When Alice Lay Down With Peter Read online

  October II was my dad’s birthday, and they were going to quit work early and celebrate by heating up the icy river water for a bath. My mother had made a few friends in the parish of St. Norbert, which at that time was a vast area running about ninety miles south to the American border, though like us, most people homesteaded close to the junction of the Red and the Rivière Sale or ten miles north, where the Red met the Assiniboine River at the village of Winnipeg. There weren’t many people anywhere in those days, and Alice was hoping to store up on some companionship before the snow arrived to pen them in. A Ukrainian woman from the adjacent homestead, with whom my mother shared many bewildering “conversations,” had given them a rain barrel, and it was this that they would use for a special birthday bath.

  They preferred to be naked, even on a chilly day, as a way of celebrating their isolation and as a means of memorizing, without access to paper or pen, my mother’s burgeoning physique. Though it was early in my gestation, my mother had a belly like something carved of blue marble, and her breasts were full, pink, warm to touch. So there they were, unimpaired, parading about their fresh-cut homestead, when a broad-shouldered man upon a roan mare appeared out of the blue.

  The wind was from the south that day and carried the sound of his approach away from the river. Such was the man’s stature, his dignity, his command, that my parents stood surprised but unabashed before him, naked as the day. The stranger was of gentlemanly demeanour and, as they would soon learn, of such a visionary temperament that he looked down at my father and mother each in turn, full into their eyes, and they knew beyond doubt that this great man was looking directly into their souls. He never even realized they were unclothed.

  Quickened by the wind, the mare backed away a four-step and he kicked her into a march on the spot, though she drifted sideways and my naked parents followed, unknowing. Mum yearned to touch the red folds of the mare’s neck, where sweat clustered the hair, oily and sweet-smelling. He was a handsome man with a wonderful complexion. He looked about their shaggy clearing, the blond sap in the tree stumps, fresh-cut logs stacked beside the shack. He read the age and extent of their homestead in that quick glance. When he again regarded my parents, it was with optimism, the expectation of goodwill. His voice carried easily on the wind. “You have newly come to this place,” he announced. “Yet we make you welcome.”

  “Well, thank you,” said my father, holding up his hand. “Peter McCormack.”

  “I am Louis Riel,” said the man. He was looking again at the land, as if that was where he located human rhetoric, in fences and sod shacks. He winced in pain, thinking. “The Canadians have come with their chains, to steal our land from us.”

  “Well, we paid, you see,” Peter began, and drifted off, uncertain. This fellow, so appealing, so obviously in charge. Peter hoped to find himself on his side, which would appear to be in opposition to these Canadians. Until that very moment, my parents had entirely forgotten the political aspects of their own desires.

  “They do not respect the laws of our tradition,” said Louis Riel. “They do not even honour our right to live here peacefully, as we have for so many years. This is our native land.”

  “Yes, well, see, we’re entirely committed—”

  Riel turned his brown eyes upon my parents. “You are not Métis. Yet you have sympathy.”

  “Well, see,” said Peter, “we liked the hunt.”

  “Ah.” Riel nodded sadly. “You liked the hunt.” Their pact was firm and real. “But we will farm okay too,” he added, with that wilful optimism. “Mais mes amis, these Canadians, they do not follow the contour of the land with their bizarre maps. It is a madness to place their lines so. Such stupid lines make no way for our cattle to get the water. And the fat size of their claims. One hundred and eighty acres, why? That is too large to farm such. It is of no sense. Very clumsy, these new people.”

  “One-eighty acres. That’s a big parcel.” Peter looked guiltily at Alice. “Awful big.”

  “Why do they?” asked Riel, his boyish perplexity mixed with that brilliant intellect, and my mother and father leaned towards him, my mum’s belly pulling her towards the heat of the mare.

  “Well, if there’s anything we can do—”

  “Even now”—Riel nodded gravely—“now, the Canadian emissary is laying the chains of our subjugation.”

