The Spawning Grounds

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Turn right, the voice on his GPS told him. The contraption was wrong: he wasn’t yet at the farm gate. He slapped the side of the unit in the way he attempted to fix most of his electrical gadgets.

  It was then Jesse spotted a figure standing in the mist on the shoulder. A teen, a boy. Was he naked? He was naked. As Jesse passed him, he recognized him with a start: it was Brandon, his own son. Jesse hit the brakes and looked in his rear-view mirror, but Brandon was gone, just gone, as if he’d never been there in the first place.

  A sockeye salmon thumped on the truck windshield, cracking it, and rolled down the hood of Jesse’s truck.

  “Shit.”

  Turn right, the voice said.

  Jesse jerked the Chevy to the shoulder using both hands; the steering was stiff as molasses. He turned off the ignition and, shaking, grabbed the leg bone of one of his father’s long-dead cows from the front dash and got out to place it under the front tire as an emergency brake. He left the door open as he peered at the salmon in the middle of the road, a salmon that had dropped from the sky. A passing Dodge pickup flattened it, leaving a streak of blood and flesh down the road. Jesse searched, but the naked boy—his son—was gone. Above Jesse, the eagle that had dropped the fish on his truck circled and laughed, eye-EYE!

  Jesse sat on Eugene’s Rock scratching Stew’s dog behind the ears as he waited on Hannah. Behind him, the yellow leaves of a lone poplar rattled with a sound like falling rain.

  His daughter sloshed upriver towards him, cradling a salmon against her chest as if it were a child. The fish was big, and already the fungi that would consume its body had taken hold: white around its snout, its eyes, in spots on its back. Turbulent river breezes lifted the curls that escaped Hannah’s ponytail. From this distance, Hannah could have been Elaine, dressed in her waders as she and Jesse fished in this river in the years before her drowning, before her illness, before they had children. She looked so much like her mother that Jesse felt momentarily disoriented.

  Beyond Hannah a row of other volunteers—all women, all from the reserve, and all related by the looks of them—formed a relay up the river, handing the sockeye one to the other before the last released the fish to the spawning grounds. On the shore behind them a handful of eagles waited on the rocks for the women to leave so they could scavenge the carcasses. When Jesse was a kid, dozens of eagles had lined these spawning grounds to gorge themselves on salmon flesh over the spawning season. Stew had told him that when he was a child, he had counted nearly five hundred along the river. Now so few salmon returned, the eagles were forced to hunt for other food sources. They ate the afterbirth of Stew’s cattle, the entrails of sheep slaughtered behind the Wilkinsons’ barns, and plucked Gina’s chickens from her fence posts.

  “You’re taller,” Jesse called across the water to his daughter as she moved closer. He paused, lowering his voice so she wouldn’t hear him. “You’re a woman now.”

  Hannah stopped and looked him over. “You don’t look so different.”

  She was being kind, he knew. He had much more grey in his ginger curls, and many more lines around his hazel eyes. He had acquired that rumpled look men get when they don’t have a woman around. The lines of his palms were black with grease, his fingers gashed and covered in burns. His jeans and T-shirt were shot through with holes and his workboots were burned in spots from the fiery spray of his welding torch.

  Hannah released the sockeye into the water at her father’s feet and together they watched as it slid away to the spawning grounds.

  “Is Bran around?” Jesse asked her.

  “He’s in the house.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Hannah cocked her head. “Yeah, why?”

  The naked boy he’d thought was his son. The fish that fell from the sky. “Nothing,” he said. When she raised an eyebrow to him, he said, “I knocked and no one answered.”

  “He was sleeping when I got back from the hospital a couple of hours ago.”

  “Sleeping?” Jesse checked his watch. “It’s nearly one o’clock.”

  Hannah shrugged. “He had a late night.” She shook river water from her hands as she stood. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “I thought we’d head straight into town to see Dad.”

  “I was already at the hospital, this morning.”

  “It would be nice for Dad, don’t you think, for all three of us to visit?”

  Hannah crossed her arms. “You just don’t want to face Grandpa alone.”

  Jesse scratched the dog’s head as he looked back to the house, to the yard, to his truck. She was right. He didn’t want to face his father’s judgment of him, another recounting of his many failures.

  “I’d like you and Bran to come with me,” he said finally.

  Hannah turned her back to him. “This won’t take long.” She set off downstream, clearly expecting him to follow. Abby abandoned him to trot behind her.

  Jesse jogged to catch up with his daughter. “Where are you taking me?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Along the shore, there was a path worn first by coyote, deer and bears, then by the ancestors to the modern Shuswap, and then by white fur traders, miners, settlers and their cattle, and finally by tourists walking to and from the beach at the lake. The remains of the dead fish that bears had dragged from the river, along with the occasional mound of bear excrement, were scattered along the trail.

  Hannah led Jesse across the sandbars over to the new development, then up the river path to reserve land.

  “Here we are,” she said and waved her hand at the shore. The riverbank in this area was shored up with boulders and logs and planted in young willow.

  “So what am I looking at exactly?” Jesse asked.

  Hannah pointed to one of the many willow saplings along the bank, its leaves now yellow, and launched into the same presentation she had given the elementary school kids during their field trip at the beginning of September, at the start of the three-week sockeye run. “I planted this willow last summer,” she said. “The roots of the tree swim through dirt, seeking water, holding the soil in place. In two or three years, this bank will be bush again. The trees will provide cover for the river and fish, keep the water cool and stop the soil from washing away and suffocating the salmon eggs.”

  “This is what you want to do on our side?”

  “We’re losing the salmon,” Hannah told her father. “And Grandpa is losing his land.”

  Jesse turned to survey a line of Stew’s fence posts dangling from barbed wire over the section of eroded bank at Dead Man’s Bend, nothing holding them in place.

  Hannah said, “The flow of water will continue to eat away the bank until we deal with the problem.”

  Abby trotted towards them and Jesse threw her a stick to fetch. “So what’s involved?” he asked as he watched the dog run off. “What were you asking Dad to do?”

  “The first step is to keep the cattle away from the water. We have government funding for fencing materials and volunteers to help put up new fences along the river. Next summer, after the salmon fry are in the lake, we can shore up the banks with boulders and logs and plant willows to hold the soil in place.”

  “Next summer?”

  “We’d have to do the work then. If we do it at any other time, we risk disturbing the spawning salmon or their eggs or the fry.”

  “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 opp
osite 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.

  — 7 —

  Ties That Bind

  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.