When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “Why would you do that?” she asked Eli. “What have the Boers ever done to you?”

  “It’s either that or join the circus,” said Eli. He smiled and looked up at us to make sure we wouldn’t take his despair to heart. Lightly, “No place left to go. Should have been hung with Riel.” Sipped his coffee. He pretended it was funny. It was pathetic.

  “Come on, Eli,” said Alice. “Have something to eat.”

  I moaned when I saw she meant to stoke the stove.

  “The man doesn’t need to eat, Alice.” It was my dad. Harsh. I was uncomfortable. My parents often disagreed, but it was always from the inside of their conspiracy. We were all four standing in the hot slabs of sun. The open-screened door exaggerated Dad’s freckles. He seemed to twist himself up. “Eli’s absolutely right!” he cried. “God help us! He’s right! He may as well fight the Boers as join the circus.”

  “That’s pure bunkum,” said Alice.

  I was sweating head to toe. I kicked off my boots and stripped down to my undershirt.

  “It’s true,” said Peter. “There’s no place for a man like Eli. He’s not a banker, and he doesn’t sell farm implements. Who wants a buffalo hunter with a talent for breaking horses? He speaks four languages. Who cares? Cree? Ojibwa? French, for God’s sake! Can he play golf? Does he row? Is his father a Methodist?”

  This last one was a possibility. We all looked at Eli, who shrugged without an ounce of self-pity.

  “He can’t cheat the land office because he can’t read or write!”

  Eli winced. Peter put his arm around him and started to walk him out the door. “He’s the last one,” said Peter. “We’ve got to preserve him.” Out the door into the sun. From the porch, Peter’s voice: “The last of an extinct species.” Together the two men walked out, towards the raw path to Marie’s grotto. “The new situation is impossible.”

  “Impossible?” asked Eli.

  “It’s impossible.” And then they disappeared from our view. Alice and I were left in the kitchen. “Damn!” said Alice. She stopped. “Do you smell the sea?”

  I did. An ocean wind, there in our kitchen at six hundred feet above sea level, on our unsuccessful farm by the Red River, almost a thousand miles inland from the ocean water of Hudson Bay. The salty scent of Impossibilism, that restless left-handed ideal with its alloy of anarchism. Pungent, fishy and fresh, with a whiff of bilge. I looked at Alice. Alice smiled. “Eli stays here,” she said. “Go to South Africa yourself, why don’t you?”

  IN THE RAINY NIGHT, I sat in Peter’s undershirt and boxer shorts on a chair in the middle of the kitchen, where a breeze blew through the screen. There is no relief when one’s sweat rises to meet the humidity in summer air, the fresh rain falling on one’s own salt. Skin meets skin or wood or hide or cotton, so to move is to evaporate. Sitting on a wooden chair in the rainy breeze, golden skin a salt lick. Badly wanting Eli. Who was not present at my climatic annunciation, did not witness my skin, my flesh-petalled hue, or taste me. He was near, Eli, but he was not present.

  I could hear Eli’s voice, Adeimantus to Plato, disembodied, boyish. Peter’s catechisms, my father’s treachery. Training Eli in the impossible theories of Impossibilism. The lessons were taking place on the porch on my mother’s swing, with the rain running madly from the roof, a ledge of rain, for we had no eaves. Green rain. It kept Clark and Roberts in the barn. This was an advantage. For I had chosen to take my mother’s challenge. I’d go with them to Cape Town. By ship from Halifax. And I was listening, as a prisoner will listen to a sneeze from his juror. A pleasant sneeze? A kindly cough? Will he like me? I ran my hands over the blonde hair on my legs as I waited to learn. Will I go to war alone? Or in the company of my brilliant friend, my beloved Eli?

  The rain let up and the trees were dripping. All the years of studying were nothing compared with this. I was badly bruised by longing. After fifteen years of fasting, I wanted to speak and kiss and make demands.

  Alice fretted about “the boys,” as she called Clark and Roberts. She walked out barefoot through the mud to fetch them. As it turned out, Roberts was asleep. My mother crept in through the barn door and whispered to poor Clark, who lay wide-eyed in the straw and was glad to be offered more simple entertainment than lightning and thunder. He even held her hand as they walked back to the house.

