The Cure for Death by Lightning (8 page)

“Stop that!” he said.

My mother stopped instantly.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he said to me. “What did you do that for?”

I looked down at my dress because my father looked at it. I’d
slopped manure down my front and it had dropped off as I’d run, leaving green stains over my breasts and on my skirt.

“Look at you!” he said. “You’re filthy. Get that dress off. Wash it!”

I stepped back and my father rushed at me. “Now!” he said.

When I didn’t move he swept me up. I screamed and that made him angrier. He carried me into my room, threw me on my blue quilt, and ripped the dress from me.

“That’s enough,” said my mother.

She stood against the doorframe to my room. Her hair was coming loose from the bun she’d wound it into. My father stopped, caught off guard. He stood up straight.

“Get out of the house,” said my mother. “Now.”

I held my breath and waited, but my father only lowered his eyes and like a kicked dog he slunk from the room. My mother turned sideways to let him pass, but she didn’t let her shoulders fall, or let the air go from her chest until she heard my father’s footsteps on the porch outside. She brushed her hair from her forehead.

“I hate him,” I said.

“Get dressed,” she said.

I put on a clean brown skirt and white blouse, combed out my curls, and padded out in my bare feet. My mother heated a little cream, poured it over a slice of bread, and sprinkled it with sugar. She set the bowl in front of me. The strangeness about her had dissolved into tiredness. She had rubbed rose petal into her cheeks and lips for a little color, but my father had either ignored or hadn’t noticed this small vanity. She still had on the loose housedress that she wore to milk the cows and she smelled a little sour from the dairy. The bread and cream was child’s food and I was no longer a child, but I was thankful for it. By the time I finished the bowl, I’d forgotten to hate my father.

M
Y FATHER
wore his sheepishness like a sack over his back as he changed his shirt. He harnessed Cherry and Chief, our other horse, to the democrat himself instead of cowing my brother into it. He even helped my mother up into the buggy. But he wouldn’t look at me; he ignored me as if I weren’t there.

I sat in the back with my brother and the cream cans, watching the road unwind behind us. The road was a deep, rich brown-red, from iron deposits in the soil, I suppose, though I grew up believing the road was red from the blood of turtles. Blood Road was what the Indians called it, what everyone called it. The government maps, however, named it Caldwell Road after the first white landholder in the valley, a man who died alone in his cabin with no wife and no kids and no one to mourn him but his hungry pigs. The road had once been an Indian trail and had been expanded into a wagon road during the gold rush of 1867 that had founded the town of Promise. It had been a busy road until the new highway diverted traffic around Bald Mountain and through Promise. Now it was a quiet road through a quiet valley with only the rattle of ghost wagons and the crying songs of the berry pickers to tell us it had ever been anything different.

Towards the Turtle Creek Reserve, Blood Road wound through a valley so narrow that, even in summer, the sun didn’t rise over the hills until nine
A.M.
and then set well before three o’clock. That end of the valley was damp and dreary without sunlight. The reserve stretched over part of Bald Mountain and down its slopes to the flat lands
beyond. Here a few Indians farmed and others made their living capturing and selling the wild horses that roamed across the flat lands. It was a long walk to the reserve and going there was one of the many things my father forbade. I was also frightened. You heard things then, about the reserve; how white women were raped, how children were beaten. Except for the times I walked up Bald Mountain to count the wild horses, I stayed away from that end of the valley.

Towards the town of Promise, the valley opened up like a wound in skin. The valley basin was rich and fertile because of the spring floods, and the land along the road was cleared for pasture and crops, except for trees that grew around the many sloughs. The road followed the valley floor at the lowest point, and at spring runoff it became a muddy mess. Three miles down the road from our farm was the Boulees’ farm and then the school, a small one-room building heated with a wood-stove in the center that kept it too hot in the early summer and too cold in the winter. I still went there, but Dan had quit school a couple of years before. Beyond the school there were several smaller acreages inhabited by families that I now had little to do with since the craziness set in on my father.

