The Cure for Death by Lightning (5 page)

“I brushed down the black suit and put the button back on the white shirt,” said my mother.

My father grunted and kept eating. We ate in silence for a while. Past the barn, Filthy Billy swore at the sheep, God, the Devil, and the stars. Bells on the lead cow and sheep rang out as they ran to escape his profane march through their pastures. My father piled yet another helping of chicken and peas on his plate.

“Good chicken,” said Dennis. “Almost as good as last night’s.”

My brother laughed. My father looked up at my brother and at Dennis and went back to refilling his plate.

“You going to the funeral, Dennis?” my mother asked.

“I didn’t know her, only to see her,” said Dennis.

“Terrible thing,” said my mother. “I’m glad they got the bear before it could get anyone else. That could have been you, Beth, if that grizzly reached you last spring. We were so lucky.”

“I heard Sarah was all scrapped apart,” said my brother. “Her stomach all eaten up.”

“Enough,” said my mother.

“Bears go for your head first,” said Dennis, and his eyes lit up. “They try to rip your head off. Nothing like this one. That must’ve been one crazy bear.”

I put my fork down and pushed my plate away and Dennis grinned at that. Dan leaned across the table and pointed his fork at me.

“They said she was pulled apart from the crotch up,” said my brother. “And the tops of her legs were just gone. Nothing. That’s what would’ve happened to you, if that bear got you last spring. They say her breasts were eaten off.”

“Shut your filthy mouth,” said my father. He pointed his finger at my brother until Dan gave in and looked at his plate. My father went back to eating.

“I heard the bear walked right up to Morley Boulee,” said Dennis. “Walked right up like a tame bear and Morley Boulee shot him dead, like it was nothing.”

I looked over at my father to see if he’d react to Mr. Boulee’s name, but he didn’t say anything.

“I killed a bear with a .22 once,” said Dennis. “The trick is to get real close, then throw your arms up, like you’re challenging the bear. When the bear stands up, on its hind legs, and growls at you, when its mouth is open, that’s when you shoot it, through the mouth!”

“What a bunch of baloney,” said Dan.

“That’s an old Indian way,” said Dennis. “Taught to me by my grandfather.”

“That’s bullshit, is what that is!” said Dan.

“Enough!” said my mother.

Dennis grinned. “Yeah, well, it’s a good story, anyway.”

“Can you believe it?” said my brother. “Her breasts eaten off!”

“Keep your mouth shut,” said my father. “Keep your goddamned mouth shut.”

We didn’t talk anymore about Sarah Kemp, or anything else. My brother’s talk left me without appetite. I played with my peas, arranging them in circles. My mother stood up and began clearing away dishes and I helped. Dennis stood up too and carried his plate and cup to the washtub.

“You don’t have to,” said my mother.

“Sure I do,” he said, and he kissed my mother on the cheek.

My mother and I took a quick look over at the table to see if my father was watching, but he was still hunched over his plate, serving up another spoonful of peas. My brother had leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. His eyes were closed. I turned back to my mother and the dishes. Dennis tousled my hair and left the kitchen. Shortly after, Dan jumped up, took the .22 down from the wall rack, and left the kitchen without saying a word to anyone.

“Where are you going?” said my father, but all he got for an answer was the screen door slapping shut. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Dan striding up the driveway towards Blood Road with the gun bouncing in his hand. He was a black silhouette against the sunlit lake of flax.

I cleared the rest of the dishes from the table and dipped out some water for washing from the reservoir on the stove. My mother sat at the kitchen table cutting something from a magazine and gluing it to the page where the tortoiseshell butterfly fluttered over the oatcake recipe. I ignored what she was doing so she wouldn’t get the idea that I
had any interest at all in her musty old scrapbook, and so she wouldn’t put warning notes in there for me to find. My father wound the gramophone in the parlor, put on Enrico Caruso, and sat in the thick chair that was his alone.

