The Devil's Making (16 page)

‘No. I have no idea who they were.'

‘You never visited the house when he had patients?'

‘No.'

‘Do you know who his friends were? Did you see him with anyone?'

‘Only with Mr Lee.' Rabinowicz spread his hands, palms up, and smiled ruefully. ‘But what a business it is,' he said. ‘To be cut to pieces by the Indians.'

‘Not cut to pieces. Stabbed and mutilated.' I got up. ‘But not necessarily by Indians.'

‘You think it might be somebody else?' Rabinowicz had risen to show me out, but he paused for a minute. ‘You're an educated man, Sergeant, are you not?'

‘I hope so.'

‘So you know your history. People will say no civilised man could do such a thing – only a savage, they'll say. But ask any Jew and he will remind you that civilised men, even Christian men, or Jews themselves, are as capable of savagery as the Indians.'

*   *   *

On my way back to the courthouse, I visited the subscription library. There were no books whatsoever on the Tsimhian or any Indians North of Vancouver Island, though one book mentioned that the Tsimshian occupied some 200 miles of coast and coastal islands, from opposite the Northern tip of Vancouver Island almost all the way to Alaska. They were thought to be cousins of the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Both tribes were savage, prone to sudden raids on their neighbours by canoe, bringing back scores of severed heads, slaves, and goods. The Tsimshian were divided into various sub-tribes, often warring among themselves. Their language was different from that of the Kwagiutl, their Southern neighbours, but similar to that of the Interior Tsimshian who lived in the mountains up the rivers. In a booklet put out by Christian missionaries, I was reminded that the Reverend Duncan had reinstalled his mission at Mektakatla, and was building a church. The first mission had been attacked and many of its converts slaughtered so that it had to be abandoned. But Duncan was resolute that this time the medicine men, who incited the Tsimshian to dog-eating and cannibalism, and other depraved practices and Satanic orgies, would not prevail. Duncan also had the help of the HBC, with whom most Indians traded for the sake of better potlatch feasts, and which had established a monopoly.

The information was relatively useless. Mektakatla was well over a hundred miles North of Tsalaks anyway.

*   *   *

At the end of the afternoon I returned to the courthouse. There I read an autopsy report from Dr Powell who had examined the alienist's corpse. The report detailed the various stabs, slashes, and mutilations, and concluded as Parry had done on the spot, that no single one of them was sufficient to have caused death. The stab near the collarbone had missed arteries and only nicked the top of the lung. The stab below the ribs had penetrated the spleen. McCrory had bled to death as a result of this and the other wounds. Death might have taken twenty minutes or more.

I visited the cells. Seeds greeted me from his office which commanded a view of the row. ‘Your Indian chief is having a hard time. Lucky he don't understand English. They call him a filthy savage and worse. Them bastards. He's all right. I give him to eat, though he won't take any. Won't talk neither. You know, he's not like other murderers I've had in here. They're always whiners, self-pitying, excusing themselves, blaming other people for egging them on, or the drink they've taken, or even the victim for having “asked for it”. Wiladzap has dignity. He's probably killed plenty in his time, he's an Injun after all, but he's not fretting. I don't know as he did this one. Look for yourself.'

I walked past the cages where my chain gang were confined in pairs, playing cards or chattering. I knew I had earned their respect, insofar as they were capable of it, by working hard with them on the bridge. So when one of them called out, inevitably, ‘Constable! Gee, I see you're a Sergeant now. Anyway, when you gonna settle that Injun prince? Need a hand in stringing him up?' I turned with the intention of giving them a brief sermon – what had been called at my school some ‘pi-jaw' – adopting my vocabulary to its recipients although aware that my articulation was still English, which they would find prissy.

‘Look here, fellows. Nobody knows the Indian did anything. He's just here on suspicion. He hasn't even been charged yet.'

‘Yes he has,' Seeds interrupted from behind him. ‘He was charged this afternoon, with murder, by the Comissioner.'

‘Well, he hasn't been found guilty,' I said angrily. ‘And until he is,' I said to the cells, ‘I'd advise you to lay off.'

