Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) (18 page)

I
stayed in the skiff all night, adrift on the shifting currents.

Twice I pulled ashore and went back to the shack to look through the cracks, but the fire had died down, and the moaning woman, sitting up, her mad face staring at nothing, was even less definable than before. I didn’t dare go in, afraid she might cry out and wake the village, but neither could I go back to the ketch and leave her. I drifted, dozing, letting the current wash me past the point into the kelp beds, where the rattle of the oarlocks would wake me, and I’d row back past the village again. Just before dawn, when the night seemed darkest, the water murmured under the bilges, and I felt my head slump forward. And dreamt.

She stood on a long sand beach in a turquoise lagoon, beyond which waves crashed on the reefs, murmured as they died, and left a white line below the deep blue sky. I walked toward her but as I neared she turned away. And began walking. I ran after her and she walked slowly, unhurriedly, but the harder I ran, the more distant she became, until she was just a faint shadow on the horizon. And I was no longer sure if she had ever been there at all. I felt tears on my face. I awoke. The night was dark with rain. The dark sea glowed among the darker islands. The current flowed by the kelp, the skiff, the oars, outlining all with beads of phosphorescence.

At dawn, the clouds slumped heavily across the wet boards of the roofs.

KATE

The Cure of Death

I awake to a deserted house and silence, with the fire down to coals and dawn in the smoke-hole above me. There is the pleasant smell of fresh-sawn wood, and when I turn my head I see a coffin lying near me, new and clean: the most inviting thing I have seen since I left home. The door opens, steps approach softly, and the great painted face hovers over me. It’s too dark to see his eyes but his hair glows like a halo. He pours something in the fire and when flames fly, he comes back and looks into my eyes. He seems puzzled, sits down on the coffin, pokes the fire, his gaze following the sparks as they rise. He drags the coffin next to me, looks at me again, then pushes it resolutely into the flames. As it catches, sparking and crackling, he lifts what looks like a skinny doll as tall as he, into his arms. He brings it slowly, stands over me, then lowers it toward me. Oh, no. No, no. The lips are gone, the eyes, just old skin cracked and tight. A corpse; long dead. He holds the empty head, and puts it on my breast, again and again, growling a song. Then he lays the corpse on me. Oh, no. Dear God, no.

I
awoke in my berth to thunderous drumming.

“Cappy, you’re wanted,” Nello called from above.

I climbed up into a day as gloomy as the dawn; the chill in the air warned of snow.

A boat-length from the ketch were four canoes full of broad-shouldered men, some moving their paddles to hold the canoes in the stream, others banging them against the gunwales in unison.

A magnificent man stood in the first canoe: head raised, wearing a carved eagle helmet, its wings spread toward the clouds. A dark blanket hung over one shoulder, trimmed in red, decorated with shells, but under it he wore a gold-trimmed purple coat that could have belonged to an admiral of some tiny landlocked nation or the doorman of a high-priced downtown hotel. Below it showed tuxedo trousers and bare feet. He carried a carved stick taller than himself, ringed with bands of hammered silver and topped with a brass knob from a bedstead. He spoke with proudly lifted head and raised right arm, his voice as lordly as a challenge, as emotive as an oration.

“He said he has paddled clean around the world,” Nello translated.

“From where?” I asked.

“From the beach there. We like to exaggerate.”

As he spoke, the man stepped gracefully from the canoe and walked toward us—ankle-deep in forty feet of water. He stopped with an arm raised, like some apparition, in the middle of the sea.

“How did he do that?” I whispered.

“Christ only knows,” Nello said.

The man talked on, waving here, gesturing there.

“Is he threatening?”

“He’s inviting us to his feast.”

“As the main course?”

Instead of answering, Nello raised his right arm and, in a voice deep and stern, gave a long reply.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Thank you.”

W
HEN THE CHIEF
had walked back to his canoe and the canoes turned for shore, I pointed at the sick shack. “Last night, I saw a woman in there. Her eyes were deranged, her face so twisted I couldn’t tell for sure but—”

“But what?”

“Do you think it could be her?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s probably not.”

C
ANOES CAME FROM
both north and south all day, some single, some rafted together to make a stable barge, bringing what had been secretly made or accumulated over years: masks, boxes, baskets, furs, enormous carved feast dishes the size of a small bathtub; piles of blankets, sacks of flour, pails, mirrors, bolts of cloth, washbasins, pots, pans, hats, braided wreaths of cedar, stickloads of bracelets.

Everything they brought was to be given away to celebrate the past year’s big events: deaths, births, marriages, the raising of poles, the building of houses, the transfer of rights to fishing privileges or berry patches. “They come to feast, to sing and dance, Cappy. Tseka—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Halloween rolled into one. Feasts and theater all winter long. We forget the world outside, just laugh and cry and frighten each other to death, and kiss each other’s wives because there is no jealousy during Tseka.”

At noon he rowed ashore and came back an hour later, excited.

“Come on, Cappy. I found a cousin married into this tribe. She’ll show us around. We might just….” But he stopped when he saw my eyes.

Charlie stayed aboard to look after Sayami, and Sayami to safeguard Charlie. We rowed to the north end of the beach, and landed near the brambles where smoke rose from fires that burnt in pits like shallow graves. Women tended them, putting a layer of stones over the coals, then flopping salmon and halibut onto the stones and covering them with seaweed to bake. Their movements were flowing, unhurried, the way small waves move as they spread over the sand. They watched me curiously as I said, “Good morning,” but made no reply.

