The Cure for Death by Lightning (9 page)

The doctor’s house and office was on one side of the motel, and the blacksmith’s shop was on the other. Beside the blacksmith’s shop was the garage and gas station, the notary public, and the United Church. Opposite this, to the right of Bouchard and Belcham’s, was G. Locke Drugs and the butcher shop. To the left was W. Clark Jewelers and a vacant lot. The little police office was down by the train station. Other than a few houses, that was all there was to the town of Promise.

The dirt road that was the main street was rutted and dusty, and when a horse and buggy went by the dust didn’t dissipate but hovered, so the air was never free of it. Cars and trucks had seen their glory days briefly in the space where the Depression declined and the war and its gas rationing began. There were cars in Promise — the doctor had one, the one police constable had another — but many people went back to horse and buggy for the duration of the war.

As I was sitting on the steps in front of the store, a crow with odd coloring hopped across the street with a chunk of bread in its mouth. The crow was mostly white with black streaks running through its feathers. It stopped in the center of the street and busied itself prying the soft meat of the bread from the crust until a couple of black crows swooped down and went after the albino as if it weren’t one
of their own. The white crow fought them for a time and then gave up; it took off and landed on the church roof. I shooed off the black crows and picked up a feather the white crow had lost in the tussle; it was a beautiful thing, white with streaks and specks of blue-black.

Then Goat was there, right behind me. “Hello,” he said.

Goat was the son of Dr. and Mrs. Poulin. His real name was Arthur. My brother said Arthur Poulin had the body of a man and the mind of a stupid dog. My father, surprisingly, was kinder. He said Arthur Poulin could play the piano and could be taught other things, if someone took the time with him. Half of Goat’s face was that of a shy young man; the other was a cross-eyed child. His ears were small and square, his nose was flat and broad, his tongue hung out, his eyes were puffy-looking and slanted up. He was very short and his shoulders were hunched and he flopped around as if he had no muscle or joints. He had short stubby little hands that flew all over his body, all the time, scratching, pulling, picking. His constant nervous movements frightened me.

“Hello,” he said again.

I looked at the faces of the town buildings and at the albino crow on the church roof and pretended Goat wasn’t there. Goat stamped a circle in the dust. I flicked an ant off my skirt.

“I’m like everybody else,” Goat said. “My dad said I’m like everybody else.”

I looked up at him. Goat held one arm out and took a step towards me. I stood and ran, and after a moment Goat ran after me.

“I’m like everybody else!” he cried out.

Dan left the blacksmith’s shop as I ran by. “Give her a kiss!” my brother yelled at Goat. “She loves you!”

“Kiss!” Goat yelled after me. “Kiss! Kiss!”

I left my brother’s laughter behind and after a time I stopped running and watched as Goat caught up to me. He ran in an ungainly way, like a marionette. I bluffed. I put my hands on my hips like my father. Goat stopped running and walked towards me nervously.

“Hi!” he said.

I didn’t answer. He stopped and started walking backwards. I stared at him. He turned and ran and disappeared among the buildings.

W
HEN
I
WALKED
back down the main street, Goat had already clambered onto the church roof. He sat with his back against the base of the steeple, his head down and lolling, playing with parts of himself that I knew should never be mentioned. Above him the anvil of a thunderhead grew in the sky. Morley Boulee, the man who shot the bear that killed Sarah Kemp, was standing by the newly dug grave near the church yelling at Goat to get down. Others were beginning to arrive at the church, on foot or by buggy. It was a funeral everyone would go to, whether they knew the family well or not. The school had closed for the day, and businesses would close down while their owners attended the funeral.

We hardly went to the church, but I knew it. I knew it from Christmas and Easter, from weddings and funerals and the fowl suppers. The church was a small wooden building painted white every spring so you never saw a crack in the walls. There was no fancy stained glass, only a row of small windows up and down each side. It had a rough steeple with a wooden cross attached at the apex, and it was against the steeple that Goat leaned to hide from the world and soothe himself as best he could. A new eight-foot-high fence made of chicken wire on wood posts went all the way around the church, all the way around the graveyard that sloped up the low hillside behind the church. The fence was not pretty and made the church grounds look like a farmyard — that and the Blundells’ chickens, which pecked their way into the
churchyard and then hid in the bushes surrounding the graveyard so no one could catch them.

