When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  Eli’s face rarely lost its laughter, but a seriousness made me put both hands on his face and down to his shoulders, pulling him and shifting flat beneath him and moving under his hairy legs. I could feel him chilly on the inside of my warm legs where my nightgown rode up. It was way too much. I bent my knees so my dad’s socks were at the back of his knees and lifted myself up to him, and he was hard and cold even there, so it was a chilled hard thing that entered me then, and Eli pushed his face against my shoulder and entered me like a man thrusting into a blizzard. I was dry and had never known the walls of myself before and hadn’t thought about my interior skin before that moment, so it was my own flesh Eli introduced me to as well as his. I was determined to know more of this and pushed his shoulders hard down on me and my hands ran over his back, which was soft and muscled, and then the privacy of his bum, which I had never before considered either, a wild contradiction of a shape I’d thought only children to own, a twin round bum, and I pulled him up into me. The pain was certainly manageable, nothing more than a sliver or pain we might impose to heal ourselves, belonging to the flesh, not inflicted. Then that was gone and I got drunk on him. Faint with it. Cried out. Bringing my knees up under his armpits and amazed for the pull in him and how we could get so far, mixed with him if only I could pull him farther. If I could just make him move in that hungry wall he’d unearthed inside me and make him touch it. All of a sudden Eli goes rigid and he’s suddenly on his knees on the bed and I’m with my legs around him breathing with him and I look down and what was cold and hard is shining like an egg in the nest of damp hair.

  Eli put his hands on the bed and moaned. His muscled, hairy chest folded over his stomach, making waves of flesh with whorls of hair. I made out the shape of a face on Eli’s chest, like seeing a man on the moon. I tried to make him smile, but he only moaned again. “I’m sorry,” Eli said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Nothing could have hurt me more than did Eli’s contrition. It was a hot knife in me. He pulled his legs over the bed, snagged on the blankets, and then sat thick and sad on the edge. The goose-bumps lifted up like whitecaps on faraway water. It was about four o’clock. My room had been yellow, brown, pale orange, warm and hopeful, but with twilight all this left us rigor mortis blue. Eli’s silence when he arrived had been full of wit and friendship; now we were quiet because we were different from each other, different from the day and what had just transpired between us. The glorious hunger of that, Eli made into an ugly, misshapen mistake twisted by guilt. I was too hurt to cry.

  Moaning, Eli put his clothes back on. He was cold. “Why don’t you warm up under the blankets?” I asked him. “Just keep everything on and get warm first.”

  But no. He said it again, “I’m so sorry, Blondie. Please forgive me.”

  But he didn’t understand. I sat up. I didn’t know what to say. I was so insulted by his guilt. It made me ashamed. Later I could get mad about it, but just then, with my flannel nightgown and my socks and my frazzled white hair and chapped lips and a hangnail I’d chewed off, I was just an ugly little girl. He shamed me.

  “You’re not to blame,” said Eli.

  My nose suddenly ran; I could taste the salty snot, and I quickly wiped it across my cheek and sat trying to dry off my face. Eli picked up his coat and put it on. He was bulky and he still looked chilled. He put his boots on like a boy would, sitting right down on the floor to put his feet in them. We had nothing to say to each other. He stood up and dusted off his hands. As he was leaving he leaned over to kiss the top of my head, but I lifted up my face and when he kissed my mouth he got a fierce electric shock, and when I pulled away my nightgown lit up with static, you could see it in the darkening room. And then he walked out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CHIEF JUSTICE WAS DRUNK. After my parents dropped me off, they went directly to his home in Winnipeg, a journey of maybe six hours in the snowstorm. His house was an oak log structure built in the 1840s and so considered “established.” He answered the door wearing a burgundy velvet dressing gown tied loosely with a gold-tasselled rope about his middle. He had an enormous girth and a narrow chest, so he was shaped like a drop of water. When he was drunk, he was mean. He had given up sobriety years ago, though he wasn’t always so obviously drunk, and he retained a powerful influence over the old Red River Colony. The storm was at its peak. Peter and Alice stood frozen at his doorstep, inhuman figures caked in snow.

  “Yes?” said the chief justice. He had a powdery face pinched with ill will. “What is it?” A genius in a land of bumpkins.

  “I am Peter McCormack,” said my father. “And this here is Alice McCormack, my wife.”

