A groan went through the audience, half because of the placards and half because Helen was wearing the hooded sackcloth instead of the chiffon gown. The police arrived just as Helen entered with “PEACE THROUGH FEAR!” and they rushed the stage and the audience ran after them and general mayhem is what followed. Strangely, Alice did not faint. Peter retired to the stage manager’s office during the riot, then joined us all for the ride in the paddy wagon.
By the time they got us to Stony Mountain, a good two hours later, the Armistice had been proclaimed. Bells were ringing everywhere, and lights from the city thrown to the clouds brightened our way to the penitentiary. I was happy. I imagined that I was following the footsteps of Big Bear, waiting in his cell, sitting on his toilet, looking through the same bars through which he had looked. All around us across the countryside, people were rising from their beds to celebrate peace. One of the Smiths was locked up with us. We whispered to him not to speak. We hugged each other and wept for joy.
The guards looked tired and relieved. No charges had been laid, so they treated us gently, and one of them said, “Funny kind of justice, putting you in here without charge.” And Alice said, “It’s imaginary justice. Because we are imaginary.” The guard looked at my mother closely, with one of those sudden penetrating stares. She was seated in a dark corner of the cell, and my dad sat beside her. They were holding hands. The cell glowed, chiaroscuro.
At breakfast, the formal charges still had not arrived from Winnipeg. The day broached and boiled and dried up and failed to a snowless dusk. Still we remained in prison without charge. I was bored. I tried to imagine Big Bear’s boredom, but stale waiting is simply not romantic. We did get let out for a short walk in the late afternoon, but I was somewhat taken aback to see that the place was mostly inhabited by Indians. In some ways, Big Bear never did get out of jail. It was actually very depressing.
I sat with my daughter. Helen looked flushed, excited. “What’s got you stirred up?” I asked her.
Just then, she stiffened like a greyhound, listening to a dull vibration through the stone floor. The sound of marching grew louder. In our corridor, an overhead bulb went on and swung a little, and everything quivered to the rhythm of boots.
Eight pairs of boots in sync and the jingle of keys. The first to appear was the magistrate who had stormed Alice’s Histrionic production, a mild man with amber eyes and a reluctant ruddy face, carrying a sheathed sword before him, blinking at us like a kindly beagle. His police officers arranged themselves around him.
One more set of footsteps, clipped, brisk, eloquent. Richard walked down the grey stone hallway into the light. He was in his naval uniform. He weighed about ninety pounds. “Well, damned I’ll be,” said Alice. Richard smiled slightly. He bore the air of a man who did not believe in the power of confession. “We’ve come to let you out,” he said.
“Yes,” said the magistrate. “No harm done.” He motioned to his man to unlock the door. We stood on the threshold of the open cell, hesitant as budgies.
“It’s all right,” Richard said. “Come.” He took Helen’s arm and led us all away, folk following the golden egg. “There was a mistake. Quite an innocent mistake.” He glanced at the magistrate. “Sir John did not know that you are my friends.”
We were bundled into several waiting cars. Richard and Helen went alone in Richard’s fancy Packard. I liked this much less than illegal imprisonment. Half an hour earlier, I had lived in a world of small-town bigotry and small-scale corruption. The police were driving fast. Everybody seemed to be under secret orders.
I realized it was dark in the silent car. I looked at my mother and father. They were sitting with their eyes closed. I leaned towards them, put my hands on them, emitting a mild jolt. No effect. “Are you all right?” I asked, the way a child asks her mother if she is sleeping.
“Take us to the Histrionic Theatre,” said Alice. That was all she could say.
WE ENTERED THE SILENT THEATRE. Alice fainted twice walking from the police car to the green room, which is where she asked us to take her. Peter was calmly attentive. When we reached our destination and laid Alice upon the horsehair couch, he sat and put her feet on his lap and closed his eyes.
“Is it all right if I stay?” I asked.
My parents nodded. I sat on the floor before them. Then my mother looked down and smiled at me. She patted my head and said, “Go get the moon, Blondie.” I stupidly told her I would, thinking she was speaking metaphorically, forgetting that she’d given up metaphor at least a year earlier. She smiled again, forgiving me, and said, “The electric moon, dear. It’s backstage.”