I stumbled into the church behind my parents and my brother with the rest of the town, and stumbled out again propelled by the crowd when the casket was carried, by men I didn’t recognize, to the grave. But I took nothing from the service. Through the hymns and the sermon and Mrs. Boulee’s eulogy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the casket. The church was filled with sweet peas, nasturtiums, marigolds, bachelor buttons, scarlet flax, and spiky delphiniums picked from the gardens of every woman in that church and arranged in what was handy: cups and coal-oil tins, glass canning jars and milk bottles. Garlands of deep purple lilacs were laid over the casket. Color all over, in the blue and pink dresses of the young girls, in the flower petals, and the blossoms of fruit trees outside the church windows. Yet there was the casket, under all those flowers, too large and black for that tiny church.

No one talked on the short walk from the church to the grave. No one even cried. My mother and I found ourselves behind the mourning family, but my father and Dan ended up standing at the back of the crowd. Sarah Kemp’s mother held on tight to the arm of her own mother, Mrs. Anna Halley, and they both stood at the grave looking puzzled. Mrs. Halley was the only person I’d ever heard of who’d watched her stroke coming on. She’d been the church organist for years, and the day that eternity opened up and took her spirit was a Sunday. The story went that she was sitting at the organ at church, playing in front of everyone, looking at the music before her, when the black spot appeared on the page, just a little black spot at first, like a fly, but it grew, and grew, until it was a splash of ink across the page, obscuring the notes. She’d stopped playing then, just stopped and let her hands fall in her lap to stare in awe and confusion at the hole that had opened up in the universe, right there in the hymn “O Savior, May We Never Rest.” She had talked in her marbled way about that hole for a time, but she’d lost her right side to the stroke, and so she lost her music, and after that the black hole slowly ate up everything that made her Mrs. Anna Halley and left behind a child in a crone’s body.

Mrs. Halley moved away from Sarah Kemp’s mother and touched my head, and said, “Sarah, your hair has gone so blond.”

“I’m not Sarah,” I said. I looked everywhere but at her face and
finally settled my gaze on my feet, on the stitches in my shoes. The Swede spread his contempt over our family by not looking at us. Mrs. Bell watched me with a mask of patient charity, and Robert Parker, a boy my age from school, smiled his peculiar smile at me, half-hope, half-sneer. The whole crowd was still and staring expectantly, greedily, not shuffling self-consciously as they would if Mrs. Halley had mistaken one of the pretty Hambrook sisters for Sarah. They watched to see what would happen next. They watched to gossip later.

Mrs. Halley smiled and held her hands as if she expected me to embrace her. She had the stupid, pitiful look of one not living in her body, and that made me want to slap her. My mother mistook my anger for sorrow and held me closer. I struggled away. My mother gave me a pleading look, and I stood more defiantly than before and stared directly into the faces of the grieving family because I knew this would bother them. Mrs. Kemp took Mrs. Halley’s arm and they stood nearer the grave. Mrs. Kemp caught my eye and looked away quickly; she began to cry. I felt remorse immediately and stopped staring. My mother whispered, “Stand straight!”

Mrs. Halley spoke very loudly, as if trying to get a message across a chasm. “Who are all these people?” she said.

“We’re at a funeral,” said Mrs. Kemp. “Sarah died. Your granddaughter. Sarah died.”

“Who are all these people?”

