The Spawning Grounds Read online

  “Dad,” Jesse said, and he was struck by the wild confusion on Stew’s face as he looked up at him. “It’s me, Jesse.” He watched recognition rise in his father’s face, swiftly followed by anger.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “At work,” Jesse said, thinking the old man’s sense of time had eroded with his memory.

  “You’ve been at work for five frickin’ years? You couldn’t take a weekend off to visit your kids? It’s some woman, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Jesse said. “No woman.”

  “It’s always some woman.” Stew squinted at Brandon’s bare feet. “Where are your shoes?” Jesse looked down to see that Brandon had slipped off his runners at the door to the hospital room, as if he were entering a friend’s home.

  “Jesus, Bran, put your shoes back on,” Hannah said. “Think about what’s been on that floor, what you could catch in this place.”

  “They bug me,” Bran said. “They don’t feel right.” He fiddled with the tag on the back of his blue T-shirt as if that didn’t feel right either.

  “Elaine did that when she got sick, remember?” Stew asked Jesse. “She went barefoot, even this time of year, even in winter.”

  Jesse felt a shot of heat in his gut as he recalled his wife’s bare footprints making a trail through snow to the bridge.

  Stew took his grandson’s arm. “Look at me,” he said, and grasped Brandon by the T-shirt, pulling him close to inspect the boy’s face. “That thing got you, didn’t it?” he said, and let go.

  Jesse leaned into his daughter. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  Hannah took a step away from her father, but it was clear from the worried expression on her face that she harboured the same doubts about her grandfather’s mental state.

  “You said you saw me in the river,” Brandon told Stew. “When you drowned.”

  “I did. We both stepped out of our own skins and into that river.” Stew held out his hands. “I saw my body dead on shore, but then I looked down and saw myself in the river. My hands were young. I was young.”

  Brandon nodded as if he, too, remembered.

  “I was dead,” Stew told Brandon. “But you weren’t. Your body was still alive. That thing took hold of it.”

  Stew sat back in the wheelchair. “I never believed the stories my grandfather and Dennis Moses told about that ghost in the river. Even after it took Elaine, I wasn’t sure. Then I fell in the water Saturday, saw things for myself.” He pointed a finger at Hannah as if defending himself against an unfair accusation. “I always told you two not to swim there, and chased off any tourist foolish enough to try. At least the Indians know enough not to go in.”

  Stew had told Jesse the same thing, too many times.

  “Your mother never listened, not to me, not to Dennis, not to your father.”

  Jesse understood what Stew was referring to. On one hot Indian summer afternoon, Elaine had taken Jesse by the hand and pulled him to the river to witness the return of the sockeye and they had both marvelled at the salmon’s frustrated attempts to leap the new logjam. Logging upriver had exposed the soil on the steep slopes. When spring rains had hit that year, a slide cascaded down one of the hills, washing mud and the remaining trees into the river. The current carried the mass of logs to the narrows where the logs became trapped in the trestles under the bridge, blocking the flow to the lower part of the river and creating a reservoir above. The salmon could no longer leap the rapids to reach the place where they had once spawned. From then on, the fish could only spawn in the waters that bordered Stew’s land.

  Watching the salmon that day, Elaine got it in her head to swim with them. When Jesse refused to join her, she stripped down to her bra and underwear and leapt into the pool below the rapids with her arms wide, embracing the danger as she would a lover. There had always been a reckless quality in her that both fascinated and repelled him. Elaine had constantly goaded him past his fears, but he wouldn’t follow her into that river. She let out a whoop as she hit cold water. When she popped back up to the surface she quacked like a duck, willing Jesse to laugh with her. Then her expression changed, first to one of awe and wonder, and then to alarm, as her attention was caught by something in the river. Then Elaine was gone, suddenly pulled under by the currents. Panicked, Jesse stumbled down after her along the bank and found her minutes later at Dead Man’s Bend, curled into herself like a newborn. She was dazed, barely breathing, terrified.

