The Cure for Death by Lightning (35 page)

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Authors: Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #General

BOOK: The Cure for Death by Lightning
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“Well, it’s no skin off my back,” he said.

“Does it seem fair to you?” said my mother.

“ ’Spose. Long as you’re paying for it. But it’s a bad time of year for digging fence posts.”

“We have to do it quickly before the ground frost sets in. There’s not much work left on the fence. Dennis and Billy can help you with that this week. Then they can start work on your barn. My only concern is that the settlement seems fair to you, so there’s no resentment, so we can put this to rest once and for all.”

“No, that seems fair,” said the Swede.

I lingered over the table, placing the coffeepot just so, adding cream to a jug almost full, checking that sugar bowl with the bird on its lid. My mother gave me a stern look and nodded at the kitchen, and so I went back to leaning against the cupboard. I sulked and licked the whipped cream from the inside of a gingersnap cone, listening to the Swede’s rumble and my mother’s whisper.

My mother’s scrapbook was still open on the table. I stepped quietly forward and, very carefully, so the stiff paper wouldn’t make a sound, I turned the pages to the newspaper story about the Swede’s barn fire. There was nothing in the story about my father, no hint that the fire was a case of arson. My mother shifted in her chair in the next room so I let the scrapbook fall back to the gingersnap recipe and went over to the window to stare out at the Swede’s dog sniffing around the rock pile that marked the homesteader’s graves. All at once the dog sat up unsteadily on his back haunches with his front paws in the air, as if begging for food. He went on sitting like that, staring at nothing, pawing the air in front of him, begging. Then the birds began to land on the roof and, sure enough, Bertha Moses and several of her daughters and granddaughters were fluttering and glittering down the driveway, followed by a huge black flock of crows. A few blue-winged jays scolded them from a tree nearby. Nora trailed behind them all. She saw me in the window and waved.

I called out, “They’re here!” and the conversation between my mother and the Swede broke off in a scraping of chairs. The Swede walked into the kitchen followed by my mother.

“It’s just between you and me, then,” Mum was saying, and the Swede nodded his big-brimmed hat at her.

She picked up the scrapbook from the table and placed it on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. “Are you staying?” she asked. The Swede shrugged and nodded again. “Then take off that hat. There are ladies present.”

The Swede went pink, took off the hat, and hung it over the head of his cane as Bertha Moses and her family trooped through the door. One by one, they tweaked and teased the Swede as they came in. Nora found her way through the crunch of bodies and pushed up next to me. She took my hand behind her back. The daughter who had come to our house pregnant in the spring came this time carrying a baby wrapped in flannel. She unwrapped the child for my mother as she came through the door. The baby had purple-red patches across both cheeks, birthmarks, and a thick head of black hair. She looked like a puppy.

“Oh!” said my mother, and then, to cover her alarm at the child’s appearance, she said, “A girl?”

The daughter nodded.

Bertha patted my mother’s arm. “Don’t worry. It will pass,” she said. “All my girls were born with those marks, some on their faces, some on their backs, some on their hands. They fade away and then they become beauties, eh?”

“Such black hair!” said my mother. “Well, come in, come in.”

Bertha sat at the head of the table, in the place my father usually sat, and her daughters and granddaughters all found places to stand or lean against. The woman with the baby took over my mother’s rocking chair.

I put out the big plate of gingersnap cones filled with cream. The women were shy about reaching for the treats so I had to take the plate around and offer one to each of them.

“It’s been a long time,” said my mother.

“Too long, eh?” said Bertha. “Haven’t seen you all summer.”

“How have you been?”

“It’s been a tough year,” said Bertha. “Too many things going on. I’m getting old.”

“The Lord doesn’t give us more than we can bear,” said my mother.

Bertha raised her eyebrows and looked up over her shoulder at Nora’s mother. The Swede cleared his throat.

“How’s John?” said Bertha.

“He’s fine.” My mother turned her back on the Swede and the women and put the pot back on the stove. “He’s got a job at the mill. He’s living up there, in the camp. He’ll be there ’til spring.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” said Bertha. “I know where he is. It’s all right, Maudie.”

“I’m not lying. He’s at the mill.”

