When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “Are you a friend of my mama’s?” Dianna asked.

  Jack nodded his head, up, down.

  “Then you know where she is,” she said flatly.

  Jack tipped his head, looked to the side.

  Dianna sat forward. Bill could feel her bony joints dig into his thighs. “When is she coming back?”

  Jack suddenly straightened and brought his gaze to Dianna, without any mollification for the child.

  “Stop it!” It was Bill. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice.

  Jack looked at Bill. Dianna was cradled in Bill’s arms. “I can’t say,” Jack said. “She was captured at the Ebro River.”

  “Then the Fascists have her,” Dianna said.

  Bill stood, and he set Dianna on her feet. “It’s time you went to bed. You stay with your grandmother Blondie tonight.” Then, to Jack: “We’ll go get your plane now.”

  Pitch black, a wind with snow. “Okay,” said Jack.

  The door closed behind the two men. Dianna gave me one of her botanist’s stares. “That man knows my mother,” she said.

  I could feel the tendrils of my attachment to Helen dig into my palms like copper wiring. Where light fell, from lamp or fire, it seared my eyes, and white light filled the veins in my arms, gave me that force I needed to get Dianna washed and settled. I was old. Too old. Still, I was connected to my daughter, Helen. She had been captured. Captured is not dead. Maybe she was safe. Tired as I was, I gave this love to Dianna. Pulled the blankets up around her; she of the purple eyes dryly stated, “The Fascists must have let her go when the Russians beat them.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I think so.”

  “She’s trying to come home.” There was hope in the back of my granddaughter’s eyes.

  I kissed her bony forehead. And then I fell asleep in my chair.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PHONE RANG, WAKING ME. Morning. It was Jack. His deep, confident voice was already familiar.

  “Howdy,” said Jack. “Did you sleep okay?”

  “Where’s Bill?”

  “Well, that’s why I called. We’re going to try to haul a couple of loads of water for the cisterns today. Bill’s out clearing your drive so’s we can get through with the truck.”

  I looked out. Bill astride the tractor pushing the snow-plough. There was something angry in Bill’s movements.

  “See him?” asked Jack.

  “Thanks for calling, Jack.”

  “We’d best get what supplies you’ll need. Before the junction goes under.”

  “The junction’s not going under, Jack.”

  Pause. “Lot of snow,” said Jack. “Gotta melt.”

  “There’s time.” This was our flood. But we needed the help. “We could use some milk and bread, if you’re going to the station.”

  “You’ll need more than that,” said Jack.

  The junction went under two days later. The river that had been so far away, dimes shining on the other side of the trees, came near, underfoot. There was no tomorrow. We’d say, “Tomorrow we’ll have time to truck in more sand.” But there was no such thing as time. We witnessed the water with a sense of rightness, a sort of decency. That’s prairie spirit in the nutshell; we felt the justice of our doom. The river became a lake, a huge inland ocean. Growing, always. The lake had been there before us—let it resume. It started to rain.

  It was wonderful to let go of cleanliness, sleep, routine. In the absence of cleanliness we were immaculate, purged of habit, speaking to one another in special terms, our good manners a dike protecting us from fear. People kept arriving from nowhere, driven by the need to work, by doing without words for each other. Generosity is one of the simplest instincts of crazy old humankind.

  We built a dike with sweet-smelling burlap bags. It soon got too dangerous to get helpers out to our place. Our crew dwindled. We formed a small commune, which made Ida very happy. We were generally ecstatic; even Bill was strangely out of his skin. The waters covered the sea. It was simple. Everything was water. And in my ecstasy, I grieved, knowing that Marie’s grotto and Peter and Alice’s graves were now under water, with the first bruise of knowledge, the intimation that my daughter had suffered. I waited for a chance to question Jack. But the temperature rose suddenly, and we were going flat out to fight the flood.

  Jack was tireless. Anticipated what we’d need next. A very muscled chest and nice forearms. He never seemed to need any sleep, was running off heroism, I guess. Late at night, I fetched a couple of glasses and the bottle of whisky. I’d soon be eighty, and I’d developed a fondness for Scotch in the evening, like my mother before me. Jack and I sat at the kitchen table.