  In the weeks that followed, Elaine slid into madness. Jesse became convinced that some part of her had died in the river. One time he saw his wife standing out in the middle of the river, even as he knew she was sitting in the living room. He checked to make sure he was right and, sure enough, Elaine was seated at the window as she had been for days, staring out. When he turned back to the river, the ghost of his wife was gone.

  “That ghost, that Indian boy, has been watching, waiting for another fool to jump in that river,” said Stew. He pointed his finger at his grandson’s chest. His yellowed nails were clean for the first time Jesse could remember. “Now that thing’s inside you.”

  Jesse glanced at Brandon, expecting him to tell his granddad that the old man had really lost it now. Instead Brandon avoided eye contact as he bit his thumbnail. “What’s inside me?” he asked Stew. “What is it, exactly?”

  “The Wunks,” Stew said, then grinned. He knew how foolish he sounded, how old, how far gone.

  “But what are the Wunks?” Brandon asked his grandfather.

  “You ask Dennis about that,” Stew said. “He knows. He’ll tell you stories.”

  “Dennis Moses, you mean?” asked Hannah. “Alex’s grandfather? Grandpa, he died several years ago.”

  Confusion spread across Stew’s face, quickly followed by a flush of new grief. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. Then he rattled the plastic tray on his wheelchair. “Let me out! I’ve got to get back home!”

  Jesse put a hand on Stew’s arm. “You can’t go home, Dad.”

  Stew made an animal cry of frustration and swept the plate of food from the tray. Brandon jumped back as mashed potatoes flew across the floor and the plastic plate clattered and spun away.

  A nurse rushed in, her scrubs printed with penguins. “He’s certainly keeping us busy,” she said with the patience and cheerfulness of a well-trained daycare worker. She patted Stew’s tray. “This has to stay on,” she told him. “Do you understand? On. So you don’t fall out.” Then she knelt to clean up the food from the floor.

  She looked up briefly at Hannah, at Brandon, at Jesse. “Jesse, isn’t it?” she asked him. “Your daughter said you’d likely be here today. I’m Annette.” She scraped Stew’s lunch back onto the plate with the butter knife. “Stew gets restless, throws things around. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s a good sign. He’s got fight.”

  Jesse picked up Stew’s cowboy hat from the night table. The scent of his father was bonded to the inner band of the hat: wood shavings and the needles of lodgepole pine, as if, born to this place, Stew had taken the forests into himself.

  “I meant to tell Hannah you should take his wallet and keys home too,” Annette said. “Things go missing here. They’re in that locker.” She stood, plate in hand. “Do you have to use the washroom?” she asked Stew. When the old man ignored her, she said, “He’s due for potty time. We’ll give it a try and see if that calms him down.”

  “He’s not a child,” Hannah said.

  “No, of course not.” Annette patted Hannah’s arm as if she was, then left the room, carrying Stew’s plate.

  Jesse opened the locker door and picked up Stew’s thin, cracked wallet. He had bought that wallet for his father one Christmas, what, twenty-five years earlier? Under the wallet Stew’s clothes were neatly folded: muddied work pants and a wrinkled white T-shirt with a spawning sockeye salmon on the front.

  “This isn’t his T-shirt, is it?” Jesse asked his daughter. Stew rarely wore a T-shirt with an image on it. His stand
ard outfit was jeans or green work pants and a plaid shirt, summer or winter.

  “I bought that for him,” Hannah said. She looked away as she added, “For Father’s Day.” Hannah and Brandon had given Jesse nothing for Father’s Day, not even a card. They hadn’t phoned Jesse and Jesse hadn’t called them.

  Annette came back with a male nurse and the hoist to lift Stew. Brandon faced the door, his face reddening, as the two nurses fitted the sling under his grandfather. Annette switched on the contraption and Stew rose into the air. His ridiculous blue gown opened, exposing his bony bare arse in the sling.

  “Feel like Peter Pan?” the male nurse said and Stew turned his face away, his eyes watering.

  “We should go,” Hannah said. “Grandpa doesn’t want us watching.”

