The Spawning Grounds

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Hannah realized she must be drowning, her mind conjuring visions as it suffocated. Yet she was aware of the flow of the rapids above, the river stones below. The cold. The cold. Hannah felt her body turn in the water, pushed upward and carried along by eddies. I’m dying, she thought. I’m already dead. Above her the choppy water was a broken mirror, each shard reflecting her image back to her: a thousand, a hundred thousand selves. Hannah was each of these incarnations, and yet she was separate from them also. She was both a series of individuals caught, static, within time, and a continuum. Hannah chose a moment and rose up, her soul expanding, to become that reflection, to become the rough, troubled water, the electric air and the grieving, weeping sky.

  On the far shore, at Dead Man’s Bend, Brandon lay on a bed of glistening river-rounded stone as Gina kneeled beside him and attempted to bring him back to life. Jesse stood behind them both, hugging himself, a look of panic and sorrow on his face. All around them raindrops, thick as fingertips, were suspended in the air, caught in the instant of their fall. Hanging directly above, like a chandelier, a lightning bolt was frozen in place. Thick, black-blue and green clouds draped low, heavy in electrical charge and moisture. Only the eagle, in flight, was in motion, circling and circling, crying eye-EYE!

  Hannah watched the eagle spiral down, then looked back to Dead Man’s Bend. There was Stew, standing behind Jesse, with his hand on his son’s shoulder. He nodded at Hannah and pointed upriver to the shore on the Robertson side, by the spawning grounds.

  Hannah. It was her mother’s voice, reverberating as if in a chamber.

  Hannah.

  “Mom?”

  Hannah searched the shore, but all she saw at first was shadow, a hazy dark figure. She blinked and squinted and the figure became the silhouette of a woman. Then the woman took on colour, dimension, and became her mother. Elaine was bent over the sandy rocks on shore, searching through them, dressed in the sloppy sweatpants and T-shirt she had worn day in and day out in her final weeks, the clothes she had drowned in.

  Hannah took a step forward, realized she was walking on water and faltered. She looked down to find a child’s body, her own from childhood. These ten-year-old hands, these small, clumsy feet slapping the surface of the water as if in play.

  She took another step, then another, and, gaining confidence, she strode to shore. When she reached her mother, Elaine didn’t acknowledge her. “It’s got to be here,” she said to herself.

  Hannah looked down at the sand where Elaine turned over stones. “What are you looking for?”

  Her mother mumbled to herself, as if Hannah was another figment of her imagination.

  “Mom, it’s me.” Hannah touched her shoulder and her mother shrugged as if dispelling a horsefly.

  “It’s got to be here,” Elaine said.

  “I missed you,” Hannah told her. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Elaine lifted another stone, oblivious to Hannah’s presence.

  “There are so many things I want to tell you,” Hannah said. “So many things I want to ask.”

  “Ask,” Elaine whispered, echoing her.

  “Yes!” Hannah stepped in front of her mother, but Elaine looked through her. She bent and turned another stone.

  “You used to play with Brandon and me. Do you remember? You used to chase us through the laundry hanging on the line. You sprayed us with the hose when you watered the garden. Then you didn’t play with us anymore.”

  Hannah took her mother’s hand to stop her searching and Elaine looked down at their joined fingers.

  “I thought it was me. I thought Brandon and I were too much for you. Grandpa told us that. He told us to go play outside, to leave you alone.”

  Elaine half-turned to her.

  “But it wasn’t me, was it? Your leaving had nothing to do with me.”

  Elaine’s attention focused downriver, and Hannah turned to Stew, to Jesse and Gina with Bran’s body at Dead Man’s Bend. On the opposite shore, on the reserve side, she saw herself, a young woman, her body lying half out of the water, floodwaters rising to her waist. Alex was there in the mud with her, dragging Hannah’s body away from the river. He had jumped into the water for Hannah. He had risked his life to save her. All around her the suspended raindrops were so thick they appeared to be a transparent curtain, a waterfall, obscuring the view.

