When Alice Lay Down With Peter Read Online Free PDF

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’sprovisional 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.