When Alice Lay Down With Peter (5 page)

Wrapped in a great white capote, her womb hardened in a sustained contraction, stumbling through the drifts, my mother went out one afternoon to study her own misery. The brittle crust broke underfoot, plunging her up to her thighs in granular snow; the crust cut her flesh, and around her, like dust or nebulae, eddies of snow swirled in the lustreless light. She had never been so lonely. If it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for my thumb-sized feet under her rib cage and our murmuring prenatal dialogue, Mum herself might have turned to dust in the sinus-stinging dryness of that cruel winter of 1870.

She was at the end of her rope. Her nose ran, her tears froze like sleepydust upon her eyelids, and she called my father’s name into the mean winter air. She wore a toque over her ears, and snow is a great baffle, so she didn’t hear the approach of a man on horseback until she saw the mare’s legs, oxblood red against the numb blue snow, and heard the warm breath through the creature’s nostrils and looked up past the shaggy head into the ruddy face of Louis Riel. Riel couldn’t bear to think that one of his men would indulge in the sin of self-pity, and so he preferred to think that my mother was praying. “Pardon my intrusion upon your spiritual exercise,” he said to her. My mother smiled. “If a horse you would find,” he said, “a messenger I need.”

He sent her ten miles north, to Kildonan. She was to spy on the militant party of Canadian annexationists who were holed
up at the old stone fort there. It was said they’d taken a prisoner. She hooked her capote over the saddle horn to hide the fact that she rode sidesaddle, hoping to delay my birth. We were cantering over the frozen river, a foolhardy act but exhilarating for both of us. The horse voiced its breath, lungs drumming, and its body warmed her legs, reminding her of how desperately she needed to be touched, and she hid her face from the wind, so she didn’t see the rider overtaking her from the east or the frantic man running towards us. He spread-eagled across the packed drifts and steadied his rifle with his elbows and fired, vaguely in our direction. Our horse went down, starboard side to, but my mother skipped off unhurt and made a beeline for our assailant. She assumed our horse had been shot. She didn’t look behind her, or she would have seen the other rider lying bleeding in the snow. She ran towards the rifle; she wanted to warn the man, his bright red Assomption sash indicating that he was one of us, that the Canadians were after him. But the fellow panicked. He figured my mum was one of his captors come to carry him back to jail, and he closed his eyes and fired again. Mum was close enough to see his terrified face. It was poor Parisien, the slow-witted woodcutter. Just as she reached him, there came a flurry of horses carrying ragged, underdressed Canadians. Parisien wept and begged in French for mercy, but they chased him and swung from their horses with great oak clubs like primitive polo mallets, sporty and larking.

Mum stumbled underfoot, and when one of the Canadians jumped down, she grabbed his arm, beseeching him to show mercy, but the fellow (a tall young man with
skim-milk skin and a peevish, twisted face) shook my mother off with such strength that she flew back and struck her head against Parisien’s rifle. When she became aware of the warm blood between her legs, it produced her first spasm of maternal vigilance. She lay where she fell, afraid to move, horrified by what she witnessed.

“You goddamn son of a bitch,” the skinny man wheezed through his nose and upper palate, the words steamed upwards by the heat of his rage. He staggered on the thin soles of leather riding boots like he’d just stepped out of a saloon, wearing a light jacket, and in bare hands whitened with frostbite, he gripped an axe. The back of Parisien’s head was flattened by oversleeping and a cowlick sprung up at the top. “You goddamn half-breed fool. You ugly son of a bitch. You depraved idiot, you half-breed Indian Catholic bitch dog. You Pap, you Papist pap pap pop popery.” He slowed to take aim. Simple Parisien sat up, licked his finger and tried to calm his cowlick. The skinny Orangeman smirked and swung, and a broad gash opened the skull of Norbert Parisien. “Gotcha, you son of a bitch half-breed!”

Parisien sat still, his eyes drawn upwards, as if to look at the back of his own skull, and his face was transported, tranquil. His assailant stopped for a split second, the freezing air abruptly full of fear. Then, as if to overcome his own fright, the fellow yanked the red Assomption sash from Parisien’s waist, tied it to the pommel, fastened the other end about Parisien’s neck and, jumping into the saddle, kicked his horse into a trot, dragging the limp bundle over the snow. The sash and the blood from the wound left a watery red stain on the ice. The horse stumbled,
confused by the uneven weight it pulled, and my mother lay back and looked up at the blank white sky, feeling the urgency of my coming between her legs, thinking of our mutual blood, how it would melt with spring and confirm for the river its English name.

