When Alice Lay Down With Peter (16 page)

Peter and Alice were probably happier than they’d been in their whole lives. Alice’s school was full of new immigrants fetched by that great importer of manpower, Clifford Sifton. Sifton figured he’d outsmarted the British radicals by refusing the applications of Londoners and other urban machinists. Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Poles and orphaned British children from the English countryside—all were invited to provide cheap and servile homage to Her Majesty’s Dominion. It was Alice’s heyday. She was teaching in all her thirteen languages. At sixty, she looked ageless, with a muscled face, lithe as a gymnast.

Alice had a keen sense of smell. About two years earlier, she had sniffed on Peter’s urgent body the briny scent of radicalism. Peter’s passion for Impossibilism smelled of the sea, of fishy breezes and oily salt water, and of logs, fresh-cut timber, corduroy roads, sawdust and pine. It took her back to her first freedom aboard the ship out of Orkney. Since Peter had fallen in love with revolution, Alice had fallen ever more in love with Peter. Of course, they completely neglected me.

Peter and Alice were introduced to Clark and Roberts, with whom they were polite but uninterested. My mother couldn’t take her eyes off Eli. She looked suspicious. She leaned on her heels as if she were fat, and opened her arms to Eli like a brood hen, totally
out of character. Eli gave her an awkward hug. With her arms around his barrel chest, she slyly nuzzled his armpit. Something in this investigation made her jump. She held Eli in stiff arms, then squeezed his face between her hands. “SNAP OUT OF IT!” she yelled. Her voice was strange, sharp, nerve-racking.

Eli, stunned. But already, the blush of hope on his cheek. Alice spotted the necklace and tugged the white feathers out from Eli’s shirt. “Whooping crane,” said Alice. “You shot the crane. Who would make you act like such a damn idiot?”

She turned and nailed me with the hot iron of her accusing eye. I forgive my mother for this. She was of an older generation. They blamed women for everything in the old days. A lucky thing, too, because Eli needed all the help he could get just then. He looked arthritic. She released him. Passing me, feigning to hang up her hat, she whispered in my ear, “Sulphur and ash. And hydrocarbons, whatever the hell they are. That man wants to die. What’d you do to him?”

“Nothing,” I hissed back at her, fifteen again. Bitch.

“That’d be it, then,” said Alice. And hung her hat, grimly disappointed.

Dawn came like a girl in a yellow crinoline, crisp and bright with dew. Clark and Roberts and me, the three gamblers, had played all night. I saw the fingertips of sunrise touch the trees across the river through blue pipe smoke and the farts and belches of my slack-sphinctered buddies. I lost badly. Out of practice. Won me the confidence of the boys. I was the perfect mix: kind of a woman, but not very pretty; kind of a man, but she plays cards like she feels obliged to lose. Says sorry every time she bets
on a pair of jacks. I did. Sorry. It was four o’clock in the morning. For the first time in fifteen years, I hadn’t had anything to read for eighteen hours.

Playing cards is different from reading. At first, you think a card game is just a stupid little story. Then the stupid little story turns into a parable, a life battle; it turns into your autobiography. And when the sun comes up, the game turns into a letter from the bank—a hangover, worse than the dry heaves.

Cross-dressing is not what it used to be. Clark was a nice enough fellow, but he was not Flaubert and this was not the nineteenth century. I became aware of a quality of purposeful mediocrity in our conversation. It was suddenly a big gaffe to be passionate; significance itself was in bad taste. It was the beginning, the embryonic coagulations, of the twentieth century.

But me and Eli, we were going to South Africa with Clark and Roberts.

S
OON
A
LICE AWOKE
and stumbled from their bedroom to stoke the stove for coffee. She lit a fire so big the flames ran up her arm when she slammed the lid into place. Without really thinking, she licked at the singed hair and walked past our card game and out the front door, I presume on her way to the outhouse. It was a bright morning. The stove made it unbearably hot. Clark and Roberts and I, suddenly dying of the heat, put our cards down and crowded out to the front porch. “Whew!” said Clark. Roberts said nothing. “Hot!” said the articulate Clark. Roberts sat on Alice’s porch swing, working his brain for something to say. Being upper crust, he would make only summary statements, so he couldn’t enter a conversation till it had stuttered into speculation.

