The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “Stanley,” said Reverend Hall after a pause, “I must say I believe Mr. Halliday is right. Justice in these matters is important.”

  Spencer leaned back in his chair, raised his glass to his lips and drained it, then lifted his eyes toward the ceiling and sighed. “Damnation on that man!” He rapped his knuckles on the table for a time. “All right,” he said, “I shall front his bail. But nothing more.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands on the top of his head. “Not one penny more. Anything else he might need, he’ll have to raise himself. Or, if there be any left along this coast whom he has never wronged, then they can come to his aid. I have a cannery to run and no time nor money more to be spent on that man’s foolishness.”

  The following morning, Harry woke late, sore in his shoulder, but refreshed. Fragments of dreams played strongly still in his mind. The usual images from those dark days in Hong Kong, but mingled with brighter impressions: a seal twisting and diving in sunlit waters, a woman’s impish laughter, the fine grain of highly polished wood beneath his fingers.

  Over breakfast, Spencer mentioned that this was the first day of cannery production. “You’ll have to take your boat out some and moor it away from the jetty, I’m afraid. There’ll be a deal of trawler traffic for the next few days.”

  So he strode down the beach in a brilliant morning. Up on the jetty ahead, he could see Chinamen barking and scurrying, wide-brimmed hats flopping, arms beckoning and gesturing wildly to each other. Spencer brought them in each summer from Victoria, housing them in the dormitory flophouses he’d built farther inland through the trees. Harry had heard them singing their strange tunes in the night, smelled cooking rice and frying chilies, as if the experiences of his previous life had manifested themselves through his dreams into reality.

  The cannery boomed loud enough that one might hear its industry many miles away on the water. The hammer of the great log-fuelled steam engine that drove its machines, the gravelling steel slither of the overhead pulley networks trundling the pallets of cans about the building, and the multitudinous noises of two hundred and fifty men and women at their work.

  A large trawler was just unloading. He stopped to watch, some yards from the stairs leading up from the beach to the jetty. The Japaner crew were spearing the fish carcasses up from the hold with long, steel-tipped poles. They hurled them down to be collected on low handcarts by the gang of Chinese labourers on the jetty. Harry saw by their taciturnity that there was little love lost between the two groups.

  He sat on a boulder. He picked up a sea-smoothed piece of wood and poked absently at the stones by his feet. The previous evening, once the others had left, Annie had come to talk with him. She’d told him George would need several hundred dollars more to pay for a lawyer. Five hundred she’d said as a minimum, and she didn’t see that her husband would be persuaded to help further. And she had told him that Halliday and Spencer had spoken on the family treasures. They were, she said, currently housed with a Dr. Newcombe—a friend of Professor Boas—down in Victoria. “But you must not speak of it to anyone as yet,” she said. “Please. Let us see my brother’s trial to its conclusion first. Then we will deal with whatever comes after.” So he promised her his silence, if yet he vowed to himself that he would be down to Victoria himself, once all was settled, and bring them back himself.

  “Fat Harry!” He looked up to see Charley waddling toward him on his bandy legs, the great hump on his back rolling like some top-heavy boat in a swell.

  “Where’ve you popped up from?” Harry said.

  “Go find man come to trial help George. Witness.”

  “And?”

  Charley flopped down on the ground in front of Harry. He shrugged. “None help.”

  “Then he’ll need a good lawyer.”

  Charley grunted. “No money,” he said, but he looked keenly at Harry as he spoke. Harry did not meet his eyes, prodding still with his stick.

  After a time, Harry said, “I know it. But I’d hoped I were done with all that.”

  “Help George. Not help George. For you think. You still have plan leave coast, leave wife, go away, not come back?”

  Harry glanced up, startled. Charley was smiling. Harry made to speak, but stopped himself. He stared out toward the ocean. Charley shifted round to stare out with him into the freshening breeze. The cannery thundered about them.

  Abruptly, Harry stood. “Get yourself ready,” he said.

  “Ek.” Charley reached out and patted him on the leg.

