When Alice Lay Down With Peter (19 page)

I sat with him all night. The lights burned brightly in the morgue. I didn’t know it was morning when they came to take away the dead for burial. They put his body on a stretcher. I tried to straighten him, but there wasn’t much I could do. I followed them to the graves.

Roberts was there. The sun was hidden by cloud. Roberts was again stiff and formal, but that did not disguise his sorrow. He gripped my arm briefly. We stood beside one another and waited for the bodies to be safely bedded. Then everyone went away. But I told Roberts I’d stay awhile, and then be along. Even in grief, Roberts had an invincible shine to him, as if he carried about him his own special atmosphere. He nodded and left me there in the graveyard.

It was peaceful among the dead, their freshly rested bodies put out of sight, and so recent you could feel they were still dreaming, not quite gone. The cloud drifted off, and in the sunlight the colours were bright, brilliant, the grassy air prickly and green. I began to feel myself, the faint papery sound of my hands when I touched them together, the fine pores of my skin. In the grass beside me was one small blue flower that had somehow escaped being trampled. It was the bluest thing I’d ever seen.

And then I left him there. I took the train back to Cape Town and the ship to Halifax, and then a train back West. I left Clark in the dark garden of the dead in South Africa. I left my friend there, and went home.

T
HE TRAIN SLOWED DOWN
long enough to let me leap off into dried mud stubbled with tufts of grass. The afternoon smelled of honeysuckle, lilac and thunder. They’d been flooded that spring. Driftwood lay on the east side of the road. Towards the Red River (which was still quite high, though it was the end of May, and a white scar ran along its banks, caused by the water’s sudden retreat), the land was littered with broken wheels and broken dolls, bicycles, all kinds of private belongings that had been swept away. The flood had plucked an elm tree and laid it in the middle of the field, shining, a gigantic chewing bone.

There was enough water in the ditch to grow green stalks of cattails and common rye grass, cutgrass and a fine onion-like blade that looked something like wild rice, with a small burst of seed at its head, sunlight moving over it all, so the green fused and the blue sky shone between. The thunderhead lay off to the east, behind our homestead. A hot sky, edged cleanly by the plum-coloured cloud with twigs of lightning. I shouldered my pack and started to walk down the road towards our house, towards the stand of ash trees and the storm. I carried the message of Clark’s death like a stone under my tongue.

It wasn’t any fun being a man, especially with my face wet, as if I’d lost a layer of skin. When women cry it’s patriotic, a vote for home. But I was a man in uniform. People were cool. The
Boer War was maybe the last rich man’s war. A cavalry war. It belonged to men who cut the pages of their books with silver letter openers, knew how to handle a brolly and a shoehorn, a golf club, a tennis racquet, a tiller and the reins—some of which were useful in South Africa. Strangers were unsympathetic; perhaps they figured I had been cauterized by wealth, crying over my gin.

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.

A
ND 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

W
E 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 crashing 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.