The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  Old Francine was sitting by the fire. Her eyes came wide at the sight of me. Then she waddled over and gripped my forearms so tightly. “Devil’s back,” she said. Her fingers ran across the patch upon my eye. “You’re no more than trouble to me,” says she, and I believed it, though she gripped me harder as she spoke the words.

  THE ENGINE PUTTERED SOFTLY, keeping the boat’s position steady on the faint swell. Across a half mile of black water, just a few lights still showed at Alert Bay. It was late. By the height of the stars Harry reckoned it close to midnight. Soon, then. He watched the shore. Charley murmured slow litanies to himself, a monotonous dirge beyond comprehending.

  They had made swift progress south and west down the Queen Charlotte Strait, past Malcolm Island and into Johnstone Strait. This was as far north as Harry had travelled in past trips trading whisky, before he’d come farther last October to land up in Rupert. They’d passed Campbell River at the south end of Discovery Passage. Charley had raised his hand and hailed those he knew so many times in the canoes they passed that Harry wondered if there was anyone at all along the coast was not acquainted with the old cripple. The wind kept strong off the starboard quarter as they sailed right down the middle of the Strait of Georgia. So strong, the Hesperus listed, the mast creaking, sails cracking like rifle shots at every small adjustment. The town of Comox was an orange glimmer against darkness the second night, as they travelled on, taking turns to sleep. The following morning, Nanaimo and Gabriola Island were hardly visible away to the south as they rounded Lasqueth Island and turned east.

  Charley told him how he’d been to visit the village where the ritual for which George was accused had happened. But there were none there willing to speak for George. Word had come to the village that he had blackened the good name of the people with his son’s funeral. Even the chief, whose name was Big Mountain, had refused point-blank to honour his long affiliation with George’s family.

  “I have big secret ’bout him. I say will tell all people,” Charley told Harry. “Still, he don’t want help.”

  “You’ve secrets on us all, have you not?” Harry said, recalling how Charley’d been on to his plan to leave Rupert and be gone.

  “Not secret strong make chief come help.”

  Charley told him To-Cop had been present at the ritual as well. In what position, Charley would not say. But when Harry spoke of his encounter with the man at Alert Bay, just as they were leaving, Charley shook his head. “Bad. Watch that fuck man. Make trouble sure.”

  “But who is he?”

  “Bad man from bad paxala family. But he go priest school. Bad twice now.”

  After that, they barely spoke the whole way. The westerly gusted ever stronger, if never quite turning to a gale, Harry at the tiller, Charley seeing to the sails on Harry’s orders, unable as he was himself to do much with his one good arm, the other still in its sling, and likely halfway to crippled for good. But the landscape exhilarated him in a way he could not recall ever feeling before. The vast inlets of the mainland, the great snowtipped mountains in the far distance, both on the mainland and west on Vancouver Island, the jade green of the forests plunging down the sharp hillsides to the water’s edge. They saw pods of killer whales. On a granite outcrop, seals barked and bustled like dowdy madams at the market.

  They made it to New Westminster in three days. Harry’s man in that busy port town was a foreman with the stevedores. Through three short hours of an evening, they traded and put aboard the cargo. “Not blue vitriol, nitric acid, nor jack else evil, guaranteed as always,” the man promised. Harry tasted a keg to be certain anyway.

  The trip back went as smoothly, the same strong wind serving them equally well for both legs of the trip. They kept alert for signs of the government gunboats, which plied the waters all up and down the coast searching for such as they. Charley cackled to himself a few times en route. “Smuggling good business,” he said. “Me you. Big future.”

  Harry had few thoughts of the future any more. “I’ll be happy enough just to be back at Rupert,” he said.

  Grace. It seemed incredible to him now that all that time of his desire to be away, he’d barely given thought to her. Here was a gift the world had offered up, and him too blind to see it given.

  And Charley had known all along of Harry’s plans to be away. Had George?