My mother tapped the recipe. “We’re out of oatcakes,” she said. “I served the last of them to Bertha. One more thing to do.” She sat there for a time, looking tired, feeling the corner of the page made from blue striped wallpaper and staring at the recipe as if wishing would make the oatcakes appear. My mother’s recipe was easy, really. It called for:

I call it my mother’s recipe, though she may have copied it from somewhere; she was always copying down a recipe. But this one was not cut from a magazine, or copied from the newspaper, as she did, by rubbing wax paper over newsprint to collect the words and then rubbing the wax paper on a page of the scrapbook, transferring all those little black newsprint letters. This recipe was in her handwriting: “
Melt butter, sugar, and treacle, and add essence. Take off the fire, add oats. Mix well, pour into a greased baking dish, and bake in an oven with a moderate fire for half an hour. Let cool. Cut into squares.”

“Add essence.” By this she meant “add almond extract,” but when she made oatcakes she did add essence, her own essence. When I made oatcakes, they didn’t taste anything like my mother’s, though I followed my mother’s recipe to the letter. They tasted good enough, but they tasted of my essence, not my mother’s. There are no two cooks that can make the same dish; you’ll find that essence in one and not the other. Or the essence in each is just different. I don’t know. But you’ll know the essence of a good cook when you find it in a dish. You’ll just know. It was there in my mother’s cooking. My father knew it. He’d eat the oatcakes my mother made, but not the oatcakes I made.

My mother began mixing the oatcakes as I finished up the dishes. I went into my bedroom, passing by my father and the voice of Enrico Caruso, who had the power to make my father cry. My father jerked awake as I walked by and wiped the moisture from his eyes.

The window of my room looked directly over the garden, farmyard, and barn. I had no curtains and very little furnishing: a chair in the corner opposite my bed, a vanity my father made for me from orange crates, hooks on the wall in the corner next to the window, on which my dresses hung, and below this a basket that Bertha Moses had made and sold some years before to my mother. The basket held my socks and sweaters, the underwear my mother made for me from soft sugar sacks, and my few pairs of stockings. In the summer I went barelegged, but in the winter I wore itchy wool stockings, or stockings made of cotton or lisle. I wished for silk stockings or, better yet, the new nylon stockings. My Aunt Lou in Britain all but begged my mother to send her a pair of nylons — a woman couldn’t get a pair of them at all over there unless she had a doughboy, an American soldier, for a boyfriend — but my father said no to that, and no to a pair for my mother. They were too expensive, and nylon was better used in the war effort, to build aircraft and weapons. So I wouldn’t be seeing a pair of nylons for a very long time.

Over the chair hung a pair of my brother’s old denim pants, a pair he’d long ago outgrown. I put these on under my skirt, chose a sweater, and inspected my hair in the hand mirror on my vanity. This much my father had allowed, even given to me: the hand mirror, brush, and comb that came as a set and a packet of Jo-Cur, a powder I mixed with water to form a jelly that I combed through my hair before setting it in rags, as I would do before bed this night. I had a bottle of hand lotion that my mother made herself from six ounces of mutton tallow that she strained and cooled until it thickened and mixed with three ounces of glycerine and a few drops of oil of geranium and then whisked with an egg beater into a soft cream.

I owned no jewelry, no make-up my father knew about, or fragrances, except the secret bottle of violet perfume in the hollow stump. I had no pictures on the walls, not even a calendar. My bedclothes were flannel sheets, two gray camp blankets, and a blue quilt my mother had made during the Depression from the printed fabric of old dresses and flour sacks. The only decoration in my room was the circle of blue forget-me-nots painted on the brown metal headboard of my bed, and the two ceramic dolls, past Christmas presents, that sat on my vanity.

I didn’t think of myself as pretty, though now I look at the pictures of myself in my mother’s scrapbook and see that I was. I shared my
father’s large-boned features, but I had blond hair that I wore past my shoulders and rolled at my temples in the style of the times, fine full lips, and blue eyes. I was a big girl, muscular from milking, riding horses, and doing farm chores, with the ruddy complexion that comes from fresh air, sun, and plenty of good food. But that wasn’t the beauty of the time; then a woman was beautiful if she was fragile and had smooth, manicured hands that didn’t grow callused or red from work. The magazines I read said it was a woman’s duty to maintain her beauty for the war effort. But how could I have skin “caressingly smooth” when I needed the calluses to milk cows and shovel manure? How could I have bright lips when my father forbade lipstick? And who was there to look beautiful for? All the young men were gone, to the training camps, or overseas, or working in factories, and if there were a young man around, my father wouldn’t let me near him. Hired men were different, of course. A girl didn’t mess with a hired man.

