The Spawning Grounds (14 page)

“So you didn't believe the story yourself then,” Hannah said to Alex now.

“No.”

“What changed?”

“What changed for you?” Alex reached over and tugged the sprig of purple aster jutting from the breast pocket of her jean jacket, reminding her of this small habit she'd carried with her from her childhood. When she was a young girl, she had showered her hair and every pocket with wildflowers, imagining herself a woodland sprite. With her reddish curls and heart-shaped face, she had looked the part. She had believed in faeries then, not the pretty figures conjured by Victorian imaginations and sanitized in Disney films, but the dangerous, mercurial creatures of her grandfather's stories, the forest and water spirits her British ancestors had at once worshipped and feared. Stew called them “the old gods.”

“I've seen some things I can't explain,” she said.

“I've seen that salmon boy on the river.”

Hannah scanned Alex's face but he showed no sign that he was joking. “So this boy, the boy on the river that Bran saw, that you saw, is the one in the story Dennis told? You're telling me
he's
got Bran?”

“He's the spirit of the salmon. He'll do whatever is necessary to protect his people.”

“People? You mean the sockeye.”

“I don't have to tell you the salmon in this river are endangered. He
will
bring on that storm Dennis talked about, like nothing you've ever seen, and wipe this valley clean, so his people can return.”

Hannah laughed, but Alex didn't laugh with her. “What am I supposed to make of all this?” she asked him.

“You tell me.”

Hannah ran her thumbnail back and forth along a crack in the table's surface. The story Dennis had told had the childlike feel of a Sunday school fable. Still, still. She had seen Brandon's spirit leap into the river. She had followed her brother's doppelgänger to that shore.

“I don't know what to believe,” she said finally.

“Good,” said Alex. “That's a start.”

He held Hannah's hand to stop its restless movement, then turned it over and traced the zigzag of lines on her palm. After a while, he took her thumb into his mouth, his eyes closed and his tongue moving. Hannah's breath caught. Alex pulled her thumb from his mouth and squeezed it as he set her hand back on the table. He sat there, looking down at their joined hands, as if they were still friends in the way they had been only minutes before.

AS JESSE DROVE
into the yard with Brandon, he noticed that the archaeologist and her team had begun work around the gravesite on the benchland of Little Mountain. “Look,” he told his son as they got out of the truck, and together they stood and watched. Several of the field workers were from the Lightning Bay Indian band. Some dug with shovels while others rocked box screens suspended on frames, dust drifting like smoke. One of the men was digging neat steps into the ground, building a stairway that he would follow down into the past.

“How'd it go?” Hannah called out.

Jesse turned to find her waiting outside the kitchen door, hugging herself. He pushed past her into the house and hung his jacket on one of the hooks before he answered. “Maybe we should talk later,” he said, and lifted his chin towards Brandon as his son sullenly kicked off the summer sandals he had worn into town on this chilly October day.

“Why? What's going on? What did his doctor say?”

“There's nothing wrong with me,” said Brandon. “She just doesn't understand. None of them understand.”

“Them?” Hannah asked her father.

“His doctor wanted some tests done. We spent the morning and afternoon at the hospital, dealing with lab technicians. Bran wasn't exactly…cooperative.”

“What kinds of tests?”

“Blood tests, imaging. She wanted to be sure nothing else was going on, an injury from his fall in the river, something she may have missed before.”

“So was there anything?”

“We won't hear back for a week or so. His doctor is setting up an appointment with a psychiatrist.”

“I'm fine,” said Brandon. “I'm…” He hesitated, then said, “I'm awake now.”

Hannah crossed her arms. “You're awake?”

“I was asleep before. Everyone is asleep.”

Jesse shook his head.

“None of you
see
,” said Brandon. “You don't see, or do you?” he asked Hannah. He sounded hopeful, as if he wished for Hannah's company as he walked this strange road.

“What do you want me to see?”

