When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “Daddy!” said Helen, always the opportunist.

  “Just look at him!”

  All four of us stared out at Eli, whose attention had been drawn to the braided clouds. Three females and a phantom, all of us seized by love. Mum’s voice grew tender. “Blondie McCormack,” she said, “you go and get yourself a job.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JOHN ANDERSON’S SHOES were made for walking on Tyndall stone steps. His square and handsome hands were formed by God Himself to jingle loose change in the pant pocket of his blue wool suit. His clean jaw suspended keenly from his ears; his upper lip (behind a handlebar moustache) was fine and strong, and the lower lip full but not too full. His brow was broad, and a phrenologist would say he had great intellect and a genealogist would say he had good bloodlines and a banker would say he was solid. John Anderson was born right. He had a law degree, a low handicap and a high return on his investments.

  I went to work for John Anderson just after the New Year. In a way, it was Helen who found the job.

  Helen was now so beautiful that people averted their eyes. She was an oriental poppy. Her beauty was scandalous. She would attract a crowd. Passersby stopped dead in their tracks, banging into one another. Generous souls were struck by joy at the sight of her. For Mr. Kolchella and the rest of the quorum at the Evil Eye, Helen’s extravagant beauty affirmed something: she gave them reason to believe in the essential plenitude of the material world. The others—women eager to protect their measure of vanity, men convinced that abundance is the Devil’s work—stared and withdrew, and stared and withdrew, while Helen watched. She knew. If we were walking, she would let go of my hand. She took no joy from their joy, nor displeasure from their envy. She was fixed to a fate beyond her immediate circumstances.

  And so it was Helen who chose John Anderson—that is, she chose John Anderson’s house, and John Anderson was part of the package.

  We discovered his mansion while out walking through the rich part of town. Helen was wearing little boots trimmed with rabbit fur. I held her hand like a polar bear clutching a teacup. It was very early in the morning, the streets still dark, dawn arriving late and flat and blue. The previous night, fresh snow had fallen in a strong wind. John Anderson’s house rose like a sailing ship from the billowing snowdrifts. It was made of stone. Two coal-oil lanterns burned on either side of the grand entrance.

  Helen tore away and ran up the circular drive. To my dismay, I heard her utter a cry of pleasure. The front door to this ghastly mausoleum lay within a portico topped by a rampart, for the house was built defensively. I heard Helen take a diver’s breath, and then she plunged forward, towards the door.

  I cried out, “I will not work here!” All of a sudden, I was grieving for Clark. The mansion took on the look of a soldier’s uniform, and I became a biting dog. I realized that my friend’s death had left me with an aversion to anything resembling a military officer, and this house looked like a general snoozing after dinner.

  My lips curled back and I began to bark furiously. “Helen, if you do not come back here I will spank you! Do you hear me, young lady? I will take away your bunny boots! Helen! Don’t you dare walk away from me!”

  Helen swept towards the yawning portico, a little fish swimming towards the shark’s mouth. Just then, the front door opened and a youth of about fifteen years emerged, by appearances the son of the czar. He stopped at the steps and said, “This is my father’s house.”

  I laughed out loud. Helen walked right up to him. He said, “You’re trespassing!” Then he saw her face. And stopped dead.

  Helen went calm; a lily in a vase would not be as calm as Helen was just then. She lifted her face to him without affectation, impartial and remote. When I drew close, I found them squared off, bee to flower. I stepped into the middle of that awful equation, thrusting my face into the face of this Romanov and saying hi, for I knew that would turn him off.

  The devil only knows where Helen got her persistence. The little brat spoke clearly: “My mother is seeking a place in your household.”

  I turned on her. “Hsst! You are a shocking liar!” I cried. “God will punish you for your sins.” This was sheer genius on my part. I knew that no rich Protestant would go for a religious zealot. But Helen’s beauty cured men of both blindness and insight.

  “We happen to be in need of a cook,” said the needle-nosed czarevich. He had big adenoids and an oversized Adam’s apple, and he slurred his words, as if his tongue were waiting for the maid to bring him cocoa.

