The Cure for Death by Lightning (27 page)

We needn’t have made so many. The church was nowhere near as full for that year’s fowl supper as it had been for Sarah Kemp’s funeral. The few people there crouched in small groups, shoulders hunched, heads down, barely picking at the food on their plates. The Swede was there, and that was bad because so was my father. Sarah Kemp’s mother and grandmother were there, sitting alone at a table. Dan sat talking with a man I didn’t recognize. Lily Bell, Parker, and the other kids who had stripped me in the Fraser house weren’t there. I was relieved, at least, for that. My mother and father had come earlier, after taking the cream to town with Chief and the buggy, so my mother could help set up the church for the supper. I had ridden Cherry into town at dusk, after finishing up chores, so when I arrived almost everyone had filled his plate. I stood in line with the few other latecomers, listening to Ferguson gossip with Morley Boulee at the table behind me. Ferguson had avoided our family ever since he’d hit my father at the Dominion Day picnic, and he kept his back to me now.

“Well, the old widow’s finally gone,” said Mr. Boulee.

“Mrs. Roddy?” said Ferguson. “Yes, well, it’s for the best. She’d lived a miserable life these last years. Never got over her husband’s death. Bet she died thinking the Germans were coming to get her.”

“Any word on what killed her?”

“Her heart is my guess,” said Ferguson. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. She’d been laying there for quite a while. Something had started eating on her. Rats, I guess. It’s a crime nobody noticed she was gone.”

“She had no friends to notice, living like that.”

Mr. Ferguson shook his head, and then Mrs. Halley, Sarah Kemp’s grandmother, one arm dead at her side, stood up as I came close to her and shouted at me, “Sarah!”

Everyone turned to look. I put down my plate and ran outside and leaned against the building until I got my breath back. Twilight had come down and a gentle rain had begun to fall through the electric yard light in front of the church. We had no electricity at home, and I
thought the light was a beautiful thing. Yet with the barbed wire on top of the fence to keep Goat away, it gave the churchyard the naked feel of a prison camp. Goat waddled out from behind Belcham’s, started towards the church, saw me, and turned back to hide again behind the store. The albino crow swooped down to pick up a scrap on Main Street and flew over my head to land on the church roof. I rubbed my hands and moved a little down the wall of the church, so I was under the eaves, out of the rain.

The man who’d been talking to Dan came out of the church and leaned against the wall. He had the careless look of an unmarried man. He lit a cigarette and pretended I wasn’t there. I folded my arms. An old man came out and talked to the bachelor. I realized they must be the Fowlers, father and son, who had recently moved to the Fraser property next to the school. The old man complained that his wife was taking too long to eat and he was getting hungry. I didn’t understand. Then his wife came out, removed her teeth, and handed them to the old man.

“Food’s getting cold,” she said.

The old man brushed bits of food from the woman’s teeth and put them in his mouth. He waved at the bachelor and went inside. The old woman put her hand over her mouth and followed.

I laughed. The bachelor laughed.

“He won’t get teeth,” said the bachelor. “Stupid old man.”

I stopped laughing but carried the smile for a long time. The bachelor sniffed and ran his hand under his nose. I grew shy. The bachelor looked at his feet. He smoked. “Oh,” he said, and offered me a cigarette.

“No.”

He put the cigarettes in his pocket and threw the spent butt on the ground. “Stinky things,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“No,” he said. He kicked the ground. After a while he lit another cigarette. “I heard you run with that half-breed,” he said.

I looked up and looked away.

He said, “I know there aren’t many men around, but there’s no need for that. I’m here now. We could have some fun.” As an afterthought, he said, “I’ve got money.”

I understood he was calling me a whore and that I was being talked about around town. I ran over to Cherry, mounted her, and headed down the main street, driving my heels into the horse’s flanks to get her galloping. I ran the horse to a sweat on the way home, replaying the scene with the bachelor over in my head — how strange things had gone, how I should have slapped his face, called him trash and laughed at his makeshift patchwork and buttonholes, the grass stains on the knees of his pants. He’d been so cocky, so self-sure that I would go running with him. I was so caught up in vengeful thoughts that I rode right by our driveway, bringing Cherry up at the start of our sheep pasture along Blood Road. I dismounted, and led her through the orchard gate. A wind carried the rank smell of the Swede’s goat. A shadow skulked across the field, and I clapped to scare it off. The sheep bleated and headed for the barn, but one ewe didn’t get up. There were dark pools all around the ewe, blood. But she wasn’t dead. The blood was warm and she was breathing.

Coyotes go for the genitals and soft belly of a sick sheep. They nip like a dog at the legs and face until the sheep falls. Then they eat her alive. This ewe was still alive, and her genitals were eaten away. I pressed on with Cherry to the yard and tied her inside the barn as the homesteader’s children knocked out a warning in their graves. I went into the house and took the .22 from the gun cupboard, loaded it, and headed back to the ewe. I aimed the gun behind the ewe’s ear and fired, then shot the rifle into the air as a warning to the shadows. I slumped into the wet grass and cried for the sheep until the rain let up and the moon poked out of the clouds. A farmer’s daughter, and I cried for the loss of one sheep.

