The Spawning Grounds (11 page)

“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.

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 respect 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.

“You
are
dancing with him, aren't you?” Alex asked. “With Jesse.”

She opened her eyes to look past the hummingbird feeder at the Robertson house beyond. “I'm dancing with myself,” she said.

Then she felt another rhythm beneath the music: Grant's heavy footfalls pressing the old floorboards that led down the hall into this kitchen. She turned to find him looking directly at her with a closed expression. He had heard Alex, then. Alex cleared his throat, breaking the tension, and Grant turned heel and pushed through the door to the master bedroom that Gina had shared with him until Jesse's return.