The road followed the valley basin, along the creeks and swamps, and now, in spring, the turtles crossed the road in thousands to lay their eggs, so passing down it was a grizzly thing. Many of the people who lived in the valley didn’t stop but whipped their frightened horses over the moving road of painted turtles. The shells were crushed under the hooves of panicking horses and under the wheels of the wagons and the few automobiles. Their smashed bodies were strewn all over Blood Road, wherever the road met a swamp. But death didn’t stop the painted turtles. They came and came and came across the road, and by their tenacity and numbers alone they succeeded in seeding the next generation. The blood of the turtles seeped into the dirt of the road and hardened, paving the road a brilliant red that turned to rust when the season was done; this is what Bertha Moses told me, and the proof of the story was there, on the road we followed.

In past years my father had held something like a worshipful respect for that turtle pilgrimage. Only the spring before, perhaps a month before the bear attacked our sheep camp, my father had pulled the horses up short on the swamps just past our driveway, stepped down from the buggy, and held his hand out to help my mother down. He
had gestured for Dan and me to get down, so we stood a little way behind my father and mother and leaned on the siding of the democrat. My father had put his arm around my mother’s shoulders and together they watched the turtles climb from the swamp into the ditch, and then up onto the road. These were painted turtles, with yellow and olive-black shells that were edged with bright red crescents. They moved across the road in a slow, stubborn parade. Occasionally a little black lizard scuttled among them and hurried off into the cover of a ditch. That day Dan had picked up one of the turtles and turned her the other way. The turtle spun around slowly, using one front foot like an oar to push herself in the red dirt and paddled her way back in the direction she intended to lay her eggs. My brother turned around another turtle and another, and we watched them methodically right themselves. After a time my father told us all to pick the turtles from the road and put them to the side, and through the path we created he led the spooked horses down Blood Road until we were past the swamps.

But not this year, not on this trip to Sarah Kemp’s funeral. The strange compassion my father once had for turtles and other things — the young robin that hit the window and lay dazed on the ground until he warmed it in his hands, the heifer born with a bum leg which he didn’t kill but put a splint on, the newborn lamb he carried around all morning in his jacket to keep alive — had been broken up somehow, cracked into little pieces that made no sense to me. This year my father slapped the reins against the horses’ haunches, forcing them, as they whinnied and shied sideways over the moving road. Rocking beside Dan, I held the side of the democrat against the swaying and jolts, clenched my fist, and closed my eyes against the sight of turtles cracked and bloodied in the ruts the wheels created. But I couldn’t shut out the crunch and slide of them under the wheels and the hooves of the horses they crazed with their turtle selves. I opened my eyes long enough to see a turtle with her back legs crushed pull herself by the front legs over a last red rut and up onto the sandy banks where thousands had laid their eggs before her.

Promise was all the way down Blood Road, past the small acreages and fields, then down the new highway two miles. We made this journey every couple of days to take the cream to the train station, but we rarely went as a family. My mother and father went, or my brother went, or I went with my mother. But this day was different. This was
the day of the funeral of Sarah Kemp, a girl I’d seen almost every day of my school days, and never talked to, not even once. She had sat in the corner of the one-room school, on the other side of the big wood heater, with her head down, her face towards the front of the room where Mrs. Boulee paced, but her eyes were always in the rapture of a daydream, and her arms were folded against her breasts, bracing whatever it was that would otherwise flow out and cause a thousand deaths of embarrassment. She was as unpopular at school as I and for that reason I thought of her as my secret sister, and I did not believe her dead. The story of her death was too fantastic; it was the sort of story told around the table on Halloween. She would be sitting there, I was sure, in the corner of the dark schoolroom opposite mine on Monday, and this day, this day, as I had promised myself every day this last year, I would conjure up the courage to go over to her where she sat alone, reading on the back steps during lunch, and touch the flowered material on the arm of her dress and tell her my name, as if she didn’t know it, as if we were just now introducing ourselves.