  “I wanted to save you,” Hannah told her mother. “I wanted to fix you, make you better, bring you home, but I couldn’t.” I couldn’t, she thought, realizing the truth of what she was telling herself. She couldn’t bring her mother home then, any more than she could bring Brandon home now. It was his journey to make. She had her own.

  Hannah saw the flash of gold at her mother’s feet and reached down to pluck it from the wet sand and gravel. A ring, a gold wedding band. She offered it to her mother. “Is this it? Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Elaine looked at Hannah as if seeing her there for the first time. The confusion lifted from her face. “The ring,” she said. “We found it here.”

  “You found it here.” The ring had been slipped over a bullet and had been fixed there by grit and time. This was the same ring—Hannah recognized the jeweller’s marks—though it no longer held the bullet.

  Elaine took the ring from her and slipped it on her finger. She looked directly at Hannah. “I’ve been looking for this for so long.” She held out her hand to admire the ring and turned it on her finger. “Now I can go.”

  Elaine stepped onto the river and then headed downstream, walking on the surface of the water.

  “Mom, wait!”

  Hannah tried to follow, but the river swallowed her and pulled her down, even as her mother walked on. “Mom!” She struggled to keep her head above water. “Mom! Wait!” Her mother reached Dead Man’s Bend, where Stew waited for her. They both looked back once before rounding the bend. Then they were gone. The eagle circled and cried, eye-EYE! and time moved on. The storm broke overhead. The raindrops, suspended the moment before, fell in a torrent. Hannah sank below the surface of river water.

  “Hannah.” A man’s voice, familiar, shouting to make himself heard over the thunder of rain and river water. His voice was desperate. “Hannah, come back to me.”

  Hannah panicked, struggling towards the surface of consciousness as she would from a nightmare. She felt pressure on her chest, then again, and again, and then a kiss, lips on her mouth. No, he was breathing his own air into her. He was forcing life back into her. It hurt. Surfacing, she coughed up river water and woke into herself, into an aching chest, into stinging lungs, into biting cold.

  Alex removed his hands from Hannah’s chest and turned her on her side, to drain the fluid from her lungs. “Jesus, Hannah,” he said. “I thought I lost you.”

  He lay beside her, spooning her as she coughed the water from her lungs, both half in, half out of the water. Rain pelted down on them, as the floodwaters rose. The air felt liquid, as if she was still submerged.

  “Can you understand me?” he asked. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes. An asshole.”

  She felt him laugh a little against her. “Do you know who you are?”

  “An idiot.”

  “Good. You’re okay then.” He rubbed a cheek into her wet hair. “Hannah, I thought you were gone.” He squeezed her and spoke into her ear, his breath the only warmth against her body. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  “I’m so cold.”

  He shifted her so that she was in his arms. “The river’s rising fast. We’ve got to get out of here. Can you stand?”

  “I think so.” Then she remembered. Gina and Jesse and Bran at Dead Man’s Bend. “Bran.”

  “He’s across the river. The floodwaters are so high I’m not sure we can cross.” He paused. “Hannah, I don’t think he made it.”

  Together they looked through the curtain of rain at Gina and Jesse both huddled over Bran’s body lying prone in the mud. Jesse’s shoulders shuddered and his head was
in his hands. He was sobbing.

  “I’ve got to get across.” She dragged herself on hands and knees up the slick bank and coughed up more of the water from her lungs. With Alex’s help, she struggled to her feet, slipping before she finally gained ground.

  Alex raised his voice to be heard over the torrent of rain and rush of river water. “We’ll need a stick if we’re going to try it.” He rummaged in the nearby bush as Hannah shivered, waiting for him. He came back with two makeshift walking sticks. “Let’s go,” he said.

  They kept their heads down as they pushed through the wind and stinging rain on their way to the shallows. Alex stepped into the river first, the water up to his thighs. “Come on,” he shouted, holding out his hand. She took it and, hand in hand, they pushed their way through the water. At the centre point of the shallows, the rush of water was too much. Hannah slid and fell, gulping water. Alex pulled her back up and wrapped an arm around her. “Hold on to me,” he shouted. She wrapped her arms around his neck and, with one hand around her waist and the other on the stick, Alex dragged them both through the floodwaters to the opposite shore.

