The Cannibal Spirit (39 page)

“So you walked out on hope. But how does all this bear on you going to prison?” says Charley. “Is it not better to fight the charges and be free to play a part, whichever world you thinking's out there? The two don't necessarily connect.”

“They do,” says I. “I just don't got the words for it.”

“Well best start trying to find them, before the New Westminster jail opens up its doors to you.”

“Even had I the words,” says I, “I have not the means to defend myself.”

At that, Charley throws something across to me. I picked it from the dirt and seen it was a tin for holding tobacco. There was a bawdy Chinese dancing girl upon its lid and I remembered it as Harry's. “What's this?” says I, but Charley don't answer. I ask him, anyway where is Harry, and where they both have been. But he just pointed to the tin. So I opened it up and there inside was a great sheaf of money. Hundred of dollars there
was. I was amazed. For a time I just did not have words to speak. Then I stuttered out some query, and Charley tells me how he and Harry had been away smuggling whisky to raise funds on my behalf. I'd thought, in giving Harry management of the family store, that he'd turned his back on such things. Seems I was wrong.

“Where's Harry now?” I says.

“In Halliday's jail,” says Charley.

They had brung whisky up from New Westminster—which was ironical, being as how I seemed shortly destined for the same small city's prison myself. But word had got out of their adventure, and Halliday was waiting for them on their return. Still, old Dan Copperhand got away with his whisky for a feast. Charley got off with the money, and made his way straight north to Rupert, by what means I never asked: a cousin, a canoe, flying cross the water. I still wonder at how he gets about so quick. Of what fate awaited Harry in Alert Bay, he did not yet know.

“Will you squander Fat Harry's gift on your misery?” Charley says to me. Then he upped and was away as well, saying he was off to tell Grace how fared her husband.

I went back inside, holding the tin full of money. I sat beside the fire at the centre of the house. Francine had made a great blaze of it, and the flames burned at my face. She was sitting by the cooking fire at the back, drinking periodically from a roughware bottle. I heard her muttering to herself. Eventually, she rooted about in an old box, then came over bearing a bundle.

“You've a package come,” she says, and dropped it in front of me. Then she headed away back to her perch at the back of the house.

It bore the postmark of New York. When I pulled it open, there was a letter inside, and another smaller packet, bound with brown paper and string.

My dear George
, it read,
I am in receipt of your last letter. I am most dreadfully sorry to hear of David's death. So brave a man he was. Please do read the other paper I enclose.

Of course, I will do all I can to help you in your present difficulty. I have written as well to Mr. Spencer. Meanwhile, I am sure you will manage your way out of these present difficulties.

I am very much disappointed that you did not mention your availability to come to New York. The collections here at the museum are in a most catastrophic disorder and would so greatly benefit from your expert eye. As I wrote in my previous letter, I am also most keen to pursue the subject of the paxala with you. I understand, of course, your worries regarding your current predicament, but would appreciate hearing some word at least of the possibilities for our collaboration. You are welcome to come immediately you are able.

Please let me hear from you at once. With best wishes,

Yours very sincerely,

Franz Boas.

There was a postscript. Indeed, there was two.

P.S. I enclose a cheque for moneys owed you.

P.P.S. I also enclose a copy of our book, should it be the case you no longer have one in your keeping. It contains, as you will recall, your name on the title page. It might prove useful.

Does the man live in some different world entire, I thought, away east in his museum? Do prisons mean nothing, and life and death but details to be nosed at, like a dog to a turd?

I held the cheque to the light and saw the amount. Thirty-three dollars and twenty-five cents. I near consigned it to the flames.

But, instead, I picked up the package, untied the string, and drew off the paper wrapping. The book looked the same, and was the same as all the others what have been distributed up and down the coast. If I had only knowed the trouble it would cause me, I might not have felt such triumph the first time I ever saw it.

