When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  But they were squatters, and their rights to the land to which I was at that very moment descending through a narrow, urgent passage were naught, less than naught, for they’d worked it for only a few weeks and had less claim to it than the neighbours who had raised the roof on five or six buildings, barns, sheds, who had cleared roads through bush and tilled their ever-growing gardens.

  And the strange death of Thomas Scott hung in the air like the as yet unimaginable mustard gas.

  I WAS BREACH. Born so bruised, so swollen, bum first, the first sight of me a bowel movement, that Mum thought I was a boy and Dad cheered, “He’s well-hung!” and she was a little disappointed, but she rallied when she recognized me, swollen, bulging and blue. In every other aspect, perfect. A daughter. They washed me by the light of the fire, for in the strange ways of birth, seven hours had passed like a divine ellipsis. The three of them, my father, my mother, our midwife, stared at my calm sleep. I wasn’t yet human and I slept the sleep of angels, nothing in my soul but sky. They gazed in wonder undiminished by their irrepressible laughter. I am a modest woman, but I say with uncharacteristic pride that without uttering a sound, without thinking a human thought, at the first ass-backwards sight of me, I made people laugh. When the skull became obvious in my later years, seeing the rictus smile under my transparent skin, I would recall my family’s laughter in the first moments of my life. My father, my mother, our butter-smelling midwife running their warm, roughened hands all over my new body, exclaiming over the unearthly softness of my skin, the revelation of five toes, my long white fingers, each with long sharp nails (my mother chewed them, owning me however briefly), laughing tearfully over the black hair on my ears (which my mother began to lick away), laughing over my blatant genius when my lips suckled in sleep. My mother lay glowing like a rose window, the thick robes opened and she heedless, naked, innocent while they washed the blood from her thighs, and I slept at my mother’s breast, my left hand upon her right breast. My father, leaning on his heels, tugged at his pipe, joy flooding his throat.

  So it was that all three of my admirers were witness to the strange occurrence just an hour past my birth.

  It began as a dust funnel at the centre of Mum’s mind. Birth is an ecstatic, all-consuming, pure line of action on the Euclidean plain far above sea level, where our messy homestead lay. But there is an end, there is an end to ecstasy, an end to flight, and the landing is difficult, the dread deep in the gut when angels become glider planes repaired with tape and clothespins.

  Through the visible darkness, a figure rose from the river and walked towards our firelit manger, past it and into the woods. Mum alone saw his passing, saw the white face, his scanty rounder’s jacket, his thin-soled boots soaked with icy runoff and his six wounds, five to the scrawny body and one to the side of his face, right ear dangling. But worse, he would not meet her eyes. And the humiliation in the gait of Thomas Scott was beyond endurance. She had not only killed the body; much worse, she’d murdered the pride of the arrogant Orangeman. His broken spirit skunked by.

  My father and our midwife saw the pallor on Mum’s cheeks and thought she was going to hemorrhage. They hurried to her aid, and in that second, all three looked down to see the ivory spoon of my sternum, suddenly marked. Call it a birthmark an hour after birth, but Thomas Scott’s ghost tattooed me, bright red, though it would fade to ochre, then dun, over my many years, become beautiful as pain becomes beautiful when it’s past. The brand that appeared on my infant skin so suddenly, like a devil’s kiss, marked my mother worse than it marked me. She cried out. And then she passed out. “The ghost of Thomas Scott,” she would tell me as soon as I learned that it was words she was speaking, “the ghost of Thomas Scott has left his mark on you.” Running her dry hand over the spot, an unhealable blister, “You’ve been touched,” she would say, “by the death of an Orangeman, a drunken rogue, Thomas Scott.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE WAS A BOBCAT in our woods that summer. My mother saw the print of its big soft pads pressed into the gumbo at the river, where it had gone to drink. The nights were loud. I grew dependent on the voices of wood frogs from the marsh behind the forest and wouldn’t sleep without their ululating drone, and forever after that sound would slow the pace of my heart and I’d fall into peace as if returned to harmony with my mother’s heartbeat. Then our sleep would be broken by the scream of a rabbit when the bobcat got it.

  My parents never really named me. The dark newborn’s hair had given way to a white cloud of curls floating about my head. So they called me Blondie, a purely descriptive designation, really not a name at all.

