When Alice Lay Down With Peter (37 page)

S
HE MET UP WITH IDA
beside the train tracks in a dry field just as night was falling. The stubble smelled sweet, and the sky was a plate of blue glass with a hole for the moon. While they waited for a train, Ida cut off Helen’s hair, a nest of black snakes on the ground. Then Helen cut Ida’s hair into a short, thick pompadour that they brushed straight back. They appraised one another, circling, amazed. They had become, strangely, men. Helen rolled two cigarettes with one hand. Underfoot, they felt a train about a mile off.

“You look like a foreigner,” said Helen to Ida.

“That’s what I am, idiot.” Ida lit a match with her thumb. “I’m a Jew.”

“I’d like to be a Jew,” said Helen. She didn’t know what a Jew was. They didn’t have any on Millionaire Row.

“Well, you can’t,” said Ida. She pointed at Helen with the hand that cupped the cigarette. “You’re an anarchist.”

Helen thought she said “adulteress.” She panicked, thinking of the monk. The molten night was hammered by an approaching train. Its lantern strafed the bushes and then leapt out into the fog that rose over the river. It took every ounce of manliness to keep from running. Ida yelled something at her; there were red and yellow sparks, a light hit them, they flinched but stayed. The bullet of light coincided with Helen’s full recognition of the man she’d just met,
he was the man in her tapestry
, and the train screeched and swayed past them. Ida was panting as if she had run after it. It left a red trail. They watched it go, coal wind in their faces.

Ida began to laugh. “Oh, fuck,” she said. The curse would be their password. “We’re fucking idiots! It was going south! At a million miles an hour!” Ida laughed. “What kind of Canadian hobos would go south?”

Helen asked, almost shyly, “Why not south?”

“We have to go west!” said Ida. She put her arm around Helen’s shoulders, and they started to walk. “And when we’ve gone as far west as we can go, we have to turn around and go east. It’s the
Canadian
way.”

It was a long walk east to the railyards at Symington. They reached it at dawn. By then, they’d discussed the know-how of jumping freights. They were hungry, tired, dirty, thirsty; they hurt everywhere. By the time they jumped their first freight, they weren’t even play-acting. They were hobos.

F
OR A WHOLE YEAR, THEY LIVED
in the hobo jungles that had broken out like hives on a frayed nervous system. They lived on nothing. Helen was proving the unreality of money. It made her really skinny.

She was desperate to be homeless. It wasn’t just the railyard bulls, the private patrols, they ran from. Richard had the police out looking for her. Helen ran away from her husband while Ida searched for hers. Daniel had put a pencil in a paper bag and walked out. Ida hoped that he was riding freight somewhere. It seemed he was on every passing train, that tall man who sat apart from the others, his arms on his knees, the solitary stranger moving in the opposite direction. When newcomers joined them, she searched their faces under their soft billed caps. This was not a romantic pursuit, and Ida was not abject; rather, she was exceedingly forthright, almost bureaucratic, as if she’d been hired by a magistrate to deliver a summons to the man. Once, Helen dared to ask Ida what she expected from Daniel if she found him. Ida carefully turned this over in her mind and then said, “I just have to see him one more time, to know if he’s cruel, or if he’s…” She paused. “Or if he’s just beyond me.”

Helen was watchful too. Anything in a uniform made her heart pound, anyone well dressed or driving an expensive car made her think of Richard. He came to be associated, in
Helen’s mind, with the police. She was afraid of his blue eye with its black sickle. When he looked at her, he seemed to wipe her out. If she were to survive, she had to get away from his eyes.

In the summer heat, they rode on top of the cars. Their bodies hurt from holding on, their faces burned and chafed. Cinder got stuck under their eyelids, and they splurged on some goggles. But the cold weather nearly killed them, bedding down in a refrigerator car or in the bush by a fire, glad for the exhaustion that let them escape for a few hours. The trains were the bums’ university. By starlight, on cold nights, flame from the boiler sprayed like red paint in the frosty air, the perpetual diagnosis of the world’s sickness.

