When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  The two girls fled east. It was Noddy who carried Eli out on his back, and we ran with the flames till we found the road. The wind dropped, but the fire made its own gale. Noddy went back in. He found Jack at the shed, fighting to get the glider free. The boy got into my car. He and Jack hauled the plane out of its shed and towed it to the west and then angled towards the fire, Noddy speeding nearly into the burning ash trees at our drive, braking fiercely, but the glider was already in the air. It lifted on heat, in the firestorm, a thermal that carried Jack high. The glider’s pearly underbelly turned orange, gold, black, and its wings blushed and as it flew higher it became a pale pink bird, paler and paler, and soon it flew so high it was a new moon, a pure white spur with Mars in its hook.

  EPILOGUE

  IN THE UNFOCUSED AFTERNOON OF FIRST THAW, especially after a hard winter, the quiet is unruffled by a loose muffler on a pickup driven ineptly, gears grinding. Black mud is very black, and snow as it melts turns the bluest shade of white. The road is lined with puddles, and as the old red pickup splashes through them, the sound is softened by the mists of melting snow.

  The truck is equipped with brackets for carrying glass, huge sheets of glass that reflect the feathered sky and crisp black twigs, charred claws of burned trees. Occasionally, Bill jumps out, a halo-headed man as calm as morning, and he hauls the corpse of a spruce off the driveway, jumps back in, drives on. He drives to the end of the road, stopping often to clear the way, and when he comes to its conclusion, he continues. He has to dodge the field-stones, but otherwise it’s clear sailing for about twenty yards, when the truck becomes mired in mud up to its axles.

  This is a man who does not curse. In a sense, that’s what makes him happy. He jumps out of the truck and gingerly, one by one, removes the two-by-sixes he’s salvaged from somewhere, and he makes a sidewalk over the mud to a spot beside the slough, a ring of cataract-coloured ice with lashes of burnt cattails. Here is where he will build his daughter a house and studio.

  He builds a Dutch frame in the shape of two hands with their fingers pressed together, its southwest and northeast sides made of glass. When Dianna arrives six weeks later, she holds her skirts above the mud and ash and enters a cedar-smelling prism. The light, bright and austere, falls from a sky that was long accustomed to branches, arrives like an immigrant pleased to have shed an exhausted past.

  These are our ruins: the standing trees like black toothpicks, the stone floor and the remains of an iron chimney, a green copper box that once held Seneca root. Bits of pottery, scorched clamshells. And Ida’s granite headstone. Gone are the deer paths in the woods, the trails between the houses. And of course, there is no trace of the lilies that marked the graves of Alice and Peter.

  There’s not much left of our houses at all. The land has changed shape. The river comes close. All summer long it will circle her, flow east on one side, west on the other. The seagulls come back, but they’re almost outnumbered by owls and hawks because the mice and snakes are plentiful.

  The first thing to grow is fungus. She draws the mushrooms at the base of burnt trees. Then the June grass, arrow grass, thistle, and slowly, poplar, birch, willow sprout up from underground roots. It is Dianna’s ideal environment, at the cusp between the dead and the living. Saplings, moist green against black ash. Paradise.

  When it rains, paradise turns into Hades. The mice drown in new streams flowing where there once were paths. Dianna will be housebound for as long as the ground lies saturated, for a very long time, because the big roots are dead. The rain just runs off.

  Dianna’s baby arrives on one such night, in a downpour. She’d felt birth pains for three days. I’m not clairvoyant, but I’m old and I can count, so I know, when Bill’s truck stops at the last firm ground, we’re not a minute too soon. To the whumping sound of the windshield wipers, gazing ahead into the rainy night, we see the ghosts scatter from the headlights. “Well,” I say to Bill, “we’ll walk from here. And we’d better be quick.”

  Some of my father’s old fencing still stands, marking nowhere from elsewhere. We hurry as best we can, Eli’s wooden leg causing us some slowdown. Dianna’s house is lit up, a glass palace, and when we climb the stairs, we find the door wide open and the mice leaping about on the floor and in the rafters.

  Dianna is in the loft, like a whelping box. Bill heaves me up, and I find her sweating, soaking wet. She’s taller than I remember, and the hands that grip the bedpost are powerful, sinewy, with veins of blue twine. The baby is already half-born. So I only have to open my hand and she’s out. Dianna falls back onto the pillows. And sees her daughter’s face for the first time. Dark hair, black eyes. Born with her eyes open.

