The Cure for Death by Lightning (31 page)

“Don’t,” I whispered. “What if he sees?”

He moved into the shadow and wrapped himself around my waist and kissed me, so long and deep that I felt that part of him growing up against me. The surprise wasn’t that my lightning arm wrapped itself around Dennis, nor that my other arm followed suit, nor that I kissed Dennis back. I’d planned all this out in the daydreams that took over my nights. The surprise was that pleasure could push so far past fear as to make me reckless.

I didn’t hear their footsteps any more than I’d heard Dennis’s. All I heard was Dennis breathing against my cheek, his little piglike grunts so much like what I’d heard coming from my brother as he stood behind the cow the night before. Past Dennis’s shoulder I opened my eyes on my father and Dan as they walked into the barn. I pushed Dennis off, and my father saw us for the first time. Behind him, all around him, sunlight reflected off the dusty air. He squinted at us and said, “You!” Then he moved into the shadow of the calf stall and a darkness slid under his eyes. Dennis stood back against the barn wall, blinking and looking perplexed, as if stunned by sudden sunlight.

“You!” my father said again, and as he said it he grabbed Dennis’s shirt by the shoulders.

“What the hell?” he said, and said it again, over and over, each time pushing Dennis into the wall. Once he got a grip on my father’s arms, Dennis gave one great push and tossed my father over the low wall into the next calf stall. Dust billowed up in the barn air, reflecting sunlight like flecks of glass. My brother had been trying to pull my father off Dennis and he now leapt over the stall wall and stood between them, holding my father at the chest. My father pointed at Dennis.

“You get out of here now!” he yelled. “Take your things and get out!”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Dan. “We need him.”

“Get out!” said my father.

“He’s not going anywhere,” said Dan. “We’ve got the corn to do yet, then the flax.”

“I won’t have him here.”

“Calm down, just calm down.”

“There’s no harm done,” said Dennis. “It was just a kiss.”

“You get out,” said my father. “Don’t you ever come near my daughter again. Get out! Now!”

“Then I’m out of here, too,” said Dan, and he nodded for Dennis to leave. Dennis headed out the door, giving me a wink as he left. My father roared ridiculously at that and finally broke free of my brother’s hold. Dan chased my father into the house as my mother came running up the barn aisle.

“What’s going on?” she called.

I said, “Oh!” and began to cry.

She took me in her arms. She said, “What’s wrong, Beth, dear, what happened?” But as she spoke, a gunshot sounded from within the house, and then we were there, at the kitchen door, uncertain of how we’d gotten there, panic at our throats. My brother was just rising from the floor with a gun in his hands. My father lay on the kitchen floor. Neither of them was hurt. My father didn’t try to reclaim the gun. The kitchen table was askew, and two of the chairs had been knocked over. There was a bullet hole in the roof. My brother unloaded the gun and placed it back in the gun rack.

“I’m leaving,” Dan said. “This is it. I’m going.”

My father heaved himself up.

“You try to leave, and so help me God I’ll track you down and shoot you.”

“So shoot me,” said my brother. “By the time you find me there’ll be plenty of other people shooting at me.”

My father held his head. “Jesus.”

I backed away then and ran from the house. My mother called after me, “Beth, where are you going? What’s happened?”

I ran down the sheep pasture to Dennis and Billy’s cabin, chased by the ghost in the grass and the sound of the homesteader’s children knocking rocks in their graves. Dennis was stuffing clothes into a duffel bag when I pushed into the cabin. He was alone in there. Billy was already back out coiling haycocks in the alfalfa field.

“Well,” he said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” he said. “Jeez, that was my fault.”

He came up close to me, grinning. “Maybe we can pick up where we left off, eh?”

“No.” I stepped away. “I’ve got to get out. He’ll do anything when he gets like this.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Go back to Granny’s for now, I guess. Dan’s talking about leaving. He means it this time. He’ll go. He’ll join up. Maybe I’ll go too.”

“But what about Mum and me, if he’s gone. If you’re gone.”

“Billy’s here. He watches, you know. He’ll be around. He’s not crazy, like everybody thinks.”

“I know that,” I said.

I leaned down to look through the little window as Dennis collected the rest of his things. Dan banged out of the house and marched up the driveway, heading towards Blood Road, carrying a small bag. He wasn’t carrying his gun this time. Not a minute later, my father slammed from the house and went the other direction, through the orchard. The sheep rose up and away from him like a spooked flock of birds. Unseen by my father, a coyote skulked through the long grass behind him, then disappeared into the growth in the Swede’s pasture. My father took up his ax and started where he’d left off on the Swede’s fence. From that distance, I heard the ax chop on his upswing, so the sound appeared to lead the motion. The Swede’s goat came up to the
fence and challenged him, butting at the fence. My father knocked the goat between the horns with the ax handle, foolishly, and the goat took that as a challenge and went after my father again. My father picked up a stout branch from the Swede’s wrecked fence, leaned over the wire fence, and knocked the goat across the side of the head, hard enough so that the goat tottered and staggered away. My father took up his ax and went back to dismantling the fence. He would chop and saw and tear down the Swede’s fence all that day and into the night until the whole fence was down and our sheep were grazing in the Swede’s weedy meadowland along with the goats.

Dennis came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “What you looking at anyhow?”

“He’s at the fence again.”

“That’s some war them two got going,” said Dennis. “You know what Billy says? He says your daddy met Coyote in the mountains, last year when that bear attacked your camp. Coyote got hold of him then. Made John act like a wild man. He gets some crazy ideas, that Billy. Well, I guess he gets them from Granny. The way John’s been acting, maybe they’re right.” He chuckled, then slid his hands down my arms and put his face in my hair. “You going to be my girlfriend now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, still watching my father. Then I pulled away from him and headed for the door. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “I’ve got to stay away for a few days. He’ll come after me when he’s tired of that fence.”

