The Cure for Death by Lightning (28 page)

Nora yawned and stretched and moved away from me. “You’re all sticky!” she said.

“You’re the sticky one!”

“We’ll go swimming.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “There’s snow on the mountain.”

“Not here.”

“Not yet. The water will be ice-cold.”

“Don’t be so chicken.”

Nora pulled her jeans over her nakedness and slipped on the western shirt over the bells. I took longer dressing, put on my brother’s jeans under my skirt, struggled into my brassiere, fiddled with the buttons on my blouse. Nora leaned against the chipped-wood ladder, grinning.

“You wear so much clothes, you’d think you were a suitcase,” she said.

“Shut up.”

“So you going to tell me what happened last night?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Your dad?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“My mum went into hysterics,” she said. “Tore my stuff apart.”

“What’s she mad over this time?”

Nora shrugged.

“Remember how I asked you if you ever had something following?” I asked her. “In the bush?”

“Like Coyote Jack? Sometimes he follows. Spies on me. Dirty old man.”

“No,” I said. “Like something you can’t see. But it leaves a trail in the grass, or it makes a noise behind you, like wind or roaring or something.”

“Sure. That’s the way it is in the bush. There’s always something following. Especially at night. I go out walking in the night when I can get away just so I get spooked, so I think something’s coming to get me. Makes me tingle all over, you know?”

I knew, but I didn’t like it.

My lightning arm started going on me, shaking and making me clumsy. Nora saw that and hugged me from behind.

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” said Nora. “That’s just you getting bush-scared. Everybody hears noises in the bush.”

“I saw that white crow last night,” I said. “That albino.”

“Up here? In the valley?”

“It followed me back from town, from the fowl supper.”

“Weird, eh?” said Nora. “Granny says it’s some ghost come back from the spirit land.” She started up the ladder. “So why’d you sleep in the winter house last night?”

“Why’d you?”

I followed her out of the winter house. Despite the turning leaves, the day was like summer, Indian summer. We followed the creek bed to where Dan and I had dammed the creek, where the pool was deepest, beside my old hollow stump. My father had never removed the dam, though he’d threatened to. Over the summer it had taken on a mossy weathered look, as if it had been there forever. I pulled off my brother’s jeans, my skirt, my blouse, and brassiere, and laid them over the big hollow stump along with Nora’s clothes and the gun. I stepped into water cold enough to make my teeth ache. Nora was off and running ahead of me, tinkling because, though naked, she still wore the bell necklace. She threw herself in, making a splash as big as when Dan threw the stumping powder into the creek. I held my lightning arm and watched Nora come up with her hair sleeked back, her necklace tinkling, and her breasts bobbing on the water.

“It’s warm!” she said.

“It’s nothing like warm.”

Nora swung her arms up and sent a splash over my body that left me gasping and angry.

“Quit that!” I said.

“Can’t take it?”

I kicked water at her, and she floated off on her back, laughing and tinkling. I let myself fall into the water and came up gasping at the cold. Nora laughed and splashed more water at me.

“I said stop it!”

“What’s the matter with you today?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve been sulky all morning.” And when I didn’t answer, she said, “I seen Dennis looking at you.”

“When?”

“I seen.”

“You haven’t seen anything.”

“I seen.”

“Maybe it’s you that’s following me,” I said. “You’re some spy, like them Germans. Or them Japs. Maybe you’re a Jap spy.”

She grinned and splashed me and I splashed her back and we got all boiled up in water, sunshine, and bells. Nora stopped splashing and fell back into the water. I bounced against the creek bottom. At the creek’s deepest part, I could still feel the gravel and pebbles under my toes.

“Your mum say anything yet about going back to school?”

“Nope,” I said. “Fieldwork’s been so late this year and I’ve got to do all the chores. Anyhow, I’m not going back.”

“It’s already started,” she said.

“I know.” I kicked and shifted in the water so I was floating on my back.

“A lot of your aunts and cousins have webbed fingers and things,” I said. “Like your mum and her extra finger. That’s weird, all that stuff happening in one family.”

