When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

Rubbed myself dry with my nightdress. Somehow my limbs were still round and muscled despite the years of vegetative reading. My thighs were ample and strong, and my belly was firm with just enough fat on it; as round and white as the petals of anemone were my breasts, and the bright devil’s kiss my sole jewellery. I was thus occupied with a reunion with my flesh when I felt myself watched.

  Standing to the groin in a thicket of wild cucumber, the blushing Clark. His pink cheeks glowed. His eyes held mine. I dropped my gown. Considered catching a handful of Red River to throw into his sweetly beaded face. He was solemn. If he’d smiled, I would have transformed him into a stag and sicked the dogs on him. If I’d had any dogs. It was a lovely moment, but I couldn’t hold the nymph pose a second longer.

  Suddenly, Eli was running down the riverbank carrying his gun. He ran like a stalking cat, low to the ground, blood on the tip of his tongue. He crouched to the river’s edge without once looking at me and raised his gun. The crane lifted, revealing angel-white feathers beneath its wings, with a span that took my breath away. It straightened its stick legs and seemed to think itself into the air, for it was airborne before its vast wings swept down. I heard the explosion and smelled the blue sulphur and charcoal of Eli’s rifle. And then the bird fell, falling as heavy as a man’s body; I heard the air shoved from its lungs and an eggshell sound when it crashed on the riverbank.

  Clark leapt down to join his brother-in-arms while I threw the damp nightgown over my head. When my head emerged, I saw the two bold hunters holding the crane by its wing tips while they marvelled boisterously over the colossal prize. “Wonderful shot!” exclaimed the blushing Clark. “Very clean! Very bold move!”

  They carried on this way for hours, obviously trying to prolong a perfect communion. Homopathological. With passionate care, they carried the dead thing to the house, where its wingspan was measured and its beauty properly appreciated. “Eight feet, three inches!” cried Clark, as if he would lay down his gauntlet, Childe Clark to Sir Eli. Who was quickly saturated in shame.

  I stood in a sea of testosterone like the maidenhead on a battleship. Roberts and Clark strode over the corpse of the bird, crushing its white feathers into the dust and straddling its brilliant red head, its ochrous eye. “Good Lord! Will you look at that eye!”

  “A cruel eye!”

  “A damn cruel eye! I’ve heard of a crane just like this one attacking a child once. Good Lord! A right hostile bird!”

  Clark began to babble. “It was a whooping crane exactly like the specimen before us! Wounded it, a poor shot”—an admiring glance at Eli—“maimed by an inferior marksman. An Indian, as I recall. In a snit because he hadn’t shot a buffalo, lifted his gun and”—staggering, lifted an imaginary rifle—“BLAM! Thing dropped, all right. But then it began to run around. Dripping blood. Held up its wings, just like this one. These creatures have beaks, look at it now.” And he poked at the bird’s head with his toe. “See that beak? It’s for digging roots. That’s what they eat. Monstrous beak. I saw one such specimen drive its beak right through an oak paddle. Ferocious birds. And once enraged, extremely vicious.” He quivered. “This bird wanted revenge. It went right for the children, screaming a sound like a drunken reveille. I only wish I could forget it, the most vicious sight I’ve ever seen, war or peace. It could outrun a horse once it got its speed up. Imagine the poor little child, without a prayer, a little Indian child who had tripped and fallen down on its knees, with this terrible bird standing over it and just about to disembowel the child then and there.”

  “But you killed it,” I suggested.

  Clark looked at me. Confident. He’d pretty well married me and had five children by me with that one voyeuristic glance. “Right,” he said. “Quite right.”

  Eli swayed and lifted the crane in his arms. The bird was so heavy that Eli carried it as he would carry a dead man, the cloud white wings tumbled over his chest, and I swear the crane clasped Eli in its arms. He staggered under the weight of his angelic prey and stood before me with his offering.

  “God save thee, ancient Mariner!” said I.

  Eli’s hazel eyes divined my need for him. But he winced and said, “I’m going to South Africa.”

  “Well, take the goddamn bird with you.”

