The Cure for Death by Lightning (38 page)

“Billy thinks I got Coyote following me,” I said.

“Coyotes will follow anything,” she said. “They’re as curious as dogs.”

“No, he means Coyote, that spirit thing your granny talks about.”

“Granny’s full of stories,” she said.

“I know, I know.”

“He’s got you scared, eh?”

“Something’s been following me. I keep trying to tell you. All summer and now too. When I set traps, something’s in the bush.”

“Old Coyote Jack spying on a pretty girl,” she said.

“There’s something else,” I said. “I hear this wind, and then there’s something there, something I can’t see. I don’t know. Billy says it’s Coyote looking for a bride. He says Coyote killed Sarah Kemp. He took her for his bride and then killed her.”

“You’re listening to some mongoloid’s stories?” she said.

“Billy’s not a mongoloid. He’s as smart as you and me, and a lot nicer than you.”

Nora shifted herself closer to the fire and went sullen for a time. Then she seemed to brighten.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe you do have Coyote following. Remember he’s a shape-shifter. Takes any form he wants. Takes your body over too, if he wants. Mum says he’s like the Devil.”

She laughed when she saw the fear in my face, then she touched my face and kissed me. There was scuffing and sniffing above us. We looked up and saw the pointed face of a coyote. Then he was gone.

Nora was delighted. “Look at that!” she said and laughed. “Coyote Jack. He’s spying on us, dirty old man.” She tried to scare me further. “There’s no place safe from a shape-shifter,” she said.

When I didn’t laugh, she took my hands. I pulled away from her, stood, and put on my clothes. Then I sat with my back against the dirt wall.

Nora became cranky over my fear. She stood and dressed.

“Where you going?” I said.

“Home,” she said.

I didn’t want to be left there alone, not with some coyote sniffing around. I kicked dirt over the fire as Nora headed up the ladder. When I finished and climbed up after her, Nora had already disappeared into the bush.

On the way home I took a trail that ended up in the orchard pasture, hoping to find newborn lambs steaming in the snow next to their mothers. When I reached the orchard, however, the sheep were wary. They were huddled in a clump near the barn, all except a ewe near the Swede’s fence line, who bleated and circled her lamb. The noise of my walking had just scared off a coyote. The tracks were there, and the coyote had torn off the jaw of the lamb. I wished I’d been a few moments later; the coyote would have finished the job. Instead I had to.

I picked up the lamb by its hind legs — one good knock on the head would kill it — and swung the lamb as hard as I could against a fence post, then lay its body gently on the snow. I took off my mitten and rubbed my face.

Coyote Jack, scruffy in his tattered blanket coat, stood at the edge of the bush. When I went to wave, as I would to any neighbor, Coyote Jack disappeared.

Another ewe had given birth to a lamb near the barn. The ewe turned and turned around a little bundle that steamed in the snow, nudging it with her nose, bleating in hope of some response. The afterbirth still dangled from the ewe’s rump, creating a circle of blood in the snow around the newborn lamb. The lamb had been left too long out in the snow. Its legs were straight and stiff like a dead thing but its heart still beat and breath rose from its little nose. I picked the lamb up from the snow and tucked its body against my own inside my jacket. The lamb shivered in waves against my chest. She was still for a moment, then shivered suddenly, convulsively, as if fear had just caught up with her. I hugged her close and ran with her through the slushy snow, back to the house. As I stepped from my boots, my mother brought a towel and took the lamb from me.

“She’s gone stiff,” I said. “A coyote got to another one.”

“I’ve brought worse round,” she said.

As I washed the blood from my hands, my mother opened the oven door, tested the heat with her hand, and then placed the lamb, wrapped in the towel, in the oven, and reached to the top of her cupboard for her bottle of medicinal rum. I squatted down next to the stove and slid my thumb into the side of the lamb’s mouth to open it while my mother placed a teaspoon of rum in the lamb’s mouth.

“That will fix what ails you,” she said.

