The Spawning Grounds Read online

  “No, not like the salmon,” Alex told Hannah. “Like an army, or like a sickness, a plague. They did carry a plague.”

  Hannah waved a hand in impatience. “You were going to tell me what’s going on with Bran.”

  “I am,” said Alex.

  Libby stood as her son called her name a second time. “Mama!” This girl who wasn’t yet twenty, wearing the string of trade beads her mother had given her. She had embroidered the bodice of her dress herself, using thread Eugene had brought her from the Kamloops trading post as a Christmas gift.

  Samuel offered her the shining stone he had found. “What do you have here?” she asked in the secret language they spoke when Eugene wasn’t around. Libby turned the rock over in the palm of her hand. She glanced upriver and then down, to the white men sullying the river in their hunt for gold. “Do you know what this is?” she asked her son. “Your father came here to find this. These other men have come from great distances to find this. They are churning up the rivers and killing our fish to find this.”

  “What is it?” Samuel asked.

  “The English call it gold,” she said. “We won’t tell anyone—especially your father—you found it.”

  “Why?”

  “This gold makes some men foolish,” she said. “Your father is foolish enough as it is. So, no telling, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “In any case, it belongs in the river. Shall we send it back?”

  Samuel nodded.

  “The rock will try to escape by running across the water,” she said, “but the river will swallow it.” Libby skipped the nugget across the shallows, hitting one, two, three, four, five, six times and then the river swallowed the rock, just as she said it would.

  “She threw it back?” Hannah asked Alex. “But you said Samuel was buried with that nugget.”

  “Libby talked big,” Alex said. He grinned. “But even she couldn’t resist that gold. She went back later and searched the river until she found it.”

  In the moment she skipped the gold across the river, she was content to let it go in the way she had once released a bobcat from one of Eugene’s snares. Libby turned back to her washing, but Samuel patted her breast. “Mama,” he said. Libby wiped her hands on her skirt and, glancing at the men busy on the river, opened her blouse and sat on Eugene’s Rock. Samuel stood beside her and suckled, kneading her breast, and they both closed their eyes as they were enveloped in the sweet scent of her milk letting down.

  “What are you doing?” Eugene cried.

  Libby startled to find her husband standing on the riverbank beside her. Samuel detached from her breast to look up at him, exposing her nipple. Libby quickly covered herself as the miners were all now watching.

  “For god’s sake, Libby. The boy is nearly four years old.”

  Libby buttoned her bodice. “A child knows what he needs,” she told Eugene, in English.

  “How in hell will you conceive another child if you’re still suckling him? Don’t you want more children?”

  She squatted to wash Eugene’s shirt, her back to him. “How will I conceive another child if you never touch me?” she said.

  Libby felt the waiting in the air, like the seconds following a lightning flash, before the boom and roll of thunder. Eugene grabbed her arm and raised a hand as if to strike her, but instead let her go. “Why would I want you?” he said. “You stink of old milk.”

  Eugene marched away from her, back into the forest he was cutting, tree by tree, bush by bush, making way for fields. He had long ago given up on finding gold in the river, even as the other men searched on. Instead he had succeeded in bringing down enough of the forest that the wind now helped him do the job, ripping trees from their roots during summer storms.

  Libby sat back upon Eugene’s Rock with his wet shirt in her lap.

  “Mama.” Samuel patted her breast, to reassure her, to reassure himself. But she didn’t open her blouse to him. Instead she picked up the wedge of soap from the river shore and walked into the river fully clothed to wash the stink of milk from her person.

  The next day, Libby left the cabin at first light while both Eugene and Samuel were still in bed. Samuel heard the door close and got up to peer through the window. His mother was heading towards the shallows. Samuel ran after her, leaving the door open.

  “Go back to your father,” she called.

  But still he followed. She ran faster, to escape him, her skirts billowing. She ran until she was far ahead of him and still Samuel followed, crying and calling for his mother as he ran through the field of stumps, the bush along the river, stumbling and climbing over windfall. He fell, bloodying his hands and knees, and when he stood again he couldn’t see her. He searched and searched until he heard his father calling them both and he returned to the cabin alone.

