The Spawning Grounds (18 page)

“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.”

Libby 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.