When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  It knocked the wind out of the Canadians. They wanted to go home, back to the Protestant town of Portage la Prairie, sixty miles to the west, a long walk in the middle of February. They were worn out. For nearly a month they’d eaten nothing but bacon and bannock, and the skinny Orangeman would not eat bannock; he said it would cause him to speak French gibberish, and then he laughed with his mouth full of raw smoked fat, emitting an odour of wood and whisky and the first sulphurous indications of dysentery. His name was Thomas Scott. He was afraid of nearly everything, but mostly he was afraid of courage, so he called everybody a coward and became addicted to alcohol and rage. He hated Louis Riel like he’d hate a successful and neglectful father. Métis, Catholic, sober, solitary, authoritative, worthy of a frightened man’s hatred.

  And my mother hated Thomas Scott. She was a virgin to such ardour. He was her first true hate. The incident with Parisien the woodcutter had changed her in ways at once subtle and profound. Scott’s sneer had diminished the world she loved; his twisted smile as he struck Parisien with the axe had eviscerated her faith in human goodness. She wanted him flayed. Her introduction to evil had occurred at the moment of her initiation into the guardian role of motherhood. She’d been bleeding a little each day, a frightening secret she kept to herself. In her loneliness and anxiety, with an anger against my father that she dared not acknowledge (thinking such petulance would make her a lesser man), Mum configured Thomas Scott as the source of evil and danger to her unborn, and with logic understandable only to a pregnant, slighted woman disguised as a soldier in a drafty fort, she wanted to kill Thomas Scott and remove him from an otherwise blameless world.

  She found him, sneering, in the line of cold and hungry men stumbling home to Portage la Prairie as the winter dusk froze the gristle at the end of a bitterly cold afternoon. She spotted him in a ragged line of forty-eight men, dragging their Canadian tails across the white windy plain beyond the fort. My mother was on guard duty. She hollered and leaped on her horse and raced right up to that band of miserable federalists. She stuck her rifle under his chin, and she might have fired then and there but for the voice of Ambroise Lepine calling her back to line. One of the Canadians, old Mr. Pocha, asked what the Métis wanted of them. Ambroise Lepine removed his beaver hat and answered, “Louis Riel asks you to come inside.”

  The men looked longingly at the smoke rising from the chimneys, the huddled warmth. Ambroise Lepine smiled. “You are in time for dinner,” he said. It was magical: the bloom of camaraderie, the delicacy with which the Métis demanded surrender, the graciousness with which the Canadians accepted defeat. Thomas Scott said, “You’re bloody cowards, the whole lot of you, you shit-for-brains, priest-buggering…” And so the prisoners went in to dine.

  My mother followed, a vulture in a flock of good-natured prairie chicken.

  How she longed for Scott’s death. When the dysentery got worse, it was her job to take the man from his cell to the outhouse. It was constant. She was always a little late, and he cursed her for being a coward when the smell would bring bile to her mouth, her eyes stinging and the other prisoners regarding her with compassion, glad to be relieved of his company, if only for the little while Scott sat on the latrine drawing analogies between what passed through the swamp of his intestines and Mum’s forebears. She wanted to hurt him badly. She had never in her life raised a hand against a single soul. Swallowing vomit, holding her breath till I thought I too would expire, she dreamed she would gouge out his liver. She prayed that he would expel every organ in his rangy body—intestines, gut, heart, eyeballs—through the vacuum of his filthy sphincter. Please, God, prayed my mother while the nausea turned my home into a bilge, take not only his excrement but the whole man. Lord, take him inside out through his vile bum.

  At last the Métis council could stand him no longer. Everyone, my father and mother included, sat in the gallery of the council chamber watching the court martial. One man after another testified under oath: Thomas Scott had threatened to assassinate le président Riel; he’d attacked a guard; he’d struck down simple Parisien; he was a murderous rebel, a stinking threat to our provisional government. My mother ignored her husband, who sat beside her judiciously smoking his pipe. Mum was blinkered, harnessed to her new hate. Then Riel stood and asked the tribunal to show mercy to the prisoner.

