The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “Safe.”

  “Where safe?”

  “Harry, how impolite must I be in saying I’ll not tell you?”

  “Be fucked with you, Halliday.”

  “Harry, you’re injured, sick, and I understand your ire, but you’ll cease your cussing me. I’m Indian agent here. I will have your respect.”

  “Your agency might be harder to police than priorly.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “An observation. You make no friends in doing this. Did you not receive my letter through Eddlestone?”

  Halliday put his palms together as if in prayer, then placed the tips of his forefingers to his lips. He said, “I did. I confess I was more disquieted than reassured by its substance. In some ways it proved a spur to action. What was this war party to which you made reference?”

  Now it was the turn of Harry to pause. The issues with Walewid were now resolved, and Halliday was the last man he wanted knowing the details of what went on out there in the wilds. “About that I was wrong,” he said. “Just drunks too liberal with their words. But I wrote we were on George’s trail. Could you not have trusted that?”

  Halliday said nothing in response to that. Finally, he said, “There’s other things we need to talk on too.”

  “Are there?”

  “Your liquor trading, for instance.”

  “That’s over.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m through with liquor. It don’t do more than serve the interests of those who seek the Indians’ destruction. It keeps them slaved and beaten down, doing nothing but drink, when they should be battling to keep what’s rightfully their own ways of living.” He leaned back in the wicker chair, stopped for the moment by his own eloquence.

  “Ways that breed indolence,” Halliday said. “Ways that breed subversion to the progress sweeping over this country now. The Indian must change or perish, Harry.” He pushed himself to his feet and paced about the porch. “There is great tragedy in the decay of a people’s society. George resists, and there is dignity in that resistance. I see that.” He turned to look down at Harry, and now his tone came flat and hard. “See it enough to fear it. When George goes visiting banned rituals, he sanctions them. If the people hold to their ways, they will sink in face of the future. They will be without hope. Will you hold back the future? Will George? It is here already, Harry. And rituals of cannibalism and savagery! Do you really think they do anything for the Indian? And what George did was not more than nihilism.”

  Harry was thrown by that. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “David’s funeral. Of what did you think I spoke?”

  “But he is arrested for participating in a ritual of the hamatsa, ain’t he? What’s it to do with the funeral?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Halliday was leaning against the porch rail, silhouetted by the low red sun behind. Harry could just about see the man’s eyes upon him. “But he made more enemies in doing what he did at David’s funeral than ever he did in attending a banned ritual.”

  “Taking his head?”

  “You do not know?”

  “I heard that part.”

  “It is said George ate his dead son’s flesh.”

  Harry felt his face burning with his anger. “Who says this?”

  “Were you not there? I thought to question you on this.”

  “I left. Took the women. Some stayed.”

  “Well, they are the rumours. All are angry. The white community is quite up in arms.”

  Harry sputtered. “Is all the world obsessed with cannibals? George is no evil man. He seeks to protect the people.”

  “Oh come, he exploits them as much as does anyone. He’s been piratical in the plundering of this coast.”

  “The book in’t like that.”

  “Writing for Boas. Paid a wage by Boas. And secret myths and tales he’s written that, to the Indians, were not meant for public telling. Oh, I’m sympathetic to Boas, don’t get me wrong. Marking down a dying people’s culture for posterity. And I understand the placing of historical artefacts into the safekeeping of museums. But don’t confuse Hunt’s behaviour for nobility in the service of his people. He plies a trade even as do you. Or did, I should say, if what you say is true.”

  “You’re wrong.” Harry got slowly to his feet. “I’ll not believe what you say about him. George did take the head of his son away into the wilderness. That part is true. And I know he would stand up and confess to it. He buried it there in some tradition tied to the ways of his mother’s people. This other. I’ll hear it from George hisself or I’ll call any man what speaks it a liar. And you have taken and hid what’s owned by my family. In that you’re as piratical as any.”

  “Harry, go rest. Recover. We’ll talk more on this, I promise. How did you come by your injuries?”

