When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “He’s not really mine,” she said. “I found him. He got left.”

  He smiled, self-conscious, coy.

  “What is your name?” my mother asked him.

  “Eli,” he said. He looked out the corner of his eye. My mother felt afraid for him. He seemed to feel he was fibbing about his own name. But the Métisse brushed the hair from his forehead and murmured, “D’accord. It’s okay. Eli is your name.”

  HER NAME WAS MARIE. My mother was soon speaking discontinuous words of Cree and French. Despite her own injuries, Marie cared for my mother that night, and she collected a few drops of my mother’s pee and let it into my ear and cured the ache, and my mother said it must be an Indian cure, and the woman said, no, not Indian, she’d learned it from Baptists in South Dakota.

  Marie had stayed away since the June hunt, travelling south down the Missouri River, farther than she’d ever gone before. Then she’d heard about the trouble with the soldiers and had come home.

  “Where is that?” my mother asked.

  “Home?” Marie looked out from under the steaming branches they’d cut to form a shelter. She smiled calmly. “I’m home now,” she said. “This is our land.”

  “Yours? This is your land?”

  Marie put a rosehip in her mouth. “Ours,” she said.

  “Oh. Well. Yours.” My mother bit her lip. “We have a lot in common.”

  Marie tipped her head. “No,” she said, “not much. But you’re going to hang around anyway.”

  Then my mother did something that she would not have done before shooting Thomas Scott. She said, “I’m not leaving.” She flinched when Marie turned to her. But stayed. Wavering. “We could share…” But stopped. A look of sardonic pity passed over Marie’s face.

  My mother needed to fall asleep, and she felt this as an urgency to lie down beside my dad. The rain fell, though it was warm again that night. She asked Marie to watch me and left their little shelter, calling my father’s name, her guttural chant. She went down to the river. There was a fire burning on the other shore.

  Through waves of rain, she saw his fire burning. She thought, It’s too big. Too big and not safe; a fire as big as a house, with wet rocks around it. Like a breast, my mother thought, and she saw him leaning, thoughtfully, my philosophical dad drying himself. Mum wasn’t sure he was real. When she called out to him, he didn’t respond. It was a windy night. She stood beneath the willow bower, the itchy grass waist-high, and called him. How could he have got such a fire going? He was so familiar, his elbows on his knees, but the image flickered. She watched him till she was sure she’d made him up. And returned to our shelter seized by jealousy against death.

  The next morning at dawn, while the rain continued to fall, my mother returned to the shore in a fury. If he was a ghost, then he’d damn well better turn back into a man. In the ordinary morning light, it could be his body or a piece of wood there at Vermette’s Point, that land across the river. She waved at him, shouting. Dad woke up, and he stood and removed his hat and waved back. She could see even at this distance that his body was subdued, as if he’d emigrated, left home for good. He was consistent; each time she whistled and waved, he stood up and waved his hat at her. And then he put his hat back on his head and sat down. He stoked the ashes and stayed there all afternoon.

  It occurred to my mother that they would need a boat to bring him across. She conferred with Marie, who brought her brother from Pointe Coupée, just upriver from St. Norbert. Marie’s brother, the small and handsome François, gazed sagely across the water. The two men waved their hats politely. Then François shrugged and looked at my mother. “He looks okay,” he said.

  “But you have to bring him home,” Mum said.

  François sighed. “I’ll get my cousin’s boat,” he said. And went away.

  My mother stood on the riverbank, staring longingly at Peter, who looked back at her, almost like a stranger. François appeared at last, rowing upstream from around the bend, and crossed the river. Alice could see Peter kneel down, the two men conferring, François taking up his oars again and rowing back. He tied the boat to a willow and climbed up to stand before Alice. “He asks me to look after you. I say to him okay. Marie and me, we will look after you for now.”

  “But,” said Alice, “I have to see him. You have to bring him back.”

  François picked up Eli and held the boy upside down and said, “Maybe he need some time to think.”

  My mother looked across the rainy Red. Her beloved Orkney, standing on the other shore, strangely calm, and she knew that François was right. Peter would come back when he was ready.