  “Red hair, curly, seems to grow out of his…” My father indicated with his hands the source of the surveyor’s mutton chops.

  Riel nodded, and for a moment the two men shared a mutual revulsion of man, mutton chops, sextant, chains, pencil. Then Riel drew himself up as if to knight my chilly, naked parents. “We invite you to join our struggles, today, this moment,” he said.

  They followed him. They dressed quickly and followed him. My mother hadn’t given up the privileges of trousers, and so it was assumed that Louis Riel had acquired the help of two more men, one rather effeminate. For it truly was him. The revolutionary, soon to be the prophet Louis David Riel. And they would not spend that first winter in the shack upon their own land. They would find themselves (my mother hiding my globe-like presence beneath a buffalo robe) in an army. And before the vernal equinox, they would betray each other. And before my birth, they would forgive each other. And in that way, my mother and father brought me into a world of hope, of largesse. An environment thriving on its differences, on a lovingly nurtured variety that would expire so gradually I never noticed its diminishment—not until I was forced to see how small, how uniform, the world had become, not until I was ancient, reluctant, under the uncompromising tutelage of hawk-eyed Dianna, the great-granddaughter of my soldier-mum.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING TO DAD. Perhaps the cause was too pure, the moment too precipitous. The Hudson’s Bay Company was tired of trying to govern that huge territory called Rupert’s Land, 1.5 million square miles—the entire drainage system of Hudson Bay—granted by King Charles II back in 1670 to those true lords and proprietors, “the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” Rupert’s Land, the Hudson’s Bay Company freehold, was 40 per cent of what would eventually become Canada. And in 1869, all that land was sold to an Eastern, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon powerhouse for £300,000. Cash. No one living in the old freehold could guess the future. My dad, Peter, got so nervous he developed a tic in his left eye.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Crown struck the deal in March. But no one thought to mention it to the twelve thousand people living in the Red River Colony. They read about the sale a month later, in the newspaper.

  It’s always off-putting to be sold. The folks living south of Winnipeg, the French and the Métis and anyone else who, like my parents, had yearned for freedom, were sick at heart. Their new government, they were informed, would be run by a lieutenant-governor, an Orangeman, William McDougall, and his “appointed” council. But if this Canada wanted to buy their land, why couldn’t they buy it from the people who were living here? Indian, Métis, French. Is there an original owner of such land? This is what comes from settling down, my dad thought sadly, guiltily, his left eye twitching. You become simultaneously self-righteous and hypocritical. Where did he and Alice belong if not here, on the banks of the Red, the land bought from the Cree? And now bought again from under them by this thing, this Canada. And there was me to consider, the rubber ball in Alice’s belly, growing, making my innocent demands to colonize a raw and beautiful place, St. Norbert, the land he had begun to love.

  Early in November, Riel’s soldiers, the Committee of Safety, slipped inside the Hudson’s Bay Company’s stone headquarters, Fort Garry, what they called the Upper Fort, and took control. And when they controlled Fort Garry, they effectively controlled Rupert’s Land. It was a coup. Louis Riel established what he called a provisional government.

  The Red River Colony fell into the grips of a standoff: annexationists (largely English-speaking Protestants, some of them more eager to join the United States than Canada) on one
side; the Métis, Catholic, French on the other. (The Indians—Saulteaux and Sioux—truly parenthetical, were out in the cold, unimpressed by the Métis coup, which must have struck them as little more than another colonization.)

  Alice and Peter preferred the company of “rebels,” and were duly assigned to the dormitory called Bachelor’s Hall at Upper Fort Garry. At the fort, my dad, finding himself in a gap between governments, in the cleavage of the old fur-trade monopoly and the new Eastern cartel, began cautiously to cheer up. “A provisional government,” Peter said, rolling the words on his tongue. “Provisional.” The fresh snow rippled around him. So it was at Bachelor’s Hall, in the cold stone fort, that my gestation would take place. This was where Alice and Peter would winter, in isolate paranoia, disguise and the grievous error of violence.

