When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “Scare you?” he asked, grinning.

  “No,” I said. “You should be careful. You’ll get yourself shot one day.”

  “Yes, I guess I will.”

  I lowered my weapon. I liked him strongly and I thought he should know. I held out my hand. “I’m Blondie.”

  He laughed, but it was nice. “That’s for sure,” he said. “That’s your name, yep. Blondie. For certain.”

  “Kind of stupid. My parents did that to me.” This was a sore point. My hair grew in dense and difficult blonde curls, and my name only drew people’s attention to it.

  “They’ve got eyes in their head anyway. Yes. Blondie.”

  We stood like that, smiling at each other. Then he said, “I’m Eli.”

  It shook me. I’d loved Eli the boy all those years; the name was one of my sacred names, like the bird-and-forest song I carried with me. “You’re full of goddamn horseshit,” I told him.

  “I may be full of horseshit, but my name is Eli.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty years of age. Give or take.”

  “Then you’re a different Eli because he’d only be about seventeen or so by now. Anyway, you’re white.”

  “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  He was looking at Marie’s grotto. I was desperate to get him to stay.

  “This is where I live,” I told him. He was distracted, listening to something, but it wasn’t me. “Part of the time anyway. On my own. But I have to look after my mum and dad. Alice and Peter. At their place.”

  I asked him home. Asked him if he would be hungry and lied my face off all the way there. I did all the cooking, I told him. I broke the horses for Peter and kept the place going. I told him—this was my biggest fabrication—I told him I was a friend of Big Bear’s. But after that I shut up, because a shadow rippled across his face and I had an idea he knew something. I was dying to touch him. I made us walk side by each where the path was just wide enough for one. We were laughing and I was lying and it was just a great day. In sight of home, he grabbed my arm to stop me and he kissed me. I moaned from my feet up. We looked close at each other and that was when I saw the green part of his eyes.

  But right away, things went straight downhill.

  Eli and I arrived at the gate to the road that led to the yard. The place was riddled with fences and gates. Peter thought fences made the land his. A brand on it, his signature. He never lost his anxiety over the false scrip he’d paid for. He was like a sailor who couldn’t quite get over the fact that his ship would sail upon so changeable an element as the sea.

  I was leading Eli home through the gate. I’d forgotten all about Peter and Alice. I was going to get Eli into the kitchen and then through the door into my bedroom. That was as far as I’d planned. I wanted all his attention. I was an empire for him to discover. He was the luckiest guy alive. My wisdom was as clear and urgent as a broken mirror. I’d teach him everything I knew, the whole package: politics and a real understanding of nature. We’d go live at Marie’s cabin, and hunt and roam and never settle. But first I’d get him into my bedroom and show him my copy of Walden. He was in for a wonderful time.

  And then my mother, Alice, showed up. Seeing her was not just a letdown—it scared me half to death.

  Alice had been growing smaller ever since she’d hit forty. Dad told her it became her, and he called her his little boy, which struck me as a bit distasteful. But in a single day in July 1885, Alice seemed to lose thirty pounds and, I swear, at least a foot of height. She intercepted Eli and me at the gate, coming at us from the side and forcing us out of her way. She didn’t look up, huddled over as small as a crone. She wore a thin white nightgown, so threadbare you could see the shape of her legs through it, and I thought I could make out the dark hair of her sex through the fabric, something that would make the devil himself cry out. Over her head and shoulders she’d thrown a ragged diaper, for in her grief she imagined herself a virgin on the verge of annunciation. Tears funnelled over the dry lines of her face and I saw that the skin on her throat had come away from its binding, and I thought, Her flesh is abandoning her bones. In her hands, she fumbled with a string of garlic as if it was a rosary. Whenever Alice was overwhelmed, her Methodist guilt gave way to Catholic ecstasy. As she passed, we heard a supplicant’s gibberish, a Gregorian mix of many tongues, for by then Alice spoke at least thirteen languages, and at that point in my life, it seemed to me she spoke them all at the same time.