“Granny says they’re Coyote’s daughters. If Coyote’s inside some man when he’s with a woman, you know, then the child that woman has by him is like that. Webbed fingers, or extra fingers, or weird birthmarks, or each eye a different color.”

“You saying you’re Coyote’s daughter?” I said.

“Granny says that. My mother says my father was some white man
working for the Fergusons, who caught her in the bush. She told my uncles and they went and beat the white man up. Then the Mounties came and put my uncles in jail.”

“That’s why she doesn’t like you out walking.”

Nora shrugged. “She doesn’t like me doing anything. She’ll hit me if I look at her cross-eyed.”

“I’ve never seen her hit you,” I said.

“She’s got manners, eh? Won’t hit me in front of company. She learned her good manners from those teachers at the school. Learned how to hit from them too. That’s why I won’t go near the residential school, won’t go to church, though Mum hits me for that too. They want to teach me manners.”

“I’m getting cold.” I walked, shivering, from the water and Nora followed, shaking her hair like a dog, flinging sunlight in all directions. I picked up my skirt and dried myself with it, then dressed in my blouse and my brother’s old jeans. Nora took up the gun and, sitting naked, aimed into the treetops and pretended to shoot.

“Give me that,” I said.

I loaded the gun with the shells from the pocket of my jeans and shot off a few branches. The shots awakened the Swede’s three-legged dog and set him off. His howls were answered by a coyote’s yip farther down the valley, towards the reserve.

“You’re getting good,” said Nora.

“Been practicing.”

“Dan’s been practicing too, eh? I see him out with his gun. He’ll be joining up soon.”

“I guess. I wish he wouldn’t.”

“Then you’d be working with your dad, eh?” said Nora. “Doing fieldwork?”

I nodded and took aim at the trees again but didn’t fire.

“Dennis wants to join up too,” said Nora. “Granny won’t let him. She says the army’s no different than the residential school. They try to make a white out of you. She wants Dennis to stay here.”

“She can’t tell Dennis what to do.”

“Sure she can. She’s Granny.”

I sighed and lowered the gun and leaned it against the hollow stump.

“See this?” I said.

“The stump?”

I pulled back the weeds and bramble and exposed the hole at its base. “This is my hiding place,” I said. I took out the bottle of perfume, showed her, and put it back. “I hide in there myself sometimes.”

“You hide in there?” said Nora. She pulled the weeds back farther and sat herself down in front of the opening. “I’m not sure I’d fit in here.”

Seeing her moving herself into the hollow stump panicked me, made me angry.

“I don’t want you in there,” I said.

“Why?”

I couldn’t explain, so I didn’t say anything. Nora shimmied herself backwards into the hollow stump. The growth of grass, blackberry bramble, and forget-me-nots swept back into place when she pulled in her legs. If she’d kept quiet no one would ever know she was there.

“Can you see me?” she called.

“Please come out,” I said. “I don’t want you in there.”

She pushed back some of the weeds and peeked out. “Why’d you show it to me, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jeez,” she said. “Picky, picky.”

I was sorry for my anger, but I couldn’t shake it. Nora went sulky. She rinsed her body off in the water, her necklace tinkling as she did so, and plunked herself down on the creek shore, as naked as the smooth, round boulder she sat on.

“Come on, let’s go walking,” I said. “See what we find. Maybe shoot something for supper.”

Nora shrugged and, a little while later, she said, “Let’s go shoot out the windows in Coyote Jack’s cabin.”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “Who’s going to care?”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Somebody should take a gun to him,” said Nora.

“He’s just a stupid old man,” I said.

Nora didn’t answer that. Her face went dark and angry, so I looked in the direction of her gaze. Through the bush, the flax field shone like a bright lake. Dan and Filthy Billy harvested the oats with the binder. The horses’ harnesses jingled, and Billy let his curses bounce off the sky.

“I don’t know why your father keeps that mongoloid on,” said Nora.

“Billy? He works hard. He does a good job.”

Nora grunted and went on staring into the field.

“I seen how Dennis looks at you,” she said. “I seen how you look at him.”

“You haven’t seen anything,” I said.

Nora inflicted her two-woman eyes on me, held me with them.

“I seen,” she said. “You think you’re the only girl Dennis looks at, don’t you?”