  It was not easy. They were sentries, my father on day shift, my mother working nights. My mother’s disguise forced her to suppress her instinct for cleanliness (they would never take that birthday bath), and in the cold nights, she would climb the bastions of the fort to look south down the Red, where her homestead lay like a sleeping giant, and imagine the rain barrel full of hot river water.

  Fort Garry, occupied by Riel’s Committee of Safety and comprising voyageurs and buffalo hunters armed with muskets and revolvers and hunting knives, was an opera house of male fellowship, and while the men were generous with their fraternal affections, my mother’s condition was leading her inexorably down the path towards maternity, and in the midst of their chivalry, she felt alienated, chippy, small-minded and sad. And the men were just a little offended by this rotund and fastidious man who would not take a bath. For my own part, I feel that my congenital affection for male companionship and my tolerance for all forms of bacteria were fostered in utero.

  It must be said: my father fell in love. They were the same age, my dad and Louis Riel, only twenty-five. Dad was impressionable; it was part of his lifelong charm, a curious empathy for endangered species. He loved the smells of wet wool and sweat, the manly, casual scent of Bachelor’s Hall. From Riel’s provisional government, a consummate state would emerge, alive to the possibilities of—imagine!—the chance for betterment, simply that; a fair shake. In the rebel leader with the comely moustache, my father had found a champion. In the company of Métis soldiers, a feral home. When Riel raised the Métis flag, a fleur-de-lis and a shamrock against a pure white background, my father shouted with joy. Being neither Métis nor French, nor Irish, my exiled Orkney dad at last could pledge allegiance to the flag of impossibilities, of digression on the narrow path to motherland. He was like someone enthralled by Passion music, singing with his optimistic tenor the Passion of St. Riel.

  His zeal was chaste. He loved the company of men. He was imaginative. My mother was a man. Step one on the road to revolution. He had uncanny intuition. When he listened to Riel, my dad would stand with his head at an angle, his entire body listening with an intensity that locked his jaw shut, curled his toes inside his boots. He listened like an osprey listens to fish at the bottom of a lake. But like a bird, fish, buffalo, he was overwhelmed by external forms. He forgot that the corpulent night sentry with the crabby mouth was his parturient wife. It slipped his mind.

  Winter was a sullen season. In the valley of the Red River, a bitter blanket of snow smothered the settlers’ hopes. The future was dark as night, short as day. It was twenty below. Wind blew down from Hudson Bay, snow around the log houses hardened like some terrible parking lot of the future, and the grey sky sucked the light from the miserly sun. Christmas came and New Year’s passed. My father slapped Mum once on the back and gave her a bear hug that lifted her from the ground. Then he laughed and rode away, for he had again become a scout, and he spent his days roving the fields with the other scouts, stopping for a pipe in the windbelt by the Red, warming himself with tea and sugar because booze was forbidden by the pious Riel.

  Wrapped in a great white capote, her womb hardened in a sustained contraction, stumbling through the drifts, my mother went out one afternoon to study her own misery. The brittle crust broke underfoot, plunging her up to her thighs in granular snow; the crust cut her flesh, and around her, like dust or nebulae, eddies of snow swirled in the lustreless light. She had never been so lonely. If it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for my thumb-sized feet under her rib cage and our murmuring prenatal dialogue, Mum herself might have turned to dust in the sinus-stinging dryness of that cruel winter of 1870.

  She was at the end of her rope. Her nose ran, her tears froze like sleepydust upon her eyelids, and she called my father’s name into the mean winter air. She wore a toque over her ears, and snow is a great baffle, so she didn’t hear the approach of a man on horseback until she saw the mare’s legs, oxblood red against the numb blue snow, and heard the warm breath through the creature’s nostrils and looked up past the shaggy head into the ruddy face of Louis Riel. Riel couldn’t bear to think that one of his men would indulge in the sin of self-pity, and so he preferred to think that my mother was praying. “Pardon my intrusion upon your spiritual exercise,” he said to her. My mother smiled. “If a horse you would find,” he said, “a messenger I need.”

