When Alice Lay Down With Peter Read Online Free PDF Page A

D AD . 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 livinghere? 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 wordson 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