When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  I think I was crying as I made my way home. It would help to explain why I became such a vivid electrical conductor.

  The sun burned with heat as sharp as the cry of the tern tipping its wings in the alluvial field beside me. I counted my steps and counted the dead butterflies, and then began to count the days since I’d last been a woman. I shucked off my knapsack and took off all my clothes. The breeze and sun felt very good. Just then, the cloud spoke out deeply, thunderous. I grew aware of being naked in a cyclone; I heard the great wings, felt a strange, beating heat.

  I left my stuff on the road. My skin wrapped in tears and yellow light, I walked home empty-handed and bare-assed on a nimbus of dust, into grape-coloured air, above me a purple lid closing on the daisy eye of sun. It smelled of rain. I wondered if Eli would be there. I would deliver my stone. The road formed a T, at the junction of which was a gate to the overgrown lane to our house. The ash leaves sounded like water. They stood lopsided in a row. Under them, creamy blossoms of saskatoons and tiny buds of rose. I stood naked at the junction, and the thunderhead with its cold lip pressed above the gate.

  From the field to my left came the sound of a mouth organ, a corny, folksy tune somewhere in the grass between the ash trees. I went towards the music; each step seemed to send it farther away. I followed like a minnow mouthing the cribbing of a dock, followed where the road ran in sunshine at the iron blue edge of the storm. From a hundred feet away, I knew it was him. The song he played was as sad as a song can be, his elegy for pure intentions.

  I drew close. The tune faltered when he drew a breath, as he made a commitment to the next phrase. Sometimes thunder overran him and he played bravely under. It got louder and he played on, bold as a kid stealing from a garden, hesitant, then running hard.

  When at last I saw him, he was facing north, seated with his back against a tree. He wore the same battered hat. His hair was long and tied behind. A patient, tranquil man. I walked quietly around to stand before him. Just then, the wind blew the first brush of rain, lifting my short hair from the nape of my neck. Light rain burned and then cooled my naked skin, emitting a sibilant glow. I saw the pleasure in his face when he looked up, startled and glad. He smiled with the harmonica at his lips. Thunder was bowling along behind the flattened sky. “Hey, Zeus,” I said. He came towards me.

  The storm crashed through, falling in on us like a forest burning, a mine caving in, and there was the strong scent of sea. The rain fell in torrents, Poseidon’s backhand slap, ripping the clothes from Eli’s back and laying us in the mud. Everything was black with stark strobes of light. We hid our faces from the rain, made ourselves small as one, his muscular back, his cool face. I found I could talk while I kissed, and I poured everything into him and he into me. The lightning struck the ground beside us as I kissed Eli’s chest, but the pleasure had pulled Eli’s head back just then and he caught it, like a shotgun in his ear; it shattered his eardrum and ran through his loving throat and through him as seed to the calyx of iris and stippled us, a permanent engraving upon the land where we would grow our gardens, and the intolerable delight placed me beside myself and I was looking at the mud, where a tiny blossom of blue-eyed grass stood up in the rain. And then, truly blessed by Bacchus, we both passed out cold.

  AND SO IT GAME TO BE: Eli and I were married the following day.

  Everyone was there, Alice and Peter and all our friends. The mirror-tongued midwife spoke at length, and we all wept to hear her wisdom and goodwill and we vowed to follow her advice through all our years together. Peter’s Impossibilists made an appearance, obviously reluctant, but when they were witness to the ardent joy coming from our feverish lips, how we entwined our blackened fingers, and when they saw how our teeth laughed in our storm-burnt faces and our bare, blistered feet danced on the cool grass (for it turned sunny the following day, which was a Saturday; there was a soothing breeze and it was not too hot), when they saw that we loved each other more than we loved weddings, they focused on our nuptials with intelligence as clear as telescopes, recognizing in Eli and me the happiness, the beautiful coincidence, of lucky love. We ate honey cake and goat’s cheese; we drank water imported all the way from Shoal Lake in the east and Alice’s dandelion wine. We danced all day and all night, and the Impossibilists stood on chairs tipsy on the grass and made grandiloquent speeches, and everyone felt the day was soon a-coming when we would be glad like this forever. And so we rejoiced into the rosy dawn.

