The Cure for Death by Lightning (16 page)

Lucifer trotted up to me, mewing, and wrapped himself around my leg, then flopped himself over on the red dirt, offering his belly to me. I
rubbed him with the toe of my boot, and then wandered over, through the orchard, to the Swede’s fence. The Swede’s billy goat was ramming his head into one of the trees that made up the fence, but our sheep ignored him and went on grazing between the fruit trees. The bell on the lead sheep rang out as she ran up to me and nosed my fingers for feed. They were a strange sight, sheep out of dreams. The blue flax had clung to their coats along with everything else. I sunk my hands into their blue wool and rubbed next to their skin, where the lanolin lay, to smooth away the dryness on my hands. When Dan and Dennis sheared the sheep for my father, as they would sometime this month before the real heat of summer began, their callused hands went as soft as any city man’s. The smell of wool on a live sheep is the same as the smell of lamb meat you eat at a restaurant or buy in a supermarket. This was the smell my hands carried, as I plucked blossoms off the Swede’s dying fence and threw them in the air so they would rain down on me.

I went back to the barn and checked the cow my father had operated on. She was still lying as she had that morning. I nudged her bony back and slapped her, to try to get her up, but she wouldn’t move. There wasn’t much hope for her now; a cow that can’t get up is a dead cow. I filled a bucket with water and put it in front of her and smoothed the hair between her horns. Because she lay, the skin across her belly stretched the wounds open. Flies landed on the wound, darted away, and landed again.

When I finally went back to the house my father was no longer there. My mother was feeding the fire and whispering, explaining something to my dead grandmother. She looked sideways at me as I came in, and said, “Hello, dear.”

She’d taken a bag of flour from the hole in the wall behind her bed and leaned it against the kitchen cupboards. Flour was on the floor and on the kitchen table where she’d been mixing a batch of bread in a large ceramic bowl. Flour was in her hair, on her nose, and down the front of her dress. Though there were bread recipes within the pages of her scrapbook, the scrapbook remained on the rocking chair while she made bread; my mother never needed the recipes to guide her. She made bread so frequently that it became one of those mindless habits that made hours disappear into daydream.

“Are we going to be all right?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

I sat on the kitchen chair beside her.

“Are you ready to tell me what happened today, at school?” She didn’t look up and talked through pursed lips.

My stomach tightened up. I searched my hands and picked dirt from under my nails. “Nothing happened,” I said.

“Why were you home early?”

“Mrs. Boulee let us out early.”

“You were so strange on the bed. Like some kind of fit.”

“I felt sick. I fell asleep, then I couldn’t come out of it.”

My mother stopped working the dough and looked me up and down for a moment. “You made your father very angry. He doesn’t like it when you don’t answer him.”

“I was asleep,” I said.

“With your eyes open?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.”

“Is it the boys at school?” said my mother. “Are they teasing you?”

“No!” I said. “Nothing happened. I just wasn’t feeling well. I’m all right now.”

My mother added more flour to the dough and set the bowl in front of me. “Well then,” she said, “you can knead that for me.”

“What’s going to happen with the crops?” I said.

“I don’t know. We’ll plant again, I guess. It’s a lot of money lost on wages.”

I washed my hands and went to work. My mother insisted that I knead the dough in the way she did, bringing the dough forward with my right hand, and pushing it down back into itself with the heel of my left palm. Pull forward and push down. My whole body rocked with the effort of it. I was tired and cranky from lack of sleep and shamed by the day. Though I was used to physical work, kneading dough always left an ache in my upper arms, and tensed the back of my neck. But at the same time the rocking motion was hypnotic, calming. I pushed the day’s events into that dough, brought them up, and beat them back down again. Parker’s laughing face, then the girl’s hand in mine. My father’s anger, then blue petals drifting. Pull forward, push down.

M
Y MOTHER
woke me very early, as the sky was growing light, before my father and brother were up. Her face was still puffy and creased from sleep and she wore her milking dress and kerchief. She stood over me patting my shoulder.

