The Cannibal Spirit (44 page)

We come to the end of the boulevard. Here there is high wire fencing, and a sign above a turnstile reads
New York City Zoo
.

Boas says, “We must visit the chimpanzees. But some other day.” He points forward. “Now, here we are.”

We are standing at the edge of a small field which borders on the park. Across the wide road at its far side is a huge construction site, where a building rises up already fifteen storeys or more, clad all about in wooden scaffolding, great booms of hammer blows, men crying out, roiling clouds rising from the whole into the evening sky as if the very stone is sweating in its labours.

On the field itself is placed a marquee coloured in orange and yellow and blue, thirty feet tall, and twice that in length. A banner strung above its entrance proclaims
The Fabulous Circus of Grotesquery
, and beneath is written
The Greatest Cornucopia of Human Freaks That Ever Was Brought Together, and Other of the Strangest Oddities from All Around the World
.

A man stands upon a dais outside in a top hat and a bow tie, with a longtailed coat. He is grizzled in appearance, as if once he might have been a
prizefighter. He holds to a chain that is strung about the neck of a shaggy woman beside him.

“Step along now, friends. You never saw more hideous wonders. Worse even than the terrible wild woman I is but barely clinging to the restraints hereof.” The woman takes a dutiful step away so the chain tightens. “Twenty-five cents will purchase you such primordial
awe
as you ain't never saw
before
.” He holds his arm high in the air and waves his finger behind him as he speaks. “Here … in this un-hallowed home to human horror!”

“I saw, in this regrettable place, that which may indeed make you wonder,” Boas says. “If only for a time.”

When first I see the shaggy woman, I cannot properly comprehend what I am looking at. She is so lofty and thick set, so completely hairy over all her body, with a long beard what sweeps down off her face, that I only know her to be female by the heavy, swinging tits inside the ragged material of her shift, and by the words the carnival talker speaks. I stare like some hayseed idiot. I see a lumbering female figure in the forests of my childhood nightmares.

Boas pays and we walk on inside the tent. I wonder then if I have fallen into some vision, or if I lie still in my hotel and all the day so far has been a dream, or the drumming of the train on its route across the continent has drawn me off into sleep again. Or, yet, if I have left my home at all to travel so far and come to this place, in the middle of this park, in this city at the very centre of the world.

The ground is covered in sawdust and straw, so it feels as if I walk on thick grass, or on a pillow, each footstep sinking a little as I follow Boas forward. Two great chandeliers hang from the roof of the tent, each of them composed of many oil lamps. They cast an unreliable light on to the platforms what run down each side of the central walkway. On some of these are cages. On others, figures stand like statues or perform their chosen exhibition. There is the smell of old sweat and of something sugary and rotten. People walk among the exhibits much as I did see them in the museum, careless, speaking, so it seems, of other things.

On the first platform, a white man with tight-curling black hair and a proud face sits in a chair. He wears a black jacket with a high starched collar to his white shirt, and a pressed silk cravat. He has no arms nor legs. His feet come out directly from the short trousers he is wearing. The webs between each toe stretch as far as the toenails, so that they look more like flippers than they do feet. A young woman crouches beside him and wipes spittle from the corner of his mouth. He stares off into the air, unmoving, seeming not to take account of anything about him.

Glass jars are laid out on a table. Inside, the fetuses of animals float in yellow liquid, but they are twisted in deformity—heads tilted hopelessly sidewards, limbs folding one into another, spines bent almost double. I make to tap one of the jars.

“Don't be touching the hexi-bid-it-ets! They's precious, see you.” I look down and there beside the table is a boy, not two feet high, dressed in tie and jacket, standing with his hands at his waist and glaring black blades up at me.

On the stage behind him, a Chinese goliath raises his arms wide, his thick robes billowing out like great curtains in a gust from an open window. He sings in his own tongue, but his voice is like a child's, like a bird's. The long, oiled corners of his moustache twitch and shiver.

The sign beside the next platform reads
Tree Man
. The backdrop is of a thick forest, and a form what seems human leans against it, in shadow. I see two legs, but they are thick and malformed. A hand reaches out to pick something from a small table. The arm is festooned in half-formed branchlets, with clusters of seedpods dangling beneath. A match flares in front of its face. The end of a cigarette burns. For an instant I see the body has, all across it, bulbous growths from which the skin hangs in globs and corms, pink and black and pustulous. Eyes, as I see them reflecting the glowing cigarette, stare straight into my own. They are filled with loathing.

I turn swiftly away as a hand touches my arm. “But here,” Boas says, whispering in my ear, as if we walk in some holy space. “Come and see.” We move towards a small pen.

The floor is covered in straw. Fronds stand in small pots, and there are two heavy, warped logs. Powerful coils twine about the logs and through
the straw. They are coloured a deep emerald green, and black lines crisscross along their length.

Boas whispers, “See!” He points.

The snake's broad, flat face and jaws, near a foot wide, rest upon one loop of its body. Its eyes are twin black mirrors with a million stars in them what are the lantern lights reflected. At that place where its tail should be, another head faces the first, exactly matching, mottled green and with black arrow marks upon it. It is entirely still, except where both mouths flick split tongues towards each other.

“We walk upon its back,” Boas whispers in my ear. “May our feet tread lightly.”

I stumble away between the exhibits, my hands at my face. I wrench up my eye patch and now before me is the final exhibit.
Wild Man
reads the sign. Some thing squats low on its haunches, its hair long and so thickly matted it spears up in high, dense clumps like reeds by water. It wears only a cloth across its private parts. It leaps and tugs at the strong leather belt about its waist and the chain attached to it what runs down to a rivet on the platform. It rages, cries out in grunts that have no language. Its nails are long enough to be talons. It glares down directly at me. Its eyes are black. It lunges forward and, when it pulls back its lips into a snarl, scarce a foot from my face, its teeth are filed to sharp-pointed fangs.

