The Cure for Death by Lightning (26 page)

Bertha leaned forward over the table at us, so close I could smell her sweet coffee and tobacco breath.

“But you know,” she said. “It wasn’t a bear. It was Coyote. He was walking here for a long time. Then my son, Billy’s father, he took care of Coyote. He was Coyote’s house, see? He was where Coyote went to rest. Coyote never made my son do any bad things like what he made those other men do. Once, when Coyote was resting inside him, my son took his own life — so Coyote would have to return to the spirit
world with him — so we could walk in peace for a while. Didn’t last long, ’cause Coyote just got born again, but it was a good time. My son gave us that as a gift.”

A shiver went through Nora’s body and a smile lifted her face. She clearly loved these stories, loved to be scared half to death. I was scared too, but I didn’t like it. The stories weren’t a welcome thing. I’d have to carry them now into the woods with me and they’d jump on me.

“I thought Billy’s dad fell on a bottle,” I said. “Bled to death.”

“Yeah, he done that. But he did it on purpose.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Mother, enough!” said Nora’s mother.

“Well, of course I’m an old woman full of stories, eh?” said Bertha. “What do I know?”

She threw an angry look over at Nora’s mother. Nora’s mother threw her sewing down and left the house. Nora, me, and the other women in the house watched her, but Bertha went on sewing as if nothing happened.

S
OME HOT DAYS
are like that. So hot everything goes liquid. The air over the cornfield shimmers, air so hot and wet you feel you’re taking in another’s hot, exhausted breath. Your skin’s so slick with sweat, it’s hard to tell where your body ends and the air begins. Smells that were forgotten come to the surface. The garlic in last night’s soup rises up to the skin, irritating a mind that’s already angered by heat. These are the days best spent submerged, in a cool blue room with the curtains closed, or in a cold bath with water drawn up to your chin, or better yet in a pool in a creek hidden by trees.

But instead my mother and I were driving the democrat down Blood Road, taking the cream to the train station in town. Blood Road was as dusty in summer as it was muddy and vexing in spring. Although the ruts were still there — created in spring when the horses and buggies ripped one way, then the other, through mud to avoid the turtles — at least a buggy didn’t get stuck in summer, its wheels mired in a mess of turtle blood and horse shit. Now, in the summer, the ride was only a bumpy one. Great clouds of red dust welled up behind us.

I carried enough change in my pocket to purchase sanitary napkins, which I had run out of. I wore one of my mother’s cloth napkins instead that day, a cloth that had once been my diaper. It was a shameful time. When I became a woman, my father had warned me to stay away from bulls and male dogs at that time of the month because he feared they would attack me. And so I kept my legs closed tight, and when we reached town, I went into G. Locke Drugs straightaway. That
walk down the aisle towards Mr. Locke’s raised counter took forever. The merchandise on the shelves, the little round tables and ornamental iron chairs where I’d sucked down a soda only twice in my life, seemed to recede away from the crack of my shoes against the flooring. I stared over Mr. Locke’s head at the government war poster on the back wall, which said,
COUGHS AND SNEEZES SPREAD DISEASES.
I hated this chore, hated it more than shoveling the foul, sickly yellow shit of a sick calf from a stall.

“What can I do for you today, Beth?” said Mr. Locke. He smiled at me and waited.

Each time I made this purchase, I hesitated over how to ask. Bertha Moses called them “gunrags.” Nora, copying something her mother had picked up from her Indian residential schoolteachers, called them “nappies.” My mother didn’t call them anything at all. This time, like every other time, I couldn’t think of what to ask for, so I pointed at the row of plain brown paper packages behind Mr. Locke’s head.

He turned, and said “Oh” quietly, and handed me a box.

An economy box cost eighty-five cents for forty-eight napkins, and I had exact change in my sweaty little hand. I exchanged money for the package and hurried back to the buggy, thankful that no one else was in the store, and hid the box under the seat.

The heat of the day overwhelmed my curiosity. I didn’t go look in the shop windows, dreaming of things I couldn’t own. I sat, sweated, and waited for my mother on the steps of the druggist. Storefronts and houses wavered in the hot currents of air. The few people on the street seemed to float like ghosts. The ghost of the old Swede floated down the street and saw me sitting on the steps. I tried not to watch him. He floated up to me and suddenly became solid.

“You tell your father he’s crossed the line,” he said. “You tell your father he better stop now, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

The heat was doing something to my head. I felt drowsy. His words echoed around in my ears like marbles in a jar. The Swede put his face close up and inspected me.

“You understand what I’m saying?” he said.

I nodded. He looked at me a while, shrugged, turned, and became a ghost again, and in ghostly fashion he disappeared behind the general store.

I whistled, nervously, and watched the albino crow sitting on the
doctor’s house, Goat’s house. The crow was growing older, losing its juvenile salt-and-pepper feathers and becoming whiter each trip I took to town. Bread crumbs littered the street under the roof of the doctor’s house and, as I watched, a little girl I didn’t recognize stepped from the doctor’s house and threw more bread onto the street. I stopped whistling. The little girl watched as the white crow swooped down, caught the bread, and flew up to the roof again. When a woman called from the house, the girl went back inside and closed the door behind her. I looked over at Blundell’s Motel and stared at the window of the room where Ginger Rogers had slept, willing a face to appear until one did, looking back at me, a woman’s face, I thought, masked by the reflection of trees in the glass of the window, or perhaps it was nothing more than a mix of shadow and light.

