When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  A lovely going-to-war party for Richard. He and Helen came in from a walk in the garden. Richard held Helen’s hand. Everyone said how handsome Richard looked in his naval uniform. And then they remarked, Helen… well, isn’t she always … perhaps more so than ever before. Her dark wavy hair, a rather simple dress, they found it elegant on no one else; clothes could not compete with that kind of beauty. Though she doesn’t say much, does she? And they sipped tea and hoped she could make Richard happy. A wartime wedding? My word, as young as that! Well, that won’t do. I’d no idea! She seems much older. What a strange girl. But then, Richard… well, without a father’s hand to guide him… Sipping tea. Prohibition. A rare sunny day, the end of April. Warm. The sun rubbed fragrances from the dried old earth yet again; what astonishing resilience.

  Richard did not release her hand. They looked like they were playing at the maypole when they walked around the dining-room table. Richard avoided a conversation with his mother, who fluttered at him helplessly from behind the butler’s wagon. He backed into the kitchen, pulled Helen with him.

  Into my domain. I was surprised to see her. We looked warily at each other, yanked out of our normal roles. The war had created a special brand of sentimentality, a potpourri in the great underwear drawers of the nation, infecting us all with the strain of being awfully nice, chipper and enthusiastic for our diet of horror.

  The fight over Ypres had been going on for nearly a week. Germany had introduced us to chlorine gas. When we first heard about the yellow clouds of poison released into the wind, we stopped for just a moment; it takes only a moment for human beings to accept greater evil. A quick trip from a jagged blade, machine guns in Saskatchewan in 1885, smallpox on a blanket and exploding bullets to chlorine gas, mustard gas, napalm and Agent Orange. Within another three weeks, ninety-five thousand soldiers, Allied and German, would be rotting at Ypres. Sir Robert Borden, the anxious and earnest prime minister, was sending boatloads of boys to the front. Without a doubt, we’d become a nation. We all suffered from neuralgia, even the prime minister. Real grown-up lumbago.

  In those bad times, the kitchen became the only room where it was possible to breathe, blow a little smoke through the barrier between lump-in-your-throat cute and slash-and-burn despair. Sugar and strychnine mix better in the kitchen, as long as everybody has enough to drink, and if we still can’t exactly tell the truth, we can at least respect its absence.

  We were growing up. Helen, who came in with her soldier-lover, looked me square in the eye; the barricade crumbled, and we met each other warmly, if not safely, in the no man’s land of womanhood. She even let me kiss her. I gave her a small glass of port. We talked about the war.

  Richard lit a cigarette and leaned against the kitchen counter, Helen’s round white arm reaching to take it from his lips. She was just about to puff on it when she caught my eye. I said, “Let’s not push it.” She puffed anyway, and I was gratified to see her turn green.

  The talk was of the army. You could feel Richard’s silence, as if he’d been cut out of the picture with scissors. In the lull, I brought it round to him. “So! The navy!”

  He was too smart for that. Nodded.

  “You don’t like walking?”

  He winced.

  We were in the company of two seasoned fellows, a newspaper man and somebody in insurance, very bright and not too nice. They each had a son in Belgium. They hadn’t yet heard if their children were safe. The two fathers looked closely at Richard. The kitchen faced north, and had a tiny porthole of a window buttoned up with flowery curtains. In the overhead light, we all looked ill.

  “Where have they got you stationed, son?” asked the journalist, gruff voice, kind and resentful.

  Richard raised his eyes, as if from under a helmet. He knew he was being treated with respect. “St. John’s,” he said.

  Everyone mumbled, oh, yes, uh-huh, yup, nodding. We’d heard about the German submarines off the East Coast.

  “Lot of ships in those waters from what I hear.” The journalist sounded tired. It was hard to focus on anything those days, needled by anxiety, hard to finish a sentence.

  The insurance man piped up. “St. Johns, Newfoundland.” Paused. “Yup.”

  Helen took a sip of port. A flush from the wine, but her face was utterly sober, as I’d never seen it before. As if she didn’t need anything, neither flattery nor comfort. She’d let go of that doe-like apprehension.

