The Spawning Grounds (10 page)

“You can't do that. This is my artwork.”

“People don't draw on walls.”

“Of course they do. Graffiti, right? And this is my room.”

“You're not doing this, Bran.” She lowered her voice. “Dad and Gina want to take you to a psychiatrist.”

“No fucking way.”

“Then quit acting like a nutcase. And stop dressing like a hobo. Put on some shoes when you go outside. For Christ's sake, aren't you wearing underwear? You can see everything.”

Brandon looked down at his dirty feet, the outline of his genitals in his sweats. “Underwear don't feel right,” he said. “Shoes hurt or something.”

“What do you mean they hurt? You outgrew them?”

“No—I don't know.”

“I'll get you some new runners.”

“I don't need any.”

“Boots then. You'll need them for winter.”

“I can't feel the ground when I wear shoes. I feel like I'm floating, not attached to myself.”

“Floating?”

Brandon picked up a charcoal pencil, wiped the wall with his sleeve and redrew the lines that Hannah had just scrubbed away.

“Stop that.” Hannah took the charcoal from his hand and went back to scrubbing the wall. She scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed until not only the lines of Brandon's drawing but the paint under it gave way.

Brandon grabbed hold of Hannah by both wrists. “No!” he cried and pushed her to the floor. He redrew the image, the eye of the crow now taking three-dimensional shape within the shallow cavity Hannah had just created in the wall's surface.

Hannah got up and started on another wall, washing away the sketch of a coyote standing as a man.

“Stop it!” Brandon roared, and slammed her against the wall.

Jesse loomed in the doorway. Hannah caught a glimpse of Gina behind him. “Hey, hey, what's going on?” he said.

Hannah shook Brandon off and slopped more soapy water onto the wall. “I'm cleaning up his mess.”

“She's destroying my art,” Brandon said.

Jesse went to his daughter and took hold of one hand, then the other, to stop her restless scrubbing. But Hannah slipped from his grip and went on cleaning. “That's enough, Hannah. This isn't the time,” Jesse said.

“There's nothing wrong with Bran,” Hannah cried. “Nothing!”

“Nothing,” Brandon echoed. He dropped to the bed and went back to his feverish sketching, mumbling to himself. “Nothing, nothing, no thing, no thing, something, some thing…”

Hannah looked at him a long moment, then turned back to her chore. Jesse took her arm to stop her, but she struggled with him, fighting to wipe Brandon's madness from the walls. It was only when Gina said Jesse's name that he finally let go, leaving the red imprint of his thumb on his daughter's arm. It would become a bruise.

“Hannah,” Gina said from the door. “You can't wash this away.” She stepped forward to put a hand on Hannah's shoulder. “You've done enough. You took care of your grandfather for a long time. We'll let Jesse handle this one, okay?” She eyed Jesse.

After a moment, Jesse nodded. “I'll take care of this.”

Gina wrapped her arms around Hannah from behind, to stop her, to comfort her. Hannah dropped the scrubby and hung her head. “I can't do this again,” she said.

“We know,” Gina said. And she rocked her, even though Hannah remained stiff in her arms.

Hannah looked at her brother as he chanted nonsense in a singsong voice.
Something, nothing, no thing, some thing, thing, thing, thing…

In the few minutes they had been in this room he had completed a drawing that would have taken her hours: the
face of a native boy about Brandon's age who glared up at her from the paper with an expression of fury. She looked away, to the animals on the walls—the coyote, the bear, the fox, the crow—and each of them, in turn, stared back at her.

IN THE HOSPITAL
elevator, Hannah eyed the photograph of her grandfather on a poster with a caption that read:
Elopement Risk
. As if her grandfather was at risk of committing this rash act of happiness. Stew was caught hunched over his tray, clearly trying to wrench it off, his face panicked as the flash hit, his eyes red.

Hannah had received a call from the hospital that morning. Her grandfather had left his ward using his canes and was waiting for a taxi outside the building when staff in emergency saw him in his hospital gown and led him back inside.

The elevator door opened.

