“His ghost?” Hannah glanced at the nurse. “Grandpa, Bran is alive.”
“He may be remembering a dream,” said Annette, “or hallucinating from the morphine. Try not to take what he says seriously. They often confuse fantasy with reality.”
They, thought Hannah. “Can we just have a moment to ourselves?” she said to the nurse. “I need to talk to Grandpa.” She looked around at the other patients in the visiting area. “Privately.”
Annette nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“I’ve got to get home,” Stew said.
“You can’t go home. They won’t let you.” Dad won’t let you.
“I’ve got to go!” Stew pushed at the wheelchair, trying to get it to move. He slapped the tray, then tried to rip it off.
Annette said, “I’ll get him another dose of morphine. Take him back to his room and give him a really big bear hug so he feels safe.”
“To control him, you mean.”
“Yes.”
Hannah wheeled Stew back to his room, parked the chair beside the window and hugged her grandfather as Annette had asked, as Stew strained to remove the tray that confined him. “I’ve got to help Bran,” he cried. “I’ve got to get home!” He slapped the tray with each repetition: “Home! Home! Home!”
“Bran is okay,” she said, though of course he wasn’t. She knew it, and her father had already booked Bran’s appointment with his doctor. Stew fought her until she was nearly in tears. “Bran is okay,” she insisted again. “But I need to ask you something.” She hesitated before continuing. “Alex told me about Eugene Robertson’s wife. His Shuswap wife. He said her name was Libby.”
“Libby, yes.” Stew stopped struggling.
“Alex said the boy in the grave the construction crew dug up on the benchland was Eugene and Libby’s child. Is that possible, Grandpa? Dennis had told Alex a story about how their boy was buried with a nugget of gold in his hand, just like that boy in the grave.”
Stew didn’t seem surprised. “The boy’s name was Samuel.”
“Your great-grandfather’s name.”
“Eugene named him after his first son.” To remember him by, perhaps, or, more likely, to make amends.
“I had no idea Eugene and his Shuswap wife had a child together,” said Hannah. “You never told me.”
“I told you. You weren’t listening.”
“I don’t remember. I must have been very young at the time.”
Stew grunted. He wasn’t sure now what he had chosen to tell Hannah and Brandon—or Jesse—and what he had withheld from them. There had been a time when he believed some family stories were better left buried with their dead. He had refused to answer Jesse’s many questions about his own mother, and Hannah’s questions about hers after Elaine died.
“Samuel drowned,” he told Hannah. “Eugene never knew his final resting place. The Indians knew it but wouldn’t tell him. There was bad blood between Eugene and Libby, in the end.”
“From what Alex said it sounds like they had a pretty rocky marriage.”
“Oh, she was wild, that woman. The Indians were all wild then. They lived in the ground in burrows like animals until the fur traders came and taught them to build a decent cabin. Even once they lived above ground, any time anything important happened they ran back to the pit house to meet, and they held their winter gatherings there, underground.”
There, in the kekuli, as the Indians called it, they beat drums, sang and danced like the hooting pagans they were underneath their white women’s dresses and white men’s cowboy hats. Smoke billowed up from the central fire through the smoke hole that also served as the men’s entrance. A ladder—steps chopped into a log—ran down through this hole. The women entered through a doorway in the side of the pit house shored up with poles. These people had made these underground dwellings their homes over the winter for countless generations. Even in Eugene’s time, when the Indians spent their winters in a cabin, in summer most of them continued to live as they always had, in tents made from bark or tule mats the women wove themselves, or, if they could afford it, from canvas they bought from the trading post in Kamloops.
“Libby had an affair,” Stew told Hannah now, raising one bushy white eyebrow, “with an Indian across the river.”
“Alex told me. I expect Eugene left her after that, or kicked her out.”
“No, she stayed with Eugene for a time.” A short time.
“Eugene let her stay? Would he really allow her to live there after that?”
