The Cure for Death by Lightning (32 page)

“Beth!” she said. “Oh, Beth!”

I took a step back when she came to hug me. My father came into the kitchen then, still dressed in his nightshirt but with his field denims underneath.

“Where the hell were you?” he said.

“The Swede set the field on fire,” I said, and stepped off the porch. “I’ll get Billy!”

But Billy was already there, leaving the barn with our milk pails — five clanking to each hand — heading for the pump.

“You fill these,” he said, setting them down by the pump. “I’ll get the shovels.”

When I looked back at the house, my mother and father were standing on the porch yelling at each other. My mother had hold of my father’s shirtsleeve and no matter how he twisted and turned she wouldn’t let go.

“You will stay here!” cried my mother. “You will help put this fire out!”

“Let go of me! That Swede!”

“That Swede nothing. There’ll be nothing to come back to if we can’t hold the fire. Don’t be a fool, for heaven’s sake!”

Billy marched up to my father, forced a shovel into his hand, and directed him on how best to put out the fire, and my father let him. He stood there with his mouth a little open, listening to Billy instructing him.
Instructing him!
My mother let go of my father’s shirtsleeve, and we all did as Billy told us. I pumped water into our milk pails until my lightning arm went numb, then I pumped with my left arm. My mother carried and poured, carried and poured. I watched, as I pumped water, the black silhouettes of Billy and my father shovel blackness onto the bright orange flames, sending sparks showering into the sky.

The torch the Swede had sent spinning into the sky fell on a rich wet crop of flax and sputtered out. He’d had better luck lighting the dead grass around the flax field, but once the fire met the dirt of the field and
the green flax crop, it licked back on itself. When it became obvious that the fire in the flax field wasn’t anything a woman and a fool couldn’t take care of, my father threw down the shovel and started marching my way. He disappeared for a time as he stepped away from the fire. I went on pumping water, searching for his man shape in the black, convinced he was coming for me. But when my father disentangled himself from the night, he walked right past me, ignoring me, making me wait, fearful, for whatever punishment he was concocting. He went on walking into the house, then out again, carrying a square black shape I knew was the tin of kerosene, and another that I knew was a gun. He went on walking across the orchard and into the Swede’s pasture that was speckled with our sleeping sheep. My mother came for more water, setting the milk pails down beside me.

“He’s gone to Mr. Johansson’s,” I said.

My mother sighed.

“He took the kerosene,” I said. “And the gun.”

“Oh, Lord,” she said.

“We should do something.”

“What can we do?”

Fire lit up her face, reflected in her eyes. She ran a hand over her mouth, leaving a long black streak there.

“Help Billy mop up the fire,” she said. “It’s in hand now. I’ll get a coat and ride Cherry down to Boulee’s. We can’t stop him alone.”

I went on pumping water and sloshing it clumsily to the fire, even when the gunshot echoed from over the Swede’s way, and fire lit up the tree line that hid the Swede’s house and barn from view. Filthy Billy stopped shoveling dirt when the gunshot sounded, and tried to offer me some comfort by placing his sooty hand on my shoulder. But I went on pumping and carting water even as a horse and buggy, a wagon, and one car cut the darkness down Blood Road and passed our driveway for the Swede’s.

A
LL HELL BREAKING LOOSE
, and I decided to make cake. Honey cake, a pound cake, my mother’s own recipe. I stole my mother’s scrapbook from her rocking chair and left my sooty fingerprints on the page called “Honey Cake,” so like it or not I could never forget that night. Filthy Billy sat at the kitchen table, not scratching, not swearing, just watching, as I spread the scrapbook out on the table in front of him, cleaned my hands, and made cake. Outside, over the trees that curtained the Swede’s yard from view, fires of hell stormed up into the black. I knew it, but I didn’t want to know it. So I made cake. Billy read out the ingredients slowly, painfully, as I collected them:

I mixed the flour, baking powder, and salt together and in a separate bowl I creamed the butter and beat the honey, eggs, and vanilla into it before adding the dry ingredients a little at a time so the mix was
smooth. Then it was just a matter of stirring in the lemon flavoring. It was a nothing-to-it-cake, as rich as sin, heavenly to a hungry, worried belly. I poured the batter into a greased loaf pan and set it in the oven. The fire in the kitchen stove had burned down from neglect, and I stoked it up some, but a slow oven is what a pound cake needs.