  Harry climbed the stairs onto the jetty. Among the workers, he spied a native man he recognized, Tom Copperhand, sober for once and working with the Chinamen. “Where’s your father?” Harry called above the racket.

  Tom pointed away toward the storehouse out back of the cannery. Harry turned in that direction. Worst of all was the rotting saline stink of the gut holes beneath the jetty, storage pits where the fish butcherers threw down the skin and fins and offal to be taken out to sea and dumped. The stench lent the whole place, with the sun pouring hot upon it, a feeling of Hell itself.

  Dan Copperhand was squeezed between two stacks of crates that rose fifteen feet toward the cannery storehouse’s cobweb-heavy ceiling. In one hand he held a sheaf of paperwork, a pencil stub in the other. He peered short-sightedly up at a label that hung, half peeling, from a crate above. He wore high rubber boots to his thigh with suspenders over his shoulders to hold them up, but no shirt covered his aged brown torso. His sagging belly crushed up against the boxes in front.

  Dust drifted down where he had disturbed the storeroom’s quiet equilibrium. He sneezed and spat words in Kwakwala that Harry guessed to be curses.

  “Yoh,” Harry said.

  Dan twisted his head to look at him. “Fat Harry.” He inched his way out and stood shaking the dust from his shaggy grey hair. “Come out, let’s smoke.”

  They sat together in the sunlight on a crate. Harry passed Dan his tobacco, and together they rolled and smoked, hawked and spat between the planks to the beach below.

  “Summer’s up and running, then,” said Harry.

  “Money for Spencer to be making.”

  “Oh, you’ll find ways to scratch a penny or two from the season, Dan Copperhand.” Harry smiled. He knew Dan from the past months running the family store. The man was always useful if something particular was needed. “Contact all over place,” Grace said of him. The wealthiest Indian on the coast, as others put it, most of them grumbling, envious, as they did so.

  Dan just grunted. “What about old George?” he said.

  “He’s to stand trial.”

  “He’s all the white men ranged against him,” Dan said. “So I hears it.”

  “You heard it right.”

  Dan nodded, slow and sombre. “Needs money for trials,” he said.

  “True.”

  “You here.”

  “I am.”

  “I got to do something about that damned bastard Chief Bear Killer. Pay him back for his feast somehows.”

  Harry had heard Dan’s beef before. How Chief Bear Killer had given Dan a huge feast. How he’d shamed Dan with his largesse. How Dan now owed him by return a feast twice as grand. “I understand,” Harry said.

  “Need to give that man a big feast. Big whisky feast. Make him drink so much his stomach fall out on the ground.”

  “You need whisky.”

  “Good whisky.”

  “I can get it for you.”

  “Good, cheap whisky.”

  “Whisky’s whisky. Cheap whisky’s no more than bad alcohol mixed with bad things.”

  Dan snorted. They sat again in silence for a while. They had had this conversation before, but Harry had not the supplies to offer him.

  Now he said, “I need money for George.”

  Dan rolled the last of his cigarette between his fingers. The ash fell to the planks and was blown softly away by the strengthening breeze.

  “Got to make it now,” said Harry.

  “Good, chea
p whisky,” said Dan.

  “How much you need?”

  “Make his stomach fall out on the ground,” said Dan.

  They talked details and a rendezvous. Harry said he needed half the money up front. Dan went off and came back with three hundred and fifty dollars. “Family money we all save to make feast,” he said. “Don’t lose, or you see me in gravebox next time.” Harry folded it and placed it in an inside pocket. Then they sat once more, smoked and watched the men at their labours. A westerly blew strong now against Harry’s route out of the harbour.

  “Guess you gonna need you engine,” said Dan.

  “Once out the harbour I’ll be good.”

  “How long you gone?”

  “If this wind holds, I should be back in six days or so.”

  Dan poked with his pencil stub at the crate on which they were sitting. “Fifty thousand cans to fill for shipment to England,” he said. “When I was young, I didn’t know there could be such a number of anything.”

  A great explosion of steam erupted from the outlet pipe to one side of the cannery, as a retortman released the pressure from an oven. They watched the cloud billow out and up and swiftly dissipate against the indigo sky.