  “You will have to speak up,” I told him. “We are not accustomed to the corruption of the English language. Are you British?”

  “My grandfather was British.” This was obviously something he said often. “Though he got up here from the United States.”

  “So that is a false accent. I thought so. Come, Helen, we cannot stay with people who deceive us with godless rhetoric.”

  The boy was trying to see around me. This was the reaction to my daughter’s beauty that I most feared. Neither generous nor resentful, young Fauntleroy was merely avaricious. He looked greedily for another sip of Helen’s charms. “I don’t know about red-trick,” he said. “All’s I know is we need a cook.”

  “She makes very nice sourdough,” said my vixen.

  “I’ll tell Father you’re here.”

  I could feel the tidal swell of Helen’s willpower and took desperate measures. “Stop!” The boy turned towards me, his eyes on Helen. “We haven’t been properly introduced. How will you explain that to your British—American merchant father?” I stuck out my hand. “I am Blondie, wife of Eli the buffalo hunter. How do you do?”

  The boy seized on the chance to display his nice manners. “I am Richard Anderson, son of John Anderson, KC.” And he put his hand in mine. Well, I let him have it with all the electrical energy I could muster. Half that voltage would have singed the eyelashes off an ordinary man. But Richard had the wits of a wooden mallet, and his wealth and prestige acted as the perfect insulation. “I’ll get Father,” he said. And hurried off.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, it was not John Anderson who would hire us but his wife. She was a pigeon-breasted matron, warm as a factory clock. I have never met anyone less interested in humanity. She greeted us each morning with renewed vigour, but within seconds her attention flagged, her eyes wandered, almost cross-eyed with boredom, studying the stone floor of the kitchen, resting her eyes. She called me Barbara. I corrected her for a while, and then I just gave up. She did like my bread, though. And I soon became famous for my baking all over what they called Millionaire Row.

  Other managerial wives began to ask me for a loaf here and there, and I found I could fit in quite a bit of baking in the mid-afternoon, between lunch and the dinner party. I charged the ladies twenty cents a loaf, much of which went back into the housekeeping money to pay for Mrs. Anderson’s flour and milk. But Mrs. Anderson soon learned of my sideline, and she came charging into the kitchen just before cocktails. She looked remarkably alert.

  “Barbara,” she said to me, “I will have a word with you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I winked at Helen and wiped my hands. Helen smiled that half-smile because she knew I was imitating Grandmother Alice’s imitation of a black servant.

  “Barbara,” said Mrs. Anderson in a conspiratorial voice, “this has got to stop.”

  “My mother does voices,” I told her.

  “You are my cook,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  “It’s just for fun,” I said. “No harm.”

  “But you’re mine,” she said.

  I scratched my ear and looked over at my daughter. This was taking a seedy turn.

  “I pay you to cook for us.” For the first time, Mrs. Anderson looked directly into my eyes, but still she didn’t see me. “You get my drift,” she said.

  “Mama,” said Helen.

  Mrs. Anderson was in danger of becoming fully conscious. She turned her entire bodice towards Helen and said, “Who is this child?”

&nbs
p; “My daughter, Helen. She’s here most days with me.”

  “What is she doing?”

  “Polishing silver.”

  “But who is she? Who is she really?”

  I was becoming alarmed. “Helen. My little girl.”

  Helen sat at the top of a small, apple green stepladder. She was very still. Mrs. Anderson walked towards her till she was at her side. “Helen,” she said. “Your daughter.” She looked up at me quickly, making a comparison between chicken and egg. “Helen.”

  Helen yawned widely. Even her tongue was beautiful. Mrs. Anderson looked, wondering, into Helens mouth. Her own face wore a forgetful expression, slack, nearly innocent.

  “Where are you from?”

  “We’ve got a bit of a farm in the St. Norbert area, to the south of here. As I told you.”

