The Cure for Death by Lightning (12 page)

“Bertha!” my mother said. “I wasn’t expecting you today.”

Bertha looked at my mother’s tight smile. “Guests?”

“Yes,” said my mother. “But maybe you could come by later? On your way back from town.”

Bertha nodded, but she walked past my mother anyway and into the parlor. She walked right up to Mrs. Bell and shook her hand. My mother followed and stood at the parlor door with her hand at her throat.

“Good to see you, Mrs. Bell,” said Bertha. She looked at my father and nodded. “John.”

“Hello, Bertha. Where’s the girls?”

“They’re waiting outside.”

“Well then, they should come in,” said my father.

My mother’s shoulders fell. She closed her eyes for a moment, then she regained herself and went to the kitchen door.

“Girls,” she called. “Come in, come in.”

I stood back under the coat hooks and watched them file in, a dozen or more of Bertha’s daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and adopted daughters. The girl with the bell necklace saw me as she came in and stood in front of me. This close I could see that her eyes of two different colors, one green, one blue, were startling, the eyes of two women in one face. I looked from one side of her face to the other. She reached out her hand and was about to touch my hair when one of the women grabbed her by the arm.

“Come on,” the woman said, with a voice so like a man’s that it amazed me. “Out of the way.”

The women streamed into the parlor. I pushed past them, picked up the teapot, and pressed my way back into the kitchen to refill the pot.

Mrs. Bell stared at Bertha’s bright pink apron. Bertha smiled back at her. “You went to the Kemp girl’s funeral?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Bell. “A lovely service. All the girls were dressed so beautifully.”

“Horrible death, eh?” said Bertha. “For one so young.”

“Mauled to death by a bear,” said Mrs. Bell. “Can you imagine?”

“It wasn’t no bear,” said the daughter with the webbed fingers. “A bear don’t attack like that.”

We all turned to look at her. She was dressed much like Bertha was, in a bright blue dress with the sleeves rolled back, but without the apron. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The skin between her fingers went right up to the first knuckle, and as she gestured light flickered through the webbing. She saw me staring and closed her hands into fists.

“He must have gone rabid,” said Mrs. Bell.

“They killed that bear for nothing,” said the pregnant daughter. “He didn’t kill nobody.”

Mrs. Bell looked down at the table, played with her fork, and stirred her tea. The pregnant daughter looked her over but went on anyway.

“That was a man that done the killing. Coyote’s come and took him over.”

My father laughed.

“You should be warned about talking like that,” said Mrs. Bell. “You’re saying it was murder.”

“That was a man, sure enough,” said the pregnant daughter. The dangling earrings she wore caught the light from the window and flashed around the room.

“No man’s capable of that,” said Mrs. Bell.

Bertha Moses gave a little wave. “She means to say the spirit took hold of him and made him do it. A man stays out in the bush alone long enough, and the bush changes his shape.”

My father grinned and my mother looked horrified. The woman who had pulled the girl away from me, the one with the man voice said, “Mother. Don’t.”

“The thing is, Coyote keeps getting born, over and over,” said Bertha Moses. “He rides on the spirit of a newborn into this world. It don’t have to be a human newborn, it can be an animal, but once he’s born into this world, he slips off and goes walking until he finds somebody to have some fun with, eh? He takes that somebody over, see? Possesses him, like them demons in the Bible. Coyote has an awful thirst. Can’t satisfy him nohow, that’s what makes him so bad. You got to stay away from Coyote.” Bertha smiled, a little too sweetly. “Ain’t that right, John?”

My father laughed, a long powerful laugh, and all of us watched him at it. My mother covered her face with her hands. Mrs. Bell stood up.

“Well, I have to be going,” she said.

“Going?” said my mother. “So soon?”

“You have a houseful. There’s no room for me.”

“Oh, Flora, please stay.”

Mrs. Bell pushed her way out of the parlor and found her coat on the hook in the kitchen. My mother followed her, pleading quietly. Bertha sat back in her chair, and called out, “Mrs. Bell.”

