When Alice Lay Down With Peter (13 page)

“Up and up,” said Alice, longing. “We must go home.” And took the loan.

A
FTER ELI LEFT
, I got up to take a pee and bled into the chamber pot. Even in my devastation, I was forming a fresh resolve. I had a plan that would save us all. It needed only my parents’ arrival home to confirm its necessity.

I was sleeping when they walked in. Six o’clock in the morning and still dark. I was reconciled to my own power. My eyes retained the vision of Eli’s shining egg in its nest. When my parents stamped into the house, they looked like Lord and Lady Macbeth. And I thought, That’s enough, I see the light. But I said nothing.

I rose to make them cocoa. Alice noticed my bloodstained nightgown, but she was so exhausted I think she took responsibility for it, as if it were her own or otherwise communal. Mothers are strange. My parents were getting older by the minute. I put them to bed, and then lit a candle at the little desk in my room and wrote out my plan to save the world from extinction.

Because I had learned a terrible lesson. It was only too clear. Everything I looked at shrank away into nothing, like Eli’s desirable egg. Marie was nothing but the whisper of a moth. Riel was forever extinguished, along with the rights of more than four thousand Métis children. Eli had told me once, when we were out looking for the vanishing lady’s slippers, that my eyes were focused too far away. He said my eyes made everything close up disappear. I was so in love I thought he was paying a compliment. But it was merely descriptive, raw information. Whatever I looked at disappeared: Marie, the Métis, Peter’s freedom, and now Eli. I sat up till noon.

What I devised was a plan for my own education. A woman with my power had to be cautious. Thereafter, I would focus my potent attention only on what was truly irrelevant. Latin, naturally. A bit of history of the slave trade in the Congo, followed by the navigation routes of fifteenth-century Portugal. The tragedies, Greek. I would spend six months reading this fellow Pliny, because he’d died in Pompeii (I’d already learned that in Spelling). Then Luther, Wesley and Augustine (in honour of my mother). By mid-summer (when Eli was likely hired out in Alberta, never mind), I’d be working on a history of Mesopotamian law, subdivided: culinary, marital, inheritance, military. I would memorize the names of every Roman senator,
every British king, and learn the difference between a Plantagenet and a Tudor. I vowed never to look directly at anything ever again, never to learn anything that was not
extremely
foreign to St. Norbert, Manitoba.

Glance aslant at everything I loved, learn the foreign names for things familiar. Not common wood nymph, but
Cercyonis pegala
. Not monarch butterfly, but
Danaus plexippus
. Not Us, but Them. Not St. Norbert, but Canada. Not love. Intelligence. By this means, I would protect all that I loved. By learning. Through an exotic translation from touch to intellect, from knowledge to book-fed ignorance. Not the Red River in spring runoff full of debris from North Dakota, but the Nile and its delta, and all the mummified kings, pyramids, slave labour too ancient to matter. Not Protestant land swindles, but the Norman invasion. Chaucer (surely irrelevant). Boethius. Okay!
On the Consolation of Philosophy
. That’s a good one.

Irrelevance. My allegiance thereafter, my calling, my devotion. Irrelevance. Saviour of all that would remain secret, of my heart. An education in irrelevant information. So my home and loved ones (yes, and those departed in error, made crazy by the foreign god of guilt) may survive in blindness, in colonial disregard may we thrive.

PART THREE
1900

O
VER THE NEXT FIFTEEN YEARS
, Eli would get so bow-legged he’d eventually walk like a crab, sideways, see-sawing on a bad knee. Dust and cattle bristle had baked into his strangely handsome hide, so he was camouflaged against the sun-burnt grass as he sidled over the fair face of the district of Saskatchewan, near Batoche, at a place called Duck Lake.

A hot wind blew hard from the west, ripe with the smell of blood. Shaggy blond grass, indifferent to thirst, made waves on the mild bulges in the land by the South Saskatchewan River. Eli couldn’t read a watch, but he always knew the hour. It was noon. Vernal equinox. Broad daylight. The wind’s fingers pushed at the grasses, drew faces, erased them; the wind whispered names, phrases trailed off painful as accusations. Eli always treated daytime hauntings with respect. He tried not to be afraid.

The only other white man at the Duck Lake camp was an eager sergeant major sent West to oversee the slaughter of nearly a hundred head of cattle. The government of Canada intended to feed pemmican to the North West Mounted Police quartered up north, in the mining district of the Yukon. Pemmican, once the staple for fur traders, is sun-dried buffalo meat pounded into a powder and mixed with fat. Since the buffalo were gone, they’d have to make do with domestic cattle and a few fat horses. The Mounted Police hired Cree Indians from the nearby reserves
to do the killing and manufacture, in exchange for the heads and offal of the slaughtered animals. And the police sent the sergeant major to make sure that no tainted ingredients went into the pemmican. A man by the name of Clark. A boyish man who was forever falling in love.

Sergeant Major Clark didn’t know a bull from a cow, so he in turn had hired Eli from Batoche to run the show. Eli was the man people looked to when they wanted a job done. Clark always spoke to Eli as if they were at the fringes of a marvellous ballroom. Eli strained to hear Clark’s voice above the constant wind. “It’s going awfully well, isn’t it?” Clark asked, nibbling at a thick moustache.