“I need help,” she said, and when I sat up to clear the dreams from my head, she left my room. I threw my brother’s jeans on under my nightgown, put on a sweater and some socks, and went into the kitchen. My mother had lit the lamp on the kitchen table and now sat in her rocking chair, holding one elbow and covering her mouth as she did when she cried. But she wasn’t crying. She was laughing, or rather, trying to hold in a laugh. My mother had thrown my father’s jack shirt over her big bowl of bread dough, to keep the dough warm overnight, but she must have miscalculated the amount of yeast, or else the fire in the stove was too hot for the warm night. Whatever the case, her bread dough had risen out of the bowl and oozed into the arms of my father’s jacket and over the edge of the bowl into a heap. In the uncertain light, the bread-filled jacket looked like a drunk taking a nap face-first on our kitchen table. I laughed too, but silently. My mother and I held in the noise of our laughter until our eyes stung.

“Well,” she said quietly. “We better clean this up before your father wakes, or he’ll be livid.”

She scraped the bread dough away from the jacket with a wooden spoon, then gave the jacket to me. While she cleaned up the mess on
the kitchen table, I took the jacket outside and washed it down under the pump water in the early morning light. I scraped the bits of dough off with my fingernails and took the coat back inside to hand wash it in the washbasin. I hung the coat on a hanger behind the stove.

“If he asks, we’re just getting a start on cleaning winter linens,” said my mother.

My father didn’t ask. He didn’t even notice the coat hanging there, in the shadows behind the stove. He sat at the kitchen table with his back to the coat, hunkered over his coffee. My brother came out, yawning, and after a time Billy and Dennis scraped their boots off on the porch steps and came inside. They all sat around staring into their coffee mugs, too sleepy to talk at first, as my mother and I served up a breakfast of porridge, toast, and marmalade.

“That cow’s dying,” said Dan. My father looked up at him. “You don’t shoot her today, I will.”

“Give her time,” said my father.

“Christ, she’s suffering. Have you looked at her? There’s maggots in that wound you made.”

“She’ll heal up.”

Dan stood up. “If you’re not going to, I’ll kill her myself.”

My father stood up and leaned over the table at Dan. Dennis went on eating. Filthy Billy went on staring at the table and cussing under his breath.

“Leave her,” said my father.

“She’s dying,” said Dan. “She’s in pain. Can’t you hear her moaning?”

“You eat here, you do as I say. Leave her.”

“Cutting that cow open was just stupid.”

My father hit his fist against the table, sloshing the coffee in his cup. Filthy Billy stood up beside Dan. We all looked at him, surprised.

“(Shit) She’s dying,” said Billy. Then he was overcome by a wave of cussing so violent it took the breath from him and made him sit down again. We watched him at it, amazed.

My father, still standing, bowed his head for a moment. “I’ll do it,” he said.

“What?” said my brother.

“I said I’ll do it, goddamn it.”

“Then I’ll give you a hand.”

“I don’t want your help. The girl.”

“She’ll be late for school,” said my mother.

“Let her.”

“Let Dan help,” said my mother. “For heaven’s sake!”

“(Fuck) I’ll do it,” said Billy.

“No!” said my father. “The girl.”

My mother quickly packed a sandwich of new bread, butter, and last year’s strawberry jam into the syrup can that was my lunch pail, muttering all the while to the ghost of my grandmother, and handed it to me as I followed my father out the door. “Try not to be late,” she said.

My father strode off to the barn so quickly I couldn’t keep up to him. The petals of flax were turning brown on the barn roof and over the old Ford. When I got to the barn door, my father was already at the other end with the cow he’d operated on. The old white tomcat was walking circles in front of the barn door, and the morning sun scattered his shadow around the barn. I all but tripped over him as I came in. His eyes were glazed and paralysis had mounted one side of him, just as the stroke had mounted one side of Mrs. Halley and pushed her world into a black hole. It looked like the old tom intended to cross to the other side of the barn, but sickness reined him in like a rider turning a horse. I lifted the cat by his belly and carried him halfway across the barn. He hung limp in my hands and when I put him down again, he created a new orbit in the middle of the barn, round and round. I put my hand up to test his sight, but he had become blinded by his intent. He could see nothing but the other side of the barn.