  He would remain on the other shore for forty days and forty nights.

  The rain cleared, and fall graced us with shining, smoky light. My mother became friends with Marie. Mum managed this through a youthfully bland acceptance of Marie’s generosity. She couldn’t afford to look at it too carefully. Sometimes when she was with Marie, she felt dizzy and afraid, as if she were patting a deer or sailing a big boat, that sense of tricking power with a fragile gesture.

  And though I couldn’t yet sit up without drooling, I fell in love with Eli.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHEN WE REALIZED THAT MY DAD, Peter, wasn’t going to join us right away, Marie took us to her house near by. We’d never seen this place before on our walks through the land we wanted for our own. The house wasn’t visible from the road, and was connected only by deer trails. A squat construction of mudded logs, it was camouflaged against a stand of black spruce, a rare, nearly impossible tree in these parts, though it’s common farther north. Inside, the walls were plastered with buffalo hair mixed with clay. The single room smelled of hide, and the sunlight glazed through windows of buffalo-parchment skin. I never cried again, but lay quietly, blinking in the room’s albuminous light, cooing in its animal fragrance.

  While we waited for Peter, the two women travelled back and forth between the two houses. With the help of Marie’s brother, François, and their countless cousins, they stacked wood for winter, and Marie showed my mother where the Seneca grew, the wild licorice and bedstraw. She knew the land, an oxbow surrounded by the Red, inch by inch. Sometimes we slept at Marie’s cabin, almost without noticing. Marie must have noticed.

  Waiting was a task my mother knew well. She’d waited to go to university where she’d waited for God—an expectation she hadn’t quite relinquished on that Orkney coast where she’d met her future husband. She’d packed St. Augustine, along with her own father’s socks, for the long voyage overseas, where she waited to find him and then waited for the right time to reveal herself. She didn’t need to wait for him to fall in love with her. The wait at Fort Garry was hard; in fact, had proved beyond her. Shooting Thomas Scott had given her a new lease on life, and prepared her for another fifty years of more or less patient waiting. But it was hard.

  Why is a woman’s love supposed to be expressed by patience? Such an unpredictable expression of strength.

  And while Peter stayed in the wilderness, he saw change shedding its own skin. The Orkney buffalo hunter who had spent his youth travelling the surface of life had stopped, homesteaded.

  He felt enormous grief for his future. A farmer. How had this come to be? Concurrent with that was his unease over “our property,” his desire to make our claim to it invincible. Our false claim. He was still rocked by his loyalty to Riel, by the joy that had come from the companionship of an army of idealists. Wolseley’s drunken soldiers had mistaken him for a breed. But Peter knew that he could never truly belong to such company. And hell, he hated belonging to anything, didn’t he? Didn’t he? So why was he driven to build so many fences? Why did he find himself loving this place, if not through a sense of belonging? The marks of his ownership filled him with pride and a compulsion to do more, to improve the land. Was he completely cracked? Or could it be his having a child now? Was that what had caused this weird burrowing activity? He was driven by a fate larger than himself. The fate of paternity
. Fatherhood. A truly terrifying concept. He stayed forty days and forty nights on Vermette’s Point, across the Red from his wife and child, because of ambivalence towards his new fate. The torment of ambivalence kept him there.

  He saw his significant insignificance bleed into the earth, and at last he grew devoted to its benign reception. A parasite huddled in the earth’s rank fur, he nestled into the miniature fact of his own existence. He was nothing, yet he was also crucial to the scheme of things. It was true. And what is true is also false. The world is spinning a yarn. And he was grateful. He aged into permanent youth.

  On four separate nights, he dreamed that he was an insect. Not in any extreme empathetic sense; he was also himself. The insect varied. But invariably, he ate himself, popping his own vile body into his mouth. Chewing. The bitter taste, the poisonous secretions. The necessity.

  He thought not about rain but about the spaces between the raindrops. His idealism would flourish, but it wouldn’t hurt, not quite so much. When the dreary light of compromise lit upon Dad’s idealism, it would thereafter rise up, leap elsewhere, quick as a flea.

