The Cannibal Spirit (6 page)

Harry's skin sheened, and not only with the heat. His indifferent Christianity still flinched when faced with such barbarism. Yet he found himself stepping farther inside, despite the heat and the darkness; and now his eyes were fastened on his father-in-law.

George Hunt was standing on the dais behind the fire, wearing the button blanket his mother had made for him years before and was evidently famous up and down the coast for its intricacies. It was black with red braiding, woven in design of the killer whale, the major spirit of Hunt's mother's family ancestry. In one hand he held a long staff of black wood, shaped as a double-headed serpent. His eyes were closed.

In front of the old man was the empty gravebox. Earlier, Harry had helped carry it in with Charley. It was a square box, just less than four feet along each side. All about it were carved David's crests: the wolf, frog,
thunderbird, killer whale, and raven. Charley said George carved it himself more than a year ago, and David hardy enough to refuse its call all this time, though not forever.

Now one of the elder men placed a hand on George's shoulder. He nodded, his eyes still closed, and the beaters stopped. The dancers were still. An air pocket in a burning log squealed for a moment, and then it was only the roar and crackle of the fire.

Charley, always Charley, was standing close by. Now he beckoned Harry over, and two others as well. Harry hesitated. Pagan idolatry. But the other men were already on the platform and all seemed paused, waiting on him. So he crossed the floor, self-conscious, to join them. George seemed insensible to all about him.

Charley had a claw hammer to hand with which he now drew out the nails of the roughwood coffin in which David's body lay. At last, Charley pushed off the lid.

The corpse was naked. Its skin glowed pink in the firelight, but lucid and hollow, the thin lips black, the skin stretched already from the face so that the teeth were visible, brown and broken from the long dissolution of his illness. The shrunken ribs showed up acute, the pelvis sharp, and the man's genitals near disappeared as the body's juices had dried away. There was little to show of the man who had once inhabited this husk.

Together, they lifted the body into a sitting position, Harry with his arms under the corpse's armpits. It had been dead for several days already, and the rigor mortis must have come and gone. It reeked of putrefaction. He closed his eyes a moment as they hefted the body into the air. Then they shuffled across toward the gravebox. They bent its knees up to its chest and lowered it down into the box. Harry's elbows were still beneath the armpits, so now he lifted his own arms up and out, and the corpse's shoulders slumped and its arms fell forward, until just its head showed above the box's edge.

Now one of the dancers stepped forward and shouted, “Hap hap hap!” He wore a mask like a raven, but with the beak nearly six feet long, painted black and red and snapping open and closed. Harry moved away into the darkness and stood watching, his back against the far wall.

George lifted his head and opened his eyes. They were laced with vivid veins. The old man moved around to stand directly behind the head of his son. He knelt a moment on one knee and carefully lay the serpent staff upon the ground. Then he stood once more. He placed his hands on the corpse's skull. There was no sound at all in the greathouse.

As they moved across the cranium, shadows played on those stone claws that were the old man's fingers—fingers that would lift burning coals from fires as if they were pebbles on a beach. He had the hands of a sailor, though he was a man of the land.

Now George tensed his shoulders. He gripped his son's skull harder, the thumbs sliding down so they rested at its base. He stood up on his toes and pressed all his weight down through his arms. David's head bent forward toward his chest. His chin rested there, but still the old man pushed. And then the neck snapped, loud—a gunshot—through the greathouse.

The head flopped forward further so that now it was beneath the height of the box's lid, the chin resting impossibly against the lower sternum. George drew back his hands and they fell to his sides. Quickly Charley lifted the gravebox's lid from the back of the platform and carried it forward. He placed it upon the box, lifted the hammer from the ground, and drove in four long nails to seal it down.

The beaters drummed again, drowning the hammer's sound. The dancers spun slow circles round the fire, the hamatsa calling “Hap hap hap!” and the women wailing in unison their real and ritual sorrow.

The heat and noise beat down upon Harry. He tried to breathe away his nausea. Fucking barbarism! He had to get out. Onto the
Hesperus
and away. Right now. Cut from these black savages that he'd been fool enough to marry into.

