When Alice Lay Down With Peter (6 page)

My mother awoke first and propped herself up, chilling the space between her bare chest and Dad’s. She thought she heard someone breathing. It was the great lungs of the river, breathing like a god on the run. The lid of ice had broken overnight. Field snow from the Dakotas was pouring into the northern delta. It flooded the willow banks and rose up beside them, rushing by. She watched an ice floe smash into the full-grown elm below them, clipping it like the stalk of a sunflower, the tree crashing against the brush, and before Peter had woken up, the current had clawed the elm into its ragged passage. My father awoke and saw and heard and gathered the bedding and carried her up to higher ground all in one motion.

Their shack was washed away to Lord Selkirk’s stunted farms up north. But they were lucky. The weather stayed dry, crisply clear. The river rose another four feet and then stopped. For weeks it was a stranger, stopping just short of real violence, racing through the willow paths. My parents listened to it breaking the branches, gnawing at the banks, while around them the cleared land lay mute, white grass at dawn, warming to a muddy gold. My father dreamed that the seasons would relent and make this the last winter the earth would ever endure.

My mother loved the flood. She couldn’t fence in her gratitude. She shucked off her fat man’s trousers for a full bright red cotton dress and a thousand knitted shawls. “Glory,” my mother said. “God praise the motion of melted ice. Glory for fingers of heat, and a man’s body to nest me. Lord, grant me fast, awesome events, and oh please Lord, protect me from tiny things and boredom.”

She’d grown accustomed to crude amniotic energy, and she spent her mornings seated on the stinking buffalo robes in a heathen’s communion with the Red. With her innate genius for polyglossia, she was speaking to the fast, mucky river-flow and it was teaching her the terrible imperatives of water, flood, birth. She went into a trance, breathing so slowly that Dad wondered if she’d died, though he didn’t disturb her, so mesmerizing was her sympathy for the fearsome meters, its deep, fast currents and an intermittent piccolo or childish sirens, and the icebergs like tiles torn off the Coliseum.

They learned their lesson well. They built the second house high behind the crescent of wood that made a natural dike. The new
house was made of logs plastered with clay, a nice little place with a kitchen. Later, when Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald realized that the “impulsive Half-breeds” would need to be “kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers”—that is, Protestant Anglo settlers—and allowed the right kind of settlers to stake vacant land wherever they found it, Dad put up sheds and fences and a stable. If you didn’t build a lot of “improvements” on your land, you couldn’t prove you owned it—weird and probably illegal manoeuvrings, but effective because no Métis hunter would have the time or the money to build that kind of thing. So while all around us Métis and half-breeds were being kicked off their land, my dad was busy putting up fences and sheds. And a barn, because even though he was nestling into the farming parish of St. Norbert, he would always be more naturally a buffalo hunter than a farmer, and while he rarely kept many cows, he at one time boasted six horses. The fire has long since taken all that away, but the high wooded riverbank lasted for years, and many springs we crouched behind it.

My father never did tell my mother his fears: how he didn’t really believe things would ever grow back, how the execution of Thomas Scott had changed the world. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He had forgiven her. He knew she was guilt-stricken; that was enough punishment for anybody. But the deaths he’d known were healthy, as full of vitality as procreation. He’d seen many friends die—on the hunt, in the neighbourhood—and while he wept for the dead, somewhere in sorrow there slept the sugar and starch for new growth, a hibernation underground, for life gnarled in the roots.

But such was not the case in the death of Thomas Scott.

T
HE FINAL MONTH OF MY GESTATION
was spent in meditation, a dance, a joke and unreasonable hope. They stopped talking out loud, my mum and dad. They built the house and tilled a tiny garden. An animal-quiet hummed between them, a dumb contentment.
Le président
had announced the return of civil rule. Near our homestead, the great barricade was dismantled, and Peter joined the men for several blissful days of camaraderie while they tore down the obstacles to peace. Their Métis comrades-in-arms were astonished to learn that Alice was a woman, and they were delighted by the ruse (though they might have looked at her funny, this woman who had insisted upon executing Thomas Scott). The geese had returned, proud and plump and yelling, and on Sunday mornings the great bells at the St. Norbert Convent clamoured for miles and miles down the river, rising through warm, blue air.

Everything was new. Mail moved freely and uncensored. There was a general amnesty. Amnesty for geese, for gardens, for the Métis; amnesty for husbands who enjoy the company of other men; amnesty for remorseful wives who do not care to speak. A dawning happiness. Amnesty for Catholics; the promise of grace, even unto the Catholic Métis, even unto the rebel, the too eloquent, too charismatic, too bold Louis Riel. Lengthening days ripe with time for planting, time to plan for my arrival, time to make a province out of squatters’ territory. And it shall (on orders from Ottawa) be called Manitoba, and hereafter no one will remember whether it was, in the language of the Assiniboine, “the lake of the prairies,” or if it was Cree,
“the god who speaks.” So they’ll say it in English, call it real estate and swear it has always been so.