  The sun was low in the sky when Libby finally came home.

  Samuel listened from his small room as his father demanded to know where she had gone, but Libby wouldn’t tell him.

  “You want Samuel weaned,” she told him. “Then we shall wean him.”

  The following morning, Libby jumped on her horse and once again left Samuel with his father. She rode bareback, her skirts hiked up to expose her legs, her long black hair flowing like her mare’s mane behind her. Eugene tried to stop her from leaving with almost as much force as Samuel, both of them running after her. She wouldn’t tell Eugene or her son where she was going. Libby had secrets from them both now.

  Samuel followed her to the shallows, where the river spilled into the lake. There, from a distance, he saw his mother dismount, wrap the reins of the horse around a young cottonwood, and lift her skirts to wade through the estuary, to meet a man waiting for her on the other side of the river. Samuel hid himself in the bush to watch them. He saw his mother look back and then upriver to make sure neither his father nor the miners could see them.

  The man she met was dressed like his father, in denim trousers and a cowboy hat, but he looked nothing like Eugene. Where his father’s hair was ginger, this man’s was black, like his mother’s. Where his father’s skin was white and freckled, this man’s skin was brown and smooth, like his mother’s. The stranger was young, as young as his mother.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” the man said as Libby reached him, his voice skipping like a stone towards Samuel across the shallows. The stranger used his mother’s secret words to talk to her. So, they were not so secret. The man pointed at her breasts, to the stain of milk on her blouse. “You’re wet.”

  Libby crossed her arms to cover herself. “I’ve weaned Samuel,” she said.

  “Don’t hide. I want to look at you.” He walked around her, smiling, and ran his hand down her cheek, to her neck, to her collarbone, to her breast. He squeezed it, kneading it as Samuel had when he suckled. But Libby withdrew. “It hurts,” she said. “My milk. I’m so full.”

  “I could relieve you.”

  She laughed.

  He took her hand. “Come lie with me.”

  She shook her head but allowed him to undo the buttons of her blouse. When she was naked, he suckled her.

  “There’s nothing there,” he said.

  “I’m shy. My milk won’t come when I’m shy.”

  “Then don’t be shy.” He drew her down to lie in the long grasses along the river shore and suckled her breast again and then went on suckling, taking Libby’s milk, Samuel’s milk. She reached down and undid the buttons of his trousers, but he took her hand in his and laced their fingers together. “Let me help you,” he said.

  When he had emptied each breast he moved up to kiss her, an open-mouthed kiss, to give her a taste of her own milk. Then he rolled her over and entered her as Eugene’s bull entered a cow, pushing at her from behind. This man who had taken Samuel’s milk. This man who had taken his mother from him.

  Samuel ran to tell his father. When the boy reached him, Eugene stopped to look at him, then bent back to his chore, felling yet another tree. Th
e saw, saw, saw of the blade teeth through wood. He had not left his work to find his son. “Where in hell were you?”

  “The man drank Mama’s milk,” Samuel told him.

  Eugene’s face took on the colour of blood, but he didn’t stop or run to find Libby and punish her and the man as Samuel hoped he would. So Samuel took it upon himself to bring his mother home. He ran back to the river, took off his clothes and folded them neatly as he had seen his father do when Eugene took his Saturday bath in the river. Then Samuel walked naked into the water as his father always did. He felt, first, his bare feet on river stone, then the frigid water engulfing his tiny body as the current dragged him beneath the black surface.

  When he sloshed his way out of that river onto the far shore, he followed his own body as he would follow his mother, observing himself from without: his own small figure seen from behind, walking first on river gravel, then on white mud, then on wet grass. A storm gathered over Little Mountain, conjuring mosquitoes from the moist air. They bit his face, his shoulders, his back, his thighs, but he didn’t—couldn’t—slap them away. The insects followed the trail of his breath backwards, until they reached his mouth, the exhalation of breath that both his mother’s and father’s ancestors believed was the intangible soul, whether called mystery or spiritus. But even the mosquitoes knew breath—spirit—led to flesh and blood.

