When Alice Lay Down With Peter (38 page)

Helen, Ida, the minister named Ebenezer and a Spanish-looking kid, chronically impressed and speechless, sitting side by each atop a freight car.

“Ebenezer,” said Helen, “can I ask you something personal?”

Ebenezer wriggled his bum like a warm scone in butter. He was among
the salt of the earth!

“I’ve been sitting here listening to the way you talk,” Helen said, “and I can’t get a handle on who you are. I mean, you look like a Scot. You talk like a railway bull. But you act like, I don’t know, you remind me of my grandmother Alice.”

Ebenezer tipped his head, his eyes filled with tears. “Thank you, son,” he said. He smiled, his teeth like pale church pews. “Is that where you got your wealth? Was it old money?”

Ida, who had had to pee for the past hour, blurted out, “Hell, no! It was her husband’s—Oh…”

“My grandmother’s husband’s money, that’s right. How’d you know?”

Ebenezer was satisfied. “You look like someone who could go home for dinner. Just say it’s the cut of your jib. You’re a strange piece of work. Why you’d throw away comfort to live a hard life is beyond my ken.”

The rail line at that point ran close to the highway. Helen saw the yellow Packard, a sedate, purposeful car; she saw Richard’s golden hair, his single-minded pursuit. The road was about a hundred yards away, but he sensed her, looked over at the train, looked right at her.

Ida said, “Are we going to slow down soon?” She crossed her legs, too
girl;
she really had to pee.

“Just go over the side,” said the Spanish boy seated beside her. “Downwind,” he said. His grin involved his whole neck and chest, a lopsided, quirky tension.

“Might. If I have to.” Ida rolled a smoke, offered it to Helen. Helen was staring at her blue-eyed husband driving. Then the highway wound away behind some trees.

“I’ll have one of those,” said the boy. Accepted a light, said, “The name’s Finito.” Inhaled. That grin, white teeth, clear skin, black hair. “Know why?”

Ebenezer said, “You’re of Spanish descent.”

Finito burst into a laugh, slapped his knee, the overly demonstrative civility of very lonely people. “Everybody says that!”

Ida uncrossed, crossed, wondered if she’d hurt herself so she could never have any kids. Wondered if she’d ever
want
kids. Wondered if she’d be able to be a wife if she found Daniel now. Marriage is a feudal corruption. Finito smoked so fast he went pale. He’d left home in Portage la Prairie just a few days ago, was
already so lonesome he didn’t know if he could take it. “Yep,” he said, “everybody thinks I’m Spanish.”

Helen searched the bush for signs of highway, the yellow car. Ebenezer, again compelled by the refinement of Helen’s face under the dirt, asked her, “You a Communist too?”

“Ukrainian!” cried Finito. “You never knew!”

“No,” said Ida. “Never would’ve guessed.”

“That’s why they call me Finito,” said Finito. “Someday I’m going to go there.”

“I’m an anarchist,” said Helen. It was the first time she’d ever said it. Was it the right name for the leopard that lived inside her?

“The Ukraine,” said Ida. She found that when she talked, it relieved some of the pressure on her bladder.

“Spain!”

“Going to be a war there,” said Ida.

“Good!” Then Finito aged a decade, the bitterness crabbing his handsome features. “At least I’d have a job.”

“An anarchist,” said Ebenezer. “Now that’s a rare bird.”

They were on their way to Regina to meet up with a huge bumming parade, about fourteen hundred men riding the rails to Ottawa to protest the conditions in the relief camps. The On to Ottawa Trek. Bums on strike. The rail line was suddenly littered with RCMP. They were coming into Regina when Helen spotted the yellow Packard. It was parked at the Exhibition Grounds. Ida was unbuttoning her fly even as she hit the ground running.

Helen and Ida had just dropped into a trap.

Regina was a central depot for the RCMP. The railyards were situated so they could be closed off. So Regina is where this strike, this On to Ottawa Trek was going to end.