We dropped the cream cans off at the train station and picked up the empty ones. Like the other dairymen in the area, we shipped our cream by train to Palm Dairies in Kamloops and received payment once a month, by check, in the mail. Once we had made our delivery, my father drove the buggy back up the street to the store and tied up the horses. His sheepishness had drained away. He said to my mother, “I want to see you at that church in fifteen minutes, not a minute longer,” before he turned his back on her and strode over to Reinert’s blacksmith shop. I followed my mother into the store. My father wouldn’t enter the general store; he wasn’t welcome there and he knew it. The last time he’d set foot in Bouchard and Belcham General Merchants was the day after the Dominion Day picnic, 1941, nearly a month after the bear attacked our camp. That day he walked into the store with my mother to buy the hard pink candy he loved so much, and when he stepped out of the store into sunlight again he had managed to start a fistfight with Morley Boulee, the teacher’s husband, and to knock over a rack of ladies’ silk stockings.

My mother and I, on the other hand, were welcome in the store, as long as we came without my father. My father had given in and let my mother go to the store alone over the necessity of having flour in the house. Bouchard and Belcham’s was the only store in town. We either
bought supplies there or made the daylong trek into Kamloops. The store was old, one of the first buildings in Promise. It smelled of sawdust and smoke from the big woodstove that the old men sat around. It had a very worn oiled wood floor and the walls were plastered with government posters. Some said
DON’T BE A CUPBOARD QUISLING
! and warned of fines up to five thousand dollars and imprisonment for hoarding food; others advertised Victory bonds or demanded that we all
DIG FOR VICTORY
and grow a garden plot, or
KEEP IT DARK
and cover our windows at night and close our mouths. Other posters explained the latest rationing regulations, which seemed to change monthly, on tea, coffee, and sugar. Sugar was limited to half a pound per person per week that month, down from three quarters of a pound.

Belcham sold everything in that store: coal oil, feed, dried fruit, split peas, beans, rice, barley, sugar and sago sold by the pound from hundred-pound gunnysacks, yard goods, galvanized tubs, milk pails, pitchforks, tools, binder twine, nails in bins, newspapers and magazines, tobacco, bluing, coffee, tea, canned vegetables that we never bought, and a few ready-made clothes. There was a cheese as big as a washing machine that we cut chunks from, wrapped in wax paper and then again in brown paper. In the back corner of the store was the post office wicket where everyone in the valley and in town went to pick up their mail. Belcham ran the wicket himself while his wife ran the till. Bouchard was long dead.

I waited on my mother, as she chatted with Mrs. Belcham, reading the covers of the magazines and newspapers that offered stories on how to grow a Victory garden and how to knit ten pairs of socks a day for the boys overseas, yet another way to eat rhubarb, and how to turn old pajamas into housedresses. I fingered the few pricey packages of nylons that Belcham kept in the store, until I noticed the old men around the stove staring at me. I stared back until they looked down at their feet and then went outside and sat on the steps. I pulled my skirt over my knees and hugged my bare legs. Dan had gone off someplace; he’d jumped off the democrat before my father had even pulled Cherry and Chief to a halt. But where he’d gone, I didn’t know. There were few enough places for him to hide — the town was nothing but one long street of false-face businesses. It was framed by the United Church at one end, and the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches facing off
at the residential end. Bouchard and Belcham’s was just about in the center of town, across from the motel. The ancient little motel was then owned by the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Blundell and was fraught with stories of ghosts and the like. This one I know is true: the spring the grizzly attacked our camp and my father sold the sheep, Ginger Rogers and an unnamed male companion drove into town while on holiday and stayed the night at the Blundells’ haunted motel because there was no place else to stay. Hanging on the wall of the room in which Ginger Rogers stayed was a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Blundell standing on either side of the elegant and smiling movie star. The motel building was nothing but a frame of poles on which cedar shakes had been nailed. The floor and bunks were made of split cedar logs, the beds were straw mattresses. The only other furnishings were an airtight heater, a bucket of water, and an enamel washbasin that could be seen through the two little crossed windows in each unit. There were three units to the motel, all attached to one another and to the house in which the Blundells lived.