“Where you going to stay?” he said.

“I’ve got a place. Maybe I’ll see you at Bertha’s.”

“Listen, I’ll get one of my cousins to come by and let your mother know you’re okay. She’ll go crazy if she don’t know. As long as you’re not staying out in the open. Granny’s right. There’s something picking off kids. Promise me you won’t stay out in the open.”

“I promise,” I said.

“No walking at night, in the bush, eh?”

“All right, all right.”

I left Dennis holding his one sack of belongings and I ran away from the cabin and the farm. I took the long way around to Blood Road, following Turtle Creek, past the hollow stump, now tatty red with dying leaves, up to the benchland, then across the back of the harvested
oat field to the road. I ran as if I were being chased, across Blood Road, into the bush, down the Indian trail that ran parallel to the road, and reached the winter house out of breath and hurting. It took a moment for my breath to calm enough to hear the ringing that accompanied it, a rope of bells jingling.

“Nora?” I said.

“Down the hole!”

I blinked into the hole of the winter house to see her face appear in the circle of light surrounding the chipped-log ladder.

“What you doing here?” she said.

“How about you?”

“I asked first.”

“My father, he, well, he’s gone insane. Forgetting all about harvest and tearing down Johansson’s fence in daylight. I’m hiding out for a day or two.”

“You okay?”

“Okay as I can be.”

“What did you bring?”

“I didn’t bring anything.”

“How you going to hide out if you didn’t bring anything to eat?”

“There wasn’t any time.”

“I’ll get something from Granny, then. We’ve got to eat something.”

“No. I don’t want her to know. If Mum comes she’ll know where I am. You got to tell her you haven’t seen me.”

“If your mum comes looking, Granny will guess here anyway.”

“There’s a chance she won’t. Dennis is going to get one of your cousins to let Mum know I’m okay. I’ll go back tonight when it’s dark and get something from the root cellar.”

“Dennis said he’d do that?”

“Dad fired him today.”

“Fired him! He must have done something, eh? To get fired during harvest. What did he do?”

I climbed down the ladder into the hole. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

“He touch you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If he did something to you, I’ll beat him up,” she said. “I’ll knife him.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

Nora crossed her arms and leaned against the dirt wall of the winter house, sulky. “You like him better than me,” she said.

“Do not. Don’t be so silly.”

Nora jumped up. “Let’s go,” she said. “Now! Those factories in Vancouver will hire any woman who shows up on the doorstep. We could be making airplanes or guns. We’ll be making money for sure. We could get a place of our own. No underground dirt house. A real house, with windows.”

“Nobody’s going to hire fifteen-year-old girls,” I said.

“You’re just about sixteen. We’ll say we’re eighteen. You can get a red dress. We’ll wear make-up. Nobody will know. You can wear this!”

She pulled a Tangee lipstick from her breast pocket, the kind that changed from orange to red when you put it on, color changed by the warmth of your skin. She handed it to me.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

“My mother bought it for me.”

I tried to look her in the eye, and she looked away.

“She did not,” I said. “You stole it.”

“What does it matter where I got it. Try it on. Here let me.”

She kneeled in front of me, took the lipstick from my hand, and slowly, carefully, applied it to my lips. Then she kissed me, smearing lipstick on her and me both. She fell back on the blankets and laughed.

“We could go anywhere,” she said. “We could jump the train and just go!”

“I don’t know. We don’t have any money.”

“I know where Granny’s got a bundle socked away.”

“I’m not going to steal from Bertha,” I said.

“Why not? Okay, then from my uncle, or one of the old men. They just drink their money anyway.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to steal.”

“Don’t get so high and mighty. You’re planning on stealing tonight, from your mum’s root cellar.”

“That’s not the same,” I said.

“We could go tonight even.”

“I’m not ready to go,” I said.

“What’re you staying for? A crazy father? Mother who talks to herself?”

I cuddled my lightning arm against my knee and rocked.

“Or are you staying for Dennis?”

“I’m not staying for Dennis.”

“Who then? Filthy Billy?”

She laughed, but she threw the lipstick at the wall.

T
HE DARK TUGGED
at my clothing, yanked on my hair, held my wrists with its long snaggy hand. I knew the paths so well that, as a child, I’d closed my eyes and walked them blind. But all paths change in the dark, snake off to do some night creeping of their own. It wasn’t until I stumbled out onto the grass behind the house that I smelled the smoke, or saw the fire flicking out into the night sky. Even then I thought at first my eyes were fooling me, that I was seeing Dennis and Filthy Billy’s fire near the cabin, but somehow in the wrong spot. Then I realized: the flax field was on fire! A shadow of a man appeared to run through the flames with a torch, lighting the grass along the field’s edge. He threw the torch up and it streaked back down, sparking a trail like a meteor, landing a little farther out into the field. The shadow ran across the yard, disappeared against the barn, and reappeared again in the sheep pasture, heading through the orchard. The Swede.

I leaned against the side of the house with my heart at my throat and my stomach ludicrously growling for food, watching the Swede run, uncertain, at first, of what I should do. Finally sense got hold of me, and I ran up to my parents’ bedroom window and banged on the glass. I shouted, “Fire! Fire!”

My father pulled the blanket away from the window and loomed up in the glass, so ghostly in his nightshirt that I stepped back in fright and ran around to the front of the house. The door was open, but the screen was shut. My mother had been sitting in the rocker next to
the kitchen stove, rocking and rocking, holding the scrapbook to her breast, so engrossed in listening to her dead mother that she hadn’t heard the Swede or the fire. Alerted by my shouts, she was holding the blanket away from the kitchen window, clutching her scrapbook. I opened the screen door.