When Alice Lay Down With Peter (12 page)

Eli was included in the conversations of the men. I was given a doll and a five-year-old girl to entertain. She was a dull little thing who wanted to play house. Me, stuck with this dumb kid in ringlets. Humiliated and so bored at one point that my eyes actually rolled back in my head, revealing the vein-riddled eyeball, the only time in my whole life that ever happened to me, weird, and I know it happened only because I awoke sitting upright and looking at this snotty girl’s scared face.

“Your eyes just went completely white,” she told me, revolted.

“No kidding!” I said.

“You snorted too. You snored. You make me sick!” she said and started to cry, so I took her by the throat (we were beneath a table, the doilies of the tablecloth draped about our ears) and told her that if she didn’t shut up, I would chew off her fingers, and I put one in my mouth, tasting pork fat and nearly throwing up. I scratched the feeble veins in her feeble wrist.

It was the longest afternoon in Canadian history. When at last my parents released me, I gasped and said goodbye (my voice had gone high, something of nerves and embarrassment, the contagion of this stupid little girl’s voice). Eli turned in his chair and nodded, watching us with that clear-eyed comprehension.

Peter and Alice and I opened the door and stepped out into a changed world.

The earth was washed in a transparent film of amber, four inches of ice beneath which we could see mice run and frogs paddle and the oxblood of dead leaves. Ice coated the trunks of trees, the walls of the barn, and on the big gate, a magpie with a long wicked tail was frozen by its feet to the rail. We walked holding hands. Dad’s legs slipped out from under him, and we all fell on top of each other, scrambled to our feet, scuffled along at a snail’s pace. Upon the petrified land, snow fell in flakes the size of saucers coasting through the air, and even as we readied the wagon, snow covered the ice and our glimpse of a glass world was lost behind a blanket of white. It was a sticky coating that fell so fast it provided a decent passage for our horses, and so we made our way slowly home.

The wind picked up. Snow clung to the branches, six inches of it on the north side of the trees. Stuck to the hides of the horses, to fences (there were no electrical wires, no telephone wires, only grey-white sky between blue-white branches), eight inches of snow, upside down, defying gravity. My parents pulled up the wagon at the outer gate and stopped, looking at me with snow battening their eyelashes. They just sat there blinking. They looked like baby animals. I blinked back, waiting for them to proceed to the barn so we could shake down the horses.

“You go on in,” said Alice. She wore Peter’s old beaver hat, piled high with snow, and thick white epaulets of snow lay on their shoulders as they sat batting their white eyelashes like docile guards in the Gulag. I climbed down and stood beside the wagon, looking up. Peter gathered the reins and clicked at the horses, and they rode off, disappearing from view into the hypnosis of a gathering blizzard.

Deafened by white, I stood a minute, feeling the collar of my shirt get soaked. Then I walked to the house and went inside. Calcium light, bone blue. I stood around awhile. Stoked the stove. Sort of hungry. Still hypoglycemic from boredom. God knows where my parents had got to. So I went to bed.

I was looking at
Walden
, eating Mum’s earnest bran cookies, wearing Dad’s socks, when I thought I heard them come in. Sound of breath, of boots on a wood floor, and I realized it wasn’t my parents. I had been curled on my side. Listening, I rolled onto my back, looking up at the thatched ceiling, Vandyke brown, and the vanilla daylight. Eli walked across the kitchen and stood at the door to my room. I turned my head on the pillow to see him. He was staring out the window at the wings of snow. He glanced at me and smiled, then looked back at the window and said, “It looks just like feathers on an owl. Something strange flying by. Strong, you know.”

It smelled good with him coming in. I put my hands behind my head and breathed with that shudder of happiness you usually earn only after hard crying. After some time, Eli came over and sat on the bed, leaning over me, brushing the hair from my forehead. His hand felt dry and rough and smelled of horse. I lifted my chin and he put his hand on my cheek, and I rubbed against the rough callus on his palm and thumb. He looked me in the eye and nodded. He unbuttoned his jacket and let it fall on the floor. The quilt was wet. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off the undershirt, a faded red. His chest was thick, covered in hair; it looked like a piece of granite, moon blue with points of pink like feldspar, a chunk of flesh. He unbuttoned his pants and, his eyes on mine, raised
himself just enough to pull them off with his long johns. Cold, he lifted the covers to climb in beside me, and I saw his chest and stomach as a wedge upon the narrowing pelvis, slightly misfit so the flesh bulged above the hips and groin, like two bodies stacked upon each other and covered in coarse black, curly hair. I longed to put my tongue against the black hair. His skin was cold and soft, and I especially liked the chill skin on his thick arms. On his elbows, he leaned over me and I breathed in his good sweat, the kind from working, not nerves, his smell, woolish, horse, winter, melted butter. I kissed his shoulder, putting my tongue to his skin.

