The Cure for Death by Lightning (3 page)

My mother poured Bertha and herself more coffee and handed me the pot. I went around to the other women to top up their cups.

“I’ve been thinking maybe his blood’s weak,” said Bertha. “That’s why he eats so much.”

“Oh, I don’t think he’s anemic,” said my mother. “That would make
him tired, not like he is. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t sleep through the night anymore. He only takes naps. I don’t know what it is. For all the food he eats he doesn’t gain weight.”

My mother stood and offered the plate of cakes around. The daughter with the webbed fingers held her hand up to the window and watched the strange shadow it left on the floor. She saw me staring and tucked both hands into the pockets of her dress.

Bertha contemplated her coffee cup for a time and then asked my mother, “You going to the Kemp girl’s funeral?”

“I guess the whole town will be going. A terrible thing. It’s no way for a girl to die.”

Bertha Moses nodded slowly for a long time. Fear slipped up on me briefly, even though I knew Morley Boulee, the man my father had punched, had shot the crazy bear who was supposed to have done the killing.

The girl with the necklace put her hand to her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but she kept quiet. I took the coffeepot around again, then set it back down on the stove and watched through the window as the Swede and his team of horses thundered down Blood Road. He was near the swamps at the far end of the fields and was heading towards us, chased by a red tide of dust. The Swede, a man named Johansson, drove a fine buggy with a fold-down top and a curved front pulled by a smart sorrel he called Old Mare, though she had wings on her hooves. Johansson was a short round-faced man with a red complexion, a white bristly mustache, and eyes so blue you had to look at him twice to believe the color. He kept the fact that he was almost completely bald under a wide-brimmed, greasy felt hat that he almost never took off, even in my mother’s presence. The Swede had a son named Jack, a skinny, skittish man with his father’s brilliant blue eyes. Everyone knew Jack was half-crazy, bushed. Jack had taken to living all by himself in a squatter’s cabin on Bald Mountain after an argument with his father and some time later the Indians began calling him Coyote Jack. He had a way of sliding in and out of shadows, disappearing and reappearing just like a coyote.

The conversation stopped for a moment as everyone in the kitchen listened to the Swede and his horses thunder by.

“The government’s talking about rounding up the wild horses,” said
Bertha. “They’re going to slaughter them, send the meat over to the war. They’re talking about giving farmers on the reserve money to round them up.”

On weekends when I wasn’t working on the farm, and sometimes after school, I hiked up to the top of Bald Mountain, where Blood Road pushed up into a blind hill before washing down into the next valley, and watched the horses graze the flat lands of the reserve below. The plain was named for them, Horse Meadows. Sometimes I clapped and the wind carried the sound down onto the plain. The wild horses took off in a group, swooping across the prairie exactly like a flock of birds taking off into the air. The horses belonged to no one and wintered as the deer did, on what they could find; they often ate off the stores of farmers’ hay. Several families on the reserve made their living by capturing the wild horses, fattening them up, breaking them, and selling them.

“I think it’s a foolish idea,” said Bertha Moses. “Once those horses are gone, then what?”

“There’s all those people starving in Europe,” said my mother. “They must be fed.”

“There’s people starving right here,” said Bertha Moses. She tapped the table with her finger. My mother said nothing and we spent a long silence listening to the crowing rooster, the cackling chickens, and the songs of many birds. The women shuffled and looked around and the room began to feel cramped. The woodstove became too hot, and my mother’s prize Hosier cupboard towered over the kitchen table and the women standing around it. I leaned against this cupboard because Bertha’s family had taken up every chair and stood around the room besides. No one else in the valley had anything like my mother’s cupboard. It had a built-in flour container with a sifter, a pull-out cutting board and shelf, a sugar bin, a porcelain counter, and drawers above and below for pots and tins and foodstuffs. The very top shelf was stocked with the remedies for illness: honey and horehound candy wrapped in cheesecloth and tucked in a Nabob tea tin, a can of hot dry mustard ready to mix with flour and water for the chest of whoever got the cough this year, likely all of us; a pile of life-preserving flannel with which to apply the mustard paste and goose grease; black currant jam to make tea for colds; brown sugar to sprinkle over hot coals and then
hold under boils, and cedar slivers, to break the infection; soda to mix with water, for stomach ailments.

