The Cure for Death by Lightning (30 page)

“Billy’s having a fit,” I cried.

“Billy?” said my father. “Where is he?”

I looked at the ground. “He’s fallen. He’s having a fit.”

“Get your mother,” said my father.

I kicked dirt. “She’s having one of her spells.”

“Spells? Well, ask her anyway. See if she’ll tell you what to do. And bring me the medical book.”

I did as he told me to and found my mother still rocking in her chair. I put the gun back on the rack over her head and called her.

“Mum,” I said. “Mum!”

She turned my way but looked through me, at the gun rack on the wall.

“Billy’s having a fit,” I said. “What do we do?”

She went on rocking and looking through me as if she didn’t hear me.

I said, “Is there anything in here?” and tried to pull the scrapbook from her, but she fought me for it. I gave up and went to the gun cupboard in the parlor where my father kept his books. The medical book my father told me to fetch was called
Everything Within
, a
hodgepodge of information on how to build a house, store food, garden, sew, stay married, give first aid, take care of animals, type, give speeches, do bookkeeping, acquire poise and charm, play games and sports, travel, and so on. I stopped in front of my mother before leaving the house. I held her face with one hand so she would listen to me.

“Mum,” I said. “Billy’s down on the ground. He’s shaking all over. He’s having a fit.”

“Fit?” she said, but her eyes looked as glazed as Billy’s had, and I left her rocking.

When I reached the men out in the field, Billy was still on the ground, but his body wasn’t jerking anymore. He lay on his side, breathing heavily like a snorting horse, his jaw clamped shut. My father and Dennis knelt on either side of him. Dennis held Billy’s head, smoothing back his hair. My brother stood behind Dennis with his hands on his hips.

“What does the book say?” said my father. “Look under fits.”

I looked in the index.

“All they’ve got is something on dogs’ running fits.”

“That’s it?” said my father. “Read it anyway.”

I held the big book awkwardly in the middle of the field and found the page.

“It says give a laxative and feed the dog lean meat and let the dog rest and be kind to it. It says a dog gets a running fit when he’s upset.”

“Jesus,” said my father.

We stayed like that for a long time. I held the book, Dennis held Billy’s head, and Dan stood over us, impatiently tramping the timothy hay around Billy.

“Well, what are we going to do?” said Dan. “We can’t leave him here.”

“Just give it time to pass,” my father replied.

“Pass?” said Dan. “He’s out cold.”

“He’ll be fine,” said my father. “Or as fine as he ever is.”

“I’ll take Cherry into town and get the doctor,” said Dan.

“No!” said my father. “I’m telling you he’ll be fine.”

“He could be dying,” said Dan. “It could be anything.” He turned and started walking away.

“Stay here!”

My father’s raised voice jolted something in Billy. He opened his eyes and started swearing. The words were slurred at first.

“Billy,” said my father. “You hear me Billy? Billy!”

Filthy Billy came round to his name, but he looked at each of us with a glaze of incomprehension in his eyes. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a jumble of swear words. My father and Dan sat him up, and Dennis put the canteen to his lips. He drank a little, sputtering. Then he drank a lot. A whole canteen’s worth of water went down gulp after gulp.

“He’s all right,” said my father. “Aren’t you, Billy?”

“He could have died,” said Dan.

“Keep your goddamned mouth shut,” said my father.

“What if I don’t?” said Dan. “What you gonna do? What you gonna do?”

My father pushed Dan to the ground. There was surprise in his face as he watched Dan fall. My brother stood up, held on to his fists, and stared my father down for a while. Then he walked past him and headed for the house. Filthy Billy, Dennis, and I gaped after him.

“What’re you just standing there for?” said my father to Dennis. “Get back to work.”

“I’ll take Billy up to the cabin,” said Dennis.

“No (shit). I’m all right (fuck),” said Billy.

“Go on,” said my father to me. “Get back in the house. See about your mother.”