  “Seeking my father-in-law,” he said, and he limped away toward the Spencers’ house.

  That evening, the white men and women of the village came to dinner at the Spencers’. It was the Reverend Hall’s seventieth birthday, so Annie had informed Harry when he returned to the house.

  Now Harry sat in the dining room. Places were laid along the table, and a fire roared in the hearth. Halliday arrived before the other guests, and disappeared directly into Spencer’s office, deep in conference with the man. When the Indian agent emerged again into the dining room, sombre, trailing the tall, grey-suited frame of Spencer, Harry greeted him with no more than a nod.

  There were eleven round the table for dinner, including Harry. Woolacott was back just an hour before off the steamer from Vancouver. He sat near Harry, with the policeman’s timid, unspeaking wife between. Dr. Trelawney was there, Mr. Spencer and Annie, and William Halliday, with Maud, his wife, beside him. Directly opposite was Mr. W.A. Corker, headmaster of the residential school, and himself a former missionary, his beak nose high, and never a smile to show from that wintry face. Then there was the Reverend Alfred James Hall, honoured at the far end of the table, with his wife, low and stout and dowdy beside him.

  It was the first time Harry had been a part of such company in a formal way. He felt a bit like a foredeck tar invited to the captain’s table. So he kept his silence as much as was polite, ate with his mouth closed, and tried not to clatter and scrape his plate with the cutlery.

  Once dinner was done, the women removed themselves to the drawing room, while the men remained behind, drinking a whisky that had travelled from Scotland around Cape Horn, and then by way of Victoria to the Spencer household.

  “A treat to drink the real stuff,” said Albert Trelawney, his melancholy for home writ plain upon his face and in the tone of his words.

  “And better than that acid-brewed shite the Indians crave,” said Walter Woolacott, and he threw a glance from under his black brows in Harry’s direction.

  “Well,” said Spencer, raising his glass and staring into the whisky’s tawny depths. He stood. “A toast, then, with this precious liquid. To the Reverend Hall on his birthday. And to the continuance of his good works among the native population.” There were general murmurs of assent and glasses waved. Then Halliday stood.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “If you will forgive a more formal moment still. Acting as I do for the Department of Indian Affairs, and so the Dominion Government itself, I take this opportunity to offer my appreciation for, not only the good works of our dear colleague the Reverend Hall, but for those that all who are present this evening perform.” Harry guessed there would be some around the table might happily exclude him from such praise. “I propose another toast,” said Halliday. “To progress!” More murmurs followed, glasses were waved.

  “Come then, Halliday,” said Spencer. “What of our progress?”

  “You’d know as well as I and better, Stanley,” said Halliday.

  “But your overview! I don’t claim to comprehend the grander forces that are at work.” There was irony in his tone. “I simply employ the Indian.”

  “And proc
reate with the fuckers too,” Harry heard Woolacott mutter, who’d been drinking steadily all evening, though he was far enough along the table for Spencer not to hear.

  Halliday frowned at the constable, sitting close by him as he was. He said, “The Indian owned this land before ever we were here. We absorbed his country and called it our own. And we’ve a promise made to the Indian—and to ourselves, mind you!—that they be treated fair and squarely, with justice. And if there is injustice still—and there is that, I make no bones about it”—he glanced Harry’s way as he said it—“still do I believe the schools and the medicine and the imposition of fair laws are bringing that circumstance nearer. There’ll be a time when the Indians will have their enfranchisement, and become respected British subjects of the federal dominion of Canada.”

  “A fair speech, William,” said the Reverend Hall, “and political as well.”

  Halliday smiled thinly. “When they built Fort Rupert, it’s said there were three thousand Indians came to live nearby, and today no more than a hundred and twenty left up there. The white man has rained destruction on them. I’m hardly astounded when they resent us.”

  “So it’s our fault, their blasted savage ways?” said Woolacott.

