The Cure for Death by Lightning (21 page)

“She’ll tell Mum.”

“Then hide out in the cellar, or the barn loft. Just don’t go in the bush.”

“I’ve got a place.”

“I’m not kidding about this,” said Dan. “There’s something crazy out there.”

I stumbled back a couple of steps and swung around to the trail behind the cellar. “Be careful,” my brother called out.

I
CLIMBED DOWN
the makeshift ladder to our winter house and sat on the blanket that Nora had spread on the cool ground.

“Your mother home?” she asked.

“Dan knows. About me not being in school. He was there.”

“Your mum’s bound to find out sooner or later. She talks to Mrs. Boulee.”

“She hardly ever sees her. She takes the cream into town in the daytime, when Mrs. Boulee is teaching. When Dad’s with Mum, Mrs. Boulee won’t talk to her, not after Dad punched out Mr. Boulee.”

“She’ll hear about it,” said Nora. “Somebody will tell her. Or she’ll see you.”

“What if she does? I’ll leave. She can’t tell me what to do. I’ll find a job.”

“We’ll find a job together. We’ll go to Vancouver.”

Nora took off the bell necklace and held it out for me. I took it and jingled the bells.

“Roll on your stomach,” she said. I rolled over and lay full length, resting my chin on my hands. The bells smelled tinny. She arranged my hair to one side and smoothed the material of my blouse as if cleaning a blackboard. She began to draw on my back. It felt smooth and ticklish and I relaxed under her hands. After a while, I said, “What are you drawing?”

“I’m writing,” she said.

“What are you writing?”

“You have to guess,” she said.

I followed the circles of her hands on my back. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Guess!”

Slowly she formed the big looped letters of three words, and repeated them over and over. I understood quickly, but didn’t know what to do. I turned over and she continued to write, spelling the words over the sides of my breasts. “You,” she said, mouthing the last word, and forming a
u
that cupped my breast.

M
Y MOTHER SANG
, my brother whistled, the birds fluttered around us following the ribbons my mother had tied to the horses’ reins, and even my father smiled as he whipped those ribbons into confusion. All of us, Billy and Dennis too, rode the democrat down Blood Road, thumping and jostling over the red ruts, to the Dominion Day picnic at the Boulee’s Farm. I was squashed between my brother and Filthy Billy in the back of the buggy, thrown into Billy at every rut we thundered over, sick with the motion and dreading the picnic because of course Mrs. Boulee would be there and of course she’d tell my mother I hadn’t been in school and of course there’d be hell to pay. My mind was full of confrontations. Would Parker be bold enough to taunt me in front of all those people? If he did I would push him down. Would Lily Bell swing by in her too pretty dress and call me “Indian lover”? If she did I would slap her rouged cheek. Would my father’s face turn beet red over the sound of a spoon clanking against a coffee cup or some neighbor tipping his hat to my mother? If so I would make myself as small as those black lizards and slink away.

Mrs. Boulee had made some attempt at gaiety by tying ribbons in the fruit trees under which everyone sat. But the feel of celebration wasn’t there. A few very young children tried jumping around in potato sacks and fell. The Swede’s three-legged dog ran around begging for food, sniffing crotches and getting slapped away. In other years, the Boulees’ Dominion Day picnic had danced. Children had hopped down the
length of the orchard, their arms around each other, their ankles tied together, sweat holding their hair to their necks. They’d raced each other in potato sacks from the apple trees to the pear trees for the glory of a pretty red ribbon. Mr. Aitken’s son Henry played a fiddle and Arnold Stowards or Mike Heatley pulled out a mouth organ, and the women and their husbands danced in the long orchard grass in broad daylight.

But now the war was on, and Henry Aitken, Arnold Stowards, Mike Heatley, and almost all the young men of age were gone, and that was at the front of everyone’s mind. The women were hungry for them. You could see it in them, in the way they leaned towards my brother, Dan, in the way they fawned over Dennis and even Billy, bringing them sweating glasses of lemonade or slices of cherry pie, and in the way they lingered, as the boys accepted these gifts, smiling grins as big and foolish as that of the Swede’s begging dog.

You could see it, too, in the way the women both ignored and snatched glances at my mother. My mother had her son still at home, and a handsome buck named Dennis working for her. Though they pitied my mother because they now feared my father, she had the power these women lacked: she had men to care for.

The food, though — you couldn’t help but get distracted by the food. Cherry pie, strawberry pie, store-bought ice cream stored away from the heat in a little steel bathtub filled with ice, rhubarbstrawberry pie, raspberry pie, and cookies, cookies, cookies. And every perfect pie was laid out on the prettiest plate in the household of whomever had brought the pie. This was a time to show off, and every woman there chose the best recipe in her scrapbook and picked the freshest, most perfect ingredients from her garden. A few of the women, including my mother, had early cucumbers grown against the sunny side of the house where the heat was trapped, and, like my mother, they sliced the cucumbers so thin they were transparent, and placed them between thinly sliced buttered bread. That was the thing, at the time, to make the thinnest sandwiches.

I stacked my plate with the too thin sandwiches to feed the butterflies gnawing at my stomach: sardine, ham and onion, egg, my mother’s cucumber, and Mrs. Bell’s ribbon sandwiches that were nothing but white and brown bread sliced paper-thin and rolled together with butter. Mrs. Bell was there, of course, filling her plate behind me,
wearing a new tweed swagger coat with pleats in the back in the style of the day. She was simply showing off because the day was much too hot for any coat, much less tweed.

