The Cure for Death by Lightning (2 page)

Turtle Creek was a shallow, fast-moving stream, except for the pool at the hollow stump, and was filled with large smooth stones that I could skip across without getting my feet wet. Where it wound through our property, the stream was overhung with hemlock, alder, and pussy willow, and framed with watercress and forget-me-not. Violets and wild strawberries were slow-moving scavengers licking up everything dead along the creek shore: fallen trees, the mess of dead leaves turning to dirt, and the heap that, the summer before, had been a dead squirrel possessed by squirming white maggots.

I heard it again in the bush, where the path split from the creek and headed back to the farm. I held my breath and listened. It could be anything: a man like the ones my mother’s friend Mrs. Bell warned of, who would catch a girl in the bush and do unspeakable things to her.
Or a bear gone crazy, like the bear that had killed Sarah Kemp just that week, or like the one that attacked our sheep camp in June of the year before.

It was after that bear attack that my father sold the sheep and went into dairy cows. We had spent the late spring and much of the summer living out of a tent on Adams Plateau or Queest Mountain, herding sheep from one grazing area to the next. We all slept together — my mother, father, Daniel, and myself — in a big stiff canvas tent, on bedrolls of canvas over balsam fir boughs. The tent, our clothes, and our hair were fragrant with balsam for the whole summer. The night the grizzly attacked our camp, the dogs woke us, and we left the tent together as a continuous black shadow. We were already dressed because on the mountain we slept in the clothes we spent our days in. Each of us, except my mother, had a gun in hand. It was a clear night with a quarter moon that reflected off the backs of the sheep.

The sheep were running. In their midst a great bear rose up on its hind legs, roaring and swatting. The sheepdogs were on him, but the bear paid them little mind. As my father aimed his rifle and tried to call back the dogs, the grizzly wrapped his huge jaws around the head of a full-grown ewe and shook her from side to side as a coyote shakes his prey. My father fired, and fired again, missing both times. The grizzly dropped the ewe and charged, first at the dogs and then at us.

“Oh Jesus,” said my father. “Get down! Get down!”

My mother and father and Dan flung themselves to the ground, but I lost my head and ran back towards the tent and the great black shape chased me, snuffing and rank. I tripped and fell. My brother and father fired in the air, afraid of aiming in the dark and hitting me, but out of panic I aimed from the ground, where I had fallen, and fired at the bear. It was foolish because the little rifle I had would only annoy a monster that size. Yet I know I hit the bear because he howled, horribly, and ran off into the bush behind the tent, pursued by the dogs.

My father was the first to reach me. He fell to his knees beside me and took my shoulders up in his arms and all but shook me in panic. “You all right?” he said. “You all right?”

“I got him,” I said.

“Sure you got him,” he said.

My father left me to my mother’s care and called off the dogs and
told Dan and me to stay put with Mum and to keep a sharp eye out. He marched through the white ghosts in the bedding ground and into black.

Dan and I fiddled with our guns as we waited, turning and aiming at every rustle we heard in the bush.

“That was stupid,” said Dan. “We would have had it.”

“I got it,” I said. “I know I did.”

“With that gun, all it’s got is a scratch.”

“Well, if I had a better rifle, that bear would be dead.”

“You can’t hit nothing.”

“Enough,” said my mother. “Stay sharp.”

One shot sounded that made us all stand taller. Then my father came back the way he’d left, across the bedding grounds behind the tent, a black shadow against all those white sheep. My mother lifted the lantern to him. He was shaking and covered in bits of undergrowth and had strange clawlike scratches down each side of his face. Against the darkness his eyes looked big and crazy before he held his hand up against the light.

My mother lowered the lantern. “John, what’s happened?” she said.

My father didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t answer. He stumbled around in front of the tent for a time, and I watched him at it, growing scared. Dan took him by the arm and tried to get him to sit down on a stump, but he pulled away.

