The Cannibal Spirit Read Online Free

rain. The doorway was painted as if it were the yawning jaws of a killer whale. Harry’s motherin-law, Francine, was standing there, stout against the light behind.
    Harry and the other men manoeuvred the coffin down until they held it in their hands. Then they edged through the entrance as Francine stepped aside. Tears glistened like amber on her elsewise expressionless face.
    The bonfire in the centre of the house was lit, its flames flashing toward the timbers. Rain fizzled faintly as it fell through the smoke vent and onto the burning wood. The men walked round the fire to the far end. They placed the body on the low platform there.
    Harry stood straight and cricked his neck to left and right until the tension gave with a crack. The massive house posts rose up beside him, carved to look like gross, lumbering figures with outsize heads, their mouths open as if voicing surprise. All about the room were the masks and blankets, the giant carven boxes and eating troughs that were the heirlooms of the Hunt family. The fire was the only light in the room, and he squinted to see who might be lurking in the twisting shadows.
    George stood just inside the doorway, his bulk wrapped, shapeless, in a blanket, so that he seemed some dark spirit himself, come down off a pole to brood among the people. Abayah and Francine stood to one side; and now Harry’s wife, Grace, appeared and walked over to join the women. Sheplaced her forehead against Abayah’s. The two of them rested their arms on each other’s shoulders. Their bodies shook.
    Four women shuffled in and passed to either side of George. They made their way to the fire and squatted on the hard-packed earthen floor, cocooned in their blankets so that only their round faces beneath their wide basket hats were visible. They were all of them old, their eyes sunk deep into tough skin. One of them was Charley Seaweed’s dwarfish wife, near as bowed and twisted as was he. One mumbled and then another wailed. The others took up the sound.
    Abayah and Francine came forward now to sit side by side before David’s body. The other men who had helped carry the coffin filed out. Harry made to do the same, but Charley stopped him. “Stay put,” he said. “You only son George now.”
    The words made Harry breathe harder; but he walked across the room to stand beside his father-in-law. Ravines cut through the leather of the old man’s half-paralyzed face, so animate on one side, the flesh hanging limp off the other. It told the tale perfectly of the two men locked inside that heavy body, the one so quick to laughter, the other to black humours and rage.
    The women finished their wailings at last. Francine now spoke throaty, singsong words in the Indian language. Her voice caught at times, and she would cry out, leaning forward where she was sitting and placing her hand upon the coffin. As she spoke, George’s blue eyes flared in his brown face, staring off into the darkness, though there was nothing there.
    After Francine was done, she rested with her hands upon the coffin, her head bowed over it. The other women rose to their feet and shuffled out, with Charley following. The only people now remaining were George and Abayah, Harry and Grace. As she came close, Grace gripped Harry’s upper arm, as if to keep from collapsing, and then they sank down to rest, all of them, upon the ground in front of David’s coffin.

“A CHIEFTAIN COMES HOME . He has been called by the owl. He is looking for his ancestors, in the ocean, up among the trees, in among the stars. Dead-broken now.” That was how Abayah called to us from the steamer that night.
    I woke before the dawn, the morning of my son David’s final coming home. My wife, Francine, was grunting and snorting in her sleep beside me. I laid a palm on her fat haunch and it shivered some, but she soon quietened into proper restfulness.
    I rolled over and put my feet down off the platform.