When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  She would simply call it Richard. Richard. Because Richard will never let anything happen other than Richard.

  She touched his shiny summer suit. “You’re going to call our debt, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged pityingly. “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1970

  WE KEPT OUR DEBT TO RICHARD at a low simmer for another five or six years. I’m not the daughter of farmers for nothing. About that time it was fashionable to return to nature, get back to the land and all that invention. So Dianna’s becoming a radical fawn was normal and hip. I knew she and Jack were growing marijuana stinkweed down by the river.

  Eli and I tried it once, and I can see why it’s against the law. I saw many things: that green leaves have a pulse, for one; that Eli’s thoughts are honeycombs, for two. I can’t remember what was three.

  The young were as messy as us. If it weren’t for Bill, who refined our collective, we’d have looked like hippies. Eli was ancient and I was close behind and getting really tired of washing. I was busy. I watched the passing river. So the years covered us in sweet decay.

  My granddaughter’s volcanic soul produced illustrations that were never merely decorative. The way Dianna painted meadow rue, even blue flag, was uneasy, the very atoms had been destroyed so they could be reassembled on the page, where they shivered with certainty. Exposed ovaries, stamens, fruit, in the perfect restraint of scale, utterly sexual yet without the flagrant exaggerations associated with lust. This made them all the more potent and bold. I tried to speak of it once with her. “They are so… reproductive.” Dianna looked at me, as formal as her art. “You know,” I added, “you look like a purple coneflower.” She let me brush her long hair from her shoulder.

  Jack wandered, women followed. They often showed up at the front gate, traipsing down the road to find Jack, who was likely cutting firewood or tilling his vegetable garden. He poured these ghoulish blondes tea and chatted with them about music, and eventually they left by the same route, blandly disappointed. The Americans had been exfoliating the North Vietnamese jungle. We watched it on TV. The ground troops seemed like Peace Corps workers while the air force was burning people alive.

  Jack sat silently with us to watch “jungle.” He was drinking a lot by then, tumblers of Irish whiskey, as if it were apple juice. A prize drinker, he never appeared drunk or hungover. Dianna accompanied Jack only as far as the brink of his travels, which turned into binges. We came to understand that he was different when he was out. Young men, as well as women, followed him home, and it appeared they were disappointed to discover a flannel homesteader, apparently sober.

  Eli and I sat on the verandah bundled up against a chill. We had long since celebrated Eli’s more-or-less hundredth birthday (a happy-faced occasion that made Eli cough the phlegm from his throat and spit into his handkerchief). He was melding with his blankets; you could hardly make him out. The only thing that kept us going was a good jog on the Rototiller. The garden was what we shared (besides an evening nip) with Jack. With his help, we grew enough to take to market as we had in the old days.

  We were shuffling with the tomato plants one day when three young hobos suddenly presented themselves at the garden’s edge. They looked hungry. I suspect they were suburban brats in disguise. Their camouflage, a sort of Halloween get-up, was vaguely something, and when I asked where they’d come from—thinking, outskirts of Regina—one sallow pup replied, “Shangri-La,” while the girls tittered, and I said, “They must be devastated by your absence.” This kid had a habit of nodding his head like he was grooving to implanted music. Nodding, he intoned, “Everywhere is Shangri-La, man; you just have to tune it in.” Eli looked up from his weeding, a great smile splashed across his face, and he laughed appreciatively, saying, “Tune it in.” He pivoted on his wooden leg and resumed his husbandry, mimicking the child perfectly: “Everywhere is Shangri-La, man…” Noddy, well, nodded.

  We let them camp on “our property.” They were perfectly nice, if limp and wilted. Jack was the high priest of their vagrant religion. The two girls were obviously in love with him, but Jack seemed to have lost the coitus impulse, perhaps from drink, and they were too young besides. They went by the names of Aquarius and Pisces.

  Eli tried to engage them in political discussions. They’d made camp by the firepit, where I recall Eli bedding me in his days as a cowboy, and there remained a kitchen chair of chipped teal where he would sit, seeking conversation. He thought they were disenfranchised radicals, and in his confusion, he believed that he caught a whiff of brine. Noddy was in Cubs when Kennedy was assassinated. They all knew that Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, and they agreed, he used to be an okay French dude but he’d turned Fascist like that CIA pig Nixon since he let the U.S. do that atom bomb thing. This was news to Eli, and he innocently asked, “What thing?” But the kids were tired out by all this political rap; you know, man, that shit depresses me.

