The Cure for Death by Lightning (29 page)

“I’m not doing anything,” I said.

“Did you hear what I said?”

I put the offending hand in my pocket and stared down at my mother’s instructions. She creamed the butter and sugar together, added the eggs and milk and enough flour to make a cake batter. Then she added the baking powder and baked it in a quick oven. My mother served the teacakes hot for tea or breakfast, with butter. Tonight, though, we’d be eating pancakes.

“I had to do all the chores alone,” she said. “I’ve done nothing but work the whole day. The cows haven’t been milked this evening. God knows where they are by now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Where did you go? Who were you with?”

“I met up with Nora.”

“Is that all?”

I didn’t answer. I held out the bundle of blue flax, but she ignored me. She went on preparing cabbage for the early supper of a fieldwork day, removing the outer leaves, washing them, then filling a deep bowl with water and adding a tablespoon of salt. She would immerse the cabbage in water for an hour or so to rid it of insects. The insects would rise to the surface like the dead of a shipwreck, and my mother would skim them off before removing the cabbage. She would then wash the cabbage again and chop it into chunks for boiling.

“I had to lie this morning.” She added salt to the water. “I told him you’d got up early this morning to do chores. Then I had to make up excuses when he went into the barn and saw you weren’t there.”

“You didn’t have to lie,” I said.

“Didn’t I? What happened last night? Where did you go?”

“I felt sick. I went out to get air. I had a nightmare.”

“You went out walking after a nightmare?”

I shrugged. She looked up at my face for the first time since I came in the house. “Your hair’s wet.”

“I saw Nora. We went swimming.”

“Swimming? This time of year? You’re lucky if you don’t die of cold.”

I held out the flowers again. “These are for you,” I said.

She wiped her hands on her apron and took the blue flax, lifted them to her face, and breathed in. For a moment her face relaxed.

“Did you see Bertha?” she asked.

“No, just Nora.”

“Does Nora say why Bertha isn’t visiting anymore?”

“I didn’t ask.”

My mother put the flax into a canning jar filled with water and placed it on the kitchen table.

“Well,” she said. “I expect it’s your father.”

She pinched a blue flax flower from the bunch and pressed it with her fingertip into the scrapbook next to the pancake recipe.

“There,” she said. “Something to remember the day by, though Lord knows why I want to remember it.”

She felt the edge of the photograph of Ginger Rogers, then put her
hand to her mouth. The page also held her brief instructions for angels on horseback, and I touched my finger to it.

“We haven’t had that for a long time,” I said.

“I asked you not to touch that. How many times do I have to tell you?”

I pulled my hand away from the scrapbook and crossed my arms. My mother cradled her arm for a time and then tapped the recipe. “You get me some oysters and I’d make that in a minute,” she said.

Angels on horseback were nothing but oysters wrapped in thin rashers of bacon, fried and served hot on buttered toast. But we were three hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean and there was a war on and oysters were a luxury we couldn’t afford. Instead that night my mother and I made pancakes, fried ham, eggs, and boiled potatoes and cabbage. Pancakes in our house were an evening meal, never breakfast. The recipe on that page called for two cups of flour, three teaspoons of baking powder, one and a half cups of whole milk, two eggs, and four tablespoons of melted butter or lard.

The trick with pancakes is to beat all the ingredients together just enough to moisten — never overbeat — and to pour the batter onto the griddle from the tip of a spoon so you get nice round pancakes. A pancake is ready to turn when there are bubbles on top, but turn it only once. Otherwise the surface gets hard. The second side takes half as long to cook, so you must make sure that it doesn’t burn. I kept my back to the table and my eyes on the pancakes as my father and the men scraped the dirt off their boots on the edge of the porch and came in for supper. My mother closed the scrapbook, firmly pressing the little flax blossom into the page with the angels on horseback, and dropped the scrapbook on the seat of her rocker.

“How was town?” she asked.

“People all over,” said Dennis. “You’d think there was a carnival going on.”

“It’s the turning season,” said my mother. “Everyone wants to stock up.”

“Whatever it is, old Belcham’s doing well for himself,” said Dennis. “Hardly room to move in the store.”

“You go in?” my mother asked my father.

