The Cure for Death by Lightning (17 page)

I took the birch branch from the spruce and walked with it, driving myself that fingernails-on-blackboard crazy with the feel of birch bark under my callused fingers. I followed the pointers out of listlessness and boredom more than curiosity. At first, the forest was quiet. Then I began hearing the noises that made up the quiet: trees aching, birds whistling, someone chopping wood way off. There was something else, too. A metal sound, a tinkling or clanking, like the sound of a horse harness, but it was too far off and receding to hear clearly. I branched off the many trails, following the sound, and when I was about ready to give up and turn back I came on the girl with the bell necklace, Bertha Moses’s granddaughter, walking some distance ahead of me in the bush. She was dressed as she always was when she came to the house, in boy’s jeans, a western shirt that was too small for her, and
of course she wore the bell necklace; that was the sound I’d heard. The sight of her slim back in that clearing lit me up inside. She was bending over, working with something very tiny in her hands. She turned and I ducked down behind a wild rose bush.

“Beth Weeks, I see you,” she called out.

I stood up from behind the bush and grinned, all shyness and delight.

“You were sneaking up on me,” she said.

I took a few steps forward, holding my syrup tin with both hands.

“Scared me too!” she said.

She looked sideways at my wool skirt and shook her head. My eyes were drawn to the necklace. It was made from bells of many sizes, all cheap and a little tarnished, and strung on one thread of red yarn. I was tempted to pull the necklace because one good yank would send the bells tinkling into the air. She jingled the necklace.

“Like it?” she said. “I made it.”

I nodded, then noticed the bloody cuts on her arm.

“What happened to your arm?” I said.

She pulled her sleeve down. “Nothing.”

“Let’s see.” I reached to take her wrist but she pulled her arm away. “You did that, didn’t you?” I said.

“So what if I did?”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Mind your own business.” She buttoned her shirtsleeves. “What’re you doing out here anyway?”

“Walking. What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“No, really. What’s that you’ve got in your hand?”

The girl tried to hide what she had in her hand, but I pried her fingers open. She had two live crickets, tied together with a blond hair. She let them go and they struggled on the ground for a time, to free themselves.

“What’re you doing?” I said again.

“Nothing.”

“You killing them?”

“No!”

“What then?”

She nudged the struggling crickets with her toe. “It’s a love charm,”
she said finally. “You tie two crickets together with the hair of whoever you love.”

“Who are you in love with?” I said.

The girl shrugged and went shy. She looked up and around at the sky through the trees. I flicked a ladybug off my skirt.

“I never seen you in pants,” she said. “You don’t ever wear pants?”

“When I do chores. Under a skirt!” I giggled.

“Your dad say so?” she said.

“My mum doesn’t let me wear pants.”

“Granny says your father’s gone stupid.”

I was immediately angry and felt my face flush, but I said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Granny says that about a lot of people.”

I shrugged.

“Is it true he’s got metal in his head?”

“A bomb blew up right next to him. In the war. Covered him right up. Left bits of stuff in him. Mum says they couldn’t get it all out. She nursed him for a while, after. That’s how they met.”

“Is that what makes him like that?” she said.

The anger lit up like a match. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Yelling all the time. Or not even that. Like when he’s all nice one minute and then he’s crazy. Like how he gets so jealous if a man even touches his cap at your mother.”

The fire licked around inside me and sputtered out. I kicked the ground in silence for a while. “He wasn’t always like that. You seen him. Even last spring he wasn’t like that. After that bear attacked our camp, after we sold the sheep, he wasn’t right after that.”

“Bet it was Coyote. Granny says that. She’s scared Coyote’s back, sneaking around. Granny says if a man’s got something wrong with him, if he’s a drunk or got hit on the head or bushed or something, then Coyote can get inside him and make him crazy, make him do stuff. Bad stuff.”

I laughed. “Like Coyote Jack. I heard that. Dan told me you guys think he’s a shape-shifter.”

“Yeah, like him.”

“You really believe that?”

The girl shrugged. “Granny’s stories. Sometimes she swears it’s the truth. Sometimes she says it’s just stories.”

I kicked the ground. The girl looked down at the crickets and then back up at me.

“I like your hair,” she said. She reached out and ran her fingers through my hair for some time without speaking. It felt good and calming, like my mother brushing my hair before bed. After a minute I closed my eyes and enjoyed it.

“You’re beautiful, like an angel,” she said, and just then, I felt that way. She stopped stroking my hair and sunk both hands into her jean pockets. I tried to think if there was something in my lunch can fit to give her; I tried to think of something to say. I felt silly asking her name because I already sort of knew her. She’d been at the house with the rest of Bertha’s family so many times, drinking coffee, looking at the walls.

“Want to come to my place?” she said.

I nodded and began walking with her before I thought about where it was she lived. She lived in Bertha’s house on the reserve road with all the other women in Bertha’s clan. At that realization, all the name-calling Parker and Lily Bell and the other kids from school did rose up in a hot wave that burned my cheeks and made me sulky.
Indian lover. Squaw
. I walked on with her anyway with my fear of the reserve making me silent. The girl with the bell necklace walked ahead of me, breaking off branches now and again and sticking them in the crotches of trees. Her walk wasn’t a walk at all; it was a skip, a dance. I found myself copying her. She put another branch in the crotch of a tree.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She shrugged and kept walking.

“I saw Filthy Billy the other night tying his pants legs together before he went to sleep,” I said. “And he jumped over the fire because a lizard chased him.”

“So the lizard don’t come eat his heart.”

“Yeah.”