  “Tell me about Helen,” I asked him.

  “She was with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion,” he said.

  “Well, we know that.”

  “She was dressed as a man.” We both smiled fondly. “The last time I saw her,” he said, “she was in a line of men.”

  “A line?”

  “At the end. It was almost dark. She was like a shadow. She raised her fist, like so—” and here, Jack raised his right arm, fist forward—“that was very brave.”

  “And she was all right?”

  A trace of bitterness crossed his face.

  “Tell me what you know,” I told him. Then, I remember thinking, This man doesn’t like his life.

  “She was taken prisoner,” he said. “She was at the end of the line.” Again, Jack raised his fist. “That’s how she faced the firing squad.”

  “She was… what?”

  Jack drank off his glass, poured more, added to mine.

  I caught sight of Dianna standing straight and thin near by. “Go to bed!” I barked at her.

  She faced Jack fiercely. “Where is my mother?”

  “Now!” I cried. “This instant!”

  Dianna walked close to Jack, put her face inches from his. “You tell me where she is or you’ll die in your sleep.”

  I caught her, roughly turned her away from him, with little control over the strength of my own hands. Jack slouched in his chair, avoiding Dianna’s eyes. I pushed her to the cot we’d placed in our bedroom. Eli was already asleep. All my will went into putting Dianna into bed, forcing her to lie down; I think I forced her into sleep.

  I went back to the kitchen. Jack was as I’d left him, fingering his glass. I sat down. We didn’t say anything for a long time. Sometimes I’d look up at him, hoping for mitigation. There should have been more. A second part of the story, the escape. Jack was quiet as night.

  “Where is her body?”

  “They buried them there.”

  “Does Bill know?” I asked.

  Jack nodded, yes.

  “We’re not going to tell anyone else about this,” I said finally. “Not now.” Jack said nothing. “I have to be alone,” I told him.

  He stood up to go back to Bill’s cabin. As he left, he put his hand on my shoulder. His hand was ice cold, I could feel it through my dress. I waited till the latch closed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE LIVED WITH THE INTENSITY OF FERAL CATS. The river seeped through the ground beneath the dike, and as they became sodden, the bags were like pulpy fruit oozing sour juice. We took turns minding the pumps. We became an island. The fields of wheat or snow surrounding treed islands, at night the lights of our cottages blinking. More recent were the windbreaks, planted since the Depression, breakwaters of maple or willow in single rows, bending south. Eli took up his guitar, partly to entertain himself through flood-inspired insomnia, partly to insure its safety. We discovered that Jack liked to sing. The bitterness I’d seen that night did not resurface.

  I hadn’t yet told Eli. He was working so hard against the flood that I was afraid he too would die. My own pain entered a place bordered by a sort of untested hypothesis. I relived the moment before the firing squad over and over. I would just stay there, could go no further. I didn’t sleep, but under the circumstances no one noticed. I relived my daughter’s li
fe. She was vivid. I experienced every moment of my time with her.

  We stuffed everything we could into the rafters: furniture, food, bedding. We tied Jack’s white glider to the roof. All else stood on the sandy floor, cleansed of value. Dianna occupied a couch balanced precariously in the beams above the kitchen, the warmest spot on our island. I brought her beetles and white worms, moles and voles from the sump pits, lifting them up to her perch as if I were feeding a barn owl. She preferred drawing flora, but fauna must do on the ark. She watched our proceedings with disapproval. And she never questioned Jack again.

  The phones were still working. During this time, Bill seemed released from the tension of listening for Helen’s return, and he spoke more that month than at any time before or since. “Something’s clicking the line,” he said and looked accusingly at Ida. Ida’s muskrat coat, soaked with sand and river, weighed two hundred pounds. Proudly, she puffed up her chest, nodded and smiled. Her right incisor had died and turned grey, but her face was fatted, so age flattered her and she had become one of those handsome pigeon-women. At that moment, we all were thinking, It isn’t just Ida who’s brought the RCMP into our lives. Anyone who had gone to fight for the republicans in Spain was considered a subversive. Our eyes flitted to the window to look at the trench warfare of our yard, searching for Helen. There was only water, liver grey. When the Mounties asked for Helen, we told them, “Off with the Mac-Paps. Off with the anti-Fascists. Is there a problem?” They looked at us strangely. One officer blinked in disbelief and said, “Since 1936?” Still, we had harboured her; she was a gate left open, a light left on. I didn’t change that; I couldn’t extinguish the light.

