When Alice Lay Down With Peter

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the falting together; and a little child shall lead them
.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox
.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea
.

—Isaiah II:6-7, 9

T
HIS IS A WORK OF FICTION
based on the history of St. Norbert, in Manitoba. Though it draws on historical research, the storyteller, Blondie McCormack, and her family are born of the imagination, and of the landscape, an oxbow in the Red River.

The story begins with what is called the Métis resistance, in 1869—1870, in the largely rural area of St. Norbert, in the province of Manitoba, Canada, on the beautiful land where my family and I lived until our yard finally floated away with the Red River floods in the 1990s. The Métis were reacting to the powerful influx of Protestant white settlers, to the loss of their language rights and the ownership of their land. Their leader, Louis Riel, still provokes either passionate loyalty or bitterness in many Canadians. Some people argue that he was mad, or a liquor trader. I think those versions of Riel are highly implausible, though he did have a visionary temperament, much out of vogue. At any rate, Riel was held responsible for the death of the Orangeman Thomas Scott, who was shot by a firing squad in 1870, so they hanged him and later called him a founding father of Manitoba. Manitobans have a history of electing the same people we put in jail.

This book is written in loving memory of a particular piece of land by the Red River.

And it is dedicated to my daughters, Bailey and Hillery, and to Glenn Buhr.

I
’M DIPPING MY PEN
into the Red River, always at the same spot, and like they say, all the time into a different river. I have hauled this story out of the fish-smelling muck of the Red, where the willows have fallen, twisted from the spring flood. On the riverbank, thistle pricks your legs and wild cucumber pops underfoot and it all smells like cooked mud.

Right here, there was a fence of willow posts and chicken wire but it fell down thirty-five years ago, and even then I was too damn old to fix it, so the crazy cucumber grew over it. It’s too early and too dry for mosquitoes. The only sound is the highway in the distance, and the cooing of the mourning doves.

The heat smells of cut grass, damp clumps of it, an extreme green. It’s the end of May. The honeysuckle, cherry, crabapple and plum blossoms are full of bees, like pink-and-white hives in the sun. The scene is entirely benign. No dog on a chain, no malice in the shade, no fear and no ache in your veins. From this lucid perspective, you see me. I am laid out beside my vegetable garden.

When I was seventy-two, I grew a watermelon the size of a tractor tire. You wouldn’t think a garden could sense the age of its gardener, but now everything grows stunted, even the carrots, spindly as a baby’s finger. Beside me on the grass are a green plastic watering can, leaking its rainwater into my ear, and my
hoe, which I must have struck when I fell because there appears to be a small cut on my forehead just beneath my curls. I am wearing my Adidas, the only sensible shoes since moccasins, with knee-high stockings, my old kilt and blouse, and a blue cardigan sweater. My hat is lying upturned in the grass.

I didn’t put on a brassiere this morning. I was simply going to do the corn rows before breakfast. I couldn’t predict that I’d be seen by anybody outside the family. Since Eli passed on, I have relished my solitude. So it was that I put on yesterday’s skirt and blouse, and in the innocence of routine, I went to the garden with my hoe. Softened and kneaded by the loving hands of morning, I did up only the three pearl buttons between my collarbone and my wishbone. I was play-acting, pretending I was young. To my delight, I felt a flush of sexual desire, tender as rain.

I am not a big-chested woman, especially now, of course. My arms sag and my armpits have jowls. The buttons tore off when I fell, and so it is that you see an old woman’s breasts, which are like very overripe peaches. I have always had lovely breasts, small as they are. And that devil’s kiss, my birthmark, brown as an acorn, at the cusp of rib and breast. It is certainly provocative in its own way. And if you stretch the word a million miles, sexy. Though I am old. I am 109 years of age, since the twelfth of this month. Born on a hot day in 1870. I would have to admit, I am ancient. And today, which happens to be a Tuesday, I am dead as a stick.

PART ONE
1869

T
HESE ARE MY BEGINNINGS
.

Imagine heat. In the coupled loins of Alice (wearing wool pants and a heavy flannel shirt and, strangest of all, leather chaps, for he’d taken her while they chased a herd of thirsty cattle east from Turtle Mountain to the Pembina hills) and her skinny, ardent husband, Peter. Hot as liquor, the juice that made me, on the night of August’s showering meteors in a warm wind sweet with sage. They were alone under cowboy stars beside the embers of a campfire, laughing in their lovemaking. The most successful practical jokers in all the colony. Their britches whispered as leaves in the breeze when they rustled and rubbed together. He thrust inside her and she wrapped her chaps around him and drew her knees up to his shoulders while the seed ran down, itching and hot. A woman in her precarious circumstance must interrupt at all costs and they were careful to spill, laughing. My mum and dad, in God’s House of Lords, members of the opposition.

They’d been travelling with a half-dozen men, a sad bunch of Métis buffalo hunters reduced to driving cattle for a retired Hudson’s Bay Company officer. It had been a long month for them, feigning manly indifference to each other’s earthy scent under the duress of my mother’s disguise. It made them hot. And a little silly. And when the men had left them alone that
night with instructions to return for the stragglers, a cow and her calf that had been separated from the herd, they both shrugged and spat and threw down their bedrolls, grunting acquiescence.

A lovely night, the stars above. Hunger from a long fast, constant temptation and the arousal, perhaps you know of it, that comes from watching a lover’s freedom or solitude, the aphrodisiac of the lover’s face averted, the part that leaves you out.