  Scott didn’t understand French. He had a hangover, a miracle in a dry fort. His tongue was a dead fish in his mouth. The shaggy tribunal was an unreal joke, and he was a martyr in a land of barbarians. He sneered. My mother stood with my father’s restraining hand upon her arm. Without looking at him, she took Dad’s pipe and smoked it herself. Janvier Ritchot moved to invoke the death sentence. My mother bit down on Dad’s pipe. The tribunal voted four to two in favour of Scott’s death. My mother cried, “Praise God!” Scott looked from her to Riel, and Riel, who had no vote, spoke gently in English from a great distance. “You will face a firing squad tomorrow at noon.”

  My mother looked down at my dad, pipe in teeth. “I will be among his executioners,” she said, exalted. Dad could only look. She had won greater liberty than either had imagined. The pregnancy had lengthened her face and coarsened the cartilage of her nostrils, deepened the trough running from nose to lips, caused the peach fuzz there to darken. She left my father sitting in the empty council chamber.

  She took guard duty that night, and watched the foolish parade of petitioners come and go. She knew that grace is not granted retrospectively. She was a raven at the door. If she could, she would have knit black wool. We sat, she and I, and watched the condemned man. We watched him without pity. We were very strong.

  Without sleep, she ate her noon meal and went with the firing squad to the snowy yard. There were six of them, squinting into the low winter sun. Scott was led out, a white scarf about his eyes. The smell of snow, creamy light behind his blindfold, the impatient breathing of his executioners. His legs gave way and the minister helped haul him forward and then let him fall to his knees. His hands, secured behind him, hung limp at the end of a ridge of spine, and as was always the way with him, he was underdressed. My mother’s ears were full of ocean. She raised her rifle. She moved smoothly. She had almost reached her destination. From the corner of her eye, she saw a white handkerchief fall. She fired into the sobbing chest of Thomas Scott.

  Maybe she missed. Six shots had been fired, and there was a lot of blood. Scott curled on his right side, and a moan, deeply uttered, of no voice, of all voices, reached my mother like repentance, like eternal purgatory. With an everlasting groan, he tried to rise to his knees. Someone stepped forward and put a revolver to Scott’s head.

  She went to a corner of the yard to wait for Dad. The burden of her guilt was a fat gout she would ask him to heal. She sat cross-legged on the cold ground, expecting him, her chest in a vise. Her heart had run away. And I curled comatose, as if I too had abandoned her. She stayed there all afternoon, into the night, when she felt an atavistic care for her unborn and took herself to bed. She lay awake till the fort woke up and lit the morning fires, and she carried out her duties the next day, crouched inside herself, unable to come out. Still my father didn’t approach. She saw his back as he walked out with other sentries. She heard he was sent to St. Boniface. It wasn’t known when he would return.

  It was a week or more. I hadn’t moved and even the bleeding had stopped and she thought I would be stillborn. The sound of Thomas Scott’s agony filled the cavern of her soul. Her own life was bankrupt. She hadn’t known that Scott would carry within himself the song of all voices, an unfathomable chorus of human voices, beyond justice, beyond blame.

  She had killed a man. She had killed a man. She had killed a man. The breath entered her lungs while she chanted, “I have killed a man.” It was her liturgy. A folk song. Slowly she unfolded and lifted her head and breathed deeply. I took my cue and shifted in my dark cradle. And my mum looked out with gentle eyes, with her newly won compassion, on the catastrophe of human nature. The limestone o
f the walls of the fort was made of pressed bones, the colour of ash. An entire wall of bones, of forms extinct, remembered in stone. How beautiful it was in the winter sun.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CROCUSES LITTERED THE YELLOW GRASS like painted eggs. Everyone had grown dependent on the emptiness of winter when spring intruded on their spare rhythms, restless as a traveller come home.

  Alice and Peter came to the land by the Red, late one night, early April. In the pitch black, they threw buffalo robes upon a bit of high ground, the hides soaking up the icy mud beneath them. For the first time in months, they approached each other male to female, and maybe my father was shy to find himself sleeping with the mountains and valleys of a woman in the dark.

