The Cure for Death by Lightning (10 page)

“She got it in her head there was someone digging under her house,” said Morley. “Told Constable Peterson there was a German hiding under her floorboards, coming to get her. Even got him to do a search. Can you imagine? Some German digging under her porch. Guess he dug himself a tunnel all the way from the war.”

“Some dog likely, scratching under the porch,” said Ferguson.

“Or a rat.”

“Well, I can’t blame her, living alone like that, and all the things you read in the paper. I heard the Germans are training dogs to rape women.”

“I heard they nail women to barn doors, by their hands and feet, like
they were crucified. Jimmy told me that. He knew someone who’d seen it with his own eyes.”

The talk made my stomach turn and I moved off from the line and went to one of the windows. I had no appetite anyway for eating in the room where the coffin had been, and where my father flagrantly fed the gossip by filling his plate for a third time. I looked out over the graveyard and thought of Sarah Kemp, and of the turtle that was crushed under our wheels and that nevertheless pulled itself, bleeding, across Blood Road. There was Sarah Kemp now in the ground; I could see her grave from the window, but I couldn’t put it together with the image of that sullen girl hugging her breasts in the corner of the schoolroom, hugging whatever it was that she wished for. I couldn’t believe her dead, because to believe that was to believe I was capable of dying.

Outside the sky had gone dark. The wind lifted up petals from the fruit trees on the church grounds and littered them over the graves. A thunderhead grew over Bald Mountain and had begun to rain over the summit; we’d have rain, then, in the valley, at home. If I pressed my face against the glass I could just see Cherry and Chief. They still carried the red of Blood Road on their legs and hooves and were pawing it into the ground, sending up little red dust clouds. The glass felt good and cool on my face and I lost myself to it, forgetting for a moment the room of judging whispers behind me. I placed my other cheek against the glass so I was staring at Sarah Kemp’s grave. A figure turned up out of nowhere and slid up to the grave like a ghost. It was Coyote Jack, sure enough, here in town but looking every bit as bushed as he ever did, as ragged and nervous as a dog that’s gotten kicked too many times. He placed a bundle of dying lilacs on the grave mound and stood looking at it for a moment. Then he was gone. He had on a red jack shirt and should have been easy to spot, but there was no flash of red in the bushes, no sight of him making his way past the church. I pushed through the crowd of people still lined up at the table of food and looked out the church window on the far side.

My brother came up behind me with his plate and looked out the window. “What you looking at?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“I guess I wasn’t being too smart,” he said. “I mean, going on about Sarah Kemp’s body. I didn’t think she might be a friend of yours.”

“She wasn’t,” I said.

Mr. Ferguson, the man who had just slandered my father, walked by and slapped Dan on the shoulder. “Why haven’t you joined up yet, eh?” he said. “Got a wooden leg? Or has your old man got money?”

Dan laughed him off, but when Ferguson went to refill his plate at the food table, Dan leaned against the wall, blew the hair from his eyes, and looked like misery for a time. His suit was now too small for him. It showed too much wrist and too much sock, and his hands, as big as dinner plates, looked bigger still in that suit. He looked the clownish farmer and knew it; he played it up with mock clumsiness. The smell of his sweat drifted up, reminding me how unbearable the air in that building had become. The church was getting hot, and the mourners were generating a smell that the flowers couldn’t cover. Mrs. Bell grabbed hold of my mother’s shoulder, stood up, and then started coming our way with her dirty plate in her hand.

“Here comes doom and gloom.”

“I’m getting out of here,” I said.

I left my brother and pushed my way outside, through the crowd. The smell of rain and horses was infinitely more soothing than the smell of human grief. I stroked Cherry’s nose and, having nothing better to do, looked down the main street for any sign of Coyote Jack. The whole town was shut down for the funeral. G. Locke Drugs, the butcher shop, the harness shop, the blacksmith’s, Bouchard and Belcham’s, and the Promise Cafe, the one lonely restaurant in town — everything was closed. No one was on the street; they were all inside the church eating, save a skinny wild dog at the end of the street that left his signature on the steps of the store, and slid, like a shadow, between the buildings. Horses tied to anything handy along the street shuffled and scratched themselves with their noses. Goat had left the church roof, scared off by all the people.

Coyote Jack was scared: of men, of town, of noisy cars, the occasional planes overhead, of small transactions with store clerks, the meaning of scratchy letters on paper, of church people and God, Indians and women, the sound of the human voice. He made his living trapping and never came to town, not even for provisions — he paid the Swede, his father, to box and ship his furs and to buy him coffee, sugar, flour, and rice and to leave them on the steps of his cabin. Most
of the time he went around looking half-starved. He saw almost no one and washed his underwear by fixing them to the creek bed with a couple of rocks. I’d seen him just that week, through my bedroom window, drinking from our water pump outside. After he’d had his fill, he went skulking around the chicken coop, apparently looking for something, drumming up the will to come to our kitchen door.

I leaned up against the church and watched the petals from the apple tree flutter onto Sarah Kemp’s grave until my mother, father, and brother left the church and got into the democrat.

“Can you believe that Swede coming up and giving me a lesson in table manners?” my father was saying. “He eats rotten fish and starves his chickens!”

“He said you eat like a pig,” said my brother. “I’d say he was right there.”

“You keep your mouth shut. He’ll pay for that rudeness. He’ll pay tonight.”

My mother tensed and shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them with a forced smile.

