When Alice Lay Down With Peter (8 page)

At the fallen body of the Métisse the men stopped and gave a little bow, and the woman seemed to be waking up, as if their departure were lifting a spell. The sobering soldiers took the same road their brave leader had taken just an hour before. They walked with the indifference of people too ill to care. My mother hummed her hymn and patted my bum nervously, watching them go. Dad was dead. And the Métisse… she turned to the woman. A beauty, the mix of French and Cree, dark bony features, older than my mother by about ten years, standing up in pain. There was a matter-of-fact quality to her movements, and my mother, who could not survive my father’s death, was swamped by dread. It was raining again. Everything had to move forward, was already on its way to the impossible future.

“Okay,” the woman said with the lilt of French. She looked at Mum with tolerant distaste. She shook off my mother’s hand. “Don’t. I’ll be okay.” She looked around. “What have you done with the little boy?”

In her mind’s eye, my mother saw the grey moth upon the red spruce. “I’m positive,” she said. Always stubborn, she reached again for the woman. She hoped to rid herself of awe. She pulled her to the bush. “He’s here. Somewhere.”

The Métisse said, “Shut up.” But she kept my mother’s hand in hers. “Listen.” It took a minute to hear anything, but then gradually the sound of rain. And the voice of the child near by. “There,” he said to a couple of frogs in his pocket. The women were rather shy, watching him. The Métisse touched his hair, lifted her eyebrows when he showed off his catch.

“He’s not really mine,” she said. “I found him. He got left.”

He smiled, self-conscious, coy.

“What is your name?” my mother asked him.

“Eli,” he said. He looked out the corner of his eye. My mother felt afraid for him. He seemed to feel he was fibbing about his own name. But the Métisse brushed the hair from his forehead and murmured,
“D’accord
. It’s okay. Eli is your name.”

H
ER NAME
WAS
MARIE
. My mother was soon speaking discontinuous words of Cree and French. Despite her own injuries, Marie cared for my mother that night, and she collected a few drops of my mother’s pee and let it into my ear and cured the ache, and my mother said it must be an Indian cure, and the woman said, no, not Indian, she’d learned it from Baptists in South Dakota.

Marie had stayed away since the June hunt, travelling south down the Missouri River, farther than she’d ever gone before. Then she’d heard about the trouble with the soldiers and had come home.

“Where is that?” my mother asked.

“Home?” Marie looked out from under the steaming branches they’d cut to form a shelter. She smiled calmly. “I’m home now,” she said. “This is our land.”

“Yours? This is your land?”

Marie put a rosehip in her mouth. “Ours,” she said.

“Oh. Well. Yours.” My mother bit her lip. “We have a lot in common.”

Marie tipped her head. “No,” she said, “not much. But you’re going to hang around anyway.”

Then my mother did something that she would not have done before shooting Thomas Scott. She said, “I’m not leaving.” She flinched when Marie turned to her. But stayed. Wavering. “We could share…” But stopped. A look of sardonic pity passed over Marie’s face.

My mother needed to fall asleep, and she felt this as an urgency to lie down beside my dad. The rain fell, though it was warm again that night. She asked Marie to watch me and left their little shelter, calling my father’s name, her guttural chant. She went down to the river. There was a fire burning on the other shore.

Through waves of rain, she saw his fire burning. She thought, It’s too big. Too big and not safe; a fire as big as a house, with wet rocks around it. Like a breast, my mother thought, and she saw him leaning, thoughtfully, my philosophical dad drying himself. Mum wasn’t sure he was real. When she called out to him, he didn’t respond. It was a windy night. She stood beneath the willow bower, the itchy grass waist-high, and called him. How could he have got such a fire going? He was so familiar, his elbows on his knees, but the image flickered. She watched him till she was sure she’d made him up. And returned to our shelter seized by jealousy against death.

The next morning at dawn, while the rain continued to fall, my mother returned to the shore in a fury. If he was a ghost, then he’d damn well better turn back into a man. In the ordinary morning light, it could be his body or a piece of wood there at Vermette’s Point, that land across the river. She waved at him, shouting. Dad woke up, and he stood and removed his hat and waved back. She could see even at this distance that his body was
subdued, as if he’d emigrated, left home for good. He was consistent; each time she whistled and waved, he stood up and waved his hat at her. And then he put his hat back on his head and sat down. He stoked the ashes and stayed there all afternoon.

It occurred to my mother that they would need a boat to bring him across. She conferred with Marie, who brought her brother from Pointe Coupée, just upriver from St. Norbert. Marie’s brother, the small and handsome François, gazed sagely across the water. The two men waved their hats politely. Then François shrugged and looked at my mother. “He looks okay,” he said.

“But you have to bring him home,” Mum said.

François sighed. “I’ll get my cousin’s boat,” he said. And went away.

My mother stood on the riverbank, staring longingly at Peter, who looked back at her, almost like a stranger. François appeared at last, rowing upstream from around the bend, and crossed the river. Alice could see Peter kneel down, the two men conferring, François taking up his oars again and rowing back. He tied the boat to a willow and climbed up to stand before Alice. “He asks me to look after you. I say to him okay. Marie and me, we will look after you for now.”

“But,” said Alice, “I have to see him. You have to bring him back.”

François picked up Eli and held the boy upside down and said, “Maybe he need some time to think.”

My mother looked across the rainy Red. Her beloved Orkney, standing on the other shore, strangely calm, and she knew that François was right. Peter would come back when he was ready.

He would remain on the other shore for forty days and forty nights.

