The Cannibal Spirit (2 page)

Some months after I had finished my learning, I was away in my canoe trading for the Hudson's Bay Company. It was night and I had thrown my anchor stone. I lay in the bottom of the boat and sleep was close on me, or else it had come. Now perhaps I slept and dreamt, or else it was in truth that a killer whale come up then right by my canoe. It lifted up out of the water, and hung over me, the ocean falling off its body like a waterfall. All those tons of its flanks in black silhouette against the stars, fins as wide as my canoe was long.

It spoke then, saying its name was Lagoyewilé—which means Rolling Over in Mid-Ocean. Then it changed itself into a huge man with great long arms and slick black skin like that of a seal in the ocean at night, and after that it turned to a killer whale again. So are the ways of spirits.

Its voice sounded like a wave breaking inside a cave. It told me that I would do my first healing the day after. Then it told me all the rituals I would need. I calls them rituals now, but I did not know that word then, long before the anthropologists came up the coast calling them such. Back then, they was just things as must be done.

The next day, I paddled the waters to Teguxste village, which I came to late in the day. I pulled up my canoe upon the pebbles and an old chieftain was waiting there to greet me. “Walas gigamé,” says he. “You have come.” The chief tells me how his sick grandson had dreamt, that very night past, that I was the only man who might save him. And now here I was upon the village shore, like as if the spirits theirselves had sent me.

Now up until I saw that killer whale, I had learned the medicine tricks but had not thought ever to put practice to them, and especially not in treating a youngster gasping on its sickbed. I thought I was white man enough to know the quackery I'd learned, and to put my faith in the ways of modern science when it came to maladies of the body.

But there I was, and now all the village was out and looking on me. I suppose the memory of the killer whale, and then the tale of the child's dream, had throwed me enough that I said I'd do whatever I could.

I stayed the day in the old chieftain's home. I didn't eat nor drink nor go out, except to wash myself in the waters of the ocean. The people steered clear of me and I did the sorts of mysterious mumblings and whisperings of preparation that was expected, those I had been taught by the medicine men of Making-Alive's village.

In the evening, they came to bring me to the greathouse. I passed along the shore in front of the buildings. All the painted totems of the village, eagle and fox, beaver and wolf, stared down upon me, till I might have run straight to my canoe and paddled off, if I'd but had the chance.

I arrived outside the entrance to the greathouse. Up to that moment I had been making arguments in my head for when the child would still be sick the next morning. But now it seemed like I was being pushed at and kept from entering inside that wide door, shaped like it were the mouth of a wolf, canines of blackened timber spiking down as if they'd gobble you up should you came close enough.

A voice came whispering in my mind. It told me I had need of cedar bark. So I spoke out and the old chieftain brung me a neckring, wristlets, and anklets of red cedar. I covered them in eagle down.

But the eagle down did something to me when it touched my skin. Later, the people said I ran away into the woods, and when they did bring me back, I was singing a sacred song.

Inside the greathouse, my senses came back to me. The village's men of medicine were sitting in a line, blankets wrapped about their waists, bare chested and daubed in black paint, eagle down upon them and red cedar rings. Their eyes glared in challenge. I knew they had not been able to save the sick boy theirselves; that I was a threat to them should I succeed. Their hard eyes did put the fear to me quite powerful. I felt myself then very much the boy I still was.

The sick child was lying between the shamans and the huge fire what roared at the centre of the room. Its flames burned to the ceiling, till a man must be sent into the rafters to douse the steaming timbers there. All the people of the village was gathered, lining the walls, and all of them silent, the only sound being that of the fire. My sweat poured down me and I
was fearing even for my life if I should fail. Fearing perhaps that my white blood might betray my brown.

I followed the instructions Lagoyewilé, the Killer Whale Spirit, had given me the night before. I lifted up the boy and carried him four times round the fire. Then I sat down with the child on my lap, and the fire raging before my face.

I put my mouth to the boy's chest, where the killer whale had told me I should. I sucked, hard enough for the skin to bruise. Something came into my mouth and I spat it out into my palm. It lay there, black in the firelight, a bloody ball of sickness, a clinging, greasy worm.

I held it up for the people to see, and there was sighings and murmurings then all about. That moment when all their night terrors was made evident before them. All the proof of devilry. All of it was there in that bloody mess in my palm. So I rolled it in cedar bark and chucked it into the fire.

Then I stood the child on his feet, and fed a ring of white cedar bark down across his body and had him step out from it. I put the ring on a stick and carried it round the fire, then set it to the flame as well. I watched it burn to dust.

When I woke the next morning the boy was healed.

What was it in my hand? What was it? Well, I says it was the sickness.

Or do I say that? Making-Alive pleaded with me—when he was dying, when he knew I was writing stories of the people for the anthropologists—Making-Alive says, “Please don't tell our secrets to the white men.” But there ain't nothing set in stone these days, and all secrets come out in the end.

So there I was, young muttonhead, before the people, with the sick child at my feet. The sickness what was resting in my hand: the sickness what I had earlier made it up in the forest, when I fled in the condition of my trance, with the men following behind. All right, I do confess it: my false trance! For truth is, I was but making pretense of my disposition then. Already, the lies come sloping in like wolverines to a carcass.

I had the sickness stored away in my pocket, tufts of it, given me by the shamans—tufts of eagle down. The secret sickness: eagle down! I put
those tufts in my mouth in the forest, between gum and cheek. Later, with the boy in my arms, I bit hard at my tongue. Then I sucked on the child's body, and at my tongue as well, until I tasted my blood. I rolled the eagle down about my teeth, soaking up the blood until it did become a globulous mess; and it was that which I spat out into my hand.

