The Cure for Death by Lightning (41 page)

I turned and ran back into the church as Nora pulled away from Dennis and pulled her blouse closed. She called after me, “Beth, wait!”

But I wouldn’t wait for her. I found myself standing in the church with everything circling around me. Billy came up and took my arm. “You all right?” he asked.

“I’ve got to leave,” I said.

Nora was sitting on the outside steps and Dennis was standing with her when we came out, but I ignored them both and kept my back to them as we drove out of town. Once home, Billy let me alone and I ran straight for my room and closed the door. Some time later, Nora came after me, too quick, so quick I didn’t have time to guard myself. She banged on the window and started talking, though I refused to open it and turned my back on her.

“He said he could help me get out of here,” she called. “He’s talking about leaving again, joining up, or getting a factory job. I thought maybe we could go with him. Get away. He says he’s got some friends in Vancouver. He said he could get us some money.”

“You took money?” I said.

“Not yet.”

“He’s family.”

“He’s a cousin. Cousins marry.”

I opened the window and she climbed in. “You going to marry him?” I asked.

“No, no. I want us to go someplace, you and me. It seemed like the only way I could go someplace. He said he would help.”

“If you messed around with him.”

“If he and I was friends,” she said.

“Friends?” I said.

“Look at you! Stepping out with a mongoloid.”

My lightning arm struck out and slapped her square across the face. She breathed in sharp and held her cheek. I could see the water stinging her eyes. I looked down at the palm of my hand. It was red, I could see that, but it didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel anything. I slumped down onto the floor, holding the dead lightning arm. It slowly tingled back to life.

After a while, I said, “I’m sorry.”

“That was wrong. What I said. I didn’t mean that.”

“Billy’s not stupid,” I said. “He’s smarter about a lot of things than Dennis.”

“Tell me you wouldn’t have gone with Dennis if you had the chance.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me.”

I turned and looked her in the blue eye and then the green. “I wouldn’t,” I said.

She looked away quickly and leaned back against the wall. “You’re lying,” she said. “I saw you kiss him.”

“You watching me all the time?” I said.

“Some of the time.”

“You got no right.”

“You go walking in the bush and there’s lots of things watching,” she said. “You want privacy, stay home.”

“I have no privacy here either, and you know it.”

Nora grunted. We sat stone silent for a while longer and then the idea grabbed hold of me.

“You went after Dennis, didn’t you?” I said. “You went after him so I wouldn’t get him first. You were scared he and me would go out and you’d be out of the picture.”

“That’s crap!” she said.

“You knew he liked me. You were jealous.”

“I got nothing to be jealous about,” she said. “You’re just some girl. I don’t need you. I don’t need nobody. Plenty of boys after me.”

“Fine. Go off with Dennis. He’s nothing but a bum Indian. You neither. You fit together. Hope you’re very happy together.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

She crossed her arms, and when I found myself crossing mine, I held my hands in my lap instead. After a time, I said, “You like him better than me?”

“He smells like a goat,” she said. “They all smell like goats.”

“They all act like Goat,” I said. “Only got one thing in their heads.”

“Sometimes I only got one thing in my head,” she said.

I looked at her sideways. She smiled at me with her head down and
ran her finger along my leg. I shook my head. She put her hand back in her lap.

“I don’t want Dennis,” she said. “I want you and me to go away. Get factory jobs.”

“So how come you went with him?” I said.

“To get you back.”

“So you were jealous.”

“I wasn’t jealous.”

“Well, what are you?” I said.

“Mad.”

She harrumphed. I saw I’d crossed my arms just like her despite myself. I stood up. “I’ve got to do chores,” I said, and left the house. As I brought the cows into the barn, Dennis ran across the field from the cabin and caught up to me out of breath.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “Really.” When I kept on ignoring him, he said, “I thought you weren’t interested no more. I mean I never got a minute alone with you.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You don’t have to live here,” said Dennis. “There’s other places. Nora says you’re talking about leaving.”