  For comfort, Eli went to Bill. Bill had built up the butterfly garden to enormous proportions. The entire meadow was wildly cultivated with asters and black-eyed Susan, catmint, milkweed and little bluestem. At the centre of the meadow, surrounded by marigold, coreopsis, globe thistle, he’d built a small square room with a canvas roof and mosquito-net walls, and he’d installed a desk and several chairs. He was composing a book, “a manual of the butterflies,” with his own sketches and photographs. “The wings are clothed in a dust-like substance, which is in reality a flattened scale,” Bill was scribbling when Eli rather shyly lumbered up and banged on the fragile screen door. “Beautifully ribbed with a series of projected teeth at one end”—Bill smiled at Eli and indicated a low canvas deck chair, into which Eli descended for perhaps the rest of his life, while Bill finished—“and single pedicel at the other. These scales are arranged in regular, overlapping rows, like the scales on a fish.” Eli sighed peacefully; the soft whistle of Bill’s writing, like wings against a screen. “The scales are the butterfly’s ornamental armour.” “Armour,” said Bill aloud, and he put down his pen.

  Right off the hop: “Why do they eat rice?” asked Eli of Bill. “What’s the matter with potatoes?”

  Bill tipped his head and placed his fingertips together, as he liked to do. “It upsets you?” he asked.

  “Well, yes!” Disconsolate, Eli looked out at the yellow blooms. “Christamighty, I sound like Richard,” he said, truly miserable.

  “It’s not the rice,” said Bill.

  “Sure it is. The entire contraption, all the bare feet, and honest to Pete, I hate myself. Why should I hate myself? I’m so damn mad at them I could spit.”

  “I’ll ask them to go.”

  “No, don’t do that.”

  They sat quietly for several moments. Seagulls strayed over the meadow. Fighting the need for a doze, Eli recalled the scent of the sea. He struggled against the deck chair and asked, “What is it they see in Jack? I mean, I like Jack, even respect the man despite his… his inclinations. But what is it they want from him?”

  Bill brightened. Now he understood the question. “Jack will jump without hitting the ground,” he said. “At night, he destroys himself. In the morning, he rises.”

  “But that’s just a strong constitution. That’s what they want? A strong gut for drink?”

  “Counterfeit,” said Bill. “They need counterfeit. They think it is the way to stay… light. Everything is too heavy, man.” Paused. “The children are very sentimental. They don’t see that Jack plays for keeps.”

  Eli sat back. After some time: “What about Dianna? I worry about her.”

  Bill was sketching the Venetian of a butterfly wing. He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “She sure knows how to draw flowers.”

  Bill brightened. “She has talent.”

  Eli nodded. The two men savoured their pride awhile. Then Eli said, “Yup. Beautiful paintings. Though—they’re not a big laugh.”

  Bill grew sad. Then: “Dianna is a war artist. It is a noble
tradition. Only, the war has become more subtle and dangerous.” He sifted through his papers till he found one of Dianna’s sketchings, a prairie fringed orchid, extinct, at least on “our property.”

  Eli, gratefully, breathed. “Ahhh,” he said sadly, and shook his head, mystified. All the same, bad news is all right as long as it’s interesting. His blood began once again to circulate, prickling in his purple hand.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I STOPPED OPENING THE MAIL when we got so far behind in the property taxes, when what we owed the municipality got so far ahead of us we couldn’t even make out its dust. We owed Richard plenty too, and I was paying what I could towards the interest on his loans.

  Richard was sympathetic, even offered to write off the interest and let us start paying the principal, but I was so mad at him, I refused his offer. I guess if I’d been following the paper trail building up like a muskeg road between “our property” and the municipal offices, I’d have known about the auction. It wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to our fiscal circumstances, but I might have been able to protect my granddaughter, somehow. If we can do such a thing, protect one another.

