The Spawning Grounds Read online

  Later, as Elaine died in that intensive care bed, Hannah would tell Jesse she had heard this conversation between her father and grandfather through the heat vent in her bedroom floor. She knew about his affairs in the same way Jesse knew about his father’s drinking, when Stew was still trying to hide it, the bottles he kept in the barn. Children always knew more about their parents’ lives than their parents suspected.

  “Who did you phone?” Jesse asked his father. “Did you phone Gina?”

  “No! I’m not stupid. I see you and Gina slipping off together. It’s a wonder Grant hasn’t come pounding on this door already.” Stew pointed a finger at Jesse, his nails blackened with grease. “Gina will hear about this soon enough. Those Indians are as thick as thieves. But you already know that. I expect that’s why you disappeared with that other Indian girl tonight.”

  Jesse tried to come up with a defence, but he had none. He had made a decision to end things with Gina. She had begun to talk of a future together, of leaving Grant. She would find out about Fern, eventually, though, as it turned out, not as quickly as Stew imagined. Aside from her work, Gina kept her distance from her home reserve. It was only after Elaine’s funeral that Gina phoned to confront Jesse about Fern. And by then his affair with Gina was already over. It had not survived Elaine’s suicide.

  “Your place is here, with your sick wife,” Stew said. “Not out there, chasing skirts.”

  Jesse and Stew had fallen silent as Elaine entered the kitchen. Her medication and illness left her drowsy and vacant and she walked unsteadily. She hadn’t showered or combed her hair in nearly a week and had stopped wearing a bra, her breasts shifting under the cotton of her blue T-shirt. She walked up to Jesse slowly, and when he tried to turn away to mumble his apology at being late, she took his face in both her hands and held him there while she looked him over carefully, her eyes wild as a feral cat’s. Then she’d let him go. Later Jesse found her huddled in the bathtub, in the dark, and led her to their bed. He went back to the living room to sleep on the couch.

  As Jesse came through the door, Brandon wandered into the kitchen, eating vegetable soup straight from the can. He stopped when he saw his father and turned a little as if he was about to go back upstairs to his bedroom. His hair was dishevelled and his shirt was stained with bits of food. Nevertheless, Jesse was struck by Bran’s youthful beauty, his colouring, so like his own: Brandon’s ginger hair, his smooth, freckled face; his pale, sinewy arms and thin wrists; the white anklebone beneath his sweats. At this cusp between childhood and adulthood, he appeared unfinished, a thought half-spoken.

  “I’ve got a bucket of chicken in the cooler,” Jesse said, pointing to the container on the table. “You’re welcome to it.”

  Brandon held up the soup can, as if unheated soup was a better option than what Jesse had to offer.

  “These yours?” Jesse asked Brandon, lifting one of several honour roll certificates hanging by magnets on the front of Stew’s fridge. Both Brandon and Hannah had evidently made the honour roll at their school, year after year. “You’re smart, eh?”

  Brandon shrugged.

  That had been one of Stew’s many complaints about Jesse, that he was too damn smart. Stew had always said Jesse never had to work for anything so he had never learned to finish what he started.

  “What’s your best subject?”

  “I don’t know. Art, I guess.”

  “You drew these?” Jesse pointed at the pictures on the side of the fridge. Star Wars characters, various bipedal beasts dressed as men.

  “When I was a kid.” Brandon tossed the soup can in the garbage and wiped his hand on his sweats, then turned and headed to the stairs that led to his room. Jesse heard him climb the stairs, then close his door behind him.

  Jesse stared at the magnetic school photos of his daughter and son on the fridge door. There used to be other family pictures on the kitchen walls, of Jesse and Elaine seated with Hannah and Brandon; of Stew, Jesse and his mother, Amanda, taken when Jesse was a toddler, shortly before his mother died of breast cancer. He remembered little of his mother, only a drift of sensations, emotions: a longing for her presence; her absence like a stone in his mouth. Stew had mounted that photo of the three of them over the kitchen table where, throughout most of his childhood, only Stew and Jesse had eaten their meals. In it, his mother held Jesse on her lap, while Stew stood behind. Amanda’s face was stressed and drawn—she was already ill—and her eyes looked through the camera rather than at it. He could see the distance between his mother and father, and even between mother and son: her hold on him was loose and formal. She had already begun to leave him. Where had that photo gone? Where had the photos of Jesse and Elaine and the kids gone?

