The Cure for Death by Lightning (15 page)

I heard my mother’s footsteps and then her face was over me. She called my name and shook me, but I stared through her at the headboard. She called my name louder and slapped my face. She said, “Oh God,” and left my room. A little while later she came back with my father. His footsteps shook the bed, so I knew he was angry. He looked distorted and huge.

“She saw me, she’s awake,” he said.

“Whatever could have happened?” said my mother.

“She should be at school.”

“She wouldn’t have come home unless something happened,” said my mother. She looked into my face. “Beth, dear, what happened?” she said.

Her voice was so tender, so forgiving, I almost answered. But there was a new peace here, in not reacting. Everything seemed in my control. As long as I didn’t move, no one could hurt me, nothing could penetrate. She tried for a long time, talking sweetly to me. My father
stomped from the house, and my mother cried. Then she left my room and fussed in the kitchen, and I must have slept. When I woke, there was no one in the house, and Lucifer was mewing on my windowsill. He was wet through and looking scrawny, comical. I opened the window, picked him up, and carried him into the kitchen, where I poured him a bit of cream. I drank a cup of milk myself and ate a piece of unbuttered bread as I listened to the rain beating down on the roof and watched it slide past the window sideways. My mother’s scrapbook was there on the table in front of me. A pair of scissors sat on top of the red cover, so I knew my mother had added to it, but I felt no desire to find out what was new. I felt no desire to do anything at all but sit there. Even eating the bread was a labor I put myself through to quiet my stomach. My father opened the kitchen door and caught me like that, staring at the scrapbook, petting the black kitten, stuffing bread in my mouth.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he said.

He stepped towards me, and Lucifer jumped from my arms. I ran around the table and fled from the house across the yard and into the field of violet flax. My father didn’t bother to follow me out into the rain. I was soaked through in seconds; my hair was pulled by the wind from its barrettes and pushed around my face. A little while later I saw Lucifer streak from the house, through the rain, into the barn. The storm had taken on a new fury. Wind blistered the rain, and it boiled in all directions. Birds struggled for cover and were carried in the wind like sheets of newspaper. A whirlwind zipped by the hung laundry, flinging my father’s underwear and socks up to heaven. The fields were a tumult of motion, pushed, lifted, and cracked by the wind.

I ran back into the house as my father stumbled to the pasture with his coat over his head. From my bedroom window I watched as he struggled to get the animals into the barn. The cows were excited by the storm and his attempts at chasing them looked clumsy and foolish. Seeing him pitted against the storm in this way, I wondered how I could be frightened of him.

As I watched my father bring in the last of the heifers, the anger of the storm ended abruptly and an awful calmness smothered the house. I pressed my face against the window and saw a rain begin to fall, so
gently the raindrops seemed to float. Then I saw they weren’t raindrops, they were flowers, violet flax, fluttering to the ground. In no time at all the rain covered the earth in flowers. I opened my window and crawled out onto the purple carpet, took my shoes off and paddled around in pools of flax. The fragrance was intoxicating. The clouds moved on, and still the violet flax drifted down from a blue sky.

W
ITH BLUE FLAX
in my cupped hands, blue flax on my hair, my face, my dress, I looked over a world that was blue and as strange as a dream. The shame of nakedness in front of the kids at school seemed so far from this blue world. The wet petals of blue flax plastered the barn roof and the skin of the poplar growing through my father’s old Ford truck. Petals littered the window of the truck, covered over the rust, and gave the Ford a moment of new life. Blue flax covered the pile of rocks that marked the graves of the homesteader’s children. Chickens pecked and scratched blue petals in their yard. The roof of the house was blue in petals, and on the roadway, the blue looked deeper, vibrating against the red of the dirt.

