When Alice Lay Down With Peter (2 page)

She thought he’d come. Their catechism had reached that stage of exchange where one becomes another, pulse and tide for tide and pulse. Her own juice she mistook for his. She thought he’d spilled; she was safely playing on the shores of pleasure. She was attuned to her rhythms and knew she was ripe. So when she looked above his pounding shoulder and saw the lurid purple of the thunderhead ink the half-moon, cover it, while Dad fought for an end to his need, pounding the walls of his beloved, seeking an end, when she saw the leader stroke of lightning, a brilliant ionized path stark white against the deep purple sky and after a split second another stroke and it was the great intake of breath, dry as rage and bright as a path of quicksilver, she knew, she knew. The next stroke made their hair stand on end, my father’s hair longer and scruffier than my mother’s theatrical boy’s bob. Twenty-five thousand volts.

My father was a compassionate man who would never deliberately inflict his needs upon his beloved wife, but I can’t say for certain that he would have had the discipline necessary to stop himself before the fact that magic night. Anyone with the imagination to put themselves in his boots at that moment will forgive him the indiscretion of the fiercest ejaculation by a
white man in the brief history of Rupert’s Land. And though my mother was receptive, the voltage and the heat fired the seed, knocked her unconscious. She didn’t stand a chance. They woke up fourteen hours later, still coupled, surrounded by hailstones the size of turtle eggs, black and blue but happy. They smiled roguishly, knowing, and with muddy fingers combed each other’s sizzled hair. It was two o’clock on the first afternoon of my life as an embryo. My father withdrew from my mother slowly, very slowly, flesh welded to flesh, raw.

They would be satisfied for nearly a month. They helped each other stand and looked out at the trees, the leaves pounded by the hail. The light was white as the inside of an oxygen tent. They buttoned their trousers. Horses gone. Cow and calf vanished. They hobbled and sucked hailstones along the old trail marked by the wooden wheels of Red River carts. They held hands. They were glad I’d been tipped into the world, off a thundercloud like a huge tarnished tray, tipped like caviar into my mother’s womb. And scorched there, the seed of a jack pine. The catalyst, a stroke of lightning.

T
HEY HAD MET BY ACCIDENT
in the stark sun of the Orkney island of Hoy, where she sat reading and he sat darning his socks. My mother had been the only female theology student at the University of Glasgow, establishing what was to become a family tradition of studying passionately all things extraneous to survival. Alice had been raised a Wesleyan, and had bred her faith on a meagre diet of duty and intellect. She’d been preparing for
an examination on the methods of salvation when a sudden sneeze filled her with a need to smell the most northern sea. Telling her astonished family and her sceptical theologians that she was in a struggle with spiritual dryness, she put her books in a carpet bag, promised everyone that she would heal herself and return, and left for Orkney, the most northern place she could then imagine.

My father-to-be was a tenant farmer from Hoy. Sick of mud and poverty, he was yearning to join up with the Hudson’s Bay Company and jump aboard a ship headed for the New World.
Sailing west sailing west, to prairie lands sunkissed and blest, the crofter’s trail to happiness
. He and Alice sat down beside one another, total strangers, on a hill with a view of the sea. They’d arrived there at the same moment, obviously expecting to be alone, and had hesitated before shyly nodding hello and settling on the warm rock side by each, as if they’d planned it. He reached into his pocket and brought forth a darning needle and a pair of woollen socks, and began to sew. Strangely embarrassed, Alice quickly drew St. Augustine’s
Confessions
from her bag and pretended to read. She was wearing a black Methodist gown. Her black-laced boots were spread pigeon-toed, careless and ready. She noticed that he had a freckled complexion, her favourite kind of skin. Then he began to talk in a voice like the wind on the water, his words arriving as if out of nowhere. His Adam’s apple floated on his freckled throat. He said there was a land without landlords just across the ocean, a green and verdant place where a man could be free from tyranny, free from history itself. Rivers, he said, long and wild rivers run through the forests, into the great Hudson Bay, in a country where nobody can own you. I’m joining up, he said. The Hudson’s Bay
Company can take me there, but then I’m going out on my own and never work for any man, never be owned by anybody, not ever again. Fish, hunt, live free, he said, vigorously stitching his socks.

The effect upon my mother was a heart-stopping reversal of the far and the near. She thought about the university, which had long represented for her the keyhole to freedom, and she saw it as the funnel through which freedom poured itself into obedience. She looked again at the hands of the man beside her. He neither bit his nails nor cut them; they were worn down naturally through the effects of water, wind and soil. She saw a fly walk across his ear, unheeded. She saw the spinning possibilities for adventure, and always the lady, she chose to call it love.

She let St. Augustine fall closed, squeezing the book between her thighs as she leaned towards this stranger and kissed him on his lips, which, she discovered, tasted salty, for the air was full of sea. He kissed her back, respectful and glad, for he considered this a blessing on his voyage rather than any particular attention to his transitory self. Boldly, Alice kissed his raw neck and smelled the grass in his hair, and on the pretense of kissing his hands, she gnawed upon his calluses as if long denied some vital nutrient.

She said, “I have looked for God in all the wrong places.”

He replied with a simple and modest declaration of his unworthy nature.

Then he stood, tucked his mended socks and darning needle into his baggy trousers, thanked her for the company, and disappeared over the hill down towards Hoy Sound and the harbour at Stromness.

