“The last couple of weeks have been shit. Grandpa picked up pneumonia in that fucking hospital. They’ve got Bran drugged up so he won’t try to leave his room. Anyone would go mental in that place.”
“Is Stew okay?”
“No, he’s not okay. He’s old and he’s sick. His doctor told us to prepare ourselves. He likely won’t last the winter.”
“I’m so sorry, Hannah.”
“Why didn’t you come see me?” She realized she sounded angry. She was angry, but whether it was with Alex or Jesse or Brandon or Stew she wasn’t sure.
“Jesus, Hannah,” Alex said. “Your dad doesn’t want me in your house.”
“Maybe you remind him of himself.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, you have way more in common with Jesse than you realize, Coyote.”
The crow above them shook itself, its feathers ruffled like an old man’s tattered coat. “Don’t call me Coyote,” Alex said. “I never liked that.”
“Hey, if the shoe fits.”
“Have you seen me with another girl since I got back?”
No, she hadn’t, but she feared it.
“Did you ask to meet me just to guilt me out?” he said.
“No.”
“What then?”
“I need to find a way to help Bran.” Hannah looked down, running a finger along the fish carved into the rock. “This thing, this mystery—there must be a way to get rid of it. You told me Libby tried to save her son. What did she do?” When Alex didn’t immediately respond, she added, “You did say you would tell me the rest of Libby and Eugene’s story.”
“When you were ready.”
“I am ready.”
Alex studied her face.
She took his hand. “Please.”
Alex let go to rub both hands across his knees, but he nodded. “All right,” he said. “A story.” From the dead pine above, the crow peered down at them, as if listening.
Eugene had forbidden Libby from taking Samuel to a winter gathering in her grandfather’s kekuli. Eugene feared she would leave him. He feared she and Samuel would catch the contagion that had spread up the rivers with the returning salmon, as the people moved camp to fish. A terrible spirit had taken possession of the isolated valley as winter hit, sickening many of the children and several of the elders. But Libby stole Samuel away, riding bareback on her mare across the shallows with the boy, intent on saving her son from what was, in her mind, a more immediate threat.
To Libby, entering the side door of the kekuli was like entering the warm embrace of her grandmother. Here was a familiar place of winter gatherings, where her extended family beat their drums and sang and danced, where the sacred stories were not only told but relived. But Samuel cried when his mother brought him inside the dark mound. Her grandfather, an old shaman, played peek-a-boo with Samuel from behind his mask to jolly him out of his terror, but the old man only managed to frighten the child further.
Libby had once seen her grandfather put on his mask to find the lost soul of a baby who had become ill. He reeled the child’s spirit back on his song as if it were a fish hooked on a line. He had inhaled the child’s spirit into his own body, breathing deeply and shuddering as it settled into him. Then he’d leaned over the baby, to push the soul back into the boy with his own breath. Libby had watched the child awaken into himself and cry out, as if in relief. Perhaps her grandfather could do the same for her son.
He inspected the boy’s face, pulling up the lid of each eye to peer into the child’s pupils. But instead of preparing himself to journey down the spirit trail, he directed her to join the singing and to watch the dancers.
“If I’m here much longer, my husband will look for me,” Libby told her grandfather. “Please help my son.”
But the old man only pointed again at the three young men who danced in the flickering shadows at the far side of the pit house. “Watch now,” he told her.
Two of the men had wrapped a rope around the waist of the third and held the rope taut between them. The man in the centre whirled so that the rope wrapped ever tighter around him. He let out a cry and threw his arms wide, and he was in two, his legs dancing separately at the side of his torso. His legs continued to move away from his body, dancing down the length of the rope as his upper body danced down the rope in the opposite direction. A man cut in two.
Samuel leaned into Libby, terrified at the vision.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. She had seen the dance before. “He will come back together as one. Watch now.”
The man’s legs danced back to the centre of the rope, just as the man’s body did, turning and turning until his hips and stomach joined back together. The two other men dropped the rope and the dancer was whole again. Her grandfather patted her hand, and Libby understood why he had asked her to watch this dance. This was her son’s nature and perhaps her own nature now: like this man, Samuel was not of one spirit, but two, of two worlds.
“The mystery has control of the boy,” he told her. “I may have been able to help him if you had brought him to me sooner, but Samuel’s spirit is already well down the spirit trail. I can walk that path only so far. And no one can walk to its end and return. We only make that journey after we die.”
“Then how do I save Samuel?” she asked. “How do I bring him home?”
“If there is a way,” he said finally, “the boy would know. Ask the mystery within him.”
“He told us to let him go back to the river.”
“Samuel is too young,” her grandfather told her. “The mystery can’t complete his mission through him. He wants to go home. If you take the boy to the river, the mystery will release the boy, in the way your husband lets fish go when he doesn’t want them, when they’re too old or too small. He’ll slip from the boy and swim away into the river.”
“And if Samuel’s spirit doesn’t return to his body?”
“Samuel will drown.”
“I won’t let my son die.”
“Are you willing to walk the spirit trail yourself to lead him back home?”
Libby didn’t give him an answer. Her grandfather didn’t expect one. He knew the depths of a mother’s love.
