When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  We sat quietly, listening to the wood burn. Nobody wanted to go inside.

  At last Eli spoke. “I made my way here travelling south from Batoche through the Qu’Appelle valley.” He stopped and sighed. A little potato burst its skin, and its white flesh crackled in the fire. Eli sat with the weight of his own reluctance heavy upon him.

  “I rode through the reserve at Indian Head,” he said. “They were starving to death; some of Piapot’s band, others. They hung their dead in the trees. That was their way. It was getting dark. They looked like…” He rubbed his face. We didn’t look at him, in case he couldn’t say any more. “They looked like caterpillars or something. And the families—just walking around, you know, real sick. I got down off my horse and went into the camp. This little girl comes up to me, and she takes a hold of my hand and she shows me where to put my horse. A young girl, maybe seven years of age. She takes me to her family’s tent and tells me, ‘You sleep here.’ There was two more kids inside. Everybody else is dead. Her parents, they died, both. I, course, have a few things I give them. But she had a cough. I stay two days and she died.

  “She didn’t even weigh a feather. I give her to an old man there. He says he’s her grandfather. Then I ride directly back up to Batoche and join up with Riel.”

  My mother, Alice, moaned involuntarily, but she was perfectly still. She didn’t look at him; she stared at the fire.

  You could see that Eli had left many parts of himself behind. His face was sad, but he laughed a little. “A lot of Indians didn’t even like Riel,” he said.

  Peter said gently, “Riel.” He looked uneasily at my mother, who was still struggling painfully with the worry over Riel’s upcoming trial. But Alice pursed her lips, poker-faced. Dad almost whispered, “It’s music to hear the name.”

  Eli nodded. “A fellow with pure intentions,” he said. “Excitable intentions. But a highly decent man.”

  “Very highly decent,” whispered Dad. “I loved that man. I admit I did, and I do. He’s a rare man.”

  Eli politely ventured, “He might’ve altered a little since the ’69 trouble. His rope frayed somewhat.”

  My dad hesitated. He’d heard the rumours: a lunatic asylum in Quebec, back in the 1870s. But surely that was just a ruse. Still, it pained my father severely to know that Riel’s way, his Catholic… yes, his Catholic imagination, all clouds and voices—that way of inventing a future so far from the cowardly discipline of the bankers’ Confederation—could be ground down under the heel of this cunning new mercantile world. A vision sneezed up the great Protestant nose of Canada. “He’s the last of his kind,” Dad said. “The air around here, it doesn’t foster poets and such. Not any more.”

  “Well, perhaps we did the necessary. I guess I’m glad. It’s past now anyway.” Eli’s sadness seemed to float him up and away from the fire.

  Alice twitched. “You fought with the Métis?” she asked. “You joined that crew?”

  Eli and Alice looked each other in the eye.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re Marie’s little boy.”

  He barely nodded. “Well, I wasn’t,” he said. “You know I don’t know where I come from. But yes. Marie took me in.”

  “Where is she?” You could feel Alice sending her own roots down where she sat. Contrarily, she added, “Is she coming home?”

  Eli shook his head. “She got the TB. A year ago now she’s died.”

  My parents exchanged a quick, furtive glance. Eli noticed. He smiled, sadly teasing. “I think I brung her with me, however.” Impish, charming. “Yes, I believe Marie followed me home and took up residence in the old cabin. She’s on the premises, I’m sure she is. Or something’s nagging me to eat right and get more sleep.” He laughed. We laughed. Nervously. “Beautiful lady,” he said. “Terrible nag.”

  Peter poked a potato, offered it to Alice.

  ELI DECIDED TO RIDE BACK west to Batoche and then head north to Regina to witness the trial of Riel.

  I was heartbroken but Peter was devastated. He expressed an ardent, anguished loyalty to Eli, pretty much love at first sight. For my dad, the great Canadian Confederation marked his initiation into sedentary adulthood, and so it seemed a matter of course. But he saw that Eli had been given one of the most difficult handicaps: the curse of being born into the wrong century. Eli was a hunter. And the New World was a farm.