“No rain,” said I.

“Yep,” said Clark.

“River’s low,” said I.

“Worse out West,” said Clark.

“Dry year,” said I.

“Not a cloud in the sky,” said Clark.

“Some feathery ones,” I said, pointing, “In the east.”

“No rain in that,” said Clark.

“Sure could use rain,” said I.

“Very dry out West,” said Clark. “Drier than here.”

“Yep,” said I. “Looks like a hot one.”

“Yep,” said Clark, and sighed and stretched like a man after hard work. “Gonna be a scorcher.”

Roberts ran his fingers through his hair and it miraculously fell back glossy and neat. “That is a mare’s tail,” he said, pointing to the eastern sky. He looked freshly bathed. “It portends a change of weather. You’re quite right,” he said to Clark. “It will be a very warm day, with temperatures as high as ninety-two degrees. The weather this afternoon will be enervating. And then,” he said, rising and walking away from us, “it will rain. Very hard. Very, very hard.”

“Well,” I said, scratching my head. My hair crackled. “Coffee?”

“Yes,” said Clark. He had suddenly remembered his British accent. “Though I prefer tea.”

Dad was in the kitchen when I went in. He tucked my head under his arm and knuckled my skull, immune to the static, though my clothes clung to him. He smelled of brine. “Hot in here,” he said, releasing me.

“Gonna be a scorcher.”

Dad poured coffee. “How many?”

“Me and Clark,” I told him. Dad looked up, alarmed. “Not me and Clark like that,” I said. “Me and Clark coffee.”

“Nice enough man,” Dad said, pouring a cup. “His friend is a bit of a stick.”

“They’re both okay,” I said. “Going to South Africa.”

My father looked at me shrewdly over the fog he’d raised on his coffee, took a sip, said, “So?”

“So?”

“So what’s up?”

“You tell me.”

“Blondie, lass,” he said, “since when did you invite comment on your life?”

The screen door opened and Eli walked in, my mother close behind him. That was our reunion. Our Upper Canadian Loyalists were down taking a swim; we could hear their shouts: “The water’s splendid, old boy!”

“Righto,” said Alice, making a face. “When are the queen’s representatives taking their leave?”

“We’re going to South Africa,” I said.

“Hot day,” said Alice, blithe and deaf. “Gonna be a scorcher.” She looked at Eli. On her strong, tanned collie-dog face, a look of concern. “What’s eating at you?” she asked him.

“I’m all right,” said Eli. He was shy.

“He’s going to fight the Boers. And I’m going too.”

My mother waved at me as if I were a mosquito. She had a hard time thinking of two things at once. That’s why I’m an only child.

“Why would you do that?” she asked Eli. “What have the Boers ever done to you?”

“It’s either that or join the circus,” said Eli. He smiled and looked up at us to make sure we wouldn’t take his despair to heart. Lightly, “No place left to go. Should have been hung with Riel.” Sipped his coffee. He pretended it was funny. It was pathetic.

“Come on, Eli,” said Alice. “Have something to eat.”

I moaned when I saw she meant to stoke the stove.

“The man doesn’t need to eat, Alice.” It was my dad. Harsh. I was uncomfortable. My parents often disagreed, but it
was always from the inside of their conspiracy. We were all four standing in the hot slabs of sun. The open-screened door exaggerated Dad’s freckles. He seemed to twist himself up. “Eli’s absolutely right!” he cried. “God help us! He’s right! He may as well fight the Boers as join the circus.”

“That’s pure bunkum,” said Alice.

I was sweating head to toe. I kicked off my boots and stripped down to my undershirt.

“It’s true,” said Peter. “There’s no place for a man like Eli. He’s not a banker, and he doesn’t sell farm implements. Who wants a buffalo hunter with a talent for breaking horses? He speaks four languages. Who cares? Cree? Ojibwa? French, for God’s sake! Can he play golf? Does he row? Is his father a Methodist?”

This last one was a possibility. We all looked at Eli, who shrugged without an ounce of self-pity.

“He can’t cheat the land office because he can’t read or write!”

