The Cannibal Spirit (36 page)

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 part.

“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.

“Well you have not given me much to use, Mr. Hunt,” says he and suggests maybe I should plead innocent for now, whilst bail was posted. “That at least will give you an opportunity to go home and give some thought to the matter. Perhaps your family may have opinions to offer.” He tells me I can change my plea at a later date, though it might result in a longer sentence.

“I've not money to pay you any further, Mr. Bowser,” I tell him.

“I'll not work for nothing,” says he, “but it's a case I am keen to be involved with. You must understand there are expenses that must be born in any trial.” Anyhow, he says, we'd discuss it later, once I had made my bail.

Then off he goes and I was left alone. Dust swirled about in the sunlight what flowed in through the only window, high up on one wall. I found myself remembering a shoal of herring I had fished one day. They was being worried at by seals till they spun about, reflecting in the sunbeams so that they seemed a rainbow whirlpool stretching down into the deeps. I flung out my net and drew in hundreds, even as porpoises twisted now amongst them, and killer whales coming last to herd and swing about and throw their tails, so that the stunned herring was hurled up into the air. Seagulls dived and scooped them up. The sun flicked off their scales until it looked as if I was amidst a world of rainbows and diamonds, and me but a tiny part of that great, glorious massacre.

I thought on how alive and young and brim-filled with the murderous joy of it I'd been. I realized that there was patterns in the world. The dust
swirling and the herring doing similar. Science it is, such thinking. But it is religion as well.

Then John Clough came to lead me, shuffling in my chains, back to the cells.

I'll not dwell on those days I spent in jail. Eventually I was up before the judge. Bowser managed to talk me out of getting up right then and there to speak my mind. So instead I held my tongue tight for the time being, and I was bailed to return in just fifteen days. I had to borrow money off Bowser for my fare home.

“He's a tough old fish, this judge,” Bowser says to me outside the courthouse. “I would not trust to clemency, should you switch your plea to guilty. Get yourself home, Mr. Hunt, and talk to your family. I can't think they will want you languishing in prison over some ill-thought-through— and ill-placed—desire to make a statement.”

He reckoned I'd need some hundreds of dollars for his fees, for transporting witnesses and the like. I says I wasn't likely to find such an amount. “Then you'll go to prison, Mr. Hunt,” says he, grim faced like a judge hisself. And so we parted.

I stood there for some time after he'd gone. Choices must be made, but I had not the wherewithal to make them. My freedom weighed heavy after the many days of my captivity. Even to raise my head so that I might see again the huge, violet plumes of smoke away above the buildings, which showed where was the port—even such tiny motions of will felt hard beyond all measuring. Something was wrong with everything—with my thinking, with my place in things. But I was without the words I needed to give it name.

I gathered myself and crossed the road to sit upon steps leading down from a covered boardwalk.

It was late morning. The streets roared all about me. Yet I did feel cocooned, like when I was a child and we'd play in the snow, burying each other under the drifts, with only our eyes and noses showing, until the sounds came like echoes from elsewhere. All was far away, and the city no more than some but dimly recalled dream place of evil intent.

Someone spoke then, saying, “Do you need something, friend?” I turned to see a man in a tall hat and black longcoat stood before a shopfront that I saw was a undertaker's. I shook my head. “Well, there's dosshouses aplenty in Gastown,” the man says, pointing away along the street.

I had washed my clothes the night before, where I'd been given them back to wear before the judge. But I still made a sorry spectacle and knew it: boots, scruff trousers, and a weathered shirt of no determinate colour, without a jacket. A mismatching tie which Bowser'd brought me to wear. Over my bad eye was a new patch the physician, what had come to examine it in the cells, had given me. He cleaned it up, but he didn't think I'd see again through it, though he said that miracles had happened in the past and, no doubt, must happen more in times before us.

I rose from the steps, and stepped out into the traffic towards the docks and home. Luck favoured me, and there was a vessel steaming north that afternoon. I'd half fancied I might finish up aboard the
Comox
once more, and old Eddlestone cursing me all the way to Alert Bay. But such was not the case. Instead, I'd ship with the
Coquitlam
.

I bought half a chicken and a hard-packed ball of rice from a skinny Chinaman with a barrow. I watched as he silently took the abuse of his race from the stevedores he served. I thought, he ain't so dissimilar to the Indian. Brownskin, second-rate human being.

I perched on an iron mooring post beside the water, pulling halfheartedly at the chicken, and fingering the rice apart, to fall into the water, the fish rolling over each other to snatch and gulp amidst the city's garbage bumping there. I watched the steam tugs out in the bay, hauling and butting the lumber towards its final end in the city's sawmills.