Where seals were being butchered out, a cloud of gulls shrieked and circled, then flew off toward canoes that came in, heaped with fish. Men were hauling great loads on their shoulders, and young girls worked an open fire ringed by skewers and roasting-tongs stuck into the sand—all with fish heads and slabs of fish and fish tails on them. The roasting fish smoldered when the girls watched the men more than the flames. They looked at us openly with dark, knowing eyes; one with a sensuous mouth and blanket open at her bare chest looked away, as if she knew men like us from before.

The village rose above us on the midden. From close in you could see its steep, eroded side and the dark layers of earth and white layers of shells where, over the centuries, the remains of old villages piled upon each other. Stairs led up the midden onto the boardwalk. Two strides wide, it ran the length of the village, covered with old and young: carrying or stacking high the arriving presents, or sitting weaving, or hanging hemlock branches onto housefronts. A raven cawed from a roof. We walked under fixed gazes and suspicious eyes, carved posts with monstrous heads towering over us. I stumbled over a loose plank and into the arms of an ancient woman. Her weathered skin hung in deep folds, her gray hair flew wildly, and her nose and jaw were as twisted as her feet. I apologized. She said something and laughed, and loud laughter rose around us.

“She said she’d keep you,” Nello said, “if only you were younger.”

We were stopped by two black bears beside a door. They were perfect but for their dead eyes and their angular human movements. Nello pulled me away like you pull a child. “That’s the house of the Hamatsa, the Cannibal Dancers. If someone who shouldn’t goes in there, he dies. And that’s no theater.”

A few houses farther on, we ducked through a yawning mouth into the gloom of a great house where the stench of urine mingled with smoke. “Don’t stand there, Cappy, that’s the pee box,” Nello said. “We use it to wash blankets. And to wash our feet to keep away ghosts.”

Around a fire in the center of the house, women squatted on their haunches, taking hot stones with tongs and dropping them into wooden boxes spouting vapors that smelled of fish. A pretty young woman came toward us; pieces of abalone shells hung from her ears and played in the light. “My cousin,” Nello said, then, “Captain Dugger. An old friend.”

“My soup is almost done,” she said in perfect English. “I will show you the village.” And she went back to her box.

“She speaks well,” I said to Nello.

“Best in the village,” he said. “She learnt from the missionaries when they came a decade ago and took away the children. It was for their own good, they said; for their health. Like hell. It was to teach them to speak white, think white. Be good white Injuns to work in sawmills and canneries, not ones that quit to go feast and dance all winter. That’s why they hate the potlatch, Cappy. It doesn’t make good slaves. Anyway, the kids refused to learn.”

“Except me,” the cousin said. “I learnt. I wanted to know what they said behind my back.”

She led us out toward the quiet end of the village and, looking directly at me, asked, “Are you her husband?”

I started to answer, but was stopped by a hardness in her eyes.

“I thought so,” she said. “The
paxala
has many places: huts in the woods, caves. All hidden.”

“She’s not in the sick hut, is she? There’s a woman there who—”

“There’s just a girl and an ancient one, and a crazy lady. Nice but crazy.”

“And in the Hamatsa house?” Nello said.

“Maybe,” she said.

By the time we rowed back to the ketch, the air had chilled and the first flakes of snow ghosted over the sea.

A
T DUSK THE
beach emptied, the canoes stood alone, and the embers of the fires glowed through the falling snow. Snow-blurred figures with blankets over their heads shuffled like humble faithful along the boardwalk, heading toward the great house at the north end of the cove.

A booming voice drifted across the water, muffled by snow.

“It’s beginning,” Nello said. “Dress warm; we could be there awhile.”

“How long a while?”

“Hard to say. My uncle went to one for a day and stayed two years.” And he folded two blankets for him and Charlie. “You coming or staying?” he asked Sayami.

“You kidding?” Sayami smiled. “You think I’d miss a party?”

With all of us aboard, the skiff had little freeboard, so I rowed slowly. We hauled the skiff up the beach to just below the midden, out of the reach of the rising tide. “Remember where we’re leaving it,” Nello instructed. “Below the killer whale pole. And remember where the stairs are. If we’re separated—or if anything happens—we meet back here. If the skiff is gone—”

“Why would it be gone?” I cut in.

“I don’t know. But if it’s gone, just take the smallest canoe and get back to the ketch.”

“And if that’s gone?”

He ignored me. “Take it and don’t wait. For anyone. They won’t wait for you.”

The snow had covered the midden and the houses, and hooded the eyes of the carved beasts as if putting them to sleep. The people filed by barefoot through the snow, some carrying twigs as torches, others holding dried eulachons with their tails aflame. They stopped at the big house. At each boom of the voice from inside, a man stepped from the line—always of noble carriage, richly dressed in furs or ornate blankets—climbed the short steps to the door, and stood with the light from inside throwing a glow around him; his tribe followed close behind.

“The chiefs are received in order of stature,” Nello said.

When everyone else was inside, the name of the ketch, a bit garbled, was called.

“Go, Cappy,” Nello said. “You chief.”

I walked slowly up the steps.