Clark looked wall-eyed towards the pole frames. Splashed like poppies across the dry prairie wool were countless tents made of thin slices of flesh. The Crees were loading horse’s guts and the heads of cattle onto wagons, preparing to go home for a few days while the sheets of meat splayed across the frames were cooked by the sun and wind. About fifty Indians would stay at the camp to boil down the fat and marrow, and sew up the hides with sinew for the great sacks of pemmican.

Eli looked at Clark’s seal-like face, smooth and fulsome, and shrugged.

“It must bring back a lot of memories for you,” said Clark, bobbing his shiny head.

Eli twitched, suspicious. “Why? What’ve they told you?”

“Uhh, well, they… I mean to say, the great buffalo slaughters! Killing for tongues and all that, skinning the wild beasts, et cetera. Right here! On the open prairie! Oh, yes! I know all about that. A lifetime ago, mind you. You were… why, I bet you were just a boy!”

Eli relaxed. “Oh,” he said, “that.” He stared over Clark’s optimistic shoulder. In the blowing grass appeared the face of the old blind warrior, Assiyiwin, who seemed to nod sadly, and then the wind again, taking him away. Eli tried a polite smile for the young soldier. Must be about twenty-three years old. Wouldn’t know anything.

“Nothing much to do now,” said Eli. “You going to hang around?” His jaw was aching,
Please go
.

Clark tipped his head, considering. He ran a bright tongue along his teeth, gathering a little ball of dust, and spat. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Love to stay. Let’s pray to God this heat holds,” he said.

It did. All night. Heat rank with rendered fat and bone marrow. The smoke made everyone nostalgic. Some of the stories were told in English for the benefit of the rather sympathetic Clark, whose Cree was limited to
meegwetch
, “thank you.” By firelight, stories of the great hunts in the 1860s.
A thousand buffalo, like thunder, black air, so many!
Long, warped fingers held up, trembling before an old face like a stone on the prairie, the noise of ten thousand buffalo cupped in his broken hands.

The old men made fun of the young men. “So serious,” the old men said, laughing. “I am working!” They mimicked the young men, who swaggered under the weight of a hind of beef and ordered the women around. “Butcher this!” said the serious young men. A job with the white police, some pay and the chance to slaughter domestic animals. “Real hunters,” the old men teased. The young men tried to smile. But one young guy with a twisted face got mad at the teasing, this lesson handed him
by the elders. And the elders looked at him with the compassion of the healthy for the ill, compassion mixed with fear. The young would need to develop an appetite for the bland taste of counterfeit. Pemmican, oh sure, made of cow.

The twisted face turned on Clark and asked, “You like hanging around with Indians?”

Clark nodded eagerly. The elders laughed, but the young men grew sullen.

Twisted face went on. “You like us? You come home with us. You like eatin’ dirt? You like poor? You like Indian dog shit?”

“Thank you,” said Clark. “Uh,
meeg—
uh—
wetch
. I have to join my regiment farther north. But thank… 
meegwetch
. Most kind.”

Twisted face sneered. “Eli stayed with us. When he was hiding. My grandmother was hiding too, in the woods. When everybody was in trouble in ’85.” Slyly, to Eli: “You came to our reserve to stay out of jail. My father hid the white guys from police.” He shoved Eli’s shoulder. The elders sat still. “Eli was hiding from the whites, his own people; he buried his white face in Indian skirts. We always pay for your fear. And for the fuckin’ Riel. Shit. You want to hear an Indian story?” He stood up. The man beside him tried to pull him back, but he shook him off. He pointed at Eli. “I’m telling a story this Eli, this… friend of Indians is scared shitless you’ll find out, your Royal Highness soldier.”

An elder interrupted. “Sit down. Your feet stink.”

The younger man sat.

For a moment, it seemed the story would die with the fire. Then the elder said, “Tell. Tell what you tell.” But he looked
through narrow eyes, a warning.
There are limits to what can be told to the white policeman
.

Twisted face shrugged. “Ahhhh, it was an asshole half-breed working for the police—that’s who shot Assiyiwin. Assiyiwin came in kindness, an old man, nearly blind. Métis and the police, they want to fight on our land. Our chief, he says, ‘No, we don’t want Riel’s fight.’ Assiyiwin is a warrior when he is young. He’s not afraid to fight. But he goes with the chief. The half-breed traitor, that McKay, he points his gun. Assiyiwin says, ‘Why have you so many guns, grandson?’ Fucking McKay shoots Assiyiwin in the stomach. A good man, an old man.” His body seemed to shrink, a certain helpless smirk. “What is a warrior now anyways?”

Clark went pale. “I’m so sorry, dear chap.” The young men finally broke up laughing, rolling back, mimicked “dear chap.” Clark blinked and smiled. He enunciated carefully. “But could you,” he said, trying to be heard, “tell me what is going on? Please. If your… if your
people
did not want to fight, then why was your man shot?”

The older men were silent. Too many secrets and no one to trust.

Eli rose and walked away from the fire. Clark was acutely aware of being white. The silence was so prolonged that even the Indians, who weren’t normally anxious to fill space with speech, began to sniff and twitch. Clark cocked his head to one side, ears perked hopefully. Finally, an elder smiled kindly at Clark and said,
“Itineesit atim.”
This broke everybody up. Twisted face pointed and laughed.
“Itineesit atim!”
Patted Clark’s head. “Smart dog!”

The elder pulled himself wearily to his feet. Passing, he too gently patted Clark’s head. “Good night, Smart Dog.” As he disappeared from the light, the old man said, “Maybe Eli will tell you why our land is now our prison.”