  The water had risen nearly to the top of the eroded bank that rimmed the pasture. Hannah scrambled up out of the water and onto the muddy bank. Alex followed, splashing through the muck and rain. Rain fell so thick Hannah felt she was swimming through it, breathing it, drowning in it.

  Gina stood as Hannah and Alex sloshed through muddy water to reach them. “Thank god you’re all right,” she said. She took Hannah’s arm and, together with Alex, led her to Jesse and her brother. Beneath the barbed-wire fence that hung over the bend, Jesse held Brandon and rocked him. Hannah was sure her brother was dead. She understood why Jesse rocked him, why Brandon had rocked himself within his blue room. She rocked herself now. “Oh, Brandon,” she said.

  But then her brother’s face turned to the sound of her voice. “Hannah,” he said.

  She put both hands to her mouth. “You’re okay!”

  Bran pointed past her. “Look!” This time Hannah saw the boy when he did. A Shuswap kid about Brandon’s age, naked, standing in the middle of the swollen river, standing on the rough, muddied water, as if it were uneven ground.

  — 33 —

  Dead Man’s Bend

  AS JESSE DROVE Hannah and Brandon home from emergency, the rain still fell so hard the wipers couldn’t keep up, and he had to peer out the truck window to see the road in front of him. A passing car threw a wash of water over them. Lightning hit the fields on either side, and static crashed into the music on the Chevy’s radio with each strike. Jesse clicked off the radio. “Christ,” he said. “When is this going to let up?”

  “Not until it’s done,” said Brandon.

  Jesse laughed, thinking he had stated the obvious.

  “Until what is done?” Hannah asked him.

  The set of Brandon’s mouth was grim. “We shouldn’t go back home,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Where do you suggest we go?” Jesse asked him. Brandon didn’t answer. He looked straight ahead, at the wash of water pouring down the windshield, obscuring the landscape around them.

  They drove on. Trees along the side of the road thrashed back and forth. Jesse dodged one that fell in front of them, then struggled to control the truck in the raging wind. The driver of an approaching truck flashed his lights and honked as they met, apparently trying to tell him something, but Jesse kept going, driving through the stream of water that covered the road. The rain fell faster than it could drain.

  Alex was standing at the red kitchen door under the roof overhang when they finally arrived in the farmyard. He held his jacket over his head as he sloshed towards them through the pool that covered the lane. Large drops pelted the water around him as if he was under fire. Hannah opened the truck door.

  “We’ve got to go now,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I couldn’t get back across—the river was too swollen. I waited inside. Hope you don’t mind.” He looked at Jesse.

  Jesse leaned over Bran to talk to Alex. “Thank you for helping to find Brandon—and for saving my daughter’s life.” He paused. “I’m sorry about the things I said to you in the past.”

  “We can worry about all that later,” said Alex. “Right now we’ve got to go.”

  “Go where?” Hannah asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere on higher ground. The hall.” He pointed at the community hall on the hillside above them. “Grant’s going from house to house, warning people in the valley to leave. The logjam at the narrows has started to collapse. It isn’t going to hold much longer.”

  Above the remains of the burned bridge, muddied stormwater had broken the banks and threatened to burst the log dam completely. Water already churned muddy and thick with debris into Gina’s pasture and had begun to flow into Stew’s fields as well. “Shit,” said Hannah. “Spice.” The mare was struggling to maintain her footing in the rushing water within her small pasture at river’s edge. “We’ve got to get that horse out of there.”

  “Where’s Gina?” Alex asked. “Can’t she take care of it?”

  Jesse said, “After she followed us into emergency, she headed back to her apartment.”

  “I’ve got to get Spice,” Hannah said. She got out of the truck and ran through rain to the gate. Across the road, Spice had fallen and was now sliding backwards along the fenceline as the current tugged her along.

