The Cure for Death by Lightning (4 page)

That other photo on the buffet, the one of my mother and father, was the one I dusted longer and gazed into with a kind of wonderment because all my history and all my future were captured in that moment. My mother was dressed in the drab nurse’s outfit she wore to drive the horse-drawn ambulances during the war. My father wore his army uniform and the same puttees he now wound around his legs to do farm chores. In the photograph, his head was still bandaged. They had met when my mother drove my father from one London hospital
to another. How my mother came to visit him as he lay for months in that hospital, I never knew. As the eldest daughter, my mother had nursed my ailing grandmother right up until the week of her own wedding, so perhaps she was at her strongest, at her most sure serving sickness. Later I would come to believe that she was.

I put down the photograph of my mother and father, went back into the kitchen, and took up my mother’s scrapbook. There was a new page in it, made from brown wrapping, onto which she had glued Sarah Kemp’s funeral notice from that week’s newspaper. Beside the notice, my mother had added a story warning of bear attacks and an increase in livestock loss to coyotes. Next to this my mother had written my name, “Beth,” in bold lettering, followed by an exclamation mark.

I slapped the scrapbook shut, convinced that my mother knew I peeked at it and that she was trying to lecture me in this sneaky way about walking alone in the bush. I placed the scrapbook as it had been, sitting on the rocker, and guiltily, angrily, I wiped down the oilcloth on the kitchen table all over again and washed all the spoons and cups.

Bertha’s visit had set the day back; she’d come at a time when there were chores to be done and, as if she didn’t know it, she and her family had waltzed themselves into the house, drunk our coffee, and wasted the time away with talk. Now chores weren’t done and supper would be late and there’d be hell to pay when my father came in from the fields. Earlier, before I had started to clean up, my mother had grumbled all these things under her breath to her own mother, who’d been dead twenty years but was still watching over her, as she caught up a chicken in the coop, then killed it, cleaned it, and sat it in a bucket of cold water in the pantry. Then she’d saddled up the little mare, Cherry, and taken her up to the benchland to bring down the cows while I’d cleaned house. There’d been a coyote in the chicken house; coyote tracks and bloodied feathers were all over. The chickens were panicked, chasing each other in circles as if one of them had a worm. The rooster didn’t have any rooster left in him. Most times he leapt up and showed his spurs to any passing shadow, but now he hid in a corner, nursing a wing. Lord knows how a coyote got in the coop, but he did, and how many he got was anybody’s guess; there’s no counting in a coop full of chickens.

My mother had carried the chicken, our supper, by its feet and wing
tips so it would calm down before she reached the chopping block behind the house. A chicken that flaps its wings flaps itself into panic, and there’s nothing as frustrating as trying to kill a panicked chicken. Mum took up the ax, laid the chicken’s head over the edge of the chopping block, and eased the chicken back until its neck was stretched out. She slammed the ax through the chicken’s neck into the chopping block, and flung the chicken’s body onto the grass in front of the root cellar so it wouldn’t flap itself into the mud. The chicken body danced a circle in the grass, spewing blood every which way, and fell on its back. The air left its lungs in a squawk, and the head still lying on the block opened and closed its beak as if trying to claim the noise. I watched the chicken head, waiting to see the point of death, something I was never certain of.

Mum was a master at the art of cleaning a chicken, and if you don’t think it’s an art, you watch, you just watch Mum heating up the kettle until it’s good and hot but not boiling, and pouring the water into a bucket and dunking the chicken into it to loosen the feathers, but only for a few seconds. If the water boils, it burns the chicken skin. If you leave the chicken in the hot water too long, the skin tears when you pull off the feathers. The art is in the motion of it, in taking the bird by the legs and plunging it in the hot water without burning yourself; in swirling the bird around in the bucket, as if cleaning the bucket with the feathers; in grabbing the bird’s flight feathers and letting it drop, all in one motion, so the bird’s means of escape come off in your hands.