  He sent her ten miles north, to Kildonan. She was to spy on the militant party of Canadian annexationists who were holed up at the old stone fort there. It was said they’d taken a prisoner. She hooked her capote over the saddle horn to hide the fact that she rode sidesaddle, hoping to delay my birth. We were cantering over the frozen river, a foolhardy act but exhilarating for both of us. The horse voiced its breath, lungs drumming, and its body warmed her legs, reminding her of how desperately she needed to be touched, and she hid her face from the wind, so she didn’t see the rider overtaking her from the east or the frantic man running towards us. He spread-eagled across the packed drifts and steadied his rifle with his elbows and fired, vaguely in our direction. Our horse went down, starboard side to, but my mother skipped off unhurt and made a beeline for our assailant. She assumed our horse had been shot. She didn’t look behind her, or she would have seen the other rider lying bleeding in the snow. She ran towards the rifle; she wanted to warn the man, his bright red Assomption sash indicating that he was one of us, that the Canadians were after him. But the fellow panicked. He figured my mum was one of his captors come to carry him back to jail, and he closed his eyes and fired again. Mum was close enough to see his terrified face. It was poor Parisien, the slow-witted woodcutter. Just as she reached him, there came a flurry of horses carrying ragged, underdressed Canadians. Parisien wept and begged in French for mercy, but they chased him and swung from their horses with great oak clubs like primitive polo mallets, sporty and larking.

  Mum stumbled underfoot, and when one of the Canadians jumped down, she grabbed his arm, beseeching him to show mercy, but the fellow (a tall young man with skim-milk skin and a peevish, twisted face) shook my mother off with such strength that she flew back and struck her head against Parisien’s rifle. When she became aware of the warm blood between her legs, it produced her first spasm of maternal vigilance. She lay where she fell, afraid to move, horrified by what she witnessed.

  “You goddamn son of a bitch,” the skinny man wheezed through his nose and upper palate, the words steamed upwards by the heat of his rage. He staggered on the thin soles of leather riding boots like he’d just stepped out of a saloon, wearing a light jacket, and in bare hands whitened with frostbite, he gripped an axe. The back of Parisien’s head was flattened by oversleeping and a cowlick sprung up at the top. “You goddamn half-breed fool. You ugly son of a bitch. You depraved idiot, you half-breed Indian Catholic bitch dog. You Pap, you Papist pap pap pop popery.” He slowed to take aim. Simple Parisien sat up, licked his finger and tried to calm his cowlick. The skinny Orangeman smirked and swung, and a broad gash opened the skull of Norbert Parisien. “Gotcha, you son of a bitch half-breed!”

  Parisien sat still, his eyes drawn upwards, as if to look at the back of his own skull, and his face was transported, tranquil. Hi
s assailant stopped for a split second, the freezing air abruptly full of fear. Then, as if to overcome his own fright, the fellow yanked the red Assomption sash from Parisien’s waist, tied it to the pommel, fastened the other end about Parisien’s neck and, jumping into the saddle, kicked his horse into a trot, dragging the limp bundle over the snow. The sash and the blood from the wound left a watery red stain on the ice. The horse stumbled, confused by the uneven weight it pulled, and my mother lay back and looked up at the blank white sky, feeling the urgency of my coming between her legs, thinking of our mutual blood, how it would melt with spring and confirm for the river its English name.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HUGH SUTHERLAND WAS DEAD.

  He had been on a mission from his father to deliver a message to the Canadians at the other fort when he’d overtaken my mother, his horse racing behind her, over the waves of snow upon the river. Shot in the chest by Norbert Parisien the woodcutter. Parisien would stubbornly manage to stay alive for another few weeks.