  He backed away, the white bird around his neck, and turned and fled into the bush. Recrimination had made him blind. And fixed to the past, he crashed through the overgrown path to Marie’s grotto. Clark and Roberts and I watched him go. “That’s bush!” cried out the faithful Clark. “He’s walking into bush!” He glared at my chest beneath the flannel nightgown, as if the cause for Eli’s sudden lunacy lay there.

  “Why South Africa?” I asked Clark.

  “Why? For queen and country!”

  In socks, in damp nightgown, I followed Eli. His rigorous grief and the bulk of their bodies had bulldozed a fresh trail. I found him in the clearing by Marie’s cabin. He stood, rotating slowly with his face lifted to the sky, in his arms the radiant bird. I took the crane from him and laid it on the ground. With his rough fingers, Eli plucked at its flight feathers.

  We buried it in the shade of black spruce, the crane as large as a man. All was still. We breathed together. The ground was made of decayed things, roots and needles and blown maple leaves rotting like the pages of a book.

  ELI MADE A NECKLACE of leather and attached to it three white feathers. He stood upon the mound of rust-coloured earth and slipped the necklace over his head, tucking it under his shirt. And this from an illiterate man.

  I followed him back to the house, where we rejoined Clark and Roberts. Eli was as calm as a ship in the doldrums, mesmerized by his own jealous folly. But there was a heat about him. I felt it when I handed him a glass of water. When his hand touched mine with the inevitable electric spark, the water in the glass clouded over and bubbled slightly. He kept glancing over his shoulder, as if hearing a footstep behind him. Other than that, he looked great. And I yearned for him till I thought I’d fall down.

  They’d left their wagon at the gate by Lord Selkirk Road, and Clark and Roberts were suddenly convinced it would be stolen. Roberts was eager to retrieve it, but Clark stopped him and said, “Blondie will give me a hand.” He looked at me. “I’ll bet you’re good with horses,” he said. Eli laughed sadly. I pulled a pair of Peter’s trousers over my nightgown, snapping the suspenders, and plugged my feet into my boots. To Roberts, I said, “Help Eli with supper. Make enough for six.” Roberts looked peeved.

  Up the road, Clark swaggered, each of us leading a horse, for they’d left the traces on the wagon. My father’s fences extended like Chinese boxes around our whitewashed homestead. At the edge of “our property,” Clark halted and pulled me to him in ardent desperation. His moustache was auburn. He grabbed a fistful of my frizzled hair and touched his lips to mine. Up close, I got a view of the effect of heat on wax: his moustache drooped abruptly about the corners of his smirking mouth, and a bit of melted wax stung there and made an instant blister. The shock was a bright one, blue in colour, with flashes of yellow at its edges. The bolt entered Clark’s mouth and travelled down his windpipe, showering him with intestinal gases. For good measure, I kissed him again. His head scrolled back on his spine; it drew his eyelids back over his eyeballs weirdly, all red veins, and I was instantly cured of any illusions about his good looks. He smelled funny too. Like bad blood sausage.

  Being an Ontario man, Clark looked for an external source for the terrible odour. We were standing close to the wagon full of pemmican. “Goddamn Blackfoot,” said Clark.

  “Cree,” I corrected him, anxious that the electricity had indeed altered his memory.

  “Cree,” said Clark, recovering. “Quite right. Childlike people. That meat, by God, has gone bad.”

  Of course it hadn’t. The pemmican was dry and hard. Clark sat down at the side of the trail. He pretended to be judging my ability to harness the horses. He was like a drunk woken up after passing out, trying to recall last night’s lust, to me
asure the remorse. I let him off the hook, carried on as if nothing had happened, although I did take advantage of his forgetfulness by acting the part of young male hick. I had a plan.

  THE HOUSE WAS REDOLENT with Eli’s stew. He put wild parsley in his stews. Anyone would love a man like that. I was working Clark over in my delicate way: by suddenly walking more bowlegged than Eli; by speaking with a jaw taut with male energy, droppin’ my g’s. Eli stirred some turnip into the stew. Then he fished out the feather necklace and stared at it, disconsolate. He looked as if he’d already married his own death. I put Peter’s pipe between my teeth and lit a match on the seat of my pants. If Eli was going to South Africa, then so bloody well would I.

