The Cure for Death by Lightning (24 page)

A few days after the Dominion Day picnic, I was picking cherries, stuffing my mouth with those sweet cherries, when Nora appeared under the tree as if she’d always been there. She touched my knee, scared me half to death.

“What’re you doing here?” I said.

“Come to see you.”

“You know Dad says no.”

“Hasn’t blown over yet?”

“No.”

I dropped cherries into her waiting hands, and she hung them over her ears, colored her lips with their juice, spit their pits at the sheep grazing around us. When we were both sick-full of them, Nora took out her knife and carved the bark of the tree below me.

“You’ll kill it,” I said.

“I won’t kill nothing.” She went on carving and I went on picking cherries.

“Why don’t you come with me now? Your mum’s gone. I seen her driving into town.”

“She was just taking the cream in,” I said. “I don’t know when she’ll be back. If she catches me gone, I’m in for it.”

“You’re in for it anyway.”

I shrugged and went on picking. Nora pulled a little bark from the tree with her fingers.

“Chicken,” she said. “Your mum don’t even hit you or nothing. She’s not half crazy like my mum.”

“Crazy enough. She talks to my grandmother’s ghost. I see her listening, like she hears somebody.”

“Lots of people haunted by ghosts,” said Nora. “Come down. See what I did.”

I climbed down and sat my basket of cherries on the ground. Nora had carved our names, hers and mine, in the trunk of the tree, and surrounded them with a heart.

“Somebody could see that,” I said.

“Let them.”

She pushed me against the tree and kissed me. I pushed her off.

“Somebody could see,” I said.

Nora stepped away and kicked the ground.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Nora cleaned the dirt from under her nails with the blade while I tried to think of what to say.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” I said finally. “I’ll tell Mum that I’m going and I’ll go. There’s nothing she can do to stop me.”

“Come now,” said Nora.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got chores. I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the winter house.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She turned her back on me and walked back to Blood Road through the orchard. Lucifer tripped along behind her, parting a second path through the grass. I watched her for a time, then — cherry juice coloring my lips tart red, cherry juice leaving stains like blood down the front of my blouse — headed back to the house with one of Bertha Moses’s red cedar baskets filled with sun-hot cherries.

That afternoon my mother came back from town loaded down with several elegant wine bottles. Mrs. Boulee, the schoolteacher, had asked her to fill them with beet wine for her as a favor, and my mother had felt obliged, after all that had happened, to comply. She got to work on the beet wine that very afternoon. There was sediment in the bottom of almost every bottle, so she filled them half full of warm water and added a drop of ammonia and a bit of crushed eggshell to each one. We shook each bottle so the eggshell stayed in the bottom to scratch away the sediment. It didn’t take long to clean those bottles.

Beet wine was a common wine in the valley, as beets grew well there, and a wine of an uncommonly lovely rich red color. My mother’s recipe called for:

My mother put the water on to boil first, of course, because that could take forever on a woodstove. Then we went outside together to
pick the beets. Even before you pull the beet from the ground you can clearly see the beet draws its blood from the earth: red runs through the veins of the green leaves, making it the prettiest plant in the vegetable garden. When you pull the root up, you’ll see the long whipping tail of the beet that reaches far down into the soil. Slice the beat crosswise and you’ll see deep red growth rings, just like what you’ll find in a tree. Run your thumb across the cut root and your thumb will turn the color of a tatty girl’s lipstick. A cut beet will bleed into your soup pot and color everything in it. That’s why, if you want to keep the color of a boiled beet for your table, you trim off the tail and snap off the greens but don’t cut into the root itself.

Color is what my mother wanted in her wine, so she and I spent the better part of the afternoon cutting the beets into little cubes and boiling them slowly for two hours until the pot appeared to be a kettle of boiling blood. Later I would hold cheesecloth across the mouth of a crock as my mother ladled the beet blood into the cloth to strain it. She would then add the sugar and raisins, orange and lemon peels, and float the slice of toast covered in yeast, yeast-side down, on the mixture. We would let this stand in the root cellar for a fortnight, stirring several times each day. Then my mother and I would very carefully strain the beet wine and bottle it for Mrs. Boulee.

I stood next to my mother at the kitchen table on the afternoon that Nora and I had picked cherries, dicing a pile of cleaned beets. On the table before us, the scrapbook was open to the recipe for beet wine. My mother’s beet-bloody fingerprints covered the page. As I was cutting, I sprayed a bit of beet juice on this page, so I grabbed a dry dishrag and dabbed it up.

“Leave it!” said my mother.

“I was just wiping it off.”

“I said leave it!”

I threw the cloth on the kitchen cupboard. “How long do I have to stay around here?”

“I don’t know,” said my mother. “The way your father’s talking, he may never let you out of the house.”

“But I’m going out of the house. When he’s not around.”

My mother looked at me sideways, and I grinned at her.

When she smiled back, I said, “I’m going to go see Nora tomorrow.”

“You know your father doesn’t want you seeing that girl.”

“He doesn’t want me seeing anybody. He’ll keep me locked in here forever.”

“Maybe it’s best for now. It’s not safe walking in the bush. Anything could happen.”

“Billy scared that Parker kid off,” I said. “Scared him good. With a gun. Wish I’d done it.”

“I don’t mean Robert Parker. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. I mean a bear or cougar. There’s those children missing on the reserve. It could be Mr. Boulee didn’t shoot the right animal. I couldn’t bear it if you were out there and some animal.… No, Robert’s a good boy. You must have misunderstood. He was having a game with you, I’m sure of it. He helped me carry my flour out to the democrat just today.”

I watched my mother for a long time. She wouldn’t look at me. She went on dicing beets. Her fingers were bloody with their juices.

