Alex nodded as if he had come to a decision about her. “All right. I’ll tell you the same story Grandpa Dennis told Stew when your mom was sick.”
“About Eugene and Libby? About Samuel?”
“No, about the spirit that lived in Samuel, that lived in your mother. The one that now lives in Bran.”
Alex had followed his great-grandfather across the bridge to the Robertson side of the river. At fourteen, he was already much taller than the old man. Dennis moved slowly with the aid of his cane and Alex was itching to stride ahead of him, but out of respect he walked behind as they passed through the Robertson gate, with its ridiculous pink flamingos, and made their way to the house. Stew’s truck was parked in the yard, but not Jesse’s.
“Jesse’s not here,” said Alex, thinking they should turn back and come another day.
“Good. Then maybe Stew will listen.”
Dennis knocked on the back kitchen door with his cane. Then knocked again. Finally Stew opened the door, his breath stinking of rum.
“You sleeping one off this late in the day?” Dennis asked him.
“Kids are at school. Only time I can sleep.” He nodded at Alex. “Isn’t he supposed to be in school?”
“He is,” Dennis said. “I’ve come to see Elaine.”
“Elaine? What in god’s name for?”
Dennis didn’t answer. He pushed past his friend and, with both Stew and Alex following, made his way through the kitchen and dining room and into the living room, where he knew he’d find her. Elaine sat in a captain’s chair in front of the window, facing the river and the cliff face beyond. Since Stew and Jesse wouldn’t let her near the river, the mystery had to prepare here. Dennis pulled up a chair and sat beside her. Elaine’s expression was blank, her eyes focused on the cliff face across the river, the figure painted there.
“She’s filled with the mystery, all right,” he told Alex, in English so Stew would hear. Then, in Secwepemctsín, he said to Elaine, “I see you’ve begun your work.”
Elaine turned her head slowly to look at him, then set her gaze back on the pictograph.
“She doesn’t speak any Shuswap,” Stew said. “You know that.” He paused. “What did you tell her?”
“This isn’t Elaine,” Dennis said. “Elaine’s out walking. I’ve seen her soul on the river. She’s getting ready to take the spirit trail.”
“Dennis Moses, what in god’s name are you going on about?”
Dennis tucked his chin to his chest as he thought how to explain. “People and animals are separate now,” he told Stew, holding up two fingers. “But once, in the time of the old stories, when animal and man were still family, a man’s soul could flit away as an owl, or the spirit of a bear could slip under a man’s skin. In that time a Secwepemc boy could ride the ice floe downstream, downriver, down to the ocean to the land of souls, as the salmon do, and then swim back upstream to his grieving grandfather, reborn within the skin of a sockeye. That time has passed, but sometimes, even now, an animal spirit finds his way back to us, into us, as it has with Elaine.”
Stew laughed and Dennis stood slowly, painfully, to put a hand on Stew’s shoulder to make it clear that he was serious. “If we don’t get this mystery out of her, Elaine will die. Sooner or later, it will take her back to the water. And when that happens, well, it may already be too late for the rest of us as well.”
“What do you mean, ‘mystery’?”
Dennis turned to his grandson. “Tell me, Alex. What do you remember me telling you about the narrows?”
Alex shrugged. “Only that it’s a gateway.”
“Gateway?” Stew asked.
“There are gateways all over,” Dennis said. “There’s a door to bear country in Green Timber. And the entrances to the buffalo and elk lands are out there in Cree territory. You’ll find the gateway to the salmon world here, under the rapids at the narrows. The fish wait all winter in their world beneath the river gravel to be reborn, in the way our people once waited for spring within our winter houses. The salmon dance through winter; they sing their songs and tell stories beneath the gravel. In spring they return as their own offspring, to swim downriver to the lake and then, when they’ve grown, downriver to the sea, following the same path our souls travel after we die. When my time comes I’ll swim downriver with the salmon, to the land of souls.”
“Dennis, for god’s sake. Just tell me what this ‘mystery’ is.”
“There it is again,” Dennis said to Alex. “That white man’s impatience.” Dennis patted the air in front of Stew with a hand knobbed by arthritis. “All in good time.” He sat back in the chair next to Elaine. “Now where was I?”
“You were telling us about the gateway, about the salmon,” Alex said.