  My mother awoke first and propped herself up, chilling the space between her bare chest and Dad’s. She thought she heard someone breathing. It was the great lungs of the river, breathing like a god on the run. The lid of ice had broken overnight. Field snow from the Dakotas was pouring into the northern delta. It flooded the willow banks and rose up beside them, rushing by. She watched an ice floe smash into the full-grown elm below them, clipping it like the stalk of a sunflower, the tree crashing against the brush, and before Peter had woken up, the current had clawed the elm into its ragged passage. My father awoke and saw and heard and gathered the bedding and carried her up to higher ground all in one motion.

  Their shack was washed away to Lord Selkirk’s stunted farms up north. But they were lucky. The weather stayed dry, crisply clear. The river rose another four feet and then stopped. For weeks it was a stranger, stopping just short of real violence, racing through the willow paths. My parents listened to it breaking the branches, gnawing at the banks, while around them the cleared land lay mute, white grass at dawn, warming to a muddy gold. My father dreamed that the seasons would relent and make this the last winter the earth would ever endure.

  My mother loved the flood. She couldn’t fence in her gratitude. She shucked off her fat man’s trousers for a full bright red cotton dress and a thousand knitted shawls. “Glory,” my mother said. “God praise the motion of melted ice. Glory for fingers of heat, and a man’s body to nest me. Lord, grant me fast, awesome events, and oh please Lord, protect me from tiny things and boredom.”

  She’d grown accustomed to crude amniotic energy, and she spent her mornings seated on the stinking buffalo robes in a heathen’s communion with the Red. With her innate genius for polyglossia, she was speaking to the fast, mucky river-flow and it was teaching her the terrible imperatives of water, flood, birth. She went into a trance, breathing so slowly that Dad wondered if she’d died, though he didn’t disturb her, so mesmerizing was her sympathy for the fearsome meters, its deep, fast currents and an intermittent piccolo or childish sirens, and the icebergs like tiles torn off the Coliseum.

  They learned their lesson well. They built the second house high behind the crescent of wood that made a natural dike. The new house was made of logs plastered with clay, a nice little place with a kitchen. Later, when Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald realized that the “impulsive Half-breeds” would need to be “kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers”—that is, Protestant Anglo settlers—and allowed the right kind of settlers to stake vacant land wherever they found it, Dad put up sheds and fences and a stable. If you didn’t build a lot of “improvements” on your land, you couldn’t prove you owned it—weird and probably illegal manoeuvrings, but effective because no Métis hunter would have the time or the money to build that kind of thing. So while all around us Métis and half-breeds were being kicked off their land, my dad was busy putting up fences and sheds. And a barn, because even though he was nestling into the farming parish of St. Norbert, he would always be more naturally a buffalo hunter than a farmer, and while he rarely kept many cows, he at one time boasted six horses. The fire has long since taken all that away, but the high wooded riverbank lasted for years, and many springs we crouched behind it.

  My father never did tell my mother his fears: how he didn’t really believe things would ever grow back, how the execution of Thomas Scott had changed the world. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He had forgiven her. He knew she was guilt-stricken; that was enough punishment for anybody. But the deaths he’d known were healthy, as full of vitality as procreation. He’d seen many friends die—on the hunt, in the neighbourhood—and while he wept for the dead, somewhere in sorrow there slept the sugar and starch for new growth, a hibernation underground, for life gnarled in the roots.

  But such was not the case in the death of Thomas Scott.

  THE FINAL MONTH OF MY GESTATION was spent in meditation, a dance, a joke and unreasonable hope. They stopped talking out loud, my mum and dad. They built the house and tilled a tiny garden. An animal-quiet hummed between them, a dumb contentment. Le président had announced the return of civil rule. Near our homestead, the great barricade was dismantled, and Peter joined the men for several blissful days of camaraderie while they tore down the obstacles to peace. Their Métis comrades-in-arms were astonished to learn that Alice was a woman, and they were delighted by the ruse (though they might have looked at her funny, this woman who had insisted upon executing Thomas Scott). The geese had returned, proud and plump and yelling, and on Sunday mornings the great bells at the St. Norbert Convent clamoured for miles and miles down the river, rising through warm, blue air.

