The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “I’m charged with being at a banned ritual,” says I, stuttering some.

  “And the mutilation of a corpse,” says he, and went on to read from the charge sheet what he had before him. “You’re a unique case,” he says after. “We’ve had nothing like this before that I’m aware of.” And he asks me if I have a lawyer, at which I reply that I ain’t. “Have you money?” says he.

  “No,” says I, and he asks if I was planning on mounting a defence. Well, I didn’t have no answer to that. Eventually, I says, “I don’t know.”

  He speaks on the seriousness of the charge and how I’d be locked away in the jail if convicted. Then he asks if I’ve anyone I could send a message to.

  “My brother-in-law, maybe,” says I. He says he’d get me pen and paper shortly. Then he sent me off to be scrubbed and locked up.

  “What should I be doing?” pipes up Woolacott.

  The captain eyed him over the pince-nez perched low on his fat nose. “You’re the constable that brought him here?” says he and, when Woolacott nods, “Then you can see to his cleaning, since you are responsible for his current condition.” Seeing Woolacott under the harsh eyes of scrutiny did bring to me some solace of retribution, if but for a moment.

  I was led away down a hallway strung with flickering electric lanterns. I was stripped, given soap, and stood under a shower. After, they gave me thin cotton pants and shirt. Only my boots was I allowed to keep of my own few possessions. Then they led me deeper still into the building and placed me in a cell with two other Indians, drunk unconscious on the only pallets.

  Woolacott looked in at me through the bars, mouth curled up, savouring. He spoke of how he’d be away back to Alert Bay. “Might not be seeing you for a time,” says he before he goes off.

  I sat upon the floor, my back against the windowless wall. I put my face in my hands, hoping, I reckon, to shut out that world which I knew now I had no chance, ever, of affecting. It was despair, yes, but also it was shame, embarrassment even, at my own naivety.

  HARRY CAME AWAKE, crying out, his fingers splayed in the air before him. He was soaking wet, the wound at his shoulder pounding where he had rolled onto it in his disquiet. The nightmare: the streets of Hong Kong, the plague, walking to the door with the Chinese sign for Joy writ up on it. Waking as his hand reaches out to push that door open. Always the same.

  He lay on his back for a while. Then he cursed and swung himself up and out of bed as if the sheets were themselves riddled with pestilence. He pulled the blanket about his body, picked up his tobacco, stole quietly out of the room and down the stairs of the Spencers’ house in the darkness. He went through the dining room and out the twin doors to the porch. Outside, he gulped air until his breathing slowed. The night surged above him. Ragged cloud raced across the stars. The moon had already dropped beneath the horizon. The wind blew strong and cold from the north. He rolled a cigarette. He sat on the rocking chair, smoking, his bare legs, with the brash scar running down his left shin, propped up on the porch’s railing.

  It was five days since George had been taken to Vancouver. Harry had slept away the first two. On the third, the weather had been hot, and the room in the hospital baking, until he had to get out and breathe the freshness of the wind. So he’d made his promises to Trelawney to be careful, and shuffled up and down the beachfront to the cheery insults of the people.

  Yesterday, he’d moved his things from the hospital to the Spencers’. Mr. Spencer was terse, but showed concern for his injuries nonetheless. And he did not ask for details on how he had come by them, which was a relief. Annie fed him new bread, butter, fruit, and enough sweet, feminine fussing to make him pine some for his own wife. They said nothing of his father-in-law. It was Charley who’d explained the events of George’s arrest. Now Charley was away somewhere. “Go learn story” was all he’d say.

  He watched the faint glimmer from the stars on the soft-lapping tide. His breathing had calmed. The images of his nightmare had faded enough so that they no longer plucked at his reason. He knew what lay beyond the door, knew the origin of the nightmare. The memory was terrible. As terrible as anything would ever be. It was shame. It was guilt so overwhelming it sucked him down like a turbulent sea into darkness. Yet now that he had been to the very boundaries of his own death and been saved, he would not turn away from anything before him again.