  And Eli and I knew, as Alice and Peter had known before us.

  It was the seed of the jack pine. The catalyst, a stroke of lightning.

  And we knew the child fired this way would be a daughter.

  And our daughter would be called Helen.

  And Helen would be the most beautiful woman the world had ever known.

  PART FOUR

  1902

  CHAPTER ONE

  WE MADE OUR HOME in Marie’s grotto, slipping into its shady rooms as into the third hour of sleep. I belonged there, among sheaves of dreams. Yet I was a visitor.

  Marie’s grotto was a place of happy melancholy. It smelled of parsley and hide. The spruce lumber for the walls had been well oiled when it was first cut, and the old pine floor was waxed with beeswax, the window frames and cupboards with a mixture of pine resin and sunflower oil. The midwife had made curtains, quilts, rag rugs in Galatian dyes—cherry red, blueberry and a hectic pink of unknown origin—and these lay across the muskrat skins, the pelts that had survived the years. Its light was the colour of steeped tea, and everyone in its vicinity looked young and sunny and well. Even my dead mother-in-law, Marie.

  I grew, orb-like, and like Alice before me, I refused to wear clothes. As the time of Helen’s birth approached, there ran a dark brown line down the centre of my belly and my pelvis opened and my bare feet splayed. I was splitting in two. Winter had delayed nearly till Christmas, the warm weather permitting me naked freedom until December, when it got cold enough to skate over at the Rivière Sale, the Red being too wide and treacherous. The air was just cold enough to freeze the shallow water, ice so smooth you’d swear it moved.

  We’d skated for a week, our wet chins chafed by woollen scarves.

  On the day it finally snowed, the baby began to tumble and dance. My mother came with the midwife, and they sat on my bed and placed their hands on me and all the while they spoke to each other in God knows what language, nodding and cracking jokes as if I weren’t there. I laughed when they laughed.

  I was an onion. Within me, skin upon skin peeled back of its own accord. A most pleasant divestment. My outer skin stretched like deerskin on a drum.

  She came in a late-winter snowstorm. It was a lovely storm, and we were celebrating quietly with warm milk sweetened with rum and a fire in the stove. Very cold. Eli and I were dancing, his woollen jersey rubbing cleanly on my skin, for I was such an oven I wore nothing but a pair of moccasins and the old red Assomption sash I’d stolen from Alice’s memory chest, faded and beautiful, wrapped around my belly. When the waltz came to a close, we kissed one another formally, twice. And then Eli put on his buffalo coat and went to find a horse that had escaped from the pen that morning. “He’s probably standing at the gate, waiting to be let in,” he said as he shouldered the coat. “That horse is a dog.” He filled his pipe and went out.

  When he closed the door, he was utterly gone. I could hear nothing outside except the cold crack of air and the gracious music of falling snow. Suddenly, somebody threw a bucket of water on the floor. I yelled, and slipped on a puddle under me. My legs trembled and my feet planted themselves wide apart. I tucked my hands beneath my belly, and my face grew as long as the face of an elephant and then my arms grew till they dragged to the ground and I trailed my claws on Marie’s wooden floor and the carvings from my claws would remain for many years to come. I crawled under the big table littered with books and winter cuttings of plants. I think I was singing a song of turtles, and then with my reptilian hands on either side of my shell, the crashi
ng of books and plant-cuttings. When the turtle lifted on her claw legs, she banged into the kitchen cupboard and her shell knocked down the spoons and dishes Alice had bestowed upon our marital home, and in the broken china the turtle cut her ancient paws and the blood came from a breach in her self and I raised myself by putting my hands upon my thighs and with all the strength of time itself I tore myself in two.