The trek had been stalled in Regina for more than two weeks. Ida emerged from the bushes. They made their way to the town’s Market Square. There was going be a big bum-rally with a lot of galvanic speeches about the right to decent work and pay. The police were on their way to Market Square too. The RCMP had just decided they had enough evidence to arrest seven of the trek’s leaders, on what charges I don’t know, but remembering what had happened to Bobby Russell in 1919, I assume they simply called these men subversives and that was that.

The RCMP charged out in the midst of the speeches, and everybody started running. Then the local police joined this mess, armed with baseball bats. Ida was one of the first to pick up a rock and chuck it at a cop.

Helen dragged Ida away. “Let go of my fucking arm.” Hate poured out of Ida like electric light. She was less than five feet tall. Starving that year as a hobo had made Ida stocky, made her muscled and heavy of bone. She moved like Jack Dempsey. She pivoted out of Helen’s grip and leapt in the air, coming down with a man’s throat in her hands; she hung on, and you could see the holes in her boot soles when she kicked at the air while the guy spun circles in the dirt, trying to fling her off. Helen caught her wrist as she wound up to hit him with a brick. Ida let go, so the brick fell on his face. Helen held Ida under her arms, pulled her on top of herself, and Ida struggled against her till she could turn around. “You fucking bastard,”
Ida said, and punched Helen in the jaw with a fist like a small stone. Helen had slow anger, a pilot light; ignited, it never went out. She didn’t forgive, ever.

One man died. Det. Charles Millar. He was hit from behind with a piece of wood. Smashed his skull. The rioters hit the cops who were trying to carry Millar to an ambulance. The cops got beaten with lead pipes, wood bats. Cops on horseback beat the strikers with clubs. This happened for about six hours. Trekkers hid behind streetcars, threw rocks at the police; it rained glass. The police shot at the rioters. Real bullets. This was a riot, mind you, not a civil war. Trekkers hit by a bullet in the foot, in the back, a bullet in the stomach, in the face. Ambulances pulled up and hauled away the injured men. Ida reclaimed Jerusalem; she proved herself a man of steel, and finally, exhausted, let herself be carried back to the Exhibition Grounds and fell asleep in the hay. Finito had watched. The riot was torture for him. He remained dead pale and quiet.

Finito misunderstood this country. He thought we knew what we were doing. Each side. He believed that we had a plan. Scared him half to death.

Helen thought she saw the war beneath the surface. She thought, Scratch the surface and a war bleeds out, and it’s always there. Helen saw this, the civil war under the skin. It is safe only at the centre of the battle, where the danger is not hidden beneath the false surface of peace. She believed that, deep in her gut.

But the riot had all the reality of the boondoggle road. It was an occasion. There are so many innocent people. Almost everybody.

Just before dawn, in the hours after the riot, Helen strolled through the Exhibition Grounds, fingering an unlit cigarette, and watched the remaining Trekkers sleep, still dressed, wearing their boots.
War is chronic
. There is something deeply painful in the look of a man curled in the fetal position with his boots on, both hands tucked between his knees, the blood in his ear dried black, blood cupped between his praying palms.

Grandmother Alice had taught Helen to listen to languages she doesn’t speak. Helen listened to the men breathing.

For the first time since she had left Richard, her own hands ached for her loom. It was a rare spasm of nostalgia. For reverie, for privacy, the luxury of soft surfaces, the illusion of depth. Part of her missed being kept. She even missed his jealousy. The riot left her with a hangover. The biggest building at the Exhibition Grounds had become a minimum-security jail. Ida, with a wealth of hatred that surprised Helen, had already tried to escape. The riot had triggered something in them both. Rage, pure and simple, ran like booze through their veins from the distillery of their hearts. Ida and Finito lay on their backs, hound muscles twitching. Helen inhaled the funk of hay and livestock, the stink of blood and meat, and then went outside to smoke.

Richard stood against the building; she saw his white collar. He barely moved, only his eyes followed her. Seemed he carried a shield, a field around him. “Are you satisfied?” he asked. His voice as soothing as gun oil. And something erotic, a suggestion of her promiscuity. As if her place in this mess could only be sexual. Her homesickness of a few minutes ago was irrelevant here. He kept her out.

“How are you going to live?” he asked.