  Everything was new. Mail moved freely and uncensored. There was a general amnesty. Amnesty for geese, for gardens, for the Métis; amnesty for husbands who enjoy the company of other men; amnesty for remorseful wives who do not care to speak. A dawning happiness. Amnesty for Catholics; the promise of grace, even unto the Catholic Métis, even unto the rebel, the too eloquent, too charismatic, too bold Louis Riel. Lengthening days ripe with time for planting, time to plan for my arrival, time to make a province out of squatters’ territory. And it shall (on orders from Ottawa) be called Manitoba, and hereafter no one will remember whether it was, in the language of the Assiniboine, “the lake of the prairies,” or if it was Cree, “the god who speaks.” So they’ll say it in English, call it real estate and swear it has always been so.

  She went into labour like a jackrabbit, so fast they were stunned. Even her Ukrainian neighbour and best friend, round as a fresh loaf, who had borne nine children, told my dazed, sweating, rapturous dad (a blistering hot day in May, mosquitoes had hatched the night before in a cyclonic night storm in a heat wave, fast baby mosquitoes, but my father liked mosquito bites, he liked to slide his hand down the back of his shirt for a good scratch, and his own nicely muscled back kept the heat of the day in it like soil and over new harrow trails the rich black mud stayed warm through the short nights), her Ukrainian tongue filling him with happiness and visions of pure water running across a creek bed, and Dad understood more than her information, he read her nuance, that his wife was giving birth within the hour, that his wife was singing an anguished love-chant, and though her voice was as guttural as a pig’s, deeper than lowing cattle, his name was embedded in it, the current of her devotion beneath her agony, her birth song, the awful tearing of life into life. Mum squatting, even in hysteria, a zealous anti-colonialist, a pure squatter, gripping red-knuckled the limb of a willow tree, for her friend had prepared a birthing bed at the edge of their clearing, she’d made a great fire over which the river water boiled in a vat like an upturned clarion bell, and she skimmed away the twigs and bark and brewed fresh cedar branches and washed my mother’s hot flesh with tepid cedar tea and smoked away the edge of pain till my birthing wasn’t painful or sharp but blurred and earnest and Mum committed herself to giving me life, liberty and happiness.

  It was the twelfth of May when my mother clutched the willow tree and wailed her birth-chant and Dad’s Christian name. Downriver to St. Boniface, Riel listened to the saints singing in clouds full of lightning, and way beyond to the East, where colonies are conceived, ran the great machinery of Canadian territorial claims, playing a tri
ck upon the upstarts of the Red River. Yes, a province was being born, yes, of two languages (and our Ukrainian friend, invaluable midwife, the enchanting linguist lending her persuasion to Mum’s ear, Give over, my beloved, give over to the violent sea, give over to the inevitable death of birth, give over to the new, my round old moon, give away your life for life). Oh yes, a province, with an elected body of good men and true and even French, united with the landlords in the East, and near by our neighbours looking with some anxiety at pencilled scrawl upon a land title, a fading, incomprehensible claim of ownership for land they’d shaped and carved for two years or for fifteen years or for a generation, and worse for those who had not penetrated the mysteries of the Land Office, those whose names had not been scrawled upon a dog-eared surveyor’s field book.

  Suddenly my father remembered Mum’s hat and the scrip that she’d tucked into the hatband, its tea stains of sweat. With the sound of Mum’s thunder in his ears, he left the fireside and the midwife and went into the house. A doubt, sharp as broken glass, had presented itself. He searched the house till he discovered the hat, which had fallen under their bed, and he got down on his knees and withdrew it from amidst the dustballs and sat in a mote-river of sunlight and took the ostensible land title from her sweat-band, sniffed it affectionately and opened it with care. It was not, of course, a deed, a scrip or a title. He already knew. What Dad unfolded was a charcoal drawing of a buffalo.

  Even with a heart of dry ice, my father admired the refinement of the lost Cree’s art. He quietly folded it and put it in the leaves of his favourite book, Henry David Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and later, when my mother had regained her strength, he would show her this proof of their fragile claim to a home, and she would be so thrilled by the artist’s depiction of the lost creature, Bison bison (otherwise the buffalo), she would fight Dad to the ground, holding him between her knees, pinning him down as if she would plant them both, and she would say, “Here is our land; let them dig us under if they want a better claim!”