The Cure for Death by Lightning (33 page)

“Maybe you should go,” I said. “I’ve got to do chores. Nobody’s here to take care of things.”

“Aw, come on!” she said. “This is our chance.”

Billy stood up and held open the screen door. Light was crawling up the sky. The lead cow’s bell jingled as she walked from the pasture into the barn and took up her stall.

“(Shit) I think (fuck) you should go,” said Billy.

“Shut up,” she said.

“Please, Nora, I’ve got things to do,” I said. “We haven’t slept and we’ve got chores yet. I don’t want you here when Mum comes back.”

“Jeez,” said Nora.

She slapped out onto the porch, and I followed her out to the yard. I walked to the fence line and looked over the fire damage as Nora stormed and kicked up the driveway to Blood Road. Dawn was sending its first feeble light over the hills, but that was enough to see what needed to be seen. The Swede’s attempt at violence had turned into nothing but a favor. We often burned the grass in the pastures ourselves come fall, so it would grow back lush the next spring. He’d done it for us, cleaning up the weedy grass along the field’s edge. A few of the fence posts were scorched, but no real harm had been done. Filthy Billy came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. The comfort of him made me suddenly weep.

“He’s coming,” said Billy.

I looked up at him and he nodded in the direction of the wood that had once been the Swede’s living fence, stacked in the orchard pasture. As we watched the sheep suddenly scattered in two directions. Down the midst of them a path opened up in the grass and sped through the orchard straight for us.

“That’s Coyote,” he said. “That’s him walking.”

I stepped back into Billy, and he held me for a moment with his face in my hair. Then he gave my shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. He took hold of the seat of the binder and the bull wheel as if bracing himself. The thing left the grass and ran across the yard lifting the dust and leaving red footprints as the only indication that anything at all was there. The footprints ran right at Billy and seemed to slam into him. Billy buckled under the impact, falling to his knees. He grunted and shook, and I was afraid he’d go into convulsions again, but he didn’t. He sat up again and began cursing louder than he had all night.

I said, “Billy?”

He looked up at me and, still cussing, nodded that he was all right. After a time he stood and leaned against the binder.

“I’ll (fuck, shit) start on the (fuck) corn,” he said. “(Shit) I’ll just fill my (shit) canteen. Excuse me.”

Billy unwound the canteen from the base of the binder seat and walked across the yard to the pump. He walked in the footsteps of the thing that followed and as he did the red footprints disappeared.

The cows had already entered the barn and lined themselves up. I stepped through the chores, shaken by the events of the night, thankful for the mind-dulling salve of habit. As I was throwing the chop to the pigs, my mother walked into the yard, leading Cherry. When she saw me, she let go of the reins and crumpled to the ground. I ran to her and helped her up.

“What happened?” I asked.

“They’ve taken your father away,” she said.

“Is Mr. Johansson dead?”

She looked confused. “Dead?” she said. “No! He was drunk. On beet wine.
Our
beet wine. He stole the wine we made last year from the root cellar. He must have stolen other things too. There’s been jars going missing.”

I blushed at that, but she didn’t notice.

“We heard a gunshot,” I said.

“I don’t know what your father was up to. I don’t think he knew. All I know is no one was hurt. I’m thankful for that.”

I helped her inside and she took up her scrapbook from the kitchen table and sat in her rocking chair. I put on the kettle for tea.

“What’s going to happen?” I said. “With Dad?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and that was the last thing she said out loud until lunch. She closed her eyes and muttered to her dead mother and didn’t let up, even as she dozed, until I put a dinner plate down in front of her place and sat at my own place across from Billy. She ate the meal heartily, as a man eats, hunched over the plate, scraping the food into her mouth. My dead grandmother had taken over the rocker; it went on rocking all through dinner. My mother came back to life after the meal, though her eyes glistened with sleeplessness. She slapped both palms on the table.

“Well!” she said. “We’ll have to get Dennis back here. Any word from Dan?”

“No,” I said. I expected her to sink back into one of her muttering spells, but she did nothing of the kind.

“I guess that’s for the best,” she said. “He’s been biting at the bit to join up for a long time. It had to happen soon or later.”

“What’s going to happen to Dad?”

My mother looked away, poured herself more tea. After a time, she said, “We won’t talk of that. Do you understand? You don’t talk to anyone about that.”

“Why not? What’s happened?”

“I said we won’t talk about it. Finish your plate.”

I exchanged a look with Billy, and played with my food.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “He won’t be home for a long time.”

She wiped her hands on a napkin and gave me a little smile. “Well, no school for you this fall. I’ll need you here. I expect you won’t be disappointed at that.”

I shook my head.

“Billy,” said my mother, “when you get a chance, please ask Dennis if he’ll come back, and if he would please stay on after harvest. Do you think he will?”

Billy shrugged and nodded. “(Fuck) It’ll (shit) make Granny happy,” he said. “Probably he will (shit). Excuse me.”

“Good. There’s work for you right through the winter if you want it.”

Billy grinned and swore and nodded.

“But you will stay away from Dennis, young lady,” she said to me. “Understand me? I’ll have enough work to keep you two very busy.”

I felt my face grow hot. Billy’s swearing quieted down to nothing for a minute and then flared up again so that he nearly choked on his food. My mother stood up and poured him a glass of water.

“We’re going into town tomorrow,” she said.

“(Shit) You think that’s a (fuck) good idea?” said Billy.