I rushed out and couldn’t find any lights and crashed about till I found it: the electric moon we’d used in Antigone. I could barely lift it. I stumbled back to the green room and tried to lay it gently on the floor. “Plug it in,” said Alice. I leaned the moon against one wall and plugged it in. It was a full moon. The glass was ribbed in the art deco style, kind of jagged. It looked like an electric moon. “Hold it up,” said my mother. I was about to protest. But I looked at her. Peter seemed to be sleeping, his head resting on the back of the couch. Alice was lying on her side now. She pulled her knees up and lay curled like that, and I saw how small she’d become, small as a thimble. I lifted the electric moon high over my head. It cast a warm urban glow over us, unnatural and strangely humane. Alice murmured something. She stretched one hand down to Peter, but she couldn’t reach him. My father was still, his lovely white hair in the light, his face bone china. They were not touching when they died. Their bodies lay abandoned. I held up the moon as long as I could, until my arms went numb and my back burned and the edge of glass had cut my hands.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dear Lord, may my joy not leave me.—J. S. Bach, in his diary
NEWS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION reached “our property” like the first smoke of a prairie fire. Eli was inhaling Russia. When I woke him, he’d turn on his side and try to comfort me with stories of a Bolshevik revolution. Everyone will have enough to eat, he told me, and no one will be a slave to the factory or the machine. Men and women will be equal, Blondie, and children will be raised into freedom. People can become whatever they want: a fisherman, a farmer, a poet. I could hunt buffalo and write songs. And you could be a… be a… what would you want to be, Blondie? Eli whispered to me, lying on his side with our heads on the pillow, looking at each other. You could be what you like, he whispered. And that made it worse, because I was all willpower with no idea how to use it, other than for destruction.
Winter, blue as an egg, brought duty and exhaustion. Out of bed in the dark to prepare food, my skeleton was scrap metal, hunger and work clicking metal on metal. In sorrow I became a worm wintering in the red bark of the spruce. Click of beak in the bark of a tree; time a flicker’s beak digging me out, an insect meal. Grief is dry. Thirst in every pore; even the molecules that make me, dry as pellets. My brain was crushed glass. My rash returned and my skin peeled off in painful scabs under the awful beak of daily duty.
I was untouchable, given my rash and the dry electrical field around me. Eli housed his grief for Peter and Alice as his adoptive mother had taught him. He didn’t really believe in death. He lost a bit of weight, and gave up butter and coffee. His eyes were less green, more like ripe grain, but otherwise he looked purified and grateful for his life. He pulled back the curtains to let the white winter sun show a bit of coloured glass on the sill. Part of Eli always lived outside, the part of him that would almost outlive him. Calm, breathing deeply while his lungs got used to a world without the breath of Peter and Alice in it.
Sometimes in bed at night, when the air became too dry to breathe, I touched Eli and sparks lit the room with fast white light. Eli made a sound like a crow, or if my voltage was low, a cat.
Eli buried Alice and Peter beneath the strange black spruce trees, near the spot where we’d buried the crane long ago. The marshy profile of the trees, their despondent branches. The earth was frozen, but
he said the frost wasn’t deep; he said it got soft just a foot under. It was too cold. Their bodies rattled in their icy graves like dried beans in a bone whistle.
I outlived my parents after all. And when the grass began to grow on their graves, I hobbled down to plant lily of the valley where their bodies lay. It was too dark in the woods for many flowers. But when other things won’t grow, lilies will.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was our avowed purpose to have the working class intelligent, so that when the natural or revolutionary change came in society they could intelligently take control.
—Robert Russell, at his trial for seditious conspiracy, in Winnipeg, 1919
RETURNED SOLDIERS ROAMED the streets of Winnipeg like injured birds dragging a wing, permanently dislocated. There wasn’t any work. Much of the North End of Winnipeg was a slum. It made them mad. And very patriotic.
