The Devil's Making (52 page)

‘And for you, my boy'. Pemberton interrupted.

‘People can be so very cruel,' Mrs Pemberton cut in. ‘I fear for you both.'

‘Yes!', said Pemberton. ‘I remember the filthy slanders Governor Douglas had to endure about his wife being half Indian and possibly – so it was whispered – “illegitimate”. As if these pioneer marriages needed benefit of law! No more than do the common law marriages of Scotland even to this day. Douglas and his wife have endured it all, and their daughters have married well. But the tendency in this Colony is toward increasing harshness. Even Governor Douglas did not have to deal with such as Amor de Cosmos and our American residents. The Americans cannot, as we British do, consider themselves and the Indians as common subjects to the Queen, God bless her!' Pemberton paused, perhaps in a rush of sentiment, then resumed vigorously. ‘I hope the Canadians, who are also subjects of the Queen, will do better than the Americans – but not if Amor de Cosmos is an example! Consider Mr Begbie: some years ago he could count on some good feeling toward the Indians, but more and more, every effort he makes on their behalf – to have them recognized as landholders and eventually as citizens – is spurned. You'd be better off even in India where an Englishman can marry a Hindu girl and though it might not be a perfect match, at least their children are accepted. Here your children would be damned. You could keep a squaw in a shack by the Upper Harbour and no-one would blink an eye. But marry one! I would try and ensure that you could stay with the police, but I would fail! Better for both of you to go back to England, even, if you marry.'

‘As you must, my dear,' Mrs Pemberton said. ‘I feel it in my heart.'

‘You were always a romantic,' Pemberton said to his wife with a tight-lipped smile. Then to me: ‘I know you're a man of principle. If you wish me to marry you both, I'll do it at the drop of a hat. You can always have a church marriage at a later date.'

‘Thank you.'

‘I hear Mrs Somerville has gone and married Mr Quattrini,' said Mrs Pemberton, as if trying to lighten the sense of doom which hung in the air since Pemberton's tirade, and which Lukswaas, ignored, had obviously caught: she sat like a rock, looking at the rug.

‘Oh dear,' said Pemberton with a rueful expression, no doubt thinking of poor Kathy Donnelly. Then briskly, ‘Have you eaten, Chad?'

Sandwiches and iced tea – an American habit – were called for. I ate, and talked with the Pembertons. The subject of marriage was put aside and a certain calm could re-establish itself. Lukswaas sat quietly listening and I agonized for her. She must feel like a wild bird caught in a cage. I didn't want that fate for her.

Eventually it was time to go to the courthouse. Pemberton, out of magnanimity or resignation, invited me and Lukswaas to walk down with him.

Lukswaas shook hands with Mrs Pemberton and said in clear English, ‘Thank you.'

‘Bless you, child,' said Mrs Pemberton.

I walked with Lukswaas on my arm, and Pemberton on her other side. People on the path beside Fort Street and then on the board-walks moved aside to let us pass, but with unfriendly expressions.

At the courthouse, Pemberton signed the papers for Wiladzap's release, in Superintendent Parry's office off the vestibule where Lukswaas and I waited side by side, not touching. Pemberton had given me a week's leave. I explained quietly to Lukswaas in Chinook that I would not have to come to the courthouse for seven days. She nodded. She seemed to accept everything as it came and took it for granted that we would be together. But she caught me looking worried. Without a word, she tapped the signet ring I had put on her left hand, and made as if to take it off. I stopped her and took her hand.

Then the outer door opened and Aemilia came in. She was wearing a gingham dress, checked blue and white, and a straw hat under which her hair was bunched up. In her ears she had silver earrings, obviously Tsimshian, and on both arms just below the frilly cuffs of her sleeves she wore wide silver bracelets engraved with dense and complex designs.

Lukswaas exclaimed with pleasure in her own language and she and Aemilia hugged each other. They spoke in Tsimshian, which Aemilia pronounced slowly but with clicks and glottal stops.

Pemberton came out into the vestibule with Parry and greeted Aemilia, whom he knew. I introduced Lukswaas to Parry, who had not recognized her. Parry inclined his head, but looked embarrassed, and focussed his attention on me. ‘You've done a good job. But my God what a mess it has all been! For myself I'll be thankful when the Indians have left Cormorant Point and made their way North again, though I do regret that the Tyee had to cool his heels in jail for over three weeks. But then it turns out that he speaks English! He could surely have saved his bacon before now.'

