The Cannibal Spirit (9 page)

HARRY CADWALLADER
lounged in his weathered old rocker on the porch outside the store. The morning breeze was light and spoke of sun and humid warmth all day. Out across the bay, the trees on the Island of Graves broke the horizon. Four days had passed since the funeral, and the weather had stayed fair.

Rounding the eastern headland, he saw a steam launch coming, its prow cutting cleanly through the light swell. The ensign of the Indian Agency was at its masthead. Most likely it was William Halliday, Indian agent for this region of the coast. He was coming from the south. He'd be out from Alert Bay, passing through en route to the outer villages, part of the bimonthly trip he took to make his presence felt among the people of the coast. Harry had met him a few times. He seemed a decent enough man, as far as his task was given and his values allowed. Harry had been wary, though, knowing his trade in liquor would land him in trouble if Halliday should learn of it.

As the boat neared the jetty, the Reverend Crosby stepped out along the boards and raised his hand to hail the incoming launch. With him was the Indian who'd been there the day of David's funeral. He wore still the black cassock similar to Crosby's. One of those the missionaries took in and raised in the mission schools. Harry squirmed at the thought of such a place. He knew the origin of his unease, though by Christ's blood he would not dwell on it. Memories were best left boxed away to be forgotten over time. Now and what was to come were all that was needed by a man.

The boat drew up alongside the jetty. It was indeed Halliday, his red hair and beard bright in the sunlight. He watched the man tie off to the cleat above him, the launch low against the pillars in the ebb tide. Crosby and the Indian came up and soon the three men were engaged in conversation.

“Fat Harry.” Below him on the shingle the old chieftain Owadi stood puffing. Harry spoke a greeting. “I come to talk wealth of blankets,” said
Owadi. Harry sighed. He knew what that meant: some thorny exchanges ending in the extension of credit.

“Come on inside,” he said. Owadi, wrapped in a dirty blanket and wearing knee-high rubber boots, stepped up to the porch, gingerly with age, but his chin high and proud.

Inside was gloom and cobwebs. The store's big front windows, on each side of the front door, were filthy as always: rain, dew, the grime of engines, oil, black smoke, grease from untanned hide, dust and sea salt caking them inside and out. He kept meaning to wash them, but always the thought that soon he'd be away had stopped him from bothering.

He sat on one of the drums of engine oil that stood browned with rust in the centre of the room. He rested a boot on a broken generator head. Other parts lay scattered on the floor. He was one of the few this far up the coast who knew the workings of an engine. It was a reason George had given Harry management of the store.

Owadi stood in the doorway and examined the room, as Harry knew was protocol for any chief when visiting and on sight of another's riches, though Owadi visited the store nearly every other day on some mischief or another.

Harry rustled in his coat and pulled forth his tobacco tin. He ran his thumb across the strutting Chinese burlesque on the narrow tin's lid. He opened it, rolled a cigarette, and struck a match against the oil drum beneath him. Smoke spiralled, lilac and grey, into the rafters.

He followed Owadi's eyes around the room. There was a table in front of one window on which lay greasy-fingered piles of paperwork, an abacus, some broken chocolate, and two small jars of boiled sweets. There were shelves to the ceiling on the two walls to either side. Soaps and salves for cuts (though the mission kept the greater measure of medications), cans of salmon, sardine, and fruit, jars of molasses, tea, coffee, hard biscuits, drums of cooking oil, jars of salt, and phials of pepper. The people still relied on hunting, fishing, and gathering for most of their food.

There were cotton and canvas trousers, overalls and thick woollen sweaters uncoloured or in dull green, skirts and dresses, long socks and woollen jackets in plain or plaid. There were long sailor's canvas coats in black,
oiled and waterproof, too expensive for most, silk and cotton stockings and a handful of handkerchiefs, plimsolls for the children, the rubber boots bought under-counter from the canneries' warehousemen. Harry knew every item now, its state and price, and who might likely purchase it.

He finished his cigarette and rolled the burning ember dead between finger and thumb. He sighed and heaved himself up from the oil drum. “Owadi, great chief,” he said at last. “What can I do for you?”

Owadi seemed locked in indecision. Then he said, looking furtively through the open door first, “You have furs and blankets upstairs?”

“I do.” As the old man well knew.

“We look.”

Harry crossed the room and motioned Owadi over. A staircase went up along the rear wall. Beneath the stairs, an opening led into the back rooms where were the private places of his marriage, such few as there could be with the constant, prying company of the people. Harry followed the old man up the stairs into the shadows above. It seemed clear Owadi had words on his mind to speak and wished them secret.

Up in the loft, Harry stood blinking as his eyes adjusted. Cobwebs hung thick across the single window to the front and there was little light, if just enough to see by. To his left a wall divided the attic in two. A locked door kept the produce of real value secure—tobacco, hats, ammunition, a couple of rifles.

To his right were scattered a few boxes, cans of aging foodstuffs, and the hides and skins from trade among the people. There were hair seal, raccoon, black bear, wolf, mountain goat, elk, marten, deer, and even two land otter skins, stacked into the canted, spider-ridden corners. And there were blankets piled everywhere, great mounds of them, slowly moulding.

“Many blankets,” Harry said.

“Blankets is wealth,” the old chief said.

“Though they ain't what they were, now the ceremonies have been banned. And we've more than we need already, you can see.” Once they had been virtually the coin of the coast. Harry'd been offered them in exchange for his whisky many times, great rotting stacks of them, of little use to anyone nowadays.

“Old ways change. Always worse,” said Owadi.

“Right enough.”

Owadi lapsed into a ponderous silence.

So the old man wasn't here to trade blankets. He watched the chieftain from the corner of his eye, erect, stiff, his eyelids half-closed in thought. “The world comes always faster,” Harry said, “even here on the coast.”