“There’s no shame in it,” said Bertha. “That place will keep him from making more trouble.”

My mother said nothing to that. She pressed her lips together and started making hot chocolate in a big aluminum pot. The Swede put his hat on. Bertha went on sitting like a queen at the head of the table, in my father’s place, with her arms stretched out before her and both hands palm down on the table. She looked grim. Nobody said anything for a long time.

Finally the Swede stood and made for the door. He said, “Well, I’ll be going then,” but didn’t wait for the chorus of goodbyes from my mother and Bertha and the other women.

The house had grown dark, and I lit the lamps. Nora grinned at me and played with her necklace so the room filled with bells as the daughters and granddaughters murmured among themselves.

Billy stuck his head in the door and swore at us all.

“Billy boy!” said Bertha. “My grandson!”

Billy grinned at her but didn’t say anything to any of us. The swearing filled his mouth. But he held open the door and nodded at the fire burning over by his cabin.

“Billy and Dennis have a bonfire going for us tonight,” said my mother.

“Ah!” said Bertha. “Got to have a fire to chase away the dead tonight, eh?”

All the women put their coats on and made their way out the door. I took my father’s gun down off the rack and filled my pockets with shells. Billy carried the kettle of hot chocolate and we all made our way over to the hired hands’ cabin, crunching over the frost-crusted mud of the fields.

As we came to the cabin, it was obvious that Dennis was drunker than before. He leapt crazily, clumsily, in a circle around the fire, tripping and righting himself, singing out and stopping to drink from the bottle in his hand. Billy was as sober as he ever was. He fed the fire and teased up the flames. We all found logs to sit on, or places to stand. Bertha and my mother sat together on a log. Nora and I sat side by side on two stumps. Dennis stumbled by us, leering, so close we had to move our feet out of his way.

The daughter with the webbed fingers and the one with the dog-baby exchanged a look. The one with the webbed fingers shook her head in disgust and nodded at Dennis. “Coyote’s come took him,” she said. “Stupid man, shouldn’t have got drunk, not now. He knows better too.”

“What’s all that about?” I whispered to Nora.

Bertha overheard me, and said, “Coyote goes for the weak ones, just like the coyotes you get in your traps. Booze makes you weak. So does a knock on the head.” She gave her forehead a light tap with her fist. “So does too much time alone in the bush. Anything like that, what makes you crazy, that makes it easy for Coyote to come in and take you over. Then he makes you do things, stupid things. Like this silly moose.”

She pointed at Dennis as he danced around the fire with his bottle. Long shadows stretched out behind him, distorted monsters against the trees. He tripped over a log and went sprawling. The bottle leapt from his hand and crashed against the side of the cabin. Nora laughed, but the daughter with the baby and the one with the webbed fingers shook their heads and stared angrily at Dennis as he crawled around on his belly like a lizard.

“Look at him!” said Bertha. “That’s what Coyote does. He’ll make you do any nutty thing.”

Bertha looked around at her daughters and gave a little wave. “But nobody wants to hear that,” she said. “The priest comes and tells me to quit telling those stories, that they’re no good, they’re scaring people. Then the old men on the reserve, they don’t like me talking either. They say I’m making fun of what’s sacred. Coyote’s like a god, eh? But the things Coyote does, well, he does us women no good.”

Nora’s mother shook her head at Bertha, and Bertha sat back and
sighed. Dennis had passed out as Bertha spoke and was now snoring loudly on his back. A little whirlwind spun a circle around him and then swept through us all, leaving a chill, before disappearing into the black field behind us. Filthy Billy sat up straight and very still, listening.

“Coyote,” he said, and as he said it a coyote howled and yipped close by, in the orchard where the sheep had bedded down for the night. I reached for my gun, and Billy and I jumped up and marched back across the frozen field towards the orchard pasture.

“What Granny (shit) says is true,” said Billy.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Coyote (fuck) goes for the weak ones. (Shit) He goes for Coyote Jack, your father. Now he’s out (shit) walking, trying on Dennis. (Fuck) You be careful when Coyote’s in Dennis.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Billy shrugged and took my hand and I let him. His hand was warm and mine was so cold. We didn’t say anything else until we reached the bedding ground. Once there, he gave my hand a squeeze and let it fall. The sheep were standing and wary. When they heard us approach, one called out and that started a chorus of bleating. The lead ewe ran to us with her bell jingling and sniffed my hands.