  We had one cow at the time—thank God only one—a good milker, so we were getting loaded up with milk. Steel canisters lined up as clean as bombs on top of the potting table on the porch. It was on a Wednesday, near the end of April, that Jack took my arm. “Time to go,” he said. “The road’s wiped out, and we can’t put Bossy on the wagon.”

  He was right. And as always in the flood, it was too late. We had to grit the sand in our teeth and wade through a cold current that boiled the gravel off the road. I tied the cow to my wagon, which was loaded with several of the milk canisters, and tried to walk west, to the railway tracks. Jack gave the cow a thwack on the butt. No time, ever. Water came over my boots, rode up my pants, made walking painful. The kind of cold that amputates.

  Eli’s hand was frozen in mine. “She’s dead, isn’t she,” he said.

  We slid on the broken road. I didn’t look at his face. I looked at the ice and branches in our path, so it’s that face, the face of the river, I see when I remember Eli’s voice that day, when I hear his reckoning. In the rain on the day the road went under, we came to our loss as if it were a presence, a constant. Our daughter’s death had always been so, and would be ever-more. That was the utopia of the flood. The singular means of Helen’s death would strike at us later.

  We put Ida in the wagon and pinned her down with luggage. Eli and I held on to each other. We didn’t know where Bill and Dianna were. We reached the tracks and boarded Bossy, milk, Eli, Ida, myself. And Jack.

  Jack was cheered by the walk out. He went off to talk to the conductor. It was the first I would see of Jack’s explorations. Jack travels. Then I remembered that he’d literally dropped in. Jack had simply become part of the broken machinery of our lives. All around the rail line lay the vengeful old lake. Resuming. Bill would’ve stayed behind with Dianna. Fugitives have to stay near the source of their innocence.

  Bill and Dianna were having an argument. Dianna was refusing to leave the house. She could only picture her mother coming back through all that water to reclaim her. And find Dianna gone.

  When the dike broke, they watched the oil-like patch enter the front door and cross the floor till it reached all the walls, where it climbed up. The windows exploded, now one, then another. The smell of mud was rich and exclusive. The river entered our home with an animal persistence, sliding up steadily. Then it stopped a couple of feet below their perch. Bill looked at Dianna with the mildest reproach. “Here we are,” he said.

  Dianna crawled over to look out the small porthole under the eaves. Her mother would need a boat.

  The sky cleared in May. The prairie was an open sea except for the giveaway windbreaks, just the fingertips of the drowned. It warmed up. There was much to observe. Things reduced to a minimum give a slow, ample yield. Every day, Dianna measured the river’s erratic ebb with charcoal, dangling from the rafters with Bill holding her upside down by her feet. Only the two of them, waiting for Mama, who would come in a boat. They’d be like two boats on the sea. They would give her all their attention. There is time here. Everything changes into the next thing, but slowly. So you’re ready. So you know, you can draw it. They lived on raw potatoes, carrots, wrinkled rutabagas we’d hauled up from the root cellar. She refused to eat her parsnips but was otherwise uncomplaining. Through all the discomfort, Dianna never grumbled. She was afraid that her dad would make her leave.

  Marie was at large, hovering over the sallow sea. Helen’s return was imminent, especially now that there was only water. Dianna listened. She could not keep her eyes focused when the bullfrogs droned. Even in the sun, while her father was reading and water slapped against the house, she heard the footstep, felt the caress, and she slept.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I WAS ALWAYS SWIMMING THEN, when I walked down our road. Even in our living room, when we built it new, waltzing with Eli was wading with Eli, an effect not improved by our wonky sense of rhythm. The branches of trees were webbed with flax straw that floated up from septic fields, Gothic and hairy. Houses were turned inside out, swollen, distended couches and rugs, the colour of chicken fat, hauled out to the front yards. Our house had turned as black as a wet box of tissue. The old house, built by Peter and Alice. And Marie’s place, who knows how old it was.

