The Cure for Death by Lightning (6 page)

Dennis pointed out a thing on the ground. It was a forked stick jammed into the earth. Tied between the tines, pieces of grass cradled something I was unsure of at first.

“That’s one of them lizards,” said Dennis. “That’s one I caught. Billy’s too scared to go after them. You go after them and tie them up like this, then they can’t come and eat your heart.”

Held above the moisture of the ground, the lizard hadn’t rotted, but mummified. Dennis stood and held out his hand and helped me up. “Anyway,” he said. “Did you want something?”

I looked at my feet, and then at the remnants of the fire. I shook my head.

“Just come for a visit, eh?” said Dennis.

I shrugged and immediately regretted it. Mrs. Bell said shrugging looked slovenly. Dennis watched for a time as I looked down at my feet, embarrassed by my sour milk clothes and my weak attempts at vanity, the perfume on my feet, the lipstick in the crook of my arm. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He patted me on the shoulder as my
brother might and that hurt worse than any spoken rejection. Nevertheless he said, “You just come over any time, any time.”

I walked home through the twilight and the field of violet flax, feeling the tiny blue flowers with the palms of my hands, no longer chased by bloody images of Sarah Kemp, but by a blood heat of another kind, one I didn’t have words for yet, but one that had everything to do with Dennis.

As I passed the barn, my father stepped out of the dark, scaring my heart into my throat. He pushed me up against the barn wall and pressed his weight against me. “You don’t ever go to that cabin,” he said. “Hear me?”

His fried-chicken breath in my face and the dog shit still on his boots made me think of the chicken killing that day, and with that came, clear and unwelcome, a picture of Sarah Kemp’s face, blood-smeared and chewed. I looked up at the stars past my father’s shoulder and willed myself there. My mother called from the house, “John, cocoa’s ready!” and my father let go, looked me down for a time, and then strode around the barn and across the yard to the house. After a little while I straightened my blouse and followed him.

M
Y FATHER
woke my brother in the middle of the night before Sarah Kemp’s funeral and together they went out, once again, to cut down the Swede’s living fence. The dispute between my father and the Swede had begun that spring with a notion that took hold of my father and wouldn’t let go: he believed he owned a piece of land on the Swede’s side of the fence. Long before my father bought the farm, the Swede had built a fence of living trees, in the style of his homeland, on what my father was now convinced was our property. My father had in fact bought the farm from the Swede’s in-laws.

Johansson was fond of telling how he’d bought a ticket on the
Titanic
and missed the boat because he got drunk the night before at his sister’s wedding. He took another, less ill-fated boat to the New World, and, after shifting around the continent working where he could find jobs, he took on the homestead in Turtle Valley next to another Swede by the name of Olsen, whose bad luck was legendary. Olsen had married a Turtle Creek Indian woman named Mary and had had eight children by her, but each and every one of the children had died. Everyone seemed to have a story about it. I’d heard from Lily Bell, Mrs. Bell’s silly daughter, that the children had come down with an illness that took their minds, and made them see things that weren’t there, before it took their bodies. Dennis had told Dan and me that the homesteader’s children had been attacked, one by one, by a bear or a cougar, something that had left the children half-eaten in any case. I
thought these were just stories, and the children had died of childhood diseases. All the children were buried on what was now our property, off beside the barn.

By the time Johansson had moved to Turtle Valley, the only child left to the Olsens was Caroline, a sweet, frightened half-breed Johansson married when she was sixteen and he was twenty-seven. Caroline died a year later of consumption, three months after giving birth to a son the Swede named Jack, because he liked the sound of it. After Olsen died, his widow took up with an Indian fellow, moved back to the reserve, and put the farm up for sale. That was when my father purchased the farm. He added on to the house, and put up a new barn, picked rocks from the field and piled them to hide the graves of the homesteader’s children and to rid himself of their bad luck.

