chock full of his usual self-importance. All was turned by the tides of such a world, tumbled opposite and upside down, until the waves came so convoluted that they made no sense at all.

  “Well, clean him up,” said a voice, weary. “And get a doctor to his eye. Cannibal savage as he may be”—and these words were spoken with irony, I noted, even mazed as I was from the city—“still no reason we should act the same.”

  I looked up to see the man what had spoken sitting behind a table weighed down with brown files and paperwork. Plump in his face and flame-cheeked above his uniform, he’d have looked cheery were his expression not so grim.

  “Mr. George Hunt?” he says, and I respond in the affirmative. He asked me if I’d had the charges laid against me clearly stated, and he cast such a look at Woolacott as to suggest such might well not have been the case.