  The only photograph that remained was of his ancestor Eugene Robertson, a shot taken in the late-Victorian era: a careful, freckled man, sitting beside his petite, proper British wife, their children encircling them. Like so many of his countrymen, Eugene had sought out the wilderness but then forced his British civilities upon it.

  Jesse recalled a scrap of story Stew had told him about this first Robertson, who had crossed an ocean and a continent to reach British Columbia in his hunt for gold, leaving a young wife behind in the old country, and who had stayed on in this new world even though he had never found the treasure he sought. There was no bridge over the river at the time Eugene made his decision to stay. He had not yet built this house and he slept outside on a fragrant mattress of balsam boughs. Perhaps his decision was thrust upon him—he had lost everything and couldn’t afford to go home—or maybe he had found something here, in the Shuswap, that he could not leave behind: these blue, forested mountains, this hidden valley, this river that was so full of life then. Eugene sent for his wife almost a decade after finding this place, having spent those intervening years with a Shuswap woman.

  As the salmon ran the river, Eugene had untied his cottonwood dugout from a riverside willow and took up paddles to cross the water with the express purpose of finding himself a woman in the Shuswap village. As he stepped out onto the far shore, he looked up and saw a pair of eagles, talons locked, cartwheeling down from above in a mating display. Directly below the courting birds, a girl prepared salmon for drying on racks. She looked up first at the eagles, and then at Eugene watching her. The eagles didn’t separate on the wing as Eugene expected, but fell from the sky and crashed into the bush close to the girl, their talons still locked together. They flapped and hopped through boxwood and salal as they tried, unsuccessfully, to untangle themselves one from the other.

  Here was divine providence, Eugene thought: his choice had been made for him. He and the girl would join as the eagles had. What the girl thought had not been passed down in this family story. She was much younger than Eugene, less than half his age. Eugene ferried her back across the river in his canoe, and took her as his wife that day, without a priest to formalize the marriage, and without a roof to hide their lovemaking from God and the angels. Their first union could not have been what the girl had hoped for.

  Jesse had no idea how that relationship between Eugene and the Indian girl had ended or if children were born from that union. Maybe he had distant cousins across the river. A great many of the current surnames on the reserve originated with white fur traders or miners who had taken Indian wives and had children, then deserted their Shuswap families when they moved on or went home with whatever fortunes they had accumulated. It struck Jesse that he was as irresponsible as those men. More so. He didn’t have the cultural ignorance—the arrogance—of that past era to hide behind.

  The kitchen phone rang but he didn’t answer it. He leaned against the fridge, listening as the answering machine recorded the message.

  “Jesse, it’s Gina.”

  As if he wouldn’t recognize the weight and texture of her voice.

  “If you’re there, pick up. I see your truck in the yard.”

  She was nearly whispering. She didn’t want Grant to hear. When Jesse didn’t pick up t
he receiver, Gina said, “We need to talk about Brandon. I saw him walk into the river today. His behaviour recently has been…” She paused. “I’m worried about him. Call me.”

  Jesse waited for a goodbye, but there wasn’t one. The message light blinked after Gina hung up. He hit play and listened again to the rise and fall of Gina’s voice, the only thing that seemed familiar in this moment. Not this decaying house. Not this farm settling, sinking back into the earth. Not his own son and daughter. They were all strangers to him now.

  He pressed the message button a second time, searching for some hint of that old affection for him that he had always found so comforting. But Gina wore what he had jokingly called her shrink voice, one that kept the native teens she counselled at once placated, orderly and at a distance. He listened to her message a last time, nevertheless.

  We need to talk about Brandon.