H
UGH
S
UTHERLAND WAS DEAD
.

He had been on a mission from his father to deliver a message to the Canadians at the other fort when he’d overtaken my mother, his horse racing behind her, over the waves of snow upon the river. Shot in the chest by Norbert Parisien the woodcutter. Parisien would stubbornly manage to stay alive for another few weeks.

It knocked the wind out of the Canadians. They wanted to go home, back to the Protestant town of Portage la Prairie, sixty miles to the west, a long walk in the middle of February. They were worn out. For nearly a month they’d eaten nothing but bacon and bannock, and the skinny Orangeman would not eat bannock; he said it would cause him to speak French gibberish, and then he laughed with his mouth full of raw smoked fat, emitting an odour of wood and whisky and the first sulphurous indications of dysentery. His name was Thomas Scott. He was afraid of nearly everything, but mostly he was afraid of courage, so he called everybody a coward and became addicted to alcohol and rage. He hated Louis Riel like he’d hate a successful and neglectful father. Métis, Catholic, sober, solitary, authoritative, worthy of a frightened man’s hatred.

And my mother hated Thomas Scott. She was a virgin to such ardour. He was her first true hate. The incident with
Parisien the woodcutter had changed her in ways at once subtle and profound. Scott’s sneer had diminished the world she loved; his twisted smile as he struck Parisien with the axe had eviscerated her faith in human goodness. She wanted him flayed. Her introduction to evil had occurred at the moment of her initiation into the guardian role of motherhood. She’d been bleeding a little each day, a frightening secret she kept to herself. In her loneliness and anxiety, with an anger against my father that she dared not acknowledge (thinking such petulance would make her a lesser man), Mum configured Thomas Scott as the source of evil and danger to her unborn, and with logic understandable only to a pregnant, slighted woman disguised as a soldier in a drafty fort, she wanted to kill Thomas Scott and remove him from an otherwise blameless world.

She found him, sneering, in the line of cold and hungry men stumbling home to Portage la Prairie as the winter dusk froze the gristle at the end of a bitterly cold afternoon. She spotted him in a ragged line of forty-eight men, dragging their Canadian tails across the white windy plain beyond the fort. My mother was on guard duty. She hollered and leaped on her horse and raced right up to that band of miserable federalists. She stuck her rifle under his chin, and she might have fired then and there but for the voice of Ambroise Lepine calling her back to line. One of the Canadians, old Mr. Pocha, asked what the Métis wanted of them. Ambroise Lepine removed his beaver hat and answered, “Louis Riel asks you to come inside.”

The men looked longingly at the smoke rising from the chimneys, the huddled warmth. Ambroise Lepine smiled. “You are in time for dinner,” he said. It was magical: the bloom of
camaraderie, the delicacy with which the Métis demanded surrender, the graciousness with which the Canadians accepted defeat. Thomas Scott said, “You’re bloody cowards, the whole lot of you, you shit-for-brains, priest-buggering…” And so the prisoners went in to dine.

My mother followed, a vulture in a flock of good-natured prairie chicken.

How she longed for Scott’s death. When the dysentery got worse, it was her job to take the man from his cell to the outhouse. It was constant. She was always a little late, and he cursed her for being a coward when the smell would bring bile to her mouth, her eyes stinging and the other prisoners regarding her with compassion, glad to be relieved of his company, if only for the little while Scott sat on the latrine drawing analogies between what passed through the swamp of his intestines and Mum’s forebears. She wanted to hurt him badly. She had never in her life raised a hand against a single soul. Swallowing vomit, holding her breath till I thought I too would expire, she dreamed she would gouge out his liver. She prayed that he would expel every organ in his rangy body—intestines, gut, heart, eyeballs—through the vacuum of his filthy sphincter. Please, God, prayed my mother while the nausea turned my home into a bilge, take not only his excrement but the whole man. Lord, take him inside out through his vile bum.

