When Alice Lay Down With Peter (32 page)

I rushed out and couldn’t find any lights and crashed about till I found it: the electric moon we’d used in
Antigone
. I could barely lift it. I stumbled back to the green room and tried to lay it gently on the floor. “Plug it in,” said Alice. I leaned the moon against one wall and plugged it in. It was a full moon. The glass was ribbed in the art deco style, kind of jagged. It looked like an electric moon. “Hold it up,” said my mother. I was about to protest. But I looked at her. Peter seemed to be sleeping, his head resting on the back of the couch. Alice was lying on her side now. She pulled her knees up and lay curled like that, and I saw how small she’d become, small as a thimble. I lifted the electric moon high over my head. It cast a warm urban glow over us, unnatural and strangely humane. Alice murmured something. She stretched one hand down to Peter, but she couldn’t reach him. My father was still, his lovely white hair in the light, his face bone china. They were not touching when they died. Their bodies lay abandoned. I held up the moon as long as I could, until my arms went numb and my back burned and the edge of glass had cut my hands.

Dear Lord, may my joy not leave me.—
J. S. Bach, in his diary

N
EWS OF THE
R
USSIAN
R
EVOLUTION
reached “our property” like the first smoke of a prairie fire. Eli was inhaling Russia. When I woke him, he’d turn on his side and try to comfort me with stories of a Bolshevik revolution. Everyone will have enough to eat, he told me, and no one will be a slave to the factory or the machine. Men and women will be equal, Blondie, and children will be raised into freedom. People can become whatever they want: a fisherman, a farmer, a poet. I could hunt buffalo and write songs. And you could be a… be a… what would you want to be, Blondie? Eli whispered to me, lying on his side with our heads on the pillow, looking at each other. You could be what you like, he whispered. And that made it worse, because I was all willpower with no idea how to use it, other than for destruction.

Winter, blue as an egg, brought duty and exhaustion. Out of bed in the dark to prepare food, my skeleton was scrap metal, hunger and work clicking metal on metal. In sorrow I became a worm wintering in the red bark of the spruce. Click of beak in the bark of a tree; time a flicker’s beak digging me out, an insect meal. Grief is dry. Thirst in every pore; even the molecules that make me, dry as pellets. My brain was crushed glass. My rash returned and my skin peeled off in painful scabs under the awful beak of daily duty.

I was untouchable, given my rash and the dry electrical field around me. Eli housed his grief for Peter and Alice as his adoptive mother had taught him. He didn’t really believe in death. He lost a bit of weight, and gave up butter and coffee. His eyes were less green, more like ripe grain, but otherwise he looked purified and grateful for his life. He pulled back the curtains to let the white winter sun show a bit of coloured glass on the sill. Part of Eli always lived outside, the part of him that would almost outlive him. Calm, breathing deeply while his lungs got used to a world without the breath of Peter and Alice in it.

Sometimes in bed at night, when the air became too dry to breathe, I touched Eli and sparks lit the room with fast white light. Eli made a sound like a crow, or if my voltage was low, a cat.

Eli buried Alice and Peter beneath the strange black spruce trees, near the spot where we’d buried the crane long ago. The marshy profile of the trees, their despondent branches. The earth was frozen, but he said the frost wasn’t deep; he said it got soft just a foot under. It was too cold. Their bodies rattled in their icy graves like dried beans in a bone whistle.

I outlived my parents after all. And when the grass began to grow on their graves, I hobbled down to plant lily of the valley where their bodies lay. It was too dark in the woods for many flowers. But when other things won’t grow, lilies will.

It was our avowed purpose to have the working class intelligent, so that when the natural or revolutionary change came in society they could intelligently take control
.

—Robert Russell, at his trial for seditious conspiracy, in Winnipeg, 1919

R
ETURNED SOLDIERS ROAMED
the streets of Winnipeg like injured birds dragging a wing, permanently dislocated. There wasn’t any work. Much of the North End of Winnipeg was a slum. It made them mad. And very patriotic.