Out in the pasture, my father’s struggle with the calves and heifers had ended. The cows were in the barn calling to one another, springing in the excitement of the storm. My father now stumbled down the length of the wheat field where the young wheat was lodged, fallen over but not flattened completely; each stalk leaned on its neighbor. The flax field was nothing now; its fragile flowers had been whipped by the wind into the air and had showered down on us, a harvest ruined. Even so, the blue. Blue around my toes, blue in the trees. I threw up my handful of wet blue petals and let them rain down on me.

My mother stood at the barn door, hugging herself, looking around in amazement and horror at all that blue. Out in the field, my father turned and started kicking his way back to the house.

“Are you all right?” said my mother. I nodded. “Then go find Dan,” she said. “See if he’s okay. And Dennis and Billy.”

I followed the Swede’s fence to the creek, instead of cutting through the field to the benchland where Dan had been working earlier in the day, to avoid my father. The petals of blue flax speckled the morning glory growing up the Swede’s fence. I picked some of the blossoms and put them in my pockets. The Swede had been at work again on the disputed fence line, moving it a greater distance yet into my father’s field. He had placed deer antlers along the top of this section of his uprooted and dying fence line, making the fence look fierce and ragged and foolish, a portrait of the old Swede himself. My father’s bit of fence lay, once again, on the ground: a tangled roll of wire and fence post. Nothing of it reminded me of my father. I touched the antlers of the Swede’s fence and tugged at the vines that held them. Honeysuckle vines came off in my hands. An unnatural fear that I would be punished for this act came over me, and I looked around quickly to see if the old Swede was watching. Then I bolted. I followed the creek up to the benchland overlooking my father’s property, running until the fear exhausted itself. Dan and Dennis were nowhere I could see, but Filthy Billy was walking around in the field below, looking over the damage. It occurred to me that if I ran down that hill, I could fly. I spread my arms and it felt like that: the air carried me.

Filthy Billy was wet through; his hair was flat to his head from the rain and he was sprinkled all over with blue petals. “Hello (fuck),” he said. “Excuse me, hello (fuck).”

“Hello,” I said.

“(Shit) Excuse me. Sorry (fuck). Some storm, eh? (Shit).”

“You seen Dan and Dennis?” I said. “Mum’s worried.”

“(Fuck) Sorry. They snuck off (shit). Excuse me. Into town before (fuck) the storm. They’ll be okay. (Fuck) Excuse me.”

I looked off down the fields to the tiny black figure of my father kicking and tramping the wheat field by the barn. Clouds of birds circled over him and the piles of wet and steaming alfalfa hay. Where the blue lake of flax had been, there was now a green patch of flattened plants. Filthy Billy swore under his breath, apologized, and scratched the skin on his forearm.

“Why do you scratch so much?” I said.

“Sorry. I can’t (fuck) help it. Excuse me.”

“What does
fuck
mean?” I said, to taunt him.

“(Shit) You should go,” he said. “(Fuck) Your dad’s (shit) going to be mad. (Fuck, shit) Excuse me. After this storm. (Shit) If he sees you and me (shit). Sorry. (Fuck) You should go. (Shit) Excuse me. Please. Go.”

I walked through the grass that hemmed my father’s fence along Blood Road, watching the grass part for my feet and watching, also, for the tiny black lizards that would climb inside you and eat your heart.

Then I heard it, as if my fears had conjured it, the swooshing behind me, the sound of grass opening a path to the wind. But it wasn’t the wind. Something followed me in the grass. There was a second path through the long grass behind mine, coming at me. I walked faster and then ran. The path through the grass chased me. I jumped over the fence behind the pile of rocks, the homesteader’s graves, and leaned against the back of the barn out of breath, my heart pumping fear into me. A pair of hands clutched the boards of the fence, as if someone were leaning on it, but nobody was there. I kept my eyes on the hands on the fence, backed around the corner, and ran smack into someone. I jumped and squeaked. The girl with the bell necklace was standing right there.

“Hi!” she said. She bent forward and looked at the fence line. “What you running from?”

“Nothing.”

“You home early from school?”

I looked for the hands on the fence which were no longer there, and nodded.

“Hey, you okay?”