The silence stretched on, filled with the complaints of chickens. I played with the little bird on the lid of the sugar bowl on the counter. My mother’s best teaspoons were fastened on clips that ringed the bowl. Our everyday teaspoons were scattered over the white oilcloth on the table, leaving brown pools where the women of Bertha’s household had placed them after stirring their coffee.

The girl with the bell necklace looked at me, then smiled at the floor. She drew circles on the floor with her bare feet. I grew shy and looked out the kitchen window at the woodshed and the blue lake of flowering flax. Beyond the flax, in the field of alfalfa, the three figures of my brother Dan, Dennis, and Filthy Billy labored away, shimmering in the heat. I strained to see my father and when I couldn’t I grew uneasy.

I pushed myself away from the cupboard and filled a plate with the last of the oatcakes as my mother told the story of how my father tried to fool the hired help, Dennis and Filthy Billy, who were both Bertha’s grandsons. My father hired older Indian boys who ran away from the residential school. He said he was doing them a favor, but the truth of it was that almost all the young men in the valley, white or Indian, had enlisted and those who hadn’t had taken factory jobs in the cities. Now, with the war on, there was no shortage of jobs. The only men left were the native boys who hadn’t yet enlisted or the old bachelors who couldn’t be worked hard. Even before the war, my father hired Indian boys because they worked for cheap and didn’t talk back unless they got drunk. If they got drunk, my father fired them.

“John brought home a porcupine yesterday,” my mother told Bertha. “He skinned it, cleaned it, and said, ‘It’s chicken.’ I said, ‘That’s not chicken.’ He said, ‘I said it’s chicken, so it’s chicken.’ I said, ‘Fine, it’s chicken,’ and cooked it as if it were chicken. Dennis and Filthy Billy come in for dinner, and John says, ‘Maudie cooked chicken for dinner.’ Everyone helps themselves, and then Dennis whispers, ‘Porcie,’ and Filthy Billy whispers, ‘Porcie.’ ”

Everyone laughed because they knew what my father had become. The laughter became huge and shook the house and hid the sound of my father’s boots on the porch. The screen door slammed shut and my father was there in the kitchen, a giant over us, dressed in the denim
pants and jacket that were his field clothes, and his puttees from the Great War. His boots smelled bad, of dog shit.

“What’s this about?” said my father. “What are you laughing at?”

There was a pause. One of Bertha’s daughters said, “Nothing.”

My father pushed me out of his way and stood over Bertha Moses. Bertha became an old woman in my father’s shadow. He sucked the air from her cheeks and made her eyes dull. “You told Dennis not to work,” he said.

My mother said, “John,” but he just stood there with his hands on his hips and his feet planted as if nothing could move him. Bertha Moses looked at my mother, then up at my father, and we all listened for a while to the noisy birds. Then Bertha stood and her daughters stood behind her. The sound of their chairs scraping against the floor drowned the birdsong and made my father appear smaller, as if he were an ordinary man. He held his forehead at the sound, flinched at it. The women’s combined shadows pushed my father’s shadow against the wall.

“I said he deserves more for the work he does,” said Bertha. “I said he doesn’t have to work into the night.”

“You don’t know nothing,” said my father.

“There’s a war on,” said Bertha. “Dennis doesn’t have to work for you. Billy neither.”

“They’ll get no better work.”

“You hire our boys because they don’t know how to ask for what they’re worth,” she said. “You treat them as if they were slaves.”

“Shut up.”

“They’re not slaves.”

“Get out of my house!” said my father.

The women moved forward and surrounded him. Bertha Moses’s shadow gripped my father’s shadow around the throat, forcing blood into his face. He began to shake and his face grew redder and redder until I thought he might explode. He stepped back through the women and pushed open the screen door.

“You get out of here,” he said, and fled from the house.

My mother looked at her shoes. Bertha sighed.

“We should be going,” said Bertha Moses.

“Yes,” said one of the daughters, and the women made the motions of leaving.

“It was good to have you,” said my mother.

The daughters and the daughters’ daughters filed out the door, and the girl with the bells smiled and jingled her necklace as she went by. Each of her eyes was a different color, one blue and one green. She was a half-breed, then. Bertha stayed behind.