  “It is an absolute delight to meet you,” said the chief justice, and closed the door.

  After a moment, Peter lifted the brass knocker and pounded again. The door opened immediately, and the chief justice stood there with a cigar, smiling grimly. “I know very well who you are,” he said, letting them in, “You owe me a lot of money.”

  “Which I’m paying back.” Peter shook himself like a wet dog, flinging snow on the wainscotting. Alice just stood there, melting quietly.

  “Don’t bother,” said the judge. “Why don’t you borrow more? I’ve got oodles of cash.” Sticking the cigar between his contentious teeth, he shuffled towards a pair of French doors and pried them open. Looking back at my parents, he said, “Do come in.”

  Peter entered the judge’s library on his toes, obstinate and thinly dignified. Alice trailed after him, shapeless, damp as protoplasm.

  “Drink?” The chief justice offered port.

  “No,” said Peter.

  “Yes,” said Alice.

  The chief justice poured three from an ugly decanter. Alice, looking at it, thought, Grown children who are larcenous just like him, rheumatic wife who hates him. There was that baking-soda smell of false teeth in the judge’s library, though the fire burned as it should in an appropriate hearth and the leather-bound books stood uncut in a glass cabinet. On one wall there hung a huge map of the new Manitoba, a grid upon the topography and the sections in faint red. Alice, the idolatress, was mesmerized. On a wood pedestal stood a snowy owl stuffed in flight, a wingspan of three feet, its wild concentric eyes alien and turned towards the room at an angle impossible even for such a bird, as if its neck had been broken.

  The judge sat down at a rolltop desk and dipped his pen in ink. “You have repaid me exactly one-third of what you owe. At 8 per cent. Never missed a payment. Why should you pay me back now? Borrow more.”

  “I don’t like owing,” said my dad.

  The chief justice shook his pen, flung ink at the map. “You are desirable,” he pronounced. “I mean that in a monetary sense,” he added, directing his attention to Alice, who removed the beaver hat and freed her hair from her damp collar. “Put on weight,” the judge intoned. “Fatten your wife,” he told my dad.

  “I don’t like owing,” said my dad, never aware of repetition.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said the chief justice. “If you refuse my offer, I will investigate the propriety of your claim. Latour Road. That’s funny. I thought that was Métis land.”

  Alice and Peter stiffened. The moth wings stirred at the back of their minds.

  Guilt-stricken, Peter made a clean breast of it. “That’s right, Métis. We paid for it, but then again, we never did. It’s confusing. I don’t want to think I stole it. I’m trying to prove up.”

  “Good man. It will take more. Put up some fences. You’ll need a loan.”

  “It’s very good of you, sir,” said Alice, her accent of choice north England, flat and nasal.

  “Think nothing of it.” The chief justice stood and walked unsteadily towards her, holding out a promissory note. He leaned over her, his low girth touching her and she looking up into his wet mouth. “The money comes from infant estates, you see.”

  “Oh, God,” said Alice.

  Real-estate speculation on the land supposedly allocated to Métis “children”
was a sordid sewer running under and feeding the recent economic boom. Nearly one and a half million acres had been promised to those with a mix of English or French and Indian ancestry, but the Manitoba government pretended that “children” meant little kids, not Métis offspring. In the wink of an eye, four thousand people lost their entitlements, and packages of 140 acres were given to the English settlers. The rest of the land was bought from the Métis for peanuts and resold at “true” value. The Métis lost their river lots to us, and people like us. Alice and Peter moved heavily towards the door, the taste of the judge’s sweet port in their mouths.

  “We have lightened their burden. The half-breeds cannot farm,” the judge was saying, and he waved the note before them. “We have relieved them of an improvident responsibility. Have no worry. Good legislation, good laws, and we’ll quiet their claims. Of course, there’s a slim chance your ownership is legal and binding. But we can’t be too sure. Put up a new barn. Build fences. It’s all on the up and up.”

  “Up and up,” said Alice, longing. “We must go home.” And took the loan.

  AFTER ELI LEFT, I got up to take a pee and bled into the chamber pot. Even in my devastation, I was forming a fresh resolve. I had a plan that would save us all. It needed only my parents’ arrival home to confirm its necessity.