“None down,” said Billy.

“That’s something.”

Beyond the bedding ground we could see nothing but black. But there was a sound. Just wind through the trees at first, and then it became more, a rushing, air through a tunnel or water plunging. The sheep split and ran in two directions, opening up a path between them that ran straight for us. The sound became water rushing at us, deafening. I shot the gun off into the air twice because there was nothing to aim at. Billy held his ears against the rushing sound and slid to his knees.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Sweet Jesus.”

And the sound was on us, engulfing us, the rush of a huge heart beating. Billy fell over and went into convulsions. I dropped the gun, knelt beside him, held his head, and smoothed back his hair. There was nothing of Billy in his face. His body jerked like animal flesh, like the body of a calf or a chicken just slaughtered, just a bundle of unthinking
nerves. The rushing sound collapsed down on us and the convulsions stopped. I rocked him until he began to move his mouth and his eyes fluttered open. Almost immediately he began cursing loudly.

Nora crept out of the black and knelt beside us. “What’s the matter with him?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “One of his fits. He’s all right now.”

“We heard shots.”

“I thought I heard something in the bush.”

“Sounded like a big wind blew up,” said Nora.

“You heard it?”

“Yeah, just over this way. Didn’t touch us.”

Filthy Billy came back to himself slowly. A nervous tic started jumping under his eye. He put his hand over it and the tic stopped.

“You okay?” I said.

“(Shit) I’m all right.”

“Why don’t you and me go off someplace,” Nora said to me. “So many people around.”

She looked at Billy like he had no right to be there. I helped him up off the ground and wiped the dirt from his pant legs.

“Want to go back to the fire?” I said.

Billy nodded and swore, apologized, and swore again, and we made our way back to the fire with Nora trailing behind. When everyone at the campfire looked at us, I said, “It was nothing,” and the women turned back to my mother as I helped Billy sit on a log. I sat next to him and Nora sat on a stump off by herself. My mother was talking spirits.

“Anyway, we’d sit around a table and join hands,” she said. “My sisters and me, and try to contact the dead. That’s what we’d do for fun in the evenings. Everybody held seances. They were like parties, social things to do. There were books on how to do it. What to wear — you should wear white — and how to eat before — you must eat lightly — and how to hold your hands just so, palms against the table and hands spread out so just our little fingers were touching those of the person next to us. The room was dark except for one candle off in some corner. Sometimes we’d sing hymns, can you believe that? Singing hymns and trying to contact the dead. Oh! Mrs. Bell would be frantic if she knew I had done that!”

“Mrs. Bell!” said Bertha. “It doesn’t take much to get her flapping.”

“Did you see anything?” said Nora. “Were there ghosts?”

“There were raps under the table once,” said Mum. “And I thought I heard a voice. But it could have been my sisters playing a trick. I thought I saw a ghost in my room, at the foot of my bed when I was a girl, no older than Beth. I was sure of it then.”

I looked down at Billy’s boots. I wished my mother would quit talking about these things. I had heard all of it before and everyone knew my mother talked to the dead.

“And now?” said Bertha.

“I think so still. But memory, you can never be sure, can you? My mother always said she would contact me from the other side, and she did. She’s still with me. We talk. She advises me.”

“You’re a lucky woman to have your mother talking to you still,” said Bertha. “My mother only comes in my dreams.”

“Nothing lucky about that,” Nora’s mother said, in her man-voice. “Followed around by your dead mother. I couldn’t stand it. She should let go of you. Go off where she belongs.”

“Well, you would say that,” said Bertha. “The way you treat me, the way you treat your own daughter, you’re raising her like a white girl. No respect for children anymore. No respect for old people. Used to be people had children to help them, take care of them when they grew old. Now they have children because they got drunk and forgot themselves.”

Nora stared at her feet drawing circles in the dirt, smiling nervously.

“She’s my daughter, and I’ll raise her like I want,” said Nora’s mother.

“You’re doing no raising at all,” said Bertha. “You’re squashing her down.”

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