The Spawning Grounds (5 page)

“I hope the place sells by then. And even if it doesn't, I don't see the point of doing all that work if we
are
going to sell.” Jesse saw the look on Hannah's face and immediately realized his mistake. She had been asking him to keep the farm. She had been asking him to stay.

Abby bounded up the river path towards them with the stick in her mouth and Jesse threw it again, welcoming the brief distraction. He hadn't expected to have this discussion with Hannah so soon. “From what Gina has told me, I'd be silly to turn down that developer's offer.”

“Gina? You've been talking to her?”

“She phoned me a few weeks back, and again this past week after Dad ended up in hospital. She was worried about Dad's behaviour, about the load you were carrying because of it.”

Hannah kicked at an empty bottle to dislodge it from the sand and river rock and then picked it up: Jägermeister, no doubt left by a teenager hiking the trails. “So you knew about Grandpa weeks ago,” she said. “You knew and you didn't come back to help.”

Here it comes, Jesse thought. “Look,” he said. “I'm sorry about Dad, about leaving everything in your hands.”

“You say you're sorry, and yet you left me to take care of Grandpa all by myself. And now you're just going to sell the place and leave.”

“There's that facility in town. Bastion Place, is it? Gina says there's a waiting list, but I'll arrange for Dad to go there. I thought you and Brandon would come live with me.”

“I won't leave Grandpa. I'll get a job and find a place of my own. Bran can live with me until he graduates.”

“He's a minor. I'll have to support him until he's out of school.”

“He won't want to leave his friends.” Her tone made it clear that if Jesse had been around, if he was a father to his son, he would know this. “You should have been supporting us all along.”

Jesse turned to the bridge to avoid his daughter's eyes. Jesse had heard about the protest on the news. The handful of protestors sitting there now were all from the reserve, elders and young men and women who didn't have to work that day. Aside from the backhoe and the plywood signs of protest, the gathering resembled a family reunion. One of the elders gestured theatrically as he told some story. Jesse
felt a jolt of adrenaline as it occurred to him that the young woman he had known from the mill office might be there. He struggled to remember her name. How old would she be now? She might have a family by now, a kid in preschool, a child that, in his carelessness, might have been his.

A pickup truck edged by the protestors and honked, in approval or annoyance Jesse wasn't sure. Probably annoyance. The driver was white, likely one of the millworkers on his way to his afternoon shift at the mill. After the truck passed, an Indian kid in his early twenties left the bridge to walk down the reserve road. When he spotted Hannah, he raised a hand and Hannah waved back.

“You remember Alex?” she asked her father.

“Alex?”

“He used to come over with Dennis Moses, when you were still around. We sometimes called him Coyote.”

“
That's
Dennis Moses's grandson?” Jesse asked.

Hannah nodded. “His great-grandson.”

Jesse recalled the skinny kid Dennis brought with him when he came over to visit Stew, and who ate the oatmeal cookies Jesse had bought for himself. Alex was older than Hannah and Brandon but he'd entertained them with games and stories while Dennis and Stew jawed away the afternoon. Jesse had no idea who his children hung out with now. Maybe this Alex she watched so intently was her boyfriend.

“Alex organized that protest,” Hannah said. “I wish he'd shut it down.”

“You're not involved?”

“I don't like the development any more than he does. But the protest has only managed to piss off most of the landowners and millworkers who use that bridge, and that's making our job that much more difficult.”

“
Your
job?”

“Getting the landowners onside to help restore the river.” She paused as she watched Alex head to his house. “I expect the protest will be over soon in any case.”

“How so?”

“Alex announced the protest on Facebook, so the developer knew exactly what he was up to ahead of time. The developer got an injunction to remove the blockade
before
the protest even started. He had the court order in hand by the time Alex had the backhoe in place. The blockade is still there only because Grant has held off enforcing the court order.”

“Grant?”

“Gina's husband.”

Jesse's stomach tightened. “He can do that?”

“I guess it's up to the RCMP as to when the injunction is enforced. Grant must have persuaded his bosses that things needed to cool down before they waded into this one. Both sides are pretty emotional. You should have seen the construction workers when they left, all of them spitting nails.”

Jesse smiled at Hannah's use of
spitting nails
, one of Stew's sayings.

“Alex expects the police will shut the protest down once the archaeologist gets here. Listen, Dad, to save the
spawning grounds we've got to restore these riverbanks. If we don't, we'll lose the fish altogether.”

“I take it your grandfather didn't care for the idea.”

“Grandpa doesn't like anyone telling him what to do with his land.”

Jesse laughed. “That would be an understatement.”

“Will you at least consider it?”

Jesse threw a stone that skipped across the shallow water. “I just want to sell the place and get on with my life.”

