I woke beside old Francine the next morning feeling chock full of shame, but clear as to the scope and nature of my foolishness. I thought on Harry placing himself in danger for me. On all those others what looked for my welfare. It weren’t justice, after all, to let them suffer so, that I might wallow in my pity.
I went straight to the store to speak with Grace. I told her of all I had in me. “My mind had left me,” says I. “But jail ain’t helping no one. I know it now. I’ll find a ways out of it. See if I don’t.” She cast a pretty leery eye on me, and didn’t have much to say by return. I know it would have to be by my actions that I would make her see I meant my words.
My first thoughts was to head back to the village where the ritual for which I stood accused had occurred. But Charley says to me that he has already been there and none weren’t ready to stand me as witness. I suppose I ought to have knowed it already, but I was quite angered for a time.
“They don’t want to be before a court saying they was also at the ceremony what is banned,” as Charley says, and I suppose he was right. Still, Mr. Bowser weren’t going to be overjoyed when I turned up with just myself and some doubtful-looking old cripple Indian for company.
Charley and me hopped the next boat heading south to Alert Bay, the money in my pocket. Grace came with us, refusing all appeals to stay behind. “You’ve near to killed him, then had him locked up in the jail, and now you’d refuse me to see him?” says she, and there was no answering that. Poor old Francine got lumbered with opening up the store each morning. Still, I knows she don’t give too much time to the tricksy ways of the people in their negotiating, so I weren’t overly worried on that score. “Do what is right to come back to us,” says she by way of goodbye, and that was all the words she had, so angry and fretful as I guess she was.
I went first to see Halliday. He had Harry locked up for a month for his misdeeds. There weren’t much to say about that. He’d caught him fair and square with a cargo of illegal liquor. The Indian agent smiled on Charley when he saw him. “You’re a strong swimmer,” says he. Charley just shrugged his lumpy shoulders.
“What of the Hesperus?” says I.
“She is made forfeit by his actions,” says Halliday. But when I started to protesting on how much of my family’s property he had done from us already, he raised up his hand to quiet me. “I am not ignorant of Harry’s motivations in acting as he did, George. The law tells me I must auction off all vessels that are taken during such offences. Be assured the auction will be closed and Harry will be but the sole bidder.”
“And the starting price?”
“Affordable.”
I humphs and spits and stomps some, but Charley saw the wisdom of things and drew me off. “He ain’t all evil, that one,” says he, as we went through the back of Halliday’s office to go visiting with Harry.
Abayah and Annie was keeping him fed. He was resting there on the bunk under the window, right where I had so recently been myself, his head back on the wall, eyes closed and snoring. He had his shirt off, the ropes of his sailor’s arms and shoulders resting loose, the one side what had been injured drooping lower than the other, the great hollow depression of his wound striped purple now with lumpy scar tissue, and none too pretty on the eye. Still, he looked a man quite perfectly at peace in that moment. Then Grace spoke out, cursing him for a flat-faced idiot getting chopped up so. His eyes came open and, seeing Grace, he rose up like a duck from the water with a pike at its ass, stood there, shuffling and with his fingers squirming as if he was up before the judge hisself. She had a few comments of her own he needed hearing. So I gave him a few words of my thanks, told him I was sure to be seeing him soon, shared a sympathetical look with him over Grace’s shoulder, and we left them to it, eyeing each other, wary, through the bars.
Anyhow, there weren’t much as I could say. I didn’t want to speak more on my doubts about him, even to say they was gone. I had been so wrong about it all. And he seemed to have pardoned me for the horrors what he saw up there at the House of Shamans.
We stopped overnight with Abayah before the steamer was due the following morning. I went by Annie’s. “I have had it told me, by such as know, that I am a fool and, quite probably, mad with it.” To which she added her agreement. “Well, now I am about trying to make amends,” says I. So did we part then, on good terms, though I did not go see her husband—didn’t seem much point before whatever was to happen did.