  Alice walked the perimeter of “our property” the way a well-trained German shepherd will piss on its own frontiers. She walked so close to the fence her nightgown snagged on its rough wood. My dad, Peter, followed close behind. When he saw us, he winked, as if to say it was just a game. Peter was gristly, permanently fifty, with a quick, porous soul and a nervous system as transparent as the veins of wild vetch, as nimble as a wintering finch. He walked near his wife with his hands gliding in the air behind her, and when her idiotic shawl fell, he gently replaced it. I considered my options. I chose to ignore them completely and took Eli’s hand to pull him towards the house.

  “Who are those people?” he asked.

  “Nobody,” I said. “Just two people walking.”

  I got him inside. The sun showed the narrow strips of polished maple in the new floor and lit up the fresh whitewash and the new cupboard with its willow dishes and her collection of spoons, and for the moment I was glad my parents were philistines.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked him, steering him through the kitchen.

  “Of course,” he said, glancing through the new glass windows to see Alice and Peter on their weird tour.

  I grabbed a fresh loaf and the honey jar, and gently pushed him through the doorway and onto my iron-post bed.

  “Here.” I handed the food to him. Then I got down on my knees and shuffled under the bed. I kept my best things under there. I had to show Eli my pictures of Big Bear and Chief Poundmaker with the gorgeous braids like sweetgrass. The best thing I owned was a tusk of what I thought then was an elephant that Peter had dug up when he was clearing land. I got all this stuff out, and Eli sat with the honey pot and bread in his hands, looking at me, and at that moment I knew everything.

  He looked at me with clear-eyed humour. He was mine. I quickly shoved all my stuff off the bed and took the food from his hands and lay down. Looking up at Eli, I felt for the first time what it is to be a woman. He looked, really, like a man. Muscled. I could see his nose hairs. He was strong and bushy. Behind him, the sun was striking through the west window to light up the sprouts of green leaves still growing out of the thatched ceiling. Everything around us was sunny and green, and the quilt we’d float upon was sky blue, egg blue, God blue.

  But that was not to be the occasion of my virginal divestment.

  I’m sure Eli would have lain down with me; even a young man as honourable as he could not have resisted such temptation. But just then, the sun was enveloped by a thin cloud that turned the sky bright ochre and three ravens flew by, their M-shapes becoming for my excitable mother a signal of demonic intervention. It was a good thing. With the approach of evening the mosquitoes were getting terrible, and Dad was prepared to follow her all night. Eli and I heard my mother scream, scared as a rabbit, carnivorous as an owl, one high, wild shriek. We sat bolt upright and could see her through the window, collapsed on the ground sobbing, Dad trying to comfort her, crouched there, both of them weeping. I nearly felt sorry for them then, though they’d spoiled my chances with Eli.

  Outside, the air was like the underside of a mushroom, milky pale lavender and musk, the scent of fire from miles away, likely as far as the Pembina hills. The sunset was exaggerated, though at the time I thought it was the effect of love. My mother in her white gown looked like a snow goose shot from the sky. When my dad lifted her in his arms, she went limp as if unconscious, but it was a long sob that had taken the wind from her until, with her lungs nearly collapsed, she g
ave such a gasp, a mournful, wheezing cry that made me run from her, bawling, embarrassed, as if she’d struck me. Dad followed and hugged me and said, “It’s the ghost come back.”

  “He’s never gone,” I said, pulling away from him. “Why’s she acting up now? The bloody hell with Thomas Scott. The bloody hell with that cow called Mama.”

  Between us, though the evening was warm, flakes of snow were falling, catching on my dad’s eyelashes. I stuck out my tongue and tasted smoke. It was more than sun burning in the red sky. Yet it felt unreal because we could not hear a fire. The evening birds were sharply singing.

  ALICE, AT LAST, RESTED. My resentment of her was a charley horse in the solar plexus where love lives. She was my mother. She had no right to get emotional, not in front of Eli, not even in front of me. I was so embarrassed, I got tight with mother-hate.

  Eli cooked supper that night. Odd to remember this now because it was his first introduction to the family, but we were too tied up to thank him for it. The prairie fire to the west was listing up in bright yellow waves with red margins and then the impossible black sky. Quiet, though, and the wind eastwards. It lit the house, and we kept vigil in this throbbing illumination. Alice was a white thing on the couch, Peter and I in chairs beside her, while Eli paced between us and the stove, except when he went to sit in the doorway for a pipe. Every time he did this, I thought he’d go. But he didn’t. He stayed.

