The Cannibal Spirit (19 page)

The speaker stood close behind, spinning his war club in his hand. “White fuck,” the speaker says, softly, through his bared teeth.

Father let go my collar and straightways I tried to get away.

I wonder now how my life might have been if I had not made that attempt. For back steps my father at that same moment I am trying to pass behind him. Both of us go down, tangling in each other's limbs. The spittle from my father's fury sprays across my face. His arm goes back. His fist is above me.

It was four days before I woke, feeling first the weight of my body against the bunk bed's edge. All of it fog and pain. The lantern swinging above me, enough to make me giddy. Pressure in my head so strong that I wailed out.

I was on an American schooner. The
President Lincoln
. The ship's surgeon hovered over me. Breath like a still, he had, voice like mist.

“A miracle you've woken at all,” says he. I had broken my skull. The ship had moored just hours after I had fallen, so “regrettably,” as the surgeon called it. I had tumbled from a window, so he tells me, so very “regrettably.”

He'd let out the blood what was clotting between my skull and my brain. The rest had been down to my spirit, says he, what had showed much fortitude. And I did take comfort in that, broken boy, creaking in a bunk.

There were wires wrapped tight about my head, which were to stay, and I was not to move. He could not give me ought for the pain as yet. I was to stay awake till he was certain I'd not slip back into the coma from which I had just arisen.

Pain. The creak of wood and rope. The shudder of lantern light. Nausea. My mother then, come aboard to be with me. Seeing her, that fortitude of mine came clattering down swift enough, to show the weepy boy beneath.

Weeks followed at the hospital down in Comox, a fat Scottish doctor there and his fat nurses, Makah women from the south, and none too soft in their manners.

When finally we did return, Shaiks of course was long away, and George Hunt was to stay a white man. So said Robert Hunt, though my father was lucky to be alive as well. It was the very seriousness of the injury he had exacted on his son what most likely saved him. The rush to help the lifeless child. But, later, Shaiks had my father against a wall, the knife at his throat. Quiet words spoken. So Annie told me. She had been watching the events as they did occur, from some secret vantage.

Thus did I come to my crippled face and, I reckon, to the problem in my head what is the cause of my rages.

All the time I had been pondering on things past, my feet had been leading me further from Teguxste and deeper into the forest. Now the undergrowth was near impassable. Underfoot was branches that came directly out from the bases of the tree trunks, and vines also, and no more bracken. I could not make sense of it.

Now there was some brightness ahead. I hacked with my machete a few more times and grey light trickled through. I was near to exhaustion. I leaned, gasping, against a trunk, then I stepped ahead. My foot went straight down through the forest floor. I fell forward, dropping my machete as I made a grab for a branch.

The machete fell away into the depths. In front of me a tree had collapsed to make a clearing in the forest. But there weren't nothing of reason in it. I was hanging out above a drop of thirty foot or more, down to the great tree's ruin.

I had been climbing up—all that while dreaming of faraway times and the greatness that might have been mine—climbing up and away from the ground into the canopy, my feet perched on the sturdiness of the forest's flora. I have heard tell of it, though never from one what is meant to have such wilderness skills as me. I was like some white prospector, so gone astray he can no longer see his up from his down.

And now the rain arrived. The wind gusted heavier. I swayed there on the brink of the void, and I crowed with laughter. I called out to my great-uncle and to my mother and to Nakapankam. Here is a fool what knows nothing! The rain beating upon me. A fool in the forest. Meal for a bear, or some deserving forest rat.

Yet it was like something broke in me with the laughing. I recalled what it was that I was doing there: the weight of my pack and what was inside it. I thought about those men and women what are my history, and where my ancestry was come from. I knew again why I was in the forest. I knew where I was going. So I drew myself together some and spoke on how I had a task and I must follow it to its end, be it bitter or no.

Back on the forest floor, after some scrambling, slipping, and sliding, I saw in which direction was the incline and followed it. Up is forward, I says to myself. Up is forward.

Some time later, I was wrapped all about in rhododendron vines, sweat burning at my eyes, feeling like I was never getting free of them. Trussed up good and proper, deep in the wilds and night coming. But I hacked some more and then I was, quite sudden, at the edge of the forest.

The lake. Some forty years or more since last I seen it. There was bulrushes fifteen feet high down by its margins, swamp hay and cattail. No one had been there in years to cut it back. The lake is a mile long and half that wide, the steep hills behind. That day, there was geese and mallard, shovellers and canvasback ducks out on the water, what made my stomach cramp and my saliva run just seeing them.

Now the rain stopped. Birds sang in the evening air. I pushed my way through the reed grass round toward the north side of the lake. There was no path now at all. Eaten by the land. Fitting that all should return with time to its original state.

Through the high reeds and tule, I spied some distance off a pole rising thirty foot into the air and, at its top, the killer whale. The weather had been cruel to it, the features all worn and bird shit smothering much of what was left. The dorsal fin was still there, anyhow, rising sharp against the sky, and the mouth still grinned, if all its paint was long gone. Wooden planks mouldered in the clearing beneath the pole. Where once there was carven figures standing all about, now I saw only mounds of undergrowth.

I had come back, at last, to the House of Shamans.

It was there that I did first become a man of medicine. My friend, Making-Alive, brung me there. He who first suggested I become a shaman.

He was the brother of Francine, and it was for that reason I did marry her after I lost old Lucy. Poor old bugger, Making-Alive, dead not two years since of the grippe, coughing and retching his life away.