My father shook his head.

“Goat’s figured out a new way into the churchyard,” said Dennis. “He was up there on the roof again, going at ’er.”

“Shut up!” yelled my father.

The conversation went dead and the kitchen filled with the sound of pancakes sizzling. I flipped the cakes.

Eventually Dan said, “A coyote was chasing the sheep again today. I ran to get the gun, but he was gone. Can’t wait to get trapping them again.” He called over to me. “Hey, Beth, mixed up my special recipe today.”

I glared at him and forced a smile. His “special recipe” was a scent for attracting coyotes, which he’d gotten from Bertha Moses. The scent led the coyote right into our traps and worked so well that my mother had written the recipe into her scrapbook. To make the scent, start with two one-quart glass jars. Fill one jar half full with dead field mice. Fill the other half full of chunks of brook trout, and leave both jars in the sun with the lids loosely closed to keep flies out. After a couple of weeks, mix the rotting contents of both jars together. Add two drops of skunk scent squeezed from the scent glands of a freshly killed skunk. Into this add a pinch of aniseed or a teaspoonful of aniseed oil and a handful of deer hair to thicken the mix. Lastly, add a quarter cup of coyote urine taken from the bladder of a female coyote killed while she’s in heat. It’s a good idea to wear gloves while preparing the recipe, which reduces to an oily gray sludge that stinks to heaven. A few drops of that on a stump brought the coyotes running into the snares that Dan and I set.

My mother placed plates, pancakes, and ham before the men and scraped back a chair for herself. I stood at the stove, cooking more pancakes, so I wouldn’t have to look my father in the face.

“Don’t know what’s gotten into that Swede,” said my father. “He was standing across the street when I came out of the blacksmith’s, like he was waiting for me. But all he did was stare.”

“I’d think he had a right to stare and more after that fight and all the damage we did to his fence,” said Dan.

“Mr. Johansson warned me one day,” I said, flipping pancakes. “He said he’d do something if you didn’t stop taking down the fence.”

“When was this?” said my father.

“A while ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’d yell. You always yell.”

“I don’t yell!” he said, but his voice rose up to contradict him. “I wouldn’t yell,” he said again, quietly.

“You had no right to take down his fence,” said Dan.

“I had every right! And who was taking it down right along with me?”

“And if I refused?”

“You like your nylons okay?” Dennis asked my mother.

“Nylons?” said my mother.

I turned to see my father shake his head at Dennis. Dennis looked into his plate. “I guess I spoiled the surprise,” he said. “John got me to pick up some nylons for you today.”

My father played with his food. “They weren’t for Maud,” he said quietly.

Billy’s swearing swirled up into a little flurry and died down again.

“Well, who are they for?” said my mother.

My father glanced once, involuntarily, in my direction and said nothing. I was at once delighted and mortified. Nylons!

“You bought them for Beth?” she said. “She’s not old enough for nylons. I don’t have nylons. You said we couldn’t afford nylons.”

My father went on chewing his food. My mother’s eyes watered up and her chin quivered. “You bought them for Beth?”

Dad ignored her. He cut his meat and ate, methodically, intently. He stared past Billy’s shoulder at the gun rack on the wall. My mother pushed her plate angrily across the table so that it clinked against my father’s and stood up. She muttered to her dead mother and threw dishes into the washbasin, filling the room with the noise of her anger. My father winced but he didn’t get angry, not immediately. He clenched his teeth in between mouthfuls and, when her clanking reached high notes, he closed his eyes briefly.

“We’ll get on the corn tomorrow,” said Dennis over my mother’s noise. “We’re so late this year. Another week of rain like the last and we’re done for.”

Filthy Billy grew more agitated, scratching and shifting in his chair, until his swearing bubbled up like hiccups competing with my mother’s muttering; the two of them seemed to be engaged in some insane conversation.

“Slokum saw the girl on the road with that breed again,” my father said.

“Her name is Nora,” I told the pancakes.

“What?”

“Her name’s Nora!”

“Don’t raise your voice to me!” He slammed his fist on the table. My mother briefly stopped her dishwashing and muttering and then went at it again. Billy jumped up and ran out the door, letting the screen door slap closed. I watched through the kitchen window as he made his way along the edge of the lake of flax to the oat field.