  “Whole different world,” said Harry.

  Dan leaned forward and spat. “I hears that,” he said.

  As Harry walked back along the shore, the Indian he had seen back at Rupert with Crosby and Halliday stepped out from behind a building. To-Cop. The man was dressed in a stiff, black jacket with a white cravat at his neck. His bowl-cut hair flapped up in the breeze. His black eyes gleamed sharp beneath.

  “Heading out?” the man said.

  “It may be,” said Harry.

  “North to Rupert?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re friendly with Dan Copperhand, then?”

  “You’ve a keen nose for my business.”

  To-Cop just smiled. “Well,” he said, “a safe trip.” He walked away into the trees behind the village. Harry watched him go.

  Charley threw Harry the mooring line and leapt over onto the deck. He pushed against the jetty piling and the Hesperus turned its nose away from the shore.

  The engine made slow revolutions. Harry engaged the flywheel and felt the hull’s familiar shudder and then the propeller’s traction in the water. The Hesperus eased away from the jetty, past the Japanese fishing trawler. Harry turned and raised his hand.

  Dan Copperhand was perched now on top of a piling, staring after them. He lifted a hand in return. “Don’t sink, Fat Harry,” he called. “Don’t let them guv’ment gunboats take you.”

  “I’ll do my damnedest.”

  “Come home safe.”

  He took the Hesperus out of the harbour. The day’s brilliance near blinded him, so that he had to squint against it. Far off, the mountains of the mainland held still some trace of snow at their peaks, and the myriad greens of the forests streaming down into the fjords and rivers. The sun played summer dances on the rippling sea. Vancouver Island stretched away north and south a mile ahead, its own mountainous spine spearing up against the western sky. Two dolphins leapt together, some hundred yards off his port side.

  Charley sat, silent, at the prow. He wondered if he ought to tell Charley what Annie had said about the family’s treasures, Dr. Newcombe, and Victoria. But he had promised her his silence. So he cut the engine and together they raised sail. With the wind strong on the starboard quarter, they turned south. The Hesperus listed, and he ran his hand in the foam until it spat and flew up to coat his face with its cool touch. He thought he’d never felt such joy before.

  EACH EVENING I DID BEAR WITNESS to the cells’ passing business: drunk sailors and lumbermen mostly, bleeding, either viperous or sotted too stupid to resist. Once, they brung in a gaudy-suited white man, bright broad cravat and cummerbund, roaring bloody thunder with his three doxies in tow. One of them was an Indian girl and Kwagiulth by her face, rouged and primped, not thirteen years old. They led her on past with the other whores towards the women’s cells, leaving her pimp to strut amongst us, cocklike, till at last he hunkered down on the floor with the others and grew quiet in the tedium of it.

  All of them was transient visitors, excepting me. “No point sending you on to New Westminster,” as the one-arm jailer, John Clough, spoke it, “only to bring you straight back again for trying.”

  An age or else no time at all it was in there, till my mind was froze, like I was being held in purgatory, twixt one world and the next, with nothing to do but suffer the endless seconds till fate did bring its next piece of mischief for me.

  At last, one morning, John Clough came to fetch me. “There’s one to see you,” says he.

  “Who’s that?” says I, but he just flicked the keychain from off his belt, spun it expertly to the right key with his one hand, and turned it in the lock. I come out and perched on the bench along the wall opposite. Four other cells there was and men in all of them, white or Indian, and even a Chinaman, wire thin and staring at me deadpan as the others mostly snored. Clough’s young mate came forward and knelt to put shackles at my ankles and my wrists. I was shuffled out the door and along the building’s middle corridor beyond.

  We got before another door. “Top barrister, he be,” says Clough. “You’ll watch your words with him. None a your fucking red man surls, d’you hear me?”

  The man inside the door greeted me polite enough. He told me he was William Bowser, defence attorney. I leaned forward, heavy in chains, to take his hand. I felt powerfully the imbalance of our positions. He dismissed John Clough, who went out muttering on the need for wariness when in such dubious company as myself.