The old man gently smoothed the hair on Samuel’s head. His hand smelled of smoke and cedar. And from the smoke of a darkened corner, Libby’s grandmother appeared, dressed as an eagle, holding an eagle feather, to sing and to dance in circles around the fire, swooping, lifting and descending as an eagle would.
“My wife is a powerful shaman,” the old man told Samuel. “She gains her power from her guardian, the eagle. The eagle soars so high, she can see the whole river of our lives: what’s come before, what’s here now, what’s ahead for us. She warns us to what’s coming, so we can ready ourselves. These are the gifts the eagle gives my wife. These are the gifts my wife brings to our people. She dreams the future. She tells us we’re entering a time of terrible change. Watch now.”
The old woman raised her arms and downy eagle feathers manifested from the black above their heads to flutter down like snow. The feathers went on falling as long as she danced. Libby looked up through smoke and falling eagle feathers to the ladder that led to the hole at the centre of the ceiling, the men’s entrance to the pit house, to see her husband’s face looking down.
Hannah looked up to the crow that watched them from the tree above. “So Libby would have to die to save her son. Did she? Did Libby die for him?”
Alex shook his head. “She didn’t get the chance. That day Eugene found her at the gathering inside her family’s kekuli, he dragged Samuel out and told Libby to go live with her sister. He thought she was poisoning Samuel with the old ways.”
“But she wouldn’t have left her son, would she?”
“No. She set up camp outside the cabin, in the yard. She was afraid her son would find a way to go back to the river when Eugene left him unattended, that he would drown before she could bring his soul home.”
Libb
y fell sick on her bed of balsam within her tent, and Eugene found her there, in the early morning light, delirious in fever. As Samuel slept, and so that Libby would not infect their son, Eugene carried his wife through the ravaged forest. He ferried her across the river in his cottonwood dugout and took her to one of the cabins on the other side. Within the cabin, he placed her on a makeshift bed made of balsam boughs, covered her with wet sheets to bring down the fever and left her in the care of her sister, a woman too ill herself to stand.
The bodies of the smallpox victims were strewn about the encampment, some inside their cabins, some without, some down at river’s edge, where they lay half in, half out of water, their bodies dusted with snow. Many had crawled to the river, to drink perhaps, or to feel the cool water on their skin, to relieve the itch and quell the fever consuming them from within. Eugene found a young girl alive there, murmuring in delirium. He carried her to one of the cabins and then went back to check for others. A boy of ten. A woman of perhaps thirty, her face lined by starvation. He helped the few survivors to their homes, made them comfortable, started fires, brought them tea and a few rations from their stores. Even Eugene’s heart was moved by what had befallen the people.
In the Robertson cabin, Samuel woke to the cold. The fire had gone out. Above him, he saw the face of a corpse, its flesh white, wet and rotting like that of a dead salmon. A cannibal spirit, but the spectre didn’t frighten him. The cannibal’s face was familiar from the other place, the place of stories. The cannibal waved a bony hand at him to get out of bed. Samuel left his bed and followed, bare feet padding across the icy floor of the cabin. His father wasn’t there. He pushed a chair over to the window and climbed on it to look outside. The cannibal peered outside with him and shook his mangy head. Samuel’s mother wasn’t in her camp in the yard.
The cannibal waved towards the door, and Samuel opened it and stepped outside. He looked up at the cannibal for direction, and the spirit nodded towards the river. Samuel followed him across the frozen, snow-covered mud of the potato field and on through the rubble of trees his father had felled. His bare feet grew numb from the cold, but still he followed the corpse as it ambled ahead of him.
“Where are we going?” Samuel asked the cannibal.
The creature’s teeth and the bones of its jaws gleamed from beneath its receding flesh. “Home,” he said.
“Samuel drowned,” said Hannah.
Alex nodded. “The mystery went back to the river.”
When Eugene returned to his cabin, his son was gone. He searched the yard, the bush, the water, and found his son’s body at the bend in the river.
Whatever Eugene had felt in that terrible moment was not part of the story Alex’s family had passed on. Alex imagined Eugene would have knelt by Samuel for some time there, on shore, before carrying his son’s body home. He would have built a coffin, a tiny coffin made of rough pine boards he had prepared himself. He would have placed the coffin on the kitchen table, lined it with the blanket Libby had made for Samuel out of rabbit pelts and tucked his son into this soft bed. Then Eugene would have sat at that table before his son’s body, put his forehead on his hands and cried.
Libby woke late in the day, her fever broken. Around her, the cabin was alive in evening light. A woman keened some distance away, a mourning song. Her son. Her son. Libby rose, her legs unsteady, and gathered the sheet around her. She hobbled barefoot through the bodies of the dead and across the shallows at the estuary, where river met lake, and then over the logs and stumps that littered her husband’s field, stopping every few minutes to rest, her heart beating in her throat. As she reached the cabin, the sun slid behind the mountain, leaving them all in shadow. The red kitchen door was barred from within, so she thumped her fist upon it. “Eugene,” she called.