“They had a son,” Stew said. “He was too young to be without his mother. Eugene couldn’t work with him underfoot and he wouldn’t let Libby raise him across the river. But you’re right. Eugene wouldn’t put up with much from her after that. He didn’t allow Libby’s kin to visit at all, and he wouldn’t let Libby cross the river.”
“He imprisoned her?”
“No!” Stew shook his head. “He tried to keep his wife from wandering off on him, from taking his son.”
“Like a man fencing livestock,” Hannah said.
“Like a man desperate to save his family.”
Libby no longer sat with Eugene in the evenings in the tiny front room of the cabin, reading to him from the Bible. She sat, instead, in the kitchen, looking out the window at the river flowing, now exposed and naked, beyond ragged fields punctuated by the huge stumps of ancient cedars. The roots of windfalls grasped the air like eagle talons. When she turned in for the night, she slept with her son on his straw mattress. She had made her son’s room her own, bringing in the pine dresser drawers Eugene had made for her as a gift the previous Christmas, with wood he had cut from the property around the cabin. The scent of pine filled the room, a room she kept closed to her husband. She served Eugene his meals, kept house and watched over their son, but she wouldn’t look at her husband and only responded when she had no choice.
“You won’t see that Indian again,” Eugene had told her.
“I’ll do as I wish. You have no interest in me. What does it matter?”
“See him again and you won’t live here with me.”
“Then Samuel and I will live with my sister.”
“If you try to take Samuel from me I’ll take him back to my home country, off this continent. You’ll never see him again.” In that moment, in his anger and hurt at her betrayal, he believed the threat himself.
Hannah let go of her grandfather and sat on the hospital bed beside him. “But you said Eugene brought his wife over from the old country,” she said. “His English wife.”
“He did, after his son drowned in that frickin’ river.”
“Is that how it was? His son dies and he abandons Libby? Sends for his other wife?”
“Libby left him first.”
Hannah hesitated before asking the question that burned in her gut, not wanting to set her grandfather off again. “After Samuel told Eugene about his mother’s affair, after he crossed the river, did he act…” She paused. “Strange?” Like Brandon, she meant.
“Oh, yes! The boy spoke nothing but English from the time he was in diapers, then all of a sudden he started speaking Indian. One day he talked to his father in proper English; the next he couldn’t understand a word his father said, like all he’d ever known was his mother’s tongue. Eugene whipped him each time he talked that gibberish, but he wouldn’t stop.”
“Libby must have objected.”
“No, she understood what was at stake for herself and her son. She spanked him for speaking Indian too. Your mother could have learned a thing or two from her on that front. She spoiled you and Brandon.”
Stew had never lifted a hand to her, believing a man shouldn’t strike a girl child, but he had spanked Brandon many times after Jesse left, until her brother was too old to be taken over the knee.
“Samuel went strange in other ways too,” Stew told her. “Eugene found him standing in the river shallows, naked—naked in October, mind you—staring up at Little Mountain, at those pictures on the cliff,
like he was doing one of them Indian endurance rituals, like how they went off to live in the bush alone when they were just kids. Eugene figured his mother was teaching him things behind his back, getting him ready, even at that young age. When Eugene dragged Samuel out of the water, he just went right back in. Eugene spanked him for that too. When he went in a third time, disobeying his father, Eugene picked up a stick.”
Libby stepped from the house to shake out a rug and heard her son’s cry. Down by the river her husband held Samuel’s thin arm with one hand and hit him with a stick on the back, the backside, the legs, over and again.
Libby dropped the rug and ran down the cattle path in her bare feet. When she reached them, she yanked the boy from Eugene’s grasp. He had stopped crying, his face blank in shock, his bare skin lined with bloody whip marks. His eyes looked through her as she lifted him into her arms and held his small, cold, bleeding body against her breast.
Eugene shook with spent rage, the stick clenched in his stinging hand. He looked up at Libby and for the first time in weeks she met his eyes.
“The boy wouldn’t leave off the water,” Eugene said. “He kept going in. I feared he’d drown.”