I already had a copy at home. Of course I did. Another treasure to me. Thousands and thousands of pages I had scrawled. My bad script, my shaking hand, my English so weak when I set pen on paper, so much worse even than when I speak. It just closes me up like a mussel in air. Boas did advise me to write in Kwakwala, but use English words. It all jumbles. Frogspawn.

I opened up the book at random and turned the pages, not reading. So many of the stories was my own or those of my family. My life printed out
on paper, bound up and placed high on a shelf in a library somewhere to be perused by scholars. I was those pages now. Perhaps I was now forever, though nowhere was my name mentioned as the subject of those stories. I was but one more Indian. Many different Indians.
Culture
. That white word. There ain't no word for it in any Indian language I know. Call it life. I was life translated. The Kwagiulth as they are in libraries had become my own life translated. So was the direction of my thoughts.

I tossed the book sideways on the ground. I lifted up the letter again and looked to the second page. It was handwritten in Boas's careful script, neat and small, in the written high Kwakwala the two of us so laboriously crafted.

I have so much regret to miss the funeral of this, the great chieftain, your son David,
it read.
He was strong in life and proud. I know it must be a proud ceremony. I know that the people will give him great respect.

Yet there is not pain to compare with such a loss. Your son will always remain alive in your heart, as my own child who died in years past remains in mine. This pain we share and many also in these days feel this pain, but it is not the less.

I give tribute to your great son.

I read his letter and after my whole body shook with the grief of it, though still I didn't have tears to spill. But I wanted to race up and down the beach screaming, to smash the world into pieces, tear out its liver with my fingers, or throw myself upon the fire and be done with it. I put my head down on my chest and barely knew that time passed.

Eventually I heard Francine return. She sat beside me and handed me a tin cup, steaming and stinking finely of coffee. “You are an idiot,” says she.

“I know it,” says I.

That night, I lay beside her, watching the dull glow from the fire moving lazy on the empty wall above—the wall where once had hung a mask of the killer whale what my mother did bring south with her, when first she came to marry.

I felt the faint stirrings of my rage, though not strong enough to cloak my mind. I realized it was the first time I'd felt it since the night I had
killed the dreamer. There was blessing in its absence, I supposed, though in fact I felt some sustenance knowing it still lurked there inside me.

Not that rage has always led me right. It was my rage, was it not, had placed me in my current predicament? Attacking Crosby that day of the funeral, I'd brung what plot there was against me festering beneath the surface out into the open to bear fruit. Would Halliday have brung charges if he'd not heard I had assaulted the priest?

Is rage even the right word for my affliction? That is what I have always named it. Though of rage itself I'd happily see more levied against the white man's grip. Do I rage at the modern world? Like a soft tide against granite, as much use were it to do so.

What had brought us all to this—I lay on my bed thinking—this end? As if the people flowed like suds of soap into a drain, washed away by, first, the traders, then the Christians, feverish and fervent, the British, and, now, this new Canadian administration.

Where was the killer whale? Where was the great Cannibal Spirit? Was he gone forever now, deep into the forest? Or had he been snuffed out, till he did not exist in any form no more? Was belief a scene of battle what took even the history of the dead away as well, till there weren't no trace at all? As if nothing of a people, of a world of those spirits, should remain, or even seem as if it had ever been.

I drifted into a light sleep. I dreamed that I did stand high above the ocean, and the tide flowing back in ebb from the cliff beneath me. There was a beach of boulder and pebble, slimed green with algae under a dark, low sky.

And now I was there on the beach, still far from the water, my boots slip-sliding as I walked the rock pools towards the stooping, black-clad figure ahead.

The figure spat curses. I came round in front of it, and saw it was my mother, but ancient now and her face broken with pox. She was sorting among the pebbles, plucking at them, eyeing and discarding them, the thick Presbyterian dress she always wore in her last days of life muddied and soaked at its hem, lank upon her.

“What have you lost?” I asked her. She started up and looked about, but, seeing nothing, hunched down again, muttering. “Where is it?” I says, though I had no idea of what it was I spoke.

