The Cure for Death by Lightning (20 page)

I swung around and Nora was there, her hand on my shoulder, grinning, her necklace tinkling. She said, “What’s up?”

I looked back at the pasture grass and the trail that ran through it and ended at my feet. My lightning arm tugged from the brambles like an alien thing and moved through the air in front of me as if searching for something in the dark. Then all at once the lightning arm was mine again, the tingling and feeling returned. Nevertheless, I felt through the air a moment longer and ran my hand through the grass trail at my feet.

“Lose something?” said Nora.

“No. I don’t know.”

“You got yourself stuck there.” She made me stand still and, vine by vine, she untangled me. I stood like a child or an old woman getting serviced, thankful for her company, more for her soothing touch. A
wind stirred up the ghost scent of the violet flax and messed the trail in the grass so it was hardly visible. A whirlwind will play tricks like that, run itself out in a straight line and create a trail in its wake, spawning stories of ghosts and making you see things, hands on fences. So I told myself, as Nora untangled me.

“You okay?” she said.

“Yeah, fine.”

“You got some scrapes there.”

“They’re okay.”

“You’re not going to school anymore?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Your mum doesn’t know, does she?”

“No.”

Nora looked down the line of blossoms on the Swede’s fence, and around at the sheep grazing in bunches under the fruit trees. She took the hand on my lightning arm.

“You got scrapes here too,” she said. I shrugged. “You should come home with me. Granny will clean them up.”

“I don’t know.”

“She won’t tell.”

“Sure she will.”

“You should do something. Granny told me about a white woman who died when she pricked herself on a rosebush.”

“Yeah, I heard that too,” I said.

“See. Come on.”

We walked a little ways up the Swede’s fence towards Blood Road.

“Mum will make me go back to school,” I said.

“Okay, we won’t go to Granny’s. But I’ll go get something to fix them scratches. You could die.”

We walked along for a while longer, listening to the sound of Nora’s bells and the birds in the trees.

“I wanted to go to that school,” said Nora. “I don’t no more.”

“Me neither.”

“We could have our own school,” said Nora. “We could sit someplace and teach each other things. Today, we could do that.”

I shrugged.

“What do you want to do, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s that hole in the ground? The winter house.”

Nora sprang ahead of me and walked backwards, facing me, skipping like the Swede’s yellow-eyed dog, grinning and needy.

“That’s something,” she said. “We could rebuild the winter house.”

“Rebuild it?”

“Sure. It’ll be our house. No one can find us. We’ll bring stuff there. Food and blankets and things, and make a house. It’ll be hidden.”

That lit me up inside. A place to go to that my father wouldn’t know about. A place no one would know about. I’d take my little treasures there, my violet perfume, my nail polish, the scrap of red velvet, and other things too, that I’d planned on getting, a pair of nylons, a tube of lipstick, a dress with a bit of red on it, maybe at the collar, a racy girl’s dress, something to dance in.

“We could decorate it,” I said. “Hang some things up on the walls.”

“They’re dirt walls. But yeah, we could hang things. Granny’s got a bolt of red material. She’d give me some.”

Nora took my hand again and we walked like that, my hand getting sweaty in hers from the plans we were making. Shared secrets, a new thing for me. Most secrets I kept to myself and squirreled away in the holes of trees.

“The Georges’ little girl’s gone missing now too,” she said. “She didn’t come home last night. My mum says I got to stay around the village, don’t go in the bush.”

“You’re still out.”

“I’m not scared. I was out walking the night Sarah Kemp got killed. Saw her ghost.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

We came onto Turtle Creek on the place where it switched back on itself. Nora pulled me by the hand to the creek bank and washed the scrapes on my shins and arms in the cold creek water. I flinched at her nursing.

“Lots of blood from nothing scratches,” she said. “You won’t die.”

“What do you think happened to those kids?” I asked her. “On the reserve.”

“Who knows,” said Nora. “Granny says an animal spirit’s gone crazy, out for blood. Coyote, she says, like I told you. He gets inside a
man or a bear or a coyote — any living thing walking around — and makes that man or bear do crazy things. Everybody’s talking like it’s Coyote Jack gone crazy. My mum says stay away from him.”

“You really think he’d go around eating people?”

“Granny says that sometimes. Other times she says they’re just stories people tell when they get scared and don’t know what’s out there.”

“He left his cat,” I said. “I found his cat.”

“His cat?”

“Beside the road. He left his cat for me. My dad called him Lucifer because he’s black.”

“How did you know it was him?”

“I saw him. He was watching me.”

Nora shuddered dramatically.

“He’s not so bad.” I said. “He’s just shy.”

“Coyote Jack’s not shy, he’s bushed. He really is a coyote. He fades into the trees like magic. I’ve seen him. Granny says he’s lived too long in the bush. The bush makes you change shape, takes away your man-body, makes you into an animal.”

I picked up a stick, dipped it into the water, and watched it slide into two pieces where it met the surface. Nora washed my blood from her hands and then lazily let water drip from her fingers onto my lightning arm. She caught a drop sliding down my arm and smeared it in slow circles around the blue veins in my wrists.

“Your skin’s so see-through,” she said. “Like I could look inside and see your bones.”

She looked up at me and made me look a long time at her two-woman eyes. Looking at her confused me. I went back and forth between each differently colored eye held in a different face. She was two women — or girls. We were both just girls. Nora leaned her two-woman face into me and kissed me like a lover, there, at Turtle Creek, with my feet in the creek water to cool me, my lightning arm tingling as if it might die.

