When Alice Lay Down With Peter (3 page)

Besides, not since the lightning had struck had they seen hide or hair of their crew of domesticated Métis buffalo hunters.

They walked most of the way over the Pembina hills to the junction of the Red and the Rivière Sale without seeing a soul. But for twenty miles of that trek, they hitched a ride in a cart pulled by an ox.

It was a hot afternoon, and my mother and father had been walking for two days. They were still pretty tender here and there, and they walked like a pair of hounds, sniffing at the blossoms of Great Plains lady’s tresses. The air smelled sweetly of skunk, an
aroma they both enjoyed. They told the urgent autobiography of paramours, needing to re-create themselves now, with the lover arrived to heal the story into shapeliness, to make graceful the erratic gestures of a life. Occasionally one of them would drop out of earshot, distracted by the shriek of a falcon, ambling to catch up and beg for a recap, a clarification. “Your mother had a nice singing voice?” “You saw me in a dream?”

My father was terrible for mumbling into the breeze, turning his long, skinny back, his voice nested in the hair of his chest. But my mother, still an earnest Methodist, would tell her life all in a breath, fighting for air, stalling the laughter. She was in the midst of a description of her family back in Glasgow, a long, loving history lasting at least an hour and a half—with her heart pressing her larynx and her eyes blind to the aspen stands and swift fox, her memory so full of the particulars of her lost family that she was hyperventilating—when my dad put his hand over her mouth and pulled her down into a low-lying stand of cattails. An inadequate hiding place, more a starting line if they found they had to dash.

Two Red River carts, noisy as stuck pigs, rolled into view. Two oxen walked peaceably in an atmosphere of panic, seeming to exist in uncanny quiet while the carts shrieked and tin cups rattled in the breeze. They were stacked with gear; a lantern swung, tipping coal oil into a basket of onions and potatoes set upon a serpent’s coil of hundred-link chains.

My mother and father hid while the first cart screamed past. In it there appeared to be five soldiers, though their uniforms were filthy and my mother had the impression they’d been lifted from dead bodies, perhaps somewhere in the south, where American soldiers were battling the Blackfoot. But when
the second cart rolled by, my mother moaned deeply, an old hunger suddenly recalled. There, seated between a red-haired man with mutton chops and a shining brass sextant, was a woman. Blinded by a sudden and irrational grief for womanhood, my mother stumbled out to the middle of the trail and stood helpless, her hands forgotten at her sides, her mouth open, a drop of spittle upon her lip. The driver was given no option. The cart came to a halt, dust floating in sunlight and silence thick as honey, out of which recommenced the singing of birds. With her eyes fixed upon the skinny dress-up boy, the woman motioned them to climb aboard and indicated they could settle into the bale of straw.

They rode all afternoon in deafening noise, reluctant to speak above the din. The only words the young woman pronounced were in a language so foreign it sounded counterclockwise. The driver didn’t appear to understand a word she said, and he didn’t appear to care, but he nodded affably, saying, “Yep,” or “I don’t imagine.” Three times the woman touched his shirt sleeve, and when the cart stopped she waved to my mother to follow, gathered her numerous skirts and disappeared into the bush. My mum was terribly anxious when this happened the first time. Alice was, you will remember, disguised as a man. But somehow the woman knew. She led my boyish mum into the bush. They were facing each other in green shade alive with the buzzing of mosquitoes. The woman put her hand under her skirts and withdrew a leather-bound volume of the Bible. It was in English. It was unlikely she realized that it was sacred text from which she tore two pages, both from the Song of Songs, and handed one page to my mother. The paper was very fine,
high quality. The woman squatted and suddenly her face was lit by a smile, her perfect white teeth and full red lips against a tanned face and blonde hair. She smiled as if the common fact of bladders was a source of amusement infinite and humane. My mother unbuttoned and squatted too. They began to laugh while the fragrant pee ran in golden creeks between their feet, and they walked back to the wagon breathless and happy. The young woman took her seat. She was, once again, solemn as an old photograph and just as gnomic. Thus they resumed their creaking journey.

