The Spawning Grounds

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  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.

  Even after she was so heavily medicated that all she did was spend her days sitting in that damn captain’s chair, she would not doubt what she had seen with her own eyes: the eagle that placed an offering of its own wing feather at her feet with its beak. The crow with the eyes of a woman that laughed with her, with a woman’s laugh, when a calf got its head stuck in a bucket. The boy from her drawings—the boy she saw in the mirror—who compelled her to climb the railing of the bridge, to stand with arms outstretched to the damp, thunderous wind churned up by the rushing water at the narrows, to take that mystery within her back to the water, back home.

  If he had only listened, Jesse told Hannah now, if he had gotten Elaine help sooner, if he had been there for her, rather than turning to other women, she might have been alive today.

  “I heard Mom the other day,” Hannah said. “She called my name, woke me up. I think to let me know Bran was down at the river. Does that make me crazy too?”

  He shook his head. “After your mother died, I saw her many times, in my dreams, even on the street. I ran after her once, when I saw her on this road, but it was some other woman with a similar build, a tourist.”

  Abby trotted up the steps of the front deck and lay at their feet. “I guess Bran’s illness means you’ll be staying on,” Hannah said.

  “Only until I get things cleaned up here and the
sale goes through. Gina says there’s a group home for kids with mental health issues. She sets kids up there all the time. I’ll get Bran on the waiting list for it.” He hesitated. “I’ll come back regularly, to make sure he’s doing okay.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Jesse met her eyes. “Yes, I will. I’ll have to. I’m his guardian.”

  Hannah looked away and they sat in silence for a time.

  Finally Hannah said, “Alex told me Gina blames herself for Mom’s death. Was that why Mom took her life, because of your affair with Gina?”

  Jesse breathed in a last toke and held the smoke within his lungs. “I think what you’re really asking is why would your mom leave you?” he said, exhaling. “Why would any parent abandon their kid? There’s never a good answer to that one, is there?” He held her gaze to make it clear he was speaking as much about his own leaving as her mother’s.

  — 16 —

  Captain’s Chair

  THE CHAIR WAS exactly where the boy had left it, in the living room facing the window. He slid a hand along the armrest, the curve that had wrapped around the woman’s hips as they sat together here day after day, staring out this window to the cliff beyond the river. Perhaps, in this woman named Elaine, he had chosen poorly, but opportunities to swim up into this world were rare. The First People living over there, on the other side of the river, had learned long ago not to swim in the mother river. He had taken, instead, to watching these white men who had arrived not long ago. Sometimes they swam. Sometimes they played in that river. Sometimes they jumped into the waters as the woman Elaine had. They didn’t know the stories, or him. They didn’t fear him. He could navigate these white men, as he would a waterway, into this world.

  The white woman named Elaine had seemed promising at first, but she was no good. The medicine that the man named Jesse forced on her made her weak. Tired. Lost. The boy couldn’t complete his task through her any more than he could through the toddler named Samuel. Instead he swam with Elaine—always swimming—in the waters between worlds, never surfacing fully. His thoughts were as entwined with hers as the branches of the trees at the logjam below the bridge. He couldn’t always remember what he was here for or who he was. In time he came to realize there was no way he could use Elaine to complete his task.

  Finally he had whispered, Take me back to the river. He whispered and whispered until the woman rose from this chair and left the house during an unobserved moment. She walked the road to the river slowly, following the footprints he made her see there. She climbed the railing of the bridge. She stood over the rushing river water with her arms spread wide like the wings of a circling eagle. And when he whispered that it was time, she fell as a diving eagle falls, into the water.

  In the years that followed, he had waited for another chance to enter this world and complete his task, and here, in Brandon, he had found it. He made a fist and felt the strength in this forearm, the blood coursing through these veins like river water through the narrows. This body was young and strong. This would do.

  The boy settled into the chair, feeling the cool wood of the floor beneath his bare feet. Directly in front of him, he saw his reflection in the window, this body he inhabited, this boy Bran. He put his hand to the reflection and saw only one hand now, his own.

  “What are you doing?”

  The boy turned to the voice and found the girl named Hannah at the door to the living room. She strode towards him so quickly he flinched and put a hand up to protect himself, expecting the blows he had experienced as the boy Samuel. When she didn’t strike, he looked up, trying to make sense of her. He was still confused by this world, its shifting light, the reflections from his own that flickered and flitted about this place. Elaine followed Hannah into the room as a shadow, gliding behind her, matching her daughter’s movements, mirroring her.

  “Get up!” Hannah told him. “You don’t sit in that chair. No one sits in the captain’s chair. That was Mom’s chair.”

  He understood at least something of what she said. He had been listening in as the other—Bran—went about his days, taking note, learning—or relearning—the language. Still, he was uncertain. Would he give himself away if he spoke? He wouldn’t chance it. There was still so much to do.

  Instead he stood in front of the chair, as she demanded.

