For now, Jesse, Hannah and Brandon lived in a mobile home they’d parked near the crumbling foundation of the old house. Jesse planned to rebuild—the insurance would cover the cost—though all that would take time.
He stopped by the river and paused to take in the work ahead of him. The back of his elderly Chevy pickup, parked in the pasture closest to the river, was filled with bundles of willow and cottonwood saplings. A pile of logs and a second pile of boulders, unloaded there by dump trucks a few days before, sat ready. Jesse would move these down to the riverbank at Dead Man’s Bend. He would lay the logs in rows along the shore to reinforce the bank and anchor them in place with rocks. Then Hannah and Alex would plant the young trees. The cuttings would spring to life and grow; their roots would hold the banks in place. Bush would once again line this river, as it had before Eugene Robertson and the other farmers and loggers had deforested the banks. Eventually the roots of those trees would take over as the logs beneath them rotted. Silt would no longer choke the spawning grounds and the estuary. The foliage would cool the river. Perhaps, over time, as the river healed itself, the sockeye would return.
Just as Brandon had, Jesse thought. His son sat on the pile of boulders now, watching the river’s flow with keen interest, as if waiting for someone who was late. His doctor said he was making good progress. Brandon now spoke of his future, of going to art college, to Emily Carr. He took his medication voluntarily, and the new drug he was on appeared to be working, though Brandon didn’t see his recovery that way. He claimed that after his grandfather had died, Stew searched for him on the spirit trail and helped him find his way back home. Brandon continued to maintain that his visions—of the transforming animals, the boy on the river—were real and not hallucinations. Jesse supposed it didn’t much matter now, as Brandon also said he no longer saw these spirits. They were lost to him. And Jesse no longer worried about Brandon leaving the house in the night or taking his own life as Elaine had, but still he was watchful.
Brandon looked up and waved at Jesse, then leapt down off the rocks, out of the way, thinking his father was waiting for him. Before starting to move the logs, Jesse glanced out the side window of the cab, to make sure Hannah wasn’t in his blind spot. When he didn’t see her, he scanned the landscape and spotted her walking hand in hand with Alex on the far shore, approaching the footings of the new bridge that was still under construction. As Hannah stooped to pluck a sprig of wild rose, her curls covered her face. Then she stood to face Alex, handing him the thorny stem heavy in rosehips. He bent the stem and tucked it into her hair as if it was a crown and she was a dark faery queen. She raised herself on the balls of her feet and kissed him, holding his face with both her hands.
In that moment Hannah made Jesse think kindly of himself. He was not his damaged father, nor his absent mother, not if he’d played any part in creating this beautiful woman, one capable now of such open affection and trust. Perhaps, this late in the game, he could still be a father to Hannah. He would, at the very least, help support her through university. He must be the father to Brandon, who would require his help for the unforeseeable future. Jesse could not leave this place, nor did he want to now. The thought was a revelation, and a relief.
Hannah and Alex linked hands again to hike towards the grave, and Jesse turned in his loader seat, back to the boulders, the logs, the river and his son.
Hannah rearranged her makeshift crown of rosehips and walked ahead of Alex, up the rise towards Samuel’s grave. Here, at the edge of the bush above the river, ripe saskatoon berries hung on thickets of scruffy shrubs, their pomes laced with white spiderwebs that were nearly impossible to remove from the small fruit. Many of the berries not picked or eaten by birds would dry on the bush, shrivel like tiny prunes and stay on the stems throughout the fall and winter, feeding overwintering birds. Hannah pulled a lanky arm of the shrub down and pinched off several berries, rubbing off what she could of the spider’s web, before popping them in her mouth. Seedy, not terribly sweet.
Red ants scurried on the path in such numbers that Hannah couldn’t help but step on them, but she tried to avoid them nonetheless, walking at times on tiptoes. She felt Alex watching her as she walked. She felt the pleasure of her own hips.
