mind.
Cher père du Manitoba. Sorry you hung
.
T HERE NEVER WAS AN AMNESTY , but in the first week of December 1885, it snowed overnight and the next day, a thaw loosened the ground, and then they brought Riel’s body to his family land in a wood coffin. The Riel farm was northeast of “our property.” Eli was in the party bringing home the discarded saviour, the migrant statesman. A tousled prophet with self-doubting eyes (the photo-reproduced icon on our tourist pamphlets—moustache, chubby cheeks, wavy black hair).
What might’ve happened if the lawyers for his defence hadn’t pinned their case entirely on the question of Riel’s sanity? What if they’d said, “He’s sane as most of us, just not as foxy. The man’s got a point.” Of course he was nuts; he wasn’t a landlord! Native and Métis land rights? Self-government? The right to educate your children in your own tradition? What was the history thatwe lost over the lawyers’ crummy judgment? Is it ghosting down the Saskatchewan River, rising with the morning dew? How good we are at losing our own glorious options.
The thaw was accompanied by drizzle, all afternoon, making pockmarks on the new snow, so within twenty-four hours winter was shrunken and aged. The fine sleet fell without a sound, hanging in the air, and it didn’t smell like rain, but the stink of manure in the barn got strong and the wet gold hay glowed as if you could see its decay.
I went with my parents in the wagon to pay our respects at the Riel farm. I knew Eli would be there. Still, it shocked me to see him sitting at the kitchen table, his legs crossed, messy and dignified and so accomplished in the task of wearing his own skin. It made me miserable with love.
The body was in the parlour, Riel’s widow lying on a chaise near by. She was frail with tuberculosis, and overcome with the trauma from the fighting at Batoche and all the years of struggle and exile. Her name was Marguerite. She would be dead by spring. We walked into the wood-warmed house with rain dripping from our chins and noses. The wake had just begun, and it was shapeless in our hands and unrefined. We were outsiders, our grief unreconciled with the community of mourners, and I was envious of their calm distress.
The women cooked, the priest prayed. I sat at the table, in the leaking boat of my self-respect. The room was an ark, the unkosher mix of the women’s relentless fixings and the flesh-horror of the muttering priest. Peter stood shy and uneasy at the edge of conversations in French. And my mother, Alice,chameleon, rolled the dough for
de croxegnols
and listened, a brown-eyed boy-hag. To my eyes, she alone in the room could find her way through French and Latin; through the prognostics of cooks planning the next hour of consumption; through the unredemptive politics of the Métis, their slow inventory of loss. The snow-melting rain continued all afternoon.
Eli was included in the conversations of the men. I was given a doll and a five-year-old girl to entertain. She was a dull little thing who wanted to play house. Me, stuck with this dumb kid in ringlets. Humiliated and so bored at one point that my eyes actually rolled back in my head, revealing the vein-riddled eyeball, the only time in my whole life that ever happened to me, weird, and I know it happened only because I awoke sitting upright and looking at this snotty girl’s scared face.
“Your eyes just went completely white,” she told me, revolted.
“No kidding!” I said.
“You snorted too. You snored. You make me sick!” she said and started to cry, so I took her by the throat (we were beneath a table, the doilies of the tablecloth draped about our ears) and told her that if she didn’t shut up, I would chew off her fingers, and I put one in my mouth, tasting pork fat and nearly throwing up. I scratched the feeble veins in her feeble wrist.
It was the longest afternoon in Canadian history. When at last my parents released me, I
Cher père du Manitoba. Sorry you hung
.
T HERE NEVER WAS AN AMNESTY , but in the first week of December 1885, it snowed overnight and the next day, a thaw loosened the ground, and then they brought Riel’s body to his family land in a wood coffin. The Riel farm was northeast of “our property.” Eli was in the party bringing home the discarded saviour, the migrant statesman. A tousled prophet with self-doubting eyes (the photo-reproduced icon on our tourist pamphlets—moustache, chubby cheeks, wavy black hair).
What might’ve happened if the lawyers for his defence hadn’t pinned their case entirely on the question of Riel’s sanity? What if they’d said, “He’s sane as most of us, just not as foxy. The man’s got a point.” Of course he was nuts; he wasn’t a landlord! Native and Métis land rights? Self-government? The right to educate your children in your own tradition? What was the history thatwe lost over the lawyers’ crummy judgment? Is it ghosting down the Saskatchewan River, rising with the morning dew? How good we are at losing our own glorious options.
The thaw was accompanied by drizzle, all afternoon, making pockmarks on the new snow, so within twenty-four hours winter was shrunken and aged. The fine sleet fell without a sound, hanging in the air, and it didn’t smell like rain, but the stink of manure in the barn got strong and the wet gold hay glowed as if you could see its decay.
I went with my parents in the wagon to pay our respects at the Riel farm. I knew Eli would be there. Still, it shocked me to see him sitting at the kitchen table, his legs crossed, messy and dignified and so accomplished in the task of wearing his own skin. It made me miserable with love.
The body was in the parlour, Riel’s widow lying on a chaise near by. She was frail with tuberculosis, and overcome with the trauma from the fighting at Batoche and all the years of struggle and exile. Her name was Marguerite. She would be dead by spring. We walked into the wood-warmed house with rain dripping from our chins and noses. The wake had just begun, and it was shapeless in our hands and unrefined. We were outsiders, our grief unreconciled with the community of mourners, and I was envious of their calm distress.
The women cooked, the priest prayed. I sat at the table, in the leaking boat of my self-respect. The room was an ark, the unkosher mix of the women’s relentless fixings and the flesh-horror of the muttering priest. Peter stood shy and uneasy at the edge of conversations in French. And my mother, Alice,chameleon, rolled the dough for
de croxegnols
and listened, a brown-eyed boy-hag. To my eyes, she alone in the room could find her way through French and Latin; through the prognostics of cooks planning the next hour of consumption; through the unredemptive politics of the Métis, their slow inventory of loss. The snow-melting rain continued all afternoon.
Eli was included in the conversations of the men. I was given a doll and a five-year-old girl to entertain. She was a dull little thing who wanted to play house. Me, stuck with this dumb kid in ringlets. Humiliated and so bored at one point that my eyes actually rolled back in my head, revealing the vein-riddled eyeball, the only time in my whole life that ever happened to me, weird, and I know it happened only because I awoke sitting upright and looking at this snotty girl’s scared face.
“Your eyes just went completely white,” she told me, revolted.
“No kidding!” I said.
“You snorted too. You snored. You make me sick!” she said and started to cry, so I took her by the throat (we were beneath a table, the doilies of the tablecloth draped about our ears) and told her that if she didn’t shut up, I would chew off her fingers, and I put one in my mouth, tasting pork fat and nearly throwing up. I scratched the feeble veins in her feeble wrist.
It was the longest afternoon in Canadian history. When at last my parents released me, I
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