  Eli rode the Carlton Trail to Batoche like a man reading the lines of his own hand. He was never lost, and as a nomad he was always home. Up the steppes of prairie, leaving the basin of the glacial lake where its old shores rise to the Pembina hills, and up, northwest, through the Touchwood hills to Gabriel’s Crossing and Batoche. Blues pale and tender, blowing acres of bluestem, hilly as a woman’s shoulder blades, and the scent of animal and the oiled-leather creaking of the saddle and Eli’s boot in the stirrup and under them, tall prairie, swaying and distant.

  With Eli gone, life was a bore. It was harvest. I hated the way daylight exposed things in our yard: the bush, Marie’s grotto, my bedroom. Things sat up, matter-of-fact, perhaps useful if one had the strength and purpose to do anything. I worked to defy the flat fact of loneliness.

  Alice regained her strength to the point that it seemed quite safe to let her read the newspapers, and we were able to speak the name of Riel while we ate; the name came out a normal size and volume and we could properly pronounce him and we waited for his execution to be stayed.

  But I was fifteen. I was connected to the world through sympathetic magic. If I slept on my left side, Riel would hang. If I succumbed to a third piece of my mother’s flax bread, Eli would be killed in a fight. Hat on backwards, the moneylenders would cancel Dad’s loan. Boots placed right to left—or worse, if one fell over in the night—Riel would hang, Eli would die, Peter would lose the farm. Alice alone was safe from the quick trigger of my influence. Our future was littered with hidden mines.

  Fall soured summer. The crop was okay. We persisted. We worked hard. We hired a guy to help out awhile and I loaned him a pillow and he complained later that I’d given him head lice and it took endless washings with Mama’s bleach to rid me of the scratching and my hair turned white and dry and stood up frizz-full of static and nobody would touch me because I gave off such a shock, worse if you’d just licked your lips before a goodnight kiss.

  It began to snow in October, but not enough to stay on the ground. I wished it would. Without snow, the cold gnawed on the deepest roots, ate light and life till it was all zero. Freezing cold. Sound of our shoes on frozen mud, horses slipping, and I was there just yearning, praying for the bafflement of snow.

  It got sunny. Really cold. Waking up to a silver skin of frost, I looked over the edge of my bed and saw my left boot pointing east. And I knew. My prayers and complaints, my appetite for fresh bread, my carelessness with my hat, all had led to this: Riel would hang and the world would lose, lose, and it would mark the beginning of an evil era where the good guys die because they’re good and the bad guys win because they’re good at being bad.

  And Riel did hang. November 16, in the morning. He asked for three eggs and a glass of milk. Then he walked alone onto the scaffold, and they put a noose around his neck and dropped him through the floor of the gallows. And Eli would tell me later (not realizing it was an accusation, and confused when I responded to his story by getting down on my hands and knees and begging forgiveness) that Riel had stood with his head high and tried to calm the frightened priest.

  “Courage, Father,” Riel had said.

  Courage.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DAD RESPECTED MY FONDNESS for Marie’s cabin, though he never went there himself. Whenever he saw me heading in that direction, he got quiet and pious, like somebody coming into church. I never asked him why. He and my mother framed the drawing of the buffalo and hung it over the kitchen table. And they built fences around the fences. “Our property,” he called it, spitting. “Our p-property,” twitchy and defensive.

 
“Our property” had begun as a place to lie down, no bigger than the space of a dream. The disbursement of $160 hadn’t defined it much. The land they’d supposedly bought was a shadow at the outskirts of firelight, yielding as far as the tall, dead white oak, its bark peeled away; there, where the land lies low and then rises a little, and to the east somewhere, the lightning-struck elm, a great hump of roots that looks like a bear.

  When I was born, Peter turned into a wood-gnawing creature. His early patriarchal impulses were suburban. Tools of fatherhood: axe and harrow. He cut down five, ten, fifteen, twenty acres of bush, harnessed horses to their roots and hauled them into great pyres and set fire to them. All day, the slender branches of silver-leafed aspen smoked beneath the flaming roots of elm and oak, slowly smouldering while my dad returned to the house and lifted his blonde infant in his smoky hands to his smoky chest.