Hannah tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and nodded, tight-lipped. Then she pointed at Abby. “Stay with Jesse,” she said, and strode away from him down the path to the river, where she picked up a salmon from the murky waters and doggedly walked back up through river water, past the line of Shuswap volunteers, evidently determined to carry the fish all the way to the spawning grounds on her own. Jesse watched her, uncertain how to reopen this door he'd just slammed shut between them. Then he jogged after her.

Hannah finally stopped and let the fish go. Abby barked and barked again as she would on seeing a bear, and Jesse turned to see his son walking unsteadily down the narrow cattle path through the pasture in nothing but his underwear. Jesse went to meet him, but Brandon wandered right past without seeming to recognize his dad.

“What the fuck?” Jesse said to the boy's back.

Brandon waded into the cold water up to his shins and stood there, staring up at the cliff face of Little Mountain, at
the huge painted fishtailed figure rising from the zigzag of lightning. Jesse had once overheard Dennis Moses instruct Hannah and Brandon not to look too long at this pictograph or the wind would start to blow, clouds would gather, lightning would flicker across the sky, thunder would boom and rain would fall and fall and fall. Dennis had said that if a person knew what he was doing, he could use the pictograph to bring on a storm that could wipe out everything in the valley.

Hannah pushed through water to reach her brother. “Bran, what's going on?”

Her question seemed to rouse him. “I've got to talk to Grandpa,” he said. He left the water and headed back to the house, once again walking right by his father. His shins and the soles of his feet were blue from the cold.

“You want to tell me what he's using?” Jesse asked his daughter.

Hannah stared at him long enough that he became uncomfortable. Elaine had done the same when she was upset with him. “Nothing worse than you,” she said at last.

Jesse, aware of the smell of weed on his jean jacket, decided to drop the issue for now. “Are you coming up to the hospital with Bran and me?” he asked. When Hannah didn't immediately answer, Jesse tried again, softening his voice. “I'd like you to come.”

“I've got to get changed first,” she said, then called the dog. Together they walked through the pasture back to the house. Jesse said he would wait for her and Brandon in his
truck. He wasn't ready to face the demons waiting for him inside the house.

Hannah heard Brandon rustling in his room as she washed the fish from her hands in the bathroom, and then again as she changed into fresh jeans and a T-shirt. Then she heard him thump down the stairs and the kitchen door close, and she peered out her window to see her brother join Jesse in the truck, fully dressed now, except for socks: the pale bone of his bare ankle showed above his runner as he climbed in. Hannah stole the moment to sneak into Brandon's room to see if she could find his stash, but when she opened his bedroom door, she was confronted with images scrawled in pencil and charcoal across the whole of the opposite wall. Every one of the drawings was of a half man, half animal: a figure with the head of a coyote; a bear with the head of a man, standing on his hind legs; a crow with the oversized eyes of a human woman. The pictures were layered one over the other in a manner so like the cave paintings of Lascaux that it chilled her. More chilling was the fact that these could have been the images Hannah had found scattered around the house on scraps of paper when she was a girl—pictures that her mother had drawn, evidence of Elaine's obsession at the onset of her illness. Elaine had drawn picture after picture of transforming animals, and then later of a teenaged native boy, his face drawn again and again, so one image overlapped the other.

Hannah backed out of Brandon's room and closed the door, standing for a time with her hand on the knob. When she joined Jesse and her brother in the Chevy, she didn't say a word about the drawings. The dream catcher she had made for her father back in elementary school, during some lame social studies lesson on aboriginal peoples, dangled from Jesse's rear-view mirror as they pulled out of the yard.

STEW SAT IN
a wheelchair facing the window, trying to yank off the clear plastic tray affixed to it. His lunch was still on that tray, untouched, bland mounds of potato and meat. His black cowboy hat, with the red feather in its brim, sat on the table beside his bed. If he hadn't spotted the hat there, Jesse wasn't sure he would have recognized his father. The old man had been sturdy the last time Jesse had seen him, his face full, his hands and arms well muscled, but now his hands were bony, his eyes deep-set, and the skin of his cheeks sunken. There was a little yellow sign above his bed, a person in a swing, representing the lift Stew needed to get to the toilet.

“Dad,” Jesse said, and he was struck by the wild confusion on Stew's face as he looked up at him. “It's me, Jesse.” He watched recognition rise in his father's face, swiftly followed by anger.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“At work,” Jesse said, thinking the old man's sense of time had eroded with his memory.

“You've been at work for five frickin' years? You couldn't take a weekend off to visit your kids? It's some woman, isn't it?”

“No,” Jesse said. “No woman.”

“It's always some woman.” Stew squinted at Brandon's bare feet. “Where are your shoes?” Jesse looked down to see that Brandon had slipped off his runners at the door to the hospital room, as if he were entering a friend's home.