Then Goat was right there, at my shoulder.

“Something’s got her,” he said.

“What?”

Goat pointed down the empty street, in the direction of the few town houses belonging to the business owners and to the old widow, Mrs. Roddy, who thought Germans were tunneling under her home. Far down the road near the church, a scrawny dog crossed the street and disappeared behind the widow’s house. Goat dropped his arm, and it hung loose like the arm of a rag doll. He kept on staring down the street.

“The dog, you mean?” I said. “Who are you talking about?”

Goat turned his whole body to look at me, stamping a small circle in the dust.

“Well, I’ve got to go.” I stood up and dusted my skirt and stepped off the porch.

“Something’s got her,” he said again.

“Go away.”

Goat didn’t say anything more, but he didn’t look away either. He looked straight at me as he’d never done before, and that got me scared of him all over again.

“What are you talking about? Go leave me alone. Go on. Git!”

I headed for the store, and when Goat began to follow, I picked up a rock and threw it at his feet.

“Git!” I said. “Go on home!”

He stopped following me and just stood there, in front of the druggist, drooping in the heat, staring after me as I walked over to our horses. I kept my back to him, conscious of his eyes on me, and whistled. When I didn’t feel him staring anymore, I turned around. He’d gone off. I kept on whistling. My mother was taking her sweet time in the store, as she always did on days when we went into town without my father. People would talk to her then, when she was alone. Mrs. Bell left the general store and floated toward me, becoming solid as we met.

“Beth Weeks, why are you whistling?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“A whistling girl and a crowing hen are sure to come to some bad end.”

She kept on walking, not waiting for a reply. The skinny wild dog sniffed around the widow’s porch steps, lifted its leg to them, then began digging under the boards of the bottom step. After a time my mother came out of the store, carrying her net bag with the few groceries she’d purchased inside it, and a lumpy flour bag.

“Mrs. Bell sent these,” she said, holding open the flour bag. There were several jars of apricot jam in there. I took a jar out.

“Go ahead,” said my mother.

I grinned at her, tapped the lid loose against the democrat, and opened the jar. I skimmed off the jam foam with my finger and slipped it into my mouth. I held the jar out for my mother, but she saw Mrs. Ferguson coming out of the store and declined. Mrs. Ferguson held up her head and walked right by my mother, as if her own husband had had nothing to do with the fight at the Dominion Day picnic, as if it were all my father’s fault. Both my mother and I watched her walk away.

“Can I get some nylons?” I said.

“Nylons!” Mum turned to me. “You’re not old enough for nylons. I don’t even have nylons. Your father forbids that kind of wastefulness.”

“You think the Blundells really have a mongoloid child in the motel?” I said.

“Where on earth did you get that idea?” said my mother.

I shrugged. “I saw a face. In the window. I think it was a woman’s.”

“There was talk,” said my mother. “Years ago. But nothing came of
it. Some said the Blundells kept a child, a slow child, like Arthur, locked away in a back room. The Blundells denied it all. They left the church over it.”

“I thought I saw someone in that room. Where Ginger Rogers stayed.”

“Well, maybe someone is staying there.”

“Mr. Johansson came by. He was really mad. He said Dad better stop damaging his fence.”

My mother sighed.

“He said he’d do something bad if Dad didn’t stop.”

“Bad? Like what?”

I shrugged.

As my mother loaded her groceries into the buggy and stepped up into the seat, the skinny stray disappeared around the back of the widow Roddy’s house and reappeared in the shadows by the side of Blundell’s Motel. The wild dog watched us — I could see his eyes shining as we turned the democrat and headed out of town — with one paw slightly raised and his nose pointing at us, in the hunting stance of a coyote.

S
UMMER WAS SHORT
in Turtle Valley. It was over before you believed it had begun. While the wheat still turned golden in the fields, the leaves of the poplar that was growing ever larger through the engine of my father’s old Ford were turning brown and yellow. The sunflowers were ripening just as the first fall rains began. Nevertheless it was still a time of celebration, a time of harvest parties at the churches and in private homes, a time of picking and putting away, and that was a joy. In Turtle Valley, it was the fowl supper we looked forward to, a community dinner held in the United Church every farmwoman contributed to. It was a feast, even then, in wartime, a time of rationing. The excess food was the point of it all, a kind of prayer for bounty, an offering that might bring a better year next year. Always next year. The prayer of the farmer. Next year.

My mother’s own particular offering was a dessert called Bird’s Nest, appropriate enough for a supper called fowl. My mother’s Bird’s Nest recipe was pasted in her scrapbook alongside one of those ghost stories she clipped from magazines on the sly and never let me read. The recipe called for nothing but apples and a thin batter you could mistake for pancake if you didn’t know better. My mother preferred greenings, but any large apple will do. Pare them and remove the cores in such a way that the apples are left whole. Arrange the apples in a deep pie dish, as many apples as you have guests. Then mix a batter with three eggs and enough sweet milk and flour to make it a little on
the runny side. Pour it over the apples, filling the hole where the core was, and the deep dish besides. Bake the Bird’s Nests in a hot oven until the apples are cooked and the batter is brown and serve them with a bit of butter and a sprinkle of brown sugar. Well, you can’t get simpler than that. My mother and I made more than forty for that event.