I became aware of the noisy chattering of birds. “Where is everyone?” I said.

“In the house.”

I sighed and braced myself against the wall of the barn, catching my breath. Despite the storm, the wood in the wall of the barn was warm. I pressed the palms of my hands against it.

“Some storm, eh?” I said. “Look at all those blue flowers! Ever seen anything so pretty?”

“Yeah.” She grinned at me. Her two-woman face lit me up inside. I looked from the blue eye to the green and back again, in love with the wonder of them. The blue eye had specks of yellow radiating out into the blue; the green eye held enough brown to be almost hazel. There was little of the white man who had fathered her in the rest of her face, though. She was Indian enough to be an outcast in town and white enough to be an outcast on the reserve. But she looked at me like I looked at the barn kittens, and that was enough for me.

Lucifer wrapped himself around my legs and then lay on my feet. The girl took my hand, and we stared up at the petals dripping from the edge of the red barn roof against the blue sky. Her hand in mine made Parker and Lily Bell and the other kids look foolish in my mind, criminal.

I tried to think of something smart to say, to conjure something smooth and shiny to show her. I wanted to give her something, but I couldn’t think what. My stomach bundled up into a new ache, a delightful need to please. The children in the homesteader’s graves knocked rocks together briefly. A crow flew off the barn roof over our heads; its wings were transparent.

“There’s children buried there,” I said. “Under those rocks.”

“I know it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows it,” she said. “And how they died.”

“How’d they die?”

“You don’t know that?”

“Dennis says some bear got them, like what got Sarah Kemp.”

“It was Coyote,” she said.

“A coyote? A coyote got them? That’s crazy. A coyote wouldn’t kill those kids.”

The girl with the bell necklace spread a know-it-all smile on her face but didn’t answer me.

“I think I hear them sometimes,” I said. “Knocking around.”

“Coyote killed them, so they know when he’s around,” she said. “They get all excited. Try to warn you.”

“That’s silly.”

She turned my way, leaning her shoulder against the warm barn wall, and looked at my face up close, so I could feel her breath on my
cheek. She studied my hair and petted my hand. After a time I heard my father yell, from some distance away, at the end of the wheat field near the creek. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could see he was angry. Lucifer ran off. We let our hands fall. Finally my father came close enough that we could hear him.

“You!” he said. “You deaf? Get off my property. Get away from here. Lousy Indian! Get off my property.”

He marched at us. I looked at the girl with the bell necklace and saw that her face had gone stony. She turned and fled, jingling, into the house, followed by my father. The birds on the petal-blue roof of the house lifted. Presently the women of Bertha Moses’s family filed out the door. They jingled, sang, and fluttered, and the birds accompanied them. The girl with the bell necklace looked back at me several times, but neither of us waved.

I
HESITATED
back to the house. The door to the kitchen was open, but the screen door was closed. Through it I saw my father kneeling before my mother as she sat in her rocker. My mother held my father, like she used to hold him in the days before the bear attack, and he cried. She was dressed in her sour milking dress, and he leaned into her breast, heaving with the sorrow of that lost harvest. It wasn’t until then that the tragedy of the storm hit me. I’d been flirting with a girl who petted me like a kitten while my father was out there taking stock of the damage. I was wondering, tickled, at the blue that was our ruined flax crop spread all over the yard. We made our living out there in the field. Those crops fed the cows, fed ourselves, and brought in the money to buy the flour my mother hoarded behind her marriage bed. There was still time to replant, and my father would do that. But if the weather didn’t help us along, if that crop failed too, then how would we live? I backed away from the kitchen door and stood for a while looking over the yard feeling sick with worry. The homesteader’s children clanked the rocks in their graves, as they almost always did this time of day. Over them, on the edge of the barn roof, a crow paced back and forth, back and forth. The voices of Parker and Lily Bell and the other kids slipped in under the worry and pounded louder and louder at my head until they took over. My lightning arm went numb, and I nestled it against my chest as if it were a frightened child.