  “I’m not going through this again,” she said. “You’re not doing this!” Hannah took the boy by the arm and pulled him away. Then she picked up the chair and stormed out of the room with it. “No one is ever sitting in this chair again,” she said. “It’s gone. I’m throwing it on Jesse’s dump load.”

  The boy heard the kitchen door bang shut behind her as she left the house. Then he retrieved a wooden chair from the dining room table and carried it into the living room. He positioned it carefully in front of the window to afford him the best view of the cliff face and then he sat, to look beyond his own reflection.

  Brandon was there, walking on the surface of the water, his spirit wandering aimlessly on the river. The tether between his spirit and this body was becoming ever more tenuous. Soon the connection would be lost altogether and Bran would walk the spirit path. Already, without Bran’s thoughts interfering with his own, the boy felt more lucid. His purpose was clear. He must save his people, and this time, nothing would stop him. Not the weakness of a woman. Not the limitations imposed by a child’s undeveloped mind. He looked beyond Bran, beyond the river, to the lightning on the cliff face, settled both hands on the armrests, and began.

  — 17 —

  Inviting the Lightning

  THE CATTLE WERE edgy, uncooperative, as they always were before a storm. Hannah had resorted to using her grandfather’s yellow plastic herding cane to steer, poke and occasionally hit the cows and calves so they’d follow the fenceline into the holding pen. Abby trotted back and forth, keeping the animals moving. The dog knew her job. Once the cattle were in the pen, Jesse walked them through the funnel entrance into the loading chute and then, one by one, into the stock trailer.

  This was livestock day at the small local auction house. Jesse would take this load of cattle today and haul the rest to auction in the weeks that followed. In the pasture nearby, the remaining Herefords lay in a group, huddling together as they usually did before a rain. They eyed the animals in the holding pen and listened, ears cocked, to those moaning within the stock trailer. Hannah was sure they understood they were next. Cows were not the dull beasts they were so often imagined to be. While the heifers were nervous around Jesse, the oldest had trotted towards him with recognition when he first fed them on his return. After all these years they still remembered him.

  Jesse handled the animals with a confidence that Hannah lacked. She had rarely helped her grandfather work the cattle and even then only grudgingly. She had her own many household chores, so the task of working with Stew to move the cows had most often fallen on Brandon, and he wasn’t in any shape to help. When she had last checked on him he was still sitting in a chair in front of the living-room window, as he had for nearly a week now. She couldn’t get him to move, except to sleep. He no longer answered when she spoke to him. He only stared out at the river, the cliff beyond, as her mother had. Hannah had always assumed it was the drugs that had made her mother so unresponsive, and she had blamed her father for forcing the medication on her. But Bran wasn’t yet taking anything. His appointment with the psychiatrist wasn’t until Friday.

  Hannah hung Stew’s herding cane on the railing of the holding pen and leaned over it, stunned by the sudden and unexpected grief she felt, at Bran’s illness, yes, but also at the loss of these animals. They were only cows after all. They weren’t pets—Stew had made sure she understood this early—but they were companions of a sort. She had lived with many of these animals for as long as she could remember and knew their individual personalities, moods and preferences. Abby took up her post at Hannah’s feet, as she would have sat beside Stew in the past, looking as if she shared Hannah’s sorrow. Perha
ps she did. Had the dog recognized that Stew wasn’t coming home?

  “What about the horses?” Hannah asked her father.

  Jesse walked another cow into the loading chute. “Gina said she’d take the strawberry roan,” he said. “I imagine I’ll sell the rest at auction.”

  “Her name is Spice,” Hannah told him. “Grandpa’s mare. Her name is Spice.”

  Jesse turned to his daughter. “If there’s one horse you want, maybe we could find a way. If you’re staying in the area, maybe Gina could keep it for you.”

  Hannah shook her head. She had mucked out the horses’ stalls, brushed them down, fed them and talked to them, but she hadn’t ridden a horse since the day of her mother’s funeral, when she had jumped on the back of her grandfather’s mare bareback and, holding her mane, tore across the bridge and through the reserve to the logging road that wound up Little Mountain. She rode past the bald spot above the cliff face, and through the forest beyond, until the horse, spooked by something Hannah couldn’t see, or perhaps by her own fresh grief, charged beneath low-hanging cedar boughs, trying to dislodge Hannah from her back. Hannah had held on, whipped and bloodied by branches, until she finally fell, tumbling downhill through snowy boxwood and kinnikinnick, prickly Oregon grape and salal. She had lain there in the slushy snow, winded and bruised, listening as the horse snorted and charged madly through an otherwise silent forest without her. Later, the horse had found her way back on her own, after Hannah had limped home.

  Jesse looked up at Little Mountain, at the huge thunderhead that mushroomed above it. “Strange to see a thunderstorm building this time of year,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. She tasted the bitter, metallic tang of ions and ozone in the air, the taste of lightning, despite the bite of winter cold. “Remember that storm over Little Mountain the Halloween when Mom was sick?” she asked. “The lightning was right on us. Thunder boomed so hard it shook the windows in the house. I crawled into bed with you and Mom because I was so scared.”