  He strode through Hong Kong that day, that summer of ’85—that summer of plague and human folly—strutted through the chaos of the streets, a white man made immune by liquor, opium, and ignorance, and, that day, by the rage of jade-green jealousy. Of what had been in his mind when he pushed his way through that door, he was so blind stupid drunk he wasn’t sure he knew now, or even that he had known then.

  Into the whorehouse he went, along the dark hallway, and through the heavy velvet curtain at the far end. The room beyond, that he knew so well—and that he would not turn back from viewing now, in his mind’s eye, though the sweat sprang up again on his forehead, despite the coldness of the wind—the room beyond was strewn with red and blue silk cushions on the floor, tapestries of courtesans and their lovers on the walls—all of it cheaply rendered, threadworn, stained, tattered. A red lantern in the middle of the room swung slightly as a result of his entrance. Two Chinese girls, scrawny arms, drawn faces, the whites of their eyes made brown by opium addiction, stared up at him without interest. There was no one else there. Even the amah was not to be seen.

  The curtain at the back of the room shivered, and then there she was. Fah Wei. Her face was like a ten-year-old’s—smooth, a round pimple for a nose—excepting the thick rouge she applied at each cheek until she seemed some child clown. Her hair fell nearly to her waist, tied tight in a plait, a white cheongsam to her knees, her skinny arms bare.

  She feigned not seeing him at first, just spoke a word to one of the girls. But, when he advanced upon her, she looked up finally and smiled, the small crinkles at her eyes that showed her disdain, the black mischief of her unconcern. “What fuck you here for now, Harry, neh?” she said.

  Harry cursed her, shouted at her. Called her dog, slut, bitch. Raged at her there in the whorehouse on the hill above Hong Kong. Had she transacted a fuck with a man he knew, perhaps, who later boasted the delights of her? He couldn’t remember. The imagined slights. The drunken arguments that had no real origin. She drank as much as did he, drowning out the sorrows of her life.

  When first he was with her, she snuggled, fucked him with passion, as if new to the game herself. He watched her slenderness when she performed those things he knew were possible from his own childhood in the house where his mother worked. After, she would trill and wash and whistle, tell him, “I like you, not like others,” sing to him lewd songs the sailors taught her. He’d laugh right along with her, but each was a reminder of those rough scum, and the rights they also had to her body. He had been years enough at sea by then to know the way of things. He’d rousted enough in port towns. Visited with whores enough. A rope rubs and rubs against a splinter, year on year, until at last it snaps.

  Once they had passed their paid time together, he would stay on to drink, sitting in a corner, glowering, the red lantern casting shadows over him, tap-tapping his fingers, eyeing each new visitor with hatred, until the amah would send him away, and Fah Wei would kiss him and whisper, “Not think them, only you.” Each time—as now he heard her again in memory—her tone was a little colder. He’d stamp away to some opium trader in the town, mollify the gut-twisting injury of her in the smoke and flickering candlelight, the hoarse monotones of dirt-eyed Chinamen.

  He sat on the porch outside the Spencers’ home and remembered the last night, saw it like a play in a music hall, him in the front seats—best in the house.

  In the whorehouse, she is taunting him. She pulls that narrow blade from her ankle-boot. She points it toward him, and then at her own breast. “This love?” she says. “You, me? You stupid! You love? Buy me. Make me home. That love.” She dandles the blade
in his face. “Or you fuck off.” She pokes his chest with the knife. He feels a button of his shirt pop, sees it fly up between their two faces, hang a moment right at the level of their eyes, like some magic bauble, before it falls away. She laughs, but not with humour— with scorn. He hears the other girls in the room laughing as well.

  He pulls the knife from his own belt, that same blade he had levered up into the eye of its previous owner. He can feel again its balance in his hand—feels it still now, though it never left that room.

  “Want fight me?” She swings her tiny blade in circles before his face. “Fight me! Little fuck man.” Goes down into a fighter’s crouch. She slaps the blade against his forearm. It leaves a small welt of blood.