“Is it really necessary to put my grandfather's photo in the elevator?” Hannah asked the nurse, Annette, as she approached the reception desk. “And how did he get that far without anyone noticing?”

Annette said, “We had no idea he was that mobile. Or that determined.”

“Maybe if I'd stayed on Tuesday, waited until he woke up, I could have calmed him down.”

Annette held her hand up. “You can't blame yourself. You've got a life to live too. You can't be here every day.”

“He should be at home.” Hannah strode to her grandfather's room but he wasn't in it. The bed was neatly made and a man in overalls was screwing a shelf back in place above the bed. The man stopped his work and pulled an earplug from his ear. “I'll be done in a minute,” he said.

Hannah turned back to the hall. “Where is he?” she asked Annette.

“Stew was restless,” she replied. “He yanked the shelf down in the night. We thought it best to give him a change of scene. He's sitting in the visiting area down the hall.”

Hannah found her grandfather parked there with several other elderly patients, his head down, his body curled over his tray. She squatted down beside him and took his hand. “Hey, Grandpa. I hear you went for a walk.”

Stew searched her face without recognition.

Annette caught up with her. “We have him on morphine for the pain in his hip and knee,” she said, maybe to explain his lack of response.

“He shouldn't be left out here,” Hannah said. “He hates people looking at him.” She turned again. “Grandpa, it's Hannah.”

When she touched his arm, Stew startled as if he had just woken. “Where am I?” he asked.

“You're in the hospital,” said Hannah.

“My hat?”

“It's at home,” said Hannah. “Along with your wallet and keys. They're safe.”

“Bran? Where's Brandon?” The worry on his face.

“Bran is okay,” Hannah told her grandfather. “Everything is all right.”

“No! He's lost! Look. Look!”

Hannah turned to the window, to where her grandfather was pointing.

“He's there. His ghost is by the lake. Don't you see him?”

“His ghost?” Hannah glanced at the nurse. “Grandpa, Bran is alive.”

“He may be remembering a dream,” said Annette, “or hallucinating from the morphine. Try not to take what he says seriously. They often confuse fantasy with reality.”

They
, thought Hannah. “Can we just have a moment to ourselves?” she said to the nurse. “I need to talk to Grandpa.” She looked around at the other patients in the visiting area. “Privately.”

Annette nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“I've got to get home,” Stew said.

“You can't go home. They won't let you.”
Dad won't let
you.

“I've got to go!” Stew pushed at the wheelchair, trying to get it to move. He slapped the tray, then tried to rip it off.

Annette said, “I'll get him another dose of morphine. Take him back to his room and give him a really big bear hug so he feels safe.”

“To control him, you mean.”

“Yes.”

Hannah wheeled Stew back to his room, parked the chair beside the window and hugged her grandfather as Annette had asked, as Stew strained to remove the tray that confined him. “I've got to help Bran,” he cried. “I've got to get home!” He slapped the tray with each repetition: “Home! Home! Home!”

“Bran is okay,” she said, though of course he wasn't. She knew it, and her father had already booked Bran's appointment with his doctor. Stew fought her until she was nearly in tears. “Bran is okay,” she insisted again. “But I need to ask you something.” She hesitated before continuing. “Alex told me about Eugene Robertson's wife. His Shuswap wife. He said her name was Libby.”

“Libby, yes.” Stew stopped struggling.

“Alex said the boy in the grave the construction crew dug up on the benchland was Eugene and Libby's child. Is that possible, Grandpa? Dennis had told Alex a story about how their boy was buried with a nugget of gold in his hand, just like that boy in the grave.”

Stew didn't seem surprised. “The boy's name was Samuel.”

“Your great-grandfather's name.”

“Eugene named him after his first son.” To remember him by, perhaps, or, more likely, to make amends.

“I had no idea Eugene and his Shuswap wife had a child together,” said Hannah. “You never told me.”

“I told you. You weren't listening.”

“I don't remember. I must have been very young at the time.”