  “Oh, yes.” Mrs. Anderson took one last look and closed her eyes. Her hand clutched the ledge of the porcelain sink, the diamond rings captured by her arthritic knuckles. Helen picked up a spoon and her tarnish-blackened rag. She was placid. And full of rage. The household cat leapt up to settle itself on the pastry board, jade eyes, quickly asleep.

  “You should not come here,” said Mrs. Anderson to Helen.

  Everything stopped: cat, faucet, kettle, the fire in the stove.

  “What are you saying, my dear?” John Anderson stood at the padded swinging door separating us from the dining room.

  “John,” she said. “I was just having a word with Barbara.” Mrs. Anderson teetered towards her husband.

  “How do you do?” he asked me. He had an enormous forehead and a face accustomed to smiling. He was very trimly made and wore his expensive clothes as if he’d just played cricket in them. The handlebar moustache was rather like Clark’s, and that made me sad. His eyes were brown and confident. I made a clumsy curtsy. “Actually,” I told him, “my name is Blondie.”

  He brightened and laughed. “Obviously,” he said.

  His wife tugged at his arm. “You haven’t yet met her, then. You haven’t met this, this Helen.”

  “My daughter,” I said. For some reason, I was unable to go to Helen as I should have. I seemed to be stuck. I think I pointed at her, like a tourist in Eden. “Helen.”

  Helen turned slowly towards John Anderson, in her hands the rag and spoon.

  “Good God!” he said. His ears seemed to pull towards the back of his head. He suddenly looked young. I was confused. He belonged to the camp of the generous. He coughed and looked at me with Clark’s bashful eyes and said, “She is truly lovely.”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to my little girl and bowed a little. “I am pleased to meet you.”

  Helen appraised him and decided he could live.

  “I must find Richard.” Mrs. Anderson backed out of the room. “Goodbye,” she said.

  John Anderson watched her go. “I see Edith has woken.”

  “Mr. Anderson, I won’t work for you if I can’t bring my daughter with me as I need to.”

  “Is it you who bakes the bread?”

  “I bake the bread and roast the pork and fry the bacon and stir the broth.”

  “Are you Russian?”

  “My mother is, a little, sort of, or actually not at all. May I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  Helen, at her little ladder, polishing like a jeweller, burst out laughing and said, without looking up, “Shoot!”

  “Do you love money?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Indeed.”

  “Ah.”

  He shrugged. “Is that all?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then I will see to our guests. I assume there will be guests.” He turned to go.

  “Wait!” He obliged. “You seem like a decent fellow.”

  He did not respond, but put his hands in his pockets, debonair and lucid. “Do you need money?” he asked.

  “No! Lord! No! That’s… that’s disgusting. I’m sorry, I just wondered… well, never mind and good evening.”

  “If you ever do, you know, you could speak with me.”

  “Mr. Anderson, what I want to know is, Have you ever killed anyone or otherwise cheated to become this rich?”

  He smiled, nice smile on a fatless face. “You put too much salt in the gravy,” he said. “I do not like much salt. Just enough.” He indicated a pinch and then again retired his hands to his pockets and elbowed through the swinging doors to his dining room.

  “The doors whisper here,” observed Helen.

  “I hate red velvet,” said I.

  “I love it.”

  And so we resumed our unquiet evening. After some time, I said to her, “I think you should stay home with Daddy.”

  Helen said, “I have to marry Richard.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  She looked up at me, and there was her anger, some peat fire from the bog of ancient history. “Maybe so,” said she.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1911

  ELI BRIMMED WITH JOY. It was that last day of winter, when all of winter’s sky colours were suddenly bright with spring. Soon, too soon, the blossoms, the weeds and work from dawn till dusk, for while Eli had agreed to be unleashed from the economy, he still worked hard on our small farm. But today, for now, Eli was deliciously unemployed.

  It called for a celebration. He wished for a moment that he knew how to read and write. Unknown to him, he was wishing for the telephone. He needed to announce the rodeo.

  It was a strange day for a rodeo. The horses would slip in the mud, and the calves were too small for roping. It was nice out, but the roads were nearly impassable. Eli had risen at three a.m., when the ground was still frozen, and he travelled to four of the neighbours before they’d had their coffee. And it is a true fact that three out of four he interrupted making love before their children had woken up (the fourth were night people). My dead mother-in-law said it was a sign. The rodeo would be a success.

