When Alice Lay Down With Peter (9 page)

When they have crowded their country because they had no room to stay any more at home, it does not give them the right to come and take the share of all the tribes besides them…
.

This is the principle. God cannot create a tribe without locating it. We are not birds. We have to walk on the ground…
.

—Louis Riel, at his trial in Regina in the summer of 1885

I
N THE SUMMER OF MY FIFTEENTH
year, my mother went temporarily insane. It was an urgent season, tormented by grasshoppers, the locusts of doom. The previous fall, my father had built my new bedroom at the back of the house, and it was there that I would dispense with my virginity. We’d just had two bad years with no money anywhere: poor crops, failed gardens, dissatisfaction on the faces of the grown-ups, hungering want in the children’s eyes. The great boom in Winnipeg would soon be over and the speculators had migrated west into Saskatchewan. The buffalo were gone for good and the Indians were dying of scurvy. Soon, they would hang Riel in Regina and send his adjutant general, Gabriel Dumont, into the American circus, and the great Cree chief Big Bear would be chained up in Stony Mountain Penitentiary. As I look back on it now, I marvel over how bad things were, how we can tread water even when it’s full of leeches and toads.

I was a good shot and loved to hunt. It was off-season, so I was just shooting squirrels. The fields of Red Fife wheat were evil with the clatter of the grasshoppers, their weird skeletons sawing and leaping up like the devil’s fiddlers. So I took my Winchester into the bush at the north edge of what we liked to call “our property.” I was talking to myself, a habit I’d inherited from my dad (whom I now called Peter, and my mum was now Alice to me because I had to discourage them from thinking they could lord over me just because they were old). I still lived at home because I figured Peter and Alice would shrivel up if I went away. They were not exactly deficient, but middle-aged people are unstable and need constant reassurance.

The day Alice went mad the weather was beautiful: not too hot, with a slight breeze. I was having an imaginary conversation with Big Bear. It took the form of an apology. I was in love with the Cree chief; he was my version of a beat poet. I’d seen the photographs of him in the
Free Press
and loved his dusty black suit, his modest felt hat upon shaggy, silvering hair. I’d scanned the articles, threshing the narrow lines of print to seek the seeds of quotation marks, listening for his stubborn, mild-mannered and sundry ways of saying no.

“Big Bear,” I said (a squirrel, motionless, upside down), “my parents are idiots who know not what they do. My whole dumb tribe is greedy and blind and we can’t see what’s beautiful.” Because my dad had borrowed money and he looked pinched and anxious and I hated my mother’s forgetful face when they were busy building fences and more fences and I wanted Peter to chuck it all for freedom (I mean I wanted him to take a day off). I was never going to be like them, Alice and Peter—predatory,
avaricious, foul-smelling, pillow-faced, laughing to themselves in the morning and too damn busy for me.

I took aim.

“Big Bear. You are the bird flying over the land. We are the axe, the saw, the railway, the school, the money, the stupid church, the ugly guy who’s a judge; we are the Anglo, the golfer, forgive us, the merchant, the thief in the top hat, that goddam guy who loaned my dad money. Forgive us, Big Bear, because we’re scavenging dogs in the land of the Great Spirit. Help us to understand, O great chief in Saskatchewan, for you are the bird, and I guess that makes us the forest.”

I squeezed the trigger. Squirrel everywhere.

You are the bird and we the forest. Not too sure what I meant by that, but Big Bear was angelic, proud even in defeat, and the bird and the forest became my litany, quivering with poetic uncertainty, feeding my sullen protest at the supper table. The Canadian soldiers had chased Big Bear and his soldiers through the bush from Battleford and lost him. He doubled back east a ways, to his birthplace near Fort Carlton. And there he surrendered. My alternative rock star, my rock of ages. Charged with treason for protecting his own land. He was going to jail. But then, the Canadians made the whole country a jail. Fences everywhere. The Indians couldn’t leave their reserves without somebody counting heads, checking up on them. Just like me, I thought. Just like poor little white me.