The cows had walked themselves home and wandered through the gate I’d left open. They stood waiting in their stalls as I passed the barn heading for the house.

My mother was still rocking in her chair but she was no longer muttering. She turned to me with a smile that wasn’t hers at all. It frightened me.

She said, “Billy okay?”

“He’s all right,” I said, and placed the big medical book on the table.

“Good. Cows down?”

“They hid on me, then walked themselves home.”

My mother nodded. “They can be tricksters.”

I turned my back on my mother and poured myself tea.

“You seen Lucifer around?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Has Dad done something to him?”

She gave a little indifferent shrug that made me angry.

“I’ll go milk the cows.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said, but she made no move to get up.

“I can do it myself,” I said.

I left the house and took my rancor into milking, gave it to the cows, and they handed it back tenfold. They banged over the milk buckets, spilling milk and bringing the cats — all but Lucifer — running. They hit me in the face with their tails and shifted from side to side so I had to move my stumping powder box again and again. They pawed at my hands with their back hooves, bruising me. The lead cow, the one with the bell around her neck, the one I called Betty, kicked out hard as I approached her from behind, leaving a bruise and swelling in my shin. The milking went on and on and my frustration grew until I was slapping the cows when they knocked over the buckets. When the last cow was finally milked, the sky had gone black, and the air was filled with smoke from woodstoves up and down the valley. Dennis and Billy had broken the blackout and lit their campfire. After I let the cows out into the back pasture, I leaned against the fence for a time watching Filthy Billy jump back and forth over his fire.

I
N THE NIGHT
I woke to hear cows bellowing and a bell ringing, as if a cow were running, but the sound neither came nor receded. A cow out? A cow with her head caught in the fence? I slid out of bed and into my brother’s jeans, a sweater, and rubber boots. My mother’s shape was still seated in the rocking chair in the kitchen, but she was slumped down, her chin on her chest, and she whistled in her sleep. I slipped by her and closed the kitchen door carefully behind me.

The night was dark, a dark like nothing you get now. No city is dark, of course, and even in the countryside these days the night sky is lit up by the dull orange of distant towns. I’ve heard some people living in cities their whole lives have never wondered over the Milky Way. Imagine! To live your life through never seeing the backbone of the sky. Then, of course, there were no city lights to obliterate the stars. There was electricity in town, but precious little of it, and none out on the farms in the valley. That dark was so dark you became the night when you stepped out into it. Only slowly, as your eyes adjusted, did you take on form.

I pulled my shape out of the dark as I followed the sound of the bell to the barn. As I approached, there was another sound like the soft hooting of an owl from a distance. The dark deepened when I stepped into the barn, and I took a moment to realize what I was seeing. In the hazy dark the lead cow, the one we put the bell on, stood in the spot where we milked her. The white on her body glowed a little. There
were no other cows in the barn. Dan stood on a stumping powder box immediately behind her. His hands held the cow’s pinbones and his face shone white in all the black of the barn. He pushed himself into the cow, and with each push the bell around her neck rang. He was making that other sound, the soft grunting. Dan turned sharply and some bit of light in his eye flashed in my direction. I turned on my heel and walked quickly back to the house.

The next morning at breakfast, Dan tried to wipe the midnight bell ringing out of the space between us with jokes and roughhousing. He slapped Dennis on the shoulder, grinning with his mouth full of egg. He kissed my mother on the cheek as Dennis did and tugged my apron undone. But I didn’t give him anything. I didn’t laugh at his jokes. Just like the others, he was filth and shame, the evil Mrs. Bell spoke of.