A great time for rhetoric. Robert, or Bobby, Russell and his friend Dick Johns had gone off to Calgary in the late winter of 1919 to the Western Labour Conference, where they endorsed “the principle of Proletarian Dictatorship,” which would lead to “the transformation of capitalist private property to communal wealth.” My dad must have shuddered in his grave at the word “dictatorship.”
The rich were scared in the spring of 1919. The revolution in Russia made it seem that the future was up for grabs. Winnipeg’s local elite ignored the fact that the labour leaders were British-born, and they fostered the loving concept of the “enemy alien”—presumably anyone fewer than two generations removed from Europe. The federal government, as in 1870 and 1885, moved in with the army to extinguish the “revolt.” And the lumbago-stricken prime minister, Robert Borden, banned publication in eighteen languages. No more Russian, no Ukrainian, no Yiddish, just English, English, English, only one kind of English bird to sing at the grave of Peter and Alice. Thereafter, our citizens would be saved from differing opinions. Borden had no lines on his face. He would preserve us from the wrinkles of dissent.
Winnipeg moved towards a general strike. The construction trades and the metal workers had been on strike for nearly two weeks when Helen got invited to a luncheon at the home of Mr. Richard Anderson. Another thing the war did: it gave Richard his last name. Mr. Anderson it was, no more Richard. When Helen said it now, Richard, I turned away, so intimate was the sound of his Christian name on her lips. I refused to call him Richard. I called him Dick.
“Say hi to Dick,” I told Helen as she climbed out of the back seat of my Ford. She wore blue flimsy stuff that fell around her hips, and she smelled, flagrantly, of lilac. Hot day in May. “Hey!” I called out to her as she veered past Dick’s baby blue Packard and up his stone stairway, swanky, on her slender leather shoes. “You match his car!” She daggered me, high upon her mountain of beauty.
It was my birthday. If I’d felt any older, I’d have been immortal. My daughter and I were electric eels. We did not speak, we zapped. I left the speaking up to Eli. She blew him a kiss. The flapper had not yet been invented. Helen was inventing her. “Bye, Daddy!” she called. Breathy voice. Eli was driving. He looked at her sadly. Shook his head and said goodbye. Helen, with that slight hesitation, taking on the limestone steps. Eli listened for the sound of the outer door being opened before driving away, not too fast. I turned in my seat and watched Richard answer the door. He reached out his hand and pulled our daughter into his house.
We went downtown. Eli and I had a cup of tea with Bobby Russell, at his office in the Labor Temple. I love the name Bobby. I love being In, especially with the Out crowd. And I’ll always be soft for a Scot. Bobby Russell was the most decent man, moderate in his appetites (no sugar) and self-disciplined. But Eli was so distracted by his unease over leaving Helen at Richard Anderson’s lair that Bobby finally put his hands together over his cup, stuck out his chubby lower lip, blinked curiously and with such shy sympathy that Eli finally smiled, shook his head and said, “It’s a friend of our daughter Helen’s got me in a knot. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned dad.”
Bobby Russell clicked his tongue. “The lass has a beau?”
“Richard?” Eli sat back. “Good Lord, I guess that’s what he is. What’s to become of her? Richard Anderson, her beau.”
Bobby’s jaw dropped. “Richard Anderson?”
“You know him?”
Bobby forgot his own interdiction, added sugar, busily stirring. I poked his arm. “You’d better tell us what you know, Bobby. We won’t shoot the messenger.”
He glanced up sheepishly. “Well, I’ll not be interfering with a family’s business. And I don’t imply any judgment upon your young girl.”
Eli moaned.
Bobby hurried, “Nothing so much illegal, not at all. The rules of capitalism put him square with the law. He’s a determined young fellow. An aggressive pup. We’ve been in negotiations since the construction trades went out, beginning of the month. That’s his territory. He’s put off. Seems he’s been buying a lot of land for development and finds himself out of pocket and unable to get on with putting up houses.” And here, Bobby’s political blood pressure rose, and he smiled. “Square with the law, he is. And all that about to change. He’ll be out. His kind. It’s just a matter of time. And a revolution.”
We three laughed, Bobby in earnest.