So Charley and me went on down to Vancouver. My lawyer, Mr. Bowser, when he sees me and Charley, did shake his head, and made it clear my chances wouldn’t be more than panning for gold in the bath.
I had other thoughts.
A few days later and there I was, waiting outside the court in a fair morning turning to hot, sitting on those steps what I had stood on two short weeks before, when Mr. Bowser made my bail for me. As the city rattled past, so the dust mounted up from off the road like smoke devils.
Charley Seaweed was beside me, ready to state to the court there hadn’t been no human corpse present at the hamatsa ceremony for which I stood accused. I confess I was a mite dubious at how useful he might be to my cause: his leathery brown old Indian face, short most of its teeth, what looks more often than not as if it is leering, filthy, at some young saintly missy striding by, his hunched back, what was made all the more fantastical by being dressed up smart in a new grey shirt and black morning jacket.
As we waited on Bowser turning up, so we did watch those down at the far end of the court’s stairs. There was three of them. One was a tall man and thin. His name was Copper Dancer. Beside him was a shorter man by the name of Inviter, as I might translate it. Both was well dressed enough in black suits and cravats that I knew they must be funded by others wealthier than theirselves. They paced and turned, paced and turned. I could see they was made discomforted by the city’s overbearing presence. They did not look our way.
There was a third man also present, he dressed in the black gown of the priesthood, and his bowl-cut hair without a hat. To-Cop sat upon the lower step and watched us back, without expression.
It was the morning of the second day of the trial.
The first day I spent listening to those as was arranged against me. I heard tell of the wrongdoings what I had performed at that ritual, as the prosecution and, after, as To-Cop did recount them. To-Cop told how he had been present that seventeenth day of February as a spectator only at the village of the chieftain Big Mountain. He was there to watch a dance of the hamatsa, what is one—as he did describe it—who dances and eats a dead body. I learned how the corpse of a dead old woman was brung in to the greathouse by the hamatsa dancers. I learned how I was called forward by Big Mountain, how I went all about the house singing my sacred song, how I took a long blade and chopped off the corpse’s legs and then its head, and did give out portions to all the hamatsa chieftains present, and then how we sat and ate up all the fleshy parts of the body. I heard as well how I stood up, at the end, and advised everyone not to say anything about it, as it was a most serious affair.
Well, it was a day of appealing storytelling, for sure. But there is another version to be told, though it was not to be the one I was to tell in court. There is guilt tied up in it, but of a different sort.
It was February. I had been a long day travelling across a cold and lifeless sea, the sky a grey haze what it can’t be seen where the air does finish and the clouds begin. The day was ending and my bones creaking when I pulled my canoe up the pebbled beach at the village of Klawitsis. Chief Big Mountain’s village.
The people was at their preparations for a feast. As I walked up among the buildings, I says a word here or there to those I know, and I saw how the piles of blankets stacked up inside the doorways, ready for distributing at the feast, was threadbare and not of those quantities I remember from past days.
“George is here,” old man Seal Singer says. “Hide everything away or he’ll leave with his canoe piled up with our treasures.”
&n
bsp; “I’ll take a couple of your fat daughters as well, Seal Singer,” I says. “You’ve plenty spare.”
“They’re all away south to the cities now,” Seal Singer says, more quiet, and I knew it was to work on their backs among the white men.
I came to the greathouse, and there was the chief inside, Big Mountain, old now, if huge in his body still. “There is witchcraft afoot,” says he.
“I’ll find those what are doing it,” says I. “I’ll take the game from them.”
That night I slept out beyond the edge of the village among the dead. I lay there among the graveboxes hidden in their wooden mausoleums, and above me in silhouette against the stars was others strung up and lodged on the branches of the trees. Some of the people spied me there, and I knew I was spoken on and wondered at, feared perhaps as well, which was a good thing for my endeavours.
Next day, I strode out through the forest. After some hours, I stopped for a blow, leaning against the trunk of a red cedar, speaking a few quiet words to it: mossy, ragged master. I was wondering at how the years creep in, and me not noticing, to steal from me my vigour.
