When Alice Lay Down With Peter (23 page)

E
LI BRIMMED WITH JOY
. It was that last day of winter, when all of winter’s sky colours were suddenly bright with spring. Soon, too soon, the blossoms, the weeds and work from dawn till dusk, for while Eli had agreed to be unleashed from the economy, he still worked hard on our small farm. But today, for now, Eli was deliciously unemployed.

It called for a celebration. He wished for a moment that he knew how to read and write. Unknown to him, he was wishing for the telephone. He needed to announce the rodeo.

It was a strange day for a rodeo. The horses would slip in the mud, and the calves were too small for roping. It was nice out, but the roads were nearly impassable. Eli had risen at three a.m., when the ground was still frozen, and he travelled to four of the neighbours before they’d had their coffee. And it is a true fact that three out of four he interrupted making love before their children had woken up (the fourth were night people). My dead mother-in-law said it was a
sign
. The rodeo would be a success.

Eli was the only buffalo hunter farming in St. Norbert at that time. Most others had been cleared out west to Saskatchewan, like songbirds from a forest on prime land. But the neighbours had many talents, and 90 per cent of the time, their energies were devoted to turning those talents into labour. The rodeo
was Eli’s way of switching things around: turning labour back into talent, where it belongs.

People came from all over, and mud seemed immaterial and the sun shone. Eli baked bannock over an open fire. The midwife sang a song while my dad, Peter, played the fiddle. Dad hadn’t realized till just then that he knew how to play the fiddle. There was saddle bronc-riding and bareback bronc-riding, but not too much of it because we had only one stallion who was mean enough. By the time we finished with the bareback riding, the stallion was so exhausted he was gentle enough to serve in the barrel racing, where he won first prize for the young neighbour boy who needed just such a victory.

The boy belonged to a dour Methodist family whose appearance at the rodeo shook Alice’s faith in atheism. She’d been bolstering her shaky rejection of God with a sort of paint-by-number version of fundamentalists, but when MacDonald and his scrawny kids showed up prepared for a party, she had to recognize the strange mix of things. For his part, MacDonald tried to justify his secular pleasure by turning Eli’s rodeo into an agricultural fair, progressive and earnest.

Old MacDonald hauled with him the ten miles between our homes his latest farming implement: a deep-cutting blade. He’d fashioned it in his own barn, for he was a pretty good blacksmith. This plough could cut through sod like a hatchet, turning the soil a good two feet deep, “where the real fecundity of mother earth is hidden from view,” said MacDonald
(“veuuuw,”
he said). And while people squinted at him and shrugged, as if to say, “Who cares about deep blades on a plough,” you could see that the seeds of competition had been sewn. A bit of envy and a bit
of fear. By fall, there would be many new blacksmiths in the neighbourhood. The soil would never be the same; mother earth would soon be aging fast in the prairie wind.

But farm implements do not belong at a real rodeo, and Eli gently discouraged any further references to tilling and such. When the races were over and everyone was wondering what to do next, we heard a gunshot and the crows scattered up from the compost. And there was Eli, dressed in his buckskin and beads, wearing his fancy moccasins and the Assomption sash and an eagle feather in his hat. He rode the newly broken stallion, a fine black creature of great dignity and intelligence, marching backwards, cutting tight circles and changing leads. Eli reined in quickly, and the black horse rose on its hind legs and Eli yelled, “Throw!” and my mother tossed something into the air. The blue glass bottles fell in sunlight and exploded into a bright, sparkling shower when Eli shot them out of the sky.

Helen had been perched uneasily on the outskirts of the party, sulky with the grown-ups, rude to the kids. She would not wear her farm clothes, and the hand-me-down shoes from Grandmother Alice made walking difficult in our yard, so she got stranded on the bench near the firepit. We’d been forced to ignore her. Eli and Alice didn’t notice her when they began their game with the gun and the blue glass. I was watching from the tall corral fence. Alice laughed and tossed a bottle high over the firepit; we watched it spin through the air, and my heart stopped when I saw Helen’s face raised towards it. Eli didn’t see her there. He fired, and the glass rained down upon her. Helen watched till the last moment, when she covered her face with her hands.