I
WENT TO MARIE’S LOG HOUSE
on my outings almost every day. Marie had gone away with the little boy, Eli, after Wolseley’s soldiers had buttoned their trousers, and after she and François and their numerous cousins had helped Alice survive Peter’s sojourn in the woods across the river. Marie loaded her things onto her brother’s wagon. Alice stood by fretfully, and finally blurted out, “Come home, or back… yes, come back whenever you like.” Marie and François stopped and looked at Alice, blank-faced. Alice blundered on, “I mean, after all, it’s your… that is, it’s our… or I…” She stopped. François kindly nodded and resumed his work, avoiding Alice’s eyes, but Marie gathered up her tolerance and distaste and gently withered Mum, who looked away in shame.

We lost a lot of Métis after the 1870 troubles. They couldn’t stomach the government. They moved west to Saskatchewan and Alberta, or south to Montana and the Dakotas, where they could hunt just a while longer, preserving a migratory life, shepherded by their Catholic priests.

Abandonment enhanced the magic that surrounded the place. There still remained Marie’s small knife on the crooked table and a green copper box with a lid, which I liked to remove to sniff at the remains of the dusky Seneca root. On one wall hung a pair of snowshoes with painted frames. There was a mud oven which I never dared light, and a mud floor over a stone foundation. The rafters were lined with skins—buffalo, fox, bear, rabbit. The surprising cluster of black spruce that grew up around the cabin made it humus-coloured and nearly buried the low walls in sprouting roots. In the intervening years, the land seemed to have sunk farther into bog. It was connected to
our house by a nearly invisible path, and no one guessed my secret grotto. I was like a philanderer with an apartment.

And so I learned to enjoy the gift of solitude. I talked to myself. I was a soul misunderstood, perched in the pungent dust on the ground of Marie’s grotto, speaking thus when I sensed the presence of a foreign creature. A good hunter, I lifted my nose to the wind and went completely still. The shadow of a man fell across the slant of sun through the doorway. And then I heard him breathing. My heart pounded through the tips of my fingers. I leapt up and grabbed my gun and was at the door to see his first blink of consternation. There stood a young man looking at me.

He was ugly in a wonderful kind of way. His hair was brown by default and as erratic as the fur on a feral cat. He had a short back with thick thighs, oversized hands on muscled arms. His eyes were an uncertain mix of green and brown, but clear, clear-sighted. I took special interest in the arms where he’d rolled up his sleeves: muscled flesh on the lower part of the forearms where the skin is soft, with light hair on the upper part, just to the wrists joining to the huge hands wrapped around his rifle, which he cocked across his barrel-sized chest.

“Scare you?” he asked, grinning.

“No,” I said. “You should be careful. You’ll get yourself shot one day.”

“Yes, I guess I will.”

I lowered my weapon. I liked him strongly and I thought he should know. I held out my hand. “I’m Blondie.”

He laughed, but it was nice. “That’s for sure,” he said. “That’s your name, yep. Blondie. For certain.”

“Kind of stupid. My parents did that to me.” This was a sore point. My hair grew in dense and difficult blonde curls, and my name only drew people’s attention to it.

“They’ve got eyes in their head anyway. Yes. Blondie.”

We stood like that, smiling at each other. Then he said, “I’m Eli.”

It shook me. I’d loved Eli the boy all those years; the name was one of my sacred names, like the bird-and-forest song I carried with me. “You’re full of goddamn horseshit,” I told him.

“I may be full of horseshit, but my name is Eli.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty years of age. Give or take.”

“Then you’re a different Eli because he’d only be about seventeen or so by now. Anyway, you’re white.”

“Didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s okay.”

He was looking at Marie’s grotto. I was desperate to get him to stay.

“This is where I live,” I told him. He was distracted, listening to something, but it wasn’t me. “Part of the time anyway. On my own. But I have to look after my mum and dad. Alice and Peter. At their place.”