  My mother carried me in a sling stuffed with clean cotton. Her hair had grown very long, and she wound it into braids that lay like soft ropes around me. When my mother was a man, her driving energy had been situated in her cerebrum, rather like a propeller on the nose of a plane. But returned to womanhood, she decelerated, became as low-pitched as the diesel throb of the frogs, as if she were driven from a source low in her belly. She wore skirts and aprons. The only articles of a man’s clothing that she would not relinquish were my father’s woollen socks, because they fit with her beaded moccasins, and her hat, rain or shine. With the moccasins, the papoose-sling, the cotton skirts, the shambling hat, she looked like a Métisse. She had a narrow beak. Her strong Methodist jaw, her muscular upper lip, her big-knuckled hands and long arms were attached to a short, wiry frame.

  She was having a bit of trouble relaxing into civilian life. It wasn’t very interesting being an ordinary woman in the province of Manitoba. The land was wonderful, but the politics were, quite frankly, ugly and deceitful. Thanks to Riel, Sir John A. had indeed granted us bilingual schools, given us a few seats in the Canadian Parliament, promised treaties to settle the Indians. Everybody got excited at the prospect of being railroaded. He had a genius for economy of scale. He could have been a brilliant ecologist, with his grasp of tautologies, of recycled manure. Every Christmas in our meagre household, as I unpacked my tiny Christmas stocking, I’d have Sir John A. Macdonald on my mind. He would have made a brilliant housewife, the way he could stretch a morsel of liberty, a tidbit of dignity. Sir John A., the Mother of Confederation.

  Macdonald packed the hundred square miles surrounding our homestead with all the provincial status we could eat. It got hot in here, steamed up with our new responsibilities, nerved up with the shock of our brand-new identity. And around us like a wine-dark sea lay the vast holdings of the Canadian government, the sable empire of what was still called the North-West Territories. Administered from Ottawa. Hawks and eagles, owls and rabbits, bear and wolf, Cree and Ojibwa. Latent, veiled in royal rhetoric. Real estate. Millions of acres of real estate. Make sure it’s Protestant, British and white. And keep it out of the hands of the Americans. The quick old boys in Ontario planned to run it for themselves.

  It began to rain. It rained for four days. We went out (my white head protected by a wild rhubarb leaf) to pick the end of the corn, knee-deep in mud. A warm rain and no wind, but hard, hard rain. It began to resemble punishment. My mother had a spacious soul, and she accommodated the ulcer of guilt from Thomas Scott’s death sentence. Thomas Scott lived with us, so to speak, in the dark corners, but we still lit the lamps, remained loyal to day’s light and love’s warmth. We let him stay on, a deranged boarder. We owed him that.

  But the rain fell so hard and for so long it seemed unnatural. It was dark inside our little house. My father had gone to Winnipeg two days before. Sir John A. Macdonald had sent Col. Garnet Wolseley and twelve hundred soldiers out here to save us from “the Half-breeds.” It was a friendly expedition, with some British regulars and a whole lot of Orangemen aiming to avenge the death of Brother Thomas Scott. The troops had stormed Lower Fort Garry, hoping to wipe out Riel and his men, but were disappointed to find the front door open and the fort abandoned. A short distance away, Riel stood watching them awhile before he turned to the south and walked into exile (and in exile he would be elected to t
he House of Commons). It was open season on the Métis. The soldiers set up the Loyal Order of the Orange in Winnipeg, and that grand organization began to rule us all. Inspired by booze, the soldiers beat up Métis men and raped the women. With all the brawling, Dad told Alice she had to stay home with me. My mother was feeling a certain ambivalence towards being a woman.

  I had an earache and told her so the only way I could. She paced, patient, singing old Wesleyan hymns that depressed her. But the downpour drowned out her singing and my crying drowned out the downpour and she began to hold my wailing little body just a bit too tight. At last, when she heard me sharply cry out and understood it was from the tiny, secret pinch she’d given my thigh beneath the shawl, she stopped. She put me down. Very carefully, she wrapped me in fresh moss and put me in the sling and covered it all with her old capote. She left my dad a note. She took a bit of dried moose meat, a few cold pancakes and—selfish thing—a small bag of sugar, for she was becoming secretive and liked to wet her finger and suck on sweets. A coal lamp burned over the wash basin. She blew it out. We headed for Winnipeg, a ten-mile walk.