Alone, Alice saw the perfection of the sunlight on rock, grass, sea.
Perfection
. She studied it all afternoon, until the light grew diffuse, became a green membrane over the world. She gathered herself and stumbled through the dusk to her room at the isolated home of the schoolmaster’s widow, got into bed fully dressed and lay awake till dawn. The following morning, she went down to Stromness and searched the harbour and the town. He was nowhere to be found.

A
LICE CUT OFF HER HAIR
. She put on a pair of trousers and got a job on a boat sailing out of Stromness for York Factory, on the shores of Hudson Bay. She proved useful aboard ship, and arrived with the reputation of a popular young lad capable of work that demanded more finesse than muscle. The chief factor at York Factory was accustomed to boys arriving from Orkney, and he hired her to work on the forty-foot York boats travelling the Hayes River south more than 150 miles from Hudson Bay to the series of lakes midway to Lake Winnipeg, to trade with the Indians who would come north in their canoes laden with furs. Alice worked with all the optimism of a wolf pup on her first hunt, believing she was looking for her underfed crofter. It would be unseemly for a woman to be looking for liberty.

But a year and a half went by, and she knew in her bones that her particular Orkneyman wouldn’t be among the industrious Company men loyal to a fur kingdom ruled by London merchants. She began to grow desperate. So when the ice set, early in 1869, Alice quit the Company, pocketed her wages and
asked a trader with a dog team if he’d take her on, and in that way she travelled south over frozen lakes to Norway House at the northern tip of Lake Winnipeg, and then south to Lower Fort Garry on the banks of the Red River, almost a thousand miles below Hudson Bay.

Spring thaw. The Red River Colony was a wretched sea of mud. Where was the perfection she had witnessed at Orkney? A vision of sun upon ocean waves breaking perfectly on the rocks, it had fostered her manhood and stirred her desire. She sniffed the air, caught a fresh breeze from the west and hitched a ride with a cart brigade that travelled about seventy-five miles west, over the Pembina hills to the valley where the Métis buffalo hunters would go for the spring hunt, and she slipped into that company and tried to make herself useful.

She found him at last, at the hunters’ encampment in the Pembina valley. She saw his freckled throat, leaned in cautiously to sniff his grassy hair, hitched up her pants and suggested they team up. They hunted for buffalo together for a month without Alice making known her true identity. He was greatly relieved, then, to learn she was “the female from the university.” He’d been compelled by the slope of her shoulders, her sway-back and double-jointed knees that made him think of a little girl. She was a comely, artless boy with a hoarse voice and brown eyes like a fallow deer. Such was my father’s courage and tenderness that even when he thought she was a boy, he’d never let his desire twist itself into hostility. He had been, however, the only one willing to work with her; all the other men had lusted too, and thought there must be something deviant in a lad who could inspire such passion.

They were better than lovers; they were conspirators. When the buffalo hunt failed, they signed up with a crew of Métis hunters driving cattle. There had been only a few buffalo near the Red River valley for several years, but a retired Hudson’s Bay Company officer was collecting a herd for private sport, and he hired some Métis, my mother and dad hidden among them, to drive the buffalo over his vast tracts of land along with his domestic cattle. The hunters were tormented by the unnatural curtailment of their instincts. Forced to herd the animals they would traditionally slaughter, thwarted and confined in the New World, they watched with growing consternation the arrival of antipapist anglophiles from the east. True, their outward circumstances had been altered but a little: they still rode horses over unfenced land, had no money, owned nothing and slept on the ground. But the cursorial Métis had lost their true function. They weren’t permitted to shoot. Like the old ruminants they herded, the disarmed hunters chewed the cud of rebellion, squinting into the dust stirred up by advancing civilization.

My father was philosophical. Even here, in the brand-new Dominion, he had an overseer in the person of an aristocratic Scot. The retired Hudson’s Bay Company officer would arrive with a gaggle of flatulent lords, three servants to a man, and they would bed the occasional Ojibwa, whom they said they found quite frisky if caught young. Buffalo proved better game than partridge or fox. The muzzled Métis hunters herded the buffalo within easy range, and before long, Lord Hardy and Lord Finlayson and Lord Simpson would be sent back to Scotland sated, carrying hairy buffalo heads aboard ship and wearing elegant robes
and hats. The New World was certainly wild. Returned from their excursion, they wrote poetry in the vein of William Wordsworth. They had known, in a biblical sense, Nature. And she was sublime.

But for my mother and dad it was truly paradise to work hard and be paid a man’s wage, and still—for they were both of an extraordinary intellect and easily bored—enjoy the fact that the expression of their lives was one extended double entendre. They found themselves so amusing that everyone laughed with them, and they developed a reputation as a sort of travelling vaudeville in the camps.

Then, as they say, lightning struck.

T
HEY LEFT THE EMPLOY
of the retired Company officer.

My dad had long since been depressed over his boss’s speculations in real estate. He felt compromised. Walking gingerly towards the settlement at the Red, he confided to my mother that he felt the ground shift beneath them; the black-eyed Susan and dusty stalks of prairie orchid, the air full of sparrows and breezes like invisible thumbprints, the bountiful gifts of the Great Spirit were changing shape as if to hide themselves from fate. He said he felt like someone witnessing a murder, and the victim was the land they looked on, there, in the innocent sun. The Garden of Eden had been sold to Eastern millionaires, and its beautiful limbs would soon be clothed in pinstripe and fences. And with tears in his eyes, my father said he was afraid.