A great time for rhetoric. Robert, or Bobby, Russell and his friend Dick Johns had gone off to Calgary in the late winter of 1919 to the Western Labour Conference, where they endorsed “the principle of Proletarian Dictatorship,” which would lead to “the transformation of capitalist private property to communal wealth.” My dad must have shuddered in his grave at the word “dictatorship.”

The rich were scared in the spring of 1919. The revolution in Russia made it seem that the future was up for grabs. Winnipeg’s local elite ignored the fact that the labour leaders were British-born, and they fostered the loving concept of the “enemy alien”—presumably anyone fewer than two generations removed from Europe. The federal government, as in 1870 and
1885, moved in with the army to extinguish the “revolt.” And the lumbago-stricken prime minister, Robert Borden, banned publication in eighteen languages. No more Russian, no Ukrainian, no Yiddish, just English, English, English, only one kind of English bird to sing at the grave of Peter and Alice. Thereafter, our citizens would be saved from differing opinions. Borden had no lines on his face. He would preserve us from the wrinkles of dissent.

Winnipeg moved towards a general strike. The construction trades and the metal workers had been on strike for nearly two weeks when Helen got invited to a luncheon at the home of Mr. Richard Anderson. Another thing the war did: it gave Richard his last name. Mr. Anderson it was, no more Richard. When Helen said it now,
Richard
, I turned away, so intimate was the sound of his Christian name on her lips. I refused to call him Richard. I called him Dick.

“Say hi to Dick,” I told Helen as she climbed out of the back seat of my Ford. She wore blue flimsy stuff that fell around her hips, and she smelled, flagrantly, of lilac. Hot day in May. “Hey!” I called out to her as she veered past Dick’s baby blue Packard and up his stone stairway, swanky, on her slender leather shoes. “You match his car!” She daggered me, high upon her mountain of beauty.

It was my birthday. If I’d felt any older, I’d have been immortal. My daughter and I were electric eels. We did not speak, we zapped. I left the speaking up to Eli. She blew him a kiss. The flapper had not yet been invented. Helen was inventing her. “Bye, Daddy!” she called. Breathy voice. Eli was driving. He looked at her sadly. Shook his head and said goodbye. Helen, with that slight hesitation, taking on the limestone steps. Eli listened
for the sound of the outer door being opened before driving away, not too fast. I turned in my seat and watched Richard answer the door. He reached out his hand and pulled our daughter into his house.

We went downtown. Eli and I had a cup of tea with Bobby Russell, at his office in the Labor Temple. I love the name Bobby. I love being In, especially with the Out crowd. And I’ll always be soft for a Scot. Bobby Russell was the most decent man, moderate in his appetites (no sugar) and self-disciplined. But Eli was so distracted by his unease over leaving Helen at Richard Anderson’s lair that Bobby finally put his hands together over his cup, stuck out his chubby lower lip, blinked curiously and with such shy sympathy that Eli finally smiled, shook his head and said, “It’s a friend of our daughter Helen’s got me in a knot. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned dad.”

Bobby Russell clicked his tongue. “The lass has a beau?”

“Richard?” Eli sat back. “Good Lord, I guess that’s what he is. What’s to become of her? Richard Anderson, her beau.”

Bobby’s jaw dropped. “Richard Anderson?”

“You know him?”

Bobby forgot his own interdiction, added sugar, busily stirring. I poked his arm. “You’d better tell us what you know, Bobby. We won’t shoot the messenger.”

He glanced up sheepishly. “Well, I’ll not be interfering with a family’s business. And I don’t imply any judgment upon your young girl.”

Eli moaned.

Bobby hurried, “Nothing so much illegal, not at all. The rules of capitalism put him square with the law. He’s a determined
young fellow. An aggressive pup. We’ve been in negotiations since the construction trades went out, beginning of the month. That’s his territory. He’s put off. Seems he’s been buying a lot of land for development and finds himself out of pocket and unable to get on with putting up houses.” And here, Bobby’s political blood pressure rose, and he smiled. “Square with the law, he is. And all that about to change. He’ll be out. His kind. It’s just a matter of time. And a revolution.”