My mother was no help, no help at all. She sat in her rocking chair, rocking and rocking, hanging on to her scrapbook, staring off at nothing. I made breakfast by myself and laid it on the table for the men, refilled cups, and cleared away the dishes. My mother sat in her chair all that time, rocking, muttering, and my father didn’t say a word about it. I brought her a cup of coffee sweetened with milk and half a teaspoon of sugar, the way she liked it. But my mother looked through me, like a stubborn child punishing the parent that punished her. I said, “You find the nylons okay?” I made a point of saying it, so my father would hear. But my mother ignored this too, only drawing her lips into a straight pink line, and my father went on eating as if he hadn’t heard.

Dennis tried to slide his hand over my fingers as he handed me his breakfast plate. My father looked up just then, to see me shaking my head at Dennis. I turned away when I saw him watching, but I could feel his eyes on me.

I refilled the cups of all four men and took my apron off. As I tied my kerchief over my hair I said to my mother, “You coming?” She ignored me, so I said it again, and when I said it the third time, as I put on my boots, something broke inside and I found my mother’s own words coming out my mouth. “Quit your sulking. We’ve got work to do!”

She looked up at me with eyes so big and hurt I wanted to slap her.

“Come on!” I said.

My father said, “Don’t talk to your mother that way.” But he didn’t raise his voice or look my way and I knew something had shifted.

“The cows aren’t going to milk themselves,” I said, to my mother, with her own words. “Get yourself ready.”

She complied and, clumsy and slow-footed as a chastised child, followed me outside.

My mother and I let in the cows and set up our stumping powder boxes, rattled our pails into position, and settled into the shush-shush rhythm of the milk hitting the pails. I was off from my mother’s rhythm, slower because of the weakness in my lightning arm, anxious from my father’s hot, dark looks, sick with the image of my brother stepping on my stool to do his dirty business. I couldn’t bring myself to lay my head on the cows. Their flanks were too hot, their stomach music disgusted me. The cows, picking up my case of nerves, rocked back and forth on their high-heel hooves, kicked, and slapped me with their filthy tails. The lead cow, the cow with the bell, would not stay still. She pawed my hands with her hooves as I milked, slapped me around the head with her tail, bawled, shook her head, and rang her bell, and that sent a ripple of nerves through the whole herd. They all started prancing and bawling like new mothers separated from their calves.

“There’s been coyotes here in the night,” my mother said, suddenly chatty. “You can feel it in them.”

I didn’t answer. I knew it hadn’t been coyotes that had scared the cows. Then the rhythm of my mother’s milking quickened, and she said, “My father gave me stockings too — silk stockings — while my mother went without.”

I didn’t say anything to that. At first I wasn’t sure what she meant, and then I didn’t want to think about it, because if she meant what I thought she meant then she knew, and the shadows that visited at night weren’t just nightmares. I blocked it out of my head, pretended that she’d said nothing at all, and went on fighting my way to a full pail of milk, then another and another. When we were finally done I’d worked up a full sweat and my lightning arm was numb.

“Hope they settle down by tonight,” said my mother, as she put her last pail to one side. She walked the cows down to the end of the pasture and let them out to roam over the benchland for the day, then went to feed the pigs.

I added a last pail of milk to those already covered with cheesecloth
near the mouth of the barn. I stretched and took a step back, into an empty calf pen, so I could dry the sweat from my face with the edge of my skirt without surprising Dennis or Billy with a view of my bare thighs. I needn’t have stepped back. Dennis came into the barn and caught me like that, with my face in my skirt.

“Hey,” he said. “Nice legs!”

I pushed my skirt down, horrified that he’d seen, and looked around nervously for my father.

“He’s still in the house,” said Dennis.

He stepped into the calf stall with me and I stepped back against the wall. The stall was only three by six feet, set off in the darkness of the corner of the barn, filled with the dusty homes of spiders. All the stalls were empty now. The calves were in a small pasture behind the pigpen until winter was truly on us. Dennis clutched the low walls that encompassed the stall and moved towards me, slowly, blocking the way out. The smell of him was woodsmoke, bacon, and coffee, and under that the sweet stench of his sweat. His hands on my arms were nothing like velvet.