The blue glass rained down. Miraculously, there was just one sliver stabbed in her left hand. I took it out with tweezers. I was curiously grief-stricken over the possibility of the smallest scar on my daughter. Her perfection had become a liability, yet I was unwilling to relinquish even a fraction, as if it would let her loose. And I so wanted to keep her.

The rodeo changed Eli. He hung back that day while I tweezered the glass from Helen’s hand. She and I were on the porch with a bowl of water and the bandages. Eli hesitated at the steps as if he would say something. Then he walked by and went into the house. I could hear him walking inside; his boots were louder, his body less contained.

When I’d finished with Helen, she went into the house. I listened, but they didn’t talk. I tossed out the water and took my things to the kitchen. Eli was releasing Helen from a hug, and as he did so, he placed his wounded paw against her face and looked at her with a strange, intense objectivity. She smiled, shy, almost apologetic, and slipped out of reach. Eli went back outside without speaking to either of us. Next thing I knew, he was in the corral, working with his horse, hour by hour.

That was a Friday. By Saturday, Eli was a gun-slinging, cow-punching, bronc-breaking rodeo cowboy. Suddenly he could yodel and spit, and his legs grew more bent than ever and his eyes, which had widened into a farmer’s guileless gaze, narrowed with perpetual mirth and his voice, which had got higher, a breathy tenor as high-pitched as the wind in grass, burrowed deep into his barrel chest like he’d swallowed his own larynx. He suddenly knew the words to more than five hundred songs. By
Sunday, Eli was stewing coffee over an open fire, and that night he took me to bed outside on a bedroll smelling of cow dung, and he leaned over me and looked down with those brand-new wrinkles and sang a sad ballad about his mother. Not Marie, but some old white kind of Ma. It was just a song.

He grew reckless, restless, solitary, but I loved this version of my husband too. Eli could turn into a blue-eyed bat; love is permanent.

We let the farm go that spring, much of it fallow, just a few acres of rye. For my part, I got hold of some cabbage seeds and radish, onion and garlic and turnip, anything that tasted hot or grew underground. Potatoes, carrots, a half-acre of gladioli. With the money I was making as John Anderson’s cook, I bought a trailer and hitched Peter’s black stallion to it, and we kicked and cantered back and forth from the river to my garden with water, for all the days of May and June were dry. Eli continued to sleep outside, so I did too, though it wasn’t my first choice. I found an old jib sail in the basement of the Andersons’ house and rigged up a tent to keep off the dew.

I rose with Venus and rode to town in time to cook the Andersons’ breakfast. Helen was always with me. On one hand, she was indifferent to me, favouring the company of her cowboy dad. But she insisted on coming to the Andersons’, and I was very glad to have her. She was bewildering. She didn’t really like me much, and we were stilted in conversation. I was always stunned by her beauty. Maybe that’s what made her standoffish. I was forever staring at her, backing up for a better look, then zooming in on her flawless skin, the curve of her shoulders, the slim bone of the clavicle, her dark blue eyes, lush black eyelashes and brows.

Helen liked to polish the silver, and she knew every serving spoon and ladle. She loved the mother-of-pearl fish cutlery, she said, palming them, the weight of them and how cool to touch. She liked to polish everything, glass chimneys, crystal, to oil the oak and walnut wainscotting of the Andersons’ dining room, though there were other servants for that. But Helen did not polish or oil like a servant. Hers was an act of ownership and intimacy and defence. She loved the swinging door between kitchen and dining room. Through it she passed to a richer world.