  I was sleeping when they walked in. Six o’clock in the morning and still dark. I was reconciled to my own power. My eyes retained the vision of Eli’s shining egg in its nest. When my parents stamped into the house, they looked like Lord and Lady Macbeth. And I thought, That’s enough, I see the light. But I said nothing.

  I rose to make them cocoa. Alice noticed my bloodstained nightgown, but she was so exhausted I think she took responsibility for it, as if it were her own or otherwise communal. Mothers are strange. My parents were getting older by the minute. I put them to bed, and then lit a candle at the little desk in my room and wrote out my plan to save the world from extinction.

  Because I had learned a terrible lesson. It was only too clear. Everything I looked at shrank away into nothing, like Eli’s desirable egg. Marie was nothing but the whisper of a moth. Riel was forever extinguished, along with the rights of more than four thousand Métis children. Eli had told me once, when we were out looking for the vanishing lady’s slippers, that my eyes were focused too far away. He said my eyes made everything close up disappear. I was so in love I thought he was paying a compliment. But it was merely descriptive, raw information. Whatever I looked at disappeared: Marie, the Métis, Peter’s freedom, and now Eli. I sat up till noon.

  What I devised was a plan for my own education. A woman with my power had to be cautious. Thereafter, I would focus my potent attention only on what was truly irrelevant. Latin, naturally. A bit of history of the slave trade in the Congo, followed by the navigation routes of fifteenth-century Portugal. The tragedies, Greek. I would spend six months reading this fellow Pliny, because he’d died in Pompeii (I’d already learned that in Spelling). Then Luther, Wesley and Augustine (in honour of my mother). By mid-summer (when Eli was likely hired out in Alberta, never mind), I’d be working on a history of Mesopotamian law, subdivided: culinary, marital, inheritance, military. I would memorize the names of every Roman senator, every British king, and learn the difference between a Plantagenet and a Tudor. I vowed never to look directly at anything ever again, never to learn anything that was not extremely foreign to St. Norbert, Manitoba.

  Glance aslant at everything I loved, learn the foreign names for things familiar. Not common wood nymph, but Cercyonis pegala. Not monarch butterfly, but Danaus plexippus. Not Us, but Them. Not St. Norbert, but Canada. Not love. Intelligence. By this means, I would protect all that I loved. By learning. Through an exotic translation from touch to intellect, from knowledge to book-fed ignorance. Not the Red River in spring runoff full of debris from North Dakota, but the Nile and its delta, and all the mummified kings, pyramids, slave labour too ancient to matter. Not Protestant land swindles, but the Norman invasion. Chaucer (surely irrelevant). Boethius. Okay! On the Consolation of Philosophy. That’s a good one.

  Irrelevance. My allegiance thereafter, my calling, my devotion. Irrelevance. Saviour of all that would remain secret, of my heart. An education in irrelevant information. So my home and loved ones (yes, and those departed in error, made crazy by the foreign god of guilt) may survive in blindness, in colonial disregard may we thrive.

  PART THREE

  1900

  CHAPTER ONE

  OVER THE NEXT FIFTEEN YEARS, Eli would get so bow-legged he’d eventually walk like a crab, sideways, see-sawing on a bad knee. Dust and cattle bristle had baked into his strangely handsome hide, so he was camouflaged against the sun-burnt grass as he sidled over the fair face of the district of Saskatchewan, near Batoche, at a place called Duck Lake.

  A hot wind blew hard from the west, ripe with the smell of blood. Shaggy blond grass, indifferent to thirst, made waves on the mild bulges in the land by the South Saskatchewan River. Eli couldn’t read a watch, but he always knew the hour. It was noon. Vernal equinox. Broad daylight. The wind’s fingers pushed at the grasses, drew faces, erased them; the wind whispered names, phrases trailed off painful as accusations. Eli always treated daytime hauntings with respect. He tried not to be afraid.

  The only other white man at the Duck Lake camp was an eager sergeant major sent West to oversee the slaughter of nearly a hundred head of cattle. The government of Canada intended to feed pemmican to the North West Mounted Police quartered up north, in the mining district of the Yukon. Pemmican, once the staple for fur traders, is sun-dried buffalo meat pounded into a powder and mixed with fat. Since the buffalo were gone, they’d have to make do with domestic cattle and a few fat horses. The Mounted Police hired Cree Indians from the nearby reserves to do the killing and manufacture, in exchange for the heads and offal of the slaughtered animals. And the police sent the sergeant major to make sure that no tainted ingredients went into the pemmican. A man by the name of Clark. A boyish man who was forever falling in love.