I see black eyes in the wilderness. Whirl and bite and shroud of leaves. It is not tamed. It must be fought. Fought with hands and teeth. In the dank gloom of the forest. The buildings of New York are the trunks of great trees. They soar upwards till they are lost in cloud. All of it—forest, city, the world entire—rears high above me now.

I see my son, David, alive, dancing his first hamatsa ceremony, panting after, his thick hair flat with sweat across his forehead where the mask was placed, his hands on his knees, gasping, exhausted, laughing, men around him, pounding his shoulders, laughing with him.

Harry lies by the flames, white face, unconscious, the great hole in his shoulder, the well of blood inside. I sing the sacred song. I know the plants what are the antiseptics of the forest. I understand the cleaning of wounds.

And I know his dark thoughts, his despair, even as I clutch hold of his belief. I draw out the corruption from him.

My eyes boil. The tears come to me at last and I weep. My rage is my grief. I hear myself like a dying animal.

I am in the forest, the place I know. But the huge trunks of cedar are the pillars of granite outside the museum. They rear up around me, shaggy, draped in moss, old, hoary men who mutter and grumble and are ponderous, but carry slow murder in their hearts. Moonlight slits through the canopy. Everywhere, the shadows twist and wander. Salal fronds wind up around my thighs, till I must wade through them like a churning tide. I smell the mould-reek of the forest floor, taste the sweet dust of the multitude of spores what ride the air. The Chinese giant's childlike song coils among the trees. There are masks hanging on all the granite pillar tree trunks. There are bear and wolf and killer whale, Hoxhok and thunderbird, sparrow and raven. The wood from which they are carved is become supple. Their black- and red- and white-painted features squirm. Their mouths open and close as if they are just now learning that such actions may be possible. On the ground, I see the fetuses of animals. I see smashed glass. A seal flashes past, so close I must duck to avoid it, though it is already gone, just its flipper, looking almost like a foot, brushes my cheek.

Now I notice how the light is not the weak light of lanterns swinging overhead, nor the glow of the city night. Instead, it is a flaming sunlight. I look out. A killer whale sounds on the waters of the Pacific. The jewelled surface of the sunlit ocean stretches away and I am floating on it, the cool ripples at my skin. There is no land in any direction. The whale's spume flies up, those great lungs exploding like the retort in a cannery. Its dorsal fin quivers. Its flukes climb over me, before it slides back under the water, making not a sound as it goes away into the deeps. I could follow it down till I am again between the high fronds of kelp that dance in the shadows of the ocean. There is peace in the dark places. There is an ending to things. So I might believe it.

Instead, I close my eyes. At last, the light through my lids grows darker, my grief grows less, and, when I open my eyes again, I am standing just inside the exit from the marquee, where a corner of the tent is lifted up and tied off. New York burns amber in the street lamps.

In 1900 a man was committed for trial at the Vancouver assizes for cannibalism, and although there was no doubt of his guilt, the jury acquitted him on the ground that they thought it was impossible for the evidence to be true.

William Halliday,
Potlatch and Totem:

The Recollections of an Indian Agent
(1935)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first acknowledgment is to George Hunt, whose life and writings have impelled me forward these many years. That said, I have nonetheless chosen to play merry havoc with the facts of his life, in order to come at the truth of this fiction of mine. I have conflated certain elements of his biography, separated by many years, into one short period. I have manipulated his family tree to suit my own ends, and been more reckless still with others who appear in the novel—Harry Cadwallader in particular.
The Cannibal Spirit
is a work of fiction and must be considered so.

After many years of research, I am indebted to numerous writers for their work on Hunt and on the Northwest Coast (though they must bear no responsibility for my errors). They include Franz Boas (of course), Douglas Cole, Ira Chaiken, Alda Jonaitis, Ira Jacknis, George Quimby, Bill Holm, Robert Galois, Jeanne Cannizzo, Edward Curtis, Marius Barbeau, Gloria Cranmer Webster, and, especially, Judith Berman.

Many people have helped me. Roland Littlewood and Murray Last encouraged me at the beginning. University College London and the Wingate Scholarship funded aspects of my research. The American Philosophical Society, the American Museum of Natural History, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the University of British Columbia, and the British Library were all of great assistance, allowing me access to archives and other primary source materials. Julia Bell, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Fran Merivale, Mariko Iwasaki, Katie Morris, and Niki Aguirre helped me learn to write (with similar caveats to those above). Later, Jo Baker, Graham Mort, and Alison Macleod read my manuscript and made important suggestions. Dr. Jeremy Pfeffer said, “It's the trial—aha!” Tom Geens had several inspired insights, and the story would be much diminished
without them. Lee Horsley has been a constant support; she possesses the coolest eye. Jane Haynes has kept me alive these past years, and I owe her a great debt.

Shaun Oakey is a copyeditor without equal. At Penguin, Nick Garrison saw what others didn't and played a faultless hand from start to finish. Lapidary indeed …

My agent, Isobel Dixon, put her name and her ceaseless enthusiasm behind me, and I won't forget it.

George Green made me believe I could begin, and then guided me through all the long years to this novel's conclusion. The best friend and mentor I could imagine.

Finally, Anita Sivakumaran has harassed, poked, sighed, tapped sharp nails on desktops, remorselessly bullied me from beginning to end. She is the reason I plunged in, the reason I soldiered on, and the reason I had the daring to write those awful, arrogant words
The End
. Magnificent muse, fearsome editor—this book is for her.