It was some ways ahead, fifty yards or an hour’s hard walking, I didn’t know. Lagoyewilé—what is Charley Seaweed, of course, when he’s sneaking about doing his dreaming for me—had told me where to go the evening before, as we sat by a fire at the water’s edge, the forest hanging over us, a day’s paddle still from Klawitsis village.
“Follow the route I tells you,” says he, “and blackheart fucks at the end you will find.”
So I had walked for three hours from the village in the direction what he told me, and then he said I’d see the fire by its smoke.
But there was a rainstorm raging, and the forest bleeding green shadows. So no smoke could I see, nor much of ought else besides. I’d fancied putting a bullet in a deer as I went on, but no animals moved in that sodden wilderness. The only thing in my nose was the fresh-mould smell of rain. No sound was there more than hiss and drip and, dull through the miles of forest, the roar of thunder out on the ocean.
Well, the storm passed over at last and the forest steamed and sucked. I walked the rough track, quieter now, my better ear forward, sniffing for woodsmoke.
I heard them first: words chanted that I couldn’t make out, but following the rhythms of a stick being beaten on a hollow log.
Now I saw smoke ahead, rolling up amidst the trees. It was blue-dark to tell me new-cut hemlock was being burned.
A yellow cedar lay across my path where it had fallen long ago. With its trunk, its branches, and the flora it did bring down in its ruin, and all of it covered now in moss and vines, it rose full fifteen feet in height before me, and the smoke billowing from the far side.
Off to my left, I spied a rope hanging down from the top. So, taking hold, I pulled myself up.
At the top, I rested on my belly on the soaking moss. I edged forward through the undergrowth, which was like a giant spider’s web. At last, near trapped among the tangles, I could see down the far side.
There was a small clearing, no more than thirty foot wide, carved out by hand from the rhododendron thickets what sprawl among the fir and cedar and the hemlock trees.
The fire in the clearing’s centre was hissing and crackling as it fought the damp from the storm. There was fresh-cut branches of hemlock, their leaves still on the twigs, resting close beside the fire, which threw up clouds of smoke. The smell came to my nostrils strong and bitter.
Two men was there. Both was wearing sackcloth trousers and that’s it. Their bodies and their faces was daubed in charcoal till black, but for the lines of sweat which had run down their skin to show the brown beneath.
One of them, short and bandy-legged and his hair long near to his waist, was resting on a dead log, a leg to either side, beating the wood with a length of cedar. His chest was heaving so that it was clear to me he’d been about his task some time already.
The other was more than six feet tall and thin like an aspen. He strode around the fire, throwing up calls and wails into the air, and now I could make out the words.
“Big Mountain,” says he. “You are suffering. Hah, hah, hah,” and his arms rose up each time he spoke. “The great chief soon will be dead.”
Off to one side, there was a small stream coming out from the undergrowth. It had formed into a black pond by the fallen tree trunk upon which I was hiding like a lizard. The pond rippled with the flowing-in of water, the reflections of the fire’s light all shuddering and crazy in it. Beside this pond, I saw the packs of the two men. There was an ancient Hudson’s Bay Company musket as well, sawn down to half its length, its stock green now with age, but its iron still oiled and clean.
The man beating time shouted out, “Make him dead! Make him dead!” The other one went over to the far side of the fire and now I saw a shape lying on the wet earth. Beside it was a blanket laid out and items resting upon it.
The tall man stooped down and lifted up a skinning knife from off the blanket. Then he took hold of the shape. I squinted harder and now I knew that what I had come to discover was true, for lying there was a human body.
Its legs was curled up against its torso and it had been dead for many years, its skin all leathered and black. The body was dried and shrunk, as they do, till it looked more a child in size than the adult it once was. Its head had been hacked off and lay in the mud some little ways off. I could see by the length of its grey, straggling hair that it was the remains of an old woman.