  Sergeant Major Clark didn’t know a bull from a cow, so he in turn had hired Eli from Batoche to run the show. Eli was the man people looked to when they wanted a job done. Clark always spoke to Eli as if they were at the fringes of a marvellous ballroom. Eli strained to hear Clark’s voice above the constant wind. “It’s going awfully well, isn’t it?” Clark asked, nibbling at a thick moustache.

  Clark looked wall-eyed towards the pole frames. Splashed like poppies across the dry prairie wool were countless tents made of thin slices of flesh. The Crees were loading horse’s guts and the heads of cattle onto wagons, preparing to go home for a few days while the sheets of meat splayed across the frames were cooked by the sun and wind. About fifty Indians would stay at the camp to boil down the fat and marrow, and sew up the hides with sinew for the great sacks of pemmican.

  Eli looked at Clark’s seal-like face, smooth and fulsome, and shrugged.

  “It must bring back a lot of memories for you,” said Clark, bobbing his shiny head.

  Eli twitched, suspicious. “Why? What’ve they told you?”

  “Uhh, well, they… I mean to say, the great buffalo slaughters! Killing for tongues and all that, skinning the wild beasts, et cetera. Right here! On the open prairie! Oh, yes! I know all about that. A lifetime ago, mind you. You were… why, I bet you were just a boy!”

  Eli relaxed. “Oh,” he said, “that.” He stared over Clark’s optimistic shoulder. In the blowing grass appeared the face of the old blind warrior, Assiyiwin, who seemed to nod sadly, and then the wind again, taking him away. Eli tried a polite smile for the young soldier. Must be about twenty-three years old. Wouldn’t know anything.

  “Nothing much to do now,” said Eli. “You going to hang around?” His jaw was aching, Please go.

  Clark tipped his head, considering. He ran a bright tongue along his teeth, gathering a little ball of dust, and spat. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Love to stay. Let’s pray to God this hea
t holds,” he said.

  It did. All night. Heat rank with rendered fat and bone marrow. The smoke made everyone nostalgic. Some of the stories were told in English for the benefit of the rather sympathetic Clark, whose Cree was limited to meegwetch, “thank you.” By firelight, stories of the great hunts in the 1860s. A thousand buffalo, like thunder, black air, so many! Long, warped fingers held up, trembling before an old face like a stone on the prairie, the noise of ten thousand buffalo cupped in his broken hands.

  The old men made fun of the young men. “So serious,” the old men said, laughing. “I am working!” They mimicked the young men, who swaggered under the weight of a hind of beef and ordered the women around. “Butcher this!” said the serious young men. A job with the white police, some pay and the chance to slaughter domestic animals. “Real hunters,” the old men teased. The young men tried to smile. But one young guy with a twisted face got mad at the teasing, this lesson handed him by the elders. And the elders looked at him with the compassion of the healthy for the ill, compassion mixed with fear. The young would need to develop an appetite for the bland taste of counterfeit. Pemmican, oh sure, made of cow.

  The twisted face turned on Clark and asked, “You like hanging around with Indians?”

  Clark nodded eagerly. The elders laughed, but the young men grew sullen.

  Twisted face went on. “You like us? You come home with us. You like eatin’ dirt? You like poor? You like Indian dog shit?”

  “Thank you,” said Clark. “Uh, meeg—uh—wetch. I have to join my regiment farther north. But thank… meegwetch. Most kind.”

  Twisted face sneered. “Eli stayed with us. When he was hiding. My grandmother was hiding too, in the woods. When everybody was in trouble in ’85.” Slyly, to Eli: “You came to our reserve to stay out of jail. My father hid the white guys from police.” He shoved Eli’s shoulder. The elders sat still. “Eli was hiding from the whites, his own people; he buried his white face in Indian skirts. We always pay for your fear. And for the fuckin’ Riel. Shit. You want to hear an Indian story?” He stood up. The man beside him tried to pull him back, but he shook him off. He pointed at Eli. “I’m telling a story this Eli, this… friend of Indians is scared shitless you’ll find out, your Royal Highness soldier.”