  Alice brought Clark up the porch steps, interrupting the Republic. Peter finally shut up, and he and Eli came inside with Clark and Alice. I sat stolid in my wooden chair. Eli’s hair had curled, and he looked baffled and honest and good. Evil Alice wiped her feet on a potato sack and asked us all to be seated.

  “Now,” she said, “we will hear from Sergeant major Clark.” She leaned towards him. “I’m sorry. What is your Christian name?”

  “Christian?”

  “Yes. What did your mother call you?”

  The ears of Smart Dog perked at the sound of the word “mother,” like “cookie.” “Mother? My mother?” He chewed the moustache. “Clark,” he said.

  “Clark,” said Alice. “My daughter is already old. But a mother, as perhaps you know, will always nurse her young.”

  Clark, a city boy, blushed.

  “She will nurture her young, even when her young, even when her ungrateful young, is merely a specimen of immobilized energy. She reads, you see,” said Alice to Clark. “That’s all she does.”

  “She’s…” Clark began. “She’s…” He rocked to and fro in his seat, nibbling, trying to recall why he was beached on the female pronoun. “She’s not much of a card-player.” He smiled at me cheerfully. “Good thing we were just in for matches,” he said. And gave my knee a shove.

  “Sergant Clark!” said Alice, with a glimmer of Count Otto von Bismarck. “My daughter is considering joining your regiment. Please inform me who is your commanding officer!”

  Clark answered brightly, “A man you may well know!”

  When people leave home, they lose much of their understanding. They just can’t know what words mean; they don’t know the stories behind the nouns and when the verbs did what to whom. Take Clark. Poor, dumb soldier.

  “Blondie,” he said, “will be under the command of a great soldier. General Buller proved himself as a young man right here! Right here at Red River!”

  “General Buller!” said Alice.

  “Of course, he was only a captain then. Under General Wolseley. Think of that! Thirty years ago. And Wolseley a colonel.”

  “Wolseley,” said Alice, and looked at Peter. “A general.”

  “Ohhh, he was only, maybe, say, thirty-five years of age when he came out here to put down the rebellion. They say it was a terrible fight. Wild half-breeds. It made Wolseley’s career.”

  “Career.” Alice looked jaundiced. “It made his career.”

  “Yes! Quite! Voyageurs, they say—the same ones brought him out here—took him to the Nile to help Gordon. Of course,” Clark confessed manfully, “Khartoum had fallen and Gordon was dead by the time Wolseley arrived.” He brightened. “But Buller was right here! I suppose he might have walked on this very property! They say he came this close to hanging Riel over breakfast. So the story goes.”

  The room was quiet. Clark, still confident, groomed his moustache with his fingers and gave a little click with his heels as a show of respect. “Did you meet the man? General Buller, I mean.”

  Alice flexed every muscle in her body, head to toes; she pulled her lips back from her long, yellowing teeth and spat on the floor like a camel.

  “I met him,” she said. “He was singing ‘God Save the Queen.’ ”

  “That… that would be… him.…” Clark’s enthusiasm was spent. He looked at the bright spot of spit on the floor with polite disgust.

  Alice changed mood and shape. She softly came beside me and wrapped her arm around mine. “You must go to South Africa, Blondie, darling girl of mine.”

  “What?” said Peter.

  “She goes. That’s my final decision.” It was just like Alice. She ch
anged character as easily as she shifted tongue. Peter and I looked at each other, confused, trying to remember when we’d had a matriarch. Alice adopted new roles so fully that she brought a history with her, and within minutes our family was led by Alice, had always been led by Alice.

  “What about Eli?” asked my dad, tentative in his supporting role.

  “We’ll need someone here to help with the farm. We’re losing a valuable farmhand,” said Alice, squeezing my shoulder.

  “Pardon?” This was just slightly over the top.

  “And Eli can stay on till Blondie gets back from the war.” Having spoken, Alice sat at the kitchen table and dealt herself a hand of solitaire. We were, it appeared, dismissed.

  We shuffled outside. It was impossible to talk in front of my mother. We held a sub-rosa council in the yard.