  Eli returned just in time to receive the waxy infant. He cradled her. We found the blankets fallen off our bed and laid Helen down and pinched the cord and a gust of pain brought out the afterbirth. Eli lifted her lovingly and put the tip of his finger in her mouth, and we heard the sea-born creature breathe. We knew her. We said hello in the shelf of peace. He tied the navel himself, for he’d learned to sew by stitching saddles. We cleaned her with snow heated on the stove and wrapped her. Helen’s face was the colour of anemone, and her features, the soft bones, translucent. Even in her first minutes, her beauty was… strange. Overwhelming. I didn’t sleep for many nights afterwards, not because she fussed, but because I could not take my eyes off her, as if I were waiting for her beauty to subside.

  ABOVE THE BLACK SPRUCE it was sunny and gay. At the end of April, the snow at last turned to cornmeal in green grass at the base of the trees. I awoke to the sound of snow tobogganing from the roof and opened my eyes directly into the solemn gaze of my child. Blue-black eyes and, at nearly two months of age, precise black eyebrows and thick black curls. No resemblance to her mother. She’d been watching me sleep with a look of unmistakable pity.

  The heat woke up the flies, buzzing against the glass for a final hour before dying on the windowsill. Helen fumbled with dead flies and licked them into her mouth. I was unfamiliar with children and didn’t realize how remarkable was her coordination.

  The door opened and Eli walked in, behind him the shadow of my mother-in-law. Her voice, that atonal bone sound, a falling note not unlovely to the ear but changeful, a tone of constant fall. “The baby should not eat bugs,” she chimed, “especially when the bugs are freshly dead.”

  I sighed. Eli shrugged hopefully. There was the bright chirrup of melting snow on the wood porch. Helen twisted herself out of my arms like a fish out of a net, and Eli snatched her up just as she was about to fall off the bed. “There now,” he said, and turned towards the corner of the room, where Marie occupied a kitchen chair. She was more a collection of dark green light, a gathering into shape. She smiled peacefully and then she said, “It’s time you two were properly married.”

  Now, at the sound of her voice, Helen lay her head on her father’s neck and fell asleep.

  “But first, would you like tea?” Marie rose and went to the window. The daylight showed her to be quite real, though it seemed to be evening where she was, or raining, or June. Beneath the window was a drawer that I had never been able to open. Marie pulled it easily and withdrew a packet of dried roots and herbs. She set the kettle on the stove and it quickly began to steam, and she offered us tea that smelled of licorice.

  We sipped, smiling politely. It was sort of her house. I wondered if I’d get a chance to talk this over with Eli, if we could maybe set down a few rules in the future. Marie, more corporeal than usual, put her cup down and looked at each of us, candid and fond. She smiled at Helen. “Poor little one,” she said, “to be the cause of so much suffering.”

  “But,” I protested, “she is a joy!”

  Marie nodded, as if there was no contradiction. “Powerful wishes are always innocent.” She passed her dusky hand over Helen’s face, and Helen dreamed she was falling, flung her arms out. Marie said, “She will need more than forgiveness and mercy. But they will give her only pearls.” For a moment, this phantom grandmother looked infinitely grieved, then she brightened, and business-like, she asked us, “Would you like me to hear your vows now?”

  Eli seemed to understand. He put the sleeping baby into her cradle and stood, waving me to attention. I joined him at his side. And we became husband and wife. Again. In Marie’s jurisdiction.

  In a backstage whisper, Marie said, “Remove your gloves!” I realized that Eli and I were wearing ornate riding gloves with beadwork and long leather fringes. We took them off, embarrassed.

  “And now,” she said, “repeat after me. I take off my glove…”

  The promise we would make to each other would be a beautiful misunderstanding, a necessary promise impossible to keep. It was the treaty between Mawedopenais, the leader of the Ojibwas, and the Great Mother, our dead queen, spoken more than thirty years ago, when I was a baby and Marie was the adoptive mother of a little boy precariously named Eli. We gave each other everything, and in exchange we were promised security and peace everlasting. In one hand, we held the right of trespass, and in the other, the privileges of privacy. We promised boundaries; we permitted access. One of us believed we’d won the right to unlimited enjoyment of life’s necessities and pleasures. The other understood that we’d placed limits upon ourselves (always in a free and non-compulsory arrangement), that we would thenceforth own a certain share of the land, the water, the air and all the gifts of the Great Spirit therein. We were both committed to this covenant, and spoke from the bottom of our hearts.