  Well, here was Harry now, bobbing on the water a mile offshore in the darkness, waiting on a sign from Dan Copperhand. Harry Cadwallader: a man full capable of standing up and doing what was right. Though it was strange, sure enough, that doing right meant doing the very thing he had decided was wrong. Fifty kegs of whisky in his hold. Halliday would drool if he knew what was floating out here at this moment.

  A light came on near the cannery. It winked on and off, then twice more.

  “There it is,” Harry said. He uncovered his own lamp and repeated the signal. He watched the light flash twice in acknowledgment before it was extinguished.

  Twenty minutes later, they lay some four hundred yards off the southeast corner of the island. Harry killed the engine and let the anchor drop down through the shallow water.

  They heard the engine of Dan’s swift ketch shortly after. Harry showed his lamp again, since thicker clouds had now drawn over the new moon and the night was blacker than a bucket of tar.

  “Yoh,” Dan called, and threw across a rope. Charley caught it, and Dan drew alongside. Harry heard his engine disengage, but remain idling. “Good trip?” Dan spoke softly now.

  “No gunboats, storms, or leviathans, praise be.”

  Charley spoke a few quiet words in Kwakwala and Harry thought he heard the name To-Cop mentioned. Dan, who had stepped across the joined gunnels, spoke quickly in return.

  “What is it you’re saying?” Harry looked to them both.

  “Ask if To-Cop stay Alert Bay,” said Charley.

  “I seen him a few times down by the jetty,” Dan said. “Charley here thinks he’s spy to Halliday and Woolacott.”

  “Let’s be done with our business as soon as may be.” Harry lifted the trap door to the hold and swung the lamp he held inside.

  Dan peered down. “There is a sight!” he said, eyeing the kegs. “Pay back that cocksucker chief double.” He fumbled in the chest pocket of his shirt and drew out a wad of money. He leered and winked as he handed it to Harry. “Bring George home early, eh?” Harry pocketed the money and leapt down into the hold.

  He hefted the kegs up through the trap door, although it was tough work with his bad arm. He had to lever them up with one hand and his knee, one keg on top of another, and Charley reaching down, lifting them and handing them across to Dan, who’d removed himself back aboard his own boat.

  They’d been at this for some time, and near three-quarters of the whisky had made its journey aboard Dan’s ketch, when Charley stopped, leaving Harry perched with a keg on one shoulder as his method had improved. When Harry made to complain, the old Indian raised his hand for silence. “Listen,” he said.

  Harry eased the keg down and raised his head outside to hear. He heard the slither of water along the hull, the wind drawing lightly at the furled sails, the drone of Dan’s engine idling, the clink of the anchor chain as it moved against the cleats. Then he heard it: another engine, turning slow revolutions yet insistent, closing, not far off. A smaller vessel’s engine, much like his own. There were only three small boats with engines in the area, and two of them were moored right here. The other was Halliday’s.

  “Sweet fuck.” Harry drew himself out of the hold, in time to see Dan hack with a machete at the rope that linked their boats together, even as he was engaging his engine. It roared life beside them, larger, faster than that of the Hesperus.

  “I go now,” said Dan, as his ketch moved swiftly away from their own. “Sorry.”

  “Get the anchor up!” Harry pointed Charley forward. He made his own way aft. Yet even as he sought to work the engine into life, he could hear how close was Halliday’s boat, not a hu
ndred yards away. And now the traitorous clouds parted and the moonlight came through, enough for him to see the Indian agent stood at the prow of his vessel, and other figures visible behind.

  “Harry Cadwallader!” Halliday called across the water. “Harry, I see you there. Don’t seek to move off. I am coming over and will board you.” Harry ducked forward again, until the deckhouse hid him from view. Charley was sitting there on a keg.

  The Indian looked up at him and shrugged. “Not luck today.”

  “Let’s get these kegs over the side,” said Harry and made to lift one.

  “Not time,” said Charley. “Keg float. Them see. Too late.”

  Harry swore. He was as angry at Charley’s composure as he was at their situation. “Then what the fuck to do?”

  “Have baccy tin?” said Charley.