The rain cleared, and fall graced us with shining, smoky light. My mother became friends with Marie. Mum managed this through a youthfully bland acceptance of Marie’s generosity. She couldn’t afford to look at it too carefully. Sometimes when she was with Marie, she felt dizzy and afraid, as if she were patting a deer or sailing a big boat, that sense of tricking power with a fragile gesture.

And though I couldn’t yet sit up without drooling, I fell in love with Eli.

W
HEN WE REALIZED THAT MY DAD
, Peter, wasn’t going to join us right away, Marie took us to her house near by. We’d never seen this place before on our walks through the land we wanted for our own. The house wasn’t visible from the road, and was connected only by deer trails. A squat construction of mudded logs, it was camouflaged against a stand of black spruce, a rare, nearly impossible tree in these parts, though it’s common farther north. Inside, the walls were plastered with buffalo hair mixed with clay. The single room smelled of hide, and the sunlight glazed through windows of buffalo-parchment skin. I never cried again, but lay quietly, blinking in the room’s albuminous light, cooing in its animal fragrance.

While we waited for Peter, the two women travelled back and forth between the two houses. With the help of Marie’s brother, François, and their countless cousins, they stacked wood for winter, and Marie showed my mother where the Seneca grew, the wild licorice and bedstraw. She knew the land, an oxbow surrounded by the Red, inch by inch. Sometimes we slept at Marie’s cabin, almost without noticing. Marie must have noticed.

Waiting was a task my mother knew well. She’d waited to go to university where she’d waited for God—an expectation she hadn’t quite relinquished on that Orkney coast where she’d met her future husband. She’d packed St. Augustine, along with her
own father’s socks, for the long voyage overseas, where she waited to find him and then waited for the right time to reveal herself. She didn’t need to wait for him to fall in love with her. The wait at Fort Garry was hard; in fact, had proved beyond her. Shooting Thomas Scott had given her a new lease on life, and prepared her for another fifty years of more or less patient waiting. But it was hard.

Why is a woman’s love supposed to be expressed by patience? Such an unpredictable expression of strength.

And while Peter stayed in the wilderness, he saw change shedding its own skin. The Orkney buffalo hunter who had spent his youth travelling the surface of life had stopped, homesteaded.

He felt enormous grief for his future. A farmer. How had this come to be? Concurrent with that was his unease over “our property,” his desire to make our claim to it invincible. Our
false
claim. He was still rocked by his loyalty to Riel, by the joy that had come from the companionship of an army of idealists. Wolseley’s drunken soldiers had mistaken him for a breed. But Peter knew that he could never truly belong to such company. And hell, he hated belonging to
anything
, didn’t he? Didn’t he? So why was he driven to build so many fences? Why did he find himself loving this place, if not through a sense of belonging? The marks of his ownership filled him with pride and a compulsion to do more, to
improve
the land. Was he completely cracked? Or could it be his having a child now? Was that what had caused this weird burrowing activity? He was driven by a fate larger than himself. The fate of paternity. Fatherhood. A truly terrifying concept. He stayed forty days and forty nights on Vermette’s
Point, across the Red from his wife and child, because of ambivalence towards his new fate. The torment of ambivalence kept him there.

He saw his significant insignificance bleed into the earth, and at last he grew devoted to its benign reception. A parasite huddled in the earth’s rank fur, he nestled into the miniature fact of his own existence. He was nothing, yet he was also crucial to the scheme of things. It was true. And what is true is also false. The world is spinning a yarn. And he was grateful. He aged into permanent youth.

On four separate nights, he dreamed that he was an insect. Not in any extreme empathetic sense; he was also himself. The insect varied. But invariably, he ate himself, popping his own vile body into his mouth. Chewing. The bitter taste, the poisonous secretions. The necessity.

He thought not about rain but about the spaces between the raindrops. His idealism would flourish, but it wouldn’t hurt, not quite so much. When the dreary light of compromise lit upon Dad’s idealism, it would thereafter rise up, leap elsewhere, quick as a flea.

This is what I know of my father’s sojourn in the wilderness.

On the forty-first morning, my mother and I went as usual to wave at Dad. It was nearly the end of October, and the day was dull with coming winter, starved of light. When we arrived at the river’s banks, Peter was already there. He waved once and disappeared, and Alice and I turned away, despondent. Alice felt too sad to make the walk home, so we sat down where the willows made a bony hammock. All warmth had slid out of our world, and we
were left in the stark, declining day leading inexorably to solstice. An ugly bit of weather. Even the geese early departed.

Then the sound of Peter’s shout from upriver, clear enough in the absence of geese and wind and other life. Through the cavity of afternoon, Peter’s voice, calling,
“Alice
. Alice!” A hundred yards upstream, a stick man walking on water, yelling for Alice. Then we made out the raft that carried him and the pole he used to push his way. He’d waited until the river fell low enough, and took his chances, gauging where we’d seen the steamboats grasshopper over the shallow parts. Midstream his pole couldn’t touch bottom, and then the current was carrying him down the centre of the Red. He wasn’t going to make it. As his raft passed by, he dove in, the current carrying him downstream. Alice and I leaned out over the muddy water, and she held on to a wild rose bush, not noticing the thorns in her palm, trying to see if Peter had made it to land. The raft was a bump on the broad brown river. Quiet. Mum called out; the air felt thick as lard. She called a third time. And then Peter answered. “Yo!” he said. Alice looked at my fat face in the papoose and asked me, “Did he say yo?” She scuttled through the brush, protecting me from scratches and branches, in a dead heat, until she reached him at last.

PART TWO
1885