I walked to the end cell. Wiladzap was curled up in his bed in a grey blanket – the only place in which he was out of sight of the prisoners in the adjacent cell – but facing toward the cage door. His black eyes, slightly narrowed, were watching me.

I said, ‘Nika mamook elahan nesika?' (‘I do anything for you?')

Wiladzap did not answer.

‘I already told him he could send out for things,' said Seeds from behind my elbow. ‘If there's anything he wants special, I mean. Or maybe clothes. I offered him prison clothes but he turned up his nose at them, you might say. So long as he pays for it. Do his people have money? Anyway, my jargon ain't so good, so maybe you can explain again.'

‘I'm sure his people have at least some money. Anyway, I'll guarantee his expenses for anything he needs – up to £20 or so,' I said, thinking of the remains of the money I had brought from England. I went on to explain to Wiladzap what the jailer had said, and that I could advance funds for anything Wiladzap needed.

Wiladzap said nothing for a few moments. Then he said quietly, ‘Nika pittuk, tamala wawa.' (‘I think, tomorrow talk.') But ‘tamala' for Indians could mean tomorrow, next week, or never.

‘Kloshe,' I said. (‘Good.') I left Wiladzap to his thoughts, and followed Seeds back to his office apartment. I was surprised Seeds had been so understanding.

‘Where have you been all day?' Seeds asked.

‘On the job.'

‘All hell bust loose around here. People from the newspapers, rubber-neckers. That's why the Commissioner charged him. It was getting too hot. Everybody screaming something should be done fast. He left this note for you.'

Seeds passed me a folded piece of paper, sealed with a wafer. I ripped the wafer with my thumb nail.

‘Dear Hobbes: I look forward to your reports. Keep at it. You have
carte blanche.
It was necessary to place a charge, as you will have heard. But it will take several weeks at least until trial. Normally would take months, but much pressure to act. Yours truly, Augustus Pemberton.'

Nice of the old boy, I thought. It was Pemberton's way of saying that his own mind was still open.

‘Then there's this news from England,' Seeds remarked.

‘What news?'

‘It was in the paper. By electric telegraph. The parliament in London have abolished public executions. But it don't go down well here. This Colony ain't a drawing room. What's the point of having a good hanging judge like Mr Begbie if the hanging's done sneaky, in the middle of the night or sometime when nobody can see it? I remember the last one – in '63, right outside this door. Three Injuns, Cowitchans, they was. They'd massacred three settlers on Saltspring, and the daughter of one, a fine girl though she was already married. They stripped her clothes off and cut her up something horrible, then tied a piece of a stove to her hair and threw her in the bay. We found the body. Yup, they hanged all three. They just go crazy, Injuns, from time to time. It needs an example. Why, even old Freezy knew that when he had one of his squaws' head chopped off on the beach. Anyway the Commissioner says the Legislature is goin' to debate it soon as possible, most likely to pass a law keeping executions public here. Good thing too, though not so good for the chief. But on second thoughts, who wants to be hanged sneaky-like, in the middle of the night? Myself I'd rather go out in a blaze of glory.'

‘I see what you mean.'

I felt hopeless. The timing was not good. I could imagine one of the Legislature's vituperative debates, Amor de Cosmos – originally Bill Smith from Nova Scotia and the leader of a pro-Canadian sentiment – haranguing about public safety, invoking the ‘Vox Populi,' the voice of the people which of course spoke through him, bewailing the foul murder of a ‘prominent medical man.' And everyone afraid of offending ‘our American cousins, sons of a common English mother – or rather, common sons of an English mother…' I was tired. I did not give a damn for Wiladzap, the ‘lucky in hunting', who had probably lopped the heads off innocent men in pirate raids. Still, I wanted to know the truth.

*   *   *

Yet all the while Lukswaas is in the back of my mind. I looked at Wiladzap and I wanted to help him – for her sake. At the same time I hated him for having her as his wife. He was so sure of himself when he said she would not make ‘bebe bebe' with McCrory. He trusts her. Why should he? She was as open with me as if we were free to be friends. I could swear she responded to my interest in her. But she is a savage. They think differently. But how could she be so fresh with me – fresh as a girl?