Samuel whimpered in Shuswap when Eugene spoke and looked to his mother for reassurance, having clearly not understood a word his father said. How could a child so easily lose the language he’d been born into?
“You stop that now,” Eugene said. “You speak decent English or I’ll give you another licking.”
Libby’s glance silenced her husband, and she cocked an ear to listen to her son. Her face took on the haunted look of those in the first stunned moments of mourning.
“What’s he gibbering on about?” Eugene asked. “Tell me!”
Samuel swam a tiny cupped hand towards the river, mimicking a salmon in flight, and his mother at last translated for her husband. “He says, ‘Let me go.’ He says, ‘Let me go back to the river.’ ”
“Bran!” Stew cried. He wrenched the tray on his wheelchair and, when he couldn’t detach it, pounded it with both fists. Hannah pressed the button for the nurse and almost immediately heard the squeak, squeak, squeak of shoes. A nurse Hannah didn’t recognize arrived. “At it again, eh, Stew?” she said. She turned to Hannah. “We’ll have to sedate him.”
“No!” Stew cried. “I need to get home! I’ve got to help Brandon!”
“Are the drugs really necessary?” Hannah asked the nurse. “Isn’t there some other way to get him to calm down?”
“I’m sorry,” said the nurse. “He needs rest, and so do the other patients.” She administered the drug and held his hand, murmuring reassurances to him until he calmed. Then she nodded at Hannah and left the room.
Hannah hugged her grandfather, laying her cheek against the old man’s prickly stubble. “Don’t let Bran out of your sight,” Stew said. “That thing will take Bran with it back to the river, like it took Samuel.”
“Like it took Mom,” Hannah said.
Stew looked up at her. “Yes,” he said. His shoulders heaved once in a sigh or a sob, but he didn’t say anything more. Hannah felt his body relax and then slump, as he sank into the drug as if into river water.
— 12 —
The Dance
GINA WAS DANCING in her kitchen to a collection of ’90s tunes on her iPod Shuffle when Alex entered the house without knocking. She saw him but didn’t stop. Arms in the air, jangling her bracelets, gyrating her hips, shaking out her long black hair, she felt like dancing.
Alex walked around the kitchen island to avoid bumping into her. He helped himself to a Pepsi from the fridge and leaned back against the counter to watch. “What are you doing?” he asked, grinning.
“Working off some stress,” she said.
“Well, stop it. It’s just wrong, like watching your auntie stripping at some bar.”
Gina pulled out her earbuds, pocketed them, and raised an eyebrow to Alex. “Now you know how I feel when I see you dance, Coyote.”
Alex lifted his can in a salute, but Gina knew he hated the nickname.
“Does all this dancing have anything to do with Jesse coming home?” he asked.
“Shush.” Gina glanced down the hall towards the den, where Grant watched TV, another damn football game.
“Trouble in paradise?”
Gina didn’t answer.
“Huh. So Grant is pissed that Jesse’s back home. Imagine that.”
“He’s pissed I’m helping Jesse with Bran and Hannah.” Gina ran herself a glass of water and leaned against the kitchen sink to drink it. “There is nothing going on between Jesse and me.”
“Not yet,” Alex said.
“That kind of talk is only going to cause me trouble.”
Alex held a hand out as if to protect himself from her anger. “Okay, okay. I was just joking around. So what’s going on? You didn’t ask me over to watch you dance.”
“No.” Gina rubbed her forehead. “Listen, Alex, you’ve got to tell Bran Dennis’s stories are just that—stories. They aren’t real.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
Gina studied his face. Did Alex really believe them? “Then stay the hell away from Bran until he gets treatment.”
Alex leaned across the kitchen island that stood between them. “Gina, if Grandpa Dennis was right, if his stories about the mystery are true, then Bran’s life is at stake. Hannah and Jesse need to understand what’s happening. You need to let them know the mystery is real.”
She waved a hand in exasperation. “But it’s not!”
