The Cure for Death by Lightning (7 page)

The Swede had built his fences with living trees for fence posts; he had planted young poplars between mature trees, and bent and wove them into crossbars that he held in place with vines of honeysuckle. Because honeysuckle never dies, the vines flourished, winding themselves farther around the living fence posts and crossbars, year after year, building an impenetrable hedge that came into leaf and blossomed from May to October.

Near the creek, my father and brother had cut down a section of the Swede’s fence and piled it neatly on our side of the property. In its place, my father had put up ten feet of barbed wire and post fence, but he’d stepped it one foot into what the Swede claimed as his property. He had left the roll of barbed wire at the point where the two fences met, so he and Dan could pick up where they left off another night. The going would be slow because my father and brother used a crosscut saw, in the dark, and the Swede’s fence had become a tangled forest over the years. Whenever he took down my father’s barbed wire fence, he’d plant fast-growing poplars, back where he figured the fence should be. But the trees drooped sadly and never had the chance to set their roots. My father and brother simply pulled them up by hand. I picked up a bit of the Swede’s fence, a thin poplar branch so grown past the honeysuckle’s confines that it looped into itself like a curl of my hair.

I moved the cows through the sheep pasture and into the barnyard, locked the gate, and went into the barn. I gave up trying to do the
chores alone, and instead went looking for cats. The barn cats were wild. They screeched and clawed at me if I was unlucky enough to catch one. But the very young kittens, the ones with eyes not yet opened, hadn’t seen enough to run scared. The mother cats hid their kittens in the dark, miniature alleyways between stacks of hay in the barn loft. I hid them from my father and the old white tom and his appetites. He’d eat his own offspring if he found them early enough, bloody enough, or else he’d lick them clean and carry them away to some nest like a mother cat. He was unnatural, turning like that.

The morning of Sarah Kemp’s funeral I came across the old white tom in the corner of an empty calf stall clutching two kittens under his back legs. He humped against the head of the kittens, as if mating a female. I threw a pebble at the tom and missed. He looked at me, tucked the kittens tighter against his body and humped again. I threw another rock, then a stick. The tom finally ran off and the kittens scattered.

I climbed the ladder to the hayloft. When I found a nest of kittens tucked in a hole in the hay, I pulled one from the nest and sat with it in my lap, a kitten so tiny and soft, its bones so close to the surface, its heartbeat so quick, it was a wonder it didn’t die of heartbreak. I clenched my teeth in the love of it, its utter dependency.

My father called my name and entered the barn, walking down the alleyway, looking from side to side. I became very still. He called my name again, then listened and looked up for a long time at the place where I hid. I swallowed and held my breath and thought of how I might escape if he began climbing the ladder. That ladder was the only way down. Finally my mother called him and he left the barn. When the screen door to the house slammed shut, I breathed out and fell back into the loose hay.

My mother came into the barn carrying the milk buckets, and I climbed down and opened the gate to let the first four cows into the barn.

“You shouldn’t be wearing your good dress for milking,” she said.

“I’ll be careful.”

“More kittens?”

“There’s a calico,” I said. “Don’t tell Dad.”

We pulled the empty stumping powder boxes up to the cows and
milked with sleep still on us and the faces of our dreams still around us. We were milking Jerseys, and Jersey cows are the most jittery, the easiest to scare, but also the most gentle when treated right. With chocolate brown eyes and sweet long lashes, they’re the beauty cows. The irony is that the Jersey bull is the meanest bull you’ll ever find.

Whatever you take into milking is amplified by the act of milking. If you begin milking angry, the cow will feel it, stiffen, and kick; or she might not let her milk down for you, and your anger will only get bigger. If you go into milking with sleep still on you, then milking is a meditation; the cow feels your sleepiness and is calmed by it; you feel the muscles in her big side relax, and she lets her milk down. Then the rhythm of the milking takes over: the steady shush-shush of the milk into the bucket, the rocking of your body as you squeeze one teat, then the other, one teat, then the other.

Everyone who milks has her own way and her own rhythm. At home I could tell who was milking just by listening to the rhythm of the squirt into the galvanized steel pails. My father’s rhythm was too fast, without a steadiness to it; he rarely milked the cows because when he did, they kicked him. I’d seen him go sprawling across the barn floor and the box on which he sat go flying. It’s no small wonder he got kicked because he yanked on the cow’s teats as if they were ropes on a church bellpull. There were unbelievably long spaces between the squirts in my brother’s milking; he milked one cow in the time it took my mother to milk three, so he didn’t milk much. Mostly it was my mother and I, milking to the rhythms of our own heartbeats, so close sometimes that the milk squirted into the pails in unison, like an iambic drumbeat. My mother sang quietly, and we milked with our heads against the warm flanks of our cows. They knew us enough to trust us. When we opened the doors to them, the cows came in by themselves, always in the same order, the lead cow with the bell first, and found their own stalls, always the same. Cows are creatures of habit and get agitated by anything new — a new box in the barn, a different smell on our clothes, even milking at a different time — so we tried to wear the same clothes each day, and milk at the same time, quietly and evenly.

We set each full bucket of milk aside with a cover because even the smallest fleck of manure tainted the milk. When we were done milking,
I lowered one pail into the well so that the base was just touching water, to keep the milk cool for our own use. My mother and I then carried the remaining buckets into the house. My job was to work the cream separator in the pantry while my mother washed up and made breakfast. I pinned cheesecloth to the separator bowl with wooden clothespins and strained the milk through it, adding more as the level went down. Then I turned the separator handle, and turned it and turned it. The handle had a bell on it that dinged as it went around, then changed to a different tone, and finally stopped when it was time to let the milk and cream out. I’ll always remember the sound of the separator — whir, ding, click, whir, ding, click — faster and faster as I turned until the bell stopped ringing and I opened the tap on the bottom of the bowl and let the skim milk run into a bucket below, and let the cream flow into a second smaller pot. I did this over and over again, until all the milk was separated.