“My great-uncle did that too before he died. Some of the old people are still scared of those lizards. Filthy Billy’s just plain crazy. Granny says she’s seen a man die from his heart getting eaten that way, by one of them lizards. Can’t believe half what Granny says.”

“I like her,” I said. “I still have that velvet she gave me.”

We walked on a little longer in silence. The girl put branches in the crotches of trees now and again, and I found myself doing the same.

“I’ll show you something,” said the girl.

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

T
HE GIRL
with the bell necklace left the trail and pushed her way into the bush. I followed with my hand up to protect my face and my skirt from catching on every branch. “Dennis is scared of those lizards too,” I said.

The girl grinned at me. “So am I.”

“They’re not even lizards, you know,” I said. “They’re salamanders. My dad says they’ll live through fire. You can throw them in the fire and they’ll live. They live forever.”

“Don’t tell Billy that, eh?”

We came on a clearing and what looked like a mound of dirt overgrown with moss and weeds. Bush was all around us, and someplace close Turtle Creek burbled away. “This is Granny’s old house,” said the girl. “A winter house.”

“Where?” I said.

She took me by the hand and led me forward slowly, testing the ground with her feet, as if we might fall through to China. “Careful,” she said. Then there it was, a hole to China in the ground, an opening into darkness at the center of that mound of dirt and weeds. I could clearly see the old posts and sticks that served as supports.

“There’d be a ladder there,” said the girl. “Right down the center where the smoke came up. You’d climb down into the smoke to get into the house. Sometimes there was a door on the side for women and old people, so it was easier, and so the women were never higher up
than the men. It was bad luck to have a woman over you if you were a man.”

“People lived there?” I said.

“Granny lived there, when she was small. That was my great-granny’s house. Then it was Granny’s house. My mum wants nothing to do with it, so I guess it’s mine now, eh?”

“My dad wouldn’t give nothing to me,” I said. “The farm goes to Dan when he’s done with it, even though Dan wants nothing to do with it.”

The girl led me back down the bush trail, and before I knew it we broke out onto the road that led right through the reserve village. Women watched us from inside their houses; I saw them from the corner of my eye and when I turned to look at them, they disappeared. Two old men sat on the steps of one of the houses, laughing and playing ball with several small children. When they saw me they stopped laughing and watched as we passed.

The reserve was overwhelmed by the church. It sat up on the hill at the far end of the reserve road, painted white with new shingles on the bellcast roof of the belfry. Children played all over the churchyard. Two little girls ran, laughing. The older of the two grabbed the other and made her stand still. The older girl put her hands on her hips as her mother might, wagged her finger, and said, “Shut up, you just shut up,” and then they ran off, giggling. A small boy with a dirty face held a dog at the hips and made humping motions against its backside. I looked away.

The church was ringed by an unkept graveyard dotted with simple white crosses, no big headstones or stoic angels, no fence to keep the chickens out. Children played there now, in the graveyard, pitching a baseball, batting, catching, and running from cross to cross as if they were bases. As we got closer, I saw objects on the graves. In one case it was a frypan; in another, a teacup without the saucer; in another, the head of an ax; in another, the black lid off a woodstove. Whether children’s playthings or tokens to take to the next life, I never asked. Before I had the chance, two boys were on us, following our footsteps, capturing our shadows in their arms. They were dressed up like cowboys, and one wore chaps. He said, “Hey, half-breed, you gonna come to my house tonight, drink some booze, eh?”

“Go shut up,” said the girl.

“What, you too good for us now, running with a white girl?”

The other one called, “Hey, white girl, what time is it? Got to hurry, eh? Got to be on time, eh?”

“Wouldn’t touch no half-breed anyhow,” said Chaps. “She’s got fleas.”

“No, she got ticks from that Weeks girl. Sheep ticks. That’s what them Weekses are, a bunch of sheep ticks. Whole town knows they’re sheep ticks.”

“She’s a Cockney. Go back where you belong, Cockney.”

Without a twitch to betray her, the girl swung around and pushed the boy without chaps down. Her necklace swung around too and tinkling accompanied her attack. The other boy moved at her.

“You gonna hit a girl?” she said. “You’re a big man, Jason, hitting girls. Real big man. Bet you learned that from your dad. Bet you watched him beat your mother. You learn good, eh?”

The boy took a step back. “You’re no girl,” he said. “You’re a sheep tick. Stupid, dumb half-breed, got no father.”

“You got no mother. You got a woman beater for a father.”

“Least my mum and dad was married when they had me.”

“That don’t stop you from being a bastard.”

The other boy rose up through this and pulled on Jason’s sleeve. “Come on,” he said. “That’s the white in her talking. She ain’t worth nothing.”

The unnamed boy spit in the red dirt at our feet and backed off down the road. When they were far enough for me to be brave, I said, “I think he likes you.”

“Sure he does.”

I ribbed her, and she jostled me back and then raced me up to the porch of the log house that could belong only to Bertha Moses. A patchwork quilt with big red scraps of that velvet she had given me hung over the porch railing along with women’s bloomers, stockings, brightly colored blouses, and skirts. The house was an unpainted, weathered gray. It wasn’t a government house like the others. It looked as if it had been built someplace else and then reassembled in this spot because old chinking was blended with new in the gaps between the logs and in some places the wood wasn’t weathered as much, as if it
had been snug against another log for a time and then exposed in the rebuilding. The house was on the reserve road but wasn’t on reserve land. There was a huge, neatly kept vegetable and flower garden in front which we had to walk through to get to the porch; the garden was fenced off from the chickens that pecked and scratched the yard. Bertha had made patchwork curtains, the same as the quilt that hung over the railing. I stopped at that quilt and pinched the softness in the velvet squares.