“Mrs. Bell is coming to visit tomorrow,” she said. “It’s been such a long time since she’s visited. Since anyone’s visited.”

“Beth got a kiss from Goat,” said my brother.

“I did not!”

“Don’t call him Goat,” said my mother. “That’s shameful.”

“I’ll tell you what’s shameful,” said my brother. “Them keeping that mongoloid idiot running around. They should lock him up. Send him to Essondale with the other crazies.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said my father. “He can be trained. They can all be trained. You teach them something once and they’ll remember it forever.”

“They should at least have him castrated. He’s disgusting.”

“No more disgusting than you,” I said to my brother.

My father grunted. My mother started up a sweet humming that could have been any song. Goat wasn’t the only mongoloid in the valley. There were rumors about the Blundells, the owners of the motel where Ginger Rogers stayed. People said they kept a child in one of the motel units and never let her out. Or there was a ghost child there, in the room Ginger Rogers slept in, killed by her father, the senior Mr.
Blundell, a wispy gentleman with a cookie-duster mustache. Or the ghost of the very first owner of the hotel, a whore named Louise who kicked up her heels in the gold rush that founded the town, haunted the rooms.

“Stop that!” my father said to my mother, and she stopped humming.

I searched the windows of the Blundells’ motel as we passed, but the face of the building was blank.

W
HEN
I
BROUGHT
home the cows down Blood Road that evening, the sky turned the odd green of a lightning storm, and then the lightning began. I counted the distance between lightning and thunderclaps with my footsteps. The cows, spooked by the turtles and the storm, kicked up their heels and ran off down the road. I let them run; they’d find their way home before me. Then I heard the slap of a man’s footsteps behind me, following. I swung around, but there was no one there — only my own footprints followed, and even they were melting away in the rain. I stiffened in fear and listened. The wind whipped up the waves of alfalfa, corn, and flax in my father’s fields and rain splattered around me, thrilling the back of my neck. My hair stuck miserably to my head. Trees along the road swayed, and the leaves of the plants turned the vibrant, glowing green that rain brings. The forest conjured up mists and little puffs of it spilled out onto the road and disappeared.

And there was Coyote Jack, standing near the forest edge. I gripped my gun tighter from surprise, but he only nodded. Then he wasn’t there anymore, and I heard the mewing. I looked around and saw no cat, but as the thunder crashed the mewing grew louder. I called, “Puss, Puss?” and a little black cat jumped from the hollow of a log by the road. I looked to see if Coyote Jack was around, if this was his cat, but he’d long since blended into the forest.

The black kitten trotted over to me. I tucked it into my jacket and
trembled all the way home, trying to think how I could avoid my father, where I could put the cat so he wouldn’t find it, what story I would tell my mother about my wet and muddy blouse. When I reached the yard, I ran the cows awkwardly into the pasture behind the barn, still holding the cat in my jacket. My father was leaving the barn just as I reached it.

“What’ve you got there?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, and tried to walk around him, but my father would have his joke with me.

“Let’s see,” he said.

I opened my jacket a little, knowing he’d take the thing from me, this black heart, knowing he’d drown him like he drowned the others, to spite me, to get even for some outrage I couldn’t have guessed at. The black cat stuck his wet head out and mewed.

“Look at him!” said my father.

“Don’t kill him,” I said. “Please.”

“Why would I kill him?” said my father. “Black cat. Satan’s cat. Call him Lucifer. Take him in and show your mother.”

He was unnatural, turning like that, but I didn’t question him. I took the little black gift to show my mother. She was stoking the kitchen fire, muttering to the ghost of my tiny grandmother. She quit mumbling when I came in and straightened her back.

“What do we have here?” she said.

“Father says I can keep him,” I said. “He named him Lucifer.”

“Well, there’s no telling,” she said. “Maybe he’s coming back to his old self.”

She took the kitten from my coat, checked his sex, put him in a box near the stove, and placed a saucer of cream before him. Then she insisted I take my blouse off immediately, to soak it in a washbasin, so I went to my room and changed into a clean blouse and one of my brother’s sweaters. When I brought the dirty blouse back into the kitchen, my mother had the black kitten in her lap and was gently applying butter to each of its paws.

“This will keep him home,” she said. “He won’t wander.”

I put the blouse into the soak in the washbasin and dried my hands. My mother put the cat on the floor and we both watched as he very deliberately licked his paws. Then my mother took my hand. Her fingers were warm and slippery with butter.

“I should have put butter on your paws,” she said. “I worry, you know, when you’re out in the bush. You never know what’s out there.”

“I take a gun,” I said.

The kettle whistled and I made tea. My mother wiped her hands and brought out the tin of shortbread. We had an impromptu teatime alone, until my father and brother came in from the barn, yelling at each another.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” said my father.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” said my brother.

“Like hell I can’t. You eat off my table. You do what I say.”

“You’ve worked me like a slave. I don’t owe you nothing.”

“You leave and this farm falls apart. Think of your sister. Think of your mother.”

“Don’t give me that,” said my brother.

My father scraped back his chair loudly. I threw on my coat and carried Lucifer outside, hugging him. The voices of my father and brother chased after me, chased me to the barn and the solace of the cows. The storm had carried the red dust of Blood Road to our farm and rained it down — on the windows of the truck and the poplar growing through it, the lumber and the pile of rocks — covering everything with the blood of turtles, the blood of our recklessness. The blood of a war a thousand miles away rained down on us.