The Devil's Making (38 page)

I sat up, and Lukswaas too. I got to my feet, and she too, as if wanting not to lose me. She even took my hand – shyly, it seemed. Perhaps the Indians did not usually hold hands. I walked forward into the sun, and could not help enjoying its heat on my skin as I stood looking at the sea. I stepped forward, Lukswaas still holding my hand trustingly, and into the leading wave as it crossed the sand. We both gasped. It was freezing. We stepped back. I looked at us both. A naked woman, tall, brown and lithe, and a naked man, taller and white. In fact, since both of us were slim and smooth skinned, our body hair curly and fine, we looked not much more than a gangling boy and a very pretty girl.

I asked in Chinook how old Lukswaas was, wondering if she knew. She said she was eighteen, and held up ten fingers, then eight. She asked me the same question. I said I was twenty three, and held up all ten fingers twice, then three. We smiled at each other. I could have cried. It was time for me to speak.

I said we could not see each other again. It was not possible. It was not right.

Lukswaas said, changing the subject in an illogical way, that Wiladzap was in the jail. When would he be free? Was I closer to finding the murderer?

I said that I was still working to find the murderer, and I hoped I would, although time was short. In truth, although I did not tell Lukswaas this, I was more hopeful, since I was planning to ask Pemberton for permission to interview Beaumont on San Juan Island: I found it hard to believe that Beaumont could have murdered McCrory, but there were more questions and more of a mystery surrounding Beaumont than anybody else, and this gave me a sort of twisted hope – like one of the arbutus growing crazily out of the rock.

Lukswaas bit her lip and looked at me, frowning. Then she begged me to do all I could to find out who had killed the doctor. Wiladzap must be set free of the jail. How was Wiladzap? Did he eat? Did he walk? What did he say to me?

Yes, he ate a little. And he walked once a day. But he had said nothing. I returned to my original subject. I reached out, took Lukswaas's hand, and looked into its palm. As I did so I could feel my desire returning, my body coming alive to her. ‘Halo nanitsh nika mesika, mesika nika.' I said vehemently. (‘Not see I you, you me'). I dropped her hand and turned away.

‘Kahta?' I heard her say. (‘Why?').

I turned back wearily to face her, my desire at least gone as I was out of reach of her, and I was trying not to see her as I spoke. ‘Kehwa Wiladzap', I said. (‘Because of Wiladzap').

Lukswaas said with what seemed to me unreasonable stubbornness, that while Wiladzap was still in jail we could see each other.

It was as if she did not understand complex feelings at all, I thought. I hated her for the brutal simplicity of her mind: yes, so long as Wiladzap was in jail we were free to see each other. So we would. Enough.

She was looking at me with an intense, worried expression. Then this softened and turned vulnerable. ‘Mesika tikegh nika?' She asked. (‘Do you love me?')

I felt deeply touched. ‘Nika tikegh mesika' I said. Then, for good measure I added what I had said earlier in English. ‘I love you.'

She recognized the words, and smiled. Then she said that when Wiladzap was free from jail, I could have a talk with him. She said that if she could not be with me she would cry and cry. This was as simple in Chinook as English: ‘Nika cly, cly, cly.'

She turned away as if afraid of having said too much. She had. It was indeed too much for me. Was she proposing a sort of trade, where Wiladzap would sell Lukswaas to me? I felt excited, flattered, horrified, and sick.

‘Mesika klootchman Wiladzap, halo klootchman nika', I said. (‘You woman Wiladzap, not woman me').

‘Ihtah?' (‘What') She looked at me in surprise. ‘Klootchman Wiladzap? Nika klootchman Wiladzap? Wake. Nika ats Wiladzap.
Ats.
' (‘Woman Wiladzap? I woman Wiladzap? No. I sister Wiladzap.
Sister.
')

I felt as if I had walked into a wall: my body tingled with shock from head to toe. ‘Mesika
ats
Wiladzap?' I said numbly. (‘You
sister
Wiladzap?').

‘Mesika
ats
Wiladzap', she repeated. Then for good measure she added that Wiladzap was her brother. She looked at me impatiently, as if this was obvious and I was being stupid.