  “Yet that is no reason,” Halliday went on, ignoring the constable, “not to aid in their improvement. Indeed, our task is only made more earnest by our culpability.”

  “You’d perhaps to tell my boys that,” said the headmaster, “when they stick a knife to themselves and, claiming injury, beg to be returned to their families.”

  “Adding another to my sick list,” said Trelawney, “and it so long already.”

  “And the girls,” said Hall, “sent south to the cities to prostitute for the monies needed for their ceremonies.”

  “’Tis true the Indian seems to lack that fine feeling we call sentiment,” said Halliday.

  Harry turned a spoon in his fingers. He wondered what might Annie Spencer’s sentiment be to such opinion. At the head of the table, her husband seemed barely to be listening at all.

  “Ain’t that a bit general?” Harry said.

  “I’ve lived here all my life, Harry,” said Halliday. “Forgive me, but your take on matters Indian is scant as yet … and, shall we say, privileged.”

  “Well, let us speak on a particular matter,” said Reverend Hall. “George Hunt is away to Vancouver, and the good constable just returned from taking him there. What news, Mr. Woolacott?”

  “He’s at the police station awaiting trial.”

  “A very unfortunate case,” said Hall. “I’ve known him now so many years. His father helped me open my first mission, at Rupert, back in ’77.” He laughed, his otherwise frail voice rich in its humour. “George was quite the good Christian back then.”

  “You speak lightly of a serious matter,” said Halliday.

  “I know he is no friend to you,” said Hall. “Believe me, I have argued with him many a time on issues relating to the scriptures, and of its teaching to the red man. But he is a passionate advocate for their rights and their traditions. I respect him, even as I do not agree with what he has to say.

  Still, I know my colleague Reverend Crosby has not such sympathy on the matter.”

  “He’s a damnable menace,” said Woolacott.

  “Walter,” said Halliday. “Remember in whose house you are.”

  “Aye,” he grunted toward Spencer. “I am sorry for that.”

  “I’m currently in no mind to disagree,” said Spencer.

  “Well.” The Reverend Hall gazed at nothing in particular as he spoke. “It seems he has truly brought misfortune on himself at last.”

  “So it’s true then that there are cannibal feasts still happening here on the coast?” Trelawney said. His whole body quivered, but his eyes glittered.

  “Believe it!” said Corker. “Somewhere out there even now a corpse is being most hideously butchered, and the fire is being laid.”

  “It seems incredible.” Trelawney’s bottom lip hung open slightly in his excitement. “Is it every part of the body that is consumed? Do the women and children also partake of such meals?”

  “Mainly the men, as I have heard it,” said Corker. “Though it would not surprise me to hear they were all participants together in sin.”

  “Well,” said Trelawney. “Really it is remarkable in this modern era to imagine such events continuing!”

  “Dirt-worshipping fucking heathens, all of them,” said Woolacott.

  “Enough, Constable!” said Halliday.

  Harry’s resentment had been rising as the conversation continued. Now he could hold on no longer, even in such company. “Seems to me it’s more that George is subject to conspiracy than that any of these damned insults be true.” He gazed about the table in defiance.

  Halliday eyed him without expression. Hall looked down at his whisky, and Corker looked as if he was ready to burst, his face near purple. Trelawney shifted in his seat.

  “What might you mean by that?” said Woolacott. “If you’ve accusations, make them plain.”

  “You’re the policeman,” Harry said. “It is you that is making the accusations. George a cannibal! If I accuse you of anything, it’s stupidity, man.” Woolacott eyed him dangerously. But Harry stared right back. Only the vacant chair where Woolacott’s wife had been lay between them.

  “Yes, yes,” said Halliday. He raised his hands to invite calm. “That’s quite enough of this, I believe. From both of you—if you will forgive me, Mr. Cadwallader.”

  “Halliday told me what happened at Rupert with the family’s property, Harry,” said Spencer. “An unfortunate business. I understand you feel anger about it.”