  And then, from the dark corner by the woodbox, there came the sound of a chair scraping over kindling and high-pitched ghostly, triumphant laughter. The corpse of Thomas Scott was corpulent with a diet of victory. He wore new shoes and chewed on a cigar. He laughed so loud he woke up Alice, who pushed herself up on an elbow and looked at him through strands of greasy hair.

  “I’ve just dropped in to say hi,” he said.

  Alice nodded. “I knew you were coming. It’s about the trial in Regina, isn’t it. Riel is going to be convicted. I knew it,” she said. “I knew it even before I saw the crows.”

  “Perceptive,” he said, cleaning the nails of his right hand with the nails of the left. “And such a nice hostess. It’s been—” he searched his empty bottle of a brain for the word—“fun. I feel… fed.”

  “Like fungus, like rot on a young tree, you miserable dead bastard,” said my dad.

  “Uh-huh. Yeah! Or as the Frenchies say, ‘Wyoi! ExactAmAnt!’ Tsk. A sym-pathetic man.” Thomas Scott stood. His new shoes had already been soaked and curled in rain. He stretched, yawning. “Want to hear what the judge will say to Riel?”

  “No!” cried Alice.

  But before her protest was spoken, the ghost grew till he was eight feet tall or more (though the ceiling of our house was not more than six), and his spare frame filled out and a great white beard grew on his face with the snow white eyebrows, and the thin jacket of Thomas Scott became a flowing robe of black velvet and his cigar grew long until it was a gold sceptre inlaid with rubies emitting a red light. His voice, which had been reedy, now came from the depths of the hallowed halls of judgment, resounding the words “Louis David Riel! I hereby pass sentence upon you!” And the wall behind his shaggy white head flared as if by fire, and upon it we saw the great stark shadow of a gallows. His terrible voice bellowed at us with the force of a cannon. “You will be taken to the place appointed for your execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead!” The apparition began to evaporate into a smoky dew, floating as transparent as a day moon, but still the voice came, solid and huge and mordant. “May God have mercy on your soul!” it shouted through air that was suddenly saturated with the smell of burnt fat.

  It was very hard to get to sleep after that. My mother sat on the couch, pensive, with her hands tucked under her thighs, staring at her toes beneath her nightgown, transfixed but less gloomy than I’d expected, as if chewing the cud of her fresh guilt. It is beyond nature to doubt the word of a ghost. Riel was surely to be hanged for a murder in which she herself had taken part. He hadn’t had a vote in that tribunal back in 1870. My father would argue with her, rather tentatively, that Riel had assumed leadership in our so-called rebellion, but Alice knew that Peter too felt uncertain and uneasy. And she knew the power of her own bloodthirst. I saw her heart growing, painfully, to accommodate the new cargo, the prophesizing spirit of Louis Riel.

  By the light of the western prairie fire, I put Eli to bed in the stable. I carried a straw tick out for him and tossed it into the loft. He was distracted, standing silent in the yard, looking to the west. I went and stood beside him. “It’s just like ’79,” he said. “When everything burnt up.” His face was strained. He looked at me. “They did it on purpose. That was the end of the hunt. The buffalo couldn’t come up because everything was on fire.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked. The notion of conspiracy, with its by-product of paranoia, is bred most easily in the minds of adolescents and other rednecks.

  But Eli put a name to them, and again I suspected that he knew more than I. “The Americans,” he said. “They set fire to the whole border and burned the buffalo back down south.”

  “Why?”

  “It starved the Indians,” he said. “Sitting Bull was waiting for the buffalo. They didn’t show. And the Indians starved. So they’d take treaty.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe.”

  And Eli shrugged. A devastating gesture.

  I left him in the yard, looking at the fire. I think in the night he removed himself to Marie’s grotto, but of this I can’t be sure. I felt a surge of health and wakefulness despite the sombre atmosphere at home, and went often from my room that night to stand at the door looking out. My mother remained, a wax figure upon the couch. Her patient suffering soothed my resentment, relaxed the hate-knot in my belly. A dark, sleepless night walled by the western fire, and my mother glowing with pain and patience. She was no longer an embarrassment. While I swung between her and the inspiring absence of Eli, the charley horse inside me was released, soothed with fresh respect for the size of this diminutive woman. How she could house her torments so generously.