The lamb swallowed fitfully and a stream of rum ran down the side of her mouth, dripping down to the oven floor, filling the kitchen with the sweet, warming scent. I stripped off my brother’s jacket and my blouse right in the kitchen, and slid on one of my mother’s sweaters, pulled up a chair, and warmed myself by the open oven door. The sweater smelled of my mother and the powder she wore, and combined with the light lamb smell and the warmth of the rum. My mother brought me a cup of tea and pulled up a chair next to me.

“Ah,” she said, and breathed deep. “Peaceful. There’s life for you, that little thing.”

I put my feet up on my mother’s cupboard counter and instead of complaining my mother followed suit.

“We’ll have to check in the night for lambs,” she said. “You go once again before bed, then I’ll wake in the night and have a go.”

“They’re all in the heifer pasture,” I said. “They’ve got snow if they’re thirsty.”

“Anything in the traps?” she said.

I blushed and turned my face to the window. “No,” I said.

“Odd,” she said. “Those coyotes are smart ones.”

The lamb lifted her head and stirred a little. “There you are,” said my mother. She knelt next to the stove and slipped her hand into the towel and rubbed the lamb’s tiny legs. “She’ll be just fine,” said my mother. “Warm her up and get her back to her mum. Get the first milk in her. That’s the best chance they have.”

The lamb bunted against my mother’s hand, as she would against the ewe’s teats. My mother sat back to drink her tea and the lamb took a few faltering steps around the open oven, looking for her, and fell back over onto the towel. There’s nothing as magic as a lamb just born. She’s tiny, as light as nothing, covered in wool of the tiniest curl, so tiny you can’t believe it’s a sheep you’re looking at, not even after years of lambing seasons. Look at this wee animated thing, suddenly up in the air as if all four legs were springs, then suddenly fallen, knees tucked under her, bunting and sniffing at every passing shadow, so trusting she’ll suck the finger of the man who will butcher her.

C
HRISTMAS
E
VE
, the moon was full; it cut in and out of the clouds, bruising them blue and yellow, teasing the stubble in the fields with silver light and then hiding again. I stood at the kitchen window, and my mother sat in the rocker, leafing through her scrapbook, hoping for something that would excite us out of loneliness and into some celebrating.

My heart wasn’t in it. I missed Dan and, though I still feared him, I missed my father. In past years we spent Christmas Eve dressing up and eating a late supper of pork pie, carrots, turnips, Hubbard squash, and Christmas cake for dessert. The Christmas before, my father had won the school’s turkey raffle and the day before the turkey was to be butchered, it escaped the chicken coop, where the chickens had tormented him, pecking everything that was red on him, and flew up to roost on the barn roof. We spent Christmas dinner eating an unlucky chicken and listening to the turkey gobble. Dan and my father never did get that turkey off the barn roof. Sometime Christmas night it flew off, and we never saw it again. Bertha said some of the hunters off the reserve had caught sight of it that winter and tried to bag it for supper, but then Bertha was always telling stories like that. Christmas Eve was a time for decorating the tree and, if my father was out doing a few extra chores for Christmas Day, for singing Christmas carols. If he was inside we didn’t sing; the sound of our voices, even my mother’s sweet soprano, made his head ache.

Now, with my brother soldiering and my father locked away with crazies and idiots, we didn’t have the strength for singing or eating. For supper we had sandwiches made from a ham cooked two days before, and a slice each of the Christmas cake my mother had made in late November and iced that night with almond icing. Dennis had taken off to spend the day at Bertha Moses’s, but Billy had eaten supper with us. He’d brought a Christmas tree with him, the bushiest he could find, a stout young pine that now leaned against the wall of the house outside on the porch. None of us spoke. When he was done eating, Billy had given us a little bow and walked over to Bertha Moses’s, leaving my mother rocking and me staring out the window. Without bodies to dampen the sound, the room felt hollow. Our voices bounced against the walls. My mother’s rocking echoed too, creating a creak that set me on edge.