  As Hannah mulled over Alex’s story, she reached down into the water to stroke the hump of one of the sockeye bucks, this old man who was too exhausted to take flight. She knew by the slowing of the fish’s tail he would soon die. The tail beat as the heart beat, continuously and without thought, until life ended. A smaller sockeye buck waited to the side, hoping for a chance to mate with the female once this bigger male was gone. Other males, already spent, rocked in the shallows, their tails flicking from time to time as their lives unravelled.

  “So the mystery took Samuel,” Hannah said. “Like you think it took Bran.”

  Alex paused before responding. “Like it took your mother.”

  “My mother.” Hannah looked to the far shore as she considered what he’d said.

  In that moment Alex thought he might bring her to some genuine understanding, but then she swung her scepticism around herself like a cloak. “You do understand how fucked all this sounds,” she said.

  “You know something’s going on,” Alex told her, “or you wouldn’t be here asking me about it. And hey, if you don’t believe me, go ask your grandfather. Stew knows more than he’s been telling you.”

  “Grandpa says the Wunks got Bran.”

  “The Wunks? Is that what Stew calls the mysteries?”

  Hannah tilted her head to appraise him. “Trying to get other people to believe Dennis’s stories isn’t going to make you believe them yourself, you know,” she said.

  Alex raised both hands, exasperated. He wouldn’t try to convince her, not now. She would see things for herself or she wouldn’t. Dennis had taught him that it was an elder’s job, a teacher’s job, to guide a kid into discovering things for himself, rather than cutting the lesson into little pieces and feeding it to him, as the teachers did in the white school system. When Alex had asked Dennis to teach him how to drive a car, Dennis threw him the keys to his Buick and said, “Go to it.” Since Alex had watched him drive, Dennis figured that was enough. Dennis was more or less right, Alex thought, though on his second day out he ran the car into a tree.

  “When you’re ready to hear me out,” Alex told her, “I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”

  “Tell me now.”

  Alex stood to skip a stone across the water. “You’re not ready.”

  Hannah found a rock and made a sullen attempt to skip it, but the stone plopped sadly into the river.

  “How could you grow up around this much water and not know how to skip stones?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. Dad left. Grandpa never got around to teaching me.”

  “Come on.” Alex waved her downriver.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the lake. You’ve got to learn how to skip stones and I don’t want to scare the fish.”

  He led Hannah past Dead Man’s Bend to the lakeshore. There, he picked up a stone and took her hand in both of his to position the rock in her palm. “Now throw with your whole arm, like this,” he said, and he showed her.

  Hannah flicked her wrist, holding the image of his throw in her mind. The rock landed with a splash.

  “No, don’t flick your wrist. Throw with your whole arm. Whip it!”

  She watched the way his grip simply let go in the last instant. Then she tried again, and the stone skipped once.

  “Here,” he said, and he picked up another rock. “You want a flat stone,” he said, “but one that’s rounded on the bottom, like a dinner plate.”

  One of the miniature plates from the tea set she had as a child, she thought. He sent it skimming across the water, three, four, five, six times, the circles spreading out, meeting each other.

  “And you want one with a bit of weight,” he said, bending to search for another. “Not so light that the wind will catch it. I like them just a little pointed on one end, something I can set my finger on.” He held just such a rock between index finger and thumb, his middle finger supporting the stone from beneath, then sent the rock blazing across the water. A dozen concentric circles melting one into the other.

  Hannah chose and threw a rock, but again it only skipped once before sinking into the river. She took a moment to remove a gumboot and stood on one foot to dump the water from it. Her sock was wet and as she removed it, Alex took her hand to help her balance, and she kept on holding it as she stepped, barefoot, back into her boot even though she no longer needed the steadying. She was both surprised and thrilled by the warmth of his hand.