I asked him home. Asked him if he would be hungry and lied my face off all the way there. I did all the cooking, I told him. I broke the horses for Peter and kept the place going. I told him—this was my biggest fabrication—I told him I was a friend of Big Bear’s. But after that I shut up, because a shadow rippled across his face and I had an idea he knew something. I was dying to touch him. I made us walk side by each where the
path was just wide enough for one. We were laughing and I was lying and it was just a great day. In sight of home, he grabbed my arm to stop me and he kissed me. I moaned from my feet up. We looked close at each other and that was when I saw the green part of his eyes.

But right away, things went straight downhill.

Eli and I arrived at the gate to the road that led to the yard. The place was riddled with fences and gates. Peter thought fences made the land his. A brand on it, his signature. He never lost his anxiety over the false scrip he’d paid for. He was like a sailor who couldn’t quite get over the fact that his ship would sail upon so changeable an element as the sea.

I was leading Eli home through the gate. I’d forgotten all about Peter and Alice. I was going to get Eli into the kitchen and then through the door into my bedroom. That was as far as I’d planned. I wanted all his attention. I was an empire for him to discover. He was the luckiest guy alive. My wisdom was as clear and urgent as a broken mirror. I’d teach him everything I knew, the whole package: politics and a real understanding of nature. We’d go live at Marie’s cabin, and hunt and roam and never settle. But first I’d get him into my bedroom and show him my copy of
Walden
. He was in for a wonderful time.

And then my mother, Alice, showed up. Seeing her was not just a letdown—it scared me half to death.

Alice had been growing smaller ever since she’d hit forty. Dad told her it became her, and he called her his little boy, which struck me as a bit distasteful. But in a single day in July 1885, Alice seemed to lose thirty pounds and, I swear, at least a
foot of height. She intercepted Eli and me at the gate, coming at us from the side and forcing us out of her way. She didn’t look up, huddled over as small as a crone. She wore a thin white nightgown, so threadbare you could see the shape of her legs through it, and I thought I could make out the dark hair of her sex through the fabric, something that would make the devil himself cry out. Over her head and shoulders she’d thrown a ragged diaper, for in her grief she imagined herself a virgin on the verge of annunciation. Tears funnelled over the dry lines of her face and I saw that the skin on her throat had come away from its binding, and I thought, Her flesh is abandoning her bones. In her hands, she fumbled with a string of garlic as if it was a rosary. Whenever Alice was overwhelmed, her Methodist guilt gave way to Catholic ecstasy. As she passed, we heard a supplicant’s gibberish, a Gregorian mix of many tongues, for by then Alice spoke at least thirteen languages, and at that point in my life, it seemed to me she spoke them all at the same time.

Alice walked the perimeter of “our property” the way a well-trained German shepherd will piss on its own frontiers. She walked so close to the fence her nightgown snagged on its rough wood. My dad, Peter, followed close behind. When he saw us, he winked, as if to say it was just a game. Peter was gristly, permanently fifty, with a quick, porous soul and a nervous system as transparent as the veins of wild vetch, as nimble as a wintering finch. He walked near his wife with his hands gliding in the air behind her, and when her idiotic shawl fell, he gently replaced it. I considered my options. I chose to ignore them completely and took Eli’s hand to pull him towards the house.

“Who are those people?” he asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “Just two people walking.”

I got him inside. The sun showed the narrow strips of polished maple in the new floor and lit up the fresh whitewash and the new cupboard with its willow dishes and her collection of spoons, and for the moment I was glad my parents were philistines.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him, steering him through the kitchen.

“Of course,” he said, glancing through the new glass windows to see Alice and Peter on their weird tour.

I grabbed a fresh loaf and the honey jar, and gently pushed him through the doorway and onto my iron-post bed.

“Here.” I handed the food to him. Then I got down on my knees and shuffled under the bed. I kept my best things under there. I had to show Eli my pictures of Big Bear and Chief Poundmaker with the gorgeous braids like sweetgrass. The best thing I owned was a tusk of what I thought then was an elephant that Peter had dug up when he was clearing land. I got all this stuff out, and Eli sat with the honey pot and bread in his hands, looking at me, and at that moment I knew everything.