  My father hurt like a virgin at an orgy. A weaker idealist would have lived at O’Lone’s saloon. But pain never scared Dad. He held the hurt bundle of his idealism like it was a puppy in a blanket. He had visceral humility, a thorough fidelity to being alive, even when it hurt. He felt such gratitude for the privilege of taking part in life’s adventure that the tears would bite his eyes and his laughter was a cry with joy in it, and my mother would touch him, struck by awe for the spirit she saw there.

  Idealism made him suffer. And his pain, on the raining afternoon my mother tried to walk to town, was an astonishing hot red thing. Dad had been on his way back home, worried about Alice and me, when he first saw Col. Garnet Wolseley trot by wearing bright red trousers and a tunic adorned with loops of gold thread and brass buttons and medals for heroic deeds for the British army in China and India and Crimea. Wolseley’s cherry-red gallantry glowed like embers, receding as he rode wetly north, back to the Lower Fort, downriver from Fort Garry, to dinner and a fire. If you followed Colonel Wolseley down the muddy road towards his comfort and his cognac, it would have been a peaceful little scene deserving of our nostalgia for British soldiers come to save the English-speaking pioneers from impulsive half-breeds who had, without provocation, dyed their hands in the diabolical butchery of the brave, young Orangeman Thomas Scott. If you were deaf, if you kept your sentimental eyes upon the heroic coloner’s blue-blooded slog home to his toddy and his bath.

  My father began to hurry home. Just south of the St. Norbert church, in Métis country, the soldiers were hunting for Riel. They had tracked a man they thought might be him right onto our property. Dad could hear the whooping and shouting in the bush quite near our house, and he ran towards the sound with his heart in his mouth. He stumbled into a clearing, and there he found the Métisse; she lay with her face in a puddle. A russet skirt with a pumpkin-coloured apron, torn, had been lifted to expose her bare legs and buttocks. Her long black hair had been pressed into the mud by somebody’s boot. Dad gently turned her over, wiped the dirt from her nose and mouth. She stirred.

  Everyone was dangerously subdued. A boy of perhaps four years of age sat near by. Dad smoothed the woman’s skirt over her legs, but he was stopped by a hand with red hair sprouting between the knuckles, and he looked up directly into the hairy ears of the mutton-chopped surveyor. The fellow grinned a grin conspiratorial and obsequious. My father stood, straightening his hat. The child stood, mimicking. The surveyor said, “Looks like you’ve picked up a stray.”

  Someone began to giggle. The haggard collection of soldiers were staggering drunk. A fat man laughed so hard he doubled over and then sat down, aiming for a fallen tree trunk, which he missed, and floundered in the mud with a bad fit of hiccups. Mutton chops winked at Dad.

  The very drunk have flight patterns like swifts or swallows, abrupt and veering. Suddenly, the fat soldier stopped laughing and spoke to my father with elaborate care. “Are you a murderer?” he asked my dad. All the soldiers fell silent. The speaker rose and, with an injured expression, wiped his trousers. Two hiccups in succession, and then he said, louder, “Are you the one put the bullet to Brother Scott’s head?” Through the willows, Dad could see the wide, grey river. The Métis named Goulet had drowned not far from shore, a stone’s throw. Both my parents knew Goulet well. He’d been a member of the court martial that had condemned Thomas Scott to death. The soldiers had killed Goulet by throwing rocks at his head while he tried to swim across the river.

  The little boy spotted a frog in the grass and began to chase it into the woods. He was only as tall as the milkweed. When he came to a fallen tree, he crept under it and disappeared into the bush. Dad made a move to go after him, but the soldiers cut him off.

  My father knew we make the world by looking; we’re always making it up. So he wasn’t surprised to see my mother emerge from the woods with me in my sling and the boy’s hand in hers. He’d conjured her, wife and murderer. Mum was looking refreshed, wearing her capote and her wet hat, and looking for all the world like the boy’s aunt.