“Nora told you that?”

“I’m leaving,” said Dennis. “I’ve been making plans. I’ve been saving money.”

“If you go, how are we going to run the farm?”

“I promised Granny I’d stick around ’til your father gets out of that place, and I will. I wouldn’t leave your mum like that. But we don’t have to be around when your dad gets home. We can get out of here, for good.”

“I have no money,” I said.

“We could work that out,” said Dennis. “We could be friends.”

“Friends! Just leave me alone!”

I thought I was marching back to the house, but I hit Blood Road before realizing where I was. I stood there breathing hard for a long time, until I saw Nora coming down the road from the reserve. So I waited on her. She carried the red carpetbag stuffed so full it wouldn’t close. When she saw me, she stopped and looked as if she were thinking of cutting off through the bush, but she didn’t. She kept on coming.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters.”

Nora pushed back the sleeves of her jacket and showed me both arms. She had cut herself yet again. Blood dripped onto the snow on the road.

“This place is going to kill me,” she said. “Nothing here but this.”

“You’re not leaving ’cause of me,” I said.

Nora shrugged. “Some of it’s you,” she said. “But mostly Mum’s gone crazy. I guess she seen a little of what you saw at the church.”

“Where you going to go?”

“Vancouver, maybe Calgary. I’ll see which train I can get on. I’ll find work there. I got a little money from my uncles.”

“They know about it?”

“They know they’ve got empty wallets,” said Nora.

“Jeez, Nora,” I said.

“You going to come with me?”

I shook my head and looked at the carpetbag she carried.

“What’re you staying here for?” she said. “Your father’s coming back. You know he is.”

“It’s home,” I said. “I don’t know anything else.”

“You’re never going to if you don’t step out.”

“I got things to do here first,” I said. “I’ll go when I’m ready. Anyway, Mum needs me now.”

Nora fingered the bell necklace.

“I got to go,” she said. “Before she sends someone out to find me.”

“You write?”

“Sure, I’ll write. I’ll find a place. Then maybe you can come.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She touched my hair and smoothed her hand down my face, then adjusted the bundle on her shoulder and started walking down the road. She turned once and waved. I couldn’t believe then that she wouldn’t be back the next day. Spots of blood dropped from her arm to the snow, creating a trail behind her, and when she was so far down the road I could no longer hear her bells, the Swede’s three-legged dog jumped from the bush and followed her.

Filthy Billy slid out from the bush around the swamp and pushed
through the snow to reach me. He put his hand on my shoulder and we watched together as Nora disappeared down Blood Road.

“She’ll get into some trouble,” said Billy.

“Maybe,” I said.

“She got money?”

“I don’t know.”

“You going to leave too?”

“No,” I said, and his grip on me got stronger.

S
PRING CAME
on Turtle Valley like a change of mind. One day, we were tugging rocks from their concave beds in the frozen field and throwing them on the stoneboat. The next, weeds were breaking through that same field, birds were challenging each other with their voices for nesting places, and the painted turtles were straining across Blood Road. When spring hit Turtle Valley you felt it in your step. A load was lifted off. Moving got easier. It was like an old body had sloughed off and left a new, sleeker skin, like those black lizards in our yard that shed themselves. That spring it hit Billy most of all. Once he shed his winter clothes, I don’t think I saw him once without a smile. Of course he wasn’t swearing anymore or scratching, but that had been gone for a while before spring hit. It was something else. His skin shone in the way leaves do after a good rain. It was as if he’d been remade, as if that old Billy had been sloughed off and he’d grown a new skin. His laughter made him a pleasure to be around, a joy to talk to. Then again, maybe it was I who had done the changing, like those lizards, got a fresh pair of eye skins to look through, so I could see him better. Whatever the case, he was different. Nobody, not even Dennis, called him Filthy anymore.

“Beautiful day,” said Billy.