  This is what I know of my father’s sojourn in the wilderness.

  On the forty-first morning, my mother and I went as usual to wave at Dad. It was nearly the end of October, and the day was dull with coming winter, starved of light. When we arrived at the river’s banks, Peter was already there. He waved once and disappeared, and Alice and I turned away, despondent. Alice felt too sad to make the walk home, so we sat down where the willows made a bony hammock. All warmth had slid out of our world, and we were left in the stark, declining day leading inexorably to solstice. An ugly bit of weather. Even the geese early departed.

  Then the sound of Peter’s shout from upriver, clear enough in the absence of geese and wind and other life. Through the cavity of afternoon, Peter’s voice, calling, “Alice. Alice!” A hundred yards upstream, a stick man walking on water, yelling for Alice. Then we made out the raft that carried him and the pole he used to push his way. He’d waited until the river fell low enough, and took his chances, gauging where we’d seen the steamboats grasshopper over the shallow parts. Midstream his pole couldn’t touch bottom, and then the current was carrying him down the centre of the Red. He wasn’t going to make it. As his raft passed by, he dove in, the current carrying him downstream. Alice and I leaned out over the muddy water, and she held on to a wild rose bush, not noticing the thorns in her palm, trying to see if Peter had made it to land. The raft was a bump on the broad brown river. Quiet. Mum called out; the air felt thick as lard. She called a third time. And then Peter answered. “Yo!” he said. Alice looked at my fat face in the papoose and asked me, “Did he say yo?” She scuttled through the brush, protecting me from scratches and branches, in a dead heat, until she reached him at last.

  PART TWO

  1885

  CHAPTER ONE

  When they have crowded their country because they had no room to stay any more at home, it does not give them the right to come and take the share of all the tribes besides them….

  This is the principle. God cannot create a tribe without locating it. We are not birds. We have to walk on the ground….

  —Louis Riel, at his trial in Regina in the summer of 1885

  IN THE SUMMER OF MY FIFTEENTH year, my mother went temporarily insane. It was an urgent season, tormented by grasshoppers, the locusts of doom. The previous fall, my father had built my new bedroom at the back of the house, and it was there that I would dispense with my virginity. We’d just had two bad years with no money anywhere: poor crops, failed gardens, dissatisfaction on the faces of the grown-ups, hungering want in the children’s eyes. The great boom in Winnipeg would soon be over and the speculators had migrated west into Saskatchewan. The buffalo were gone for good and the Indians were dying of scurvy. Soon, they would hang Riel in Regina and send his adjutant general, Gabriel Dumont, into the American circus, and the great Cree chief Big Bear would be chained up in Stony Mountain Penitentiary. As I look back on it now, I marvel over how bad things were, how we can tread water even when it’s full of leeches and toads.

  I was a good shot and loved to hunt. It was off-season, so I was just shooting squirrels. The fields of Red Fife wheat were evil with the clatter of the grasshoppers, their weird skeletons sawing and leaping up like the devil’s fiddlers. So I took my Winchester into the bush at the north edge of what we liked to call “our property.” I was talking to myself, a habit I’d inherited from my dad (whom I now called Peter, and my mum was now Alice to me because I had to discourage them from thinking they could lord over me just because they were old). I still lived at home because I figured Peter and Alice would shrivel up if I went away. They were not exactly deficient, but middle-aged people are unstable and need constant reassurance.

  The day Alice went mad the weather was beautiful: not too hot, with a slight breeze. I was having an imaginary conversation with Big Bear. It took the form of an apology. I was in love with the Cree chief; he was my version of a beat poet. I’d seen the photographs of him in the Free Press and loved his dusty black suit, his modest felt hat upon shaggy, silvering hair. I’d scanned the articles, threshing the narrow lines of print to seek the seeds of quotation marks, listening for his stubborn, mild-mannered and sundry ways of saying no.

  “Big Bear,” I said (a squirrel, motionless, upside down), “my parents are idiots who know not what they do. My whole dumb tribe is greedy and blind and we can’t see what’s beautiful.” Because my dad had borrowed money and he looked pinched and anxious and I hated my mother’s forgetful face when they were busy building fences and more fences and I wanted Peter to chuck it all for freedom (I mean I wanted him to take a day off). I was never going to be like them, Alice and Peter—predatory, avaricious, foul-smelling, pillow-faced, laughing to themselves in the morning and too damn busy for me.