A few days later, the authorities put them on a passenger train to Winnipeg. According to Ida’s analysis, it was a Fascist coup. “Rotten Bastard” Bennett had outfoxed everybody. The Trekkers had vented in the wide, empty Liberal province of Saskatchewan. It was safe to send the boys home, or to whatever tree the hobo crows might land on next. Ida and Helen got two tickets to Winnipeg.

“Where are you going, Finito?” asked Ida.

Finito shrugged. “I don’t give a shit,” he said.

Ida squinted at him. The three of them stood there, scratched their head lice. After a bit, Ida went back to the long table where the commissioner of labour, fellow named Malloy and not a bad man at that, was handing out train tickets. Ida elbowed her way to the front of the line and said to Malloy, in a no-nonsense manner, “I need a ticket for my brother.”

Malloy looked up from under his hat at Ida. Helen got the impression that Ida didn’t fool him with her disguise. Malloy stared at her and at Finito, not unkindly with his brown eyes. Then he rubbed his jaw with one hand and, with the other, handed Ida a ticket. “Here’s for your brother,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Ida, kind of softly.

“That’s okay,” said Malloy and nodded at her. Somehow that was the kindest transaction Helen had seen in years.

They had three tickets to Winnipeg. It was the summer of ’35.

They walked back south from the railway yards, separated mid-town. Ida was taking Finito home with her. Helen grabbed Ida’s arm, and nodding towards Finito, she asked, “You going to tell him?”

Ida didn’t answer. She took off her cap. She tipped back her head. “That’s what home smells like in summer.” She smiled lazily at Finito. “It smells like fresh-cut grass.” Finito looked. When Ida took her next step, it was as a woman. Finito’s eyes slid sideways; he kept his cool, watched her for about a hundred yards. Her hips grew round, her breasts grew big. When she turned and called out to him, “Hey, Finito! There’s a meeting at the Labor Temple!” Finito ran after her, slowed, shuffled, then ran again.

Helen stood alone awhile. It did smell of lawn clippings. The modesty of the yellow sunshine on the grass could only be the daylight of home.

S
HE WALKED THE REST OF THE WAY BACK
to the village at St. Norbert without rest. The pilot light burned inside her, a cool blue flame. At the bridge over the Rivière Sale, she stopped. She was only five miles from home, but she stopped.

To the west, the quiet greenery surrounding the Trappist monastery.

The land looked fat (an illusion). In full leaf, the elms resembled florets of broccoli. My daughter sat smoking on the high road looking down to the woods. Every time she looked at the spire of the cathedral, blond stone rising above the trees, a sanguine desire surged through her limbs. She sat at the roadside like a monarch on milkweed, feeding on the pleasure inspired by the forest and church spire, the haven of the monk. She thought,
He
is in there.

She’d kept him in mind. All year, every time somebody turned her down when she tried to bum a dime, the monk was there like a good promise. She knew damn well she’d messed with him. So be it. Treat desire with respect. She thought about Richard. His fidelity. His hatred.

Helen lifted her sweaty pack and began the last five miles, dying to see her mother. After a time, dizzy with hunger and heat, she saw the figure of a man a hundred yards beyond, and she knew him from the way the fields on either side rippled and
folded. This would be the man who
listens
. His brown robe blew in the wind. He must be very hot inside it. The heat gave the illusion of his walking backwards; he approached her with the oddly distracted attitude of a man wholly focused.

Within hearing distance, the flagging of robes and the profoundly silent voice of a Trappist monk. Brother Bill (for that was his name) was completely transparent. When the wind blew, it blew
with
him. Like water. In his hands he carried a wooden box. It was large but appeared to be lightweight because he carried it before him like an offering. Helen put her hands out to receive it, otherwise he might not have stopped. Maybe he didn’t recognize her. She’d had a fresh brush cut, and she must’ve lost twenty pounds since their first encounter. So there they were, chewing dust, roadblocking one another by accident. But when he looked into Helen’s face, it was like his whole soul took a picture. The shock shook the ravens in the dead oak half a mile away. It was seriously portentous. He read her face, his own expression rippling with kind amusement. He had the most virile kindness.