The Cannibal Spirit Read Online Free Page B

things about me, I took hold of her ankle. “Whale woman,” says I, shaking her so her calf wobbled. “Plenty of meat for all.” She just kicked out with her other sealskin-wrapped foot so I near lost my coffee, spoke a few words on the foul sight of my balls cooling in the morning air for all to see from under my blanket, and went back inside.
    I gulped a scalding mouthful of coffee. Out along the far end of the jetty, where the water was deep enough still for it to float, my son-in-law Harry Cadwallader’s boat, the Hesperus , was bobbing. Harry. It was my first jarring thought of the day, for Harry and me didn’t see exactly eye to eye, nor never rightly had since he married my Grace.
    Charley would say, “The thing with Fat Harry is he’s a better man than he thinks he is.” But there was darkness in him, I could see it. Something terrible out of his past murking up his mind, like a still pond in which a hooked fish thrashes at the bottom till it has clouded all the water with silt.
    But I had work to be doing today, and I meant to get it done. Francine called me inside. We ate a hot slab of dry salmon with a bowl of eulachon oil, the rotting black paste reeking sweetly in my nostrils. The early fire smoked, the faggots wet still from the night and from the hard rain the day before. It fogged the air till I felt for a time outside of things, the sharp lines of the timber walls, the masks and pillars and platforms twisting and curling, losing all sense of the solid.
    So I shook myself to my feet and says, “I must be to it.”
    The family store is down the far end of the village. I gave all I saw a fair good morning. Most was on the beach now, working the boats—carvedcanoes, with a few of the white man’s plankboard hulls as well—or they was standing about gossiping.
    At the store, where Harry and Grace did most of their living, I called to them my presence and sat in the rocker on the porch. Harry came out and leaned on the porch-post to stare at the water. Grace was tra-la-la-ing out back, the first songbird of spring.
    The account book was on the table there, where someone must have been working at it earlier. I picked it up and had a poke through. “You’ve not been keeping these as you might,” I says to him, after a time.
    â€œI’ve followed the methods as were used previous,” says he. He folded his arms tight about him.
    â€œWell then, you’ve put the numbers in wrong.” He hadn’t though. Winter’s when the people are at their poorest and trade comes down almost to nothing. I was seeking for a fight.
    Harry paced up and down some. That boy’s like an ember on the air sometimes, spinning about, glowing hot, but scarce a sound to be heard. Shouldn’t call him boy, I suppose, him in his forties. But too old for Grace, so I was thinking.
    Shortly, he turned to me. “I’ve done all the books as clear and true as is. If you’ve a problem elsewise, then let’s have it.” Found some spunk at last, he had, though at the time it just brought me to anger.
    Well, we swapped a few hot words. Harry says I never did trust him, and what reason was there for that? And I says, why should I, coming in off the sea out of the blue yonder? Did he think I didn’t know what his hold was filled with? Well, it was you gave your assent to the marriage, says he. Maybe I was a fool, says I.
    It was only Grace who came out front and broke it up. “You two idiots don’t know better than to fight among yourselves, whilst the world’s out there with teeth just waiting to bite you,” says she, or words like them. Harry went away down the beach, whistling some tune over and over to hisself, and I collected the bundle I had come for and slunk off back home. She has the fury of her mother, and they’s the only ones ever could shut me up.
    They was small-minded things we spoke to each other, Harry and me,