Once they reached the grave, Alex held the tent flap open for Hannah, and the smell of earth rose up to greet her. “Careful,” he told her. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light, and then she found herself right at the edge of the grave, looking down at the tiny backbone of the child curled like a sleeping infant.
The band council would hold a burial ceremony here in the coming week and the grave would be filled in shortly after. The band had come to an agreement with the developer to leave the remains of the child in place, by the side of the road, where they had been found. A concrete slab and monument would both mark and protect the grave from vandals or unscrupulous collectors who might seek to make an artefact of this poor child’s bones. Construction crews would begin work on the development all over again at the mouth of the river once the bridge was rebuilt, and once the rezoning changes went through. Development almost always won out over other concerns. At least, she thought, this developer would not have the Robertson land, Jesse’s land, her land.
Hannah had wanted to see Samuel before the grave was closed, before the monument was built, before development finally took over this place. She felt compelled to come here, to make some kind of connection with this child, her distant relative, and to the story that had led her to this peace, to Alex. She unzipped the tent window to cast more light into the grave, and the nugget of gold cupped within the child’s finger bones shone. All at once Hannah was struck by this proof of Alex’s and Stew’s stories—Dennis’s stories. Samuel had found that gold in the river. He had carried it to his mother. She had buried it with him in this grave. Perhaps the rest of the story was true as well.
“Did I really see that mystery the day I drowned?” Hannah asked Alex. “Or was that just a hallucination?”
“You tell me.”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Don’t presume to speak of what you haven’t seen or experienced, Dennis had said. She supposed she could presume to speak of what she herself had seen. But what would she say? The only thing she knew with any certainty was what Alex had been telling her all along: the history of his people and hers wasn’t back there, in the past; they lived it every day. The proof was here, in this tent. Dig away just a few shovelfuls of soil and here was their story, at her feet.
Libby had dug this grave for her child in a hurry: the evidence was in its shallowness, the misplaced bones. Very likely, Libby feared capture. She would have dug up this child’s body from the reserve cemetery upriver and wouldn’t have wanted to alert anyone to her labours, so she would have picked a moonless night. She would have dug in the dark, without a lantern, with that white picket fence of the grave around her. She had removed the cross before digging, propped it against the picket fence. Her child’s grave was like every other here, and there were so many others. Only her son’s name, chiselled into the cross, set it apart: Samuel Robertson. She had stolen the shovel she used from the bridge construction crew. The wooden bucket she had brought with her was the one she used to haul water from the river; she had woven the large basket from cedar.
Libby was in her early forties now, and drunk, drunk on a bottle of whisky she had bought from a white bridge worker with her body. The man’s name escaped her at the moment, though he visited her cabin often. A regular. He liked her, too, and said he was thinking of staying in the region once the bridge was complete later that fall. Ernest, that was it. Ernie. Another damn Englishman. She stopped to take a drink from the bottle before returning to her digging.
In the river below her, many of the sockeye from that year’s run were already dead, floating belly up in the water. But the smell of their rotting carcasses did not overwhelm the place as it had when Libby was a child, as so few salmon now returned.
After a time, she felt her shovel hit wood; she had reached the plain pine box Eugene had built for their son. She scraped away the remaining soil and used the shovel to pry the lid open. Water had seeped into the grave, rotted the bottom of the coffin and allowed the worms and insects to eat Samuel’s garments and flesh. All that remained were his muddied bones.
Libby gathered her child’s bones in the bucket and basket, feeling for them in the dark of the grave; the skull first, then the leg bones, the arm bones. Finally, she found the tiny, fragile bones of the fingers. These she tucked within the pocket of her apron. She left the hole of the grave open, left the empty bottle of whisky, too, and carried her son’s bones to the river to wash them, bone by bone, beside the carcasses of dead sockeye.