  Clark and Roberts and I were just settling down to a bit of poker when Alice and Peter came home. Eli was sitting on the front steps when they appeared. It was nearly ten o’clock. The sound of their horses and then the wagon emerging in the purple night, and the silhouettes of my parents’ hatted heads. They spied Eli by the lamplight. Peter stopped the wagon fifty feet away. They looked at each other in silence. From inside the house, I sensed a gladdening of the air and went out to the porch. I couldn’t see my parents’ faces, but I knew they were smiling.

  “Hello, Eli,” said Peter, calm and warm.

  Eli stood dusting his rump, and walked to them. He held his head high, as if he was leaving room for the lump in his throat. He opened the barn door and then led their horses in. No one said another word.

  It was normal for Alice and Peter to get home so late. Alice was teaching school in North Kildonan. Peter, after he’d done as little as possible towards keeping our farm running, would take her to school and then travel back to Winnipeg, where he’d spend the day in conversation. Peter had dutifully cleared enough land for planting and adopted the role of unsuccessful farmer. But by 1900, he was beginning a new career, as philosopher of Impossibilism.

  Impossibilism had travelled to St. Norbert from the West Coast, from British Columbian mining towns, from Vancouver’s disaffected Marxists, who saw nothing but an ugly twin in the socialists’ reforms of capitalism. The Impossibilists rejected any compromise and every conciliation with organized bureaucracy. The all-means-nothing crowd, I guess. An anti-crowd, a restless bunch, quite wonderfully allergic to any kind of salt-to-pepper relationships: union to industry, now to when. Impossibilism was the left hand refusing to shake hands with the right. It just didn’t go in for twos.

  Peter and Alice were probably happier than they’d been in their whole lives. Alice’s school was full of new immigrants fetched by that great importer of manpower, Clifford Sifton. Sifton figured he’d outsmarted the British radicals by refusing the applications of Londoners and other urban machinists. Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Poles and orphaned British children from the English countryside—all were invited to provide cheap and servile homage to Her Majesty’s Dominion. It was Alice’s heyday. She was teaching in all her thirteen languages. At sixty, she looked ageless, with a muscled face, lithe as a gymnast.

  Alice had a keen sense of smell. About two years earlier, she had sniffed on Peter’s urgent body the briny scent of radicalism. Peter’s passion for Impossibilism smelled of the sea, of fishy breezes and oily salt water, and of logs, fresh-cut timber, corduroy roads, sawdust and pine. It took her back to her first freedom aboard the ship out of Orkney. Since Peter had fallen in love with revolution, Alice had fallen ever more in love with Peter. Of course, they completely neglected me.

  Peter and Alice were introduced to Clark and Roberts, with whom they were polite but uninterested. My mother couldn’t take her eyes off Eli. She looked suspicious. She leaned on her heels as if she were fat, and opened her arms to Eli like a brood hen, totally out of character. Eli gave her an awkward hug. With her arms around his barrel chest, she slyly nuzzled his armpit. Something in this investigation made her jump. She held Eli in stiff arms, then squeezed his face between her hands. “SNAP OUT OF IT!” she yelled. Her voice was strange, sharp, nerve-racking.

  Eli, stunned. But already, the blush of hope on his cheek. Alice spotted the necklace and tugged the white feathers out from Eli’s shirt. “Whooping crane,” said Alice. “You shot the crane. Who would make you act like such a damn idiot?”

  She turned and nailed me with the hot iron of her accusing eye. I forgive my mother for this. She was of an older generation. They blamed women for everything in the old days. A lucky thing, too, because Eli needed all the help he could get just then. He looked arthritic. She released him. Passing me, feigning to hang up her hat, she whispered in my ear, “Sulphur and ash. And hydrocarbons, whatever the hell they are. That man wants to die. What’d you do to him?”

  “Nothing,” I hissed back at her, fifteen again. Bitch.

  “That’d be it, then,” said Alice. And hung her hat, grimly disappointed.

  Dawn came like a girl in a yellow crinoline, crisp and bright with dew. Clark and Roberts and me, the three gamblers, had played all night. I saw the fingertips of sunrise touch the trees across the river through blue pipe smoke and the farts and belches of my slack-sphinctered buddies. I lost badly. Out of practice. Won me the confidence of the boys. I was the perfect mix: kind of a woman, but not very pretty; kind of a man, but she plays cards like she feels obliged to lose. Says sorry every time she bets on a pair of jacks. I did. Sorry. It was four o’clock in the morning. For the first time in fifteen years, I hadn’t had anything to read for eighteen hours.

