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

brother’s wagon. Alice stood by fretfully, and finally blurted out, “Come home, or back… yes, come back whenever you like.” Marie and François stopped and looked at Alice, blank-faced. Alice blundered on, “I mean, after all, it’s your… that is, it’s our… or I…” She stopped. François kindly nodded and resumed his work, avoiding Alice’s eyes, but Marie gathered up her tolerance and distaste and gently withered Mum, who looked away in shame.
    We lost a lot of Métis after the 1870 troubles. They couldn’t stomach the government. They moved west to Saskatchewan and Alberta, or south to Montana and the Dakotas, where they could hunt just a while longer, preserving a migratory life, shepherded by their Catholic priests.
    Abandonment enhanced the magic that surrounded the place. There still remained Marie’s small knife on the crooked table and a green copper box with a lid, which I liked to remove to sniff at the remains of the dusky Seneca root. On one wall hung a pair of snowshoes with painted frames. There was a mud oven which I never dared light, and a mud floor over a stone foundation. The rafters were lined with skins—buffalo, fox, bear, rabbit. The surprising cluster of black spruce that grew up around the cabin made it humus-coloured and nearly buried the low walls in sprouting roots. In the intervening years, the land seemed to have sunk farther into bog. It was connected toour house by a nearly invisible path, and no one guessed my secret grotto. I was like a philanderer with an apartment.
    And so I learned to enjoy the gift of solitude. I talked to myself. I was a soul misunderstood, perched in the pungent dust on the ground of Marie’s grotto, speaking thus when I sensed the presence of a foreign creature. A good hunter, I lifted my nose to the wind and went completely still. The shadow of a man fell across the slant of sun through the doorway. And then I heard him breathing. My heart pounded through the tips of my fingers. I leapt up and grabbed my gun and was at the door to see his first blink of consternation. There stood a young man looking at me.
    He was ugly in a wonderful kind of way. His hair was brown by default and as erratic as the fur on a feral cat. He had a short back with thick thighs, oversized hands on muscled arms. His eyes were an uncertain mix of green and brown, but clear, clear-sighted. I took special interest in the arms where he’d rolled up his sleeves: muscled flesh on the lower part of the forearms where the skin is soft, with light hair on the upper part, just to the wrists joining to the huge hands wrapped around his rifle, which he cocked across his barrel-sized chest.
    “Scare you?” he asked, grinning.
    “No,” I said. “You should be careful. You’ll get yourself shot one day.”
    “Yes, I guess I will.”
    I lowered my weapon. I liked him strongly and I thought he should know. I held out my hand. “I’m Blondie.”
    He laughed, but it was nice. “That’s for sure,” he said. “That’s your name, yep. Blondie. For certain.”
    “Kind of stupid. My parents did that to me.” This was a sore point. My hair grew in dense and difficult blonde curls, and my name only drew people’s attention to it.
    “They’ve got eyes in their head anyway. Yes. Blondie.”
    We stood like that, smiling at each other. Then he said, “I’m Eli.”
    It shook me. I’d loved Eli the boy all those years; the name was one of my sacred names, like the bird-and-forest song I carried with me. “You’re full of goddamn horseshit,” I told him.
    “I may be full of horseshit, but my name is Eli.”
    “How old are you?”
    “I’m twenty years of age. Give or take.”
    “Then you’re a different Eli because he’d only be about seventeen or so by now. Anyway, you’re white.”
    “Didn’t mean to upset you.”
    “It’s okay.”
    He was looking at Marie’s grotto. I was desperate to get him to stay.
    “This is where I live,” I told him. He was