“I don’t care if he looks at me.” But the shame of the lie made me look down. “I got to get home,” I said. “I haven’t helped with chores at all today.”

“Your daddy still thinks you stay in the house all day, eh, Daddy’s girl?”

“I don’t care what he thinks. Anyway, he’s gone into town with Dennis.”

“Maybe Dennis will buy you a present, eh? Maybe you’ll be his girlfriend then, when he pays for it.”

I turned on my heels, red-faced and confused by her insults, and, weighing the gun in my hands, cut through the bush into the alfalfa field.

Off towards the house, the flax, planted for a second time after the great storm, bloomed like a reflection of the sky. Before me a field of plumed corn stood as if it were a great army of soldiers on parade, and just beyond them Dan drove the horses to pull the binder, cutting a path through the bed of oats. He sat on a seat perched over the bull wheel, one reason we prayed daily for cloudless skies. The bull wheel was what powered the binder, and it was hell in mud. A good rain ended the day — even the week — in the field, and that could mean the year’s crop, and all the work that had gone into it, was wasted. Billy sweated behind Dan and the horses, picking up the bundles of oats the binder dropped and throwing them up into stooks to wait on threshing.

I followed the trail that the binder had made through the oats. When I came on them, Dan called out “Ho!” and pulled up the horses. He wiped his face with his sleeve.

“Dad and Dennis back?” he called.

“Not that I know,” I said.

Behind us, Billy stacked the bound sheaves of oats on end, one against the other, so they formed a tepee, a stook. The fabric of his shirt was wet through with sweat — almost transparent — and each time he bent and straightened the fabric molded around the muscles of his shoulders. Billy was no longer a boy. When he caught up to the binder, he stopped, stretched his back, and reached for one of two canteens wound around the base of the binder seat. He drank watching me. There was a bit of snakeskin tucked into the ribbon of his hat.

“You (shit) okay?” he said to me.

“Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”

He glanced up at Dan and shrugged.

“What’s that in your hat?” I said.

“(Shit) Rattler.”

“Why’s it in your hat?”

“So I (shit) don’t get a (fuck) headache.”

“You been getting headaches?”

Billy shrugged and nodded, swore and took a swig off his canteen before handing it to me. I drank and watched a drop of sweat slide down his neck and over his collarbone.

“Bad ones?” said Dan.

Billy nodded again, and I gave him back the canteen. He poured water into his hand and tossed it onto the back of his neck.

“How’s it going to help a headache?” I said.

Billy shrugged. “Ever (shit) seen a two (fuck) headed rattlesnake?”

“No,” I said. “That’s stupid.”

“Not (shit) stupid,” said Billy. “My uncle saw (shit) one himself. A head at each end. (Fuck) No rattle on that rattlesnake. But that same (shit) day, my uncle’s best friend died.”

“You saying the friend died because your uncle saw a snake?” said Dan.

Billy nodded and drank from his canteen.

“(Shit) It’s a warning,” he said.

“That’s stupid,” I said. “There is no such thing.”

Billy shrugged and grinned. Dan poured water from his own canteen over his head and put his hat back on.

“We better get this done, eh?” he said. “Before Dad gets home. He’ll fire us all if we don’t. Hey, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. Maybe we should sit here and do nothing, eh?”

But he giddyupped the horses anyway. Billy went back to stooking. I stepped into the army of corn and followed a row back to the flax field, where I picked a tender breath of blue flax to placate my mother. I didn’t walk right up to the house. I couldn’t. Instead I wandered across the yard and looked halfheartedly and unsuccessfully for Lucifer until I’d summoned the courage to enter the house.

My mother was making supper. She wouldn’t look at me and began peeling away the leaves of a cabbage on the kitchen table. Her scrapbook was on the table next to her, open to the page that contained the photograph of Ginger Rogers and recipes for pancakes, angels on horseback, and quick Sally Lunn. Sally Lunn was a teacake that was sweet but not too sweet. My mother’s recipe called for:

The recipe was one of my favorites and, without thinking, I put my finger to it. My mother batted the air over my hand, and when I ignored her and stubbornly kept my finger on the scrapbook page, she said, “Don’t touch!”