“Killing people as it comes,” said Owadi.

“Aye, and sad it is. Even for me, if I ain't more than a white man.”

Owadi looked at him then, and Harry realized he rarely met the eyes of any Indian man. “What can we do against you?” the old chief said at last.

Harry chose his words and was careful in voicing them. “I'm proud being a part of the Kwagiulth through marriage. I hope I'm to be trusted by you, that I've shown myself an ally to the people.” Though he looked to the floor as he spoke the words.

Owadi nodded faintly, gazing sharply at him. “Fat Harry,” he said slowly, “old George family is great among us. But for many, they is not Kwagiulth. You know George father, he was white, from England. And George mother Tlingit tribe, from the north. We had three hundred years of war with them people. When George marry with first wife Lucy, Tlingit and Kwagiulth come together and that was the war's end, lah.” Owadi's head bobbed in ritual acknowledgment as he spoke. “For that we grateful, though there be some might think still of glory in killing men.

“To many, George is good man to stop war, to write our stories for us, and to make our history in books for white people to see.” He stopped to cough, a long phlegm-filled rasp. He said, “For them to see we is real and forever—same as them, important as they is in life. But George has took many thing of us and sold them, told secret of us, and he is enemy in some people mind.” He looked up again and into Harry's eyes. “You understand?”

Harry was undone by such forthright words. He was more used to burrowing hard for meaning in the Indian's usual indirection. He said, “Something is occurring?”

“But old George gone now. Flown. Gone.”

“Yes.”

The night of the funeral, Harry and the women had returned through the rainstorm to the village. They had ducked toward the greathouse and his wife had made it clear that that was where they'd sleep the night. Many came to join them at dinner, but the talk was low and sparse. Harry spluttered down a little of the foul black oil of the eulachon fish they so favoured, with his salmon, and some bitter stew of berries. The sun fell and the rain ended. Eyes were kept lowered and there were none of the usual jokes and tales told around the fire. More than with ritual grief or with solemnity, the air felt pregnant that evening with reservation and with doubt.

He walked out after dinner. Across the water, fires burned on the Island of Graves, where the men who had stayed on with George were still at whatever it was they were doing. But he knew no one would tell him what was happening there. So he shrugged and spat and smoked, and went to his bed among the fifteen others who slept that night on the platforms about the greathouse's inner walls.

Late in the night he awoke. The cinders of the fire cast a wine-red glow across the timber ceiling. Soft voices muttered. He saw George at the doorway talking to someone outside, and turning then into the room. The old man stamped across to the fire and squatted before it. He was carrying a wooden box, about a foot and a half on each side, that seemed carved with intricate details, though it was impossible to make them out in the gloom, and which he placed down and rested one palm on its top, firmly, as if he must not ever lose it from his touch. He took up a half-burned faggot with his other hand and pushed at the embers, his fingers almost in the flames as they flickered lazily to life.

George huddled there, stock-still, his blanket about him, massive as a bear come in out of the forest to the fire's warmth. After a time, he lifted a hand and ran it slowly across his forehead. He pressed his thumb and forefinger to his temples. Then he closed his eyes.

Harry sat up. He reached across his sleeping wife to find his tobacco tin. He rolled and licked and placed the finished product in his mouth, then flicked alight a match and drew in the cigarette's smoke. As it curled back out he saw George's eyes upon him. They gazed at each other as Harry smoked. Nothing was said, and no emotion, nor any sign even of recognition,
could Harry see in his father-in-law's eyes. They were as cold and black as those of a whale. He remembered George roaring like a furnace in his passion, hectoring and railing at the people on the Island of Graves. There was some part of the man that was distinct from ordinary human life. Something outside of reason. In that moment, Harry felt that his own anger toward him lacked any meaning in the world. As well to hurl an insult at a mountain.

The following morning George was gone. He had taken his canoe and the paraphernalia for a hunting trip, so Francine had told him.

“But gone where?” Owadi said. “Why go now?”

“I was thinking misery at the death of his son had drove him off,” said Harry. “Though none seem over-willing to share their thoughts on the matter.”

“Ah,” said Owadi. “But very wrong go now. For four days after funeral, family must stay, mourn dead, make ceremony. And then they must make funeral pole and song to sing about the dead. And after, the ceremony for his heir as well. David heir is still a boy, so it was for George to do. Many people, they is angry he go away.” He was silent for a time. “And there was what happen on the island too. Many's not happy for that.”

“What happened, Chief?” He'd had no luck in gleaning anything from the people in the days since. He knew something wasn't right, just by the silence with which his questions had been met, even by his wife.

“Some people think George and the man, Doctor Boas, make their book and put words inside to say we all cannibal men for real. That we eat people, and is savage all through. They is angry for that.”

“There ain't no such words. I read enough of it to see it shows you in a favourable light enough.”

The old man did not speak for a while. Then he drew his hand in a line across in front of him. He said, “You have many blankets. You a wealthy man, Fat Harry.” Then he stepped away down the stairs.

Harry sat upon a pile of those blankets. The first shafts of the sun broke through the soiled window, throwing light across his family's petty fortune. He had lived forty-two years, and had travelled the world and come to be here. A brown-skinned savage chief had told him he was wealthy for
the decomposing blankets in his attic. Yet this battered store and all its contents would scarce bring half the value of the
Hesperus
.

There'd been warning in Owadi's words. George had enemies. But that was no news at all; everyone knew it to be true. There must be more to it. Something specific. Yet what that might be, Harry could not know. He'd speak with his wife, though she was away gathering salmonberries, and would not be back till the sun set. Even then, she was more often lip-sealed on matters pertaining to the people. He was and would always remain a white man, whether he pitched his body black and leapt naked with them round the fires in a mask. More reason still to be gone.