“Stay away from her,” my father said to me.

“Dad,” said Dan.

“I said stay away!”

Dennis stood, pushing away his half-finished plate.

“Sit!” said my father, then he lowered his voice. “Finish your food.”

Dennis sat again. I piled the pancakes no one would eat onto a plate as my mother banged dishes in the washbowl next to me. My father turned in his chair and yelled at my mother. “What’s the matter with you?”

My mother didn’t answer or look at him. But now that she had a reaction from him, she took up the scrapbook and dropped into her chair by the stove and rocked and rocked, clutching the scrapbook to her chest, staring and muttering at someone only she could see. The words she said sometimes rose up so that I could almost catch them, then slipped down again.

My father smoothed his forehead and pushed his plate away. “Well,” he said. “Let’s get that binder fixed. We’ve got work to do tomorrow.”

In a habit that remained from the good days, my father took three strides to leave the house — two into his boots and one out the door — fitting on his cap as he did so. Dennis gave my shoulder a squeeze and followed my father. Dan dallied a few minutes longer, sliding on his denim work jacket with a practiced unhurriedness, taking the time to tie up his boots. As he left he looked over at my mother, then shrugged and offered me his smile of apology.

My mother went on rocking beside the stove, with her back to the window, muttering to her dead mother.

“Mum?” I said. “Do you want some tea or something?”

She glanced up and, pouty as a small child, went on rocking. I reached out to touch her cheek, but she pulled her head away. I went into my room to change into my milking dress. Three pairs of nylons were lying there on the rumpled blankets I’d become the night before. I picked up the nylons and placed them on my parents’ bed, on my mother’s side. As I left the house I reached over my mother’s head for my .22 and filled my pockets with shells.

Lucifer followed me through the orchard grass, parting a slim path beside mine. The sheep were wary and staring at the Swede’s meadow, where a shadow moved through the new brush. Coyote. I aimed the .22, fired, and missed. Lucifer shot home, but the coyote skulked towards Blood Road, not in any particular hurry. After a time the sheep went back to their evening grazing.

There was enough day left for Billy to finish the oat field, but in the bush the trees sopped up what light there was. I searched the wooded areas for the cows, calling them. They were being tricksters this evening, standing very still when I called so I wouldn’t hear the ringing of the lead cow’s bell. I came out into an open area that surrounded one of the many sloughs, stopped, and listened carefully. I knew they would betray themselves sooner or later. Twilight descended. Mosquitoes sought me out and bit me. I brushed them off. Then there was a hand on my shoulder.

I jumped and turned. Filthy Billy was there, looking down at me with his pants legs bound to protect him from what chased him. He was freshly washed and smelled of soap.

“You okay?” he said.

“Okay?”

Billy licked his lips and looked around at the bush behind us and at the field of oat stubble stretching out towards the house. His eyes settled on the little black figures of my brother and Dennis working under my father’s direction on the binder in front of the implement shed.

“He’s coming,” he said.

“Who? My father?”

I peered over at the flax field.

Billy didn’t answer me. He kept looking over his shoulder, his eyes open wide, at something I couldn’t see.

“What is it, Billy?” I said. “What’re you looking at?’ ”

He took a few steps backwards, then turned and began running, looking over his shoulder. I looked at the direction he was looking and saw nothing at first. Then the sound came, of grass shooshing, and then the path, cutting a swath through the grass a foot wide and heading straight for me. I leapt out of the way and fell, but the path through the grass kept on going, past me, chasing Billy, pulling in its wake the overpowering stench of wet dog. Billy ran this way and that, but the path followed him, gained on him. He leapt out of its way, and fell into the long timothy grass, where I couldn’t see him anymore. I ran to him, following the swath, and when I came on him, Filthy Billy let out a howl that had nothing human in it. His legs and arms jerked and his jaw clenched shut.

“Billy?” I said. “Billy!”

He went on convulsing. I left him and ran back to the yard, still carrying the gun. Dan, Dennis, and my father had worked up the smell of oil and sweat as they labored over the binder by the implement shed. I pulled on Dan’s sleeve.