“Stuff’s going on at the reserve all the time,” Mrs. Bell was saying. “We don’t hear the half of it.”

She was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson, who’d sold us the Jerseys. I watched Mrs. Ferguson’s ugly mouth, looking for that crooked, tea-stained tooth.

“You hear about those Indian kids gone missing?” asked Mrs. Ferguson.

“Can’t get a word out of them dumb Indians,” said Mr. Ferguson. “I asked Jimmy George about them missing kids and he just looked at me and didn’t say a word. Not one word. He was sober too.”

“Bertha Moses told me some crazy story about a coyote that eats people,” said Mrs. Bell. “Then she accused Coyote Jack of Sarah Kemp’s murder! Coyote Jack! Sarah would have scared
him
half to death, poor little thing.”

“I’m starting to think maybe Morley shot the wrong animal,” said Mrs. Ferguson.

“He’s saying that himself,” said Mr. Ferguson.

Mr. Ferguson drank from his cup. Because the thumb and index finger on his right hand were missing, he held his cup in an odd way, hooked over the three remaining fingers.

“Could have been a cougar,” said Mrs. Bell. “Remember years ago that boy got scratched up pretty bad. It was a cougar then.”

“A cougar will go after a little one, maybe,” said Mr. Ferguson. “Sarah Kemp was almost grown. Never heard of a cougar going after an adult.”

“If it’s hungry enough it’ll go after anything, don’t you think?” said Mrs. Bell. “Or if it’s frightened?”

“Got to wonder how any wild creature could be hungry enough to go after a child, let alone an adult, with all the livestock around,” said Mr. Ferguson. “Never seen a thing like it. Most times coyotes go after livestock in the winter, when game’s low. But not this year. There’s no shortage of deer and rabbit. Louise can’t keep them out of her garden. I don’t know. Maybe them Indians are right. Maybe there is something crazy out there.”

“I don’t think we should let the little kids go out hunting for strawberries
alone like we did last year,” said Mrs. Bell. “Send the bigger kids out with them. Keep an eye on them.”

“No argument from me,” said Mrs. Ferguson.

I picked out cutlery and sat on the grass beside my mother, opposite my brother and Dennis, careful not to look at Dennis, lest my father see. Billy wasn’t swearing much. He pushed food into his mouth so fast the words didn’t have a chance to come out. My mother touched a napkin to the side of my father’s mouth and wiped off a bit of mayonnaise.

“Morley says Goat’s got a new perch,” said Dan. “The old men put rolls of barbed wire along the top of the fence around the church, so now Goat climbs up on top of Blundell’s Motel and plays with himself up there. Morley said he saw the idiot slide down the side of the roof and nearly fall right off! Sooner or later he’s going to kill himself. That would be the best for everybody.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said my father.

“I’ll talk like I want,” said Dan. “He should be locked away in Essondale. They should castrate him.”

“Enough!” said my mother.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said my father.

“Yeah?” said Dan.

We watched for a moment as my father closed his eyes and breathed out long and slow, pushing the anger down to his boots. “Goat and Billy here and those like them, they know things we can’t possibly know,” he said. “They have talents that come from God alone. Goat can play piano like he was made for music. I’ve heard him myself in the doctor’s parlor. Hum him a tune, and he’ll play it, though he’s never heard it before.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard that,” said Dan.

“You heard it, but you’ve never seen it, and that’s the thing. If you’d seen it, you wouldn’t be talking like that now. And Billy here, he can find water anywhere if you give him a stick to find it with. It’s like their minds aren’t all cluttered up with useless things, so God can work straight through them.”

Dennis and Billy looked at each other. I’d never heard my father talk about God in this way before. Mrs. Bell had called my father a faithless man, to my mother’s face. Bertha Moses had said my father’s spirit was an empty jug just waiting for Coyote to pour himself into. My father
bent his head into his plate and played with his food, and in the silence that followed his little speech my mother reached over and put her hand on his. He took her hand and for a time they sat there looking at each other lovingly, as if all the events of this past year had never happened.

Filthy Billy didn’t look up. He stirred his food around in a circle on his plate. Then he talked at it. “(Shit) My mind (fuck) ain’t empty. My mind’s so full it’s going to (shit) split open one of these days.”

All of us looked down into our plates and snuck looks at Billy and at one another. Billy had shaved, combed his hair back with bear grease so it shone, and put on a clean white shirt and wool trousers. He looked kindly, not crazy. He went back to filling up his mouth so it wouldn’t spill out filth and further embarrass my mother. None of us said any more until Mrs. Bell waved at my mother from the food table and made her way over.

“Here comes doom and gloom,” said Dan. “She got herself a new coat, I see.”

“Enough of that,” said my mother.

“Well, I’m not going to sit here listening to her.” Dan stood up and Dennis and Billy stood with him. They carried their plates to a plum tree nearby and sat under it, laughing at something Dennis had said. Mrs. Bell ran over and sat right next to my mother so their knees were touching and grinned so foolishly I wanted to slap her.

“Well! I’ve got you to myself!” she said, as if my father and I weren’t there.

My father shook his head and stared at nothing, chewing his food.

“How are you today?” said my mother.

“I have an ache in my back,” said Mrs. Bell. “The weather’s about to turn, I can feel it. We’ll have rain this weekend. It’ll be a rainy summer, a bad year for crops, and coyotes all over the place. There’ll be plenty of farmers ruined, I’m afraid.”

“Well, it’s a beautiful day today,” said my mother, and she nodded at the girls skipping near the Boulees’ house. “The children are certainly enjoying it.”