  The journalist pushed off. “Well,” he said, putting down his glass and winking at me. “Thanks.” He walked slowly, as if arthritic, though he was only about forty-five.

  “I’ll be going too.” The insurance guy placed his glass, tidy, beside his friend’s. “Nice party,” he said to me, as if I were the hostess rather than the cook. “Thanks.” Going out he stopped, remembering something. To Richard: “Newfoundland,” he said. Looked at him. Then, noncommittal, uneasy, “Going back there, are you?”

  Richard’s jaw tightened.

  The insurance man’s eyes darted to Helen. “Going to have another look?” He noticed a cupboard door ajar and pushed it shut. “I’m sure your dad would’ve been relieved. Home turf and all. Nice to stay in Canada.”

  Richard said, “I hope I’ll see my share of danger.”

  The insurance man looked at him sharply. “Oh, don’t wish that.” He shook his head sadly. “Never wish for that.”

  Richard stepped forward and aimed for a dainty, took one, looked at it as if it were roadkill. “I’m not afraid,” he said.

  The insurance man nodded. “No, I’m sure you’re not.”

  “I’m not.”

  “We’re pretty well convinced of that, Richard,” said I.

  Helen was attentive.

  The insurance man asked Richard, “What kind of ship will you be on?”

  “A minesweeper.” Richard with his dry mouth, his defensive eyes.

  “Good God,” said the insurance man. “Do you have to?”

  “Yes. Of course I do.”

  “It’s a terrible war,” said the insurance man.

  I piped up. “What does a mine look like?”

  Richard looked at me like someone remembering an opponent on his flank. “It’s a… the size of… like a dinner table, only maybe smaller. It’s round, you see, and it has horns.”

  “A sea monster,” I said. “God, you’d think we were making all this up.”

  Richard’s slight, nervous smile. “It does sound rather bizarre.”

  Mrs. Anderson plummeted into the room like a bird down the chimney. “Oh, my boy!” she said. “Don’t hide yourself! Come!” She moored at his arm and drew him out of the room with her unsteady willpower, a tug drawing a ship to sea.

  Helen sighed, eminently visible. The insurance man wouldn’t look at Helen. His eyes strafed her, fast and away. For all his decency, he treated my daughter as something forbidden. It gave her peculiar power. She knew this well.

  “Thanks for dropping by,” I said to him.

  He blushed and said, “I’m sorry.” I felt sorry for us all then. We suddenly seemed to remember our places. “Goodbye, then,” he said, and walked out slowly.

  “Damn!” I said.

  At the door he turned, brightened. “What’s that?” He smiled. “Yes! Damn it all! Goodbye, then. Bye-bye.”

  When he’d gone, Helen looked at me dryly. “Richard wants me to get engaged when he gets back.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said I would.”

  “Do you love him?”

  She gave me a sharp look. “Yes,” she said. I was horrified to hear a new quality of obedience in Helen’s confession. “He says he’ll make me happy.”

  “You young people talk funny.”

  She lifted her right arm. “He gave me this.”

  She wore a delicate watch, a feminine timepiece with a tiny face. I squinted at it. “Hard to read, isn’t it? Or is it just for show?”

  “He says I’m supposed to—” Helen began to laugh.


  “No!” I said. “Watch for him?”

  “A little bit sickening.”

  “Well, he hasn’t much education. We mustn’t be snobs.”

  “He looks nice in his uniform,” she said, and she put her head on my shoulder. I felt like somebody was filling my mouth with pretty buttons. My head hurt. I was trying to look out on acres of land, across an ocean, and somebody was putting a miniature cameo close before my eyes, so they ached. We had no name for brainwashing in those days. I looked into my daughter’s eyes. She was almost engaged in this role. But somewhere behind the sentimental misery, I thought I could detect a latent restlessness.

  “What made him go so late to war?” I asked lightly.

  “He wanted the navy. Only there were hardly any boats before.”

  “His father wanted him in the navy,” I said. I’d only then remembered.

  “Richard wants to go back.” Helen stood upright. The strings and harps faded away.

  “Go back where?”

  “Where it happened.” She loosened the belt of her dress, an actress backstage. “Near where the boat sank.”

  “The boat. Oh.”