Charley Seaweed was beside him, gesturing toward the gravebox. Charley tugged at his arm, but Harry pulled away.

“You white head have pain, eh?” Charley shouted into his ear, against the cacophony of the women's and the dancers' cries. “Nasty business. Oh yes.” He pointed to the gravebox. “But you help now.” His grip was merciless, so, instead of running, Harry followed the old Indian's bent back along the platform.

“Put hand far side,” Charley said. Harry eased past George, almost cringing to avoid him. He noticed now the old man's cheeks were wet, though there was nothing of expression in his face. Harry knelt at one corner of David's gravebox. Charley and the two men each took another corner. Charley nodded. Together they heaved and raised the box to the height of their hips, hunchback Charley deformed but hugely strong, his arms bulging, as though he'd been thirty years aloft in the rigging of a sailing ship.

They eased forward, Harry and Charley stepping first from the platform. The other men in the room came forward now. Bodies bunched in and Harry felt the load lighten as they walked the box around the fire and toward the entrance.

Without ceremony they fumbled and bustled the box through the doorway. “Aaah,” went up the murmur from the people outside, and “Hap hap hap!” as they rose to their feet. Harry glanced toward the beach, eight feet below down a steep bank. Canoes were waiting at the water's edge.

Some of the men slid nimbly down the bank and stood at the bottom looking up, their hands raised, almost supplicatory, in support of the gravebox's descent, and of its carriers.

Amidst the elbowing crowd, Harry took his first tentative step onto the steep and sodden incline. His second slipped from under him. His feet flew forward. His hands let go the box. His backside hit the ground and he slid down, his greatcoat risen up about his head, to roll across the pebbles and come at last to rest at the feet of the men on the beach.

As he pulled his mud-caked coat from round his neck, a cheer went up and laughter. “Hah! Fat Harry, you a seal go back to water in a hurry!” “You been drinking you own whisky again, Fat Harry!” “All that fire in house too hot for Harry!” “Fat Harry need gravebox soon!”

Hands reached down, lifted him to his feet, beat upon his back, tugged his coat back into place, until a smile forced its way onto his face.

“All right, all right, damn you all for heathen bastards,” he said. When he'd gathered himself, he looked to see what had become of the gravebox. It was halfway to the beach, the men in a double line passing it down the
slope, their feet firmly planted. At least he hadn't brought the whole lot with him. The other people were sliding and jumping toward the pebbles.

Along the plankway, then, came waddling the short, plump form of the missionary Reverend Crosby, with an Indian acolyte in priestly costume and a bowl-shaped haircut following close behind him. Crosby approached George Hunt, who was standing now close by the family's ancestral pole.

“You get back up there,” whispered Henry Omxid behind him. “Help stop trouble.” Harry sighed. He was only surprised Crosby hadn't shown up sooner; and his father-in-law would be in no mood for conciliation. To jeers and taunts, Harry scrambled back up the bank, hands helping even as a boot connected with his backside to more guffaws and cheery profanities.

Charley was at the top. “I get box in canoe,” he said. “You go stop George make crazy with Rev'n Crosby. I wait people beach. Keep 'em quiet.”

“Mr. Hunt,” said the missionary as he halted in front of George, “I thought better of you than this.” He was more than a foot shorter than Hunt, and was forced to tilt backward, his hands at his waist, to better look up at him. “Of course, I am sorry for your loss. And I understand your son was a breed and honour needs showing to that side of his blood.” He came forward now, so that only George and Harry could hear him. His fat, crimson face crumpled with passion. “But you consign your son to torment in eternity by burying him in this way. We've our differences, George. I know it. But in this you must hear me.” He reached out as if to take hold of George's arm, then stopped himself. “You must,” he said.

He turned to Harry. “And you, Mr. Cadwallader! What do you here? Are there no words that you could speak to your father-in-law? Is there nothing you want to say? Are you in sympathy with what goes on? You and I are the only white men in this place, whatever your line of business might be.”