Sometimes Ida fell asleep while they talked and woke up screaming, with Helen’s hand over her mouth in case she blew their cover. Ida said she saw people stripped and shaved, she saw wax and fire. In the dust, she drew stick figures laid in heaps. She felt ashamed of her dreams, but she couldn’t stop them. The drone of the train tattooed itself on Ida’s soul; she had to find protection, some religion. She questioned everyone, Had they seen a very tall, skinny man named Daniel? The men looked at her warily. And yes, of course, Daniel had been seen in Thunder Bay, Regina, Kapuskasing, Moose Jaw; Daniel was everywhere but here. She hadn’t earned him. At last, she was infected with shame. Helen heard her muttering in German; she put her hand on Ida’s forehead. “Shhhh,” Helen said, “tell me.”

They were riding on top. No moon, no light, clusters of men rolled up, sometimes three to a blanket, and one dog. Beside them lay a man so thin they could barely see his face, his eyes and cheeks reduced to shadow. His reedy voice drifted into
their conversation as if it were something travelling in the air, like the smell of alfalfa mixed with burning garbage from the jungles they passed, and he said, or perhaps he said, “It’s the Fascists.” Ida turned to him. He was not Daniel. He looked at her through black sockets, eyeless, expressionless. Ida lay beside him with her face close to his. “Tell me about the Fascists,” she asked him.

“Gleichschaltung
.… They’re joining… they’re planning to take over Europe.”

“Gleichschaltung,”
said Ida. She stared at the sky.

“What is it?” asked Helen. She was almost frozen with fear.

“It is an invitation to the end of the world. A command performance.”

The train travelled quickly; it was night, and there were perhaps forty men with them. “But we’re not alone,” said Ida. And Helen thought, We are all alone, and this is our only hope, that we act alone. Helen had come to the trains through the leafy avenues of money, and she was frightened of what might happen if the rich joined with the rich, the poor with the poor, to fight for the government of each other. She would not be governed. She would fight like a cat against the restraints of government. She felt rage eating at her inside. It was worse than hunger.

W
HEN
I
DA GAVE UP HOPE
of finding her husband, it reduced her to ashes and finally forced her to reclaim herself as an entirely new woman. She lost her soft margin, her youthful faith in implicit goodness. She bounced back, tougher, sardonic. She and Helen laughed a lot, a slapstick sense of humour; life’s one big kick in the butt.

Ida’s speech was a hot pepper stuffed with quotations from Marx. She could be brutal and rude, but she got away with it because she was a walking satire and most people didn’t want to be called bourgeois, whatever the hell that is when it’s home. She needed a religion, something big and purposeful. So she became a Communist.

Three times during that year, they dropped off a freight car to see us for a short stay. They would casually walk into our yard, short and tall, gaunt men with purple shadows around their eyes, covered in bruises. Helen’s long, thin hands descended from a beat-up jacket three sizes too small, and her pants stopped several inches short of her boot tops, so you could see her bony legs without socks. She sat down on the front steps and took off her boots, revealing her narrow feet, their finger-like toes blackened by dust and crooked from walking. Stretching happily, she’d smile at her dad and me, white teeth, a dirty face. The smell was so rank, she’d take her
first bath outside in a tub in the yard, unabashed, desexed by starvation.

We fed them constantly. Our garden had a windbreak and was close enough to the river for irrigation, and we’d sold enough vegetables at the north-end market to keep the cow and a few chickens, so we weren’t starving, though we didn’t bother to seed wheat because prices hadn’t come up much since hitting bottom in ’32.

Richard would drop by often to see if we knew anything, had we heard. He’d look around carefully, casually. We were lucky for the first two visits; his timing was off. I was always edgy, though, and it felt ugly, hiding her from him. The more he looked for Helen, the more it became impossible for him to find her; the beam of light from his scrutiny was sending her farther and farther away. He was righteous and mad at first, though he affected more simple anxiety for her safety. I felt sorry for him and gave him coffee or a drink, and I could at least share his anxiety. He and I were talking so, one time, when he said, “She’d be better if she had a child.”

He was getting into his car when he said this. We’d had a drink of Scotch.

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know about that.”

He nodded, convinced. “It would give her something. Other than herself.”

“Well, that’s a loving attitude, Dick.”

“I’m a firm believer in family, Blondie.” I’m sure I saw hatred in his face. “I’ll never give up on her. I’m not that kind of man. Family is everything to me.”