  “He has to go back there, he says.”

  To the scene of his loss, to the site, which itself was lost, which continues to shift. To drag the sea with his strange plough. Bring the bombs up to the surface.

  RICHARD CRUISED THE COAST of Newfoundland in a minesweeper, sailed a loop two hundred miles offshore, thrown to sea like a stone on a lariat. Traces of his father in the fight between salt and ice, in bodies they lifted from the sea. He furthered his studies in navigation and learned the ocean through its correspondence with the sky, the true fiction of celestial bearings.

  For three years, he wrote Helen letters free of the effacement of the censors because he’d done that for himself. He never told her about the claustrophobia, the flaccid boredom spiked with fear, the maggoty food; he never mentioned the sleepless mines, how they float up like eyeballs. He never mentioned fire or explosions, or the German sailor they found floating without arms or legs and how they stuffed the torso into a bottle of vinegar and put him up with the pickled eggs behind the seaman’s bar at the harbour at St. John’s. He never told her about the man who burst into flames when a torpedo struck his ship; how the oil on deck rose up to clothe the man in flames as he ran, even as he leapt into the ocean; how he burned in the water, high yellow flames on the surface of the sea.

  He never wrote about these things. His experiences went into his private vault, where they failed to pay him compound interest. He behaved bravely. He did. Yet nothing he did would ever recover the moment when he left his father on that ship and escaped with the women. With the women.

  With an elegant hand, he wrote pleasantly brave missives, euphemistic, as if protective, always stylish. We read his letters for the metallic taste they gave us. But Helen was fixated. She hung heavily about the house, in her hand his most recent letter, compelled by his manly absence, his seeming austerity. She sat in a garden chair watching a shadow of a leafless tree on the wall as it eventually brought about the motion of blossoms and bees.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE GOLDEN FIELDS WAVED at us from the farthest edges of land. Sepia sky from the bleeding of yellow light. Seeds hidden within the whiskers of barley. A border of sunflowers with heavy heads and strange pitted faces turned to the east, away from us, so we had to walk up from behind, tap them shyly on the shoulder and take a knife to their thick stalks, carrying back home the thick brown plates of seed. The sunflowers framed a field of rape. Birds jumped through the air when we walked among the yellow flowers, and on every petal was a spider, a wasp, a black-and-yellow beetle, a fly, a honeybee on every ripe spike and bloom.

  I walked down Lord Selkirk Road to bring Eli some water. Beside me many white butterflies flew inches above the road. The crop kept Eli at home. Most young men in the vicinity had signed up all in a rush to escape the farm, so we were short-handed. We heard a rumour of some workers coming from Quebec, where the wages were lower and the young men didn’t know the words to “Rule Britannia.”

  That fall, Prime Minister Borden sent 250,000 Canadian bipeds overseas. He’d gone to England and sat right beside Prime Minister Asquith at a meeting of the British Cabinet while they talked about whether cotton should be contraband—very alarming stuff—and Asquith told our leader that the tradition forbade the taking of notes in Cabinet, so this was never even supposed to be history, very hush-hush, very big stuff for Canada. Send men, you dreary colonial upstarts, not presumptuous small-time politicians. It was all going straight to Dada. Overseas, they got Dada. In St. Norbert, we got gas-burning tractors pulling three-bottom ploughs.

  The tractor was terrific, vibrating under my bum, unhousing my kidneys. Goodbye horses. I thought it would grieve Eli, moving farther away from his boyhood, but he just said I was sentimental, which was a lot of dung. Eli could never keep up with Peter’s philosophy, the built-in shiftiness of Impossibilism. Rebellious, yes, but I think he obeyed some innate discipline in change, in all the inherent loss. Eli, poor man, believed in progress at the time.

  When the machine broke down, Peter would hobble out (my father had become as transparent and beautiful as a water spider in his ancient, agile motion, with the white butterflies fluttering beside him at shin-level, my impossible dad). Peter could fix anything. He’d been made famous for the deep-tilling McCormack blade, an improvement on old MacDonald’s blade, or so we thought. The logic of the machine was the logic of speed which was the logic of the future which led Peter to the source of the problem every time.