Mrs. Bell looked back through the parlor doorway, tight-lipped, as she put on her coat.

“Your girl Lily called my granddaughter a squaw,” said Bertha. “You make sure she don’t do that again, eh?”

Mrs. Bell went red to her bones and pushed her way out of the house.

“Can’t imagine where she’d pick that up from,” Bertha said. “But I imagine she’s got to learn those words from somewhere. Don’t she, John?”

“Cookies?” said my father.

I looked over at the girl with the bell necklace and found her looking at me. She grinned and disappeared behind her aunts and reappeared just behind me in the crush of Bertha’s progeny. Hidden within the crowd of women, she ran her fingers along the back of my hand, petting me. The thing was so unexpected, so thrilling, so soothing, I just stood there breathless, letting it happen. She stroked me like I stroked those kittens my father had hunted down and killed just because I loved them. I watched my father now, watched that he didn’t see the girl standing behind me, petting my hand. After a time the girl took my hand, and I held on to hers like a secret.

“We better be going,” said Bertha. “Maudie, can we buy a little cream from you?”

“You know I can’t sell it off the farm. With the rationing.”

“I thought maybe a bear could come raid your can, eh?” said Bertha. She clawed her hand in the air.

“Go ahead,” said my father.

Every woman in the room looked at him. He shrugged and grinned.

The girl with the bell necklace squeezed my hand and disappeared into the crowd of women. Bertha’s daughters and granddaughters filed out the kitchen door, and the flocks of birds lifted into the sky above their heads. My mother handed one of the daughters a syrup can, and the woman went to the well, brought up the shipping can, and ladled out some cream. Bertha, my mother, and my father stood on the steps admiring the day as it slipped into night. The sky had gone pink without any of us noticing or any of us getting to the chores.

“John,” said Bertha. “You given my boys a raise yet?”

My father folded his arms. “You stay out of that, Bertha. It isn’t your affair.”

“Lots of my boys gone off and joined up. Soon there won’t be nobody left to work on the farms, all the boys gone. How you going to manage then?”

“We’ll manage.”

“I think Dennis and Billy, they’ll do well if they join up, they’ll get money, and they’ll see places they don’t get to otherwise. I think I should say to them to join up. What do you think about that, John?”

“You don’t want them enlisting. We both know that. You want to keep them here.”

Bertha shrugged. “If they don’t get paid like they should, I’ll tell them to join up. They listen to their granny.”

My father’s face went red and he clenched and unclenched his fists. Bertha smiled.

“You get out!” my father yelled. “Just get out!”

“John,” said my mother.

“Get off my property. Stay off it!”

Bertha Moses shrugged and smiled and signaled to her daughters and granddaughters to start down the road. She took my mother’s hand and gave it a squeeze and then trotted over to the other women with her long braid and beads swinging. They marched down our roadway, a parade framed by the field of flax behind them. The girl with the bell necklace turned and walked backwards a little way behind the others. She smiled at me and gave the necklace a jingle and then turned back as they rounded the corner out of sight.

S
UNDAY MORNING
as I left the barn I heard a shuffling in the woodshed.

“Dan?” I said.

The shuffling stopped. I hesitated towards the woodshed.

“Dan, is that you?”

Dan poked his head around the corner and grinned. He was shirtless, a thing that wasn’t done then, any more than a woman would go out without a blouse now. His nakedness embarrassed me but also fascinated me because he was so obviously no longer a boy. I felt awkward and fat in my heavy clothing. The day was unseasonably hot and muggy, but despite the heat, I wore a pair of my brother’s old denim pants under my skirt.

“Everybody gone?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Dad not around?”

“He got mad and went off someplace.”

“What say we go fishing?” he said.

He held open a duffel bag for me to see. I knew the type of fishing he was after. In the bag he carried several sticks of stumping powder, a roll of fuse, blasting caps, and a crimper — a tool that looked like a pair of pliers with a pointed end on one handle. The .22 leaned against one of the saddles on the dirt floor.