Third visit. Afternoon. Late summer, a drizzle, rain thin as radish seeds. Helen stood at the window, a slice of bread in one hand, a piece of cheese in the other, talking to Eli. Eli sat at the kitchen table watching her. He was somewhere past seventy years now, the old weathered barn of his body more ruined and more handsome than ever. He was still a big man, even if he did keel over a little and the parts of him missing were like holes in the barn roof. His beauty took your breath away. “If they can’t speak English,” he was saying, “if they’re from all over, I can’t picture how they can talk revolution, one to the other.”

“Well, everybody talks about food mostly. Cake and soup and that. And sometimes their mothers. It’s pretty easy to follow,” she said, scratching her neck. We hadn’t yet killed off all the fleas.

“Keep eating,” I told her.

In this single thing, Helen was obedient. Chewing, she quietly added, “Gramma Alice would be happy as a pig in shit.” She cheerfully swallowed the bread.

“Watch your language,” said I, for old time’s sake.

“A pig in goddamn shit. She would, eh, Mum? I think about her a lot. All the mess, everybody talking. She’d of loved it.”

“Maybe. But she wouldn’t want to be patron saint of a starvation train.”

The fast approach of Richard’s car, even the tires seemed high pitched and panicky. The three of us stiffened. Helen watched her husband slide out. He was very well dressed. She made a move as if to bolt, then stood frozen. Richard walked briskly towards the house. He saw her through the window. He stopped for a second and then kept coming at his quick pace. I
let him in. He stood expectantly. “Well,” he began, even now managing that half-smile. “You’ve cut your hair.”

“I’m not going back with you,” said Helen.

“You’re very thin.”

“I’ll put it back on. See?” She indicated the cheese in her hand. She put it down on the table.

Richard looked nervously at Eli and me. I didn’t want Richard nervous.

Helen said, “Go away, Richard.”

Eli said, “Hush now, Helen. There’s more to say than that. Have a seat, Richard.”

He didn’t take the chair, but entered farther into the room. Leaned against the kitchen cupboard and crossed his arms.

“There is nothing to say,” said Helen.

“Calm down,” said Richard. “You’ve got to calm down.”

“No. I don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything.”

“No one is making you do anything, Helen. I’ve always let you do whatever you like.”

“You
let
me? Listen to me, Richard. I will do as I need to do.”

“But now it’s time you came home. It’s not respectable. It’s not right. You could get sick, if you’re not sick already. You had an adventure. Now it’s time to—what?—just grow up.”

Helen looked so sad at that moment that Richard was encouraged. He went to her, took her hands between his. “I’m being loyal to you. Not many men would do that.” He touched her face. “Where is
your
loyalty?”

It wasn’t a question. It struck Helen. She avoided his eyes, but she said, “You would never understand. Please, leave me alone.”

“I never thought you’d go that way,” he said. “You’re going nowhere. She’s a little unbalanced these days, right, Blondie?” He looked at me for confirmation, which I declined to give him. I had so often had the same thought myself, but, damn it, in a different sense than Richard’s. In many ways, Eli and I were proud of our daughter just then, scared but proud; it takes courage to lose your balance, to learn to fall. Richard continued, his confidence rising. “Get rested, come home. We’ll make a few changes, if you’re so unhappy.”

“Just…” She broke away from him, backed away. “Just give me a few days. Then, maybe.”

He shook his head. “You always expect too much.” He sighed. “A few days. Blondie will look after you, will you?” He appealed to me. I gave my best poker face. He needed to leave on a high note. He did his best to walk out casually, the winner.

When he’d gone, we were quiet for some time. Eli looked upset, the way he used to, in the days when he couldn’t look at Helen.

“Are you really going back to him?” I dared to ask.

She scratched, the tension easing out of her. “I’d rather be stuffed.”

“He’s not going to give up.”

“Well,” she said, “what can he do?”

We three thought about it, and though we couldn’t come up with anything, Richard stuck with us like a bad debt.

“F
ELLA,” SAID THE
P
RESBYTERIAN MINISTER
to Ida while he scratched his hide (the fields they passed looked unseeded, straw-littered), “you’re talkin’ Moscow Excretio.”

Ida squinted. “I hate money,” she said. “That’s not so hard to understand.”