The Cannibal Spirit by Harry Whitehead Page B

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.
    Grace. Her brother was dead, her father fled who knows where or why or what he was doing. Yet there was no denying it, her grief terrified him. At night she was fanatical in her passions, tearing at him with her nails, biting his shoulders until he bled. She clung to him when she slept, as if she knew his thoughts, knew that if she let him go, she’d wake the morning after to find her husband gone as well. Harry lay awake half of each night, fighting a panic he could not understand, groggy and stupid in the morning, terse with her, his irritation growing by the day. There’d been strong words more than once already, always on petty subjects—what food was for lunch, what washing had not been done, why his clothes were not folded as they should be—a sailor’s whining. Issues domestic and ridiculous that made him despise himself. But for the strength of her arms about him, he might have upped and run already.
    All experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine with use. As though to breathe were life!
    He’d read that in a book of poems he’d found in the hold of the Hesperus when first he’d purchased her. He had learned it by heart. And he’d not stay here to rust, or to be set upon by a bile-filled cocksucker hell-bent on dominion over all those close to him.
    But he could not leave as yet. Not with her brother dead and her father gone. To lose her husband as well would be too cruel. He’d do what was proper. He’d see her good and safe with her father returned. Then he’dslip away, and she’d be free to find a man more fitting than was he. The Kwagiulth had no issue with remarriage. It even brought prestige to the chiefly among them, as he’d heard it, the women and the men.
    He rolled tobacco and watched the dust dance in the attic’s fractured sunlight.
    Later, Harry rocked on his porch. There were none who’d come to buy that day, though that was not unusual in itself. There were barely a hundred and twenty Kwagiulths left in the village now. Once there’d been more than two thousand.
    The humid air was heavy and everything quiet. Out on the ocean to the north and west, dark clouds were festering and a storm would blow through the night.
    The tide was out and a few women picked cockles farther down the beach, their fat bodies bent forward, their conical hats reminding him of the paddy fields that ranged along the shores beneath the peaks of Hong Kong. It was a sight he’d seen many times aboard ship as they’d made their way toward the dockyards of that vast bay, with all its cacophonies and promises drifting across the water, intoxicants to the men who manned the ships.
    Now Harry saw Halliday and Crosby striding down the beach, along with the priest’s Indian acolyte. Harry realized he was to be their destination.
    â€œMr. Cadwallader, a word with you,” said the Reverend Crosby, red-faced and puffing piety.
    â€œHow might you be, Harry?” Halliday smiled. He was dressed in thick broadcloth and cravat, smartly turned out, for all his itinerant vocation.
    â€œWell, thank you, Mr. Halliday. Reverend Crosby.” He nodded, and to the Indian as well. “Can I invite you in back for some coffee?”
    â€œThere’s not time for that,” Crosby began.
    But Halliday said, “That would be fine,” and they followed Harry inside and through the store.
    Harry reheated the coffee that sat on the small stove in the back room. He was introduced to the unspeaking Indian, whose