  Eli was on the tractor. I walked over the swaths and waved my arms above the din of the machine. He stopped and cut the engine, and I sailed over the mud waves and bit his dusty pant leg at the wrinkled groin, where it was sunwarm and smelled of geraniums, while the engine hiccuped a few times as it submerged beneath the hot sun. Perfect weather, air cool as a lake, geese yelling.

  Onion sandwiches—Eli’s favourite and something I’d grown to count on over the years. When Eli eats an onion sandwich, I know where he is. He once ate one out on the rodeo road, mid-summer, somewhere near Tyndal, where the bitter soil yields the hottest, juiciest onions, after he’d been away for seven weeks—and seven celibate weeks of warm weather is not the same as seven celibate weeks of cold weather—and that onion’s juices aroused me all the way to St. Norbert while I was weeding the garden wearing nothing but a strategic kerchief, hoeing the radishes, and this set off a triadic sympathy, onion to radish to my optimistic glands, and it would have taken all my strength to keep my hands off myself. Women did that sort of thing back then too, you know. Not all our labour went to the making of post-war babies. Eggs slipped out of the basket, soup slipped off the spoon, and sometimes, when the garden was as warmly scented as the inside of a wicker basket and crickets zigzagged on freshly hoed soil and monarchs hovered over milkweed and the ash trees rustled like bedsheets and the heat made a bell jar, we might kneel a moment, overcome beside the sugar-peas, some white-blossomed, some fruiting, some emptied of fruit by birds or raccoons, and there in the privacy of our own field spill a little juice, just so the cup isn’t overflowing while we wait for our Elis to come home.

  But this day of autumnal plenitude, of booming wheat prices, of Eli’s actual ripe-onion material presence, with the muddy flavour of Eli’s pants in my mouth and him climbing down and all he had to do was loosen his belt and the wide waist of his trousers freed his warm, sweet… let me say his warm, sweet hard-is-welcome, so we buckled gracefully down upon a bed of shining wheat straw and then we heard, far from the quarter section at the railway tracks, the excursion train loaded with harvest workers hooting at us like a bunch of French grackles flocking in to stand the sheaves up in stooks for the final ripening.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE MAGNA CARTA!

  “SO WHAT! SO BLESSED DAMN WHAT!” But nobody heard the etiolated protests of a fallen Methodist beneath the desk-t
humping and the cheers and the applause of gloved hands in the gallery. My mother alone, a scarecrow in her black cape and red tam, surrounded by glowing women who had just that moment heard the passing of the Bill for the Enfranchisement of Women.

  God save the king. All the women stood and sang “For They Are Jolly Good Fellows,” and all the good fellows stood and sang it right back. Alice rolled her eyes and sighed to the vaulted ceiling of the chamber. “God blessed so what? So blessed damn!” She was a dyslexic blasphemer. And then, when the cheering reached its sober, self-congratulatory, gee-it’s-a-relief-to-get-that-off-my-chest bonhomie, and bonnefemme too—of course they can vote; they have soldier-babies, they can vote; they make munitions, they can vote; they vote Liberal, they can vote!—bundled-up-in-good-wool-and-furs climax, Alice said, “Hell it all to damn!”

  But she was excited. She was, after all, a founding member of the Political Equality League, and had attended meetings faithfully, especially after she’d quit and erased her name from their records. But ever since the “enemy alien” midwife had been run out of St. Norbert by the mothers of soldiers in France, Alice had an inkling, like pepper in the salt, that women could be just as mean-spirited as men. But hush, it was time for the ladies to sit, nestling their velvet bums into comfy chairs, to listen with wifely charity to the men speak from the chamber below.

  It was a love-in. Women who vote, it was testified, make good life partners. Why, we can all vote together! Ha ha ha! Only a coward would argue that the women’s vote will threaten the family! Foolish bigots! Women’s vote the cause of divorce? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Give ’em their rein, I say. Eve might have caused a whole lot of trouble, but (with a gallant nod to the gallery) I’ll bet Adam preferred a helpmate to a doormat. But seriously, if a mother will send her son to fight Kaiserism, she deserves the vote. And if that mother loses her son in the bloody fields of France, she deserves our protection and our undying gratitude. A-men!