“The cream’s got to go in and there’s things we need.”

The meal made us all drowsy and we made up for the sleepless night
there in the warm kitchen. My mother dozed in her rocking chair, and Billy and I propped our chairs together against the wall near the stove. We slept much longer than any of us had intended, and when I woke, still serenaded by my mother’s sleeping whistle, I was surprised to find night was creeping over the window and Billy’s sooty-black hand was hanging on to mine.

T
HE ROAD THROUGH TOWN
had gone muddy from the first fall rain and was littered with yellow and red leaves. Blue plums hung on the trees in the churchyard like Christmas ornaments. Old men with time on their hands had dug several fresh graves in the churchyard as they always did this time of year, before the ground frost set in, so the graves would be ready for that winter’s dead. These were shallow graves, dug to just below ground frost level and filled with leaves. In the winter when a grave was needed, the leaves would be removed and the rest of the earth in the grave would be dug out. The leaves kept the soil in the graves from freezing. When filled with leaves, the graves looked more like beds, deep soft pools that tempted you to jump in.

I bounced down that muddy road in the democrat with my mother and the cream cans, angrily watching for signs of gossip, and watching for it I saw it. Mr. and Mrs. Slokum, farmers with property next to the Boulees, left the blacksmith’s laughing, but when they saw us pulling up to the train station to unload the cream, they ducked back into the shop. As we drove the buggy back to Belcham’s, several faces peered out at us from the one fly-specked window of the blacksmith’s shop.

Some others, though, who had helped my mother the night before, were friendlier than they had been in months. Mr. Boulee waved at us from the steps of the druggist’s, and Ferguson, who had beat up my father at the Dominion Day picnic, came up to my mother, as she tied Chief and Cherry to the poplar by the store, with his hat in his hands. He kicked at the mud.

“You need any help on that farm, you just let me know,” he said.

My mother nodded but kept her arms folded across her chest.

“I didn’t mean it to come to that,” said Mr. Ferguson.

“Then you shouldn’t have spoken out about him that way,” said my mother.

“It seemed the best thing to do at the time,” said Ferguson. “He’s been so odd this last year. What if he’d done something to you, or the girl? What then? I couldn’t live with that.”

I looked off at Blundell’s Motel and the white crow that sat over the haunted room.

“What’s done is done,” said my mother.

“Look, I didn’t come to argue my case,” said Ferguson. “I came to say I’m sorry about it all. And if there’s anything I can do, if there’s anything Mrs. Ferguson and me can do, you just call on us.”

My mother unfolded her arms, and said, “Oh, Bob, how did all this happen? We used to be such good friends.”

Mr. Ferguson shrugged and the sorry sack slipped off him like an old coat. He straightened himself out and looked full into my mother’s face for the first time.

“That’s all I come to say,” he said.

“Well,” said my mother. “Send my regards to Mrs. Ferguson. Perhaps you can both come up for coffee. Some time soon.”

“You heard anything from that boy of yours?” he said.

“No, not yet.”

“Well, I expect he’s getting his training. It’s likely the best thing for him. Louie Moses said he saw Dan hopping the freight for Vernon.”

“Yes,” said my mother. “I heard that.”

“Some time soon, then,” he said, and put his hat back on. He nodded at us both and headed for the blacksmith’s shop.

I followed my mother into the general store with my head down. The old men who had dug themselves graves at the churchyard were sitting around the stove. They watched us as we came in and when my mother went to the far end of the store to the post office wicket, I turned and caught them whispering and gesturing at us. I stared at them until they stopped whispering and looked at their boots, then walked past them, with my head up, out of the store.

The town was quiet. Nobody on the street now but me, Cherry, Mrs.
Bell’s horse over by the church, and the albino crow that sat on the roof of Blundell’s Motel, preening its dirty white feathers. A dispute over a strip of land half a world away had taken up all the young men and many of the young women besides. I walked across the mud to the motel and the room where Ginger Rogers had spent a night the year before. The window in the room was small and crossed like the windows in our house, no fancier than that. Poplar leaves had gathered around the steps to the door. As I walked up to the building, the sun came out for a moment and a face jumped into the window and scared me half to death. I put my hand up to the glass and saw my own face reflected there. I cupped my hands against it in the glass and looked for ghosts or some hint of the glamorous life of Ginger Rogers. Some graffiti maybe, a message cut into the cedar wall with a knife, “Ginger Rogers was here,” or a thread from an exquisite gown overlooked in a year of cleaning. There was the picture of Ginger Rogers standing between the elderly Blundells, framed in a locked glass box on the inside wall near the door so no one would steal it, and that was something, to see that surprising glamour strung up between two such ordinary faces.

I wiped my fingerprints from the window with the sleeve of my sweater and crossed my arms against the cold. Over at the plum tree in the churchyard, Mrs. Bell untied her mare and stepped the horse and buggy back a few steps before setting her eyes on our democrat in front of the store.

I turned a little, preparing to take a quick-heeled walk in the other direction, just as my mother left the store on the arm of the schoolteacher, Mrs. Boulee. My mother and Mrs. Boulee exchanged a few quiet words and embraced around their packages. Mrs. Bell stopped in the center of the street when she saw that, her boots up to the ankle in mud, then turned on her heel and got into her buggy. She drove by as Mrs. Boulee went back into the store and my mother got into the democrat, and though my mother waved, Mrs. Bell kept her hands on the reins and her eyes on the muddy, rutted road.