When I left my room, my father sat with his head against the back of his chair, still listening to Caruso. He watched me as I walked through the parlor and into the kitchen. My mother was readying the kitchen for the night, covering the window with heavy wool blankets. Even there, in Turtle Valley, we were under blackout.

“Where are you going?” said my mother.

“For a walk,” I said.

“This time of day? It’s almost dark.”

I ignored my mother and left the house. When I swung around the barn and headed for the creek through the sheep pasture, the lead sheep ran up to me, her bell ringing, and sniffed my hands; lambs trotted up, then bounced back under the cherry trees when I turned to them. Our fruit trees grew there, in the sheep pasture. Cherry, plum, apple, and pear trees flourished from the creek end of the pasture to the house. The pasture itself was held in check by the Swede’s magical fence, which was constructed from living trees and bramble. The sheep had just been turned back into this meadow and the grass was still long. I waded through it, intending to follow Turtle Creek up to the benchland and back, when suddenly it was there, at the far end of the pasture near the house, something cutting a path through the orchard grass. I walked backwards a little way to see if it followed and it did; the swath through the grass turned and kept coming at me. I didn’t
stop to find out what it was. I ran, heading towards the hired hands’ cabin, and jumped the pasture fence. The thing in the grass kept coming, so I ran up to the cabin and reached it out of breath and terrified.

Dennis answered the door. “Well,” he said. “My girlfriend’s here. You want to come in?”

I looked back at the swath in the orchard grass running parallel to the path I’d made. The second path stopped at the fence. Mine went on, flattening a trail through the grass all the way to the cabin.

“You okay?” said Dennis.

I nodded without looking him in the eye. Behind Dennis, Filthy Billy sat on his bunk tying a piece of binder twine around his pant leg.

“What’s he doing?” I said.

Filthy Billy looked up, grinned, swore, apologized, and went back to his pant leg.

“He’s getting ready for bed,” said Dennis. “He saw a black lizard today, when we were working. You know, those little guys, about this long.”

Dennis held his thumb and index finger about three inches apart. I nodded and looked back at the field. There was only one path now, the one I had made, as if nothing at all had been following me. I’d been chased by wind and stories of Sarah Kemp.

“That’s so the lizard doesn’t get up his pants and eat his heart,” said Dennis. “You see one of those lizards, it’ll follow you, and when you’re asleep it’ll go up your pants and eat your heart.”

“I see those lizards all the time,” I said. “They’re everywhere. Never ate my heart.”

“Guess those lizards don’t like white meat,” said Dennis.

Filthy Billy wheezed out a laugh.

“Your heart’s up here,” I said. “Why doesn’t he tie his shirtsleeves shut if he’s so worried?”

“The lizard enters your body someplace else,” said Dennis, and he grinned at me wickedly.

I grew shy and watched as Filthy Billy tied the other pant leg tight around his ankle until Dennis pointed at the campfire a few yards behind the cabin. Filthy Billy and Dennis had set up a circle of stones in which they sometimes broke the blackout and lit fires. I’d watched the fire from my bedroom window at night and heard their laughter.
Around the fire they’d placed several logs for sitting, and about a cord of carefully stacked firewood stood between two paper birch nearby. The cabin was at the far edge of the flax field from the house, set up against the bush, and the yard around the cabin was no yard at all, just the crazy mix of growth found at any field edge: young pine, aspen and brambles, milkweed and purple-headed thistles, wild strawberry and lamb’s-quarters. The hearth in the circle of stones still smoked.

“Billy built a fire and jumped over it,” said Dennis. “To confuse the lizard, so he’d follow Billy into the fire and get burnt up.”

I laughed.

“You don’t believe me?” said Dennis. “I’ll show you!”

He took my hand and that sent my heart rocking and knocked thoughts of Sarah Kemp flat. My hand became a huge thing inside his; I knew every tingle, every squeeze, and was aware of little else. He walked me to the forest edge, squatted in the grass, and pulled me down next to him. He still held my hand, cupped it, in fact, in both his hands. I leaned into him because I could do nothing else, and breathed in the sweetness of his sweat. Then I caught a whiff of the sour smell, from milking, on myself. It embarrassed me and brought me back to myself; I began to fear my father.