  I took aim.

  “Big Bear. You are the bird flying over the land. We are the axe, the saw, the railway, the school, the money, the stupid church, the ugly guy who’s a judge; we are the Anglo, the golfer, forgive us, the merchant, the thief in the top hat, that goddam guy who loaned my dad money. Forgive us, Big Bear, because we’re scavenging dogs in the land of the Great Spirit. Help us to understand, O great chief in Saskatchewan, for you are the bird, and I guess that makes us the forest.”

  I squeezed the trigger. Squirrel everywhere.

  You are the bird and we the forest. Not too sure what I meant by that, but Big Bear was angelic, proud even in defeat, and the bird and the forest became my litany, quivering with poetic uncertainty, feeding my sullen protest at the supper table. The Canadian soldiers had chased Big Bear and his soldiers through the bush from Battleford and lost him. He doubled back east a ways, to his birthplace near Fort Carlton. And there he surrendered. My alternative rock star, my rock of ages. Charged with treason for protecting his own land. He was going to jail. But then, the Canadians made the whole country a jail. Fences everywhere. The Indians couldn’t leave their reserves without somebody counting heads, checking up on them. Just like me, I thought. Just like poor little white me.

  I WENT TO MARIE’S LOG HOUSE on my outings almost every day. Marie had gone away with the little boy, Eli, after Wolseley’s soldiers had buttoned their trousers, and after she and François and their numerous cousins had helped Alice survive Peter’s sojourn in the woods across the river. Marie loaded her things onto her brother’s wagon. Alice stood by fretfully, and finally blurted out, “Come home, or back… yes, come back whenever you like.” Marie and François stopped and looked at Alice, blank-faced. Alice blundered on, “I mean, after all, it’s your… that is, it’s our… or I…” She stopped. François kindly nodded and resumed his work, avoiding Alice’s eyes, but Marie gathered up her tolerance and distaste and gently withered Mum, who looked away in shame.

  We lost a lot of Métis after the 1870 troubles. They couldn’t stomach the government. They moved west to Saskatchewan and Alberta, or south to Montana a
nd the Dakotas, where they could hunt just a while longer, preserving a migratory life, shepherded by their Catholic priests.

  Abandonment enhanced the magic that surrounded the place. There still remained Marie’s small knife on the crooked table and a green copper box with a lid, which I liked to remove to sniff at the remains of the dusky Seneca root. On one wall hung a pair of snowshoes with painted frames. There was a mud oven which I never dared light, and a mud floor over a stone foundation. The rafters were lined with skins—buffalo, fox, bear, rabbit. The surprising cluster of black spruce that grew up around the cabin made it humus-coloured and nearly buried the low walls in sprouting roots. In the intervening years, the land seemed to have sunk farther into bog. It was connected to our house by a nearly invisible path, and no one guessed my secret grotto. I was like a philanderer with an apartment.

  And so I learned to enjoy the gift of solitude. I talked to myself. I was a soul misunderstood, perched in the pungent dust on the ground of Marie’s grotto, speaking thus when I sensed the presence of a foreign creature. A good hunter, I lifted my nose to the wind and went completely still. The shadow of a man fell across the slant of sun through the doorway. And then I heard him breathing. My heart pounded through the tips of my fingers. I leapt up and grabbed my gun and was at the door to see his first blink of consternation. There stood a young man looking at me.

  He was ugly in a wonderful kind of way. His hair was brown by default and as erratic as the fur on a feral cat. He had a short back with thick thighs, oversized hands on muscled arms. His eyes were an uncertain mix of green and brown, but clear, clear-sighted. I took special interest in the arms where he’d rolled up his sleeves: muscled flesh on the lower part of the forearms where the skin is soft, with light hair on the upper part, just to the wrists joining to the huge hands wrapped around his rifle, which he cocked across his barrel-sized chest.