  As it was, Dianna saw Richard’s latest Cadillac (pink, I’m afraid; he too was showing signs of age) drive right past the garden, slow down as it passed Noddy and the girls snoozing in their sleeping bags, and then speed too fast past Bill’s butterfly meadow and bump on down to Marie’s grotto. Dianna ran to the oxbow in her boat-shaped cowboy boots.

  Richard got out and stretched. Dianna, breathless, had a weird image of herself holding a clamshell like a shield. He smiled at her with more indifference than he’d ever shown before. “Well,” he said, “I think I just saved your collective butts.” He used the occasional colloquialism now; generally, the world was bound to get more liberal. “Come.” He took her arm. “Take me on a tour.”

  Dianna shook her arm free. She was mute. Nearby, the graves of Peter and Alice and Ida’s pink fieldstone, and from the bush, through the stifling summer heat, an insect drone that might have been Marie’s refrain.

  Dianna thought it was Marie, a shadow come up from the river through the black spruce, but when it came into the sunlight, she saw it was Jack. He stopped at his screen door.

  Richard stuck out his chin. “You know, I never impose myself on you, Dianna. I let you do as you please. And bear the costs. I don’t mind. I’m doing it because someone has to.” Then, softly, “And because I loved your mother.”

  Without a word, Jack went into his cabin.

  Richard, more stiffly, “But he’s got to go.” He held up his small hands. “That’s my one condition. The rest of you can stay as you are. Except those—What are you people doing? Kick the bums out. Don’t slide into the mud, Dianna. Buck up. Jack goes. And the—what?—the hippies, they go too.”

  Dianna refused to speak. She turned on him her anatomist’s stare. It spooked Richard, but he made himself get back into his car casually. “Come out for lunch with me sometime. I’ll buy you something to wear. This is a new role for me too, you know, Dianna. Help me out a little. I’ve turned lots of properties in my time, but this is the first time I’ve been a landlord. Landlord. Not sure I like the sound of that. I’d rather be your godfather.” He laughed. “Or patron, better. Let’s not go overboard.” Turned the ignition. Through the car window, his tanned, sun-lined face. “Lunch. Promise.” Pointed his finger at the cabin. “But he goes. Hear me? He goes, or I let the land go up for sale.”

  It was then that Dianna began to incorporate insects into her drawings, spiders and wasps and the like. Not only the leaf and bloom of wild geranium, but the entire roadside, the dust, the neighbouring plantain and the beetle. These were her most terrifying paintings. They invoked themselves, over and over; this is this is this is this.

  That very night around the campfire, guitars and wine and stinkweed, Noddy begged Dianna to “stop looking at him with those eyes.” Dianna turned away for his sake.

  Noddy and the girls liked us, even though we were straight. We had finally been out-squatted. They had no mirrors in their hippie camp. But they looked into the mirror all the time; all they saw, or would see, was themselves. In the lotus position. “East,” Noddy said, “has met West.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JACK, IN A RED WOOL SHIRT with that long, loping stride, walks from the potato patch down the slope of lawn to the willow mess at the riverside. Drink has not diminished his physical strength. He lopes down the gangway to the floating dock, which he himself has repaired. The green river curdles, but when you look straight down, the water shows red-grey. It’s the same water we used to swim in, and of course it’s not.

  Dianna has seen him cross the lawn; she sees his shoulders and the handsome neck, the blue shadow of his jaw. But by the time she reaches the dock, she has been joined by Noddy and the girls. Suddenly everybody is on the dock, which keels and gurgles foolishly.

  “Man, it’s hot,” says Noddy.

  Pisces touches Jack’s arm. “Aren’t you dying in that thing?”

  And Aquarius teases, “Why don’t you take it off?”

  Jack’s eyes dart to Dianna, surprising her.

  Noddy is taking off his shirt and pants. “I don’t care if that water’s nuclear, man, I’m going in.”

  Noddy and the girls strip naked and leap into the river, up to their knees in gumbo. A medallion dangles on Noddy’s breastbone. Dianna is shocked to see how skinny he is, his dark hair and remarkably long penis hung from hip bones like dinner plates. The mud here is almost quicksand. She calls to them to be careful. They are splashing each other; they are “free spirits.” Pisces says, “Okay, Mum.” Pisces has nipples like rosehips. When they climb out of the water, they smell of fish and excrement. Aquarius is already scratching, though perhaps it’s psychological.