D
URING THE WEEK
or so that followed, Nora and I never met at the winter house, never planned for its construction. I’d just go walking, down the Swede’s living fence, or along Turtle Creek to the place it bent in on itself, or maybe up over Bald Mountain to count the wild horses grazing miles away, it seemed, on the plains below. Somewhere on those old trails she’d find me, or I’d find her first, in the way I’d find the sheep, or the cows to bring them down from the benchland for milking, by the bells around her neck, by the steps that jingled them. Then we’d go walking together and sooner or later we ended up at the hole in the ground that led to China, the winter house.

“We’ve got to take it apart first,” she said. “Fix it right.”

So we took apart and rebuilt our winter house, over the course of a week or so. We constructed a frame of old lumber and logs over the hole, and laid sticks and brush over the frame. We covered this with mud and dirt, so our hut looked like nothing but a mound of earth, and then covered that with more brush. The winter house already had a worn ladder, a pole with chunks taken out. We went down the hole through the center. We didn’t build a side opening.

I wanted to give Nora something so badly that I stole my own treasures from the hollow stump and brought them to the winter house and shared my secrets with her. I pulled the top from my violet perfume and handed her the bottle.

“That perfume stinks,” she said.

I smelled the violet perfume again, and all the richness I’d felt when I put it on my feet was gone. Its sweetness in the confined space of the winter house made my head hurt.

“How long you had that stuff?”

I shrugged. I stoppered up the perfume bottle, lifted my skirt, and tucked the bottle into the pocket of my brother’s jeans, next to the scrap of velvet and the bottle of nail polish. Later I would sneak it back into my hollow stump by Turtle Creek.

“What you got there?” said Nora.

I rubbed the sticky perfume off my hand onto my skirt and pulled the bottle of nail polish from my pocket. She took it.

“Now that’s something. My mother won’t let me wear nail polish.”

“My father neither. He threw it into the manure pile,” I said, and immediately regretted it. Nora held it up between her fingers. “I washed it,” I said. “It’s all cleaned.” She sniffed it and handed it back to me. “What’ve you got?” I asked.

Nora dragged her red carpetbag over to the circle of light around the post ladder. She pulled out a ragged gray camp blanket and a box of wood matches.

“All we need now is food and we got a house,” said Nora.

“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll go back home and get some jars from the cellar.”

“What if your mum sees?” said Nora.

“She won’t. She’ll be out serving lunch in the fields now.”

“You’re taking a chance,” she said.

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “Can I use this?” I held up the red carpetbag.

Our root cellar was cut into the bank of the low hill behind the house. Its roof was held up with heavy timbers and covered over in dirt and grass and weeds so it looked like nothing but a door in a hillside. It smelled of darkness and damp, the haunt of last year’s apples and sprouting potatoes laid out in bins on the floor along the dirt walls. Before the snow fell, the apple bins would be full of fruit from the trees that bordered the sheep pasture: Russets, Grimes Golden, rich red Jonathans. The smell of apples still ripening would be everything in that dirt house, but now that sweetness was subtle. On the cellar shelves were jar after jar of sweet promise: raspberry jam, strawberry
jam, cherry jam, sweet whole cherries pitted and sugared and cooked in their own juices, huckleberries that Bertha Moses and her daughters had brought round in big stained baskets the fall before and traded for cream and butter; plums boiled and sugared into jam, or left whole in syrup to cleanse away the sins of beef from the body in midwinter. There were jars and jars of chutneys made from apples, raisins, sugar, vinegar and spices, and squash jams — marrow and citron jams that tasted of candied ginger — but no canned tomato relishes or pickles, save the beets, as ripe and rich as bottled blood: my mother regarded tomatoes with suspicion and considered pickles foreign and largely indigestible.

I looked up at the blank windows of the house for any sign of her. Seeing none, I opened the door in the hillside slowly, watching for the place where it squeaked. When the squeak began, I set the carpetbag down to hold the door open. I’d never stolen from my mother; there’d been no need. I never went hungry and the things I really wanted never found their way to this farm, so theft was never on my mind. Still, here I was thieving.

I backed out the hillside doorway with my hands full of jars, and Dan was standing there, wearing his ragged field denims, a short reddish beard over his heavy jaw, smelling of soap, hanging on to the door. He scared me half to death. “What you got there?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Looks like a lot of nothing. You wouldn’t be taking that over to the reserve, would you?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody. I sometimes snitch a jar of strawberry for Dennis and Billy.”

I gave him a thankful look and put the jars into Nora’s carpetbag. “Dad isn’t around, is he?” I said.

“He’s still out in the wheat field. He’s eating lunch out there with Mum.”

I picked up the bag and carefully slung it over my shoulder.

“You’re not going to school?” said Dan.

“Who says?”

“You’re here now, aren’t you?”

“Don’t tell Dad. Please don’t tell.”

“They’re going to find out sooner or later.”

“I know,” I said.

“If those kids give you any more trouble, you come to me, okay?”

“What kids?”

“Robert Parker and the others.”

“How’d you hear about that?”

“People still talk to me, you know,” he said.

I looked over at the house and didn’t say anything. The blood pounded into my head so I couldn’t think.

“Why don’t you give Dennis a chance, eh?” said Dan. “He’s a good guy. The girls like him. Even Lily Bell likes him.”

I kicked dirt.

“Is it ’cause he’s Indian?”

I shook my head. “Dad would kill me,” I said.

“There’s that, isn’t there,” said Dan. “Jesus, he’s so loony these days. I wonder if things will ever get back the way they were.”

I looked out past the house at the tiny figures in the field.

“What do you do all day?” he said. “You go wandering around in the bush?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“There’s kids, young kids, gone missing on the reserve. Dennis is right. Killing that bear didn’t fix anything. There’s some animal out there gone crazy and it’s attacking people.”

“I heard,” I said.

“I don’t want you running around in the bush alone. Go visit Bertha.”