“Come again,” said my mother. “Please. He won’t remember. He gets angry and it washes away.”

She tapped her forehead in the place where there was steel, not bone, in my father’s forehead, where a scar marked his injury from the Great War. During that war my father had been running through a graveyard when the shells hit and buried him alive among the corpses. A second round of shells hit, at once unburying him and saving his life, and wounding him with shrapnel. Bertha knew this story, as everyone did.

“No,” said Bertha. “I don’t think it’s that. I think what’s got hold of Coyote Jack’s got hold of your John.”

When my mother laughed and looked puzzled, Bertha Moses took my mother’s hand in both of her own. She glanced at her daughters waiting by the flower bed and lowered her voice. “John didn’t turn until that bear attacked. You said so yourself. Something got him in the bush. You be careful. You and the girl.”

But then she smiled, as if it were all a joke, and winked at me so her face crinkled up to nothing. She took a pinch of tobacco from a pouch in her apron pocket and rolled a skinny cigarette as she walked down the path to where the women waited. One of the daughters, a woman with a large strawberry birthmark on her cheek, lit a match on the side of her shoe and held it up to Bertha’s cigarette. I followed the women a little way down Blood Road; the birds followed them too, attracted to their glittering jewelry and bright ribbons. Purple swallows zoomed around them. Bertha Moses and her daughters and her daughters’ daughters sang hymns of praise all the way into town.

I
STOKED
the fire in the kitchen stove, cleared the cups from the table, and scrubbed the sticky spots of evil on the oilcloth where Bertha Moses and her daughters had left their coffee spoons. Mrs. Bell said all dirt was evil, and it was a Christian woman’s duty to scrub away evil and never turn her back on it. Evil was what made you sick. Evil was what crept into your night dreams and made a sinner of you. A dirty house was an evil house, and a woman must guard against the evil men brought into the house on their boots. Mrs. Bell was the one town visitor we got those days, so what did I know? I scrubbed the evil from the oilcloth and from beneath the water tub in which we washed dishes; dusted it from the kitchen chairs, the gun cupboard, the parlor table, and from the family photographs sitting on the buffet; and swept it from the floor under the coat hooks where my father left his boots.

There were no photographs on the buffet of my brother and me, only pictures of my mother’s family and the one photograph of my mother and father, taken on the day of their engagement. I knew little of my father’s history, other than that his mother had died giving birth to him and that he had worked from the time he was ten until he was fifteen leading the pack ponies down into the black mouth of the mine. The ponies knew enough to come back up by themselves, hauling rock, but needed convincing to go back down again. There was a photograph of my mother with her parents, taken during the Great War. My mother wore a nurse’s uniform and stood very tall over her own tiny
mother. My grandmother was dressed in dark and lacy Victorian garb and looked very old and tired, but my grandfather, an engineer, looked quite dapper. He was smiling and had his hand around my mother’s waist. Neither my grandmother nor my mother was smiling. About the time my mother became a woman, my grandmother took sick with an unexplained series of niggling illnesses, stomach complaints and headaches, weakness and malaise. My mother became the woman of the house then, making the meals and tending her mother and looking after her two younger sisters. As my grandmother became increasingly bedridden, my mother also became her father’s escort to plays and concerts. She became his favorite of the three daughters. He bought her silk stockings, boxes of candy, and called her dear. There were two photographs of my mother’s sisters: Aunt Lou, who sent Christmas packages each year from England, and Aunt Amy, who lived with her pastor husband in Australia. I had never met either of them, and my grandparents were long dead. When the great fire of polio still raged over Australia, my mother carried Aunt Amy’s letters into the house in the manner I’d seen her carry out dead rats. She put the letters in the roasting pan and into the hot oven for a time, not so long that the letters burned, but long enough to kill the polio spirit that might have lived in them. When we were very young children, it was my mother’s worst fear that she might put Dan or me to bed healthy only to have one of us awaken with a useless arm or leg that we could no more command than we could command a chair to dance. Infantile paralysis was what they called it then, and next to nothing could be done for it, though people believed in all manner of cures. The things you could believe then … that heating up a letter from the bottom of the world would stop a deadly bug from entering your house. If you could believe that, you could believe in ghosts. My mother did that too.