Now I think of the forbidden thing. My mother. She was not quite faithful to my father. No, to be honest she was not faithful. Mr Aubrey, my father's curate, a hard-drinking, fox-hunting man with a large private income, ten years younger than my father, a frivolous man who once told me he didn't believe a word of the scriptures but it was the duty of a gentleman to promulgate them, they gave a necessary order to the minds of men. (Not women, he didn't mention them). Such a contrast to my dear old irascible father who was always ready to thunder on about God's word, and as good as gold: he would beat the bounds of his several parishes once a year as if they were so many folds and he God's sheep-dog, barking around the sheep and lambs to make sure they lived their ordained lives as he lived his. Why had my mother married him? – gay and light as she was, daughter of a baronet, from a family who had always enjoyed life, and in previous centuries had shown few signs of morality. Not for his money: he had little. I wonder if it was because she knew in herself that if she did not marry a very good man she would go to ruin. And she played the game of being the parson's wife. Until Aubrey came along. Not that there were any obvious signs between them – nothing for my father to notice. Nor Henry, absorbed in his own pursuits – hunting with Aubrey, for that matter, when he could get hold of a good mount. (We could never have afforded a hunter.) But I noticed. Well, I couldn't help it. At the age of fourteen I was out walking on the downs under the sound of the skylarks and making a private study of the various barrows and stone piles from prehistoric times: there was one long barrow I could crawl along, first between two sagging portal stones, then along a dusty tunnel between upright stones with slabs across for a roof, then where the tunnel had fallen in I could climb out through a hole to the top of the barrow, about half way along. And one day I had sat a long time in the barrow, just below the hole, my back against an upright stone, trying to recreate in my mind the druids of the stone age – while at the same time knowing that one theory about such barrows was that they were merely storage chambers or ‘souterrains' for storing grain. No, I believed the other theory – based on the discoveries of charred bones in similar barrows – that they were tombs for the victims of sacrifice. And I heard laughter above me, through the hole, and the voices of my mother and of Aubrey. I sat as if frozen and listened. Eventually the voices moved away.

That evening I asked my mother what she had been doing at the barrow with Mr Aubrey. I should explain that my mother and I were close. We could talk of anything. She was what German theologians would call a Freidenker – a free thinker. She had even said to me once that when I grew up I would decide for myself whether or not I believed in Christianity, and that for herself, she had decided she did not – but that she loved my father dearly so she was prepared to believe for his sake. So I said, ‘If you love my father so dearly, what were you doing laughing with Mr Aubrey on the barrow?'

She went pale. She was always pink-cheeked, so that was an event. But she looked me straight in the eye (mine and my father's and Henry's are blue but hers are brown) and she said ‘I've fallen in love with Mr Aubrey, that's why. But you will have guessed that, so why should I hide it? But I do want to hide it from your father. Nothing will come of it.'

But eventually, about a year later, something did come of it. I don't know exactly what. But she was right, I can guess. Henry was staying with friends when it all blew up so I was the one who overheard, distantly echoing, their night-time arguments. In the day-time they were like ghosts: my jovial elderly father grey-faced and sad, my lighthearted mother –grey-faced and sad. I even heard her say to him – and it consoled me, somehow, for the old boy's sake – ‘Even as a lover he is nothing like you, he is just a ball of fluff that wisps away in the wind. He is nothing. But I wanted some lightness. We are so serious, you and I. We sit every evening discussing the meaning of life. And I love you for it, a thousand times more than him. He is nothing. You know I stopped it even before you found out. It's over now, believe me.'

He did believe her. They reconciled. Mr Aubrey resigned his post ‘for private reasons' – and took up a parish in London. Some months later he was found dead in his rectory, having drunk, it was said, three bottles of brandy in quick succession.

I suppose my mother is a powerful woman. She and my father appear close. She has even become a pious believer in the church. But sometimes I think she is happier than he is. In another context, some while ago, when he and I were discussing some piece of bad behaviour – well, I might as well write it down, the bad behaviour was an echo of my mother's, a village woman who had run off with a tranter, a man who transported goods between the local villages, then returned to her husband – my father said, using a cliché, unusually for him, ‘A man can forgive but he will never forget.'