The Spawning Grounds (6 page)

THE WEATHERED WOODEN
sign that greeted them at the gate when they got home from the hospital read, simply,
Robertson
, a sign that had served the family for three generations. Pink flamingos perched on the fence posts on either side of the gate, and a hodgepodge of garden gnomes, birdbaths and lawn ornaments covered the lawn, a patch of grass Stew never mowed anymore. The ornaments were Stew's idea of a joke: elaborate decorations on his junky, decaying estate.

Abby ran up to greet them as Jesse parked the truck, and then barked and leapt up to gain his attention as he got out. As Jesse scratched the dog behind the ears, Brandon disappeared into the house without saying a word. Hannah headed towards the pasture.

Jesse called after her, “Hey, I thought we'd have a bite to eat.” He hauled the cooler out of the back of his truck.
“I picked up a bucket of KFC in Kamloops.” When Hannah didn't respond he called, “Where you going?”

She kept her back to him. “To see a man about a fish.”

He glanced at Gina's house, where he saw a figure watching them from the kitchen window. Gina, undoubtedly, though Grant's truck was also in the driveway. Jesse raised a hand, but the figure moved away from the window.

Abby whined and Jesse shifted the cooler as he turned to confront his past, this farm that had been his home, not just in his childhood but also throughout his married life. Along with the cattle, the past summer's plague of grasshoppers had eaten the pastures down to a brown ragged matt. Then the insects had turned to the orchard that surrounded the house, eating the leaves from the apple trees. Small, scarred apples dangled from the bare branches.

The willow by the kitchen door had grown. He had planted the tree the week Hannah was born, assuming that he and Elaine would raise their daughter together here on this farm, his inheritance. Planting that willow had been foolish, he thought now. The roots of the tree had pushed under the house, cracking the foundation on that side. They had likely crept into the septic field as well, fingering their way into the pipes.

The house was as Jesse had left it, the work on the exterior still undone. A stack of cedar siding sat on the front deck; tarpaper flapped by the back door that led into the kitchen. He'd gotten that far putting up the new siding before Elaine got sick; it was a job he could have finished in a weekend if he'd put his mind to it.

The kitchen door was red, and in need of paint, as it had been when Jesse was a child. His father had always referred to this red door as the servants' entrance, the one he used himself. Stew had told him that his ancestor, Eugene Robertson, the first homesteader in the valley, had indulged his Shuswap wife by allowing her family to enter through this door to visit her in the kitchen. Eugene would not permit them to enter through the front door, nor would he let his wife entertain her kin in the small room that served as a parlour, though she had sat there with Eugene in the evenings. Together, at night, Eugene and his Shuswap wife read the Bible by lamplight, both for her spiritual illumination and so she could practise her reading. Eugene had attempted to exorcise what he viewed as her pagan beliefs from the house so they would not infect the children he had hoped they would have together.

Jesse turned the knob of this ancient door with its peeling red paint but then hesitated before stepping across the worn wood of the threshold. The dark kitchen cupboards and the stove were the same ones he'd known in his teens and young adulthood. But so much else had changed. His wife had been dead eight years, yet he felt the same anxiety and guilt he'd experienced the last night he had come home smelling of another woman, that sweet girl from the reserve who wasn't yet out of her teens, the new receptionist at the mill where he worked, a girl who hid behind giggles as a child might hide behind bubbles she dispensed from a wand. Her name once again escaped him. It was something young, green.
Fern
. The girl had had a scar on her shoulder, made by human teeth, he'd discovered that evening. Fern had been bitten by a
white man, she told him, when he'd touched the pale crescent. A
white
man, she had said with emphasis, perhaps acknowledging that Jesse had been accepted at least somewhat by his Shuswap co-workers at the mill. That's all she had said after he'd moved Brandon's backpack to the front seat and folded down the back of the minivan to accommodate their lovemaking. He had tried to please her, in his way—it had been important to him to please her. He'd circled her small breasts, hid his fingers in the cleavage between her legs until her unresponsiveness told him that she was deriving no pleasure from it, and then he took his own.

He had come home that night and sat in the van for a time, looking through the side window of the living room, watching his wife and his father. Stew had been drinking a glass of rum and Coke and reading in his scruffy armchair. Elaine, as usual, sat on a wooden captain's chair facing the front window, one that overlooked the river.

Stew had waited up for Jesse that night with her and, as it turned out, had phoned around trying to find him too. Jesse hadn't called to say he'd be late, that he would miss dinner. Why hadn't he just phoned that night to say he was pulling a double shift?

When Jesse finally entered the house through the back door, he'd found his father at the kitchen sink, rinsing his glass. His shoulders had curved with age. He had become an old man.

“What is it with you and these Indian women?” he'd asked Jesse, without turning to him. “Do you really believe they'll ask less of you?”

Jesse took off his jacket and hung it on a hook by the door. “Does Elaine know? Did you tell her?” Elaine was just around the corner, in the living room, likely still staring at the dark glass of the window as she had for weeks now.

“Of course Elaine knows. A wife always knows.” Stew paused. “Some part of her knows.” In that moment Jesse realized how naïve he'd been—no, foolish—in his pursuit of other women, even before Elaine took ill. He had been the boy who stole from his mother's box of chocolates while she was in the kitchen, thinking she wouldn't hear his footfalls over the clatter of dishes, that she wouldn't notice the missing nougat, her favourite.

