The Spawning Grounds (8 page)

“What is it?” Samuel asked.

“The English call it
gold
,” she said. “We won't tell anyone—especially your father—you found it.”

“Why?”

“This gold makes some men foolish,” she said. “Your father is foolish enough as it is. So, no telling, all right?”

“All right.”

“In any case, it belongs in the river. Shall we send it back?”

Samuel nodded.

“The rock will try to escape by running across the water,” she said, “but the river will swallow it.” Libby skipped the nugget across the shallows, hitting one, two, three, four, five, six times and then the river swallowed the rock, just as she said it would.

“She threw it back?” Hannah asked Alex. “But you said Samuel was buried with that nugget.”

“Libby talked big,” Alex said. He grinned. “But even she couldn't resist that gold. She went back later and searched the river until she found it.”

In the moment she skipped the gold across the river, she was content to let it go in the way she had once released a bobcat from one of Eugene's snares. Libby turned back to her washing, but Samuel patted her breast. “Mama,” he said.
Libby wiped her hands on her skirt and, glancing at the men busy on the river, opened her blouse and sat on Eugene's Rock. Samuel stood beside her and suckled, kneading her breast, and they both closed their eyes as they were enveloped in the sweet scent of her milk letting down.

“What are you doing?” Eugene cried.

Libby startled to find her husband standing on the riverbank beside her. Samuel detached from her breast to look up at him, exposing her nipple. Libby quickly covered herself as the miners were all now watching.

“For god's sake, Libby. The boy is nearly four years old.”

Libby buttoned her bodice. “A child knows what he needs,” she told Eugene, in English.

“How in hell will you conceive another child if you're still suckling him? Don't you want more children?”

She squatted to wash Eugene's shirt, her back to him. “How will I conceive another child if you never touch me?” she said.

Libby felt the waiting in the air, like the seconds following a lightning flash, before the boom and roll of thunder. Eugene grabbed her arm and raised a hand as if to strike her, but instead let her go. “Why would I want you?” he said. “You stink of old milk.”

Eugene marched away from her, back into the forest he was cutting, tree by tree, bush by bush, making way for fields. He had long ago given up on finding gold in the river, even as the other men searched on. Instead he had succeeded in bringing down enough of the forest that the
wind now helped him do the job, ripping trees from their roots during summer storms.

Libby sat back upon Eugene's Rock with his wet shirt in her lap.

“Mama.” Samuel patted her breast, to reassure her, to reassure himself. But she didn't open her blouse to him. Instead she picked up the wedge of soap from the river shore and walked into the river fully clothed to wash the stink of milk from her person.

The next day, Libby left the cabin at first light while both Eugene and Samuel were still in bed. Samuel heard the door close and got up to peer through the window. His mother was heading towards the shallows. Samuel ran after her, leaving the door open.

“Go back to your father,” she called.

But still he followed. She ran faster, to escape him, her skirts billowing. She ran until she was far ahead of him and still Samuel followed, crying and calling for his mother as he ran through the field of stumps, the bush along the river, stumbling and climbing over windfall. He fell, bloodying his hands and knees, and when he stood again he couldn't see her. He searched and searched until he heard his father calling them both and he returned to the cabin alone.

The sun was low in the sky when Libby finally came home.

Samuel listened from his small room as his father demanded to know where she had gone, but Libby wouldn't tell him.

“You want Samuel weaned,” she told him. “Then we shall wean him.”

The following morning, Libby jumped on her horse and once again left Samuel with his father. She rode bareback, her skirts hiked up to expose her legs, her long black hair flowing like her mare's mane behind her. Eugene tried to stop her from leaving with almost as much force as Samuel, both of them running after her. She wouldn't tell Eugene or her son where she was going. Libby had secrets from them both now.

Samuel followed her to the shallows, where the river spilled into the lake. There, from a distance, he saw his mother dismount, wrap the reins of the horse around a young cottonwood, and lift her skirts to wade through the estuary, to meet a man waiting for her on the other side of the river. Samuel hid himself in the bush to watch them. He saw his mother look back and then upriver to make sure neither his father nor the miners could see them.

The man she met was dressed like his father, in denim trousers and a cowboy hat, but he looked nothing like Eugene. Where his father's hair was ginger, this man's was black, like his mother's. Where his father's skin was white and freckled, this man's skin was brown and smooth, like his mother's. The stranger was young, as young as his mother.

“I didn't think you were coming,” the man said as Libby reached him, his voice skipping like a stone towards Samuel across the shallows. The stranger used his mother's secret words to talk to her. So, they were not so secret. The man pointed at her breasts, to the stain of milk on her blouse. “You're wet.”

Libby crossed her arms to cover herself. “I've weaned Samuel,” she said.

“Don't hide. I want to look at you.” He walked around her, smiling, and ran his hand down her cheek, to her neck, to her collarbone, to her breast. He squeezed it, kneading it as Samuel had when he suckled. But Libby withdrew. “It hurts,” she said. “My milk. I'm so full.”

“I could relieve you.”

She laughed.

He took her hand. “Come lie with me.”

She shook her head but allowed him to undo the buttons of her blouse. When she was naked, he suckled her.

“There's nothing there,” he said.

“I'm shy. My milk won't come when I'm shy.”

“Then don't be shy.” He drew her down to lie in the long grasses along the river shore and suckled her breast again and then went on suckling, taking Libby's milk, Samuel's milk. She reached down and undid the buttons of his trousers, but he took her hand in his and laced their fingers together. “Let me help you,” he said.

When he had emptied each breast he moved up to kiss her, an open-mouthed kiss, to give her a taste of her own milk. Then he rolled her over and entered her as Eugene's bull entered a cow, pushing at her from behind. This man who had taken Samuel's milk. This man who had taken his mother from him.

Samuel ran to tell his father. When the boy reached him, Eugene stopped to look at him, then bent back to his chore, felling yet another tree. The saw, saw, saw of the blade teeth
through wood. He had not left his work to find his son. “Where in hell were you?”

“The man drank Mama's milk,” Samuel told him.

Eugene's face took on the colour of blood, but he didn't stop or run to find Libby and punish her and the man as Samuel hoped he would. So Samuel took it upon himself to bring his mother home. He ran back to the river, took off his clothes and folded them neatly as he had seen his father do when Eugene took his Saturday bath in the river. Then Samuel walked naked into the water as his father always did. He felt, first, his bare feet on river stone, then the frigid water engulfing his tiny body as the current dragged him beneath the black surface.

When he sloshed his way out of that river onto the far shore, he followed his own body as he would follow his mother, observing himself from without: his own small figure seen from behind, walking first on river gravel, then on white mud, then on wet grass. A storm gathered over Little Mountain, conjuring mosquitoes from the moist air. They bit his face, his shoulders, his back, his thighs, but he didn't—couldn't—slap them away. The insects followed the trail of his breath backwards, until they reached his mouth, the exhalation of breath that both his mother's and father's ancestors believed was the intangible soul, whether called mystery or
spiritus
. But even the mosquitoes knew breath—spirit—led to flesh and blood.