The Spawning Grounds (27 page)

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.

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.

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 offered 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.

Lastly, I'm grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for financial support as I wrote the first draft of this novel.

GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ has been published worldwide in English and in many other languages in more than fifteen territories.
A Recipe for Bees
and
The Cure for Death by Lightning
were international bestsellers, and were both finalists for the Giller Prize.
The Cure for Death by Lightning
won the UK's Betty Trask Prize, the BC Book Prize, the VanCity Prize, and was shortlisted for the Chapters/
Books in Canada
First Novel Award. Both
Turtle Valley
and
A Rhinestone Button
were national bestsellers in Canada. Her first book,
The Miss Hereford Stories
, was shortlisted for the Leacock Award for humour. She currently teaches fiction privately through online forums and lives in the Shuswap in south-central BC, the landscape found in so much of her writing.

For more, visit Gail's website,
gailan​derson​dargatz.​ca
, and follow her on Twitter
@AndersonDargatz
.