  “Let’s wait in the hall,” Jesse said. He ushered his son and daughter past the hoist. They sat in the orange plastic chairs in the hallway. Staff had propped up a few elderly patients in the waiting area at the end of the hall, their wheelchairs facing the television. One or two watched a football game. Others sat with their heads back, staring at the ceiling, but most slept with their chins on their chests.

  Jesse could hear Annette in the bathroom, congratulating Stew. “Great! That’s two successes today!” The old man mumbled in response. The stink of shit. What milestone was this in his father’s life when a bowel movement had become something to celebrate? Jesse thought of Hannah and then Brandon when they were toddlers and the poop discussions he’d have with Elaine on returning home from work. Brandon went potty twice today! Hannah had jumped in excitement around him, her little pigtails bobbing, as he’d clapped his hands.

  “Grandpa would rather be shot than end up like this,” Brandon said. “He wants to die at home.”

  “I know,” Jesse said.

  Hannah shifted in her seat. “I could help take care of him. I already pulled out of my classes this semester.”

  “You didn’t need to do that.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “I’m here now.”

  “Then let’s bring Grandpa home.”

  Jesse said, “We couldn’t even get him to the toilet, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You just don’t want to deal with him,” Hannah said.

  Jesse didn’t reply. There was no point in arguing. He knew this to be true as much as she did. He turned to Brandon. “Gina says you’ve been skipping school too.”

  “I can’t think,” he said. “I can’t read. Nothing makes sense.”

  “It’s just stress,” said Hannah. Then, to her father she added, “I needed Bran’s help on the farm.”

  “What was all that crap about the Wunks?” Jesse asked Brandon. “You think you’re possessed or something?” Brandon wouldn’t look at his father. Jesse eyed him and sat back in his chair.

  Through the space between the doorway and the curtain Annette had closed for privacy, Jesse saw the male nurse help Stew to the bed, then fasten a diaper around his hips. He looked away, anywhere but at his father: at the man who slept, open-mouthed, in the room beside Stew’s; at the old woman shuffling her wheelchair down the hall towards them, calling for help.

  When she reached them, she stopped and took Hannah’s hand in hers. “Help me,” she said. Her voice was old and shaky and flat. “Help me.”

  Hannah removed the old woman’s hand from hers, setting it gently back on the handle of her wheelchair, and the woman carried on down the hall as if she hadn’t stopped, still calling for help. From one of the rooms an elderly man took up her cry. “Help me, help me, help me,” he mumbled in a monotone, as if he had long ago given up hope that help would arrive.

  — 8 —

  The Red Door

  THE WEATHERED WOODEN sign that greeted them at the gate when they got home from the hospital read, simply, Robertson, a sign that had served the family for three generations. Pink flamingos perched on the fence posts on either side of the gate, and a hodgepodge of garden gnomes, birdbaths and lawn ornaments covered the lawn, a patch of grass Stew never mowed anymore. The ornaments were Stew’s idea of a joke: elaborate decorations on his junky, decaying estate.

  Abby ran up to greet them as Jesse parked the truck, and then barked and leapt up to gain his attention as he got out. As Jesse scratched the dog behind the ears, Brandon disappeared into the house without saying a word. Hannah headed towards the pasture.

  Jesse called after her, “Hey, I thought we’d have a bite to eat.” He hauled the cooler out of the back of his truck. “I picked up a bucket of KFC in Kamloops.” When Hannah didn’t respond he called, “Where you going?”

  She kept her back to him. “To see a man about a fish.”

  He glanced at Gina’s house, where he saw a figure watching them from the kitchen window. Gina, undoubtedly, though Grant’s truck was also in the driveway. Jesse raised a hand, but the figure moved away from the window.

  Abby whined and Jesse shifted the cooler as he turned to confront his past, this farm that had been his home, not just in his childhood but also throughout his married life. Along with the cattle, the past summer’s plague of grasshoppers had eaten the pastures down to a brown ragged matt. Then the insects had turned to the orchard that surrounded the house, eating the leaves from the apple trees. Small, scarred apples dangled from the bare branches.