  We’re busy for a while, cleaning them up, and only when I’ve wrapped the infant and returned her to her mother do I really see her. She’s infinitely familiar. And infinitely new. We light the candles. The mice play, and rain runs down the glass and the ghosts sit in the shadows. Alice and Peter are there, and Marie, and even the damp Orangeman, Thomas Scott, his clothes ill-fitting, his shoes wet. I long to speak with my mother and father. They don’t glance my way but sit in silence, they on their side, we on ours. I search for Helen, but she’s not there. My heart gapes open. I do get tired of the raw part of living. Morning has not been thought of when the shades grow remote and fade. Receding in the dark, they travel past Dianna and her infant. Dianna has removed the swaddling blankets so as to stroke and admire the beautiful girl. As our guests pass by, a mark appears upon the baby’s chest, a tiny plum, a burnt kiss. Dianna cries out and touches the mark with her lips, as if to keep it there. In the gaunt light of dawn, we make our beds and soon we are asleep. In our brief sleep, Helen wanders through our dreams, and when Dianna awakes she feels the greatest happiness it is possible to feel. She names her daughter Helen.

  When the sun dries the mud, we begin again to pace out the place where the garden will be. Bill, with some hired help, builds us a brand-new shack near by. Jack doesn’t come, and I begin to think he’s among the crows who have taken up residence in the single remaining oak tree, but I don’t say a word to anyone, not even to Eli. When you are my age, you can’t afford to seem flaky and it’s best to appear matter-of-fact.

  We live there in peace for many years. Dianna has the stubborn, rather frightened dignity of one who has chucked everything and gained everything in the same grand gesture. She always wears three skirts. She continues to draw: marshland, growth under the weight of decay. We search the oxbow for signs of Helen. And everywhere, there are signs.

  We plant an orchard where the pines once grew. In their fourth summer, they blossom. That is the summer Eli passes on. My hands reach for him. I continue to talk to him, and his silence, obdurate, relentless, wears away at my happiness. Death never does become less shocking. For a long time I consider following him, but I do grow curious to see the fruitfulness of the apple trees. And besides, my great-granddaughter has the blackest hair, the reddest lips and the most insolent habits ever known to womankind. She’s running across my garden, the sun soaking into her long hair. We’re overrun with wild cucumber. She has become a high and mighty young woman, and she’s absolutely no help at all with the weeding. I’m tempted to chase her out of here before she tramples my delicate nest of meadowlarks hidden, there, doesn’t she see it? Among the blue-eyed grass.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the course of writing this novel, I have consulted many books, and owe a debt to all of them. I am particularly grateful for the following:

  Maggie Siggins, Riel: A Life of Revolution (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994); Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser, Loyal till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion (Calgary: Fifth House, 1997); Mary Weekes (as told to her by Norbert Welsh), The Last Buffalo Hunter (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1994); A. Ross McCormack, Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries: The Western Canadian Radical Movement, 1899—1919 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); Victor Howard, “We Were the Salt of the Earth!”: A Narrative of the On-to-Ottawa
Trek and the Regina Riot (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina, 1985); Victor Howard and J.M. Reynolds, The MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion: The Canadian Contingent in the Spanish Civil War (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1986); Len Scher, The Un-Canadians: True Stories of the Blacklist Era (Toronto: Lester Publishing Ltd., 1992); and John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock, HOW to Know the Butterflies (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1915).

  I wish to thank the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous assistance. And to Janice Weaver, Victoria Marchand, Lorraine Sweatman, Alan Sweatman, Dawne McCance, Linda Stecheson, Elizabeth Sweatman, Connie MacDonald, Sally Sweatman, Peter C. Newman, Lindy Clubb and Barbara Schott, many thanks.

  Diane Martin at Knopf Canada has helped me countless times with her canny, witty editorial talent. And it is a delight and a privilege to work with my agent, Anne McDermid.

  At last, at the end of Blondie’s journey, I am able to thank my husband, Glenn Buhr. Without his humorous wisdom, his clarity and courage, this book and I would have long since lost heart.

  MARGARET SWEATMAN began When Alice Lay Down With Peter in St. Norbert, Manitoba, where her studio overlooked the Red River. During the writing, her house flooded twice and was eventually lost to the river. “Everything about the book is located there,” she says, “in a much-loved place.” A playwright and lyricist, she is the author of two previous novels, Sam and Angie, and Fox. Margaret Sweatman lives in Winnipeg.