  I take off my glove and give you my hand, and with it my birthright and my land—

  And in taking your hand I hold fast all the promises you have made…

  All the promises you have made…

  As long as the sun rises and the water flows…

  As long as the sun rises

  And the water flows.

  When we’d made our faulty promises, we kissed and thanked Marie, who nodded agreeably and offered us cold duck with choke cherry jam.

  And when the time came for us to go, we bowed and saw each other to the door and waved goodbye, Eli and I, hopeful, waving goodbye to Marie, and Marie, with confidence, seeing us out, into our own futures, like tadpoles swimming into the fishy light of our flawless memories.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1906: HELEN’S EDUCATION

  AS SOON AS SHE WAS ABLE to walk with some assurance, Helen used her new skill to walk away from me. When I remember her now, it is always the back of her head I’m seeing, her determined shoulders as she toddles out of the yard on some business of her own. She always treated me with dutiful affection. In fact, despite a certain distaste for the corruption of middle-aged flesh, she loved me, in her evasive fashion. I was non-essential. Everyone was. Though she was fond of us, especially when we were near by.

  Helen’s beauty was an attribute of such magnitude it became an independent creature, a sort of symbiotic organism that attached itself to my daughter. In photographs, she seemed upstaged by her own beauty, which was like a competitive friend sticking her head in front of the camera, obscuring the presence of a shy child who satisfied herself with the vicarious pleasures of living life through another. Helen’s beauty robbed Helen of herself.

  Her grandmother Alice was no fool. She saw that Helen was in danger. Alice would watch my little girl walking through the cow parsnip with the sun flashing from her raven hair. She called to her, but Helen never came when we called; we would have to fetch her. Helen was listening to her own ticking heart, dazed by the fracture between herself and the resplendent girl the world saw. My mother was a nineteenth-century woman, and she perceived the problem as one of simple vanity. And being an idealist, she thought to correct what seemed like vapid girlishness with a good strong dose of her favourite medicine, that being formal education.

  So Alice took Helen to school.

  My mother would come for Helen every morning at five o’clock. I would gather Helen up in my arms and walk down the path separating our houses. She would clutch me with cool little hands about my neck while we bounded down the path through the dusky leaves. Her living grandmother greeted us at the clearing, a white figure half lit by a lantern held high, and with an easy shift of her weight, Helen was gone. From one life raft to the next. Always with that same detached gaze. I stopped them and de
manded my kiss, and Helen would lean out from the ledge of Grandmother Alice’s arms and obediently put her lips anywhere in the vicinity of my face. Then with a trace of a smile, she was gone.

  During the long buggy ride, she stared up at the fading stars, listening to Grandmother Alice sing, and when they were drawn into the streets of Winnipeg and the horses drummed on cobblestones and her grandmother fell silent, Helen sat up very straight to stare at people. The city had grown big by then, and there were many people walking and many carts with milk and newspapers and pigs and bread, and at least in the richer south part of the city, there were electric streetcars.

  One morning on their way to the school, they saw a horse and wagon collide with a streetcar. The wagon tipped over, dragging the horse down with it. The horse struggled to its feet, twisting the traces till one snapped off and splintered into its neck. It was trapped, speared, gaffed half-backwards, its front legs buckled, then it stood and pulled the wagon on its side over the street, the wood frame breaking up into pieces. Alice tried to cover Helen’s eyes, but Helen pulled away. She was keen, alert, interested.

  By the time they arrived at the Mission school, there were a dozen children waiting at the door with that forthright insistence of hunger. Those were the ones without food at home. Some members of the church distrusted Alice’s method of supplying food and clothing to bribe the children to come to school. Salvation is sufficient unto itself, they argued; such economic meddling will defile the true spirit of the church. My mother agreed and removed the school to its shoddy digs near the CPR station and the Dominion Immigration Hall (which was always overflowing with those “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” so desirable to the Minister of the Interior—as long as the shabby Europeans left town quickly to farm, and as long as they did not get the vote).