Free When Alice Lay Down With Peter by Margaret Sweatman

fate of paternity. Fatherhood. A truly terrifying concept. He stayed forty days and forty nights on Vermette’sPoint, across the Red from his wife and child, because of ambivalence towards his new fate. The torment of ambivalence kept him there.
    He saw his significant insignificance bleed into the earth, and at last he grew devoted to its benign reception. A parasite huddled in the earth’s rank fur, he nestled into the miniature fact of his own existence. He was nothing, yet he was also crucial to the scheme of things. It was true. And what is true is also false. The world is spinning a yarn. And he was grateful. He aged into permanent youth.
    On four separate nights, he dreamed that he was an insect. Not in any extreme empathetic sense; he was also himself. The insect varied. But invariably, he ate himself, popping his own vile body into his mouth. Chewing. The bitter taste, the poisonous secretions. The necessity.
    He thought not about rain but about the spaces between the raindrops. His idealism would flourish, but it wouldn’t hurt, not quite so much. When the dreary light of compromise lit upon Dad’s idealism, it would thereafter rise up, leap elsewhere, quick as a flea.
    This is what I know of my father’s sojourn in the wilderness.
    On the forty-first morning, my mother and I went as usual to wave at Dad. It was nearly the end of October, and the day was dull with coming winter, starved of light. When we arrived at the river’s banks, Peter was already there. He waved once and disappeared, and Alice and I turned away, despondent. Alice felt too sad to make the walk home, so we sat down where the willows made a bony hammock. All warmth had slid out of our world, and wewere left in the stark, declining day leading inexorably to solstice. An ugly bit of weather. Even the geese early departed.
    Then the sound of Peter’s shout from upriver, clear enough in the absence of geese and wind and other life. Through the cavity of afternoon, Peter’s voice, calling,
“Alice
. Alice!” A hundred yards upstream, a stick man walking on water, yelling for Alice. Then we made out the raft that carried him and the pole he used to push his way. He’d waited until the river fell low enough, and took his chances, gauging where we’d seen the steamboats grasshopper over the shallow parts. Midstream his pole couldn’t touch bottom, and then the current was carrying him down the centre of the Red. He wasn’t going to make it. As his raft passed by, he dove in, the current carrying him downstream. Alice and I leaned out over the muddy water, and she held on to a wild rose bush, not noticing the thorns in her palm, trying to see if Peter had made it to land. The raft was a bump on the broad brown river. Quiet. Mum called out; the air felt thick as lard. She called a third time. And then Peter answered. “Yo!” he said. Alice looked at my fat face in the papoose and asked me, “Did he say yo?” She scuttled through the brush, protecting me from scratches and branches, in a dead heat, until she reached him at last.

PART TWO
1885

CHAPTER ONE
    When they have crowded their country because they had no room to stay any more at home, it does not give them the right to come and take the share of all the tribes besides them…
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    This is the principle. God cannot create a tribe without locating it. We are not birds. We have to walk on the ground…
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    —Louis Riel, at his trial in Regina in the summer of 1885
    I N THE SUMMER OF MY FIFTEENTH year, my mother went temporarily insane. It was an urgent season, tormented by grasshoppers, the locusts of doom. The previous fall, my father had built my new bedroom at the back of the house, and it was there that I would dispense with my virginity. We’d just had two bad years with no money anywhere: poor crops, failed gardens, dissatisfaction on the faces of the grown-ups, hungering want in the children’s eyes. The great boom in Winnipeg would soon be over and the speculators had migrated