‘Nika tum tum mesika klootchman Wiladzap,' I said slowly. (‘I mind you woman Wiladzap'). I remembered the question she had been asked by Pemberton at the courthouse: ‘Mesika klootchman Tyee?' Literally, ‘You woman chief?', meaning the chief's wife. I repeated it to Lukswaas now: ‘Mesika klootchman Tyee!'

‘Klootchman Tyee? Ah-ha. Klootchman Tyee! Nika Klootchman! Nika Tyee!' Lukswaas's voice had risen in a kind of panic.

At last I understood. She was saying ‘Woman chief. Yes. Woman chief. I woman. I chief.' She was a chief in her own right – there was the mistake.

Lukswaas was backing away from me, her eyes open wide in horror. Her mouth also opened wide and she raised one hand and covered it, still backing away. Horror … I had never seen anything like it, and I felt myself invaded by it, my own eyes and mouth opening wide, as I felt a deep internal chill which seemed to freeze even my heart. I had been making love to a mere girl, thinking she was another man's wife. My God. I struggled with Chinook: ‘Kunish, kunish man kopa mesika elip nika?' I called out to her in agony – how many men had been with her before me?

‘Halo man, halo man. Ikt. Ikt. Mesika!' (‘No man, no man. One. One. You.') She was shaking her head, still in horror. ‘Klootchman Wiladzap?' She repeated. (‘Woman Wiladzap?').

‘Nika wake kumtuks', I said desperately. (‘I not know').

‘Wake, wake'. (‘No, no'). She clamped her hand over her mouth again, shaking her head slowly, eyes still horrified.

I felt like death. Our love had been killed on this beach. Of course Indian women were different, she had been more forward with me than a white girl would have been, but I had asked her to meet me in the forest, and she had accepted under the same innocent and overpowering compulsion as mine. But my compulsion must now be seen as a cynical adultery. What we had done was no longer the same, because while we had done it I had thought she was merely another man's wife in an act of betrayal. I could see all this clearly, but tried to redeem some of it with what was, after all, the truth, calling out in Chinook that while Lukswaas was in my arms I forgot the whole world. ‘Lukswaas!' I called, but it was as if my words bounced back at me off a stone.

Lukswaas broke suddenly from her position of rigid horror, and dashed across the beach to our clothes. She seized her apron and slipped it on, stepped into her moccasins while pulling her chilcat around her shoulders, and ran away, scrambling through the bushes and into the gulley. I followed her, but half-heartedly, half-paralysed by a huge sense of guilt and stupidity. I stood naked on the beach, hearing the rocks scrape as she made her way up the gulley, then nothing.

I went over to the pile of clothes. She had abandoned my ring, on its leather thong, throwing it in the sand, I picked it up and put it around my neck with her stone, and dressed wearily. All my movements were slow. I looked listlessly around from time to time. My eyes kept being drawn to something which at last I went to examine, dragging my feet. It was a gouged out area behind some rocks just above the high water mark. I realized it was a place where a boat had been pulled in and beached. I thought of Beaumont's possible trips alone from San Juan, although Beaumont had mentioned landing at Telegraph Cove, a mile to the East. It would take a strong man to haul a boat this far up on the beach. I crouched down and examined the pebbles. Some were marked with brown varnish. But this was common to all boat bottoms.

Who would beach a boat in such an isolated place? But this was soon lost in a return of my agony about Lukswaas.

*   *   *

I trudged through the forest and back to the road, aware of nothing until I saw a figure on the road in front of me. My heart leaped. I thought it was Lukswaas. But no, it was a man who, to my surprise immediately jumped off the road and took to the woods. Suddenly alert, I tried to follow the man with my eyes, but lost him almost at once. A man in a straw hat darting into the bushes. I might have followed him, out of suspicion, but felt too crushed and weary. I trudged back through the forest, and along Cedar Hill Road.

The implications of what Lukswaas had told me were too painful to consider. Instead I tried to think of the implications for Wiladzap. These seemed so important that I decided to take the unprecedented step of calling on Augustus Pemberton, whose house at the top of Fort Street I would pass on my way into town.

It was late afternoon by the time I reached the house, too early for Pemberton to have dined. I rang, and was admitted by the maid, then shown into a small sitting room or ‘parlour'. It was amusing really, to contrast this simple wooden house – which nevertheless by Victoria's standards was quite elegant – with the grand Georgian terrace in which no doubt a man of Pemberton's standing would be living in Dublin, where he had come from.