“I’m going to see Nora tomorrow,” I said. “While Dad’s out in the field. He doesn’t have to know.”

“You’ll stay here,” she said. “I need your help.”

“I’ll do the work and then I’ll go. You can tell him or not. I’ll leave after he’s gone out for lunch and come back before supper.”

“You will not leave this house.”

“What are you going to do to stop me?”

My mother looked away. She went on chopping beets. After a time I went back to cutting them as well.

“I have some preserves for Bertha,” she said. “Remember to ask me for them before you go.”

My father ran into the kitchen then, holding a hand that was bloody, howling like a child, crying real tears, so panicked he walked right into the table that was filled with beets before falling onto the seat of a chair. My mother pulled off her apron to use as a tourniquet and my father sank into her, hid his head between her breasts as she tied her apron around his wrist to stop the bleeding. When she washed the blood away, it turned out to be nothing but a nasty cut to the meaty patch at the base of his thumb, but she held him anyway, rocking him as if he were a child, and I watched him hold on to her as if he were hanging on for dear life.

T
HE THING
that followed hopped onto Blood Road and followed me, I heard it, but I held my breath and told myself it was my own imagination at work, nothing more, and that time I came to believe it because the sound stopped. I turned then, more from curiosity than fear, to see if there were footprints following mine in the red dirt. There were none. Instead, a little way in the bush, I caught sight of a coyote nervously watching me. Since I had no gun I left him to his curiosity and went on walking. He followed me; I caught glimpses of him trotting parallel to me in the bush.

My mother had given me two tiny jars of wild strawberry jam for Bertha and I carried them in my skirt pockets. I had walked past the root cellar into the bush, so my father wouldn’t catch a glimpse of me leaving from the field, and then followed Blood Road towards the reserve.

Nora was standing, waiting, at the last corner before the reserve. She was dressed as she always was, like a cowboy, with her bells around her neck. She waited in the middle of Blood Road with her hands in her jeans pockets, and when she saw me coming she grinned a little shyly and scuffed her feet in the red dirt.

“What’re you doing out here?” I said, as I came up to her.

She shrugged.

“I was coming to the winter house to see you,” I said.

“I know.”

She didn’t reach out to pet me or say anything to settle my nerves, so I put my hands in my skirt pockets and looked around behind me for signs of the coyote. Nora stared off down Blood Road.

“You know what we could do?” said Nora. “We could walk right down that road, and keep on walking and catch the train this afternoon for Vancouver.”

“We don’t have money.”

“Don’t need money. We could jump a train. Get a job in Vancouver soon as we get there. They’re begging for girls to work the factories. We could go right now.”

“Nah.” I looked down at my shoes, then caught sight of the fresh cuts on Nora’s arms. She saw me looking and pulled her sleeves down to her wrists.

“I got a coyote following me,” I said.

She squinted past my shoulder into the bush. “Where’s the coyote?”

“He’s there, sure enough.”

“Come on.” She took my hand and we pushed into the bush, heading towards the winter house. “There’s coyotes everywhere. Coyote got our cat. Too many of them living off farmers’ garbage and chickens, then they breed. Soon enough you got too many and they starve and go after the sheep.”

“We lost a ewe and a calf to coyotes already this year,” I said.

“Everybody’s losing sheep. My uncle Louie lost a sick cow to them coyotes. She was too sick to get up and the coyotes ate her cunt.”

“No!”

“I saw it!”

I took Nora’s arm and we shivered through the bush.

“Maybe Coyote Jack’s following you,” said Nora.

“He’s around. He comes to the house sometimes. I see him through the window, hanging around. Sometimes he gives me the creeps.”

“You ever been to Coyote Jack’s cabin?” said Nora.

“Don’t even know where it is. Dan said it’s someplace on the mountain.”

“I been there,” said Nora.

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe. It’s just a little house. Smaller than Dennis and Billy’s cabin. I looked in the window. Everything’s really tidy. You wouldn’t
think he’d be neat, but he is. He keeps a garden behind the cabin. I took a carrot and ate it.”

“No!”

“Let’s go there now,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on. What else you got to do?”

“I’ve got to take this jam to Bertha.”

“It can wait. Come on!”

We followed one of the many Indian trails up the mountain. The path was winding, steep, and overgrown, as if it had not been used for some time. We climbed it with our breath short and our hearts clanging with the outrageousness of what we were doing. After all the terrible stories of Coyote Jack, we were seeking him out, we were following his trails, we were tracking him down.

“What if he’s home?” I called up to Nora’s back.

She looked over her shoulder once and kept on climbing up the slope. “What if he is?” she said.

“Bertha thinks he’s dangerous.”

“Granny thinks every man’s dangerous. She had some things done to her when she was young.”

“You said yourself he’s crazy, that he scared you.”

“Yeah, well, you scared now?”

“I’m not scared,” I said, though my heart banged against my chest and the hairs on my arms prickled. “He’s just a shy old man.”

“Shy old man or shape-shifter. He could be watching us now. He could be that robin there, or a deer watching us quiet as can be from behind that mess of blackberries, or he could be that tree there, even. Coyote can be anything.”

“Stories,” I said.

“The Bible’s full of stories,” said Nora, and I recognized it as something Bertha had said in the past, at some now hazy coffee visit in our kitchen.

I watched the denim pull and stretch over Nora’s bottom as she climbed up the path before me. The higher we climbed the drier it got, until we were in pine forest with nothing for underbrush. The hill leveled out a little, and Nora led me into a new meadow of fireweed and wildflowers, and there, in the middle of it, was a tiny cabin and
garden plot. Even from there, I could see the neatness of it. The garden was planted in careful rows and the dirt around the house was swept out in a design of rays radiating from the house.