The Cure for Death by Lightning (42 page)

I tore the paper into strips and soaked them in water, and then mashed the paper back into the pulp it had started out as, with a
potato masher. When my mother used plant matter — like the dry stalks of potato plants — she boiled it first, until it was soft, and then mashed it. I placed the pulp mess into the washtub in which we took baths, which was half filled with water. I dipped the screen down into the bath and brought it up from the water, flat, so the paper pulp caught on the wire mesh and the water drained through it. This pulp became the paper.

But I had to dry it first. To do that, I made a mound of folded newspapers and wet it thoroughly with water. Over this, I placed one of those dampened couching cloths. I took that screen filled with paper pulp, turned it over the mound, and kind of rolled the paper off the screen and onto the cotton.

The paper now looked like a layer of porridge. I smoothed another damp couching cloth over that mess and went on stacking sheets of pulp and couching cloth until I had ten or so sheets. I took this wet stack outside to the porch, put it down on the porch floor, and placed a flat board over it and stood on that, to drive the excess water out. After I had squashed the water from the paper, I spread the sheets out on a blanket on the grass to dry in the sun as Billy and I cleaned out the coop. Once they were almost dry, but still a little damp, I would iron the pieces of paper smooth.

As Billy and I left the robin to his worm, and turned back to the chore at hand, I saw my mother and father driving down Blood Road. My mother drove slowly because of the turtles that spooked the horses. My father was nothing but a slumped black figure in the buggy beside my mother, but I knew him at that distance.

Billy and I were waiting for them in the yard as they drove in. When my mother jumped down to tie the horses, my father went on sitting in the buggy and only stared at his feet. Despite the warmth of the day, the buggy blanket covered his lap.

I called, “Dad!” but my mother intercepted.

“Move slowly, talk quietly,” she said. “Don’t expect much.”

He looked up, and I saw recognition there, but he went back to staring at his feet. Billy held my arm, held me back from my father. Then he went up to him himself, approached slowly and deliberately, as I’d seen him approach that deer. When he reached the buggy he kept a bit of distance from my father and talked softly. Whatever he said got a brief smile.

Spring hadn’t touched my father, hadn’t changed him for the better. He came out of that place looking worse than he had when he went in. He’d lost weight. The clothes he’d worn the night he burned the Swede’s barn were loose on him. He was pale from too many months cooped up inside, and his hands were as smooth as a city man’s. He was tired, weak. He needed help from my mother and Billy to walk from the buggy to the house.

My mother sat my father down in his chair in the parlor and brought the ottoman close so he could rest his feet, and that’s where he stayed for the next three days. He slept there at night and sat there through the day listening to the same Caruso record over and over. He seemed to have lost his ability to shed a tear, or else the music had lost meaning for him. He stared at the wall, or flipped through one of the big war books my mother had placed on the table beside him. He took the plates of food we brought him but ate little. Although he talked to Billy, whispered to him, he said little to my mother, and nothing to me for the whole of those three days.

The day my father returned Dennis disappeared. He packed his few things, said goodbye to Billy and Bertha, but left without saying a thing to my mother and me. Even Bertha couldn’t talk him out of leaving this time.

“He wouldn’t come to the house,” Billy told me. “Afraid of your dad, I guess. And I think he kind of knew, I mean, about you and me. He’s going to hop a freight to Vernon. Join up. See the world, eh?”

When Billy later told my mother that Dennis was gone, she and I were milking the cows.

“Well, that’s best for him,” said my mother. “We could use his help, but I’m sure we’ll manage.”

“He said to say goodbye,” said Billy. “And to say thanks. He said don’t worry about this last week’s pay. He says he owes you that for leaving without notice.”

“That was kind of him,” she said. “But when you hear from him, let me know and I’ll forward the money.”

My mother stood up from her milking stool and wiped her hands. “Do me a favor, Billy. Tell John that Dennis is gone again. You have a way with him. While you’re at it, tell him about that tractor we’re looking to buy. And the cow you had to shoot last month. It was one of his favorites.”

Billy did this for my mother, and more. He became the bearer of bad news, a translator between my mother and my father, a way past the dispute that neither of my parents acknowledged, not with words. Billy could get my father talking with that sweet way of his, tricking him with his grin and self-effacement into believing that nothing was really that bad, nothing was worth getting all steamed up about, and for Billy, after all he’d been through, truly there was nothing worth worrying about. Life was good.

“We were late planting last year,” said my father. “Then that storm last spring cleared out the flax crop, nearly wiped us out. I don’t want that happening again.”