So the man with the skinning knife gripped one of the corpse’s arms and put his knee between its legs and its body. He pulled upwards and pressed down with his knee, grunting, till there was a crunching sort of a dull explosion. The corpse’s legs snapped forward to hang, still curled, but loose from the torso, and the body flopped onto the ground as the tall man dropped it.
Then he hunkered down. With the knife he did something I couldn’t clearly see. Shortly, he stood once more and held up what looked a leather pouch, but was the withered tit of the dead old woman.
He rolled the body away with his foot and I saw that most of the skin from the corpse’s right side had already been took off. The tall man knelt on the blanket and dropped the tit beside him. He rooted among the other paraphernalia what was there.
I spied another rope tied off nearby me that fell down toward the clearing, ending just before the edge of the black pond.
The tall man was still at work on the blanket, and the other one beating his rhythms on the hollow log. Both was facing away from me.
I eased myself around so that my feet, instead of my head, was now aimed towards the clearing. I pulled my rifle from off my shoulder into my hand, checked my machete was secure and that my knife was safe in its bootsheath. Then I took the rope in my empty hand.
Keeping watch on the two sorcerers in the clearing all the while, I lowered myself down the tree trunk till the slope was steep enough that I was hanging only by the strength of my arm. Then I let go of the rope.
I slipped on the mud at the edge of the pond and went down on one knee, even as the man beating rhythm at the hollow log swung about and spied me.
I jumped up smartly and ran round the pond, slipping and slithering, to the two men’s packs on the other side. The tall man spied me now as well. The man at the log was on his feet and scuttling my way.
I got to their packs and took up the Hudson’s Bay Company musket. I tossed it into the pool and raised up my own rifle. At that moment, something thumped against my chest and knocked me backwards a step.
But I held up the rifle to my shoulder and looked along its barrel at the men, who was standing still now, gazing black murder at me. I glanced down for a moment. There was the tall man’s skinning knife what he had used to chop off that dead old woman’s tit, lying on the ground at my feet, and that he must have throwed at me. I checked my shirt for blood but there weren’t none. It had hit me handle side round.
So I smiled across at him. “Copper Dancer,” says
I, “your luck ain’t worth a shit today.”
Well, there was bad words spoke between us then. But eventually we was all sitting round the fire and my rifle still aimed at their sorcerous hearts should they be minded to try any fancy stuff.
“Go on,” Copper Dancer says, “take our knowledge for your own, so that you become a powerful sorcerer like us.” And it was true I wanted to know all that they had been up to, though I had other reasons than sorcery for wishing such knowledge.
The next afternoon, I arrived back into the village. By the way the people viewed me, I knew some guessed what my mission had been, and others had had it told them. So when I held up the bag in which I lugged the game, they fell back and murmured amongst theirselves, or else they turned away and spat upon the ground. A few backed through the doorways of their cabins into darkness.
“In the witchcraft place,” I tell Chief Big Mountain, as we stood beside the ocean, “I beat the sorcerers and I took away the game. The game what is the cedar bark with which they caught your breath as you was sleeping, and your piss and shit, and as well a stick you used for eating. These had they buried in the ground, wrapped in a corpse’s skin, beneath a fire of hemlock. I dug them up and I was careful I did not disturb the contents inside the skin. I put it in this bag and brung it here. Now take it and throw it away into the sea.”
The chieftain hurled the bag out into the water. I had placed a stone inside and it disappeared under the surface. Big Mountain spat on the pebbles for fortune. “You have saved me,” says he.
“And put the Devil to witchery,” says I.
“Now the hamatsa can be called in from the forest.”
We went back up the beach to the chieftain’s greathouse. The people watched me, but I weren’t certain there was much of admiration in their eyes.
Later, the fire danced high into the timbers of the roof. The leading men of the village clans and their sons sat, stolid and sweating, about it, affecting to ignore the danger to the building what the flames threatened. Each had a Bay blanket wrapped about them. Some wore bear-skin hats and others was bareheaded, but all had their faces painted black, as members of the hamatsa society are in the habit of at such occasions.
The Cannibal Spirit Page 30