  “Wet socks make me crazy,” she said, to explain herself as she at last removed her hand from Alex’s, but she saw from his half-smile that he had not bought that explanation. He bent to search for another stone to avoid looking at her. Hannah did the same, embarrassed now. She let one rock after another drop from her hand, just as he did. The smoothness of the rocks, tumbled by thousands of years of glacier movement and, more recently, the pounding of river water. The heat of his body beside hers.

  In two hands, she held out a flat stone the size of a dinner plate. “Here,” she said, joking to ease the uncertainty between them. “Skip this.” And Alex did, five times before it belly-flopped into the water. “Impressive,” she said.

  “Grandpa Dennis taught me to skip stones. He used to bring me down to the lake when things got bad at home. He didn’t say a word about Mom and Dad fighting, or about Dad after he left. We just skipped stones together. Somehow that made things better. I knew I would be okay.” He skipped the stone he had been holding. “I still come down here when things are rough. I can almost feel Grandpa Dennis skipping stones next to me.”

  Hannah weighed the rock in her hand. “I hear Mom sometimes, calling me.” She glanced at Alex to gauge his reaction before she added, “Other times I feel her in the room with me.”

  Alex nodded as if this was an everyday occurrence. “The spirits of suicides linger,” he said. “They are often confused, clinging to the world they abandoned, and can’t walk the spirit trail until they let go.” He paused. “Or their families let them go.”

  Hannah let the stone drop and reached for another. “Mom found a gold ring here one summer, a wedding band. It was stuck over the end of a bullet.”

  “Seriously?”

  Hannah had been standing close to her at the time and would have found the ring if her mother had not. She didn’t want to leave the beach after that, and sulked as she followed her mother home for supper. At the age of nine she had caught gold fever, the treasure hunter’s sickness.

  “At the dinner table that night we tried to figure out how the ring had gotten on that bullet. I mean, did they come together in the river, or did someone stick them together intentiona
lly? Grandpa thought the ring was an omen and maybe he was right. It was only a couple of months later that Mom got sick and Dad started disappearing on us. Then Mom left too.” Taking her own life.

  Hannah flung her stone across the water and this time it skipped and skipped and skipped, like moments ticking back in time, she thought, watching the circles spread away.

  “There, see, you’ve got it,” Alex said.

  Hannah grinned at him, the sudden thrill of this small success in her belly, a feeling she had thought she left behind in childhood, but here it was. When Alex held her gaze, she felt a flush rise from her chest to her face, her body revealing the secret she had been keeping from him. She turned away, to pick up another stone, and skipped it.

  Beside her, Alex sent his own stone shuddering across the water. “I would never leave like your dad did,” he said. “If I loved a woman and she was sick, I would stay.” Hannah glanced at him, found him watching her, and looked back to the ripples he had just created. He stooped down to pick up another stone and placed it in Hannah’s palm, this one so smooth that it seemed as alive as a hen’s egg. He cupped his hand over hers and once again held her gaze so she understood he had also experienced the shift in understanding, in expectation, between them. “The perfect stone,” he said, before letting go.

  — 10 —

  Madness from the Walls

  WIND PLUCKED LEAVES from the poplar on the front lawn and blew cool air in through the partly open window, bringing with it the sharp, leafy scent of a Shuswap autumn. Just a few more days and they’d be into October. Jesse closed the window but the morning chill remained. The house had never been properly insulated and, with its excessive roof overhang, had rarely been warm, even on summer evenings. This cramped living room was especially cold; Eugene Robertson had designed it that way in the days when a parlour was not only reserved for infrequent guests but for the family dead, who were displayed here until buried. The dead were still here, Jesse thought, present even in this windowsill, where much of the ancient putty had come loose and fallen out. Eugene Robertson had once kneaded linseed oil into this putty to keep it from drying as he worked it, and pressed it into place around the panes. He had left his mark on this window—the whorls of his fingers and thumbs—just as he had left his mark on this land, in the whorls of the ancient stumps of the trees he had felled, which still stood in the fields. Some were so huge it would take another hundred years for them to rot and to return to the soil they had sprung from.