  “You want to fucking smoke?”

  “Give tin.”

  Harry stood a moment fuming at him. Then he drew the tin from his pocket. He threw it over. “Choke on it, why don’t you,” he said.

  Charley just smiled. He opened the tin and turned it upside down. The contents dropped out to the deck, where the wind made the papers separate and the tobacco drift in clumps away across the planking.

  Halliday called out again. “Don’t try to run for it, Harry! We have you.”

  “Give money. All of it,” Charley said. “Quick now.”

  Harry stepped forward and handed the money across. Charley placed the money inside and sealed the tin. “And what do you hope to achieve by that?” Harry asked.

  “Not get water in. Good box.”

  “What in all hell you talking about?”

  “Them not see me. Me go.” He pointed shoreward. “Swim. You stay.”

  “Me stay?” Harry struggled for a moment to think. But Charley was already up and moving to the gunnels to the far side of the direction from which Halliday was approaching.

  Charley sat with his legs dangling over the water. “Good tin,” he said. “Where you buy?”

  “Hong Kong,” he said without thinking. “Girl gave it me. Long time ago.” Charley dropped quietly into the black water. Harry hurried across to look over the side. “You’ll sink, won’t you? That great hump on your back?”

  “Not sink,” said Charley. “Turn like whale in ocean.” With that he disappeared beneath the surface, even as Harry felt a bump as the Indian agent’s vessel drew up against the Hesperus.

  He sat upon a keg. He ran his hand up through his hair. He thought about Grace. His wife. She’d laugh to have seen old Charley disappearing into the water like that. Lean right back, slapping at her thigh and roaring, like the first time he saw her. Well, Harry had done what he could do. For her. For her family. For his family. And it was enough, was it not? Enough for any man.

  I SPENT THAT DAY OF MY RETURN TO RUPERT just sitting by the fire in the greathouse, Francine feeding me, looking on the empty walls where the treasures of my family had been took by Halliday. My wife saw there weren’t words yet for speaking, and she left me alone.

  Later, Grace came visiting. Don’t we always talk of our sons? But she’s a treasure more than all the masks and blankets I might gather along the cursèd coast. Well, I gave her to Harry, and I did it knowing there was darkness undiscovered in that man.

  Grace was all concern for me, and for her husband, who had not yet returned. In Alert Bay, I’d understood from Annie that he and Charley had left six days before for Rupert. Charley’d told her they was heading home.

  Where had they gone? I could not believe disaster would have come upon them, Charley the wily dreamer and Harry with all his years at sea. And there hadn’t been no storm that I had seen.

  Charley’d spoke of his doubts on Harry before he and Grace was married. Harry was a wanderer, “a ghost on the waters.” He’d be away with the spring tides, so Charley thought. But Grace was so sure. Harry so solemn when he came to ask her hand from me. He’s near twice her age, though he don’t look it, with that boyish face and his sprightly bearing.

  I guess I’d wanted to believe in him: white man of substance with that sleek-lined boat of his. Now my head was plagued with all sorts of black doubts. I even entertained a moment’s notion of Harry pitching Charley overboard, a hand on the old man’s hump and a quick shove.

  Anyhow, I told Grace of her husband’s injuries, making light of them, but said he and Charley was away on business for me and would shortly be back. When she asked me of the trial, I said I needed time to think. We’d all talk on it soon enough.

  I watched as she and her mother sat wittering away at the back of the greathouse. I felt bound all about by shame and I did not speak another word that day.

  The next morning, I was shook awake by Charley hisself. “Francine tells me you’ve not spoke a word on what’s been happening,” he says, once I’ve dragged myself up to sit out front in the grey light of the dawn. I was so befuddled I couldn’t hardly keep my eyes open. I felt like I needed to sleep for a month. Or for eternity.

  My wife and Grace was making coffee out back. I says to wait till they come join us then we’d speak more. I didn’t even think to ask him where Harry might be, or where the two of them had gone off to.