  Bowser was a grand-looking gentleman, plump, red faced, in his forties as I reckoned, smart dressed in a black suit and a bowler hat that lay beside his papers on the table. “Mr. Spencer at Alert Bay has instructed me to arrange your bail,” he says. “He is your brother-in-law?”

  “He is,” says I. “Though I’d not expected his help.”

  He tells me he has been reading my charges and finds hisself rightly interested. “I’ve not seen its like before,” says he. “Indeed, I don’t believe such a case has ever come before the courts.” They were making of me a test case, as he saw it.

  Well, I just grunted at that. They was all against me, as I already knew it.

  “Which gives me some hope,” he goes on. “All will depend on the quality of the witnesses.”

  I saw there was creases of good humour beside his eyes, which met mine without compunction. He mentioned the condition of my injured eye. It had not yet been tended to since Rupert, though I had given it little thought. It didn’t seem like something to be worrying on with all else against me as it was. It had closed up, scabbed and dried, but a thin white fluid came out of it and down my face at times. Scandalous, he reckoned it, and told me he would have a physician sent for smartly. Then he asked me what I thought my defence might be.

  I had been pondering precisely that, of course, this time behind the bars. But in that moment it seemed I had nothing to say, or else I had too much, and all I could do by way of reply was clasp my hands together and rock back and forth on that chair like a retard.

  Bowser was watching me with his beady grey eyes. “So,” he says at last, “regarding bail. I must enter a plea of not guilty, or one of guilty with mitigating circumstance. Pleading guilty would lead to your more immediate sentencing. Mr. Hunt, what will it be?”

  “What plea should I make?” I asks him.

  It wouldn’t be professionally appropriate for him to lead me in such a fashion, however. “I suggest,” he says, one eyebrow arching up, ironical, “you ask yourself if you are guilty of the charges laid against you.”

  “Guilty of eating the flesh of a human corpse?” says I.

  “And of participating in a ceremony banned under Canadian law,” says he.

  “’Tis true I was there,” says I. He asks if I played a role, and I tell him just by being there I played a par
t.

  “The issue of most import will be whether you partook in the mutilation of the corpse,” says he.

  “It is the ways of the people at such a ceremony that a corpse be cut up,” says I, leaning forward to rest my manacled fists on the desk. “Since the first days of time has it been so. I will not deny the ways of the people for no man nor white judge and jury what may be seeking my ill and those of the people.”

  Bowser did not speak for some while after that. Then, says he, “You are the son of a white father and a native mother?”

  “I am,” says I.

  “And you’ve chosen your affiliations as being with the bloodline of your mother?” says he.

  I looked for sarcasm in his face, but there weren’t none to be seen. “If there’s brown in your blood, then that’s forever how it is,” I tell him. “Don’t matter what I’d choose for myself, the world will always see it so.”

  “But where does that leave you in relation to the charges?” he asks me.

  “I’d not recognize their legality,” says I, and thought that sounded nearer the truth than anything I’d yet said on the matter.

  “I fear the bench won’t likely be prepared to hear such an argument,” says Bowser.

  “That may be so,” says I, “but there it is.”

  “I must confess to you I find the details of the ritual somewhat, ah, distasteful, as they have been written down. Such would be similar for the jury as well, I suspect. Yet,” he goes on, “I have seen much of the certainties of men, and how such certainties may serve to do no more than oppress the lives of others. So it is I find myself in sympathy with you.”

  Nonetheless, as it stood I was on my way to prison. Might be six months or several years. It was an untested law, so there weren’t much by way of precedent. “I question what purpose the position you are making for yourself will serve,” he says, sounding much like Spencer had. “What will it change? Whose life will it change for the better? Who will listen?”

  I tell him I had hoped to be tried in Alert Bay, and to have spoke my case there among the people. My people. “But if it’s here I must speak my piece, then so be it,” I tells him. And the truth of it is I had come to the conclusion that I was done for anyhows. That being so, I’d damn well say what I had to say to whoever was there to hear me.