Light had already hit the tops of the blue Shuswap hills that surrounded her; she would have to hurry. She carried her child’s remains up to the benchland that overlooked the narrows, beneath the mystery painted on the cliff. She dug a shallow grave and arranged her son’s bones within the earth as he would have slept within her as a foetus. She draped his bones with a new robe she had sewn from her own dress, a dress she had made from fabric Eugene Robertson had bought for her many years before, and placed within the delicate bones of her son’s fingers the nugget of gold he had once brought her as a gift, the gold she had first given back to the river, and later retrieved, as a memory of him. Then she buried her child once again and swept his grave with the branches of rose bushes to keep Samuel’s spirit from roaming this earth.
Eugene Robertson crossed the new bridge to reach Libby’s cabin after dark, as she knew he would. He wouldn’t venture across the river in daylight hours and risk being seen by his English wife. Libby had watched from across the river as this white woman named Mary had tended her garden, brought flowers into the cabin Robertson had built for Libby, as she produced and then raised Robertson’s children. A girl. A girl. And finally a boy. His legacy. Libby watched the cabin grow into a house as Eugene added a front parlour and then a second floor, with bedrooms for himself and Mary and their children. Eugene wouldn’t have told Mary he had another wife across the river, but then Eugene and Libby had never had a ceremony or piece of paper between them. Only history and the bones of a dead child.
Robertson, her husband, limped as he made his way to her door. His body had clearly grown tired of him and his habits.
“Where have you put my son?” he demanded, as she opened the door, holding a candle.
“You’re so old now,” she said. His hair was white, not the ginger it had once been. But he was still freckled. He was as spotted as a trout.
“And you’ve become fat,” he said.
The flame of the candle flickered in the wind and almost went out. She cupped her hand to it to keep it alight. She wasn’t fat. She had only grown womanly. The boyish figure of her girlhood marriage had blossomed into one that the men of the bridge crew had found comely enough to pay for.
“Where is my boy?” Eugene asked again.
Libby didn’t answer. Eugene looked away from her, at the silhouettes of the ragged garden in the dark. These people hadn’t learned to work the soil, he thought. Farming wasn’t in their blood. Even so, they made their attempts, now that homesteaders increasingly fenced the land that had once fed them, now that they were forced to live on these tiny tracts of land, these reserves.
“You’ve taken up whoring,” he said. He had seen the men from the bridge crew make their way to this cabin. Libby had never been worth his effort, the time he had taken to teach her to read, so she would be able to teach their children; the money he had spent on fabric so she could fashion herself a decent dress.
“My husband won’t support me,” she said. “My sister can’t feed her own children, much less me.”
“I could have you arrested,” he said. “Desecrating a grave is a crime.”
“Does Mary know you’re here? Does she know about me? Should I introduce myself?”
“You’ve been drinking. I can smell the whisky on you.”
“So have you.”
The wind blew up, snuffing the candle, and the two of them stood at the threshold in darkness.
“I could come in,” Robertson said finally. “I sold a mare and her colt this week. I have a little money.”
He couldn’t see her face and she said nothing, but after a time she stepped back into the cabin and allowed him to enter.
— 35 —
The Spawning Grounds
HANNAH AWOKE IN Alex’s arms, in his bed, to find they had been engaged in lovemaking while still submerged in dreams, her body and his swimming together of their own accord. Alex was still deep within those dark waters, she could tell. His half-opened eyes looked through her, rather than at her, as a man does when he is about to come, though she could tell he wasn’t there yet. His small room hugged the used double bed they nested within, and a string of tiny, solar-powered lights lit the ceiling above them; Alex had hung them there for Hannah, and arranged them, she realized only now, to resemble the Milky Way. The wooden horse that Eugene had carved for Samuel sat on the dresser. It belonged to them both now.
“You awake?” she whispered. When he didn’t answer, she asked, “Where are you?”
He went on touching her as if she hadn’t spoken, and she opened to him, pulled him deep inside, wrapped herself around him, and he came. Then, finally waking, Alex kissed Hannah’s cheeks, her hair, her collarbone. He ran his hand down her torso and strummed her as he would his guitar, leisurely, taking his time, the melody going nowhere in particular.