  Eli was the only buffalo hunter farming in St. Norbert at that time. Most others had been cleared out west to Saskatchewan, like songbirds from a forest on prime land. But the neighbours had many talents, and 90 per cent of the time, their energies were devoted to turning those talents into labour. The rodeo was Eli’s way of switching things around: turning labour back into talent, where it belongs.

  People came from all over, and mud seemed immaterial and the sun shone. Eli baked bannock over an open fire. The midwife sang a song while my dad, Peter, played the fiddle. Dad hadn’t realized till just then that he knew how to play the fiddle. There was saddle bronc-riding and bareback bronc-riding, but not too much of it because we had only one stallion who was mean enough. By the time we finished with the bareback riding, the stallion was so exhausted he was gentle enough to serve in the barrel racing, where he won first prize for the young neighbour boy who needed just such a victory.

  The boy belonged to a dour Methodist family whose appearance at the rodeo shook Alice’s faith in atheism. She’d been bolstering her shaky rejection of God with a sort of paint-by-number version of fundamentalists, but when MacDonald and his scrawny kids showed up prepared for a party, she had to recognize the strange mix of things. For his part, MacDonald tried to justify his secular pleasure by turning Eli’s rodeo into an agricultural fair, progressive and earnest.

  Old MacDonald hauled with him the ten miles between our homes his latest farming implement: a deep-cutting blade. He’d fashioned it in his own barn, for he was a pretty good blacksmith. This plough could cut through sod like a hatchet, turning the soil a good two feet deep, “where the real fecundity of mother earth is hidden from view,” said MacDonald (“veuuuw,” he said). And while people squinted at him and shrugged, as if to say, “Who cares about deep blades on a plough,” you could see that the seeds of competition had been sewn. A bit of envy and a bit of fear. By fall, there would be many new blacksmiths in the neighbourhood. The soil would never be the same; mother earth would soon be aging fast in the prairie wind.

 
But farm implements do not belong at a real rodeo, and Eli gently discouraged any further references to tilling and such. When the races were over and everyone was wondering what to do next, we heard a gunshot and the crows scattered up from the compost. And there was Eli, dressed in his buckskin and beads, wearing his fancy moccasins and the Assomption sash and an eagle feather in his hat. He rode the newly broken stallion, a fine black creature of great dignity and intelligence, marching backwards, cutting tight circles and changing leads. Eli reined in quickly, and the black horse rose on its hind legs and Eli yelled, “Throw!” and my mother tossed something into the air. The blue glass bottles fell in sunlight and exploded into a bright, sparkling shower when Eli shot them out of the sky.

  Helen had been perched uneasily on the outskirts of the party, sulky with the grown-ups, rude to the kids. She would not wear her farm clothes, and the hand-me-down shoes from Grandmother Alice made walking difficult in our yard, so she got stranded on the bench near the firepit. We’d been forced to ignore her. Eli and Alice didn’t notice her when they began their game with the gun and the blue glass. I was watching from the tall corral fence. Alice laughed and tossed a bottle high over the firepit; we watched it spin through the air, and my heart stopped when I saw Helen’s face raised towards it. Eli didn’t see her there. He fired, and the glass rained down upon her. Helen watched till the last moment, when she covered her face with her hands.

  The blue glass rained down. Miraculously, there was just one sliver stabbed in her left hand. I took it out with tweezers. I was curiously grief-stricken over the possibility of the smallest scar on my daughter. Her perfection had become a liability, yet I was unwilling to relinquish even a fraction, as if it would let her loose. And I so wanted to keep her.

  The rodeo changed Eli. He hung back that day while I tweezered the glass from Helen’s hand. She and I were on the porch with a bowl of water and the bandages. Eli hesitated at the steps as if he would say something. Then he walked by and went into the house. I could hear him walking inside; his boots were louder, his body less contained.