My mother was a shameless voyeur. All afternoon, she focused her gaze upon the woman, my dad occasionally poking her ribs to make her stop. My mum would look away, embarrassed, but drawn like a dog to a buried bone, she would be back at it before long, fixing to understand how a woman with no English could be seated between a hawk-nosed Loyalist with mutton chops and a shiningly elegant sextant. At last she could not deny her curiosity a minute longer. Shaking off my dad’s restraining hand, she crawled up to their seat and crouched there, a kid between two grown-ups. Dad couldn’t hear the words she spoke into the man’s ear (which was full of curly red hairs, as if the mutton chops grew from that source). Without batting an eye, the fellow pulled a ledger from inside his shirt. Mum crawled back to Dad, clutching her prize.

It was a surveyor’s notebook. The land was sketched in pencil, artfully, bulrushes to indicate marshland, and stands of maple, poplar, pencilled as if the words themselves were drawings of trees. He’d traced the meandering of the Assiniboine River, and identified each oxbow, the shifts in vegetation: “Oak, Elm & Ash” on the
south side, “Elm, Maple, Willow” to the north, “Principally Poplar & Thick Brush” in the bend. And within the margins his splendid sketches, a pair of mallards, a peregrine falcon, immature/mature, in flight/at rest, a burrowing owl with young (they looked like monkeys, but my mother didn’t know that, having never seen a monkey; thus, the young owls resembled young owls). My mother could not have been more moved by the sight of a painting at a museum. It was the first time she’d seen her unkempt new country represented in artistic form.

She tried to share her enthusiasm with Dad. But my father’s face was seamed with sorrow and he ran his worn fingers over the grid that lay upon the topography like a net, like a snare. My mother saw the land loved by an artist, but Dad saw the surveyor’s scribbles as scars inflicted on his weary freedom. He pointed to the surveyor’s remarks and watched my mother’s lips move as she read, “Little of the land has been cultivated, though the soil is rich black loam. The people who wander through it know nothing of agriculture and will not prove to be desirable landowners. It is my considered opinion that they will never give up their roving habits, unless, perhaps, faced with starvation.”

My parents descended for the last time at the first encounter with the Rivière Sale. The men nodded as impassively as a pair of duellists, and then the surveyor squinted at my dad and said, “I don’t believe I recall your name.”

“The name’s Peter McCormack,” said Dad. “This here’s my wife, Alice.”

The surveyor took a look at muddy little Alice and burst out laughing. Alice ignored him and reached longingly to touch the woman’s skirts. “Are you
his
wife?” she asked her.

“No! She ain’t my wife,” said the surveyor. “A bohunk. Belongs to the bohunk on the wagon on ahead some.”

The woman shrugged and met my mother’s eye, and revealed a reservoir of mirth vast as a decade of rain. As the wagon rolled out of sight, my parents heard the untamed wheezing of a hurdy-gurdy and then the woman’s lush voice singing in her mirror-imaged tongue.

T
HEY REACHED THE RED
. Already, my mother was starting to feel the nausea that would plague her through the course of my gestation. She was that kind of woman. Within hours of fertilization. There was for her no gradual acceleration or nuance of trimester. Maybe they hadn’t heard of trimesters in those days. Pregnant equalled pregnant. Full stop.

She tried to find a way to express to my father the radical change taking place within her. It was a mixture of joy and deep melancholy. She removed her hat and rubbed her head. She scratched her invisible balls. The freedom granted by her disguise was abruptly precious, now she was fated to lose it. She would never in her future life earn as much as she had earned as a boy. She would never enjoy a woman’s labours as she had thrilled to the work offered a scrawny seaman, a novice trapper or an unseasoned cowboy. The silver maples bore yellow seeds whose blades floated down on the early autumn wind. She scooped up a twig of seeds, hurrying to keep up with my dad, and with her nail she peeled seed after seed and put them in her mouth.

She searched her pockets as if looking for words, but found instead a spoon she’d brought from Scotland. It was the first in a collection of spoons she would harbour till her death. A worthless spoon, mostly nickel and crooked from riding in her pants, it was a king’s pattern with an obscure family crest upon its stem.