She drifted, floating on the perimeter of sleep as if on water lapping the shore, dreaming of Leviathan, an enormous fish swimming in the water at her feet. Within her the possibility of a child swam upriver, navigating the underground crevices of her body as salmon fry chart tiny waterways under rock, until it reached her redd. Her single egg drew this potential towards itself, pulled this possibility in, and the bloom of life began, here in this riverbed inside her.
On the opposite shore, a boy watched her. He nodded when she saw him and waved her over before going back to his task, reinforcing the shoreline with rocks and fallen trees, planting saplings that would eventually shade and protect the river. Hannah picked her way across the water at the shallowest point and joined him, to shovel out small holes and step willow and cottonwood saplings into the ground. When they had completed this chore, Hannah and the boy brushed the dirt from their hands and stooped to gather the sun-bleached bones of the sockeye from the river-rounded stones on shore.
Some skeletons were complete, the eyeholes of their skulls staring up at the sky. Others were scattered by scavengers, and Hannah had to pick up the bones one by one, placing them within a cedar basket the boy had provided for her. When their baskets were full, Hannah and the boy tossed the bones into the water. Beneath the water’s surface, the bones coalesced, took form and grew flesh. The tails of the salmon beat as the fish leapt back to life. The salmon transformed further, from the blue and silver of the open sea to the red of a sockeye returning to the river. One by one, the mature salmon gathered at the spawning grounds, to hover over their stone nests in shallow water—this blessed place of both endings and beginnings—to spawn and die, to spawn and die, to spawn and die, and live.
Acknowledgements
THERE ARE HUNDREDS of salmon spawning streams and rivers in British Columbia. I’ve set this work of fiction in my home country, the Thompson–Shuswap region, one of the largest salmon spawning areas in North America. The Lightning River and surrounding community in this novel do not exist, however, and are intended as a mythic representation of our interactions with all our salmon-bearing rivers, both in the past and present. I offer my thanks to the volunteers—including my husband, Mitch Krupp—who worked on river restoration projects throughout British Columbia and in Ontario and showed me their work and answered my questions over the last decade.
A great many books on the history, cultures and rivers of British Columbia of
fered inspiration for this novel—too many to list here. The following publications were of particular use: The Shuswap by James Teit, edited by Franz Boas (E.J. Brill, 1909); Shuswap Stories, Collected 1971–1975, edited by Randy Bouchard and Dorothy I. D. Kennedy (CommCept, 1979); and Mark Hume’s The Run of the River: Portraits of Eleven British Columbia Rivers (New Star, 1992). Shuswap History: A Century of Change by Annabel Cropped Eared Wolf (1996); and Shuswap History: The First 100 Years of Contact (1990) by John Coffey et al. were both produced by the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society in Kamloops. I found inspiration for parts of this novel in the “Story of the TsolenU’et’s Son” which appears on pages 669 and 670 of Teit’s The Shuswap. Dennis’s story in Chapter 14, “Bones of the Salmon,” is based on this story. The dances in Chapter 20, “The Crow,” are a recounting of dances described in Shuswap Stories, this page and this page.
The epigraph for The Spawning Grounds is by Alan Haig-Brown, from his introduction to Mark Hume’s Adam’s River: The Mystery of the Adams River Sockeye (New Star, 1994). The first chapter of this novel was inspired in part by an account written by David Salmond Mitchell in his unpublished manuscript, “A Story of the Fraser River’s Great Sockeye Run and Their Loss” (1925).
“The Raggedy Man” is by James Whitcomb Riley from The Golden Book of Poetry edited by Jane Werner (Golden Press, New York: 1966). The quote from Edgar Allan Poe is from “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The signs of protest as well as other signs throughout the novel were inspired by or taken wholesale from real signs posted along actual rivers throughout British Columbia and Ontario.
My deepest appreciation goes to Anne Collins, who helped me to sculpt my initial draft into the story you see here, and to my agent, Jackie Kaiser, for her invaluable advice and encouragement over the years it took to write this novel.
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