The Cure for Death by Lightning (22 page)

“They should enjoy themselves while they can,” said Mrs. Bell. “I’m afraid we’ll have another dead child before the year is out. Morley Boulee says he shot the wrong bear.”

“He talked to you?” said my father.

Mrs. Bell glanced at my father but answered looking at my mother. “Well, no. But Mr. Ferguson says he said that.”

My father smirked and went back to eating. Mrs. Bell stared at him for a moment and then took my mother’s arm.

“Well, here we are,” she said, again dismissing my father and me both. “Alone! Every time I see you, you’re talking with someone else.”

“I wish that were so,” said my mother.

I put my plate down and Mrs. Bell looked over at me as if she had just noticed me. “Tuck your skirt over your legs, dear. You are showing too much leg.”

I ignored her and looked over at Dennis, Dan, and Filthy Billy. Mrs. Ferguson, who had bawled me out for my father’s misdeeds, was serving sandwiches to my brother and my father’s hired hands. Dennis laughed at something she said and then saw me looking at him. He winked and went on looking at me so long that both Billy and Mrs. Ferguson glanced my way. I grew shy and pulled my skirt down over my knees. When I looked up again to see if Dennis was still watching me, I saw Mrs. Boulee, my schoolteacher, leave the house and head our way. I picked up my plate and started walking off.

“Where are you going?” said my mother.

“For something to drink,” I called back.

I went over to the food table and poured myself lemonade from the glass jug my mother had brought and watched, with my knees going weak on me, as Mrs. Boulee sat beside my mother, even though my father was there, and began talking. They both gestured in my direction. It had finally happened, then. Mrs. Bell moved away from my mother, adjusted her skirt, and turned her back on Mrs. Boulee.

Suddenly Lily Bell was there, standing beside me. “How come you’re not going to school?” she said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t look at her. I drank my lemonade as if she weren’t there.

After a time she said, “I’m sorry, about what happened at the old Fraser place. It was a game. I didn’t think it would be like that.”

When I still didn’t respond, she said, “You didn’t tell no one.”

I gave her a mean-mouthed look and turned my back on her. She left me and I watched as she swayed over to Dan, Dennis, and Billy and offered them yet another plate of cookies. She had on another dress too
frilly for the war rations or her age but again I felt clumsy and out of place in my pinafore made from two old dresses, bare legs and gillies, though many of the women there wore dirndl skirts sewn from old curtains. Lily wore lipstick and a little eye shadow and, compared to her, I felt as plain as paper wrapping. Dennis and Dan laughed at something she said, and she sat down in front of them, with her back to me.

The Swede came by, followed by the three-legged Lab, and offered my father a swig from a brown paper bag, and I watched, amazed, as he and my father went around to the back of the Boulees’ barn. My father and the Swede had been something like friends before the bear attacked our sheep camp, but ever since my father had started up the dairy there’d been nothing but grief between them over that fence. My mother watched him go as Mrs. Boulee talked to her. Then Mr. Boulee shouted out that all the little kids should go hunt for strawberries now, and could they please be accompanied by an older sibling?

I had no younger brother or sister to accompany on the hunt for wild strawberries, but I went anyway, to get away from Lily Bell and her pretty dress, Mrs. Boulee’s concerned looks, and my mother’s tightlipped stare.

Wild strawberries like meadowlands, clearings, and the edges of forests and roadways. The sides of Blood Road were thick with them, and the young kids and their older brothers and sisters scrambled along the ditches to find them. It was a contest, of sorts, to see who could bring the most back. As tradition had it, the children weren’t looking for strawberries for themselves, though their tongues became bright with the red of them, nor for their parents, but for the old women and old men, to decorate the old-timers’ ice cream.

I crossed Blood Road, pressed the wild strawberries into the mossy ground with my feet, and entered the bush. There were no paths here that I knew of, so I made my own, cracking twigs and swishing through undergrowth until I came across a deer path that opened a way into the bush. I reached a place where sunlight slanted through the trees and into a clearing. Then I was far enough away that I couldn’t hear the laughter from the Dominion Day picnic. There was a bath of other noises here, birdsong and trees shushing, and I closed my eyes and let these wash over me.

Then there was that other noise, the dull roaring and crackling I knew but didn’t want to believe. It filled me up and took away my breath. My stomach gripped it.

“Nora, is that you?” I called. “Come out, Nora. I hear you.”

The roaring went on, came at me.

“Who’s there?” I said.

The birds went quiet, and the roaring grew. I walked slowly at first, back towards the farm, with my whole body listening. The roaring seemed to come from all directions and grew louder and louder and then suddenly the sound was on me and Parker was there, pushing me down and holding my squirming body with his own. He put his hand up my skirt and pulled down my panties. He undid his pants and pushed himself between my legs, hurting me, unable to find an opening. The roaring enclosed me, deafened me, held my screams and curses to the ground.

As suddenly as it started, the roaring stopped. Filthy Billy was there, over Parker, poking the gun into Parker’s rear end. “Get off!” he said.

Parker went still, looked over his shoulder at Billy and the gun, and slowly moved off me. Billy kept the gun pressed into Parker’s buttocks until Parker had crawled away from me on all fours, clownishly, with his pants around his knees. Billy pushed the gun inward once, just for the justice and meanness of it. It was so unlike him that in my fear and nervousness I laughed a little. Billy tipped the gun up and watched as Parker quickly pulled his pants on and stumbled down the path. After a time I heard him crash through the bush as he headed towards Blood Road. Filthy Billy turned his back to me so I could arrange my clothing.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” he said.

“He knew.”

“He won’t remember. Or if he does, he won’t know why he did it. You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to see him ever again.” I leaned against a tree and hugged myself. Billy squatted near me.