  ELI WAS ALWAYS ANCIENT. It was in part a question of style. He was shabby and debonair, vain and disinterested. He was short, but he seemed tall. The most learned person I’ve ever known. Knowledge clung to him like burrs to a buffalo. But his was the wisdom of an older world, the one burnt out by the American agents who would set fire to an entire border to starve out the Sioux.

  It was apparent he was illiterate the first time we spoke. His ear was too good for a literate man, his memory too clear, and he knew many names for things—the name that told its purpose, its local use; the new colonial name; and sometimes the old Native names. Seneca or cattle herb or rattlesnake root. Wild rice, river rice. Big bluestem, turkey foot, muskooseeya.

  One afternoon, I was hurrying through the house to fetch something for my mother. We’d been busy outside all morning, building a corral for Dad’s three new horses. My arms ached and my hands burned pleasantly from the stone hammer, and I rushed in, distracted and light with the thoughtless pleasures of work, in a hurry to get back outside. Shocked, I saw how still, how graciously abandoned, was our sun-dusted house. Out of place at the centre of the room was a spoon-back chair of bent maple, reddish wood upon the waxy floor, horsehair adrift. Upon this chair were Eli’s shambling hat and his gloves, his fingerprints pressed in horse oil, the shape of his hand. I was unnerved by how worn they were, how ragged and how dispossessed. Pale green, faded grass colours, vulnerable and ready. I heard his voice outside, laughing at some joke of my father’s. He had inhabited us and let himself be inhabited, which seemed terrible at that moment. Intimacy itself was terrible, and I felt sick. Later, when the day cooled, Eli donned his hat and gloves for the last hour of work before sleep. I watched him put them on, and was relieved that the hat acquired dignity on his shaggy head, his gloves when filled with his big hands gained authority. I was glad to see him walk away that night. Separate from me. Not my responsibility.

&nbs
p; He stayed in Marie’s cabin. My father was pleased to have some help while Alice recovered (she was simply inclined to be healthy, partly, I think, because she liked herself better that way). We worked all day and told stories through the night. Love, even my erratic love, made the shortest sleep sufficient.

  We had a couple of acres of wheat, four acres of oats, half an acre of potatoes and half an acre of peas. If that doesn’t sound like much, why don’t you go for a long walk in the heat behind a pair of oxen while you push at a plough knee-deep in mud? We’d soaked the wheat in barrels with a fistful of lime before we sowed, so it came up very fine, no smut, no rust, and we hauled water all the way from the river in pails we slung from yokes over our shoulders. It was worth it. We got three and a half dollars a bushel selling it for seed wheat. Add to that two-fifty a bushel for the potatoes and two dollars a bushel for the oats, and we’d do okay. The peas mostly went to the raccoons and birds, but we had a good feed all the same.

  I knew we were boarding a stray. Eli wouldn’t be around for harvest. But for now, it was green summer. At night, my parents told stories about the hunting days. And you could tell by the way he listened, and sometimes, when they’d pause, he’d finish their sentences, that Eli knew the hunting life, even though he must have been about ten years old when the buffalo, and the life that went with the buffalo, disappeared.

  It was a dark night without a moon. Once night settled, the mosquitoes left us in peace. We stoked a big fire down by the river. Kept some new potatoes cooking in embers at the fire’s edge. Peter had just delivered a long, boasting tale of a hunt back in ’68, when he’d shot fifty buffalo, fourteen of them at one run, over a butte in the Northwest, letting go the reins and lying back on his horse’s rump as they fell downhill, straight through the middle of an animal sea. He emptied his cartridges and reloaded without thinking, and only when he stopped at the bottom, with all these buffalo wheezing or dead around him, did he figure out that he’d had to load his rifle while his horse fell down that hill. When he’d stripped them and loaded up the tripe and fat and hides, it took ten carts to carry everything back to Cypress Hills. Could have used a boy to help him. He winked at my mother, speared a potato, blew away the ash and bit gingerly, blowing. “Seventy-eight was the last time I ever saw a good-sized herd. Seemed they dried up in a day.”