When she got no response, she limped to the front of the house and cupped her hands against the glass to look in the window. The room glowed with lantern light. An open casket sat on the table and Samuel lay inside. She slapped the window and cried out, but Eugene wouldn’t acknowledge her, his shoulders shuddering as he wept. Libby could not reach her child through the window, she could not hold him to say goodbye, and so she pressed a hand to the glass and sang. She cast the song into the air in the way she would have thrown a rope into the water, to rescue her drowning son.
The crow lifted from its perch, and Hannah watched it fly across the river and disappear into the mist.
“I saw Bran’s ghost,” she told Alex. “That day with you in the kitchen.”
Alex nodded. “Then he may not have started his journey south. He could still find his way back to himself.”
“But how do I get the mystery to leave?”
Alex echoed what Libby’s grandfather had told her. “Ask Brandon,” he said. “Ask the mystery.”
“And if he doesn’t want to go?”
“Then the story will play out.”
“Bran will die.”
“And this valley will drown. Like it did before.”
“You really believe this is true, Alex?”
Alex nodded, and reached out for her hand.
— 21 —
Dark Water
THE NURSE OPENED the door to Brandon’s hospital room and Hannah stepped in. Brandon sat in a chair by the window, staring out at the bare trees in the snow-covered park and the small lake beyond. His face was puffy and sullen from the medication. His shoulders were hunched, like those of an old man, and Hannah felt chilled by the similarity to her grandfather, and to her mother all those years ago.
Jesse had left to make the hour-long drive into Kamloops for supplies that morning. He had made a point of joining her for each of her visits over the last week, worrying she would fuel Bran’s delusions with more of Alex’s stories. This was her first chance to see her brother alone since she’d talked to Alex on Eugene’s Rock.
“Bran,” Hannah said, from the door. He swung his head towards her voice. He didn’t look directly at her, but at the ceiling above. She whispered, “Are you in there?” Or was she talking only to this mystery, his illness? She hesitated, then spoke up so he would hear her. “I’ve come to ask you something,” she said. “How do I help you? How do I bring you home?”
Brandon blinked at the fluorescent light above her head. If he had heard her, he didn’t seem to understand. “Brandon!” she shouted, but she didn’t move any closer. “Tell me what I need to do. How do I fix this?”
Her brother startled at her raised voice and looked directly at her but seemed puzzled and afraid. Then his gaze travelled back to the light above. “Where are you?” she asked him.
When he still didn’t answer, Hannah slid down the hospital wall to sit on the floor, her face in her hands. After a time she heard a light thump and looked up to see that a hummingbird had hit the window and was now fluttering against the glass, apparently bent on attacking a reflection of itself. Hannah stood to watch the bird. Snow drifted down over the landscape behind it. Bran had turned towards the movement at the window too. The bird flew off, only to return, to beat against the glass as if it, and not Brandon, was inside a cage. Its shadow quivered frantically on the hospital wall.
She had to get out. She had to get out! Hannah tried the door, forgetting that the nurse had to open it from the outside.
“Hannah,” Brandon said. She turned to find him looking around the room as if in an attempt to locate her. The hummingbird’s wings vibrated on the surface of the glass behind him. “Hannah.” His voice sounded hoarse and hollow. Then he found her at the door, her hand on the doorknob. “Hannah, wait.”
“Brandon?” she asked. Is that you? She crossed the room to put a hand on his arm, but she felt nothing of her brother’s presence. He was as absent as her mother had been, though here his body was, sitting in front of her.
“Help me,” he said. “Please, help me.” His accent was that of a native Shuswap speaker. This was not her brother.
The hummingbird flew off and Hannah pulled her hand away. “Wh
at do you want me to do?”
“Take me home.”
“They won’t let you out.”
“Help me get to the river.”
“The river.”
“Please,” he said. “The medicine they give me makes me slow and stupid. I can’t do anything here. Let me go back to the river. I’ll release the boy. I’ll go home.”
Let me go back to the river, Samuel had told his mother.
“Will Bran come back when you’re gone? Will he be safe?”
“I will release the boy.”
Hannah studied her brother and then stood, looking towards the door. “Christ,” she said with despair and resignation, and wrapped a robe around him. “Let’s go.”
Hannah knocked, and after a minute or so a nurse’s face appeared at the small window and she opened the door for them. “Taking Brandon to the visiting area?” she asked as Hannah helped her brother walk through.
“Yes,” she said, but after the nurse left, she steered her brother to the elevator. Hannah guided her brother past the nurses’ station and pushed the elevator button. The attending nurse called, “Taking Brandon for a walk outside?”
Hannah didn’t respond.
“You’ll need to sign him out.”
“Like hell I do,” Hannah muttered under her breath.
The nurse stood as Hannah and Brandon entered the elevator. “How long do you intend to be out with him?” she called. “You’re not checking him out, are you? You’ll have to talk to his doctor.”
Hannah pushed the button for ground level.
“Hey, wait!” the nurse shouted, but the elevator doors closed.
Abby barked from her tether line as Hannah helped Brandon out of the truck. She wrapped him more tightly in the robe they’d brought from the hospital and got him to slip on the Crocs Jesse had left by the back door. As she walked him to the river, she regretted not grabbing coats for Brandon and herself as well to protect them from the cold and light snow.
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