I saw as well the arrival of the cruise ship the
Empress of India
, its whistle reverberating around the great bay, its glittering figurehead, its long bowsprits and sloping masts, the slim bows and the overhanging stern so majestic, looming over me like a glacier, and all the people calling out from its decks, the throngs gathering on the shore in their finest costumes, till it seemed the entire city must have turned out to witness its arrival and to celebrate their success in luring such munificence off the world's oceans.

I was bustled and cursed out of the way by a stevedore, so that the huge cables could be drawn in with longshore poles and coiled about the mooring posts, one of which I had been sitting upon. I watched the new arrivals from across the Pacific as they poured down the gangplanks to fill yet more the multiplying city.

When at last it came time to board the
Coquitlam
, I lay down under the awning and was immediately asleep. I believe I curled up into a ball upon the planking like some lost cub.

I was three days aboard, the steamer stopping at all its possible ports en route. The money from Bowser was finished. I went hungry, till the lumberman berthed on deck beside me, high in drink and not put off by my silence, brought enough back for the both of us from where he'd hopped ashore at Nanaimo.

His name was Jack Crabb, out of Evansville, Indiana—“not never looking back”—short three fingers of his right hand after a chain snipped them away, hauling a redwood near Bella Coola. I ate the dried salmon and bread, but refused his offer of liquor. Crabb slapped me on the back and says, “Half my insides is tore out from this shite, spitting blood in mornings. You done right avoiding it.

“Thought myself pauce of luck, I did,” he goes on, “till I sees you. Pardon me for mentioning, but you is a sorry-looking sleeping Jesus, and I ain't lying.”

I had no words for him, though it didn't seem to bother him none. He burrowed in his pack and drew out a ratty Bay blanket, which he placed across my shoulders. I was near blue with cold from the night before, though I didn't realize it till after I was so cosseted.

We sat then in silence together, watching the two dolphins what danced and leapt in the steamer's wake.

“Still, there ain't much you need to get along,” Crabb pipes up at last. “And as to what sort of a man you is: well I seen men say ‘Yes!' to a question about theyselves and ‘No!' to the selfsame question the following day— and believe both answers as if they was speaking from their very souls.

What manner of a man you is ain't more than a matter of what situation you finds yourself in, day by day by day. And that be the truth, amen.”

I stepped back onto the cannery jetty at Alert Bay twelve days after I had left it in custody of Woolacott. Eyes followed me along the front till I stood before the greathouse of my dead son, David, what is halfway along the beach. Whispers must have gone ahead, for Abayah was waiting on me at the entrance. She drew me inside, holding hard to my arms.

We spoke but little. I was overcome and hardly able to walk the few steps to a bed and fall down upon it, before I was asleep. She was by my side when I awoke, her two children owl-eyed behind her. As she prepared food, I took them on my lap beside the fire and spoke a few words in answer to their queries on the speed at which the embers burned, the poor state of my beard, what was under my patch, and when their father was planning on coming back—which finality was more than yet they was able to grasp.

Later, rested up, bathed, and dressed in David's clothes, I stood outside Spencer's door. In truth I did hesitate before knocking. I'd seen my brother-in-law earlier through the open doorway at Abayah's, stopping a moment as he passed by to peer inside, grim faced. I guessed those who'd seen me on the jetty would have told him of my arrival. Of what might be in his mind, however, I did not know.

Annie answered the door. “You've a hollow look to you, brother,” says she, and tells me I must eat with them.

“Better see your husband first,” I says, and she nodded, sombre, directing me towards the dining room.

Spencer had his back to the fire in the grate. He was nursing a brandy glass. “Will you have one?” he says, and I tell him perhaps I will. We watched the bustle of the flames for a time. “You made bail, then,” he says, and I thank him for it. “Though I was navigated into it,” he goes on. “If you will believe it, you've Halliday to thank, and the Reverend Hall.” At that I was greatly surprised. Strange enemies indeed! “And Harry spoke quite vehemently on your behalf, so he did. I don't mind telling you I'd not at first been minded to help.”

“Anyway,” I says, “my thanks.”

He asks me what the lawyer said to me and what I planned on doing next.

So I tell him the lawyer reckoned the case was pretty strong against me.

“Yet you pleaded not guilty?” says he.

I tell him I did, but was considering changing my plea when I came to trial. He wanted to know how long I'd be in prison then, and I says there ain't no precedent to tell me.

“You'd plead guilty to cannibalism and heathen practices?” he asks me.

“I may,” says I.

“Then I'll not aid you further,” he says, near boiling with his rage again. “You've brought disgrace on your family.” He tramped outside, but, a moment later, he was back. “And I'll trouble you to know I expect to see my money back,” he says. “You'll not run for the forest.”