“Did you get him?” Dan said.

“I don’t know,” said my father. “So dark. Something came after me. I shot it. I think I shot it.”

We watched for the grizzly all that night, but he didn’t return. The next day Dan and my father tracked the bear’s trail of blood for three miles to a patch of thick bush before giving up. There were too many stories of bears ambushing hunters for them to push farther. We never found the body of the bear, but then we never would. Bears bury their dead, just as they bury their kill.

The grizzly attack on our camp shook us all. My mother wouldn’t let us out of her sight. My brother woke shouting. My father went silent and moody and sat around the camp with his gun over his knees eating whole legs of lamb, whole pots of stew, at a time. We watched him eat, amazed. A week after the grizzly attack, my father drove his entire
flock of Corriedales to Salmon Arm, loaded them on a freight for Vancouver, and sold the dogs to a sheep trader named Currie. A month later my father went back to Currie and bought a handful of knotheaded, fence-breaking, black-faced Suffolk from him because he couldn’t think well of himself without sheep and because they were going for next to nothing. When he bought ten Jersey cows from Ferguson to begin his dairy, he put an end to those glorious summers we spent wandering the mountains and began, wholeheartedly, his career of unhappiness.

I was fourteen last summer when the bear attacked, and so a lifetime of those summers on Adam’s Plateau, Hunter’s Range, and Queest had firmly fixed the need in my body to wander. Although I now hiked only within the hilly range that encompassed Turtle Valley, and though I now took my gun almost every time I left the house, I still had reason to fear, even here, by Turtle Creek. Sarah Kemp, who’d been killed by a bear that week, was a girl my age. I’d be going to her funeral in a day. So it was that with every rustle in the undergrowth my body tensed, with every crack in the bush I listened. But this time, this time, the sound of something following became a shushing through the grass, my fear at play. I let out my breath and kept on my way, back home.

The sky over the farm was ablaze with birds. Seagulls and crows jabbered and cawed over the barn, the manure pile, the stack of lumber and fence posts, and the heap of rocks that marked the graves of the homesteaders’ children. Starlings chattered on the poplar that grew through the front end of my father’s old Ford truck. Barn swallows darted between the handful of ewes in the orchard pasture that bordered on the Swede’s property, and over the lake of violet flax past the house. They looped up and formed a circle in the sky for an instant, before diving down for insects between the bodies of the sheep. Swallows zoomed over the heads of my father, my brother, and our hired men, Dennis and Filthy Billy, as they coiled alfalfa hay into haycocks, by hand, with pitchforks. The starlings in the poplar flew up in a great breath, then landed on the roof of the house, enraging the rooster into crowing, and sending the little black lizards that lived around the yard scuttling into hiding. The chatter of birds was deafening, and because of them, I knew we had guests.

B
ERTHA
M
OSES
and her daughters and her daughters’ daughters were standing or sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee left from breakfast. One of the daughters was ladling hot water from the reservoir on the cast-iron stove into the coffeepot. I’d polished the woodstove with stove black the day before to protect it from rusting, and it shone as black as the daughters’ hair. I backed out the screen door and searched around the yard for my mother. When I found her in the barn, shoveling out the stalls, I called, “Mrs. Moses and her family are here,” and went back to the house to set out more cups and spoons, cream, precious sugar, and a plate of oatcakes. Bertha Moses and her family were walking from the reserve into town — when they went to town they often stopped at our house on their way.

My mother entered the kitchen wiping her hands on her skirt. She wore her milking clothes, a brown housedress and gum boots, and her long, long hair was tucked away in a blue kerchief, so you’d think she had no hair at all. She smelled sour from the dairy.

“Bertha,” she said. “Good to see you.”

Bertha Moses dressed altogether differently from my mother. She had salt-and-pepper hair done up in a single braid that lay down the back of her red dress, and her sleeves were scandalously rolled to the elbow. She wore black stockings and moccasins decorated with porcupine quills and embroidery, strings and strings of brightly colored beads, and even now — out visiting — a pink apron filled with
tobacco and papers and matches, bits of fabric, threads and beads, and a few dirty, crumpled dollar notes.