  Jesse took Brandon’s school photo from the fridge and held it a moment before placing it back beneath a magnet. Then he climbed the stairs to his son’s door and knocked. “I thought we could spend a little time together tonight,” he told his son, through the door.

  “What?”

  “Maybe we could hang together?” Jesse opened the door as he spoke. “It’s been a while—” He stopped when he saw the state of his son’s room. The same light blue paint on the walls; the same bowl light fixture on the ceiling; the same orange, green and brown bedspread, a 1980s castoff from his father’s bed; the same mirror on the wall. Brandon had even left the Back to the Future Part III poster up in the corner, one Jesse had duct-taped there. Brandon had turned the antique bureau—a relic from Eugene Robertson’s time—into a desk for his laptop. He had littered both it and the floor with books, dirty clothes and a mountain of junk food wrappers. A pile of his dirty socks and underwear sat in the corner. But Jesse was stopped in his tracks, struck with nausea, not by this disorder, but by the images Brandon had drawn on the walls. His wife, Elaine, had sketched these same creatures, over and over, in the months before she had taken her own life. Brandon was at work on one now, squatting in the corner of the room to complete a sketch of a fox with human feet.

  “Jesus, Bran.”

  Brandon stood to face his father, charcoal in hand, his blank look unreadable. Behind him, on the wall, the drawing of a crow with the eyes of a woman stared at Jesse.

  “What the hell is going on?” Jesse asked, though he feared he already knew.

  Bran searched his circling thoughts for some explanation that his father would accept. These weren’t all his own thoughts, he knew. Many belonged to another. For a fleeting moment Brandon understood what this other was telling him, but then his awareness fell away, as dreams do once the sleeper wakes.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not yet.”

  Then his attention was caught by a flash of water on the wall, a reflection, this pretty thing, catching light. He reached out to touch the mirror, and as one thought skipped across his mind another took its place, one overlapping the other like concentric circles in the water.

  — 9 —

  Skipping Stones

  ALEX HAD WALKED so quietly through grass and mud to where Hannah waited on Eugene’s Rock that she hadn’t heard him, just felt the warmth that radiated from him as he stood beside her, the shelter his body provided from the cool, late-afternoon breeze. Below her in the water, a sockeye pair prepared to mate in the gravel of the riverbed. The female sockeye had swept the rocks, flicking her body to clear away the algae and silt that might suffocate the eggs she would lay here. The male hovered by the female, stroking her with his whole body, waiting. When she was ready and released her eggs, he quivered, letting loose his milt to swirl within the water, to cover the eggs. He would soon swim away to die, but the female would stay as long as her tail beat, to protect her nest of stone.

  Alex sat down beside Hannah with the old familiarity, close enough that the hairs of his forearms raised goose bumps on the skin of hers. He smelled, faintly, of cigarettes and of the orange he must have just eaten.

  “Got your smoke signal,” he said. When Hannah raised an eyebrow at him, he tapped the cellphone in his jacket pocket.

  Hannah wasn’t sure what to think of these small jokes Alex made. Had the Shuswap even used smoke signals? She figured he was making fun of her, poking holes in the preconceptions he assumed she carried from her white world. Then again, maybe not. He had, after all, reinvented himself during his time away at university; he had distanced himself from his roots, even as he returned to them.

  “So what’s up?” he asked.

  “Jesse finally got back. I was just in town with him and Bran, visiting Grandpa. Christ, Alex, I think Grandpa’s losing it. He says Bran is possessed or something.” She rubbed her knees. “Thing is, Bran seems to think he is too. He’s drawing on his walls. Crazy shit. Animals that are part human.”

  “Like what your mom drew.”

  Hannah glanced away and nodded. “That day we fell in the river, you talked about a water mystery. I thought maybe if I knew what you told Bran I could make him understand it isn’t real. Or maybe you could?”

  Alex shook his head. “I can’t do that. Only he knows what he’s dealing with.”

  Hannah shifted away from him. “What did you tell him?”

  “Stew must have told you about Eugene Robertson.”