My mother hung the bird on the wash line by one foot, where, earlier in the day, she had hung our underwear out to dry inside pillowcases so they would neither entice nor offend a man who might come into our yard. Her hands flew over that bird, plucking the downy feathers and pin feathers until you’d think it was naked, but it wasn’t, not quite. For the chicken’s final humiliation, Mum lit a torch of rolled brown paper wrapping from the perpetual fire in the kitchen stove and ran it along the chicken, burning off the fine hairs that remained without burning the skin, heating the loose skin so that even now, in death, it drew back in horror and puckered tight. She pinched the flesh at the wishbone and cut out the crop, then cut the naked bird down by bending and cutting off its feet. The chicken was nothing now but meat. To clean out its insides, she took the bird into the house, laid it
on the cutting board, and, with a knife that she sharpened right then and there, she sliced the bird from breast tip to pope’s nose. This is the feel of the inside of a creature that was alive just a half hour ago: hot and wet, jelly and snakes, soothing for achy human hands. Cleaning a chicken wouldn’t be anything but scrubbing out a particularly messy pot of noodles, if it weren’t for the smell. The smell is what stirs the nausea, but the blood lust too. That lust crawls up the back of your neck and plants itself on you, an old beast excited by the smell of warm blood, the smell of coming-on-sick time and warm liver, of something hungry.

Once the cleaning was done, my mother rinsed off the chicken, dropped it in a bucket of the coldest water available, and allowed the chicken to stiffen in the pantry off the kitchen because a chicken that isn’t left to die properly isn’t worth eating; it’s as tough as an old laying hen and has no flavor.

When I’d swept and washed all the evil from the house, I picked the sweet young peas from the garden and sat on the porch and shelled them, popping the end off the pod and running my thumb down the row of peas to loosen them. Peas on the vine are designed to fool you. Go down a row of peas once and you won’t see a pod. Go down a second time and pea pods appear out of nowhere. Go down a third time, and still more appear, where there were none, as if looking for them creates them. I filled a white ceramic bowl with the sweet green peas I’d imagined into existence and picked a few leaves of mint to boil them with.

Dennis and Filthy Billy came into the house, took their boots off at the door, and sat down at the kitchen table. I didn’t look at them, didn’t even say hi, and kept my head on what I was doing. I washed my hands in the bowl on the bench by the door, made tea the way my father forbade, from the hot water in the stove reservoir, and put tea and cream and cups down in front of the men. I started cutting up the chicken for frying because that chicken was as stiff as it was going to get that night.

Dennis was also a grandson to Bertha Moses. He was just filling out, cocky as only a man of eighteen can be, and Indian all over. As most young Indian men did then, he wore a cowboy hat, a red plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, and I suppose like all the young men
left on the reserve he hoped to ride the rodeo circuit once the war was over and life could go on. The Indian boys too young to enlist still rode the wild horses for the empty stands at the reserve corral, though there was no one to watch or coach them but the old women and tired young mothers whose men were so far away they could no longer imagine their faces.

Dennis sat with his hands behind his head and watched as I tossed chicken pieces in flour and fried them in the big cast-iron spider pan. His watching made me conscious of how my skirt pulled across my bottom, how my breasts shifted under my blouse. He made me think of my own body and I didn’t know what to make of that.

“Chicken again tonight?” said Dennis. “That was good chicken we had last night, eh, Billy?”

I looked up and he winked at me.

“(Shit) I took some of them (fuck) chicken quills home for (shit) Granny’s moccasins,” said Billy.

Dennis stood up and leaned against the cupboard beside me.

“You going to be my girlfriend?” he said.

I looked past him, past the screen door, out to the barn.

“He’s still in the field checking the corn,” said Dennis.

I went back to the business of frying chicken.

“How come you’re not going to be my girlfriend?” he said.

I gave him a mean look.

“No, really,” he said. “You could be my girlfriend.”

“You got hands like sandpaper,” I said.