  They slept with fine black soil in their hair, littering the bedding with grasses and ash; they dreamed thick green dreams of fire and seed.

  And Marie hovered over our lives. Her cabin grew out of the strange stand of black spruce on land we wished to be ours. Marie was fixed. She arrived, as soft as the dust on a moth’s wing, and left a permanent dye upon our fingertips. She would linger.

  And Peter had borrowed money from somewhere.

  The moth will stir at the back of the mind.

  Cher père du Manitoba. Sorry you hung.

  THERE NEVER WAS AN AMNESTY, but in the first week of December 1885, it snowed overnight and the next day, a thaw loosened the ground, and then they brought Riel’s body to his family land in a wood coffin. The Riel farm was northeast of “our property.” Eli was in the party bringing home the discarded saviour, the migrant statesman. A tousled prophet with self-doubting eyes (the photo-reproduced icon on our tourist pamphlets—moustache, chubby cheeks, wavy black hair).

  What might’ve happened if the lawyers for his defence hadn’t pinned their case entirely on the question of Riel’s sanity? What if they’d said, “He’s sane as most of us, just not as foxy. The man’s got a point.” Of course he was nuts; he wasn’t a landlord! Native and Métis land rights? Self-government? The right to educate your children in your own tradition? What was the history that we lost over the lawyers’ crummy judgment? Is it ghosting down the Saskatchewan River, rising with the morning dew? How good we are at losing our own glorious options.

  The thaw was accompanied by drizzle, all afternoon, making pockmarks on the new snow, so within twenty-four hours winter was shrunken and aged. The fine sleet fell without a sound, hanging in the air, and it didn’t smell like rain, but the stink of manure in the barn got strong and the wet gold hay glowed as if you could see its decay.

  I went with my parents in the wagon to pay our respects at the Riel farm. I knew Eli would be there. Still, it shocked me to see him sitting at the kitchen table, his legs crossed, messy and dignified and so accomplished in the task of wearing his own skin. It made me miserable with love.

  The body was in the parlour, Riel’s widow lying on a chaise near by. She was frail with tuberculosis, and overcome with the trauma from the fighting at Batoche and all the years of struggle and exile. Her name was Marguerite. She would be dead by spring. We walked into the wood-warmed house with rain dripping from our chins and noses. The wake had just begun, and it was shapeless in our hands and unrefined. We were outsiders, our grief unreconciled with the community of mourners, and I was envious of their calm distress.

  The women cooked, the priest prayed. I sat at the table, in the leaking boat of my self-respect. The room was an ark, the unkosher mix of the women’s relentless fixings and the flesh-horror of the muttering priest. Peter stood shy and uneasy at the edge of conversations in French. And my mother, Alice, chameleon, rolled the dough for de croxegnols and listened, a brown-eyed boy-hag. To my eyes, she alone in the room could find her way through French and Latin; through the prognostics of cooks planning the next hour of consumption; through the unredemptive politics of the Métis, their slow inventory of loss. The snow-melting rain continued all afternoon.

  Eli was included in the conversations of the men. I was given a doll and a five-year-old girl to entertain. She was a dull little thing who wanted to play house. Me, stuck with this dumb kid in ringlets. Humiliated and so bored at one point that my eyes actually rolled back in my head, revealing the vein-riddled eyeball, the only time in my whole life that ever happened to me, weird, and I know it happened only because I awoke sitting upright and looking at this snotty girl’s scared face.

  “Your eyes just went completely white,” she told me, revolted.

  “No kidding!” I said.

  “You snorted too. You snored. You make me sick!” she said and started to cry, so I took her by the throat (we were beneath a table, the doilies of the tablecloth draped about our ears) and told her that if she didn’t shut up, I would chew off her fingers, and I put one in my mouth, tasting pork fat and nearly throwing up. I scratched the feeble veins in her feeble wrist.