The riverbank sloped like a woman’s lap in a green-checkered apron bleached by a dry summer. They walked through cutgrass and blossoming thistle towards the muddy shore. There was a wide clay shoreline of baked, fishy mud, for the water was low. In the fissures between the clay tiles ran red long-legged spiders. They stood holding hands (in my mother’s other hand, the spoon like something growing, urgent), looking at the pale waves on the wide river, a broad view of the Red’s bend. Sweat formed on my mother’s upper lip. Fish smell and smoke. There, only fifty feet away, a bonfire. Tending it, a young Cree. He wore a wool coat in the heat, handsome clothing, a tall hat. He looked at my parents over his shoulder as if they were insectivores, maybe a couple of plovers eating spiders. They heard a screen door slam shut. From a wood shack, across the grassy slope, walked a woman carrying a baby in a papoose. Even from a distance, you could see she was beautiful. She, too, was dressed finely. She, too, threw my parents a brief, diffident glance before joining her partner by the fire.

From her molars, my mother tasted a bilious acid, the flavour of rotten apples. She was throwing up, projectile vomiting, before my father had time to turn around. It was a miracle because she hadn’t had any food in four days. Copious amounts. Things she’d never eaten, food not available in the Red River valley in
1869. Oranges and mango, artichokes and lichee nuts. The future cuisine of the Dominion. I say again, my father was the most compassionate man in the history of
Homo sapiens
, and he leaned towards my mother and held his hand to her forehead, supporting her head while she emptied her extrinsic puke. The acid made her voice as high-pitched as a whistle. “I need,” she said.

And Dad said, “Anything. Anything at all.”

“I need a home,” said my mother. And at once the nausea was gone. She stood, clear-headed, wiping her mouth, ecstatic.

Dad was already walking towards the campfire. He had the wisdom to stop halfway and sit down on a storm-fallen tree. My mum joined him. They stared at the water for three hours. The two couples ignored one another all afternoon and into the evening, when a waning moon climbed out of the forest in the south. Then my dad, looking at the old moon, said, “This is good land.”

The Cree nodded. The beautiful woman rocked to an unheard song.

“My woman is carrying a child,” said my dad.

The Cree gave him a scathing look. It was in bad taste to speak of one’s good fortune to a stranger.

“We need a home, see?” Dad persisted. “You’ve got—what?—I bet you’ve got 160 acres, am I right?”

No answer.

“We’ll pay a dollar an acre,” said Dad.

The Cree’s head went up. He motioned to the woman, who produced a bag with a beaded string and handed it to him. The Cree opened it, withdrew a piece of paper. “One hundred
and sixty dollars,” he said. My parents were startled by his voice, startled to hear a French timbre on the syllables.

My mother had the money she’d earned in her two years as a man. She’d kept it in her hat. She handed it to my father who handed it to the Cree who handed it to his beautiful woman. The two men shook hands. Thinking she might enjoy the privileges of manhood for a few more months, my mother also offered the Cree her hand, but he looked at her with gentle ridicule. He said, “Your baby will have a long life.” His voice was as soft as hide. Then he removed his hat and filled it with river water and doused the fire, and soon my mother and father were alone in the dusk on 160 acres of bush by the Red.

M
Y MOTHER WORSHIPPED WORDS
. Spoken, written, words of love, fibs, prayers, sung or shouted—she respected them all—jokes, bragging, any myth involving theft and the names of things that make the world vivid. She learned the local name for every growing thing on her new property. She had an ear for foreign words but hadn’t quite got them organized; she learned countless words of Cree and Ojibwa, French and German, but she was not yet tempted to assemble a sentence. Sometimes at the riverside, while she stroked her growing belly and watched the reflection of trees and sky upon the water, Alice would make up songs with words from whatever language came to mind, long melodic phrases strung together like exotic shish kebabs. She sang high-pitched and childishly, and my dad liked to stand in the grass near by and listen.