“They were so sated and drunk by this time you’d have thought he wouldn’t have had the energy for what happened next. It’s what often happens. They fall asleep with their faces in their plates and when they wake up the next day their heads hurt so bad they’re no longer interested in even the gift-giving part, to say nothing of the host’s destroying his property for them — even if he still had enough left in him to do it. The taste in his mouth alone is enough to make him wish he was dead.
“But I’d been watching him, John Lookout, the host. And they’d been watching him too. He hadn’t touched a thing. Practically. He’d picked at his food. And though I won’t say he was on the wagon, he’d been abstemious, and seemed, well, to have drunk only out of politeness, a sort of social drinker, to make his guests comfortable. And that’s what kept them interested, I think, helped preserve that last bit of alertness in them. Gave them their second wind. Kept their peckers up.
“So they really didn’t know what to expect. Even after he rose and proposed that toast we had all been waiting for and thought he was going to rise and propose at the beginning.
“ ‘I thank you all for coming, and drink,’ he said, ‘to your healths, and ask, as a favor to me, that you accept a few lousy tokens of my appreciation.’
“Whereupon he began to give away the store. You know, the artifacts I was telling you about? His beads and his blankets, his scrimshaw and tsatskes. But big stuff too, the stuff they use to live by, the tools that earn their bread. The harpoons, nets, rafts and kayaks. The paddles. The very machinery, I mean, that made the potlatch possible, and not only that but his down parkas, the qiviut wools that kept his family warm, the oil that burned in his lamps during the long dark year.
“Then forced whatever the Indian equivalent is of the doggy bag on them, pressing them with food that had not yet been eaten, then with food that had not yet even been prepared.
“His generosity was shameless, and John’s guests, both the one or two who had been formally invited, and those of us who, like myself, had merely been attracted — it was us, incidentally, who walked off with the biggest prizes; he was scrupulous about this — were beginning to feel more than a little uncomfortable. That kind of pride and ostentation went beyond tradition and custom and was starting to seem, well, destructive. Yet to refuse a gift was not only rude, it was taboo, a little higher than incest on the scale of things you don’t do.
“When he had given away all the gifts he had to give, and disposed of all his food, he seemed physically to slump, somehow to collapse in the face as though he’d been rendered suddenly toothless, all expression fled from him. He seemed — we all felt it, I think — not only to have used up all his worldly goods and chattels, but all his ideas as well, all the hope he might ever have had for a future. This is important. I must make myself clear. Understand that he did not suddenly appear bereft or deprived. He did not seem desolated or stripped. No grief was in it. Nothing was in it. As if all the wise old man from the different village altogether who’d brought the potlatch to life by rising and proposing his toast to nothing at all had to do to see the toast bear fruit right before his eyes, was just stay awake long enough to see John Lookout’s face at that moment. It was the empty, vacant, neutral face of someone not very interesting in pre-REM sleep.
“But just then, quick as it had emptied out, quick, that is, as a tire blown on the highway, it filled up again. Lookout jumped up, smacked himself in the head, ran out, and was back in a minute with an unopened case of French champagne. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said. ‘I’m all farblondjhet tonight. There’s still some champagne left. Who needs a refill? How about it? How about it, Nanook?’ Nanook, who looked as if he was going to throw up, groaned and covered his lips with his fingers as you might cover your glass with your palm to decline wine. ‘You? Charley Feathers? No? How about you, Patricia Whale-water? No one? You’re sure? No takers? You’re sure? All right, it’s going going gone then, everybody,’ he said, and started to smash the bottles of champagne. He threw them against the walls of his house, he threw them on the floor. With all his might he threw them through his closed windows. He uncorked the last two bottles and emptied their contents over two handsome woven rugs he had apparently forgotten to give away.
“In the silence that followed we were not only too embarrassed to look at John, we were too embarrassed to look at anyone else either. I suppose that’s why we never knew who the guest was that finally spoke, who broke the silence and pierced that tight ring of eyewitness shame we all feel when someone fails to bridle an enthusiasm that has passed beyond mere enthusiasm and spilled over into the red zones of lost control and flagrant zealotry.
“ ‘That is a fine icebox someone has sold you, John Lookout,’ the guest said. To alter the mood. To save the party.
“ ‘Oh, do you think so?’ John asked. Then he opened the door of his G.E. frost-free refrigerator and ripped it off. He removed its blue plastic crisper, set it on the floor and jumped up and down on it until it was in pieces. He did the same with the butter tray, tore out the wire shelves, destroyed the icemaker, and then went to work on the motor itself, being careful to spare, out of respect and courtesy to his guests, only those parts where the freon was stored.
“A strange thing happened.
“The mood altered once more. The zealotry retrograded back into enthusiasm again, and the enthusiasm re-metamorphosed into that ostentatious generosity which is the impulse and impetus of a potlatch in the first place.
“There was a frenzy of generosity. One Indian was so moved he gave away the lead dog of the dogsled team that had fetched him. The man he gave it to was so moved he shot the dog.
“Desperately they tried to part with the gifts they’d been given, and, when they couldn’t, they destroyed them. And when they ran out of things to destroy that John Lookout had given them, they turned on their own property and destroyed that. Mukluks went, parkas. Snowshoes, canoes, curved ulu blades for gutting fish. Everything, everything! All were caught up in the spirit of the celebration. After a time, when there really was no more property left toward which they could demonstrate their indifference, they seized upon their own families. Braves beat their squaws, squaws hit their papooses, papooses scratched at their mosquito bites until they became infected. Even then that terrible nexus of generosity cum enthusiasm cum ostentation cum zealotry wasn’t finished. When you thought it was over, something else would happen. Someone rose, for example, stuck his finger down his throat, and regurgitated the entire feast he had consumed just hours before. It was awful,” he said, remembering, “awful. You couldn’t know how they would ever manage to end it.
“It was the major trope of that particular potlatch, and the source of an important new Indian stereotype — the Indian-taker.” He paused. “It was a sort of Black Thursday for them, you see, and effectively destroyed the Indian economy in that part of the high Yukon for years.”
“How did they?” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“How did they manage? To end it.”
“Oh,” he said. “When I took out my ulu and started to shave off my beard.”
It was stuffy in the cabin and I cracked open one of the plane’s Plexiglas windows, surprised to feel the air, soft and dark and balmy as the sweetest spring. It was even a little warm, in fact, and Philip and I removed our outer garments. Flowerbeard seemed oblivious to the weather, and not only didn’t take his parka off but hadn’t even lowered its hood, which still covered his knit woolen watch cap. Indeed, he was talking again, launched, I supposed, into another tale, as oblivious to his audience as he was to the temperature.