When I reached home the second time, Nora was waiting outside my bedroom window. I threw down the gun and swung out at her. I don’t know why, exactly. I was angry because of the bachelor’s offer to buy me, and because of the sheep with her cunt eaten by coyotes. She took both my wrists and held me like a squawking chicken until the rage passed and I collapsed against the house.

Nora walked out into the yard. Her necklace jingled rhythmically, and the lights it sparked in the moonlight reflected off the house. She stamped out a circle in the dirt. Her movements were precise, as in a ritual, and the bell necklace sounded and shimmered to the beat. She
sang quietly. I wondered if she hadn’t bewitched me. But of course all lovers are bewitched.

“Some men beat their women, or don’t allow them friends,” she said. “Granny says it’s all the same. That’s why they want to pay for you. That way they own you.”

She’d heard the rumors before me. Nora stamped her circle. The bells and their lights became their own music.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“We could go. We could leave.”

When I shook my head, Nora stepped inside the circle and held out her arms. I stepped into the circle with her and wrapped my arms around her and we held each other until I heard my mother and father driving home.

I
DIDN’T THINK
I’d slept that night, the scene with the bachelor was playing so hard and so violent through my mind. Yet I woke to my father slamming into the house, reckless of the sleepers within. Though my mother must have been awake, he came into my room, came to my bed as a black faceless thing, with only the form of a man.

I removed myself into the forget-me-knots painted on the headboard of my bed, and watched from there, leaving all the fear and anger in my body. It was a moonless night. A few stars were winking just above the black trees. My room, though, was black, and my father was even blacker. He was a big black thing moving over my body, flattening me down to nothing, making me no more than a blanket on the bed. I felt nothing. I wasn’t there. He didn’t do that thing to me. That wisp of a black blanket under him wasn’t me. The lightning arm moved, that was all. It pushed at the black shadow over it. My father took the lightning arm by the wrist and wrestled it down and made it part of the blanket he moved over, moved into. I watched him at it.

After a time the black thing stopped and got up off my blanket-body. It blocked the pale light of the window for a moment, then slid on, the shadow of a man crossing a wall. The lightning arm lifted up and felt the air, then fell, slack, to the bed. I didn’t go back into my body or claim my lightning arm, not then, though my body rose up and went walking. I followed my body, because I couldn’t do otherwise, through the parlor and past my father, who slept in his chair by the gramophone
as if he’d never entered my room. Over him, her face reflecting the dim light from my bedroom window, my grandmother watched him grimly.

My lightning arm stirred vinegar and water, filled a wine bottle with the mix, and took the bottle to the outhouse to douche as my mother had instructed. I came back to myself there and when I left the outhouse I saw the eyes and feathers of the white crow from town glowing in the dark. He was sitting just outside the outhouse, looking at me. I said, “What do you want?”

The white crow tilted his head, shook himself, and hopped forward to peck at my white toes.

“Get out of here,” I said.

I kicked at him, and he hopped back. I threw a rock.

“Git,” I yelled. “Get out of here.”

The crow hopped a few yards away. I charged at him, yelling and throwing rocks and he finally flew away. Once he was gone the night seemed to deaden all sound and weigh down on me. I wanted to break through the heaviness with my voice. I wanted to scream.

The sound was separate from me and had the power of many voices and made the sky expansive and huge. It woke every living thing and the forest began rustling. The scream in my throat stopped, but the scream went on. It was bestial and lonely, like nothing I’ve heard since. I ran back to the house, and my mother was at the door. She held the door open.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Something scared me,” I said.

“What was it?”

“I don’t know.”

I
WENT BACK
to my room, but not to that bed or to those blankets. I huddled in the corner next to my vanity and hugged my lightning arm through the night. The pictures welled up and dissolved in the black: the slow fling of my father through glass, the pain on his face, the way my hand ached with the pushing. He crawled back through the broken window, dead now, a ghost with a form that enlarged and shifted and darkened into an animal shape crawling through broken glass, coming for me as I crouched in the corner.

The thudding in my chest woke me. Outside a haze backlit the trees on the benchland, though most of the sky was still black and speckled with stars. I stretched awkwardly out of the corner and dressed quickly, quietly. My father’s black shape shifted in the chair as I passed him, but he didn’t wake. I took down the .22 from the gun rack in the kitchen, put a box of shells in my skirt pocket, and eased open the screen door. Lucifer slid around my bare legs as I stepped off the porch and he followed me up to Blood Road and past the Swede’s driveway, mewing, then gave up when I turned down the Indian path to the winter house.

The Indian trail was the half dark that slips into your blood and quickens it, sets it pounding. Every night creature watched; every crack or shifting branch was an unseen thing following. When I climbed down the ladder into the even deeper dark of the winter house, I was nearly scared out of my skin when my foot found a lump in the blankets and that lump let out a groan.

“What you doing here?” said Nora.

“What you doing here?” I said, louder than I meant to.

“Don’t have to yell.”

“Well?” I said.

“Don’t ask.”

“You neither.”

I climbed under the blankets and Nora moved away from my cold hands. When her breathing said she was asleep again, I moved closer and held her arm, just above the place where she cut herself, and, chased by shadows but holding on to safety, I drifted off to sleep.

We didn’t wake again until sunlight was shining directly down into the hole of the winter house, heating the wood of the chipped-log ladder and making us sweat.