Billy and I were cleaning out the chicken coop, loading a year’s worth of poop onto the stoneboat to spread it on the field. Dennis was already out harrowing the field. It seemed like only yesterday that we’d
been racing against the snow to bring in the flax. My clothes stank, Billy stank, the air stank of chicken manure, and I wasn’t thinking of it as a beautiful day until he’d said it, but when he did, I had to admit it was. We both leaned on our shovels in the middle of that stinking chicken coop and looked around us. Clear sky as high and purposeful as a cathedral. Grass poking up through the brown. Chickens were scattered all over the yard, chasing the black lizards. The robins were back, singing at us from the trees around the house, waiting for us to get out of the coop so they could get at the worms. One didn’t wait. He swooped down, pecked a worm out of the mess near our feet, and flitted up over the chicken wire, taking the worm with him.

A day like that, a day when the world was shedding its skin and growing a new one so fast you could see it happening, my mother had kept me busy with the jobs of making paper and cleaning the chicken coop, and without telling me what she was up to had gone into town with the cream to pick up my father. I didn’t know that then, as I cleaned the coop with Billy and admired the day, didn’t expect a thing.

“How about you beg off going to church with your mother Sunday,” said Billy. “You and me, we’ll pack a picnic, hike up over the mountain, see if we can’t find a wild horse yet.”

“And Dennis?” I said.

“He don’t need to know where we’re going,” he said.

I looked over at Billy. He wasn’t looking at me as he did his asking. He turned his back a little to me and watched the robins. He was wearing his denims, trousers and shirt, and he’d replaced the rattlesnake skin for a red bandana around the band of his hat. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbow, so I could see the tender skin at the crook of his arm.

“I’d like that,” I said. “I’ll make a pound cake.”

He grinned, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He watched the robin that had flown into the coop. It was sitting on the roof, still fighting to eat the worm.

“Hear your mum got a letter from Dan, eh?” said Billy. “Says he’s got an army placement on the coast.”

“I miss him,” I said. “I wish he’d come home. I wish he’d never left.”

“He’ll be just fine,” said Billy. “Just fine.”

“Wish he’d write me,” I said.

“He isn’t much of a writer,” said Billy. “Not like you. You know that.”

I grunted because when Dan had needed a letter written I had often done it for him, and because that spring I had acquired an urge to write everything down, set it down so I wouldn’t lose it. That morning, before cleaning the coop, I had made paper for my own scrapbook because my mother had refused to buy me one when I pleaded with her. My scrapbook wouldn’t be a collection of odds and ends as my mother’s was. It would be a book of words, my words. Billy was right about my mother’s scrapbook. Everyone needed a private place, a safe place in which to sort things out. I had come to understand that my mother didn’t put her words in her scrapbook because she had spoken them all to her dead mother, and would keep on speaking them to her. It was craziness, talking to a dead woman, but she spoke the words, got them out of her mouth, and that was what mattered. As Billy said, if you could only get things out of yourself — speak them, or write them down, or paste bits of them into a scrapbook — then you could sort things out. I only had Billy, now that Nora was gone, to speak my thoughts to. But there are some things you can’t tell the man who courts you, just as there were some things I could never let Nora know. Nora hadn’t written. Bertha hadn’t heard from her and never would. She had disappeared as surely as if she had stepped off the earth. Perhaps she had. Whatever the case, now that she was gone, I was determined to put my words down on paper, so I would never gabble to a dead woman as my mother did.

So I made my own scrapbook. My mother had written out instructions on how to make paper in her scrapbook, on a sample of paper she made from old letters and rose petals. I needed a screen (my mother used an old picture frame with wire mesh stretched across it and nailed in place), couching cloths (squares of cotton a foot or more across), and something to make the paper pulp with, and in. My mother made paper from anything with a lot of fiber in it — potato plants, corn husks, flowers, bits of fabric. But most often she remade new paper out of old, from salvaged wrapping, newspapers, letters, and catalogues, as I had that morning, before I cleaned out the chicken coop with Billy.