‘Very complicated matters,' I said.

‘Hobbes, I believe you should release the prisoner,' Pemberton interrupted. ‘Miss Somerville tells me she has invited him, and you and his sister, to her house for a period of rest, which I'm sure he'll need.'

‘Thank you, Sir,' I said dutifully. Parry accompanied me to the jailer's office where Seeds, looking a reformed character in a well ironed uniform, gave me the keys obsequiously.

I walked down the corridor, ignoring the other prisoners, to Wiladzap's cell. Wiladzap was waiting, standing squarely in the middle of the floor, his arms folded across his chest. He let them down when he saw me. ‘Hops', he said simply, and smiled.

I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. I reached out my hand, and Wiladzap shook it with a firm grip, holding onto it for a moment as if to feel the pulse of my blood, and looking me steadily in the eye. Wiladzaps' eyes I realized now, were like Lukswaas's in shape, although he had a dominating way of using them, even now as he said ‘Thank you. You find man who killed McCrory. Good. He died?'

‘Yes. He's dead. He killed himself.'

‘Killed self? Too bad.' Wiladzap looked genuinely sorrowful. Presumably he had expected the killer to go down fighting.

‘I'll tell you more later,' I said. ‘You come with me.'

I walked beside and slightly ahead of Wiladzap along the corridor. ‘Bye Chief!', someone shouted. Wiladzap ignored this. Then someone else said, ‘Lucky dog!' Wiladzap stopped and looked into the cell the voice had come from. One of my chain-gang, an armed robber.

‘Lucky', Wiladzap repeated. ‘Wiladzap name lucky'. Then he walked on.

In the hall Pemberton stepped forward and shook Wiladzap's hand, apologizing in Chinook for his detention, wishing him well in the future. Wiladzap listened, his eyes entirely focused on Pemberton's face. But I had noticed one flickering glance to where Lukswaas and Aemilia were standing behind and to one side. After this it must have taken extreme control for Wiladzap to pay attention to Pemberton who became quite carried away on his own words, as could happen easily in Chinook, but he listened patiently. Then when Pemberton stopped, Wiladzap kept looking at him and launched into an equally long speech about how his heart had been sick in the jail, very sick, but he knew that Pemberton and ‘Hops' had been trying day and night to find the real killer of the doctor. He knew the good hearts of the King George men and of their great white Queen Victoria. He knew that in the city named after the great white Queen he would be safe from evil.

Pemberton looked pleased at this. They shook hands again, and Wiladzap was free. He walked straight across to Aemilia and stopped just in front of her. ‘Aemilia,' he said. He stood straight as a spear but tears burst out of his eyes and began to flow down his cheeks.

There was a spell in the air. No one in the vestibule moved. Aemilia stood looking at Wiladzap, her grey eyes peaceful. Then Wiladzap reached out one hand to her. She reached out to him. They linked just their little fingers, like children, and stood looking at each other.

Everyone else began to move again. Parry clattered off to his office. Pemberton smiled at me and Lukswaas and walked to the door. Lukswaas and I moved toward each other and did what we had wanted to do for a long time, embracing each other tightly and rocking on our feet, oblivious of the others. I felt a great calm invade my body and hers.

When we broke apart, standing hand in hand, Wiladzap and Aemilia were still standing looking at each other, but now both their hands were joined. Aemilia looked across at us. ‘Are you ready to go, Chad? Jones is waiting outside.'

‘Yes.'

The spell was broken, and we all moved toward the door, Aemilia and Wiladzap now talking to each other in Tsimshian.

Outside in the sunbaked square we climbed into the farm buggy on which Mr Jones was sitting as upright as the most elegant of coachmen. Lukswaas and I faced backward, snuggling close into each other and not talking; Wiladzap and Aemilia opposite us faced forward, and looking each other in the eye talked all the way to Orchard Farm.

*   *   *

The next few days were not exactly easy. They were too intense for that. But when I look back from some time later I think that for all of us – me, Lukswaas, Wiladzap, Aemilia – this was our Happy Land.

