When Alice Lay Down With Peter (49 page)

That very night around the campfire, guitars and wine and stinkweed, Noddy begged Dianna to “stop looking at him with those eyes.” Dianna turned away for his sake.

Noddy and the girls liked us, even though we were
straight
. We had finally been out-squatted. They had no mirrors in their hippie camp. But they looked into the mirror all the time; all they saw, or would see, was themselves. In the lotus position. “East,” Noddy said, “has met West.”

J
ACK, IN A RED WOOL SHIRT
with that long, loping stride, walks from the potato patch down the slope of lawn to the willow mess at the riverside. Drink has not diminished his physical strength. He lopes down the gangway to the floating dock, which he himself has repaired. The green river curdles, but when you look straight down, the water shows red-grey. It’s the same water we used to swim in, and of course it’s not.

Dianna has seen him cross the lawn; she sees his shoulders and the handsome neck, the blue shadow of his jaw. But by the time she reaches the dock, she has been joined by Noddy and the girls. Suddenly everybody is on the dock, which keels and gurgles foolishly.

“Man, it’s hot,” says Noddy.

Pisces touches Jack’s arm. “Aren’t you dying in that thing?”

And Aquarius teases, “Why don’t you take it off?”

Jack’s eyes dart to Dianna, surprising her.

Noddy is taking off his shirt and pants. “I don’t care if that water’s
nuclear
, man, I’m going in.”

Noddy and the girls strip naked and leap into the river, up to their knees in gumbo. A medallion dangles on Noddy’s breastbone. Dianna is shocked to see how skinny he is, his dark hair and remarkably long penis hung from hip bones like dinner plates. The mud here is almost quicksand. She calls to them
to be careful. They are splashing each other; they are “free spirits.” Pisces says, “Okay, Mum.” Pisces has nipples like rosehips. When they climb out of the water, they smell of fish and excrement. Aquarius is already scratching, though perhaps it’s psychological.

Dianna helps Jack hose them off. They use all the water in the rain barrels and everything left in the cistern. The children still smell sour. Jack smiles, but he is always disinterested. He holds a hose against Aquarius’s blue flanks.

Dianna turns off the pump. Jack lays the hose on the grass. The smell of mud is intimate. Jack teases them while they move to dry ground, lie down and lean back on their tanned arms and flick water from their hair. A drop of water remains in the cup of bone beneath the throat. Behind their closed eyes, the light is red. Small smiles upon their faces illustrate that happiness is simple.

Dianna decides to give that sentiment its full expression.

She walks away, then breaks into a run. Jack lifts his head, twitches the air. The hot day has turned a strange yellow. Thunder travels through the oak trees and under their feet.

Eli and I felt the storm like a cold glass placed over the yard. There could be hail. Eli grunted while he plucked green tomatoes off the vine. The colours were excitable and strained. I heard Eli, and the flesh of tomatoes and beans hit the woodbox, and the children giggle in the clapping maples, elfish voices entwined with a cold wind cutting into the heat. My back was in knots, but I kept going. Under the brim of my hat, I saw the hem of Dianna’s skirt as she ran by. Hail for sure, and this our best garden in years.

Down at the end of the oxbow, five tall pines emerged from the stand of black spruce near my parents’ graves. Separated by an expanse of clover, alfalfa, dogwood shrub were the cattail and rushes of the slough, and then Ida’s grave with its pink fieldstone marker. Jack followed Dianna. The blue leaves of locoweed lit the path to where the grotto was almost buried in the trees. Dianna, teeth clenched, sucking air. Behind her (she didn’t dare to look), Jack would be coming. The scattered rain hit so cold she gasped, yet the heat was stifling. Dodging rolls of thunder as if they were missiles, she made it to the pine stand in that horrified glare of sheet lightning. At last she was unnerved, unlucid. She stroked her breasts; the smell of dye from her skirts rose like alcohol; where rain hit, it steamed upon her. She had almost won, she had nearly proven the simplicity of happiness. It would cure the world. Jack was the aperture through which she would invent her own life. If only he’d hurry.

At last he found her under the pine trees, his red shirt like a lit match. His face was suddenly haggard, he seemed almost frightening when the irony was stripped away. She drew him into Marie’s grotto. His clothes hung from his bed frame. The room was the inside of a bomb. He touched her, committing himself to that touch.