“Yes, the salmon.” Dennis laid a hand on Elaine’s arm as if to include her, but he spoke to Stew. “Coyote gave us a great gift,” he said. “He gave us salmon. He created these spawning grounds. But then, many generations ago, when our people were still as young and uneducated as you folks are now, we waged war on the salmon. There were so many fish our people didn’t think they would ever run out, so we went on killing them. We killed even the last salmon buck and took his pregnant wife as a slave.
“When her son was born the people kept him as a slave too. So it was that the last salmon boy grew up with the people. And we mistreated him as people will mistreat a slave, one who is not their own. When he came of age and it was time to find his power, his mother told him the story of his father, and of his lost people.” Dennis waved a hand for Stew to take a seat. “Just like I’m telling you now,” he said.
The boy, the salmon boy, was angry when his mother told him about the people’s senseless destruction of the salmon, of his father’s death. He felt a rage that had built during all his years living under these people who would not accept him as one of their own, who had beat him, shunned him, laughed at him and denied him entrance to their gatherings, so that he sat with his mother outside the women’s entrance of the kekuli as the feasting and dancing went on without them.
Go find your guardian, your power, his mother told him. Go to the mountain. Go. Go!
He hesitated, not wanting to leave her. She had been his only companion through life.
You’re here for a reason, she said. You must avenge your father’s death, cleanse this place of its sickness and bring your people home.
They’ll beat you when they find me gone, he said.
I’ll hide until you return. They’ll think I’ve left too.
And when I find my power?
Go, she said.
But he couldn’t leave her, not completely. He hung about the edges of the village, hidden within the undergrowth, fearful of entering the mountain forest alone, but also watching over his mother. She did hide as she said she would, within the kekuli while the people made their summer camp. But the people soon found her, dragged her from the women’s entrance and down to the river. When she wouldn’t tell them where her son had gone, they killed her and prepared her body as they would any salmon’s, laying her flesh on a drying rack. Afraid for his own life, he watched and did nothing as a storm gathered within him. Then he ran up to the benchland below the cliff, lifted his arms to the sky and, for the first time in his life, howled his rage. The sky responded. Black clouds boiled over his head. Lightning broke the air in two and thunder boomed. He was frightened at first and fell to his knees, his hands over his head, as lightning struck to his left, to his right, as hail pounded his back, as trees cracked and crashed to the ground around him.
He saw the people running to save themselves in the village below. These people who he had feared his whole life were now frightened of the storm he carried inside him. They were as ants, tiny and scuttling. He stood then and unleashed the full fury of the storm on them. Lightning struck again and again, thundering down from the sky, bursting the tents into flames, the grass into flames. The fire licked up the mountains and the trees all around burst into flames. The people
ran screaming to the river to escape the fire. Many died before they reached the water, suffocated by smoke or burned to death. Others made it to the river and hid beneath the surface from the fires. So he brought down the rains. Thunderous sheets of water fell, putting out the fires, swelling the river, unleashing a flash flood that drowned the people, washing their last footprints from this earth.
“Then the salmon boy went back to the country of the salmon,” Dennis told Stew. “He leapt over the bodies of his people, as a sockeye leaps the rapids to reach home, and in this way brought the salmon back to life. The bones of his mother and father gathered their flesh back onto themselves and their hearts began to beat. This is why we cast the bones of the salmon back into the river, so the salmon will live again, and so we will remember that if the salmon disappear, the river dies, the lake dies, the land dies and we die.”
Stew scratched the stubble on his chin. “So you’re telling me this salmon boy is the ‘mystery.’ ”
“Yes.”
“And it took possession of Elaine.” Stew managed a laugh. “Are you really trying to make me believe that story is true?”
“Many of our elders believe the old stories really happened,” Alex told Stew. “In the same way someone of your generation might read the Bible stories as fact.” He glanced towards Dennis, but didn’t look him in the eye, out of respect. Dennis believed the Bible stories as literal fact himself, with the same conviction as he believed the stories his grandmother had told him. He saw no contradiction in this. His two faiths sat peacefully side by side, like two family pit houses in the same village. “The story of the last salmon is true in the sense that it’s told to help people remember that they shouldn’t take too many fish,” Alex continued, “so enough can spawn, so the salmon will survive, so we can eat them and live.”
“That’s your white schoolteachers talking,” said Dennis to the boy. His voice held enough anger that Alex sat back, chastised. “Don’t presume to speak of things you haven’t seen or experienced.”
Alex nodded, keeping his eyes on the floor.
“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.
— 15 —
Those Who Saw
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 be
tter.”
“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.”
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