Harry could think of nothing to say by way of a response.

Crosby turned back to Hunt. “You are a leader in the Indian community. It's for you to set examples. You've made trouble enough, going among the villages, gathering their pagan falsehoods for that book of yours.”

He paused then and looked expectant, but Hunt just stared at the ground. The priest waved a hand in the direction of the boats. “You make a mockery of all we do here. Help me, George. In God's name, set an example, man! Half your blood is white.”

“Today it is brown,” said Hunt, with such a tone that Harry wondered if Crosby knew his peril.

Crosby grunted in vexation. “Once you helped us,” he said. “You learned to read and write with us! Translated for us at the pulpit. You spoke with faith once.”

“And I've since seen the price of it.” Hunt looked up now at the priest. “Your sermon's at an end, Crosby. I've my son to bury.”

Crosby's mouth thinned. “You risk a lot,” he said. “You risk much in this.”

“That is a threat?”

“Please. Save David's soul, and make a statement to the people here. Embracing the Lord is their only hope of survival, George.”

Hunt had in one hand the staff with the double-headed serpent. Now he jabbed it up at the ancestral pole above them. “You see this? My son raised it. You know its story?” The old man raised his voice so that all the people could hear. “These are the totems of my grandmother. She was a daughter of the chieftains of the northern tribe. My grandmother died drowned, and my mother it was first raised a pole like to this one in her home village. She gave these totems to me. I gave them to my son. My son was a chieftain of the Kwagiulth. As you all do know.”

He lowered the staff, and moved forward until his face was inches from Crosby's. Harry hesitated, thinking he ought to be intervening now, but instead held back. “You have heard, perhaps, what happened to that first pole?” George said, his voice low. “White men stole it. They ripped it from the earth of her village while the people was away at their summer hunting grounds. Took it to Seattle. Thieved it from us! So my son made these totems again and he did raise them up. Now you tell me he'd not want burying in the manner of the people?”

“I know the story, George,” Crosby said. “We all know the story. Men are filled with avarice: white and brown. But it changes nothing. The Indians' future lies in the arms of Christ. There is no other way.”

Hunt turned his head away and spat, then wiped his mouth with his forearm. His eyes took on that intensity which Harry had come to recognize and fear. “You'll not tell me how to bury my son,” he said, his voice low through closed teeth.

Crosby had known George longer than had he, and would surely see the warning signs. The paralyzed side of the old man's face began to sag further, his sallow canine becoming exposed as the lower lip fell away. His breath came shorter now, and his right eyelid started to flicker in the manner that foretold the onset of the old man's dreadful rage.

But George had no right to be threatening a minister of God this way. Crosby might be foolish in his way, but he represented—didn't he?— higher truths than beating drums and pagan dancing, and breaking up the bones of corpses.

“Mr. Hunt,” Harry said then. “Mayhap the Reverend Crosby ain't entirely wrong. How about giving David a part of a Christian burial, at least. You've had your first ceremonies already. What harm in giving your son both options for his afterlife?”

George seemed hardly to have heard. He tipped his great head forward toward the priest, the breath coming through his nose, like a snorting ox. Crosby took a small step back. “You risk your son's soul, Mr. Hunt,” he said, “and the wrath of the authorities as well.” Hunt raised a colossal fist before the priest's face. But, after a moment, he opened his fingers, and instead he pushed Crosby away. The man flew backward to sprawl on the plankway.

There were gasps, but also a few low cheers from the drunk among the people on the beach. Harry knelt to help Crosby up, but the priest's acolyte was there before him. The Indian's face was writ with a fury that seemed entirely out of keeping with his position. The man helped Crosby scramble up, ungainly, to his feet. His cassock caught on the rough plankboard, and a section at its base tore loudly. He clutched it into his hands, and then he
was rolling back along the plankway in the direction of the mission, with his attendant following.

Crosby turned, once he had put some distance between them. “Don't any of you think that such offences go unpunished,” he said, his voice a bird's squawk. Some men on the beach jeered, but others swiftly hushed them.