Billy shimmied his chair up to the stove and propped his feet on the lid of the warm reservoir in the way my mother forbade. Though he had sworn little as he fought the fire, he cursed softly now. I sat next to him in my mother’s rocker, leafing through her scrapbook, waiting for the cake to bake, waiting for the sound of my mother’s or father’s footsteps, or word of the fire over the Swede’s way, or what the gunshot meant, waiting for dawn.

The stiff pages of the scrapbook crackled as I turned them. The smell each page contained wafted up and was replaced by the next. Vanilla. Allspice. Lily of the valley. Rose. This was the first time in a long while I’d had the scrapbook to myself, and I pleasured in the bits of our lives that my mother had managed to salvage and save. A yellow violet, taken from the bouquet that had been on our table the last day Mrs. Bell visited, was pressed between the recipes for raspberry buns and daffodil cake. And on the page with the queen’s photograph, my mother had pressed a single blue flax flower. Beside this she had written the date of the big storm when the flax rained down on us. There were additions I hadn’t seen before: a recipe for laundry and hand soap, made from lye, grease, resin, and soft water, that my mother had cut from some magazine, and a newspaper clipping announcing the fowl dinner that was glued next to the recipe for Bird’s Nest.

I flipped quickly past the pages with reminders of the bad days: the newspaper clippings warning of bear attacks and Sarah Kemp’s funeral notice, the bit of ribbon from those that adorned the horses’ halters on the day of the Boulees’ picnic, a newspaper story about a child who had gone missing on the reserve, the widow Roddy’s death notice, and a little square cut from a pair of nylons and glued to a page. I stopped on the photograph of Ginger Rogers, and on the space between the cure for death by lightning and the butterfly with its wing torn away, where my mother had written my name and the date lightning had left my arm something close to useless.

“You should (shit) leave that alone,” said Billy.

“What?” I said.

He nodded at the scrapbook. “That’s (fuck) your mother’s private place.”

“Ah, come on.”

“No, you should put that (shit) away. Everybody needs a place to sort things out (fuck). You’ve got to know (shit) nobody’s going to snoop around in it.”

“There’s nothing in it. Nothing I can’t see. Not like a diary.”

“Doesn’t (shit) matter what’s in it. (Fuck) Excuse me.”

I grunted and leafed through the crinkly pages some more just to prove that Billy had no place telling me what to do. Then I tossed the scrapbook on the kitchen table.

“You got a place like that?” I said. “A private place?”

Billy hummed yes. “My father’s stone (shit), where he died. (Fuck) Sorry. That’s my place.”

He rearranged his feet away from the heat of the stove and looked up at the ceiling. “You (shit) got a place?” he said.

I didn’t answer him, and he didn’t repeat himself. I checked on the pound cake and then took up rocking in my mother’s chair.

“You talked to Dennis?” I said.

Billy looked uncomfortable for a moment, then said, “Yeah (shit), we talked.”

“He joining up?”

“Granny’s trying (shit) to talk him out (fuck) of it.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“Don’t know.”

After a time, I said, “You seen Lucifer?”

Billy looked a question at me.

“My black cat.”

He shook his head.

“He’s gone missing,” I said. “I think my father might have done something.”

“A tom?” said Billy. “(Shit) Excuse me. They wander.”

“Everybody’s leaving,” I said. “Everybody all at once.”