Pemberton did not keep me waiting, nor did he seem annoyed to see me. Victoria is informal compared to the Old World. ‘Well, Sergeant,' he said. ‘Not on duty, I see.'

‘No. But I have just learned something of importance in the case of Wiladzap, which I feel I should communicate to you.'

‘Of course. What is it? Sit down.' We sat facing each other in stiff wooden backed chairs.

‘I have learned from the Tsimshian a fact about which we have been in error. The young woman Lukswaas is not Wiladzap's wife, she's his sister.'

‘Really? Yes, that is a surprise. Did we not establish the relationship clearly in our interrogations?'

‘I don't think so. Superintendent Parry and I merely assumed she was Wiladzap's wife, out at the camp. And then, with the vagaries of Chinook…'

‘That's no excuse,' Pemberton interrupted. ‘Chinook's all right if you know how to use it. There's a word “ats” for a younger sister, and “klootchman” means either “woman” or “wife” – understandably, since among these people we are not always talking about formal marriages. A wife becomes a woman, becomes a wife again, if you see what I mean. But did she not admit she was Wiladzap's woman?'

‘I've gone through it in my mind, and what I recall is that you asked, “Mesika klootchman Tyee?” Meaning “You are the chief's wife?” But Tyee means any chief or highly placed person. She herself is highly placed. I think she understood your question as “Are you a chief woman?” Which, in her own way, she seems to be. So she said yes. Of course it would be far from her mind to guess we might consider her the wife of her brother. But from our point of view, she seemed to be treated as his wife: to have a status in relationship to him, to be dressed similarly, and wear bracelets of silver which somehow seems appropriate for a chief's wife. And at the same time, according to the man Smgyiik's accusation, she was the object of Wiladzap's murderous jealousy.' Here my vehemence might have betrayed some of my agony, if Pemberton, always hasty, had not interrupted again.

‘Nothing more natural,' he said. ‘The Northern tribes, the Tsimshian and the Haida, are not very well known to us, of course. But I remember Mr Begbie saying that among them the descent of property is matrilineal, that is from mother to daughter. It gives the women a certain status. And I think you're correct. It was stupid of me not to have been more precise in the interrogation. I too was making assumptions according to my prejudices. Of course she may have a sort of “Tyee” status in her own right. At the same time, as a woman in a matrilineal tribe she would be in the custody, as it were, of her brother. In fact this woman Lukswaas is probably more precious to Wiladzap as a sister than she would be as a wife. These people tend to take on wives and put them away rather easily. But I suppose a sister is always a sister.'

‘Oh God, I've been so stupid,' I said passionately.

‘Come, come. You've done a good job, you can't be perfect. At least you've found out this detail now. But mind, Chad, it will if anything make Wiladzap's case more difficult.'

‘What?' I snapped out of my own self-pity.

‘You and I may well feel that the case is mitigated by the, let us say, “chivalric” aspect of Wiladzap's avenging his sister's honour. A jury may even feel the same. But they'll send him to the gallows as readily as in the other case. The jealousy of an Indian over his squaw may occasionally provoke murder, but more often he merely sends her away. If she repents and behaves well he may accept her back, although he may have a new wife by then. The old one, the sinner, may have to become the servant of the new. It's like that among the Salish tribes around here, at any rate. No one knows about the Tsimshian. But a man murdering another for an insult to his sister! It's punishable by the rope. In law it establishes the
mens rea,
the intention to commit the crime. Forgive me, you have a law degree, so you know this.'

‘Yes, I see.' I sighed. Pemberton was hasty, but quick-minded. I could find no argument to contradict him.

‘On the other hand your report was very provoking,' Pemberton went on. ‘I must confess I was left disturbed by your revelations of this secret world of McCrory's. It's out of just such a secret world that the most heinous crimes often emerge. Yet the circumstantial case against Wiladzap is strong enough! And your insinuations about various citizens of this Colony, while disturbing, are not enough to cast doubt on Wiladzap's guilt. I'm afraid you've failed to make an alternative case. Therefore the trial must proceed, and I'm sure Mr Parry has other duties for you. The Sergeant's stripes will of course remain on your arm. You've done a fine and conscientious job.'