  That was the first question from Grace, though. “Where is my husband got to, Charley Seaweed?” says she. “Out with it.”

  “We hear George’s story first,” says he. Well Grace bridles at that and goes on some, but “You mind your uncle Charley” is all he says, waving a finger under her nose. She raised up her eyebrows and rolled her eyes about, but she held her tongue anyway.

  “You’re not the most popular man in Rupert,” says Francine to me.

  “Nor up the coast and down,” says Charley.

  “Crosby’s been making trouble since you left,” says Grace. “Speaking slurs against you, even to those few who go to his sermons on a Sunday. And Owadi has been saying things. And others too.”

  In short order, I told them of what had occurred since I was shipped off to Vancouver.

  “You don’t know how long you’d spend in jail?” says Francine. I says I don’t, and when she asks what’s to be done, I tells them I was minded to plead guilty and to speak my piece on the injustice being done the Indians by the banning of their rituals, even in a court so far off as Vancouver.

  We sat, then, for a while, and no one speaking, with the day brightening before us, and the village coming slowly to life. I felt their eyes upon me, but I could not look up to meet them.

  At last, Francine spoke up. “You are a white bastard-son madman,” says she. “My father always said you were. They truly made a devil of you in that fat city.”

  Grace asks what in all good Christ almighty did I think I was about, and speaks a few choice words more as well. Charley just sits there, staring at the ground, humpy and brooding.

  “But I was there for the hamatsa feast,” says I at last. “The flesh was cut up and eaten. Whatever was the nature of that flesh, nothing but the very worst will be believed by a white jury. There is nothing better for me to do as speak my mind.” I tell them Halliday says he’s witnesses to prove it all, and strong ones too.

  “But, Father,” says Grace, “can you not try to save yourself? Fight!” Seeing her there, her fists clenched and her thick hair vibrating about her face in her passion, I felt almost took apart then. Something just began to show itself to me. Something I had not thought. Something as yet without words. “I thought to stand up,” says I, my voice a frog croak, “and say the things I had to say before the people in Alert Bay. Down there in the city I am nothing. How would you have it? What fight do you propose? Let us hear it.”

  She just jumped up and strode off to stand, one foot up on a boulder, hands on her raised thigh, shaking her head. She was so much like her brother at that moment. David was always stamping about, chock full of opinion.

  “You daughter is right,” says Francine. “Where have your guts got to?”

  I stood and stalked over to Grace. I threw out
my hands to take in the village about us. “Have you not seen the filth?” says I. “Don’t you know the want we’re in? The cesspit down which we all is falling? Most of us dead! Yes,” says I, the spit flying out of my mouth like I had come on demented, “the city put the Devil in me, wife. The Devil that knows too well of things. There ain’t no fight that we can make against the killing of us. Soul and body, in the killing of us.”

  “And this is your argument for pleading guilty?” says Grace beside me.

  “There ain’t nothing of hope, whatever I choose to plead.”

  “What are these rumours, Father, about David’s funeral? You took off his head. I know that, though I found it difficult to believe.” She paused, and I saw that she fought her tears. I says I was following Tlingit ways and ancient they are. “But there’s other rumours, Father,” says she.

  “I’ve not anything else to tell you,” I says.

  “There weren’t nothing else,” says Charley.

  Grace spun away from me. I saw her shoulders hunched and the pain it seemed I was putting into her. “I’d not believed I’d see you turn so shameful,” she says, her back to me, and then she walked away along the beach.

  I didn’t call after her, nor speak at all. I could not even answer my own daughter’s grief.

  “Are you so stupid?” says Francine.

  I swore at her, words I won’t now repeat. “How many of your family have you lost?” I says. “You’ve not felt the pain of it as have I.”

  “I know it was Lucy bore him, but David was a son to me, as Grace is a daughter.” She spoke quietly, but, after, she stood and went back inside.

  “Well now you’ve nearly done for all of us,” says Charley. “You spoke fine words to Walewid and his men,” says he. “What’s become of them? Perhaps you left them back at Teguxste?”