  Playing cards is different from reading. At first, you think a card game is just a stupid little story. Then the stupid little story turns into a parable, a life battle; it turns into your autobiography. And when the sun comes up, the game turns into a letter from the bank—a hangover, worse than the dry heaves.

  Cross-dressing is not what it used to be. Clark was a nice enough fellow, but he was not Flaubert and this was not the nineteenth century. I became aware of a quality of purposeful mediocrity in our conversation. It was suddenly a big gaffe to be passionate; significance itself was in bad taste. It was the beginning, the embryonic coagulations, of the twentieth century.

  But me and Eli, we were going to South Africa with Clark and Roberts.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SOON ALICE AWOKE and stumbled from their bedroom to stoke the stove for coffee. She lit a fire so big the flames ran up her arm when she slammed the lid into place. Without really thinking, she licked at the singed hair and walked past our card game and out the front door, I presume on her way to the outhouse. It was a bright morning. The stove made it unbearably hot. Clark and Roberts and I, suddenly dying of the heat, put our cards down and crowded out to the front porch. “Whew!” said Clark. Roberts said nothing. “Hot!” said the articulate Clark. Roberts sat on Alice’s porch swing, working his brain for something to say. Being upper crust, he would make only summary statements, so he couldn’t enter a conversation till it had stuttered into speculation.

  “No rain,” said I.

  “Yep,” said Clark.

  “River’s low,” said I.

  “Worse out West,” said Clark.

  “Dry year,” said I.

  “Not a cloud in the sky,” said Clark.

  “Some feathery ones,” I said, pointing, “In the east.”

  “No rain in that,” said Clark.

  “Sure could use rain,” said I.

  “Very dry out West,” said Clark. “Drier than here.”

  “Yep,” said I. “Looks like a hot one.”

  “Yep,” said Clark, and sighed and stretched like a man after hard work. “Gonna be a scorcher.”

  Roberts ran his fingers through his hair and it miraculously fell back glossy and neat. “That is a mare’s tail,” he said, pointing to the eastern sky. He looked freshly bathed. “It portends a change of weather. You’re quite right,” he said to Clark. “It will be a very warm day, with temperatures as high as ninety-two degrees. The weather this afternoon will be enervati
ng. And then,” he said, rising and walking away from us, “it will rain. Very hard. Very, very hard.”

  “Well,” I said, scratching my head. My hair crackled. “Coffee?”

  “Yes,” said Clark. He had suddenly remembered his British accent. “Though I prefer tea.”

  Dad was in the kitchen when I went in. He tucked my head under his arm and knuckled my skull, immune to the static, though my clothes clung to him. He smelled of brine. “Hot in here,” he said, releasing me.

  “Gonna be a scorcher.”

  Dad poured coffee. “How many?”

  “Me and Clark,” I told him. Dad looked up, alarmed. “Not me and Clark like that,” I said. “Me and Clark coffee.”

  “Nice enough man,” Dad said, pouring a cup. “His friend is a bit of a stick.”

  “They’re both okay,” I said. “Going to South Africa.”

  My father looked at me shrewdly over the fog he’d raised on his coffee, took a sip, said, “So?”

  “So?”

  “So what’s up?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Blondie, lass,” he said, “since when did you invite comment on your life?”

  The screen door opened and Eli walked in, my mother close behind him. That was our reunion. Our Upper Canadian Loyalists were down taking a swim; we could hear their shouts: “The water’s splendid, old boy!”

  “Righto,” said Alice, making a face. “When are the queen’s representatives taking their leave?”

  “We’re going to South Africa,” I said.

  “Hot day,” said Alice, blithe and deaf. “Gonna be a scorcher.” She looked at Eli. On her strong, tanned collie-dog face, a look of concern. “What’s eating at you?” she asked him.

  “I’m all right,” said Eli. He was shy.

  “He’s going to fight the Boers. And I’m going too.”

  My mother waved at me as if I were a mosquito. She had a hard time thinking of two things at once. That’s why I’m an only child.