  So he swats it from her hand. Then he takes hold of her by the hair, pulls back her head. He thrusts the knife blade down through the side of her neck to pierce the artery. The blood explodes out.

  He feels the heat of her blood on his skin, on his face as it covers him, hears the screams of the two girls in the room. Feels the panic in him swell. The instant horror at what he has done, at what it is not possible ever to take back. He cannot hold on to the light as it is fading from her eyes. Cannot keep her from death. Her head lolls now. She is gone.

  The smallpox was everywhere in Hong Kong. Debauch and revelry had overtaken the city. He’d been waiting, like all of them, for the first signs of sickness to rise up on his own body. Ships weren’t coming in nor going out. It felt as if he was present for the last days of the world.

  And then he had run his knife through her throat and watched her life gurgle away. That was all there was. That was the man he was capable of being. She died of his madness.

  There was a night, late on a watch, some months later, the months between forgotten now. He hung off the end of a spar, far out over the ocean, a cable’s rough fibres under his fingers, gazing into the water as it plunged closer and yawned farther away in the swell. He imagined it sucking him down, away from the anguish of the life fading from her eyes. He willed his fingers to let go of the cable. But he didn’t have even the courage for that.

  And in killing Poodlas, Harry had shown his own rage still stewed inside him. For the truth was, he could have called out, spoken with the men who had come aboard the Hesperus—drunk men, as he had been so often in his life, and with such results. He could have talked the situation to some resolution, instead of being drawn by his anger into violence.

  There was a ship’s chaplain who saw him leaning out above the ocean in the time after her murder and had the courage and perseverance, where others steered clear of his dead gaze and his swift fury, to force a few words from him. “You can forgive yourself your wrongdoings,” the chaplain told him, “but not till you have wholly recognized their gravity.” But there was no judging such an act, except in letting his fingers slip from the rope and his body disappear into the ocean. There was only recognition.

  He saw again David’s rotting head in the box in the forest. He understood George’s passions. He had no right to judge what George had done. Harry understood the agony of death. Of horror. “I just seen too much,” George had said. This coast had black emotions laid all along it, as did the world.

  He rolled the butt of his cigarette around his fingertips until the wind caught up the pieces and drew them swirling away into the night. He arched his damaged shoulder up and round. It cracked and burned. It would not be fully whole again, and there would never be the strength there had been before. But he still had his arm, still had his leg, still had his life. He knew now that there were men of miracles, and he knew his father-in-law was one. Charley had been circumspect on the details of his healing. “George use Indian way and white way,” he said. “Clever bastard.”

  High in the rigging on lookout once, he’d seen a falcon far out over the sea where it should not have been. As it flew down to settle and shiver not ten feet from him, his eyes saw past its ochre body to the first faint shadow of land on the horizon. The falcon turned its head and seemed to follow where he gazed, its black beak a savage silhouette. It called out, harsh, rasping, then shook its feathers and took flight away toward the shadow. He had shouted down to those below, “Land!” and made his shilling for first-sighting.

  He leaned forward in the rocking chair and rubbed at his knees, where they had chilled in the wind. He would not add to the list of his sins by deserting these people. By upping and running out on the girl he had taken for his wife. He did not have to keep on saying forever, “Here I am and this is the limit of me!” He did not have to stay the same. He had been dead and had been made alive once more. He could be any man he chose himself to be.

  Harry paced back and forth along the cannery jetty, taking his exercise, as Trelawney had warned him that he must. He watched the village fishing boats coming in with the late-afternoon tide, the orange sun behind them. He spoke a few pleasantries to the men and women working on the dock in preparation for the opening of the cannery, in a week’s time.

  The night before seemed almost a dream in itself now. He’d finally returned to his bed with the first light of dawn, and had not woken again until lunchtime. But he felt rested—rested in a way he could not remember ever having felt before. His wounds ached and itched, but he could give a damn for them. He felt fresh, clean somehow, ready for whatever might come next.

