Free When Alice Lay Down With Peter by Margaret Sweatman Page A

west into Saskatchewan. The buffalo were gone for good and the Indians were dying of scurvy. Soon, they would hang Riel in Regina and send his adjutant general, Gabriel Dumont, into the American circus, and the great Cree chief Big Bear would be chained up in Stony Mountain Penitentiary. As I look back on it now, I marvel over how bad things were, how we can tread water even when it’s full of leeches and toads.
    I was a good shot and loved to hunt. It was off-season, so I was just shooting squirrels. The fields of Red Fife wheat were evil with the clatter of the grasshoppers, their weird skeletons sawing and leaping up like the devil’s fiddlers. So I took my Winchester into the bush at the north edge of what we liked to call “our property.” I was talking to myself, a habit I’d inherited from my dad (whom I now called Peter, and my mum was now Alice to me because I had to discourage them from thinking they could lord over me just because they were old). I still lived at home because I figured Peter and Alice would shrivel up if I went away. They were not exactly deficient, but middle-aged people are unstable and need constant reassurance.
    The day Alice went mad the weather was beautiful: not too hot, with a slight breeze. I was having an imaginary conversation with Big Bear. It took the form of an apology. I was in love with the Cree chief; he was my version of a beat poet. I’d seen the photographs of him in the
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and loved his dusty black suit, his modest felt hat upon shaggy, silvering hair. I’d scanned the articles, threshing the narrow lines of print to seek the seeds of quotation marks, listening for his stubborn, mild-mannered and sundry ways of saying no.
    “Big Bear,” I said (a squirrel, motionless, upside down), “my parents are idiots who know not what they do. My whole dumb tribe is greedy and blind and we can’t see what’s beautiful.” Because my dad had borrowed money and he looked pinched and anxious and I hated my mother’s forgetful face when they were busy building fences and more fences and I wanted Peter to chuck it all for freedom (I mean I wanted him to take a day off). I was never going to be like them, Alice and Peter—predatory,avaricious, foul-smelling, pillow-faced, laughing to themselves in the morning and too damn busy for me.
    I took aim.
    “Big Bear. You are the bird flying over the land. We are the axe, the saw, the railway, the school, the money, the stupid church, the ugly guy who’s a judge; we are the Anglo, the golfer, forgive us, the merchant, the thief in the top hat, that goddam guy who loaned my dad money. Forgive us, Big Bear, because we’re scavenging dogs in the land of the Great Spirit. Help us to understand, O great chief in Saskatchewan, for you are the bird, and I guess that makes us the forest.”
    I squeezed the trigger. Squirrel everywhere.
    You are the bird and we the forest. Not too sure what I meant by that, but Big Bear was angelic, proud even in defeat, and the bird and the forest became my litany, quivering with poetic uncertainty, feeding my sullen protest at the supper table. The Canadian soldiers had chased Big Bear and his soldiers through the bush from Battleford and lost him. He doubled back east a ways, to his birthplace near Fort Carlton. And there he surrendered. My alternative rock star, my rock of ages. Charged with treason for protecting his own land. He was going to jail. But then, the Canadians made the whole country a jail. Fences everywhere. The Indians couldn’t leave their reserves without somebody counting heads, checking up on them. Just like me, I thought. Just like poor little white me.

    I WENT TO MARIE’S LOG HOUSE on my outings almost every day. Marie had gone away with the little boy, Eli, after Wolseley’s soldiers had buttoned their trousers, and after she and François and their numerous cousins had helped Alice survive Peter’s sojourn in the woods across the river. Marie loaded her things onto her