At last the Métis council could stand him no longer. Everyone, my father and mother included, sat in the gallery of the council chamber watching the court martial. One man after another testified under oath: Thomas Scott had threatened to assassinate
le président
Riel; he’d attacked a guard; he’d struck
down simple Parisien; he was a murderous rebel, a stinking threat to our provisional government. My mother ignored her husband, who sat beside her judiciously smoking his pipe. Mum was blinkered, harnessed to her new hate. Then Riel stood and asked the tribunal to show mercy to the prisoner.

Scott didn’t understand French. He had a hangover, a miracle in a dry fort. His tongue was a dead fish in his mouth. The shaggy tribunal was an unreal joke, and he was a martyr in a land of barbarians. He sneered. My mother stood with my father’s restraining hand upon her arm. Without looking at him, she took Dad’s pipe and smoked it herself. Janvier Ritchot moved to invoke the death sentence. My mother bit down on Dad’s pipe. The tribunal voted four to two in favour of Scott’s death. My mother cried, “Praise God!” Scott looked from her to Riel, and Riel, who had no vote, spoke gently in English from a great distance. “You will face a firing squad tomorrow at noon.”

My mother looked down at my dad, pipe in teeth. “I will be among his executioners,” she said, exalted. Dad could only look. She had won greater liberty than either had imagined. The pregnancy had lengthened her face and coarsened the cartilage of her nostrils, deepened the trough running from nose to lips, caused the peach fuzz there to darken. She left my father sitting in the empty council chamber.

She took guard duty that night, and watched the foolish parade of petitioners come and go. She knew that grace is not granted retrospectively. She was a raven at the door. If she could, she would have knit black wool. We sat, she and I, and watched the condemned man. We watched him without pity. We were very strong.

Without sleep, she ate her noon meal and went with the firing squad to the snowy yard. There were six of them, squinting into the low winter sun. Scott was led out, a white scarf about his eyes. The smell of snow, creamy light behind his blindfold, the impatient breathing of his executioners. His legs gave way and the minister helped haul him forward and then let him fall to his knees. His hands, secured behind him, hung limp at the end of a ridge of spine, and as was always the way with him, he was underdressed. My mother’s ears were full of ocean. She raised her rifle. She moved smoothly. She had almost reached her destination. From the corner of her eye, she saw a white handkerchief fall. She fired into the sobbing chest of Thomas Scott.

Maybe she missed. Six shots had been fired, and there was a lot of blood. Scott curled on his right side, and a moan, deeply uttered, of no voice, of all voices, reached my mother like repentance, like eternal purgatory. With an everlasting groan, he tried to rise to his knees. Someone stepped forward and put a revolver to Scott’s head.

She went to a corner of the yard to wait for Dad. The burden of her guilt was a fat gout she would ask him to heal. She sat cross-legged on the cold ground, expecting him, her chest in a vise. Her heart had run away. And I curled comatose, as if I too had abandoned her. She stayed there all afternoon, into the night, when she felt an atavistic care for her unborn and took herself to bed. She lay awake till the fort woke up and lit the morning fires, and she carried out her duties the next day, crouched inside herself, unable to come out. Still my father didn’t
approach. She saw his back as he walked out with other sentries. She heard he was sent to St. Boniface. It wasn’t known when he would return.

It was a week or more. I hadn’t moved and even the bleeding had stopped and she thought I would be stillborn. The sound of Thomas Scott’s agony filled the cavern of her soul. Her own life was bankrupt. She hadn’t known that Scott would carry within himself the song of all voices, an unfathomable chorus of human voices, beyond justice, beyond blame.

She had killed a man. She had killed a man. She had killed a man. The breath entered her lungs while she chanted, “I have killed a man.” It was her liturgy. A folk song. Slowly she unfolded and lifted her head and breathed deeply. I took my cue and shifted in my dark cradle. And my mum looked out with gentle eyes, with her newly won compassion, on the catastrophe of human nature. The limestone of the walls of the fort was made of pressed bones, the colour of ash. An entire wall of bones, of forms extinct, remembered in stone. How beautiful it was in the winter sun.

C
ROCUSES LITTERED THE YELLOW GRASS
like painted eggs. Everyone had grown dependent on the emptiness of winter when spring intruded on their spare rhythms, restless as a traveller come home.

Alice and Peter came to the land by the Red, late one night, early April. In the pitch black, they threw buffalo robes upon a bit of high ground, the hides soaking up the icy mud beneath them. For the first time in months, they approached each other male to female, and maybe my father was shy to find himself sleeping with the mountains and valleys of a woman in the dark.