Her hand pointed vaguely away toward the ocean. I looked and now I was right by the water's edge. The surface shuddered at each tiny wave's destruction on the shore, bleak charcoal ripples that, as they fell back, drew my eyes to the horizon. Clouds hung low, heavy, threatening.

A terrible longing filled me. My chest heaved. I choked and wept. The tears ran and I tasted their salt upon my lips. And now I was beneath the waves, the dim light filtering down in freezing, emerald shimmers through the misty water. The longing was gone and now there was only peace.

My feet touched the ocean floor. All about me, long tendrils of kelp flexed and billowed, a slow-dancing forest through which small, silverflashing fish lurked and sped and hid in their appetites and their terrors.

I reached out for one and my finger glanced along its tiny flank. Perhaps its heart stopped at the shock of my touch, for now it came to rest and floated onto its side and down towards the ocean floor.

Something like a muscular lightning bolt flew from the kelp shadows. A seal's face, nose jerking, big black smiling eyes, and its head snapping sideways, mouth snatching the dead fish, then away again into the murk.

The mourning rose again in my chest until I felt I might gag. I knew my mother sought for something she could never find, and I, here under the ocean, was her last chance if only I might learn my way.

Some presence there was then, vast, menacing in the gloom ahead. It came through the snaking kelp, the dead-smiling face of a killer whale, near broad as I am tall. But, behind it, the thick tentacles of the devilfish— the giant octopus—curled out from its flanks towards me. I knew I was in the presence of the Qomogwe, the king beneath the sea.

“Is it here?” I asked it, even as I felt the soft suckers clamping at my skin. The killer whale opened wide its mouth and turned its head to the side, so that it might take my head into its jaws and devour me.

I woke to the sting of sweat in my eyes, the fire dead and nothing to be seen. My breath came short. I felt the night terrors such as I'd not since I was a child, afraid of shadows on the walls, of teeth and monsters.

I got up, the bones in my shoulders cracking and my hips stiff, knowing myself an old man. I stepped into my boots and drew a blanket about my naked form. Then I paced across the floor to the doorway.

I drew the curtain aside and stood for a moment, shivering as a northerly gust pulled at me a moment, before it died away.

I sat on the edge of the plankway, my unlaced boots dangling above the incline to the shore. As in my dream, the tide was out and the beach scattered with boulders, though also with the rotten jetsam of the village. A narrow moon threw a pale, thin light upon the village.

Away to my left, a dog barked, then shrieked as some dozy, irate Indian might have struck it.

I lowered myself onto the slope and slid down onto the beach. I made my way, slipping on the wet pebbles, towards the water. There was now no wind, the ocean still and the air cool without being cold.

At the water's edge, I dropped my blanket and stepped out from my boots. I paced into the water, careful of my footing, till I felt the sharp incline of the drop-away—that ridge with which the war canoe of Shaiks had so ingloriously collided those many years before.

I pushed out into the deep water and swam. The cold sea plucked at me till my muscles did spasm and my body shook. So I floated, face down, my head beneath the surface. The salt water burned at my eye beneath its patch, the pain like panic as it clutched my skull.

The memory of the dead fish in my dream came back to me. I opened my eyes under the water. But all I saw was darkness. I wondered if I might sink as had the fish, down into the deeps to be eaten. I wished for it.

I remembered, as I had not since the event itself, the pouring rain what fell down upon me at my son's funeral, the hurt in Harry's eyes when I sent him to take the women home.

Before me were the expectant faces of the hamatsa society men who had stayed behind. There had been words that must needs be spoken in secret, and even rituals to perform. And though I weren't no more than a father to the dead chief of the hamatsas, which in itself meant nothing, so my authority was such that they all was awaiting me to act.

Charley was there still. He weren't a member of any particular group, but always present, his twisted back, a rain-soaked hummock, proof to all of his supernatural authority.

So they stood in the rain and waited for me. And I drew up my hatchet from my belt. I drove its edge under the gravebox's lid. I pushed and yanked till I was near to frenzy, the rain driving in my face. I couldn't hardly see at all.