Nevertheless Bertha and my mother had a good deal in common. My mother had driven an ambulance and nursed during the First World War, and, until my father’s jealous rages had flared up over the last year, she’d been called on by white farmers in the valley to nurse away simple ailments. Bertha was a midwife for women on the reserve and for white women too, farmwomen who lived in the valley. Bertha had known me before I’d known myself. She’d attended my mother at my birth, a potentially difficult birth because my mother was forty. Bertha wasn’t that much older, but the deference her daughters treated her with and the authority she carried in her walk made her seem much older. She had lost her status as a Treaty Indian at fourteen when she’d married an elderly white man named Watson who owned a farm next to the Turtle Creek Reserve. She had three daughters by him. After Watson died of simple old age and was buried in the reserve graveyard when Bertha wasn’t yet twenty, Bertha married an Indian man who’d taken the white name Moses. They lived on the Watson property, Bertha’s property. A year into their marriage, Moses shot himself accidentally as he climbed over a fence with a gun, and died a half mile from home of blood loss, but not before he’d fathered a son Bertha would name Henry.

Now Henry, too, was dead and Bertha had no husband and no son. Her house was a house of women. One of the daughters’ daughters was pregnant, another had webbed fingers, and some of the younger girls had blue or green eyes inherited from white fathers, farmhands likely. Each girl’s hair was black, oiled with bear grease so it shone, and tied back with all manner of barrettes and ribbons. The daughter with webbed fingers wore a bolero jacket and skirt skillfully fashioned from an edge-to-edge coat. The sewing was Bertha’s handiwork; with the war on and fabric hard to come by, Bertha was making a good living remaking new ladies’ garments from old. Someone wore violet-scented talc. One of the daughters’ daughters wore boys’ jeans and a western shirt that stretched a little at the buttons across her breasts. She was my age and she wore lipstick and a necklace of bells strung together. I coveted that necklace. She saw me looking at it and jingled it, and the room filled with tinkling notes that lit up everyone’s face. She lifted the
necklace a little so light reflected from the bells onto my own face. I squinted and grinned at her. The room grew womanly.

“He any better?” said Bertha.

“No,” said my mother.

They were speaking of my father, of course, as they always did now, on these visits. A head injury from the Great War had left my father sensitive to sound and bright lights and he had sometimes been irritable and demanding. But I had never really feared him, not until the bear attacked the camp the spring before. Now I feared his temper in public. I feared finding myself alone with him.

In the spring of 1941, not a month after the bear attacked our camp, my father had waltzed into the general store and punched Morley Boulee, the teacher’s husband. The Fergusons, who had sold us our dairy herd, were close friends of Morley Boulee, and a week after my father hit Boulee, Mrs. Ferguson had caught me on the street in front of Bouchard and Belcham’s general store and told me I had no right to hold my head up and walk that cocky, not with a father like the one I had, no right at all. I had watched her lips telling me what my father had done. She had one crooked bottom tooth, so tea-stained that it appeared, at first, to be gold.

“All Morley Boulee did was tip his hat to your mother, tip his hat! A neighborly thing! And your father yelled at your mother, right there, in the store, how she’d been flirting with him, seeing him on the sly. Morley Boulee, we’re talking here! What would he want with a farmer’s wife when he’s got the schoolteacher? Morley stepped in, to defend your mother. He had to! And your father knocked him over, sent the stocking rack flying! What kind of father you got? Don’t you hold your head up to me! Hoarders!”

When my father knocked over Morley Boulee and the rack of silk stockings, he’d knocked over our good name. In the year that followed, things went from bad to worse. Now the only visitors we got were the gloomy Mrs. Bell and Bertha Moses and her family.