My father swore that the titles office clearly showed the land on which the Swede had built his fence was now ours, although he brought home no proof of it, and that spring after he sold the flock was the first we’d heard of it. The piece of land in dispute was one mile long and one foot wide.

He and the Swede had never argued the point; they had never even discussed it. Every few nights my father went out and took down a section of the Swede’s living fence and put up his own barbed wire. Every few days I’d find the Swede had undone my father’s work and tried to replant the section of his strange fence where he figured it should be.

The night before Sarah Kemp’s funeral, my brother and father dressed to cut down the Swede’s fence under the weight of my mother’s protestations. My mother stood in the doorway of the bedroom she and my father shared, and amplified my father’s foolishness so God could hear she had no part in it.

“At least talk to the man,” she said. “You haven’t talked to the man. Maybe he’ll sell the land. Look at you! Building fences in the middle of the night!”

I shuffled into the corner of the parlor and leaned against the dish cupboard, in the dark, so they wouldn’t see me. My door opened on the parlor, as did all the rooms of the house: my parents’ bedroom, my brother’s, and the door to the kitchen. From my bedroom door I could see into the kitchen and straight across to my parents’ room. The house
had once been the Olsens’ cabin, onto which my father had added our bedrooms and the kitchen; the parlor was the only original room. Sometimes when the house was quiet at night, or when I walked past the rock pile by the barn that marked the Olsens’ graves, I imagined I heard their footsteps, the noise of their play, or the sound of a child crying. There was no upstairs and only one doorway out of the house, the one in the kitchen, though each room had a window. We all had to pass through the parlor and then through the kitchen to leave the house. The parlor was dark, though my mother had boarded up the log and chink walls and covered the boards with wallpaper. The floors of all the rooms were of the same dark unfinished wood that my father had laid when he built onto the house.

My mother followed my father through the parlor and into the kitchen. Her hair fell to her hips, the buttons on her nightgown were done up her neck, and her sleeves were pulled down to her wrists. She hugged herself. My father carried a kerosene lamp, but he stumbled into chairs and tables anyway, thrown by my mother’s complaints. My father looked like a hunkered monster; my mother’s face was that of a ghost.

“Don’t do this,” said my mother. “Please.”

My father set the lamp on the kitchen table and put on his boots.

“Let me talk to him,” she said. “It’s all a mistake, I’m sure of it.”

When he didn’t reply, my mother lifted the lamp to the corners of the kitchen to hunt out spiders. She found one, lifted the lamp higher, and the spider became drunk on the fumes of the lamp. It dropped into the flame and sizzled briefly before turning to smoke. My brother came into the kitchen and slid on his boots without tying them. My father got up, took down a gun from the wall rack, and pulled the lamp from my mother.

“You don’t need a gun,” she said. “Why are you taking a gun?”

“I may need it,” said my father.

When my mother tried to block their exit through the kitchen door, my father tightened his lips and pushed past her. Dan scratched his hair into a haystack and rubbed the day-old beard growing on his big jaw. He smiled a sweet apology at Mum, but he went with my father.

“He’s got every right to shoot you,” my mother shouted after them. “Every right.”

She banged around in the dark kitchen for a time, stoking up the fire
in the stove. She would keep it burning even through the brightest heat of the coming summer and would go on stoking it all fall and all winter and into next spring.

“He hasn’t got the sense God gave a goose,” she said out loud. Then she mumbled, as she tended the fire, so the words only sometimes drifted up to be heard.

“Hell to pay,” she said, and the words faded again. Then “Fool” and “Wasn’t I right?” She looked up briefly, as if listening to someone talking, and said, “No, no, I can’t do that,” and went back to poking at the fire.

I knew who she was talking to. She had told me once, as we baked bread together. The day she told me, her hair had been pinned up into an unruly knot, and her hands were so muscled from milking and kneading bread that they made me think of knotted wood. Her face was red from the heat and work. She had mumbled under her breath as she kneaded the dough, as if I wasn’t right there, trying to knead the dough in unison with her. My hands ached from the labor.