  It was the longest afternoon in Canadian history. When at last my parents released me, I gasped and said goodbye (my voice had gone high, something of nerves and embarrassment, the contagion of this stupid little girl’s voice). Eli turned in his chair and nodded, watching us with that clear-eyed comprehension.

  Peter and Alice and I opened the door and stepped out into a changed world.

  The earth was washed in a transparent film of amber, four inches of ice beneath which we could see mice run and frogs paddle and the oxblood of dead leaves. Ice coated the trunks of trees, the walls of the barn, and on the big gate, a magpie with a long wicked tail was frozen by its feet to the rail. We walked holding hands. Dad’s legs slipped out from under him, and we all fell on top of each other, scrambled to our feet, scuffled along at a snail’s pace. Upon the petrified land, snow fell in flakes the size of saucers coasting through the air, and even as we readied the wagon, snow covered the ice and our glimpse of a glass world was lost behind a blanket of white. It was a sticky coating that fell so fast it provided a decent passage for our horses, and so we made our way slowly home.

  The wind picked up. Snow clung to the branches, six inches of it on the north side of the trees. Stuck to the hides of the horses, to fences (there were no electrical wires, no telephone wires, only grey-white sky between blue-white branches), eight inches of snow, upside down, defying gravity. My parents pulled up the wagon at the outer gate and stopped, looking at me with snow battening their eyelashes. They just sat there blinking. They looked like baby animals. I blinked back, waiting for them to proceed to the barn so we could shake down the horses.

  “You go on in,” said Alice. She wore Peter’s old beaver hat, piled high with snow, and thick white epaulets of snow lay on their shoulders as they sat batting their white eyelashes like docile guards in the Gulag. I climbed down and stood beside the wagon, looking up. Peter gathered the reins and clicked at the horses, and they rode off, disappearing from view into the hypnosis of a gathering blizzard.

  Deafened by white, I stood a minute, feeling the collar of my shirt get soaked. Then I walked to the house and went inside. Calcium light, bone blue. I stood around awhile. Stoked the stove. Sort of hungry. Still hypoglycemic from boredom. God knows where my parents had got to. So I went to bed.

  I was looking at Walden, eating Mum’s earnest bran cookies, wearing Dad’s socks, when I thought I heard them come in. Sound of breath, of boots on a wood floor, and I realized it wasn’t my parents. I had been curled on my side. Listening, I rolled onto my back, looking up at the thatched ceiling, Vandyke brown, and the vanilla daylight. Eli walked across the kitchen and stood at the door to my room. I turned my head on the pillow to see him. He was staring out the window at the wings of snow. He glanced at me and smiled, then looked back at the window and said, “It looks just like feathers on an owl. Something strange flying by. Strong, you know.”

  It smelled good with him coming in. I put my hands behind my head and breathed with that shu
dder of happiness you usually earn only after hard crying. After some time, Eli came over and sat on the bed, leaning over me, brushing the hair from my forehead. His hand felt dry and rough and smelled of horse. I lifted my chin and he put his hand on my cheek, and I rubbed against the rough callus on his palm and thumb. He looked me in the eye and nodded. He unbuttoned his jacket and let it fall on the floor. The quilt was wet. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off the undershirt, a faded red. His chest was thick, covered in hair; it looked like a piece of granite, moon blue with points of pink like feldspar, a chunk of flesh. He unbuttoned his pants and, his eyes on mine, raised himself just enough to pull them off with his long johns. Cold, he lifted the covers to climb in beside me, and I saw his chest and stomach as a wedge upon the narrowing pelvis, slightly misfit so the flesh bulged above the hips and groin, like two bodies stacked upon each other and covered in coarse black, curly hair. I longed to put my tongue against the black hair. His skin was cold and soft, and I especially liked the chill skin on his thick arms. On his elbows, he leaned over me and I breathed in his good sweat, the kind from working, not nerves, his smell, woolish, horse, winter, melted butter. I kissed his shoulder, putting my tongue to his skin.