A few days later, the whole city was shut down by the general strike. About thirty thousand people (nearly the same number as the Allied soldiers killed at Ypres) refused to work. Winnipeg was always split in two. North End meant poor; South End meant rich. Poor often meant European immigrants, those scary “Huns” and “Bolsheviks.” And rich meant Anglo-Saxon Protestant. At about that time, the birthmark beneath my left breast, the blister kiss of Thomas Scott, began to burn and itch and keep me awake at night. Richard Anderson, who was now openly courting our daughter, was working with his business associates to create a citizen’s committee—funny who becomes a “citizen” when the underpinnings of power are under attack. So the general strike, which might have provoked a celebration in our home, spawned strife instead, and so much tension between us that I saw in Eli’s soul, in that private space that belonged only to him, a vehemence too powerful to fit inside a cowboy ballad.
The Citizen’s Committee was a crew of grain men, hardware merchants, real-estate brokers scared by the Russian Revolution. They saw Bolsheviks in the foreign shadows of the North End. Despite their paranoia, or because of it, they considered themselves inviolably reasonable. They wanted the strike leaders deported; simple solutions carry the most weight, a signal of good management. They met at the Manitoba Club (Richard, at last, had been accepted), where they reassured one another with the beauty of their dinner jackets. The white collars on men are political forces never to be underestimated. Richard was in his element. Everybody was his father, and if his rhetoric was at times somewhat inflated, damn it, somebody’s got to say it loud and clear! No to the enemy alien! God save the king!
They said Richard was a bit of a war hero, and they put him in charge of a unit of Specials—a private police force, like the good old Montreal Cavalry in the 1837 Rebellion; young men whose hatred was masked by good clothes, who had learned how to ride on fox hunts at the club. The regular police officers had been fired because they were sympathetic to the strike. It was all left up to the Mounties and the Specials.
The federal government ordered the arrest of twelve men—eight British-born strike leaders (Bobby Russell among them) and (for a dash of that exotic flavour of “Hun”) four European Canadians. Four days later, the strike sympathizers organized a peaceful protest against the arrests.
It was June 21, 1919. Richard was on somebody else’s horse, a bitchy mare with a stiff-legged sideways gait. He lifted in his saddle and handled the mare with his left hand, neck-reined, raising himself with his knees and his strong thighs. He leaned forward and pointed his pistol at three men standing in the doorway of a hotel near city hall: a farmer from Boissevain visiting his sick sister, my mother’s old friend Mr. K
olchella, and Eli. They’d retired to the stairwell to avoid the Specials and their wooden clubs. Mr. Kolchella’s eloquent face showed the strain of the past six weeks, for he’d been working hard for the Strike Committee, having made a name for himself with his fearless oratory on the subject of the imminent demise of capitalism. Richard, riding, focused on the lapel of Mr. Kolchella’s worn jacket, to which Mr. Kolchella had pinned a Russian flag. Richard’s horse bobbed across the streams of military, its stiff prance perfectly controlled by Richard’s knees. He took aim. And fired.
Eli happened to look up. He saw Richard’s gun. He pushed both men down to the sidewalk, but Mr. Kolchella instinctively fought back; Eli lunged over him, all of this seeming to take many minutes, and the bullet travelled slowly through the air. It struck the wattle of Eli’s earlobe, the left ear, the deaf ear, went right through it and ricocheted off the building and back out to the crowd without doing further damage.
Eli fell in a dead heap.
He woke up in a pool of his own blood. His earlobe lay beside him. The chewy cartilage looked like a finger.
A nerve in his left cheek was paralyzed, but it would only make him more handsome because that side of his face suffered a sort of amnesia, became young and smooth, and hair never grew there again, so he had, like a mountainous continent with a single cultivated province, a new republic on that portion of his bushy head.
“NOT MUCH OF ME LEFT.” Eli stood in the kitchen by the sink while I changed the bandages. He held up his paw, and then examined himself in the mirror. His remaining ear had gained in stature, taking all responsibility for earness, increased in magnitude.
When Alice Lay Down With Peter Page 23