I once told Making-Alive that I did not believe in such powers. Conjurors and tricksters, says I, liars who cheat the people of their money, brewing up evil, but helpless to save a man from real illness. Making-Alive just laughed. “Many ways to heal a man,” he said. “More than you know, stupid white boy.”

When at last I followed him up to the House of Shamans, I don't know what I believed. Did I want to expose their lies? Perhaps it was that I wanted to believe. Or I wanted power, young man as I was. Shamans is chieftains in their own right, all of it tied up together in the peoples' ways. Thinking through these memories now, here in the museum hall, I reckon I was seeking for my own brown blood—seeking to belong.

Walking inside the House of Shamans and seeing all those old farts sitting about in the dimness within, I understood that now I'd truly know if their magic was real or not. Making-Alive had told me they'd kill me if my tongue come loose and I spoke of it to others. They'd come in the night to rip out that tongue, or bleed me quiet in the forest. Well, in the days what followed, they did teach me all their tricks, and I thenceforth did keep quiet on it.

Anyways, standing there in front of that high pole among the ruins, I took off my pack and laid it down on the grass. I barely knew what I should do next. Make a camp. So I got long strips of bark and bracken fronds, scythed the grass short, cut lengths of cattail from along the shore, shaved away their leaves, and I was weaving the stems in lattices, and using cedar string to draw their ends together into mats, before I realized it seemed I was planning a proper stay.

When I looked up next, the evening was fair and the night would be the same. The storm had blown out the rain, for a day or two at least.

By twilight I had a fire rustling. The firmament bore heavy down upon me without no clouds to hide it. There was just too many alternatives, among the stars, for them to loom so present whilst I was so split myself. I hunched my shoulders against them.

The Indian says the stars is the dead. Was David there among them? And Lucy? My lost babies? All those others I have knowed and lost? Are there stars for the white dead too? Must one people's story be everyone's? How can it be otherwise? Can all souls, when their bodies shrug them off at last, know to travel to the right places their peoples have constructed for them? Can it be so convoluted? If so, then all the differing tribes and races of man are surely different species as well, if such profoundly different endings be their ultimate lot.

I have also heard it said that stars are other suns, and maybe worlds spinning round them very like this one. And that from science! It's odd to me that so fantastical a story could be born out of the very heart of Reason. Surely a wilder myth than any savage people could imagine?

I pulled the contents of my pack out onto the cattail mat. At the bottom was the small wooden box. The wood was worn with age, yet it had been cared for, polished with whale fat so that it reflected the fire's flush by that lonely lakeshore.

I placed my forehead down on the box. I do not know how long I rested there. I thought that I might cease breathing altogether, and that might be the most beautiful blessing I would ever receive.

A tuft of down, what looked like it come off the breast of a duck, blew up to rest against the side of the box. I rolled it between my fingers. Blood and down. The shamans' trick. My heart pounded in my ears, my stomach heaved so that I did actually retch, though there weren't naught to bring up. I could hardly hold sense of the world around me. So I drew myself up and stamped away outside the circle of the fire's light to the lakeshore. The lake was black, but the stars threw diamonds across its surface.

“Lagoyewilé!” I shouted. But there weren't no great spirit of the killer whale out there to help me. I wondered what the boy's dream about me had truly been, all those years ago, before I did heal him. Eagle down. The sickness coming into my mouth from out the body of the boy. The healing of him. Magic. Believing in it, if that is what I did back then.

But that great deception! Sucking the sickness from the body of the boy. His limp body in my arms. My lips upon his chest. Fever and rank sweat, and the child properly unwell, eyes rolling in his head, his skin burning.

Then me spitting out into my palm that bloody ball of illness. The sighs from the people when I hold it up to show them.

David. Lucy. My baby boy and girl. I tried it on all of them. And on none did it work.

Back by the fire, I knelt beside the box. The very same box what caused the war between the Tsimshian and the Tlingit. That once contained the chieftain's head. The box Shaiks gave my mother. That she gave me. That I did give to David at the time he danced his first hamatsa. I prised up the lid. Then my rage came over me and I shut my eyes against the horror of it all.

HARRY DRIFTED IN AND OUT OF DREAM
. He saw again the blade sliding through Poodlas's upper arm and into the armpit. He went back further in his memories, to that first blade. That first time.

The Mormon orphanage stood high on Telegraph Hill above San Francisco, with the stink and poverty of Sydney Town all about. He'd spent much of his childhood confined there, once his mother died. It was a big clapboard house with high plank walls surrounding it. There weren't so many wooden houses of its size left, especially since the fires of 1850. Sometimes, when no one was watching to chastise him for it, he would scramble up through the attic and onto the red adobe tiles of its roof. There he could gaze out to the hovels and patchwork tents where the Australians, come over for the gold rush, made their homes, along with the other poor immigrants out of the Latin Americas, Ireland, and old Europe.

His father had been one of those last. He was a Welshman, with one gleaming find to his name, sifted from a river in the mountains, with which he'd won his bawdy-singer bride. “He come in that night, first time I seed him, great wad a greasy money in his paws, stinking high as a dead beast. But filled up so full with hisself as I couldn't resist his twinkling.” So Harry's mother told it. Women were rare enough in the city back then, she said, that even whores had the men doffing their caps and paying them fat compliments. She was desperate—in those last days of her life—desperate for him to know the details of his origins, pitiful though they might be. His father had taken a knife in his guts before Harry had even come squawking out into the world. So she told it. But he'd heard other stories as well: how he hadn't died at all, how he'd upped and gone as soon as he'd heard she was bearing his child. As soon as the money was gone.