“Not everybody,” he said, and put his hand on mine. I didn’t move away. His hand was sooty. My hands were the only clean places on me. Black marks covered both of Billy’s cheeks. He tapped the end of his
nose, so I would touch mine, and I found a streak of black soot mixed with white flour there.

I said, “That was something, you taking over, with the fire. Telling my father what to do. He doesn’t let anybody tell him what to do.”

“He was (shit) surprised. (Fuck) Sorry. He’s easier (shit) on me than Dennis ’cause (fuck) he thinks I’m slow.”

“You been tricking him? The swearing, I mean?”

“That’s (shit) no trick,” said Billy. “I feel bad (shit), you know. (Fuck) It’s dirty.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s kind of funny. Mum won’t let you in the house when Mrs. Bell visits. I wish she would. That would get rid of Mrs. Bell for sure.”

“Maybe I’ll sneak (shit) in next time she visits, cuss (fuck) until Mrs. Bell (shit) leaves.”

He laughed again, a sweet high laugh that caught me up and took me with him. I turned my hand over and held his and we sat there like an old couple past the clumsiness of romance, me rocking, him with his feet warming on the stove. The smell of cake filled the kitchen.

Nora opened the screen door and caught us like that. I pulled my hand from Billy’s and slid it into my pocket. Nora laughed when she saw us and clapped her hands together.

“Look at you!” she said.

Billy took his feet off the stove and slumped in the chair. I opened the oven and tested the cake, to hide my embarrassment.

“What’re you doing here?” I said, and took the cake out, though it was still moist in the center. “You’ll catch hell when Dad gets home.”

“He isn’t coming home,” said Nora. “They’ve taken him away.”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“Some men,” she said. “I think they were Mounties. Their outfits were different. They came in a car and took him away.”

“My mother?”

“She’s the one that set it up, got them to take him away.”

“What are you talking about? How do you know all this?”

When I hadn’t come back to the winter house, Nora had headed out on Blood Road to track me down and see that I was all right. But then she’d seen the fire glowing at the Swede’s place and that had drawn her into his yard. Her eyes lit up with the telling of it.

“The place was filled up with people running around and yelling,” she said. “Horses coming and going, dogs barking. The barn was burning, sparks up higher than the trees!”

“We (shit) heard a gunshot,” said Billy.

“Yeah, the Swede. When I got there, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Boulee and some others, they put the Swede’s body in the back of a buggy and drove him off. Must’ve been dead. Your dad looked really creepy, all soot-black under the eyes, crazy. Your mum was standing there, crying, telling him to keep quiet. But it’s like he didn’t hear her. Some other guys I never seen before handcuffed him and put him in the car.”

“The Swede’s (fuck) not dead,” said Billy. “(Shit) Sorry. He was (shit) likely drunk.”

“How’d you know?” said Nora. “You weren’t there.” She turned to me. “Boulee said your dad was setting the woodpile against the house on fire when they got there — your mother and the Boulees and the Fergusons — and the Swede was on the floor inside the house. The barn was already burning. They put out the fire in the woodpile and then tried to fight the barn fire, but it was going real good. That was when Mr. Ferguson took your mum’s horse over to the reserve and woke Granny up, so she’d get some of the men over to help put out the barn fire.”

Her face lit up as though she were still facing the fire, watching it. Filthy Billy stared into his coffee cup and shook his head.

“They took your father away.” She grinned. “He’s gone!”

I got up and made coffee to hide the tears welling up.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Come on, what’s come over you? He’ll get it for murder. They’ll lock him up!”

“He’s still her (shit) father.”

“He’s a monster,” said Nora. “A creep. Johansson wasn’t much better.”

“Where’s my mother?”

“She went with the men — in the car, to put your father away.”

I took up the scrapbook and sank back into my mother’s rocker.

“Beth, don’t you see?” said Nora. “We can go! We can get out of here now, right now. We can take some money and just go. Nobody’s going to know until we’re so far away they can’t find us.”