  “She’s out of her mind,” I whispered.

  Dad stood straight, weighed his judgment carefully. “She’s never been wrong before,” he said. “Sometimes she seems wrong, but later it turns out she was right.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked him. “You’re cracked too.”

  “You’ll be fighting for the glory of the Empire,” offered Clark.

  I was trying to talk to Dad. “Thomas Scott!” I hissed. “Don’t forget Thomas Scott!”

  Clark shouted, “You knew Brother Scott? The great Orange martyr!”

  “My mother shot him,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Clark. “Good heavens.”

  Dad calmly asked, “Blondie, do you want to go to war?”

  I looked at Eli. I wanted to go to bed with Eli, and if I had to go to war first, that’s the price I’d have to pay. I thought I could get it right this time. Besides, the war was quintessentially irrelevant, and I hadn’t lost the habits of a student.

  Eli had pulled the necklace from under his shirt and was counting the feathers over and over, onetwothreeonetwothreeonetwothreeonetwothreeonetwothreeonetwo, and my love for him endured one of those devastating growth spurts, became a new wild mix with the fresh additive of sympathy, something protective, akin to friendship, but it hurt.

  My father was waiting for my response. “Blondie?”

  Like a kid scared to dive, I gripped the edge with my toes and said, “I guess so.”

  “Are you sure? Because you know you don’t have to.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’ll go.”

  Clark slapped my back. “Good fellow!” Then he stopped, looking ill and bewildered.

  “What are you going to do, Eli?” I asked.

  onetwothreeonetwothreeonetwo

  Eli looked up. He had tears in his eyes. He was smiling. His voice was low, from that warm, thick chest. “I came here wanting to die,” he said. “Losing the hunt, working for fake Brits forcing their railways on us, and their roads and their sewers and their artesian wells and their foundries and their mills and their meat-processing plants. Their community halls, their churches, their schools, their municipal governments, their district governments, their provincial governments, their Dominion governments. It was all too much to bear. I wanted to die.” He looked at Peter, son to adoptive father. “But Peter’s given me hope. I want to live. I want to see the day when this entire nightmare is over and the world is a fair and free place again.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Clark.

  “Yes,” said Eli, his face lit with optimism. “Exactly!” He kissed me on the mouth. Slight spark. “I respect your decision, Blondie,” he said.

  That night, sleeping beside my packed bags, I dreamed that the moon was Eli, but Eli had become a beautiful bull, white with a muscular back and polished white horns, and he played in the surf and lay down and let me touch his breast and caress the soft folds of his flesh, and then he let me mount him and he swam out from shore, far across the wide ocean, and I felt frightened in my sleep and looked back to my little room far behind me, but I held onto that white horn and it took me out to the green and windy sea.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALICE CUT MY HAIR with quick, determined scissors while Peter wept and plucked away at a borrowed guitar. My mum and I made moustaches of my blonde curls and swept the rest into the compost heap, like thin, white wood shavings. She hadn’t wavered from her decision to send me off to war. But I know she was living in some confusion. She and I would look at each other in surprise, waiting for the other to speak. Here she was, pretty well kicking me out, yet she seemed hurt by her own decision, and she was always mad. Once, after yelling at me for leaving a dish in the sink, she suddenly gathered me in her arms and said, “This is your chance to grow up. You will become a woman by first becoming a man.” She let go. There were tears in her eyes. Then she shrugged and said, “I can only say it worked for me.”

  We fixed up the barn with some bedding and furniture, and Roberts and Clark lived there all summer. Clark loved “our property” and the land around it. He loved the sweet scent of clover, the summer storms, the first tincture of yellow in August. He loved the Red River, he said, and spent many hours fishing from its banks.

  Eli took up quarters in Marie’s grotto. Peter planted as little as possible, but Eli proved to be such a good farmer that “our property” suddenly took on a look of prosperity. It seemed that harvest came very quickly. Eli’s latent talent for growing things flourished and his bandy legs seemed straighter and he looked happy, winking at me when he donned his old hat before going out to the fields. At night, he and Peter would resume their perpetual conversation about that unanswerable ideal called Impossibilism. I was busy pretending to learn Dutch and German under the tutelage of my distracted mother and so I ignored their apocalyptic mission statements.