When the lightning hit the pine, it passed to the black spruce and over to the cabin like a hammer on a nail. It drove the lovers down through the earth, which gave way upon the ruins of Marie’s grotto, the scarce touch of stone beneath Jack’s restoration. Sap exploded, pine cones burst, needles roared into flame. He entered her and lifted her up like a burning flag. The roof blew away and they clung together through a snowstorm of
seeds, an explosion of gunpowder, a cluster of hot stars kindled between them.

Then they were running. Jack ran behind her. Through the path towards the meadow under a tower of burning trees. Dianna held a branch of black spruce. She looked back, then stopped. Jack slowed down and stood close to her. He touched her face. He was utterly foreign to her. And then he turned and ran. His red shirt disappeared down the path.

Dianna retraced the path, back to the burning trees. The roof was gone and the black walls of Marie’s cabin were like worm-eaten leaves. The fire smouldered, but it seemed it might die. She searched till she found the deadest pine, and there she laid her kindling, on the dry grass beneath the dead tree. She watched it burst into flames.

The wind, which had been light and from the west, suddenly gusted and veered to the east. Fire ran up and leapt across the tops of the trees; it travelled much faster than Dianna could run. She was surrounded by fire. The heat hit her as hard as a baseball bat and threw her out towards the river. She was standing in the mud at the riverbank. She saw the flames travel from the tip of the oxbow, through the spruce grove, over the stock dam, through the butterfly field, the mosquito netting an orange membrane; it consumed the cottage with its carved wood and travelled up the road to our house, where it devoured even the box that held the tomatoes.

The two girls fled east. It was Noddy who carried Eli out on his back, and we ran with the flames till we found the road. The wind dropped, but the fire made its own gale. Noddy went back in. He found Jack at the shed, fighting to get the glider free.
The boy got into my car. He and Jack hauled the plane out of its shed and towed it to the west and then angled towards the fire, Noddy speeding nearly into the burning ash trees at our drive, braking fiercely, but the glider was already in the air. It lifted on heat, in the firestorm, a thermal that carried Jack high. The glider’s pearly underbelly turned orange, gold, black, and its wings blushed and as it flew higher it became a pale pink bird, paler and paler, and soon it flew so high it was a new moon, a pure white spur with Mars in its hook.

I
N
THE UNFOCUSED AFTERNOON OF FIRST THAW
, especially after a hard winter, the quiet is unruffled by a loose muffler on a pickup driven ineptly, gears grinding. Black mud is very black, and snow as it melts turns the bluest shade of white. The road is lined with puddles, and as the old red pickup splashes through them, the sound is softened by the mists of melting snow.

The truck is equipped with brackets for carrying glass, huge sheets of glass that reflect the feathered sky and crisp black twigs, charred claws of burned trees. Occasionally, Bill jumps out, a halo-headed man as calm as morning, and he hauls the corpse of a spruce off the driveway, jumps back in, drives on. He drives to the end of the road, stopping often to clear the way, and when he comes to its conclusion, he continues. He has to dodge the field-stones, but otherwise it’s clear sailing for about twenty yards, when the truck becomes mired in mud up to its axles.

This is a man who does not curse. In a sense, that’s what makes him happy. He jumps out of the truck and gingerly, one by one, removes the two-by-sixes he’s salvaged from somewhere, and he makes a sidewalk over the mud to a spot beside the slough, a ring of cataract-coloured ice with lashes of burnt cattails. Here is where he will build his daughter a house and studio.

He builds a Dutch frame in the shape of two hands with their fingers pressed together, its southwest and northeast sides
made of glass. When Dianna arrives six weeks later, she holds her skirts above the mud and ash and enters a cedar-smelling prism. The light, bright and austere, falls from a sky that was long accustomed to branches, arrives like an immigrant pleased to have shed an exhausted past.

These are our ruins: the standing trees like black toothpicks, the stone floor and the remains of an iron chimney, a green copper box that once held Seneca root. Bits of pottery, scorched clamshells. And Ida’s granite headstone. Gone are the deer paths in the woods, the trails between the houses. And of course, there is no trace of the lilies that marked the graves of Alice and Peter.