“I didn't tell Elaine nothing,” Stew said. “I didn't worry the kids either. They're in bed. I told them you were at work.”

Later, as Elaine died in that intensive care bed, Hannah would tell Jesse she had heard this conversation between her father and grandfather through the heat vent in her bedroom floor. She knew about his affairs in the same way Jesse knew about his father's drinking, when Stew was still trying to hide it, the bottles he kept in the barn. Children always knew more about their parents' lives than their parents suspected.

“Who did you phone?” Jesse asked his father. “Did you phone Gina?”

“No! I'm not stupid. I see you and Gina slipping off together. It's a wonder Grant hasn't come pounding on this door already.” Stew pointed a finger at Jesse, his nails blackened with grease. “Gina will hear about this soon enough. Those Indians are as thick as thieves. But you already know
that. I expect that's why you disappeared with that other Indian girl tonight.”

Jesse tried to come up with a defence, but he had none. He had made a decision to end things with Gina. She had begun to talk of a future together, of leaving Grant. She would find out about Fern, eventually, though, as it turned out, not as quickly as Stew imagined. Aside from her work, Gina kept her distance from her home reserve. It was only after Elaine's funeral that Gina phoned to confront Jesse about Fern. And by then his affair with Gina was already over. It had not survived Elaine's suicide.

“Your place is here, with your sick wife,” Stew said. “Not out there, chasing skirts.”

Jesse and Stew had fallen silent as Elaine entered the kitchen. Her medication and illness left her drowsy and vacant and she walked unsteadily. She hadn't showered or combed her hair in nearly a week and had stopped wearing a bra, her breasts shifting under the cotton of her blue T-shirt. She walked up to Jesse slowly, and when he tried to turn away to mumble his apology at being late, she took his face in both her hands and held him there while she looked him over carefully, her eyes wild as a feral cat's. Then she'd let him go. Later Jesse found her huddled in the bathtub, in the dark, and led her to their bed. He went back to the living room to sleep on the couch.

As Jesse came through the door, Brandon wandered into the kitchen, eating vegetable soup straight from the can. He stopped when he saw his father and turned a little as if he was about to go back upstairs to his bedroom. His hair was dishevelled and his shirt was stained with bits of food. Nevertheless, Jesse was struck by Bran's youthful beauty, his colouring, so like his own: Brandon's ginger hair, his smooth, freckled face; his pale, sinewy arms and thin wrists; the white anklebone beneath his sweats. At this cusp between childhood and adulthood, he appeared unfinished, a thought half-spoken.

“I've got a bucket of chicken in the cooler,” Jesse said, pointing to the container on the table. “You're welcome to it.”

Brandon held up the soup can, as if unheated soup was a better option than what Jesse had to offer.

“These yours?” Jesse asked Brandon, lifting one of several honour roll certificates hanging by magnets on the front of Stew's fridge. Both Brandon and Hannah had evidently made the honour roll at their school, year after year. “You're smart, eh?”

Brandon shrugged.

That had been one of Stew's many complaints about Jesse, that he was too damn smart. Stew had always said Jesse never had to work for anything so he had never learned to finish what he started.

“What's your best subject?”

“I don't know. Art, I guess.”

“You drew these?” Jesse pointed at the pictures on the side of the fridge.
Star Wars
characters, various bipedal beasts dressed as men.

“When I was a kid.” Brandon tossed the soup can in the garbage and wiped his hand on his sweats, then turned and headed to the stairs that led to his room. Jesse heard him climb the stairs, then close his door behind him.

Jesse stared at the magnetic school photos of his daughter and son on the fridge door. There used to be other family pictures on the kitchen walls, of Jesse and Elaine seated with Hannah and Brandon; of Stew, Jesse and his mother, Amanda, taken when Jesse was a toddler, shortly before his mother died of breast cancer. He remembered little of his mother, only a drift of sensations, emotions: a longing for her presence; her absence like a stone in his mouth. Stew had mounted that photo of the three of them over the kitchen table where, throughout most of his childhood, only Stew and Jesse had eaten their meals. In it, his mother held Jesse on her lap, while Stew stood behind. Amanda's face was stressed and drawn—she was already ill—and her eyes looked through the camera rather than at it. He could see the distance between his mother and father, and even between mother and son: her hold on him was loose and formal. She had already begun to leave him. Where had that photo gone? Where had the photos of Jesse and Elaine and the kids gone?

The only photograph that remained was of his ancestor Eugene Robertson, a shot taken in the late-Victorian era: a careful, freckled man, sitting beside his petite, proper British wife, their children encircling them. Like so many of his countrymen, Eugene had sought out the wilderness but then forced his British civilities upon it.

Jesse recalled a scrap of story Stew had told him about this first Robertson, who had crossed an ocean and a continent to reach British Columbia in his hunt for gold, leaving a young wife behind in the old country, and who had stayed on in this new world even though he had never found the treasure he sought. There was no bridge over the river at the time Eugene made his decision to stay. He had not yet built this house and he slept outside on a fragrant mattress of balsam boughs. Perhaps his decision was thrust upon him—he had lost everything and couldn't afford to go home—or maybe he had found something here, in the Shuswap, that he could not leave behind: these blue, forested mountains, this hidden valley, this river that was so full of life then. Eugene sent for his wife almost a decade after finding this place, having spent those intervening years with a Shuswap woman.