When Alice Lay Down With Peter Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2001 by Margaret Sweatman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in 2001 by Alfred A. Knopf

  Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  An excerpt from this novel, in slightly altered form, has

  been published in Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape, ed.

  Pamela Banting (Victoria, B.C.: Polestar, 1998).

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Sweatman, Margaret

  When Alice lay down with Peter

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36598-9

  I. Title.

  PS8587.W36W43 2001 C813.′54 C2001-930581-8

  PR9199.3.S93W43 2001

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the falting together; and a little child shall lead them.

  And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

  They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

  —Isaiah II:6-7, 9

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION based on the history of St. Norbert, in Manitoba. Though it draws on historical research, the storyteller, Blondie McCormack, and her family are born of the imagination, and of the landscape, an oxbow in the Red River.

  The story begins with what is called the Métis resistance, in 1869—1870, in the largely rural area of St. Norbert, in the province of Manitoba, Canada, on the beautiful land where my family and I lived until our yard finally floated away with the Red River floods in the 1990s. The Métis were reacting to the powerful influx of Protestant white settlers, to the loss of their language rights and the ownership of their land. Their leader, Louis Riel, still provokes either passionate loyalty or bitterness in many Canadians. Some people argue that he was mad, or a liquor trader. I think those versions of Riel are highly implausible, though he did have a visionary temperament, much out of vogue. At any rate, Riel was held responsible for the death of the Orangeman Thomas Scott, who was shot by a firing squad in 1870, so they hanged him and later called him a founding father of Manitoba. Manitobans have a history of electing the same people we put in jail.

  This book is written in loving memory of a particular piece of land by the Red River.

  And it is dedicated to my daughters, Bailey and Hillery, and to Glenn Buhr.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Prologue

  Part One - 1869 Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two - 1885 Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Three - 1900 Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Four - 1902 Chapter One

  Chapter Two - 1906: Helen’s Education

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six - 1911

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven - 1914

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen - Goodbye, Richard. Write

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen - The Magna Carta!

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Five - 1921 Chapter One

  Chapter Two - 1929

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Six Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven - 1962

  Chapter Eight - 1964

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten - 1970

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I’M DIPPING MY PEN into the Red River, always at the same spot, and like they say, all the time into a different river. I have hauled this story out of the fish-smelling muck of the Red, where the willows have fallen, twisted from the spring flood. On the riverbank, thistle pricks your legs and wild cucumber pops underfoot and it all smells like cooked mud.

  Right here, there was a fence of willow posts and chicken wire but it fell down thirty-five years ago, and even then I was too damn old to fix it, so the crazy cucumber grew over it. It’s too early and too dry for mosquitoes. The only sound is the highway in the distance, and the cooing of the mourning doves.

  The heat smells of cut grass, damp clumps of it, an extreme green. It’s the end of May. The honeysuckle, cherry, crabapple and plum blossoms are full of bees, like pink-and-white hives in the sun. The scene is entirely benign. No dog on a chain, no malice in the shade, no fear and no ache in your veins. From this lucid perspective, you see me. I am laid out beside my vegetable garden.

  When I was seventy-two, I grew a watermelon the size of a tractor tire. You wouldn’t think a garden could sense the age of its gardener, but now everything grows stunted, even the carrots, spindly as a baby’s finger. Beside me on the grass are a green plastic watering can, leaking its rainwater into my ear, and my hoe, which I must have struck when I fell because there appears to be a small cut on my forehead just beneath my curls. I am wearing my Adidas, the only sensible shoes since moccasins, with knee-high stockings, my old kilt and blouse, and a blue cardigan sweater. My hat is lying upturned in the grass.

  I didn’t put on a brassiere this morning. I was simply going to do the corn rows before breakfast. I couldn’t predict that I’d be seen by anybody outside the family. Since Eli passed on, I have relished my solitude. So it was that I put on yesterday’s skirt and blouse, and in the innocence of routine, I went to the garden with my hoe. Softened and kneaded by the loving hands of morning, I did up only the three pearl buttons between my collarbone and my wishbone. I was play-acting, pretending I was young. To my delight, I felt a flush of sexual desire, tender as rain.

  I am not a big-chested woman, especially now, of course. My arms sag and my armpits have jowls. The buttons tore off when I fell, and so it is that you see an old woman’s breasts, which are like very overripe peaches. I have always had lovely breasts, small as they are. And that devil’s kiss, my birthmark, brown as an acorn, at the cusp of rib and breast. It is certainly provocative in its own way. And if you stretch the word a million miles, sexy. Though I am old. I am 109 years of age, since the twelfth of this month. Born on a hot day in 1870. I would have to admit, I am ancient. And today, which happens to
be a Tuesday, I am dead as a stick.

  PART ONE

  1869

  CHAPTER ONE

  THESE ARE MY BEGINNINGS.

  Imagine heat. In the coupled loins of Alice (wearing wool pants and a heavy flannel shirt and, strangest of all, leather chaps, for he’d taken her while they chased a herd of thirsty cattle east from Turtle Mountain to the Pembina hills) and her skinny, ardent husband, Peter. Hot as liquor, the juice that made me, on the night of August’s showering meteors in a warm wind sweet with sage. They were alone under cowboy stars beside the embers of a campfire, laughing in their lovemaking. The most successful practical jokers in all the colony. Their britches whispered as leaves in the breeze when they rustled and rubbed together. He thrust inside her and she wrapped her chaps around him and drew her knees up to his shoulders while the seed ran down, itching and hot. A woman in her precarious circumstance must interrupt at all costs and they were careful to spill, laughing. My mum and dad, in God’s House of Lords, members of the opposition.

  They’d been travelling with a half-dozen men, a sad bunch of Métis buffalo hunters reduced to driving cattle for a retired Hudson’s Bay Company officer. It had been a long month for them, feigning manly indifference to each other’s earthy scent under the duress of my mother’s disguise. It made them hot. And a little silly. And when the men had left them alone that night with instructions to return for the stragglers, a cow and her calf that had been separated from the herd, they both shrugged and spat and threw down their bedrolls, grunting acquiescence.

  A lovely night, the stars above. Hunger from a long fast, constant temptation and the arousal, perhaps you know of it, that comes from watching a lover’s freedom or solitude, the aphrodisiac of the lover’s face averted, the part that leaves you out.

  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.

  THEY 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 tow
n. He was nowhere to be found.

  ALICE 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.