There’s not much left of our houses at all. The land has changed shape. The river comes close. All summer long it will circle her, flow east on one side, west on the other. The seagulls come back, but they’re almost outnumbered by owls and hawks because the mice and snakes are plentiful.

The first thing to grow is fungus. She draws the mushrooms at the base of burnt trees. Then the June grass, arrow grass, thistle, and slowly, poplar, birch, willow sprout up from underground roots. It is Dianna’s ideal environment, at the cusp between the dead and the living. Saplings, moist green against black ash. Paradise.

When it rains, paradise turns into Hades. The mice drown in new streams flowing where there once were paths. Dianna will be housebound for as long as the ground lies saturated, for a very long time, because the big roots are dead. The rain just runs off.

Dianna’s baby arrives on one such night, in a downpour. She’d felt birth pains for three days. I’m not clairvoyant, but
I’m old and I can count, so I know, when Bill’s truck stops at the last firm ground, we’re not a minute too soon. To the whumping sound of the windshield wipers, gazing ahead into the rainy night, we see the ghosts scatter from the headlights. “Well,” I say to Bill, “we’ll walk from here. And we’d better be quick.”

Some of my father’s old fencing still stands, marking nowhere from elsewhere. We hurry as best we can, Eli’s wooden leg causing us some slowdown. Dianna’s house is lit up, a glass palace, and when we climb the stairs, we find the door wide open and the mice leaping about on the floor and in the rafters.

Dianna is in the loft, like a whelping box. Bill heaves me up, and I find her sweating, soaking wet. She’s taller than I remember, and the hands that grip the bedpost are powerful, sinewy, with veins of blue twine. The baby is already half-born. So I only have to open my hand and she’s out. Dianna falls back onto the pillows. And sees her daughter’s face for the first time. Dark hair, black eyes. Born with her eyes open.

We’re busy for a while, cleaning them up, and only when I’ve wrapped the infant and returned her to her mother do I really see her. She’s infinitely familiar. And infinitely new. We light the candles. The mice play, and rain runs down the glass and the ghosts sit in the shadows. Alice and Peter are there, and Marie, and even the damp Orangeman, Thomas Scott, his clothes ill-fitting, his shoes wet. I long to speak with my mother and father. They don’t glance my way but sit in silence, they on their side, we on ours. I search for Helen, but she’s not there. My heart gapes open. I do get tired of the raw part of living. Morning has not been thought of when the shades grow remote and fade. Receding in the dark, they travel past Dianna and her
infant. Dianna has removed the swaddling blankets so as to stroke and admire the beautiful girl. As our guests pass by, a mark appears upon the baby’s chest, a tiny plum, a burnt kiss. Dianna cries out and touches the mark with her lips, as if to keep it there. In the gaunt light of dawn, we make our beds and soon we are asleep. In our brief sleep, Helen wanders through our dreams, and when Dianna awakes she feels the greatest happiness it is possible to feel. She names her daughter Helen.

When the sun dries the mud, we begin again to pace out the place where the garden will be. Bill, with some hired help, builds us a brand-new shack near by. Jack doesn’t come, and I begin to think he’s among the crows who have taken up residence in the single remaining oak tree, but I don’t say a word to anyone, not even to Eli. When you are my age, you can’t afford to seem flaky and it’s best to appear matter-of-fact.

We live there in peace for many years. Dianna has the stubborn, rather frightened dignity of one who has chucked everything and gained everything in the same grand gesture. She always wears three skirts. She continues to draw: marshland, growth under the weight of decay. We search the oxbow for signs of Helen. And everywhere, there are signs.

We plant an orchard where the pines once grew. In their fourth summer, they blossom. That is the summer Eli passes on. My hands reach for him. I continue to talk to him, and his silence, obdurate, relentless, wears away at my happiness. Death never does become less shocking. For a long time I consider following him, but I do grow curious to see the fruitfulness of the apple trees. And besides, my great-granddaughter has the blackest
hair, the reddest lips and the most insolent habits ever known to womankind. She’s running across my garden, the sun soaking into her long hair. We’re overrun with wild cucumber. She has become a high and mighty young woman, and she’s absolutely no help at all with the weeding. I’m tempted to chase her out of here before she tramples my delicate nest of meadowlarks hidden, there, doesn’t she see it? Among the blue-eyed grass.