“We’re already on it,” said Billy. “Got the oats planted. Dennis harrowed the cornfield before he left. I’ll get at the flax today. It’s going to be a good year. I can feel it.”

I was listening in, putting together a tray of tea and cakes for my father, as he and Billy talked in the parlor. Billy said something I didn’t quite catch and then laughed his high sweet laugh that made me smile and shake my head. Then he was in the kitchen with me, tugging at my apron strings. He glanced to make sure my father wasn’t looking and ran his hand down my cheek before leaving the house.

But my father must have seen or sensed something because as I put down a tray of tea and oatcakes beside him three days after his arrival — three days of him not so much as saying hello — my father ran his hand up the back of my legs under my skirt. I spun around and stepped back and held my lightning arm in check, though it wanted to slap him. Instead I pointed at him, stuck my finger right in his face so he sat back in surprise.

“You never touch me again,” I said. “Keep your goddamned hands off me. You’re my father, for Christ’s sake.”

I surprised myself with my cussing and expected him to yell me down, or throw off his weakness and push me against the wall. But I held my ground and kept my eyes on him, and he did nothing of the kind. He began to cry, hard, as Coyote Jack had sobbed the day he’d hung himself. A man crying was no small thing. It confused me. I didn’t know what to do. I removed the record my father had been playing night and day for the past three days, but that had no effect. I offered him a cup of tea, but he refused, didn’t once look at it. When I put my
hand on his shoulder, my father went on sobbing and that made me angry just as Coyote Jack had made me angry. I yelled at him to stop. I kicked the table beside him and when that only made him cry harder, I slammed out of the house.

My mother was crossing the yard. She said, “What’s the matter?”

I threw up my hands, and said, “I don’t know,” and my mother rushed into the house and that began another harried three days because it took that long for my father to stop crying.

My mother talked to him, pleaded with him, paged through her scrapbook, looking for some cure to comfort him with and, finding none, she paged through it again. She took the cream into town and bought Dr. Chase’s Nerve Food and fed him that. She baked him a pound cake that he wouldn’t eat, poured him cups of tea he wouldn’t drink, and made him poultices for his chest which he wouldn’t allow her to apply. When his nose grew dry from blowing, he pushed her hand away when she tried to dab petroleum jelly around his nostrils. He yelled at her to leave him alone and that only made her fuss around him more. Exhausted by three days of frantic caring, my mother finally exploded. When my father slapped the oatcakes my mother offered from her hand, she slapped him back, hard, across the face.

“Enough of this foolishness,” she said. “Quit acting like a child.”

My father held his cheek, sobbed once, and that was the last of his crying. He withdrew again and wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even Billy. When another three days of his silence had passed and the parlor was taking on the foul smell of a sick room, my mother rubbed her forehead, and said, “He needs some air.”

Together my mother, Billy, and I coerced, carried, and pushed my father into the democrat. We didn’t go far, just to the first slough past our driveway where the turtles crossed in such numbers that there seemed to be a moving, living blanket crossing the road. My mother brought the horses up and we all sat in the buggy for a while, watching the turtles swarm around us. After a time Billy and I jumped off the wagon and started helping turtles up to the red sand bank, where they would lay their eggs.

It’s funny how a place will stir memories. A certain hill, the smell of red dirt, the wind of a road through swamplands, will bring a time tümbling back on you. While I picked turtles off that stretch of Blood
Road with my bracelet jingling on my arm, I watched Nora leave all over again. She was walking away from me, down the stretch of road. A trail of blood chased her. As she turned to wave, her necklace jingled, catching the light and catching the eye of crows that came swooping over her head. I got lost in the sight of Nora, the remembrance of her. Then she was gone and Billy was standing behind me, holding my shoulders.

“What you seeing?” he said.

“Nora.”

“She coming?”

“No, no, just remembering.”

“You glad you stayed?” he said.

“I’m glad I didn’t go with her.”

I turned to look at my mother and father sitting there in the democrat, watching Billy holding on to my shoulders. My father huddled into himself. My mother had seen Billy and me all right, but she wasn’t going to say anything, I could see that. She lifted her chin and breathed out. What could she say? I was sixteen now; my birthday had passed in February with only a slice of cake and a cup of tea for hullabaloo. Still watching her, I reached over and held Billy’s hand and he held it right back. My mother looked away, at the turtles, and got down from the buggy. She went around to my father’s side to help him down from the democrat. They stood there in the middle of Blood Road watching the turtles with their backs to Billy and me. After a time my mother reached over to my father, and he took her hand in his fist and held on to it for dear life.