I carried the skim milk and cream outside, poured the cream into the shipping can we stored in the well, and fed the buckets of skim milk to the few calves we kept in the heifer pasture. The calves lifted their noses and bunted the buckets, as they would their mothers, to let their mother’s milk down, and then stepped awkwardly away with foam all over their faces. The calves were heifers, our next generation of milk cows. They learned to drink from a bucket quickly, but their instinct to suckle was so strong they sucked one another’s faces, joining in odd slobbering kisses. They came up to me from behind and bunted me, thinking I was their mother, and even then tried to suck my clothing. I slapped them away, but a week-old calf is a big strong creature, if clumsy, and many times, as they did this morning, they chased me from the heifer pasture.

When I returned to the house, my brother and father were at the kitchen table with their boots on. I poured them coffee and helped my mother serve their bowls of porridge and plates of eggs and sausage. I ate quickly, then took the separator bowl, spouts, discs, rubber ring, and float off the separator to wash them, and wiped out the machine. While I was cleaning, a man and his wife came to the door. The man had a red face and a loud voice. When my mother opened the door he stepped right in without waiting to be asked. The woman hung behind. She wore a gray dress with buttons all the way up her neck. They
looked rumpled and hot, as if they’d walked a long way already that morning.

I disliked salesmen. Because we lived so close to the road and appeared to be the last house before the reserve (the Swede’s house was set far back in the woods), they always stopped by selling horse collars and harnesses, cistern pumps, gang plows, cream separators, poorly made accordions and other instruments, sewing machines, brushes, and patent medicines — all the things we could get in the Eaton’s catalogue if we really needed them.

“We’ve come to talk about the state of the world today,” said the man.

My father looked up from the breakfast table. “What do you want?” he said.

The man walked right up to the kitchen table. The woman stayed by the door, fiddling with her purse. My mother looked at her and tried to smile and then went over to the table and stood between my father and the red-faced man.

“These are terrible times,” said the man. “But they are also glorious times. The signs are everywhere. You only have to read the papers. The world is consumed by war. The coming of the Lord is at hand!”

My father made a face, shook his head, and laughed, so that the little gray woman stepped back and knocked the washbowl from the table beside the door. The bowl clattered to the floor, clattered into our ears, and clattered into my father’s head. My mother tensed. My father put his hand to his forehead and stood up as the women bent down to retrieve the bowl.

“Get out!” he said.

The red-faced man looked confused but immediately regained his ground. “We were hoping you might be generous,” he said, and both he and his wife suddenly looked sunken and hungry.

“Out!” said my father. He took the man by the shoulder and pushed him to the door.

“You wouldn’t put out a man preaching the message of the Lord. Can’t you see the warnings? The end time is near!”

My mother said, “John,” and put her hand on his arm, but he flung her hand away and marched the husband and wife out the door. The gray woman said, “Oh!” and trotted a little way. She was wearing
town shoes with heels and she limped. My father watched the couple until they rounded the corner of the driveway out of sight. Then he went to the barn. I sat at the table watching as my mother stuffed a flour sack with jars of canned fruit, jam, and bread. She took me by the elbow so urgently that I stood.

“Go out our bedroom window and catch up to them,” she said. “Explain your father’s been ill this past year.”

I pushed off my shyness and did as she asked, running the overgrown Indian trail that rounded the root cellar. I caught the strange couple as they were walking down Blood Road towards the reserve.

“Here,” I called. “Wait.”

The couple turned around and I handed the woman the bag of preserves and bread. “There isn’t anything that way,” I said.

“There’s the reserve,” the woman said. “We always do well on the reserve. The people are generous. They listen.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The couple exchanged a look, and I felt ashamed.

“God bless you, dear.” The woman took my hand and gave it a squeeze.

When I walked back to the house, black lizards skittered away from my feet and ran for cover. I went after a couple of them, trying to step on their tails, but my mother clanked dishes around in the wash pan in front of the kitchen window, a hint that I’d better get busy. When I carried out my chamber pail to the manure pile to empty it of night soil, I saw my parents’ pail was already there and opened the lid on it with the idea of emptying and cleaning the pail for them. It was full of water and at first I didn’t comprehend why. Then I saw the dark bodies of the new litter of kittens I’d played with that morning. The stench of night soil on the manure pile became overpowering. I took a step back as my father passed by with a bucket of chop in each hand. He said, “Bury those cats, will you?” as if he didn’t know what he’d done, as if it were just another chore for me to do.

I
STOOD
for a long time with my hand at my throat looking at the bucket of dead kittens. Then I removed myself and watched my hands take up a shovel, make a hole in the manure pile, and empty the foul water and the bodies of the dead kittens into it. Their bodies slid from the bucket like fish. I covered them over with manure, then followed myself to the other side of the barn, like a child following her mother. My father was there, throwing another bucket of chop to the pigs. He was wearing his town shirt, the white shirt my mother had mended for Sarah Kemp’s funeral, and the black suit pants and suspenders he saved for funerals and weddings. I followed myself up to him and watched as my hand slid into a pile of warm manure and threw it at him, hitting him in the sleeve. In the moment he looked at me, I came back to myself and ran into the house. I stood in the kitchen washing my hands beside my mother, knowing he’d follow, knowing he’d lick me good. My mother didn’t look up. She went on washing dishes even when my father stomped into the kitchen and grabbed me by the arm. She kept washing and clanking until my father let go of my arm and yelled at her.