  “I’m surprised you ain’t feeling it yourself,” Harry said, aware he was close to offending his host. “Yet it is made more so by the Indian agent’s refusing to tell the whereabouts of them now.”

  Halliday looked uncomfortable. “If you’ll give me time to organize their return,” he said.

  “I’ve a better thought,” said Harry, and he stood up from his dining chair to look down the table at Halliday. Woolacott, in his place between, still glared black thunder at him. “You tell me where they are, and I’ll go fetch them.”

  “It’s not so simple, Harry.”

  “And why’s that? Seems simple enough to me. I’ve a boat to do it.” “Give me time, is all I ask.”

  Harry blew air from his lungs and clapped the table with his palm. Trelawney jumped slightly, then half laughed in his nervousness. Harry looked to Spencer. “The two of you discussed the case against George?” he said.

  “There’s little enough to say,” said Spencer.

  “Then you’ll let him rot, Mr. Spencer?” Harry said. “You’ll buy the tale that George travels along the coast, stops off in the villages, chops up dead bodies, fries them up over fires, serves the body parts up for feasting like the beef we supped tonight?” He picked up, for want of other options, a coffee spoon, and threw it down in the middle of the table. “Can it only be me sees the lunacy of this?” All now looked away from him. He stood quietly for a moment. Then he said, “How is he even to make his defence, when he’s locked up in Vancouver?”

  “Right where he should be,” said Woolacott. “Attacking a clergyman!”

  “Now we come to the right of it,” said Harry. “Pushing Crosby at the funeral is what truly brung all of this about, eh? Not the damned cannibal dances you are all so salivating over.” Part of him wanted just to stride straight out the door—through rage, yes, but also for his own gall in standing up like this to these men of substance, in whose midst he found himself but of whom he was not an equal. Instead, he sat once more. He drummed his fingers upon the table.

  Halliday sighed. “Not entirely,” he said, “though it did prove something of a spur to action, I’ll confess it. Assaulting a member of the priesthood in full sight of the whole village! It just could not be allowed to stand.”

  “So why not charge him with that?” said
Harry. “Bring him up before the judge—even if that be you yourself—here in Alert Bay. Be done with it. It was his son’s funeral. Crosby came rampaging in. God’s truth, I’ll stand in his defence and state that there was circumstances mitigating.”

  Harry gazed about the table, but none would meet his eyes. “Mr. Spencer!” he said, when he could bear it no longer.

  Spencer tapped his fingers in uneasy rhythm on the tabletop. “I had a telegraph come from him,” he said quietly.

  “What? George? When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “What does it say?”

  “That he is awaiting trial, kept in the police station cells. As Woolacott has told us.”

  “That’s it?”

  “He wants money for bail. Five hundred dollars.” Spencer looked around the table, his chin high, defiant. “But not from me. If he’s to play this idiot game, I’ll not be a part of it.”

  The others remained silent.

  “Mr. Spencer,” Harry said at last. “Sir. With the greatest respect to you—and I apologize for my manner of a moment ago—but, sir, you are married to his sister!”

  “I made my position clear to him, Harry, when you were in hospital. That’s all there is.”

  “Mr. Spencer,” said Halliday. “If I may.” He coughed. “I know that I am, in Harry’s eyes at least, somewhat the enemy of this piece. Yet I’d like to say something about George. I’ve had my battles with the man for some years now. We disagree on many, if not most, issues. If the allegations against him are proven true—and the evidence is compelling—then he must be punished to the full extent of the law.”

  Harry made to speak but Halliday went on. “However, I do agree with Harry when he says George cannot prepare a proper defence while he remains incarcerated in Vancouver. I do not believe George is a man to up and run. And I’d be much surprised if any round this table thought as much. In posting bail, you’d not be giving him money then, since it would be returned on his coming to trial. At least you’d offer him the chance for a fairer hearing.”

  “You’d lock him up and after support him?” Harry said.

  “I’d see things done fairly. Not just for him but for all to know that this were done with due diligence to the law.”