  The willow by the kitchen door had grown. He had planted the tree the week Hannah was born, assuming that he and Elaine would raise their daughter together here on this farm, his inheritance. Planting that willow had been foolish, he thought now. The roots of the tree had pushed under the house, cracking the foundation on that side. They had likely crept into the septic field as well, fingering their way into the pipes.

  The house was as Jesse had left it, the work on the exterior still undone. A stack of cedar siding sat on the front deck; tarpaper flapped by the back door that led into the kitchen. He’d gotten that far putting up the new siding before Elaine got sick; it was a job he could have finished in a weekend if he’d put his mind to it.

  The kitchen door was red, and in need of paint, as it had been when Jesse was a child. His father had always referred to this red door as the servants’ entrance, the one he used himself. Stew had told him that his ancestor, Eugene Robertson, the first homesteader in the valley, had indulged his Shuswap wife by allowing her family to enter through this door to visit her in the kitchen. Eugene would not permit them to enter through the front door, nor would he let his wife entertain her kin in the small room that served as a parlour, though she had sat there with Eugene in the evenings. Together, at night, Eugene and his Shuswap wife read the Bible by lamplight, both for her spiritual illumination and so she could practise her reading. Eugene had attempted to exorcise what he viewed as her pagan beliefs from the house so they would not infect the children he had hoped they would have together.

  Jesse turned the knob of this ancient door with its peeling red paint but then hesitated before stepping across the worn wood of the threshold. The dark kitchen cupboards and the stove were the same ones he’d known in his teens and young adulthood. But so much else had changed. His wife had been dead eight years, yet he felt the same anxiety and guilt he’d experienced the last night he had come home smelling of another woman, that sweet girl from the reserve who wasn’t yet out of her teens, the new receptionist at the mill where he worked, a girl who hid behind giggles as a child might hide behind bubbles she dispensed from a wand. Her name once again escaped him. It was something young, green. Fern. The girl had had a scar on her shoulder, made by human teeth, he’d discovered that evening. Fern had been bitten by a white man, she told him, when he’d touched the pale crescent. A white man, she had said with emphasis, perhaps acknowledging that Jesse had been accepted at least somewhat by his Shuswap co-workers at the mill. That’s all she had said after he’d moved Brandon’s backpack to the front seat and folded down the back of the minivan to accommodate their lovemaking. He had tried to please her, in his way—it had been important to him to please
her. He’d circled her small breasts, hid his fingers in the cleavage between her legs until her unresponsiveness told him that she was deriving no pleasure from it, and then he took his own.

  He had come home that night and sat in the van for a time, looking through the side window of the living room, watching his wife and his father. Stew had been drinking a glass of rum and Coke and reading in his scruffy armchair. Elaine, as usual, sat on a wooden captain’s chair facing the front window, one that overlooked the river.

  Stew had waited up for Jesse that night with her and, as it turned out, had phoned around trying to find him too. Jesse hadn’t called to say he’d be late, that he would miss dinner. Why hadn’t he just phoned that night to say he was pulling a double shift?

  When Jesse finally entered the house through the back door, he’d found his father at the kitchen sink, rinsing his glass. His shoulders had curved with age. He had become an old man.

  “What is it with you and these Indian women?” he’d asked Jesse, without turning to him. “Do you really believe they’ll ask less of you?”

  Jesse took off his jacket and hung it on a hook by the door. “Does Elaine know? Did you tell her?” Elaine was just around the corner, in the living room, likely still staring at the dark glass of the window as she had for weeks now.

  “Of course Elaine knows. A wife always knows.” Stew paused. “Some part of her knows.” In that moment Jesse realized how naïve he’d been—no, foolish—in his pursuit of other women, even before Elaine took ill. He had been the boy who stole from his mother’s box of chocolates while she was in the kitchen, thinking she wouldn’t hear his footfalls over the clatter of dishes, that she wouldn’t notice the missing nougat, her favourite.

  “I didn’t tell Elaine nothing,” Stew said. “I didn’t worry the kids either. They’re in bed. I told them you were at work.”