I said, “Who are you talking to all the time?”

She stopped kneading and looked up at me a little dazed, as if surprised to see me in the kitchen with her. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, well, that’s my mother.”

“What do you tell her?”

“Things. About the day,” she said.

“Does she answer?”

“Oh, well,” said my mother. “If I said yes, you’d think me crazy.”

“No, not crazy,” I said.

“I think she’s here with us,” my mother had said. “Sometimes I think that.”

My mother chilled me when she talked to my dead grandmother. This night, as she finished stoking up the fire and took her place in her rocking chair, hugging her scrapbook, I hid myself deep in my bed and eventually slept. I dreamed of the triple-seater outhouse at school and in my dream, Goat, the doctor’s idiot son, sat on the roof with his back to me. The outhouse was filthy with excrement and bits of dirty magazine pages, and I was so disgusted I woke up. For a moment I thought I had wet the bed. Then the fuzziness of sleep left me and I realized how badly I had to pee.

Each of us had our own pail, not the pretty chamber pots the catalogues
sold to slip under the bed; our chamber pails were large and made of white enamel with a black rim around the top and a white lid. I used mine instead of the outhouse most nights, and then emptied the night soil into the manure pile in the morning. My father and brother stepped onto the porch in the middle of the night and peed into my mother’s flower patch, though she called them dogs for it. The outhouse sat to the side of the barn, close to the fence surrounding the sheep pasture and orchard. Over its history the outhouse had been moved several times and had been knocked over by neighbor boys on several Halloweens. It now leaned towards the barn and groaned when anyone stepped into it. There was no toilet paper, only magazines and catalogues to wipe with. There were always spiderwebs over the toilet seat and, above all else, the outhouse stank. Flies buzzed around your head, mosquitoes bit your behind, your ankles, your arms, the back of your neck. When I was very young Dan told me things lived down that hole, huge hairy things. So I didn’t sit, I barely hovered. The fear of those unnamed, unseen things in the outhouse was still with me, at night, when reason flew away. Now I squatted over the chamber pail in my bedroom, trying to avoid making contact with the rim because it was so cold. When I got back into bed, it was a long time before I warmed up enough to fall asleep again.

When light started up the sky, I dressed listening to the snoring of my brother and my father, and the clear high whistle of my mother’s sleep. I put on the blue dress I’d wear to the funeral later in the day, and pulled the rags from my hair but left the curls in disarray; there was no use combing them yet. I intended to start milking early on this day of Sarah Kemp’s funeral, but when I went out to bring the cows into the barnyard, I found that my father and Dan had left the gate to the sheep pasture open in the night. The cows were down near the creek, more curious than hungry, sniffing at the damage my father had inflicted on the Swede’s fence. On the other side of the fence, Johansson’s goat stood guard, lip-curling and sniffing the air.

The Swede himself lived in a cabin the size of our parlor, the size of the cabin that my father had built for our hired hands. The Swede didn’t have an outhouse behind his cabin, as everyone else in the valley did. He built his outhouse right over the creek, so his refuse was flushed away by the water downstream to the reserve. People living on the reserve used water from that creek as drinking water, and the
Swede knew it, but he also knew they wouldn’t complain. He kept a small weedy garden that Mrs. Bell despised him for, and a bunch of scraggly chickens that he fed in summer by stringing fish above the coop. The chickens didn’t eat the fish, they couldn’t reach them, but flies laid eggs on the fish and their maggots, wriggling, dropped to the ground. The chickens ate the maggots.

In fall the Swede hunted on my father’s property for deer without my father’s permission. He owned a three-legged Lab that shat freely all over the yard around his house and would have come into our yard, but my father fired the shotgun at him, always missing. The dog was yellow and yellow-eyed. It sometimes ran as if it had four legs, as if it still had the ghost leg that had been caught in a coyote trap. It was because of this, my father said, that he always missed the dog. Both the Swede and the dog smelled like fish.