Filthy Billy wheezed out a laugh that, for the moment, overpowered the swearing. Unlike Dennis or Dan or any farmhand we’d ever had working for us, Billy cleaned his nails and shaved daily. He wasn’t as Indian as Dennis was. He had fairer skin and odd blue-brown eyes. He and Dennis shared Bertha Moses as a grandmother, but Billy’s mother was a German woman who’d married Billy’s father, Henry Moses, during the Great War. When the German woman came back with Henry to the reserve as a war bride, she panicked at the squalor and their marriage quickly fell apart. She’d worked as a cleaning woman in town until she’d raised the money to leave on a train, but not before she gave birth to Billy. She left him with his father, Henry Moses, on a cold day before Christmas when Billy wasn’t a year old. But just as his
father had, Henry Moses took his own life, on purpose or by accident. He got drunk on beet wine and fell onto a broken wine bottle and died from lack of blood or too much cold. The Swede found Henry’s body in the snow-covered pasture across Turtle Creek, where we grew our timothy hay. Johansson had followed a trail of beet wine spilled in the snow, thinking it was blood and thinking it might be from a deer shot but not dead, or from something else he could cook for supper. He followed the beet wine to the body of Billy’s father and to the deeper stains in the snow that were blood, true blood.

“I thought some animal had come eat him,” the Swede said when he pulled out this story. “Blood all over and there were coyote tracks all around the body, great circles of tracks. I must have chased the coyotes off with my coming. Off in the bush I could hear them, snuffing and yipping around. Then one howls, and you know how they are. One coyote howling sounds like a bunch of them howling, like a chorus of them.”

After the Swede found the body, Bertha Moses raised her grandson, Billy, along with the other casualties of domestic war on the reserve. Billy got the name Filthy because he didn’t own his voice. It made him say words no one liked, and the best Filthy Billy could do was make the renegade words come out in a whisper. He ate with us, but rarely said a word during the meal, and when he was done eating, he ran out the door and all the way to the cabin, yelling the words he’d been holding back.

This night he had to hold in those words while my father and brother took off their boots and cleaned their hands in the tub on the bench by the door, while my mother went into the bedroom and changed her sour milk clothes for a clean blue skirt and white blouse, while she brushed her long hair and wound it into a fresh bun, while my brother harassed me, stealing bits of chicken, tugging at my apron strings, while I set a jug of water at my father’s place, and put the cooked peas sweating butter, the biscuits, and the fried chicken on the table before him. Billy held his breath and waited with his eyes closed, and his face red. When I set down the chicken, he grabbed a leg bone, my father’s favorite, and a couple of buns, and ran out the door, knocking over his chair on the way. My father winced at the sound, held the scar on his head, and yelled at my brother, “Pick that goddamned thing
up!” But it was Dennis who picked up the chair and put it right, and I watched him doing it, watched the bones in his big hands. Nobody talked for a long time after that. We listened instead to Billy hooting swear words at the owls.

“Crazy man,” said my father. Dennis looked over at my brother and grinned, and Dan grinned back at him. My brother was still in his field denims, and he’d rolled his shirtsleeves to his elbows, exposing his arms, but my father said nothing about it that night. Daniel was a big man, nineteen already, the image of my father (though my father now denied him during arguments, said he was a cuckolded son, no son of his), but with my mother’s sweet smile of apology always on his face, even when he tormented my father by not giving in. He had my father’s broad, heavy jaw and big features and my father’s hands, hands too huge to be believed, made that way by a lifetime of work. For the two years he’d been out of school, Dan had worked full-time on the farm with my father. He was the only farmer’s son in the valley who hadn’t joined up.

“I don’t want that squaw here again,” said my father.

“You like Bertha,” said Mum.

“I don’t like nobody who tells me how to run my farm.”

Dennis and Dan exchanged a look and then went back to cleaning their plates with their bread.

“Goddamned Swede tried digging in the fence again,” said my father. “You see that?”

My brother grunted.

“We’ll fix him,” said my father. “Tonight, you hear?”

Dan went on eating, and my mother played nervously with the rim of her plate. Dennis ate with his face close to his plate and looked from me to my father, from my father to me. I pulled my sweater over my breasts and buttoned it.

“Is your suit clean for the funeral?” said my mother.

“Sure,” said Dan.

“You spilled food on it at the church supper.”

“I wiped it off. It’s clean enough.”

“And you’ve got your blue dress,” said my mother. “You should set your hair tonight.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You still have your boots on,” she said.

“My feet are cold.”