In the time it took to lower Sarah Kemp’s casket into the ground and fix the fact of death firmly in our minds, the ladies of the church had rearranged the pews along the walls of the church, put a long table in the middle aisle, and laid out a spread for those who’d worked up an appetite with their grieving. Everyone found a place in line for the food, and the line stretched out the door and into the graveyard. With their plates in their hands, my parents found a place to sit near the front of the church. I watched as several couples looked for seats, watched my mother smile hopefully at them, again and again, and watched her face fall when the couples turned and found spots at a crowded table rather than sit with my father. But my father seemed impervious to their rudeness. He kept his eyes on his plate and ate and ate. I don’t think my mother ate a thing. When the line of people filling their plates finally came to an end, all the tables but my parents’ were so full that people were mopping the sweat from their faces. The only
one not afraid to talk to my mother when my father was around was Mrs. Bell. She ventured over to their table, and my mother’s face lit up then, even for righteous, gloomy Mrs. Bell.

Well, I wouldn’t make friends with any of them. Not with Mrs. Bell’s silly daughter, Lily, not with that Parker boy, who tried, now and again, to catch my smile and got my hate stare instead. All of them, all the kids I knew from school, were sitting at one long table at the far end of the church wolfing down the lunch, laughing now and again even though one of their number had died, throwing the occasional snicker in my direction. My father’s unpopularity had spread over me and my mother but left Dan alone. Because Dan had been out of school for two years by then, and had spent that time working on the farm, he didn’t have to contend with the jeers of the kids at school. Even so, while I defended my father against the name-calling, Dan didn’t do anything of the kind. He carried his plate around from conversation to conversation, adding to my father’s misery by telling stories on him, about how my father brought porcupine home and tried to sell it as chicken; about how he forced Dennis to undo and rewind a haycock over and over, ten times, until Dennis had raised it to my father’s sense of perfection and wasted half the morning; about how my father still hoarded flour and sugar, coffee and tea, in the hole behind my parents’ marriage bed. That last one was a lie, and a dangerous story. It was my mother who stocked the hole behind the bed; that was her domain. And there were many who took those government posters in the store seriously.

Mrs. Bell sidled up closer to my mother, so close my mother moved away a little. Mrs. Bell was doing all the talking. My mother listened politely, nodding, smiling, glancing now and again at my father. My father ignored them both. When he got up to fill his plate for the second time, Mrs. Boulee went over to talk briefly to my mother. Mrs. Bell sat back in her chair and stared dimly at Mrs. Boulee as she approached, and when Mrs. Boulee and my mother spoke, Mrs. Bell looked away over the crowd. Mrs. Boulee kept an eye on my father and when he started back, she nodded at my mother and rejoined the women at her table. Mrs. Bell watched her leave and then sat forward again in her chair and took my mother’s hand. My father sat without looking once at either of them and concentrated on eating.

I stood near the door, eating alone behind Morley Boulee, the hero
of the day. He was a slim, tiny man who, though nearly fifty and creased around the eyes, looked no older from a distance and carried himself no differently than one of his wife’s graduating students. I guessed that was part of the town’s complaint against my father over the incident in the general store, that my father had picked on a man so much smaller than himself.

Mr. Boulee stood beside Robert Ferguson, the man with the property next to the schoolhouse, the dairyman who sold us the Jersey cows. Ferguson was a tall, knotty man with a thumb and index finger missing on his right hand who smelled of cigarettes. I began disliking him that afternoon. As my father got up to refill his plate for a third time, Ferguson nodded and glared at him.

“Look at that hoarder there, stuffing his face,” he said. “Never seen a man eat so much. Can’t believe I once liked the man.”

Morley Boulee shook his head and nodded back over his shoulder in my direction. Ferguson glanced briefly at me, and, red-faced, turned his back further. I drilled hate holes into the both of them. Morley Boulee talked with a loud voice after that, so I couldn’t mistake their talk for whispers about my father. He talked about the stormy summer headed for us, the Dominion Day picnic coming up, to be held, as always, at Boulee’s Farm. He pointed out Mrs. Roddy, a tall, severe, elderly woman who still wore the long black dresses of her Victorian girlhood. Years of denying herself the love of a good friendship had left her without appetites of any kind; she was thin and righteous and mean and martyrly. She’d been widowed since the Great War and never took another husband.