  Dianna helps Jack hose them off. They use all the water in the rain barrels and everything left in the cistern. The children still smell sour. Jack smiles, but he is always disinterested. He holds a hose against Aquarius’s blue flanks.

  Dianna turns off the pump. Jack lays the hose on the grass. The smell of mud is intimate. Jack teases them while they move to dry ground, lie down and lean back on their tanned arms and flick water from their hair. A drop of water remains in the cup of bone beneath the throat. Behind their closed eyes, the light is red. Small smiles upon their faces illustrate that happiness is simple.

  Dianna decides to give that sentiment its full expression.

  She walks away, then breaks into a run. Jack lifts his head, twitches the air. The hot day has turned a strange yellow. Thunder travels through the oak trees and under their feet.

  Eli and I felt the storm like a cold glass placed over the yard. There could be hail. Eli grunted while he plucked green tomatoes off the vine. The colours were excitable and strained. I heard Eli, and the flesh of tomatoes and beans hit the woodbox, and the children giggle in the clapping maples, elfish voices entwined with a cold wind cutting into the heat. My back was in knots, but I kept going. Under the brim of my hat, I saw the hem of Dianna’s skirt as she ran by. Hail for sure, and this our best garden in years.

  Down at the end of the oxbow, five tall pines emerged from the stand of black spruce near my parents’ graves. Separated by an expanse of clover, alfalfa, dogwood shrub were the cattail and rushes of the slough, and then Ida’s grave with its pink fieldstone marker. Jack followed Dianna. The blue leaves of locoweed lit the path to where the grotto was almost buried in the trees. Dianna, teeth clenched, sucking air. Behind her (she didn’t dare to look), Jack would be coming. The scattered rain hit so cold she gasped, yet the heat was stifling. Dodging rolls of thunder as if they were missiles, she made it to the pine stand in that horrified glare of sheet lightning. At last she was unnerved, unlucid. She stroked her breasts; the smell of dye from her skirts rose like alcohol; where rain hit, it steamed upon her. She had almost won, she had nearly proven the simplicity of happiness. It would cure the world. Jack was the aperture throug
h which she would invent her own life. If only he’d hurry.

  At last he found her under the pine trees, his red shirt like a lit match. His face was suddenly haggard, he seemed almost frightening when the irony was stripped away. She drew him into Marie’s grotto. His clothes hung from his bed frame. The room was the inside of a bomb. He touched her, committing himself to that touch.

  When the lightning hit the pine, it passed to the black spruce and over to the cabin like a hammer on a nail. It drove the lovers down through the earth, which gave way upon the ruins of Marie’s grotto, the scarce touch of stone beneath Jack’s restoration. Sap exploded, pine cones burst, needles roared into flame. He entered her and lifted her up like a burning flag. The roof blew away and they clung together through a snowstorm of seeds, an explosion of gunpowder, a cluster of hot stars kindled between them.

  Then they were running. Jack ran behind her. Through the path towards the meadow under a tower of burning trees. Dianna held a branch of black spruce. She looked back, then stopped. Jack slowed down and stood close to her. He touched her face. He was utterly foreign to her. And then he turned and ran. His red shirt disappeared down the path.

  Dianna retraced the path, back to the burning trees. The roof was gone and the black walls of Marie’s cabin were like worm-eaten leaves. The fire smouldered, but it seemed it might die. She searched till she found the deadest pine, and there she laid her kindling, on the dry grass beneath the dead tree. She watched it burst into flames.

  The wind, which had been light and from the west, suddenly gusted and veered to the east. Fire ran up and leapt across the tops of the trees; it travelled much faster than Dianna could run. She was surrounded by fire. The heat hit her as hard as a baseball bat and threw her out towards the river. She was standing in the mud at the riverbank. She saw the flames travel from the tip of the oxbow, through the spruce grove, over the stock dam, through the butterfly field, the mosquito netting an orange membrane; it consumed the cottage with its carved wood and travelled up the road to our house, where it devoured even the box that held the tomatoes.