  “The capitalists are digging their own graves,” Eli said to me while he passed the young corn across the table.

  “This is the first year we haven’t had to dig the worms out of the corn before we could eat it,” I told him, rolling a cob in butter. “How’d you do that?”

  And Eli responded, “Their downfall is the inevitable outcome of a system based on the exploitation of the workers.”

  “It really is a miracle,” I said to Eli. “Best corn I’ve ever tasted.”

  Eli looked at the corn as a Zen Buddhist would examine a screwdriver. “The ruling class will crumble,” he said. “It’s just a question of time.” His confidence was a youth serum, his cheeks were as rosy as little crabapples.

  “Best chicken too; best I’ve ever had,” I told him. “Best beets. Best bread. Best butter. Best company.”

  And Alice, in German, “You have no self-respect.” To Eli, in English with a Japanese accent, she said, “Man has only begun to develop his enormous talents for large-scale destruction.”

  THEY TOOK US to the train station, Roberts and Clark and me, in the wagon full of pemmican. The place was nearly deserted because everybody was harvesting. Back in ’99, hundreds of people had come down to the station to stare with doubt or envy at the A Company, off to fight the Boers. But when Pretoria fell, the British brass told everyone the war was finished, and in England people believed them just long enough for Lord Salisbury to stage a highly successful election. So we were considered an afterthought, tourists, scavengers flocking to nibble at war’s cold remains. I didn’t even get to wear one of those funny white hats. Roberts and Clark sported very compelling North West Mounted Police uniforms. But I was forced to wear mufti.

  When it was time to say goodbye, Roberts was pure ambition, clicking and shining like a thoroughbred at the gate. Eli shook his hand with a sort of rueful affection. We all treated poor Roberts this way; he was a professional soldier, that was his fate. But with Clark, it was somewhat different. Clark blinked and wagged happily; he hugged everyone, lifting Alice right off the ground in his enthusiasm. Eli uneasily embraced him for a moment, then gave him a manly tap on the jaw. When it was my turn, Eli pulled me into his big chest for a fraternal hug. We couldn’t kiss because I was dressed as a man. Mum and Dad stood watching. Dad was quite frankly a
wreck. And while my mother appeared to be determined and decisive, you could see that she was in a lot of pain. When it came time for us to say goodbye, she kissed my cheek tenderly and I told her that I loved her. She nearly broke down, but she said, “If you get too homesick, Blondie, just… come home.” It really was terrible to say goodbye. Transvestitism had become a family tradition. And so, at the end, we all felt very close.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CLARK TALKED MY EAR off all the way to Cape Town. His monologue began as soon as we had found our seats aboard the train in Winnipeg, and it carried on without stop all the way to Quebec City. Over the entire Canadian Shield, he sang his autobiography, an extended poem filled with minutiae, for Clark took astonished pleasure in variety. On his life’s path, he would remember every pebble. He seemed to have fallen in love with every place his duties had taken him, as if he would seek to attach those locales to himself, to form himself out of extraneous landscapes and the duties of a colonial soldier. I began to think that Clark did not fully fit his role in the Canadian militia serving under the British army; he seemed to be straining to subdue a sense of loss even through the aggrandizement of his many affections. Still, he was a sweet and tender man.

  Once, as we sat together—me at the window, watching the Dominion roll away, and Clark turning in his seat so he could see my face, as he always did when he talked, study your face intently—he suddenly stopped and, suffering a mild spark, flicked my earlobe with his finger. He began to laugh, a lazy giggle, and again flicked at the soft white lobe of my small and perfect ear. “Look!” he said. “It flaps a little! Ha, ha! If you flick it. Ha! It wiggles on its own!”

  Even aboard ship, while I wormed my way through three days of seasickness, Clark’s voice leashed me to the world, gabbing and gabbing on and on. By this means, he saved my life. I had known the smell of the sea in small doses from my father, just a whiff when he would walk in from impossible conversations with his radical pals. But nothing could have prepared me for the huge lungs of the breathing ocean. Nothing could have prepared me for the strangeness of our voyage, or for the sorrows that would befall us.