“Sure. Why not?” I said.

At the place where the hollow stump hid my treasures and blossomed yellow and purple violets, we dammed Turtle Creek with rotten fence posts and fallen trees until we’d flooded a deep pool. When we were done, Dan told me to go stand away from the creek, behind some trees. He slipped a blasting cap on the end of the roll of fuse, crimped the cap on tight, and used the sharpened handle of the crimper to poke a hole in the end of the stick of stumping powder. He slid the capped end of the fuse into the hole and cut the fuse from the roll with his jackknife. About sixteen inches of fuse stuck out from the stick of stumping powder; that gave him about two minutes to get away once he’d lit the fuse. He put fuses of longer lengths into the other two sticks of stumping powder. I’d watched this operation many times when my father blasted stumps from the fields we cleared. My brother lit all three fuses, starting with the longest fuse, and hurled the sticks into the creek, then ran like hell to my hiding place. The fuses fizzed a bit when they hit the water, then boomed, and a tremendous wave covered the sun. Out of the boom came a howl like a raging bull, or like a man in agony. When the splash and thunder of the blast left our ears, the howl went on; it came from up the path.

“We’ve woken a ghost,” I said.

“Rubbish,” said my brother. But he tossed me his jackknife, picked up the gun, and walked up the path. “Stay here and get the fish.”

He was gone a long time. There were many brook trout, stunned or dead, floating belly-up in the water. To gather the fish, I cut several forked willow branches and sharpened the long end on each to a point so they looked like huge fishhooks. I took off the denims under my skirt, carried one of the forked sticks into the water and began swimming around in the creek, sliding the fish onto the willow by pushing the stick through their gills into their mouths. In this way I stacked the fish one on top of the other so they were easy to carry, and the forked branch at the bottom end of the stick kept them in place. After a while I got cold and swam back to the creek bank, leaned against the hollow stump, and warmed myself in the sun. There were sun dogs on either side of the sun, little red and yellow bits of rainbow that are a sure sign of an oncoming storm.

An ant crawled up my leg and I brushed it off. Another came. I pulled out my secret lipstick and drew a heart in the crook of my arm,
and thought about holding hands with the girl with the bell necklace, about Bertha Moses, and my father’s rudeness. I ran my hand down my bare leg and schemed on how I could come up with the money for a pair of nylons. I thought of what my father would do when he found out Dan and I had dammed the creek. I whistled. Eventually my brother marched down the path, weighing the .22 in his hand. I looked up at him, expectant.

“Must have been Sasquatch,” he said, grinning. Then he said, “Look!” and pointed out a fool hen sitting on a fallen tree close by. A fool hen is a stupid bird that just sits there waiting to die. My brother took aim, squinting from one eye. Then he had a change of thought and handed me the gun.

“I saw Coyote Jack up the trail,” he said.

“He’s always around. He’s been hanging around the house, looking like he wants to come in for a visit.”

“Coyote Jack? A visit? Ha!”

I aimed at the fool hen. “Then I saw him in town, at the funeral. He put flowers on Sarah Kemp’s grave. Can you believe it? Coyote Jack in town. Then he just kind of disappeared.”

“Crazy,” said Dan. “You know what the Indians say? They say Coyote Jack’s a shape-shifter. He turns into a wild dog or something. That’s why they call him Coyote.”

I laughed and lowered the gun. “Who told you that?”

“I heard it all over. Jimmy George. Billy. Dennis.”

“That’s nuts.”

Dan shrugged. “That’s what they’re saying. Jimmy George says some ghost took Coyote Jack over, like a demon possession, you know?”

Jimmy George was a farmer from the reserve and a friend of Dennis and Billy. He raised sheep and pastured them in the mountains over the summer as my father once had.

“You really going to sign up?” I said.

“Better than staying here. Dennis is thinking about it too, you know, except Bertha won’t let him.”