We three laughed, Bobby in earnest.

A few days later, the whole city was shut down by the general strike. About thirty thousand people (nearly the same number as the Allied soldiers killed at Ypres) refused to work. Winnipeg was always split in two. North End meant poor; South End meant rich. Poor often meant European immigrants, those scary “Huns” and “Bolsheviks.” And rich meant Anglo-Saxon Protestant. At about that time, the birthmark beneath my left breast, the blister kiss of Thomas Scott, began to burn and itch and keep me awake at night. Richard Anderson, who was now openly courting our daughter, was working with his business associates to create a citizen’s committee—funny who becomes a “citizen” when the underpinnings of power are under attack. So the general strike, which might have provoked a celebration in our home, spawned strife instead, and so much tension between us that I saw in Eli’s soul, in that private space that belonged only to him, a vehemence too powerful to fit inside a cowboy ballad.

The Citizen’s Committee was a crew of grain men, hardware merchants, real-estate brokers scared by the Russian
Revolution. They saw Bolsheviks in the foreign shadows of the North End. Despite their paranoia, or because of it, they considered themselves inviolably reasonable. They wanted the strike leaders deported; simple solutions carry the most weight, a signal of good management. They met at the Manitoba Club (Richard, at last, had been accepted), where they reassured one another with the beauty of their dinner jackets. The white collars on men are political forces never to be underestimated. Richard was in his element. Everybody was his father, and if his rhetoric was at times somewhat inflated, damn it, somebody’s got to say it loud and clear! No to the enemy alien! God save the king!

They said Richard was a bit of a war hero, and they put him in charge of a unit of Specials—a private police force, like the good old Montreal Cavalry in the 1837 Rebellion; young men whose hatred was masked by good clothes, who had learned how to ride on fox hunts at the club. The regular police officers had been fired because they were sympathetic to the strike. It was all left up to the Mounties and the Specials.

The federal government ordered the arrest of twelve men—eight British-born strike leaders (Bobby Russell among them) and (for a dash of that exotic flavour of “Hun”) four European Canadians. Four days later, the strike sympathizers organized a peaceful protest against the arrests.

It was June 21, 1919. Richard was on somebody else’s horse, a bitchy mare with a stiff-legged sideways gait. He lifted in his saddle and handled the mare with his left hand, neck-reined, raising himself with his knees and his strong thighs. He leaned forward and pointed his pistol at three men standing in
the doorway of a hotel near city hall: a farmer from Boissevain visiting his sick sister, my mother’s old friend Mr. Kolchella, and Eli. They’d retired to the stairwell to avoid the Specials and their wooden clubs. Mr. Kolchella’s eloquent face showed the strain of the past six weeks, for he’d been working hard for the Strike Committee, having made a name for himself with his fearless oratory on the subject of the imminent demise of capitalism. Richard, riding, focused on the lapel of Mr. Kolchella’s worn jacket, to which Mr. Kolchella had pinned a Russian flag. Richard’s horse bobbed across the streams of military, its stiff prance perfectly controlled by Richard’s knees. He took aim. And fired.

Eli happened to look up. He saw Richard’s gun. He pushed both men down to the sidewalk, but Mr. Kolchella instinctively fought back; Eli lunged over him, all of this seeming to take many minutes, and the bullet travelled slowly through the air. It struck the wattle of Eli’s earlobe, the left ear, the deaf ear, went right through it and ricocheted off the building and back out to the crowd without doing further damage.

Eli fell in a dead heap.

He woke up in a pool of his own blood. His earlobe lay beside him. The chewy cartilage looked like a finger.

A nerve in his left cheek was paralyzed, but it would only make him more handsome because that side of his face suffered a sort of amnesia, became young and smooth, and hair never grew there again, so he had, like a mountainous continent with a single cultivated province, a new republic on that portion of his bushy head.