Eli’s face rarely lost its laughter, but a seriousness made me put both hands on his face and down to his shoulders, pulling him and shifting flat beneath him and moving under his hairy legs. I could feel him chilly on the inside of my warm legs where my nightgown rode up. It was way too much. I bent my knees so my dad’s socks were at the back of his knees and lifted myself up to him, and he was hard and cold even there, so it was a chilled hard thing that entered me then, and Eli pushed his face against my shoulder and entered me like a man thrusting into a blizzard. I was dry and had never known the walls of myself before and hadn’t thought about my interior skin before that moment, so it was my own flesh Eli introduced me to as well as his. I was determined to know more of this and pushed his shoulders hard down on me and my hands ran over his back, which was soft and muscled, and then the privacy of his bum, which I had never before considered either, a wild contradiction of a shape I’d thought only children to own, a twin round bum, and I pulled him up into me. The pain was certainly manageable, nothing
more than a sliver or pain we might impose to heal ourselves, belonging to the flesh, not inflicted. Then that was gone and I got drunk on him. Faint with it. Cried out. Bringing my knees up under his armpits and amazed for the pull in him and how we could get so far, mixed with him if only I could pull him farther. If I could just make him move in that hungry wall he’d unearthed inside me and make him touch it. All of a sudden Eli goes rigid and he’s suddenly on his knees on the bed and I’m with my legs around him breathing with him and I look down and what was cold and hard is shining like an egg in the nest of damp hair.

Eli put his hands on the bed and moaned. His muscled, hairy chest folded over his stomach, making waves of flesh with whorls of hair. I made out the shape of a face on Eli’s chest, like seeing a man on the moon. I tried to make him smile, but he only moaned again. “I’m sorry,” Eli said. “I’m so sorry.”

Nothing could have hurt me more than did Eli’s contrition. It was a hot knife in me. He pulled his legs over the bed, snagged on the blankets, and then sat thick and sad on the edge. The goose-bumps lifted up like whitecaps on faraway water. It was about four o’clock. My room had been yellow, brown, pale orange, warm and hopeful, but with twilight all this left us rigor mortis blue. Eli’s silence when he arrived had been full of wit and friendship; now we were quiet because we were different from each other, different from the day and what had just transpired between us. The glorious hunger of that, Eli made into an ugly, misshapen mistake twisted by guilt. I was too hurt to cry.

Moaning, Eli put his clothes back on. He was cold. “Why don’t you warm up under the blankets?” I asked him. “Just keep everything on and get warm first.”

But no. He said it again, “I’m so sorry, Blondie. Please forgive me.”

But he didn’t understand. I sat up. I didn’t know what to say. I was so insulted by his guilt. It made me ashamed. Later I could get mad about it, but just then, with my flannel nightgown and my socks and my frazzled white hair and chapped lips and a hangnail I’d chewed off, I was just an ugly little girl. He shamed me.

“You’re not to blame,” said Eli.

My nose suddenly ran; I could taste the salty snot, and I quickly wiped it across my cheek and sat trying to dry off my face. Eli picked up his coat and put it on. He was bulky and he still looked chilled. He put his boots on like a boy would, sitting right down on the floor to put his feet in them. We had nothing to say to each other. He stood up and dusted off his hands. As he was leaving he leaned over to kiss the top of my head, but I lifted up my face and when he kissed my mouth he got a fierce electric shock, and when I pulled away my nightgown lit up with static, you could see it in the darkening room. And then he walked out.

T
HE CHIEF JUSTICE WAS DRUNK
. After my parents dropped me off, they went directly to his home in Winnipeg, a journey of maybe six hours in the snowstorm. His house was an oak log structure built in the 1840s and so considered “established.” He answered the door wearing a burgundy velvet dressing gown tied loosely with a gold-tasselled rope about his middle. He had an enormous girth and a narrow chest, so he was shaped like a drop of water. When he was drunk, he was mean. He had given up sobriety years ago, though he wasn’t always so obviously drunk, and he retained a powerful influence over the old Red River Colony. The storm was at its peak. Peter and Alice stood frozen at his doorstep, inhuman figures caked in snow.