Eli winced. Peter put his arm around him and started to walk him out the door. “He’s the last one,” said Peter. “We’ve got to preserve him.” Out the door into the sun. From the porch, Peter’s voice: “The last of an extinct species.” Together the two men walked out, towards the raw path to Marie’s grotto. “The new situation is impossible.”

“Impossible?” asked Eli.

“It’s impossible.” And then they disappeared from our view. Alice and I were left in the kitchen. “Damn!” said Alice. She stopped. “Do you smell the sea?”

I did. An ocean wind, there in our kitchen at six hundred
feet above sea level, on our unsuccessful farm by the Red River, almost a thousand miles inland from the ocean water of Hudson Bay. The salty scent of Impossibilism, that restless left-handed ideal with its alloy of anarchism. Pungent, fishy and fresh, with a whiff of bilge. I looked at Alice. Alice smiled. “Eli stays here,” she said. “Go to South Africa yourself, why don’t you?”

I
N THE RAINY NIGHT
, I sat in Peter’s undershirt and boxer shorts on a chair in the middle of the kitchen, where a breeze blew through the screen. There is no relief when one’s sweat rises to meet the humidity in summer air, the fresh rain falling on one’s own salt. Skin meets skin or wood or hide or cotton, so to move is to evaporate. Sitting on a wooden chair in the rainy breeze, golden skin a salt lick. Badly wanting Eli. Who was not present at my climatic annunciation, did not witness my skin, my flesh-petalled hue, or taste me. He was near, Eli, but he was not present.

I could hear Eli’s voice, Adeimantus to Plato, disembodied, boyish. Peter’s catechisms, my father’s treachery. Training Eli in the impossible theories of Impossibilism. The lessons were taking place on the porch on my mother’s swing, with the rain running madly from the roof, a ledge of rain, for we had no eaves. Green rain. It kept Clark and Roberts in the barn. This was an advantage. For I had chosen to take my mother’s challenge. I’d go with them to Cape Town. By ship from Halifax. And I was listening, as a prisoner will listen to a sneeze from his juror. A pleasant sneeze? A kindly cough? Will he like me? I ran my hands over the blonde hair on my legs as I waited to learn.
Will I go to war alone? Or in the company of my brilliant friend, my beloved Eli?

The rain let up and the trees were dripping. All the years of studying were nothing compared with this. I was badly bruised by longing. After fifteen years of fasting, I wanted to speak and kiss and make demands.

Alice fretted about “the boys,” as she called Clark and Roberts. She walked out barefoot through the mud to fetch them. As it turned out, Roberts was asleep. My mother crept in through the barn door and whispered to poor Clark, who lay wide-eyed in the straw and was glad to be offered more simple entertainment than lightning and thunder. He even held her hand as they walked back to the house.

Alice brought Clark up the porch steps, interrupting the Republic. Peter finally shut up, and he and Eli came inside with Clark and Alice. I sat stolid in my wooden chair. Eli’s hair had curled, and he looked baffled and honest and good. Evil Alice wiped her feet on a potato sack and asked us all to be seated.

“Now,” she said, “we will hear from Sergeant major Clark.” She leaned towards him. “I’m sorry. What is your Christian name?”

“Christian?”

“Yes. What did your mother call you?”

The ears of Smart Dog perked at the sound of the word “mother,” like “cookie.” “Mother?
My
mother?” He chewed the moustache. “Clark,” he said.

“Clark,” said Alice. “My daughter is already old. But a mother, as perhaps you know, will always nurse her young.”

Clark, a city boy, blushed.

“She will nurture her young, even when her young, even when her ungrateful young, is merely a specimen of immobilized energy. She reads, you see,” said Alice to Clark. “That’s all she does.”

“She’s…” Clark began. “She’s…” He rocked to and fro in his seat, nibbling, trying to recall why he was beached on the female pronoun. “She’s not much of a card-player.” He smiled at me cheerfully. “Good thing we were just in for matches,” he said. And gave my knee a shove.

“Sergant Clark!” said Alice, with a glimmer of Count Otto von Bismarck. “My daughter is considering joining your regiment. Please inform me who is your commanding officer!”