  We hauled everything out in buckets. Jack came back with us. He said he needed to get his plane. Richard showed up wearing tailored chest waders with railway gloves and a hunting cap. The trees were full of shredded sandbags that masked Richard’s approach, for he’d parked at the junction and walked down through the muck, like a landlord come to reclaim his castle after a peasants’ revolt.

  It was Jack who greeted Richard. He walked up to meet him like a sentry. I watched from the doorway while the two men talked. Jack turned around and pointed at the roof. His glider, strapped down, its wings disengaged and laced to its sides, a trussed white goose.

  Richard nodded and brushed by. He had an unfortunate blindness to whatever disturbed his consuming scheme of things. Richard approved of the flood. It cleansed us of a lot of old junk. He worked with us for about nine hours. We tore down plaster and shovelled the mess into a dump truck. The smell was vegetable but sweet as blood, and it would sit in the back of your throat.

  Richard worked non-stop, wordless, as hard as a man could work, though he was past fifty then. But he took one break, when Dianna purposefully, meaningfully, stood in his way. The two of them went for a short walk down the driveway. He appeared to be asking her the standard questions about school and hobbies and she giving him the standard answers. But the two of them were romancing. Dianna lisped beside him, toe in, tucking her straight brown hair behind her ear. She was feeling beautiful; I think she imagined that Richard admired her for her resemblance to her mother. Dianna didn’t look at all like her mother. She always watched the foreign map of Richard’s profile, but he never looked at her, though he was tuned to her presence. Richard soaked her up like she was a bandage on his wounded pride. And when Bill stumbled by with his buckets of rot, Richard lifted his head (age had lightened Richard’s hair from blond to an excessive eight-karat white gold, thick and wavy, very sensual), with a victorious and thoroughly covetous gleam in his eye.

  At fourteen, Dianna appeared to be acquiring fathers. It was an era that demanded of women a gaggle of fathers, a parliament of dads. She twitched her ski
nny hips. The two fathers each, differently, nodded their paternal heads: Bill with his unspeakable compassion; Richard, a monarch with his subject.

  Richard took up his shovel once again. I knew him to be quickly bored and felt uneasy about his long stay with us that day. I wondered what he was after. Soon after, I discovered him out back, hiding behind the remains of the woodshed, being sick to his stomach.

  “Can I get you something?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Funny smell,” he said, wincing and spitting phlegm.

  “It is. You should quit. You’ve been a brick. A real Samaritan. I like your pants too.”

  Richard, covered in the white cheese of waterlogged plaster, nodded; he never refused a compliment. I took his arm, and we walked towards his car.

  “Richard!” I said. “A Cadillac!”

  Richard retched again. He put his head down, looking at his putrid boots. “The Americans are miles ahead,” he said, and gagged. “That smell. It reminds me.”

  We stood at his car. Shakily, he put the key in the lock and stood there, too sick to move. Then he said, “It was like that in the war. When we’d find a body. That’s how they smell coming out of the water. Very similar—consistency. Drownings.” Pause. “Now I’m talking like a real vet.”

  I leaned up to pat his shoulder.

  After a short while, he said, “Of course, my father stayed in the water. He would have been cleaned.”

  “Richard,” I said, “the graves are everywhere.”

  Something in my voice alerted him. “You never heard from her.”

  “No.” Damn him. I hadn’t told anyone but Eli and Ida. Ida had looked at me with gently frustrated pity. “I know,” she had said. “It was obvious. Finito died too. At the Ebro. Helen had false papers, so we never got told properly.”

  Richard scanned the yard. Jack was washing down a chair for Eli to sit in. “Who is that fellow?” Richard asked.

  “He… dropped in.”

  “Is he foreign?”