  They saw my father’s inspiring glance and turned their attention to us. My mother, always happy to chat with strangers, gave them a winning smile. This was the final insult. These brave men had walked over fifteen hundred miles of bog carrying barrels of salt pork, expecting to free the Anglo pioneers from the rebel breeds, only to find themselves before a cheerful squaw flirting like she was their equal. The most coherent of the drunken soldiers shifted his weight, rubbed his nose with his hand and said, “And who the bloody hell might you be?”

  “She is my wife,” my father said.

  The soldier turned back to my father. “I picked you for a breed soon as I laid eyes on you.” Then he squinted, wiping rain from his brow.

  “I know who you are.” It was mutton chops. He pointed at Dad. “You shot Thomas Scott.”

  My mother and father looked across the drizzle directly at one another, a mated glance, serious and resolute. My mother’s hand calmly stroked my back. Dad yelled, “Run!” In opposite directions. My mother back to the woods, dragging the little boy, while Dad made for the river. “Lynch the bastard!” we heard the soldiers shouting. My mother looked behind and saw that they’d gone after Dad. She stopped, panting. In the quiet woods she crouched to catch her breath, studying the soaked red bark of a spruce and a moth, grey and dusty, closed up. Nobody was coming after her. It felt like hide-and-seek. She could hear the soldiers yelling near the river.

  She went to the riverbank. Dad was swimming across. He was a pretty good swimmer. Mum saw this with a sharp pang of love; there really was nothing the man couldn’t do. The soldiers threw stones into the water until at last one struck him. He sank, came up once with blood on his scalp, and then went under. My mother called his name. But he didn’t reappear. The rain fell so hard it made splashes on the surface.

  They turned and circled my mother. No one said anything. Mum bolted, but a soldier pinned her to the ground, surprised to find her so bulky, and I was squashed by his weight. Just then, my earache got terrible, and the soldier, though underfed, was tall and the pressure of his weight made a funnel for rainwater from Mum’s hat brim into my ear, and I began a howl that inspired my mother to sing, “Come, let us to the Lord our God with contrite hearts return…” The soldier pulled back, my mother bellowed, “… and though his arm be strong to smite, ’tis also strong to save.” The soldier knew the song; he heard the brogue somewhere in her multicultural repertoire, for though she seldom spoke one dialect in particular, when she was scared the Scot in her came out. He backed off and scrambled to his feet. Mum stood up, holding her song like a gun.

  The poor soldiers were perilously close to sobriety (they’d be nearly two days without relief, for the saloons in Winnipeg had been cleaned right out and they’d have to wait till Monday for a wagon from Pembina). Everybody had a hangover. Mum stepped on the soldiers�
�� toes, jiggled me with sharp pats to the backside. “All people that on earth do dwell”—her brogue a tonic of sulphur and molasses—“sing to the Lord with cheerful voice!” The soldiers, headache-shriven, picked themselves out of the mud and began to file by. You’d expect them to drop a penny in her hat. Mum pursued them, holding me before her as if I were a votive candle, bawling, “Him to serve with mirth, his praises forth to tell!”

  At the fallen body of the Métisse the men stopped and gave a little bow, and the woman seemed to be waking up, as if their departure were lifting a spell. The sobering soldiers took the same road their brave leader had taken just an hour before. They walked with the indifference of people too ill to care. My mother hummed her hymn and patted my bum nervously, watching them go. Dad was dead. And the Métisse… she turned to the woman. A beauty, the mix of French and Cree, dark bony features, older than my mother by about ten years, standing up in pain. There was a matter-of-fact quality to her movements, and my mother, who could not survive my father’s death, was swamped by dread. It was raining again. Everything had to move forward, was already on its way to the impossible future.

  “Okay,” the woman said with the lilt of French. She looked at Mum with tolerant distaste. She shook off my mother’s hand. “Don’t. I’ll be okay.” She looked around. “What have you done with the little boy?”

  In her mind’s eye, my mother saw the grey moth upon the red spruce. “I’m positive,” she said. Always stubborn, she reached again for the woman. She hoped to rid herself of awe. She pulled her to the bush. “He’s here. Somewhere.”

  The Métisse said, “Shut up.” But she kept my mother’s hand in hers. “Listen.” It took a minute to hear anything, but then gradually the sound of rain. And the voice of the child near by. “There,” he said to a couple of frogs in his pocket. The women were rather shy, watching him. The Métisse touched his hair, lifted her eyebrows when he showed off his catch.