But the truth of it—and no lies now—the truth is that the child was cured. He'd been afire with fever the night before, and me thinking influenza, what has killed so many. But the next morning, there he was, walking and eating and laughing, and me the hero. Well, I didn't hang about to soak up the praise. I got in my canoe and paddled off quick as I could, the fright of it outweighing the triumph I might have felt, the glory I might have wallowed in, there in the village.

And always since, I have had this question I can't answer: how did it work? How did I save him with such lies? I do not know.

But what stays with me—what I cannot cease from thinking on—are the dreams. First: the dream of the killer whale: Lagoyewilé, what is Rolling Over in Mid-Ocean. Too many years have gone by now. Did I truly dream it? Or was it no more than things I had been told by the shamans what taught me—things that, in the intervening years, have become the stuff of dream, of fantasy? I don't know. Many things are said of memory: how time builds our truths until they become what it is we
want
, instead of what it is we
know
.

But, more than that: what is the only truly mystifying feature—what cannot be explained at any level by dint of rational thinking—the child's dream. For it did occur the day
before
I came to the village. Of that, there just ain't no explanation I can find.

I have had the memory of that ignorance-wrought success to plague me in the years what followed, as so many I knew and loved did slip through my failing fingers into death. As the skills I learned from the men of medicine, and the skills I learned thereafter from science: as all those skills did fail me, and as everyone died, one after another after another.

Right up till the last. Till Harry.

HARRY CADWALLADER
had just climbed up onto the jetty from the deck of the
Hesperus
when he heard the steamer's whistle blow. Out there in the darkness, it would be coming round Beaver Point and pointing its nose shoreward. Before long he saw its lanterns bobbing and reflecting on the black water. He smelled rain in the air.

He sat on an empty fifty-gallon can to wait. The three electric lamps along the jetty cast dim sodium pools, the generator coughing behind the village. He took off his hat, put it down beside him, and rubbed his fingers over his forehead, then rubbed his fingertips together. The calluses were going soft. He leaned forward, hawked, and spat down between the wooden planks. He was turning into a landsman.

That same tune in his mind. Round and over and over and round. He hummed quietly to himself.
Where I am going, well, you won't never know
… It was his mother used to sing that. But he put such black thoughts away.

He looked down on his boat.
Hesperus
, read the name on the prow, as he had repainted it in black and gold a week before. Most of the day he had spent on his knees, polishing the decks and all the timber, from rudder to prow—thirty-six feet, and ten more to the tip of her bowsprit. The deck had a central hatch leading down to the hold, steel-hinged and always locked. There were canned foodstuffs, a tough-sealed sack of rice, and three cases of his trade in there. He had spent a long hour polishing the locks and other metal on the
Hesperus
with whale grease, till they had fair burned in the late-afternoon sunlight.

The pilothouse, forward of the stern, was near high enough to stand erect inside, windows to side and front. He'd buffed those windows till they glittered like crystal. He had taken out and polished the pans and plates and cutlery, then he had re-stowed them, piece by piece, in their cupboards and drawers. The machete over the doorway was honed till a leaf would part if dropped on its cutting edge.

The boom stretched back above the deck almost to the pilothouse. If the mainsail had been patched more than once, but always neatly, now he had it furled clean and tight, as were the jib and spinnaker. She'd been schooner-rigged when he'd purchased her, though with masts of equal length. He'd straightway had the mizzen out and re-rigged her as a sloop. Then he'd placed in an engine where the mizzen base had been, and a damned fine thing it was, rare too, especially this far north along the coast. He'd been down there earlier, but even he, rat-nose keen for muck wherever it might be, could find no stain on her.

She was quite perfectly prepared for travel. “Mr. Scrub-scrub!” Grace would say. “You a man at the curtain, ready to leave.” It was true. Yes, it was true.

There was a small wooden plaque above the pilothouse door that was there when he'd purchased the
Hesperus
in San Francisco, two years before. It read, “For I can weather the roughest gale, that ever wind did blow.” He liked that, though he did not know its origin.

He looked to shoreward. The fires flickering through the heavily curtained doorways were the only visible light in the village of Fort Rupert. It got deathly dark once the sun was down, excepting when a family had one of their pagan jamborees on the beach. Then some preposterous bonfire would threaten to rain down burning embers upon the whole village, and even the forest—some hundreds of yards away, as, over time, the trees had been felled for their timber—even the forest got filled up with sly-darting shadows.

He hummed,
Fixing to leave … Fixing to go … Where I am going … Well you won't never know.
Ashore till dead? Well, he'd been ashore this whole winter through, and that was long enough. Best slip quietly away and be done with it. Gone. Away. An ocean away. The whole-wide-world-beyondthe-ocean away. That was how it was. How it was going to be. They could have believed nothing else of him. Surely they could not? And wouldn't it just hand his father-in-law the opportunity to shake his fat head and spout on about how he'd always known it, how he hadn't never trusted the man, shouldn't never have given him those privileges he had and so on and so forth and so on and on, as Harry knew old George would. And
he'd be right, so he would. Proven right, and properly self-righteous with it, no doubt.

Whatever George's rantings and ragings might come to, Harry would be off with a pre-dawn spring tide—in the coming day or two—and there'd be the end of it.

A woman's voice called out from the direction of the sea. He rose up from his seat, staring out through the murk as it wailed in the Indian tongue, sounding some ritual lament, before falling away once more into silence.