At the far end of the barn, with the sledgehammer in his hand, my father motioned me to come and hold the rope halter on the cow. I held her so her head and neck were pulled flat out on the floor. My father knocked the sick cow squarely on the forehead, then took out his jackknife and cut her throat. The cow jerked from the impact of my father’s blow, but that was all.

“Why do you have to go around hurting things,” I said.

My father turned and looked at me.

“Operating on that cow was just stupid,” I said.

My father got up so quickly that he stumbled over the empty stumping powder box I sat on when I milked. When he steadied himself, he took me by the shoulders and slapped my face. It stung, hot, and I was
frightened, but I said, “You don’t scare me,” and surprised myself with the saying of it.

That creepy darkness spread under my father’s eyes, and I felt sick. He walked at me slowly, undoing his belt, and then Filthy Billy was there, at the doorway of the barn. As he came in he nearly tripped over the old tom. Nevertheless he walked up the aisle of the barn slowly, too casually, muttering obscenities. He picked up the stumping box that my father had tripped over, looked inside, and put it down again.

“Went and forgot (shit) my canteen someplace,” he said. “Don’t know (fuck) where I (shit) put it.”

My father watched Billy stumble around the barn for a few moments and then walked around me, without looking at me. He said, “Crazy man,” as he left the barn.

Filthy Billy bent down to pick up one of the grain pails and watched my father leave. Then he came over to me.

“You (shit) okay?” he said.

I shrugged.

Billy pointed out the tomcat turning circles in the alleyway. “(Shit) He’s got a (fuck) demon riding him (shit),” he said.

“Nah, he’s had a stroke,” I said.

As we watched, the old tom carved out the same circle over and over again, never varying. His white coat was stained in patches. His eyes weren’t registering what was before him.

“I should do him in,” said Billy, and for once his speech was clear of obscenities.

I said, “Yes,” and we looked at each other, both of us surprised that he wasn’t swearing for that moment. But as soon as we did, he was back at it, cussing under his breath. Lucifer bounded into the barn, stopped short at the tom, hissed, and arched. When he got no response, Lucifer walked carefully around the tom and wound himself around my feet and then around Billy’s, round and round in a figure eight.

“Maybe leave him,” I said. “Maybe he’ll get better.”

“(Shit) Maybe,” said Billy.

We watched the old tom for a little longer and then Billy tipped his hat to me and left the barn.

I didn’t go to school that morning, or any morning after. By running around the back of the root cellar and following the old Indian trail, I
could reach Blood Road without anyone seeing me. My mother would take the democrat into town later in the day, to take the cream to the train station, so I turned left and followed Blood Road towards the reserve. There were only one or two turtles still making the trek across the road. Lucifer followed me a little way, mewing several yards behind me. But he got nothing in the way of loving from me that day and disappeared into the woods, just as I turned off Blood Road to follow another of the old Indian trails. The bush this low on the mountain was dense, and I was glad for the trail. I swung my syrup-tin lunch bucket and looked up into the roof of trees. Branches were broken at eye level along the trail, breaks fresh and deliberate: a birch branch was stuck in the crotch of a fir, a willow sapling drooped in the arms of a spruce, bits of trees that didn’t belong together, that didn’t grow anywhere near one another, trees with different needs. The branches were pointers, like those Dennis or Filthy Billy used when hunting with my brother. If the hunting went on for more than a few days and the party split up, sometimes Dennis or Billy grabbed a handful of grass and left it near the dead fire. Whoever followed could tell how long ago the rest of the party had been there by the state of the grass. Then they’d put branches in the trees like those on the trail, pointing the direction they’d gone. People hunted here or on our land, but they didn’t need markers. My brother and I shot deer eating off the wheat stacked in stooks in the fields, and the occasional cougar, and many coyotes skulking behind the sheep in the pastures.