“You okay?” he asked. And as soon as he said it, I started crying. Billy brushed the hair from my eyes and cupped his hand around my cheek.

“Don’t tell anybody,” I said. “Don’t tell my father.”

“No. That wouldn’t do no good.”

“How did you know to come?”

He shrugged.

“You following me?” I said.

“You got to be careful,” said Billy. “You hear? Real careful.”

“You’re not swearing,” I said.

“Swearing?” he said. “Oh!”

Then the roaring sound was on us again. Billy looked suddenly confused, moved back from me, and began swatting some invisible thing away, as if he were being attacked by a swarm of wasps. Then he was at it again, swearing under his breath and scratching. The muscles under his eyes twitched.

“Billy?” I said. But he didn’t seem to hear me. He ran off down the path towards the farm, batting away whatever it was that chased him.

I
RAN AFTER
B
ILLY
, but when he reached Blood Road and turned again into the bush, throwing up his arms like a crazy man, I didn’t follow him. I crossed Blood Road in time to see an even crazier sight than Filthy Billy: my father and the Swede walked arm in arm towards me through the Boulees’ orchard. The Swede still carried the bottle in a bag. They both stumbled and swayed and talked so loud that people at the picnic watched them. Parker was nowhere in sight. Lily Bell was still with Dan and Dennis, though all three of them stood near the food table now with cups in their hands, watching my father and the Swede make fools of themselves. Dennis looked over at me and I looked away. I turned through the orchard to avoid my father and the Swede but couldn’t help but hear them. The sentimental cloud that comes over some drinking men had descended on Johansson.

“We were best friends,” said the Swede.

“Best friends?” said my father.

“We hunted together,” said the Swede.

My father took the bag from the Swede and drank and drank, and the Swede watched him, looking dismayed.

“We never hunted,” said my father, still holding the bag. “You shot deer on my land and left gates open so my sheep got out.”

“I gave you meat, didn’t I?”

“You gave me nothing.”

“Well, I meant to.”

“You stole game off my land.”

“You seem to be a bit confused about who owns what land,” said the Swede. “Anyhow, nobody owns the game.”

“What?”

“I saw you took a bit of liberty with the fence line.”

“What do you mean?”

“You came over onto my property.”

“You saying I stole land?”

“Not saying that at all. I’m just saying maybe you made a mistake.”

“I made no mistake. I fenced on my property line.”

The Swede and my father were no longer arm in arm. They stood a little apart, facing each other. My father clenched and unclenched his free hand. The Swede tried to take the bottle from him, but my father wouldn’t let him have it. “What exactly are you saying?” my father demanded.

“I’m saying if you didn’t make no mistake, then you’re a damned thief.”

My father threw down the bottle and punched Johansson. The Swede was on the ground, feeling the side of his mouth, as Mr. Ferguson and Morley Boulee ran up behind my father and held his arms back. He shook them off and kicked the Swede as he was getting up. The Swede feigned agony in his leg until my father was close enough, then butted my father in the stomach with his head. My father picked the Swede up by the belt loops, threw him on the ground again, and kicked him several times in the side as the Swede writhed this way and that, trying to avoid my father’s boots. Another two men pulled my father off and held him as Ferguson punched him in the stomach and as Morley Boulee tried and failed to stop Ferguson. My father buckled in, twisting to avoid the blows. Some other men who’d been drinking started pushing my father and then each other around, and women ran up, yelling for them all to stop, but they wouldn’t. My father was drunk. All the men in that fight were drunk. The Swede’s three-legged dog ran circles around them, jumping and barking.

My mother abandoned my father, left him to his foolishness. She pulled me away from watching the fight and told me to drive her home and, as she did, she held my arm so hard I feared she might hit me, or worse yet have one of her spells and go cloudy-eyed and start talking to her dead mother there, in the middle of Dominion Day picnic.

“What about Dad? What about Dan and Dennis and Billy?”

“They’ll find their own way,” she said.

I helped my mother into the democrat and slapped Cherry and Chief with the reins to get them going. Mrs. Boulee and several other women watched us drive off. My mother sat upright in her seat until we were well out of sight and then all the air seemed to go out of her. She sank into the seat and cried for a time. I put my hand on her arm, but she pulled away.

“Mrs. Boulee says you haven’t been going to school over the last month,” she said. “I had to lie. I told her we needed your help on the farm after that big storm flattened the flax field. How many times do I have to lie for you?”

“You didn’t have to lie,” I said.

We swayed down Blood Road for a long time in silence, listening to the wheels creek and jump. A coyote yipped. A pheasant leapt out of the bush and flew up at us, startling us both.

“Tell me where you’ve been,” said Mum. “Have you been with some boy? That Parker boy? Mrs. Bell says she saw that boy coming out of the bush from the direction you’d gone.”

“I haven’t been with anybody,” I said.

“You’re lying to me. Tell me the truth.”

“I am telling the truth. Sometimes I was with Nora. Only Nora.”

My mother stared at me. I kept my eyes on the horses and the road. “Your father’s right. She’s a bad influence.”

“No she’s not.”

“Does she put you up to it? Does she make you miss school? What happened that day, when you came home early, when I thought you were sick?”

I didn’t answer until my mother raised her voice to a shout. “Answer me!”

“They were picking on me,” I said. “Lily Bell and Robert Parker, all the kids, but them especially. They call me sheep tick and Indian lover and hoarder. They carried me into the old Fraser house and took off my clothes.”

My mother slapped me, setting my cheek on fire, and the horses, made nervous by the shouting, worked themselves into a run, so we had to hang on to our seats to keep from falling. I held the reins with one hand and clung to the seat with the other.

“Enough lies!” she said. “You tell me the truth!”

“They came and pushed me down. Parker and Lily Bell and those kids. They took my clothes. Parker, again today, he pushed me down.”