“Snapdragons!” she said, scaring me half to death.

Snapdragons were nothing but raisins heated on a tin plate and then doused with whiskey or brandy and set on fire. When we were children, Dan and I had grabbed for the raisins through the blue flames, but this year my mother and I only turned down the lamps and watched the raisins burn. Loneliness had made us both tired, without appetite. Nevertheless, once the raisins burned to nothing and my mother tossed them onto the snow outside, she tried again at celebrating.

“The tree!” she said.

We brought the tree into the house and set it standing upright in a corner of the kitchen, with the aid of string nailed to the wall, in a box of sand and dirt. We decorated it with bits of fabric and shiny paper, wool, and the few glass balls we owned. When we were finished, my mother opened Aunt Lou’s Christmas box. It was smaller this year, on account of the rationing, but it held the usual assortment of English chocolates and cream-filled cookies and samples of handwork — crochet doilies and embroidered handkerchiefs. We filled stockings and hung them on each other’s bedposts.

After that we went to bed because neither of us could think of what else to do. I stared at the coyotes that Billy had skinned and my mother had stretched on frames like ironing boards and hung on my bedroom wall, their inside-out skins shining in the moonlight, their dark eyeholes watching me. Outside a coyote howled. When one coyote howls,
he sounds like many coyotes, a chorus in himself. He howls at the moon and jumps up when he howls, cries for the joy of it. His cries, and yipes fill the night. I became breathless in my terror of the coyotes. I waited for them to attack. It was a long time before I slept. The coyotes entered my dreams; they growled at me. Their weight made the floorboards groan. A darkness crossed the window and fell on my chest. When I cried out, the coyotes put their claws over my mouth. They lifted my nightgown. They rubbed their wet tails between my legs and over my belly. They told me to keep quiet. I hid my dream self in the darkest corner of my room and watched the shadows of the coyotes suck the breath from my body. When they had their fill, the shadows sighed deeply, came together, and took the form of my father. He lifted his weight from my body and left the room. At dawn I woke to the sound of my mother stoking the fire and Nora climbing through the window.

“It’s all right,” she whispered.

I relaxed and made room for her. She held me and stroked my back.

“What’re you doing here?” I said. “It’s Christmas morning, don’t you know?”

“Caught lots of coyotes, eh?” she said, looking at the coyote skins hanging on the walls.

“I hate them. They smell. They scare me half to death. They came into my dreams last night.”

Nora rocked me and sang quietly, and my spirit began to fill again. I woke as if from sleep, and was surprised to find her there, singing. When Nora finished the song, she combed my hair with her fingers, as my mother used to when I was a small child. I became aware of my mother, listening at the door. After a moment she moved away.

Nora fingered the fat Christmas stocking hanging from the end of my bed. She said, “Your mother loves you.”

I didn’t answer.

“You hear when your father’s coming back?”

“No,” I said. “Mum won’t talk about it. She tries to act like nobody knows where he is. Everybody knows.”

Nora said, “At least your mother doesn’t yell. My mother yells. Boy, does she yell.”

We laughed and Nora tickled me. I fought her and we fell from the
bed. Her necklace tinkled and flashed. She let me up and we sat against the bed. She took my hand.

“You have hair like Rita Hayworth,” she said.

We looked at each other for a long time, until my mother called out, “Breakfast!”

I got up quickly, ahead of Nora. She caught my ankle and made me trip. I grabbed the loop of her jeans as she ran to the door and the room filled with light from her bells. We tumbled into the kitchen red-faced and giggling. My mother gave me a look and we quieted down and sat like proper ladies while my mother poured us both tea and set a plate in front of us. When we were done eating, my mother and I emptied the contents of our stockings — oranges, candy, trinkets, and little books — onto the kitchen table.

“Aren’t you spending Christmas with your family?” said my mother.

“They’re coming here,” said Nora. “Granny, Mum, and everybody.”