  “Hannah,” Alex called. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “She’ll die if I don’t help her,” Hannah called back.

  Alex splashed through the water behind Hannah for a few yards, then stopped. “Hannah, don’t. There’s no time. Look.” The torrent had undercut the bank at the entrance to the burned bridge and a chunk of gravel road slid into the water. The river was about to overwhelm the logjam at the narrows, threatening to flood the valley.

  Hannah turned back to Alex. “Go!” she shouted. She nodded at the yard of the farmhouse. “Get Abby into the truck and head up to the hall with Jesse and Brandon. I’ll ride Spice there.”

  “I’ll give you a hand.”

  “No. Spice doesn’t know you. There’s nothing you can do.” When she saw Alex hesitate, she called out again. “Go!”

  Hannah climbed through the fence and waded to the horse. The mare was still down, backed into the corner of the fence where the ground had given way. Her back legs were stuck. She was without a halter and Hannah had no rope. She looked around in desperation. By the time she got to the barn and back, the horse would be swept into the river.

  Hannah slid her belt from her jeans and looped it around the horse’s neck, fastening it. Then she pulled with all her strength. “Come on, Spice, you can do this. Let’s go!” At Hannah’s urging, the horse struggled to her feet but then slid and fell again. The water was rising so quickly, Hannah thought Spice was lost, but then the horse hurtled forward onto more stable ground.

  Hannah waited a moment as the horse recovered, patting her neck, then jogged with her through the water-filled pasture. As they reached the gate, Hannah heard a boom like that of an explosion and turned to the river. The thundering water had pushed through the dam, lifting the logs from the narrows. Water rushed out in all directions, surging into the pastures, flooding the reserve road, and pulling a soup of logs and debris in its wake that travelled downriver as a mass. On the far shore, trees toppled and power poles fell one after the other, the lines sparking and sizzling as they hit water. Cars were lifted and turned by the current. One flipped on its side, exposing its undercarriage. The people from the reserve had already scrambled to higher ground. Many of them now stood in front of the grave tent, staring down on the chaos below. The water was rolling across the orchard towards the Robertson farmhouse.

  “Jesus, come on, Spice, let’s go.” Hannah jumped on the horse, grabbing her mane, and slapped the mare’s rump. “Go!” she shouted. “Git!” The horse galloped up the road with Hannah struggling to stay astride. S
he hadn’t ridden since the day of her mother’s funeral. Jesse had waited with Brandon, Alex and Abby in the truck at the gate to make sure Hannah was okay. As Hannah charged past on the horse, Jesse revved out of the yard, fishtailing in a spray of water onto the road. Following Hannah, they raced the floodwaters up the hill to the hall. As Jesse parked the truck, Hannah remained on the horse as Spice cooled down, and she saw the swollen river swallow the valley floor. The development at the mouth of the river was completely destroyed. Only the cabs of the machinery were visible on the construction site. A pickup truck slid sideways towards the lake, dragged along by the rush of water. A half-finished house had been torn from its foundation and floated on the current.

  Soon her grandfather’s outbuildings, the ancient granaries, the machine shed and, finally, the barn were engulfed. One by one, the buildings slid sideways before collapsing into the waters. “Not the house,” Hannah said under her breath. “Please not the house.” But the river ate the farmhouse, too, lifting and then shifting the old building from its foundation. The rush of water dragged the building forward, and the house that Eugene Robertson had built floated like a boat over the drowned pasturelands, then downriver and around Dead Man’s Bend.

  — 34 —

  River Restoration

  JESSE RUMBLED IN the loader through the pasture towards the riverbank. Grasshoppers flew from his path, their wings shimmering in the heat of the summer day. On the opposite shore, logs and trees—deposited there by the flash flood that had burst the dam at the narrows that spring—lay in a row like dead awaiting burial. The development at the mouth of Lightning River was a tangled mess of upturned boards, trusses and two-by-fours. The reserve houses closest to the river had been torn apart, too, and his own farmhouse now sat on shore near the shallows, half in and half out of the river, sagging on one side.