“Jesus, Bran, put your shoes back on,” Hannah said. “Think about what's been on that floor, what you could catch in this place.”

“They bug me,” Bran said. “They don't feel right.” He fiddled with the tag on the back of his blue T-shirt as if that didn't feel right either.

“Elaine did that when she got sick, remember?” Stew asked Jesse. “She went barefoot, even this time of year, even in winter.”

Jesse felt a shot of heat in his gut as he recalled his wife's bare footprints making a trail through snow to the bridge.

Stew took his grandson's arm. “Look at me,” he said, and grasped Brandon by the T-shirt, pulling him close to inspect the boy's face. “That thing got you, didn't it?” he said, and let go.

Jesse leaned into his daughter. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Hannah took a step away from her father, but it was clear from the worried expression on her face that she
harboured the same doubts about her grandfather's mental state.

“You said you saw me in the river,” Brandon told Stew. “When you drowned.”

“I did. We both stepped out of our own skins and into that river.” Stew held out his hands. “I saw my body dead on shore, but then I looked down and saw myself in the river. My hands were young. I was young.”

Brandon nodded as if he, too, remembered.

“I was dead,” Stew told Brandon. “But you weren't. Your body was still alive. That thing took hold of it.”

Stew sat back in the wheelchair. “I never believed the stories my grandfather and Dennis Moses told about that ghost in the river. Even after it took Elaine, I wasn't sure. Then I fell in the water Saturday, saw things for myself.” He pointed a finger at Hannah as if defending himself against an unfair accusation. “I always told you two not to swim there, and chased off any tourist foolish enough to try. At least the Indians know enough not to go in.”

Stew had told Jesse the same thing, too many times.

“Your mother never listened, not to me, not to Dennis, not to your father.”

Jesse understood what Stew was referring to. On one hot Indian summer afternoon, Elaine had taken Jesse by the hand and pulled him to the river to witness the return of the sockeye and they had both marvelled at the salmon's frustrated attempts to leap the new logjam. Logging upriver had exposed the soil on the steep slopes. When spring rains had hit that year, a slide cascaded down one of the hills,
washing mud and the remaining trees into the river. The current carried the mass of logs to the narrows where the logs became trapped in the trestles under the bridge, blocking the flow to the lower part of the river and creating a reservoir above. The salmon could no longer leap the rapids to reach the place where they had once spawned. From then on, the fish could only spawn in the waters that bordered Stew's land.

Watching the salmon that day, Elaine got it in her head to swim with them. When Jesse refused to join her, she stripped down to her bra and underwear and leapt into the pool below the rapids with her arms wide, embracing the danger as she would a lover. There had always been a reckless quality in her that both fascinated and repelled him. Elaine had constantly goaded him past his fears, but he wouldn't follow her into that river. She let out a whoop as she hit cold water. When she popped back up to the surface she quacked like a duck, willing Jesse to laugh with her. Then her expression changed, first to one of awe and wonder, and then to alarm, as her attention was caught by something in the river. Then Elaine was gone, suddenly pulled under by the currents. Panicked, Jesse stumbled down after her along the bank and found her minutes later at Dead Man's Bend, curled into herself like a newborn. She was dazed, barely breathing, terrified.

In the weeks that followed, Elaine slid into madness. Jesse became convinced that some part of her had died in the river. One time he saw his wife standing out in the middle of the river, even as he knew she was sitting in the living
room. He checked to make sure he was right and, sure enough, Elaine was seated at the window as she had been for days, staring out. When he turned back to the river, the ghost of his wife was gone.

“That ghost, that Indian boy, has been watching, waiting for another fool to jump in that river,” said Stew. He pointed his finger at his grandson's chest. His yellowed nails were clean for the first time Jesse could remember. “Now that thing's inside you.”

Jesse glanced at Brandon, expecting him to tell his granddad that the old man had really lost it now. Instead Brandon avoided eye contact as he bit his thumbnail. “What's inside me?” he asked Stew. “What is it, exactly?”

“The Wunks,” Stew said, then grinned. He knew how foolish he sounded, how old, how far gone.

“But what
are
the Wunks?” Brandon asked his grandfather.

“You ask Dennis about that,” Stew said. “He knows. He'll tell you stories.”

“Dennis Moses, you mean?” asked Hannah. “Alex's grandfather? Grandpa, he died several years ago.”

Confusion spread across Stew's face, quickly followed by a flush of new grief. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. Then he rattled the plastic tray on his wheelchair. “Let me out! I've got to get back home!”

Jesse put a hand on Stew's arm. “You can't go home, Dad.”

Stew made an animal cry of frustration and swept the plate of food from the tray. Brandon jumped back as
mashed potatoes flew across the floor and the plastic plate clattered and spun away.