  “No, not much. Sounds like he was an asshole. He was married to some woman back in England when he took a Shuswap wife. Grandpa said he would only let her family visit through the back door.”

  “Libby,” Alex said. “Her name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her Libby.”

  “You know her name?”

  “Interesting that you don’t, given Eugene was your ancestor.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know much about our family history.”

  “I don’t suppose I would either if Grandpa Dennis hadn’t forced me to sit and listen to his stories.”

  Alex pointed across the river, to the tent over the toddler’s grave that the construction crew had exposed as they widened the road. “Have you been to the site?”

  “No, I didn’t feel—” Hannah stopped there. She hadn’t felt she had the right to visit that grave, a white girl intruding on sacred space.

  She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Alex understood. “We’re not telling most people this, of course,” he told her, “but the boy in that grave was buried—or reburied—with a nugget of gold. When I saw that, I knew who that boy was.” Alex didn’t say that he was also convinced the timing of the child’s unearthing was no accident. It was an announcement of a kind, for the few who had heard Dennis’s stories and were willing to believe them. Within that grave, the remains were arranged crudely in the foetal position and the thin bones of the boy’s hand gripped the gold as a cherished possession, even in death. Some of the bones were missing and others were out of order, which meant, from what Dennis had told him, that this child had been of special importance. The Shuswap, the Secwepemc, had once removed the bones of their honoured dead from their graves, cleaned them and reburied them in fresh garments every so often until there was no one left to remember. This grave, however, wasn’t all that old, dating from around the time of the gold rush. The Secwepemc had already been forced to give up the old ways, and buried their dead—and after the arrival of the traders and the miners there were so many dead, struck down by disease and starvation—in the ground under simple white crosses, the graves enclosed by tiny white picket fences.

  “That boy in the grave, his name was Samuel,” Alex told Hannah. “Samuel Robertson. He drowned in the river.”

  “Samuel Robertson was my great-great-grandfather, I think,” she said. “Stew’s great-grandfather.”

  Alex nodded. “I suspect Eugene named him after his first child, the one he’d had with Libby. The son he lost. Libby was one of my ancestors.”

  “Shit. You’re not going to tell me we’re related.”

  Hannah appeared genuinely panicked by the t
hought and Alex grinned. “No, not directly, not by blood,” he said, although he knew their family stories were painfully intertwined. “Samuel found the nugget of gold he was buried with right here, in these spawning grounds. He was just a little kid, not quite four years old. He gave it to his mother, to Libby, as a gift.” In the way any small child might offer a river-polished stone or ragged bunch of wildflowers to his mother, his first love.

  The gold within the gravel of the river bottom had caught Samuel’s eye, a reflection within reflection underwater. He’d plucked the nugget from the shallows and ran up shore crying, “Mama!”

  Just upriver, Libby squatted by the boulder Eugene had marked with his name, shortly before he had asked her to be his wife. Here, by this boulder, she scrubbed her husband’s shirt on river rock with the soap she had made herself from tallow and ashes. There weren’t many salmon here to hamper her task. The run hadn’t returned in anything close to their usual numbers and Libby knew why. In 1857, Eugene Robertson had been the first miner to arrive on this river, but when word spread that he had found a little gold here, other whites had followed. By the fall of 1862, the river was filled with miners. Up and down these shores, white men had staked their claims and now mined for gold in the shallows. They didn’t wash, these miners, and their stench carried on the river breeze. They wore the same long underwear, the same wool pants and shirts, day in and day out, sleeping and eating in their clothes. They smelled of pork and the pissy scent of ground coffee, of unwashed skin, of armpit stink and of the semen crusted on their underclothes. They dumped bucketfuls of rocks, sand, mud, and the red eggs of the sockeye into the screen at the top of the box, then rocked and rocked the contraption by its broomstick handle, sifting the mess into the stepped riffles below so that only the larger rocks remained on the screen. Then the miners picked through the rocks, hunting for gold. Hundreds, thousands of white men, running from the Pacific up the rivers into the interior and then to this river, like the sockeye.