Brandon waved his hands, trying to find a way to explain how he experienced the world now. “Everything is so
beautiful
,” he said, his expression a mixture of rapture and confusion. Colours were so much brighter, he said, like those in an old Technicolor movie. He could see the whole spectrum of light. He perceived the last of the fall flowers as
a bee would, in ultraviolet, the radiating lines at their centres suddenly visible, landing strips guiding the insect to the pollen. He heard sounds previously unavailable to him, as a dog might. He
felt
sound more than he heard it, the way a butterfly sensed sound with its wings, or as a sockeye responded to vibrations with its whole being.

“The wind sings,” he said. “The trees and animals talk to me.”

“Bran, trees and animals don't talk. You know that.”

“They don't speak in words. But I understand them now.”

When Hannah made a face, he said, “Abby tells you things. You understand what she wants, how she feels. She communicates.”

“But the
trees
?” Hannah asked.

“I know these experiences seem very real,” Jesse interjected. “But they're not, Bran. The psychiatrist will undoubtedly prescribe meds. When the drugs take effect—”

“I'm not taking any pills.”

“You'll have to, or you won't get better.”

“I'm not sick.” He turned to his sister. “Hannah, don't let him do this. He can't take this away from me.”

“We don't need to talk about this now,” Hannah said. “You've had a long day. How about you chill in your room for a while?”

As soon as his son and daughter left the room, Jesse rolled himself a joint from his stash on top of the kitchen cupboard. Then he stepped outside to the front deck, where he sat on the pile of cedar siding to smoke. The calm spread through his body as he looked up at the navy sky and the
deep blue hills that surrounded him. It was only three-thirty, but the light was already failing. Not long now until winter.

When Hannah came outside to sit beside him, he offered her a toke. She took the joint, breathed in deeply and held it before exhaling and handing it back to him. “He's asleep,” she said.

“He was so agitated and confused the whole day, Hannah. Did you see how he fought me when I tried to get him into the truck?”

Hannah nodded. “His doctor thinks he's schizophrenic, doesn't she?” she asked.

“I know from what I went through with your mom that the psychiatrist probably won't make a firm diagnosis until Bran has shown the symptoms for a time, but yes, she thinks it's schizophrenia.” He held up the joint. “She said weed can trigger the onset of schizophrenia, if the person is predisposed, if they have a family history of mental illness.
Was
he smoking it?”

Hannah took the joint from him before he'd offered it again. “You have to do a better job of hiding your stash,” she told him. “I found it the first day you were here.”

“If you need someone to blame, point the finger at your friend Alex. Bran really believes the shit that kid has been telling him.”

“They're stories Dennis Moses told.” She hesitated. “Grandpa believes them too.”

Jesse shook his head. “I had no idea Dad was that far gone. I'm so sorry, Hannah. I can't imagine what these last couple of years have been like for you.”

“It does seem strange, though, doesn't it?” she asked. “Bran is sick like Mom.”

“Schizophrenia runs in families.” Along with smarts, Jesse thought. The brilliant and the damned. Those who saw the world in ways others couldn't.

“The animals in Bran's drawings,” Hannah said. “The transformers—they're so like what Mom drew. How do you explain that?”

Jesse shrugged. “Schizophrenics often draw strange shit. In any case, Elaine claimed Bran saw those weird animals first.”

“Bran did? As a kid?”

“A coyote, standing like a man.” Jesse smiled a little. “When he pointed it out to your mother he called it a kangaroo.”

Elaine and Brandon were out in the garden at the time, where Elaine was pulling up the tomato plants, and at first Elaine didn't bother to look up from her work. Six-year-old Brandon had all manner of imaginary friends, most of them beasts of one kind or another. He was persistent this time, however; he tugged at his mother's sleeve. “Look! A kangaroo!”

“Kangaroos don't live here,” Elaine told Brandon. “Maybe you saw a coyote.” The tall pointy ears, the sharp snout, like Roo's in Brandon's illustrated
Winnie-the-Pooh
. Then Elaine stood straight to survey the remaining clean-up work she would have to do before snow fell, and there, past the sunflowers, by the saskatoon bushes, Elaine saw the beast.
The creature did indeed have a coyote's head but stood upright, on two hairy legs; its body was more man than wild dog. She had no name for this creature, no story for it, and so she could not make sense of it. The beast's jaws pulled back in what approximated a smile and it winked at her.