“Yes?” said the chief justice. He had a powdery face pinched with ill will. “What is it?” A genius in a land of bumpkins.

“I am Peter McCormack,” said my father. “And this here is Alice McCormack, my wife.”

“It is an absolute delight to meet you,” said the chief justice, and closed the door.

After a moment, Peter lifted the brass knocker and pounded again. The door opened immediately, and the chief justice stood there with a cigar, smiling grimly. “I know very well who you are,” he said, letting them in, “You owe me a lot of money.”

“Which I’m paying back.” Peter shook himself like a wet dog, flinging snow on the wainscotting. Alice just stood there, melting quietly.

“Don’t bother,” said the judge. “Why don’t you borrow more? I’ve got oodles of cash.” Sticking the cigar between his contentious teeth, he shuffled towards a pair of French doors and pried them open. Looking back at my parents, he said, “Do come in.”

Peter entered the judge’s library on his toes, obstinate and thinly dignified. Alice trailed after him, shapeless, damp as protoplasm.

“Drink?” The chief justice offered port.

“No,” said Peter.

“Yes,” said Alice.

The chief justice poured three from an ugly decanter. Alice, looking at it, thought, Grown children who are larcenous just like him, rheumatic wife who hates him. There was that baking-soda smell of false teeth in the judge’s library, though the fire burned as it should in an appropriate hearth and the leather-bound books stood uncut in a glass cabinet. On one wall there hung a huge map of the new Manitoba, a grid upon the topography and the sections in faint red. Alice, the idolatress, was mesmerized. On a wood pedestal stood a snowy owl stuffed in flight, a wingspan of three feet, its wild concentric eyes alien and turned towards the room at an angle impossible even for such a bird, as if its neck had been broken.

The judge sat down at a rolltop desk and dipped his pen in ink. “You have repaid me exactly one-third of what you owe. At 8 per cent. Never missed a payment. Why should you pay me back now? Borrow more.”

“I don’t like owing,” said my dad.

The chief justice shook his pen, flung ink at the map. “You are desirable,” he pronounced. “I mean that in a monetary sense,” he added, directing his attention to Alice, who removed the beaver hat and freed her hair from her damp collar. “Put on weight,” the judge intoned. “Fatten your wife,” he told my dad.

“I don’t like owing,” said my dad, never aware of repetition.

“I’ll tell you what,” said the chief justice. “If you refuse my offer, I will investigate the propriety of your claim. Latour Road. That’s funny. I thought that was Métis land.”

Alice and Peter stiffened. The moth wings stirred at the back of their minds.

Guilt-stricken, Peter made a clean breast of it. “That’s right, Métis. We paid for it, but then again, we never did. It’s confusing. I don’t want to think I stole it. I’m trying to prove up.”

“Good man. It will take more. Put up some fences. You’ll need a loan.”

“It’s very good of you, sir,” said Alice, her accent of choice north England, flat and nasal.

“Think nothing of it.” The chief justice stood and walked unsteadily towards her, holding out a promissory note. He leaned over her, his low girth touching her and she looking up into his wet mouth. “The money comes from infant estates, you see.”

“Oh, God,” said Alice.

Real-estate speculation on the land supposedly allocated to Métis “children” was a sordid sewer running under and feeding the recent economic boom. Nearly one and a half million acres had been promised to those with a mix of English or French and Indian ancestry, but the Manitoba government pretended
that “children” meant little kids, not Métis offspring. In the wink of an eye, four thousand people lost their entitlements, and packages of 140 acres were given to the English settlers. The rest of the land was bought from the Métis for peanuts and resold at “true” value. The Métis lost their river lots to us, and people like us. Alice and Peter moved heavily towards the door, the taste of the judge’s sweet port in their mouths.

“We have lightened their burden. The half-breeds cannot
farm,”
the judge was saying, and he waved the note before them. “We have relieved them of an improvident responsibility. Have no worry. Good legislation, good laws, and we’ll quiet their claims. Of course, there’s a slim chance your ownership is legal and binding. But we can’t be too sure. Put up a new barn. Build fences. It’s all on the up and up.”