Stew grunted. He wasn't sure now what he had chosen to tell Hannah and Brandon—or Jesse—and what he had withheld from them. There had been a time when he believed some family stories were better left buried with their dead. He had refused to answer Jesse's many questions about his own mother, and Hannah's questions about hers after Elaine died.

“Samuel drowned,” he told Hannah. “Eugene never knew his final resting place. The Indians knew it but wouldn't tell him. There was bad blood between Eugene and Libby, in the end.”

“From what Alex said it sounds like they had a pretty rocky marriage.”

“Oh, she was wild, that woman. The Indians were all wild then. They lived in the ground in burrows like animals until the fur traders came and taught them to build a decent cabin. Even once they lived above ground, any time anything important happened they ran back to the pit house to meet, and they held their winter gatherings there, underground.”

There, in the
kekuli
, as the Indians called it, they beat drums, sang and danced like the hooting pagans they were underneath their white women's dresses and white men's cowboy hats. Smoke billowed up from the central fire through the smoke hole that also served as the men's entrance. A ladder—steps chopped into a log—ran down through this hole. The women entered through a doorway in the side of the
pit house shored up with poles. These people had made these underground dwellings their homes over the winter for countless generations. Even in Eugene's time, when the Indians spent their winters in a cabin, in summer most of them continued to live as they always had, in tents made from bark or tule mats the women wove themselves, or, if they could afford it, from canvas they bought from the trading post in Kamloops.

“Libby had an affair,” Stew told Hannah now, raising one bushy white eyebrow, “with an Indian across the river.”

“Alex told me. I expect Eugene left her after that, or kicked her out.”

“No, she stayed with Eugene for a time.” A short time.

“Eugene let her stay? Would he really allow her to live there after that?”

“They had a son,” Stew said. “He was too young to be without his mother. Eugene couldn't work with him underfoot and he wouldn't let Libby raise him across the river. But you're right. Eugene wouldn't put up with much from her after that. He didn't allow Libby's kin to visit at all, and he wouldn't let Libby cross the river.”

“He imprisoned her?”

“No!” Stew shook his head. “He tried to keep his wife from wandering off on him, from taking his son.”

“Like a man fencing livestock,” Hannah said.

“Like a man desperate to save his family.”

Libby no longer sat with Eugene in the evenings in the tiny front room of the cabin, reading to him from the Bible. She sat, instead, in the kitchen, looking out the window at the river flowing, now exposed and naked, beyond ragged fields punctuated by the huge stumps of ancient cedars. The roots of windfalls grasped the air like eagle talons. When she turned in for the night, she slept with her son on his straw mattress. She had made her son's room her own, bringing in the pine dresser drawers Eugene had made for her as a gift the previous Christmas, with wood he had cut from the property around the cabin. The scent of pine filled the room, a room she kept closed to her husband. She served Eugene his meals, kept house and watched over their son, but she wouldn't look at her husband and only responded when she had no choice.

“You won't see that Indian again,” Eugene had told her.

“I'll do as I wish. You have no interest in me. What does it matter?”

“See him again and you won't live here with me.”

“Then Samuel and I will live with my sister.”

“If you try to take Samuel from me I'll take him back to my home country, off this continent. You'll never see him again.” In that moment, in his anger and hurt at her betrayal, he believed the threat himself.

Hannah let go of her grandfather and sat on the hospital bed beside him. “But you said Eugene brought his wife over from the old country,” she said. “His English wife.”

“He did, after his son drowned in that frickin' river.”

“Is that how it was? His son dies and he abandons Libby? Sends for his other wife?”

“Libby left him first.”

Hannah hesitated before asking the question that burned in her gut, not wanting to set her grandfather off again. “After Samuel told Eugene about his mother's affair, after he crossed the river, did he act…” She paused. “Strange?” Like Brandon, she meant.

“Oh, yes! The boy spoke nothing but English from the time he was in diapers, then all of a sudden he started speaking Indian. One day he talked to his father in proper English; the next he couldn't understand a word his father said, like all he'd ever known was his mother's tongue. Eugene whipped him each time he talked that gibberish, but he wouldn't stop.”