Orchard Farm became transformed into a sort of camp, with open fires outside in hearths built by the Tsalak who visited constantly in small groups, bringing and cooking salmon and other fish. I was unable to understand what was said between Aemilia and the Tsalak, but they seemed respectful of her in varying degrees. I was more directly concerned with their relation to Lukswaas. Sometimes she would wear English clothes and her hair in a tail, sometimes Indian and her hair in braids, as if feeling her way between the two styles. She told me she
felt
better in Indian clothes, but
looked
better in English ones. I thought she looked lovely in either. But the clothes were only a symbol of something deeper. Just as Lukswaas was attracted to something in me, she was attracted to something in English life. Conversely I was attracted to her and to something in Tsimshian life. It could become confusing. The only steady times were when we broke away from the farm and walked in the woods or over the fields hand in hand, or when we grappled passionately at night.

Even our sleeping arrangements were a compromise. (Perhaps George Beaumont could not, as he had told me, live with compromise – but I knew that Lukswaas and I could not live long without it.) Lukswaas enjoyed the neatness and order of an English house, and immediately began teaching herself to use kitchen utensils – Mrs Jones was given leave to stay in her own house for this period – and she experimented with samplers and sewing. But she preferred to sleep outside, since it was summer. Wiladzap could hardly bear to be in a house at all, although he was highly interested in all mechanical things, from kitchen taps and the pump, to the draft regulator of the fireplace. All four of us ended up sleeping every night on paliasses and blankets on the porches, Aemilia and Wiladzap in the front, Lukswaas and I in the back of the house.

Several times a day Wiladzap and I sat talking or went on a walk together over the fields. Not that Wiladzap was capable of walking for its own sake. For him everything had a goal. I was astonished at how the so-called ‘savage mind', at least in Wiladzap, was ruled by ideas of purpose. If we walked over the fields it was to be away from the others and for mutual instruction. I taught Wiladzap how to shoot a pistol – he was only experienced with rifles. Wiladzap taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow. I taught Wiladzap what I knew of the economics of trade from the English point of view – a subject which Wiladzap grasped very quickly even when it was presented in a mixture of simplified English and Chinook. Wiladzap taught me various uses of a Bowie knife.

We also had laborious but always intense conversations among all four of us, about the future. There was no doubt that Lukswaas would stay with me although ‘one day' I would visit Tsalaks. As Wiladzap said with his usual simple arrogance: ‘You save my life, I give you Lukswaas.' The case for Wiladzap and Aemilia was more complicated. An Indian woman could be taken as a concubine by a white man and become adapted to white life, although the couple were despised and shunned as exemplars of sheer lust, the coupling of a civilised man and an animal. But it was unheard of for a white woman to live with an Indian man, despite the fact that at least a few such as Wiladzap were in material terms richer than many whites. Then since the Northern tribes, Tsimshian and Haida, were known as skilled traders, and therefore the HBC in cooperation with the Colonial government was keen to restrict their activities, Wiladzap's future was precarious. In spite of his extreme, naively boastful confidence, he feared on the one hand being cheated and hemmed in by the white traders, and on the other being deserted by his own people.

Chieftainship among the Tsimshian had to be maintained by glorious deeds, trading successes, and potlatches. The competition for the eagle name ‘Legex' which Wiladzap had mentioned after his arrest, absorbed much of his ambition. Aemilia made some attempts to persuade him to settle down and farm with her. We even discussed the possibility of all four of us working Orchard Farm: in an alliance of strength, perhaps we could set our own social rules. We could perhaps buy the farm from the former Mrs Somerville who would not want it now that life as Mrs Quattrini would provide her and her younger girls a finer house in town and one in San Francisco as well. But Wiladzap could not understand agriculture. For him, only slaves carried things and chopped wood, and the idea of trimming trees so that they produced fruit was alien to him. Were not the woods full of berries anyway? Unfortunately the only attraction farming might have had for him, that of money, was in short supply in the depressed economy of the Colony. Aemilia knew, as she told me, that she would have to go with Wiladzap. She even looked forward to meeting old friends at Tsalak. But in time, she said fatalistically, things would get worse for the Tsimshian.