A nurse rushed in, her scrubs printed with penguins. “He's certainly keeping us busy,” she said with the patience and cheerfulness of a well-trained daycare worker. She patted Stew's tray. “This has to stay on,” she told him. “Do you understand?
On
. So you don't fall out.” Then she knelt to clean up the food from the floor.

She looked up briefly at Hannah, at Brandon, at Jesse. “Jesse, isn't it?” she asked him. “Your daughter said you'd likely be here today. I'm Annette.” She scraped Stew's lunch back onto the plate with the butter knife. “Stew gets restless, throws things around. I know it's hard to believe, but that's a good sign. He's got fight.”

Jesse picked up Stew's cowboy hat from the night table. The scent of his father was bonded to the inner band of the hat: wood shavings and the needles of lodgepole pine, as if, born to this place, Stew had taken the forests into himself.

“I meant to tell Hannah you should take his wallet and keys home too,” Annette said. “Things go missing here. They're in that locker.” She stood, plate in hand. “Do you have to use the washroom?” she asked Stew. When the old man ignored her, she said, “He's due for potty time. We'll give it a try and see if that calms him down.”

“He's not a child,” Hannah said.

“No, of course not.” Annette patted Hannah's arm as if she was, then left the room, carrying Stew's plate.

Jesse opened the locker door and picked up Stew's thin, cracked wallet. He had bought that wallet for his father one
Christmas, what, twenty-five years earlier? Under the wallet Stew's clothes were neatly folded: muddied work pants and a wrinkled white T-shirt with a spawning sockeye salmon on the front.

“This isn't his T-shirt, is it?” Jesse asked his daughter. Stew rarely wore a T-shirt with an image on it. His standard outfit was jeans or green work pants and a plaid shirt, summer or winter.

“I bought that for him,” Hannah said. She looked away as she added, “For Father's Day.” Hannah and Brandon had given Jesse nothing for Father's Day, not even a card. They hadn't phoned Jesse and Jesse hadn't called them.

Annette came back with a male nurse and the hoist to lift Stew. Brandon faced the door, his face reddening, as the two nurses fitted the sling under his grandfather. Annette switched on the contraption and Stew rose into the air. His ridiculous blue gown opened, exposing his bony bare arse in the sling.

“Feel like Peter Pan?” the male nurse said and Stew turned his face away, his eyes watering.

“We should go,” Hannah said. “Grandpa doesn't want us watching.”

“Let's wait in the hall,” Jesse said. He ushered his son and daughter past the hoist. They sat in the orange plastic chairs in the hallway. Staff had propped up a few elderly patients in the waiting area at the end of the hall, their wheelchairs facing the television. One or two watched a football game. Others sat with their heads back, staring at the ceiling, but most slept with their chins on their chests.

Jesse could hear Annette in the bathroom, congratulating Stew. “Great! That's two successes today!” The old man mumbled in response. The stink of shit. What milestone was this in his father's life when a bowel movement had become something to celebrate? Jesse thought of Hannah and then Brandon when they were toddlers and the poop discussions he'd have with Elaine on returning home from work.
Brandon went potty twice today!
Hannah had jumped in excitement around him, her little pigtails bobbing, as he'd clapped his hands.

“Grandpa would rather be shot than end up like this,” Brandon said. “He wants to die at home.”

“I know,” Jesse said.

Hannah shifted in her seat. “I could help take care of him. I already pulled out of my classes this semester.”

“You didn't need to do that.”

“Didn't I?”

“I'm here now.”

“Then let's bring Grandpa home.”

Jesse said, “We couldn't even get him to the toilet, for Christ's sake.”

“You just don't want to deal with him,” Hannah said.

Jesse didn't reply. There was no point in arguing. He knew this to be true as much as she did. He turned to Brandon. “Gina says you've been skipping school too.”

“I can't think,” he said. “I can't read. Nothing makes sense.”

“It's just stress,” said Hannah. Then, to her father she added, “I needed Bran's help on the farm.”

“What was all that crap about the Wunks?” Jesse asked Brandon. “You think you're possessed or something?” Brandon wouldn't look at his father. Jesse eyed him and sat back in his chair.

Through the space between the doorway and the curtain Annette had closed for privacy, Jesse saw the male nurse help Stew to the bed, then fasten a diaper around his hips. He looked away, anywhere but at his father: at the man who slept, open-mouthed, in the room beside Stew's; at the old woman shuffling her wheelchair down the hall towards them, calling for help.

When she reached them, she stopped and took Hannah's hand in hers. “Help me,” she said. Her voice was old and shaky and flat. “Help me.”

Hannah removed the old woman's hand from hers, setting it gently back on the handle of her wheelchair, and the woman carried on down the hall as if she hadn't stopped, still calling for help. From one of the rooms an elderly man took up her cry. “Help me, help me, help me,” he mumbled in a monotone, as if he had long ago given up hope that help would arrive.