She wandered freely through their house. She would be gone for hours, and then come back to the kitchen smelling of candle wax and gardenias and stand mystified beside me at the sink, watching potato peelings fall from my hands, their odour of earth, their mud eyes. I let her be. When she’d been quiet awhile, she would sigh and then talk in a desultory way. She said there were coloured balls of clay in the billiard room upstairs. She pinched a bit of raw pastry from a bowl that sat in a larger bowl full of cracked ice and put it in her mouth. Then she dipped into the pocket of her apron and produced a grey stone, holding it out to me, a petrified egg. “What is it?” she asked.

“A piece of moon,” I said.

“What’s it for?”

“Where’d you find it?”

“At Mrs. Anderson’s bath. She’s got her own bathroom, Mama. Even Mr. Anderson doesn’t go in there.”

I held the moon full of holes, a rough, hard product of Mrs. Anderson’s bath. “Throw it out, child,” I said. “Poor thing. No wonder she’s daft.”

“Did she make it with her body?” Helen began to laugh.

“She is a turtle, Helen. At night, she turns into a turtle and sleeps in the bath.”

T
HEY GAVE HER CLOTHES
. At first I thought it was patronizing and therefore quite safe. As long as they felt that Helen was beneath them, they couldn’t harm her, their weapons would be misdirected. Shawls and such, lace collars, a nearly new pair of shoes. Then she found a way of wearing them that was entirely her own. She would costume herself and walk from our backroom with her consciously distracted attitude, like a dragonfly clicking its wings in the kitchen, strangely exotic and purposeful. She didn’t sit; she hovered. She was still a child. A faint mauve vein ran over the petal flesh of her eyelid.

M
R. AND
M
RS
. J
OHN
A
NDERSON
, K
C
, and son were throwing a party: one hundred guests in the ballroom, an eight-piece orchestra, music so sentimental it made your teeth hurt, people dancing with their collective heart on their sleeve and their respective noses in the air.

A respectable lady is led by her nose, neither too much nose nor too little. Her father’s, her husband’s, fortune will be the moat about her womanhood, should she be properly governed by her proboscis. Wearing silk with lambswool and horsehair brocade, the women seemed to sail on their slippers to the bathroom, as if their destination was a silly detour en route to a real throne.

I’d spent three days preparing for that party. Helen and I stayed in town, rather than making the journey to and fro so early and so late. We slept in the little room off the kitchen. I missed Eli, but it was pleasant there, with only the work in the warmth from the stove and the dewy breath of my daughter asleep beside me.

The night before, I’d woken up to an empty bed. Her pillow was cool. This was new. I had risen countless times in cold winter nights to care for her as a baby, but I’d never been forced out to search for a delinquent.

The house was sleeping, snowlit. I walked a path of Persian wool through panelled walls and walnut beams and cornices.
There was a fire burning in the west room. By its light I saw them sitting: Richard in a chair, Helen on a couch. I was struck by the complete absence of tension between them. Richard was draped catlike across the chair, his gold hair rather long, wavy, shining around his narrow face, his nearly feminine beauty. Helen leaned against pillows with her knees curled beneath a mohair throw, her head supported by her hand. By the fireglow, something gleamed on her throat. They were undistressed by my appearance; Richard hardly glanced at me while he completed some inane commentary. I walked close to my daughter and reached down to touch a string of pearls around her neck, a double strand, cream with pink shadows, cool as a breeze.

“Who gave you this?” I asked her.

Helen’s half-smile, a nod towards Richard, who remained blandly sitting, a hint of pride. “They’re pretty,” he said. “Father found them at Panama.”

“They come from oysters, Mama.”

Richard put his small hand over his mouth and smiled. He crossed his knees over the side of his chair. “We’re having oysters tonight,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find one inside. Put another log on, will you, Barbara?”

“You realize Helen can’t accept your gift.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “No, of course not,” he said. “But I would like you to keep them for her until you feel she is old enough to accept them.”

“If you hurt my daughter, I will kill you. You do know that.”

He smiled again. A large mobile mouth with full lips. “I wouldn’t hurt Helen in a thousand years.”