She went into labour like a jackrabbit, so fast they were stunned. Even her Ukrainian neighbour and best friend, round as a fresh loaf, who had borne nine children, told my dazed, sweating, rapturous dad (a blistering hot day in May, mosquitoes had hatched the night before in a cyclonic night storm in a heat wave, fast baby mosquitoes, but my father liked mosquito bites, he liked to slide his hand down the back of his shirt for a good scratch, and his own nicely muscled back kept the heat of the day in it like soil and over new harrow trails the rich black mud stayed warm through the short nights), her Ukrainian tongue filling him with happiness and visions of pure water running across a creek bed, and Dad understood more than her information, he read her nuance, that his wife was giving birth within the hour, that his wife was singing an anguished love-chant, and though her voice was as guttural as a pig’s, deeper than lowing cattle, his name was embedded in it, the current of her devotion beneath her agony, her birth song, the awful tearing of life into life. Mum squatting, even in hysteria, a zealous anti-colonialist, a pure squatter, gripping red-knuckled the limb of a willow tree, for her friend had prepared a birthing bed at the edge of their clearing, she’d made a great fire over which the river water boiled in a vat like an upturned clarion bell, and she skimmed away the twigs and bark and brewed fresh cedar branches and washed my mother’s hot flesh with tepid cedar tea and smoked away the edge of pain till my birthing wasn’t painful or sharp but blurred and earnest and Mum committed herself to giving me life, liberty and happiness.

It was the twelfth of May when my mother clutched the willow tree and wailed her birth-chant and Dad’s Christian name. Downriver to St. Boniface, Riel listened to the saints singing in clouds full of lightning, and way beyond to the East, where colonies are conceived, ran the great machinery of Canadian territorial claims, playing a trick upon the upstarts of the Red River. Yes, a province was being born, yes, of two languages (and our Ukrainian friend, invaluable midwife, the enchanting linguist lending her persuasion to Mum’s ear,
Give over, my beloved, give over to the violent sea, give over to the inevitable death of birth, give over to the new, my round old moon, give away your life for life)
. Oh yes, a province, with an elected body of good men and true and even French, united with the landlords in the East, and near by our neighbours looking with some anxiety at pencilled scrawl upon a land title, a fading, incomprehensible claim of ownership for land they’d shaped and carved for two years or for fifteen years or for a generation, and worse for those who had not penetrated the mysteries of the Land Office, those whose names had not been scrawled upon a dog-eared surveyor’s field book.

Suddenly my father remembered Mum’s hat and the scrip that she’d tucked into the hatband, its tea stains of sweat. With the sound of Mum’s thunder in his ears, he left the fireside and the midwife and went into the house. A doubt, sharp as broken glass, had presented itself. He searched the house till he discovered the hat, which had fallen under their bed, and he got down on his knees and withdrew it from amidst the dustballs and sat in a mote-river of
sunlight and took the ostensible land title from her sweat-band, sniffed it affectionately and opened it with care. It was not, of course, a deed, a scrip or a title. He already knew. What Dad unfolded was a charcoal drawing of a buffalo.

Even with a heart of dry ice, my father admired the refinement of the lost Cree’s art. He quietly folded it and put it in the leaves of his favourite book, Henry David Thoreau’s
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
, and later, when my mother had regained her strength, he would show her this proof of their fragile claim to a home, and she would be so thrilled by the artist’s depiction of the lost creature,
Bison bison
(otherwise the buffalo), she would fight Dad to the ground, holding him between her knees, pinning him down as if she would plant them both, and she would say, “Here is our land; let them dig us under if they want a better claim!”

But they were squatters, and their rights to the land to which I was at that very moment descending through a narrow, urgent passage were naught, less than naught, for they’d worked it for only a few weeks and had less claim to it than the neighbours who had raised the roof on five or six buildings, barns, sheds, who had cleared roads through bush and tilled their ever-growing gardens.

And the strange death of Thomas Scott hung in the air like the as yet unimaginable mustard gas.

I
WAS BREACH
. Born so bruised, so swollen, bum first, the first sight of me a bowel movement, that Mum thought I was a boy
and Dad cheered, “He’s well-hung!” and she was a little disappointed, but she rallied when she recognized me, swollen, bulging and blue. In every other aspect, perfect. A daughter. They washed me by the light of the fire, for in the strange ways of birth, seven hours had passed like a divine ellipsis. The three of them, my father, my mother, our midwife, stared at my calm sleep. I wasn’t yet human and I slept the sleep of angels, nothing in my soul but sky. They gazed in wonder undiminished by their irrepressible laughter. I am a modest woman, but I say with uncharacteristic pride that without uttering a sound, without thinking a human thought, at the first ass-backwards sight of me, I made people laugh. When the skull became obvious in my later years, seeing the rictus smile under my transparent skin, I would recall my family’s laughter in the first moments of my life. My father, my mother, our butter-smelling midwife running their warm, roughened hands all over my new body, exclaiming over the unearthly softness of my skin, the revelation of five toes, my long white fingers, each with long sharp nails (my mother chewed them, owning me however briefly), laughing tearfully over the black hair on my ears (which my mother began to lick away), laughing over my blatant genius when my lips suckled in sleep. My mother lay glowing like a rose window, the thick robes opened and she heedless, naked, innocent while they washed the blood from her thighs, and I slept at my mother’s breast, my left hand upon her right breast. My father, leaning on his heels, tugged at his pipe, joy flooding his throat.

So it was that all three of my admirers were witness to the strange occurrence just an hour past my birth.

It began as a dust funnel at the centre of Mum’s mind. Birth is an ecstatic, all-consuming, pure line of action on the Euclidean plain far above sea level, where our messy homestead lay. But there is an end, there is an end to ecstasy, an end to flight, and the landing is difficult, the dread deep in the gut when angels become glider planes repaired with tape and clothespins.