  Looking out at the sea, he saw the blunt snout of Indian Agent Halliday’s launch coming in behind the fishing fleet. He pulled himself to his feet and hobbled away down the jetty and back along the shore. He passed the women at their labours, sewing nets and drying herring or berries on great rush mats on the beach, or building cooking fires outside their homes in the fair promise of the evening. Many smiled at him, and he raised his hand or spoke a few words by return.

  He came to the Indian agent’s office at last, down the far end of the village, near to the Spencers’. He levered himself down on the steps out front, and sat there, blowing from his exertions.

  Harry had counted back the days since he’d stood on the jetty at Fort Rupert making ready to go find George, and Halliday had voiced his threats. Ten days he had given Harry to find his father-in-law. Ten days exactly it had been to their arrival back in Alert Bay. Yet Halliday must have left for Rupert at least a day prior to that.

  He had not long to wait. Soon Halliday came striding down the plankway, a canvas pack on his shoulder and a satchel in one hand, dressed as was his custom in thick black jacket and trousers, grey flannel shirt, and broad black tie, salt stains smeared across them all from his passage on the water.

  When he caught sight of who awaited him, Halliday hesitated for a moment. Then he came on in determined fashion. He lifted his hand as he approached in greeting. Harry pulled himself to his feet.

  “Back, then?” Halliday said. “And what news have you for me?”

  “The news that I kept my end of the bargain. I hear the same cannot be said for you.”

  Halliday paused at the bottom of the steps. “The men at the jetty tell me you brought George back. And he’s away to Vancouver with Woolacott?”

  “He is, though he’d been better tried here.”

  “It warranted a state trial. It was too critical a case for a local court.”

  “You took the family’s property.”

  “Ten days I said, Harry.”

  “Aye, ten days exactly was it when we landed back here.”

  “And ten days exactly was it when I made my confiscation.”

  “You said to bring him to you.”

  “And I was waiting in Rupert.”

  “Damnation, man, I’ll not believe you kept your end of things. Where have you taken them?”

  “You’re quick to choose yourself an Indian, Harry Cadwallader.”

  “I’m more of them than your damned breed, you fucking liar.”

  “Hold your temper, man. You will not curse like that to me.”

  “Cursing ain’t enough for it.”

  “Please!” Halliday put his
hand in the air, palm forward, and pointed to two wicker chairs up on the porch. “At least sit. We’ll talk properly of what’s to be done.” Harry held to the steps’ rail and felt his head light with emotion. He thought that he might fall. “I see you’re far from well,” Halliday said, placing his pack and satchel on the lowest step and looking up at Harry. “Tell me what has happened, won’t you? I’m just back and know none of the details.” He came up the steps and put his hand on Harry’s forearm. Harry made to pull away but then allowed himself to be steered to one of the chairs.

  “Ten days,” Harry said when they were seated. “You gave no leeway.”

  Halliday linked his hands in front of his face, and tapped his lower lip with his thumbnails. “Unfortunate,” he said at last. “I really did expect you back at Rupert. That was, after all, where we parted.” He stared into the distance for a while. “There were,” he paused, “certain circumstances.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Woolacott and I had two men with us. But we were only four. We waited a day. But our presence did not go unnoticed, the rumours going round. We’d have been in danger had we not acted when we did.”

  “You’ll forgive my lack of sympathy.”

  “I’d have you understand, at least.”

  “So you’ll return what’s ours?”

  Halliday worked his fingers together, as if they were tight from work. Then he ran them through his thick red hair. “You want me to be the enemy of this story. But I’m not, you know. I am most wholeheartedly for the Indians.”

  “Our property, man.”

  “There are procedures must be followed.”

  “A devil on your procedures. You’re in the wrong and must make things right again.”

  “It will take time.”

  “Where, for the love of Christ, have you taken them?”

  “Into safekeeping.”

  “Where?”