“How can you say that? You saw the mystery yourself.”
Gina made a face. “I don’t know what I saw.”
“The boy,” he reminded her. “On the water.”
That was years earlier, just before Elaine fell ill. She and Jesse had met in the bush along the reserve side, thinking no one would see them there. Their lovemaking was always quick, furtive and electric, so different from the sex she shared with Grant, who, even in their most intimate moments, felt the need to take command. Afterwards, Jesse and Gina walked together to the lake, steps apart, not holding hands, as if they were only neighbours who happened to meet up for a chat. Gina followed in Jesse’s footsteps until he turned to take her arm, pressing a kiss on her that she didn’t return at first, out of shyness. Yet there was no one to see them except, perhaps, a fisherman out on the lake near the estuary.
But then Gina saw the boy, standing on the river near Dead Man’s Bend, presumably on a boulder. Naked. A boy from the reserve, she thought, and then he vanished. He just disappeared. Or perhaps he’d never been there at all. She asked Jesse, “Did you see that?”
“What?”
He looked upriver, then back at her.
“I thought I saw a boy watching us.”
“Well if he is, there’s nothing much to see, is there?”
Jesse held out his hand and Gina took it, and together they strolled the rest of the way down to the lake. That was one of the few moments of real happiness she remembered from that time. She had thought that with that public display of affection, Jesse was making a commitment, that he could, eventually, leave his wife, that they had a future together. And perhaps with him she would have the children that Grant couldn’t give her. She turned back once to see if the boy reappeared. As she faced the sun, the lines of spiderwebs criss-crossing the poplars above their heads suddenly manifested, a network of tangled connections.
Maybe the boy on the water had been nothing more than a shadow, a thought that had escaped the well of her mind, the wish for a son. Still, the memory unsettled her. The thought that she projected her desires onto reality in this way left her feeling unhinged.
She shook her head to dispel the idea. “Alex, Dennis’s story about the mystery is just a tall tale.”
“You have no respect for the old ways, for our elders.”
She grunted. “Our elders?” She leaned so close to Alex she could smell the cigarette smoke on him. “If my elders wanted my resp
ect they should have acted a hell of a lot differently.”
“Christ, Gina, that’s harsh. I hope you don’t talk to the kids you work with like that.”
“No, of course not.” She pushed back from him. “I’m sorry. Something about this situation with Bran has stirred up old memories, feelings. Anger, I guess. What Hannah is going through—she reminds me of myself at that age.”
“You work with kids dealing with that kind of shit every day.”
“I know. This just feels…different. Personal.”
“Because of Jesse.”
“Because of Elaine.”
Alex shook his head. “You weren’t responsible for her death.”
“She took her life, Alex, while I was having an affair with her husband. The whole community blamed Jesse and me.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“You were too young to notice the way people avoided me. The way they looked at me. The way some still do.” She glanced towards the den at the end of the hall, from which the voices of the sports commentators rumbled, unintelligible. The den was Grant’s fortress, a room she rarely entered. The garden with its tangled beds and bird feeders was hers. As the weather grew colder, she had no place of her own, nowhere to go when Grant’s silence weighed too heavily on her.
“Gina, if you really want to help Bran and Hannah, you need to tell Hannah and Jesse that Grandpa Dennis’s stories about that mystery are true. For god’s sake, back me up.”
Gina snorted and shook her head. “You can’t help Bran,” she said. “He needs medical care, treatment. Time to recover.”
“He’s not sick—he’s been taken over!”
“No. You need to back off. Bran won’t get better unless he understands he’s sick. You’ve got to stop supporting his delusions.”
“They’re not delusions!”
Gina pointed at Alex. “Stay away from him.”
Alex stepped back. “What the hell is going on with you?”
Gina stared at him, then put her earbuds back in, turned up the volume on her iPod and twirled away, closing her eyes, lifting her arms. She stomped the rhythm of the music into the kitchen floor, into the earth beneath it.
The Spawning Grounds Page 9