Once Elaine had seen the soul of this one beast, she saw them all, walking the roads or going about their business at the river's edge, the bewildering assortment of ancient spirits that populated the river valley, all of them part animal and part man. The bear that stood on its back legs to eat the last of the apples from her trees had the hands of a man. The fox that stole eggs from her henhouse stood upright with a paw on its hip to eat them; it had the feet of a child. The crow with the eyes of a woman followed Elaine, flying from tree to tree, peering down at her with an obsessive interest.

One morning as Elaine cleaned out the wood stove, she stepped onto the front deck to toss the ashes over her soggy and dormant garden bed and saw someone sitting on the bridge railings, as if about to jump off into the freezing water.

She called out, “No!” But the person only waved her over. Stew was in town, Jesse was in the barn with Hannah, and Brandon was alone inside the house. But the fool on the bridge was endangering his life, so she ran the short distance to the river. When she reached the bridge she saw the person on the railings was already dead. The bones of his ribs were showing through the tattered material of his dated clothing, and his entrails dangled. His bony feet were crossed and swinging over the water. He snacked on the fingers of a human hand as if on a chicken wing. The corpse pointed
down and Elaine followed its finger to see the crow with the eyes of a woman hopping in the mud towards her. Beside the bird was a set of bare human footprints that led down to the river, where they stopped. All at once the river seemed terribly inviting, as if the day were hot, a summer's day. The water would cool her, take away this turbulence within her stomach, smooth away the ache that had set its claws into her shoulders and remained since that early September day when she had jumped from those rocks and into this strange new world. She would step into these churning waters and float downriver. She would become water and drift away.

“If you go in there you won't come out again,” a woman said, and Elaine turned to find a person standing where the crow had been. An Indian woman. Elaine didn't know her. She knew so few of the Indians on the reserve just across the river. Elaine had lived her adult life on this property and never once stepped foot in the reserve village. The woman wore a dress with an elaborately embroidered bodice, the kind Shuswap girls wore at powwows and occasionally at other events to advertise their Indian pride.

“Don't go in,” she told Elaine.

“I wasn't.”

“You were. I know you.”

“No—we don't know each other.”

“Sure we do.” The Indian woman looked around at the strange creatures that watched them: the half man, half coyote lying on shore, taking in the late-autumn sun, his paws behind his head; the corpse sitting on the railing of the bridge.

“You see them too?”

“Who are you talking to?” Jesse called. Elaine turned to find her husband walking towards her down the cattle path. When she looked back at the river, the woman was gone. A crow hopped in the mud where the woman had been, but it was just an ordinary crow with the eyes of a bird. The coyote-man was only a coyote slipping into the bush. The corpse on the bridge railing had vanished. An owl perched there instead, watching her with a ghostly intelligence. As soon as she turned to the owl, it flew away.

“There was a woman here,” Elaine told Jesse.

“You were talking to air.”

“She was here.”

“What the hell is going on with you? I come in from the barn to find Brandon crying, and you nowhere in sight. He's still too young to be left alone.”

She looked up to see Brandon watching them from the front deck of the house. Hannah held him from behind.

Elaine tried to explain to Jesse about the corpse that had led her here, about the Shuswap woman and the creatures that had manifested everywhere around her.

“There was no one here,” Jesse insisted, but there was nothing he could say that would convince her that her visions weren't real. She knew,
knew
what she saw was real with a conviction—with a faith—that Jesse couldn't muster for anything. Not for himself. Not for his marriage, or even the love of his own children.

“Bran sees what I see,” Elaine told him. “Ask him.”

“He's a child. He'll believe anything you say. And where are your shoes?”

Elaine looked down at her feet to find them bare, sinking into icy river mud. She scanned the river shore, confused. Surely, she would find the footprints of the Indian woman beside her own and she could show them to Jesse? But there were none. Even the footprints she had seen earlier, the ones that led to the river, were gone. Still, this fact did not persuade her that the strange animals were hallucinations. Elaine would never believe she was mad. “What you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses,” Elaine had told him, quoting Poe.