Lightning Song (24 page)

For a moment after the spiderweb-thin filament of light hit the raised baton, Leroy did not fall. He became transfixed, a bright image in stasis of a child marching in a single-member band to some private silent music, twirling in the crackling air. He was surrounded by a blue halo. A part of this he did remember, later on. He remembered what it sounded like. A high-pitched ringing filled his ears. He remembered what it smelled like. A light like a nuclear flash irradiated from his flesh, which was set on fire and quickly extinguished by the rain. He breathed the odor of his flesh's charring. It was not a good smell, not like barbecue, it was like rubber, like hair, like garbage. The lightning streaked straight through the baton, straight through his whole body, it found its way into the ground by his right heel, which blazed up. He wished he could remember that part, when he walked on a column of flame.

R
apidly now the days seemed to grow shorter and not so hot as they had been. Earlier and earlier in the afternoons the llamas' sweet cries came from the pasture to say good night to the sun. The summer storms decreased as well, were not so violent or so frequent as they had been for three months, and the wind was not so high. Autumn seemed a tamer season than the summer had been. The air grew crisp, fruit ripened on the trees, the summer crops finished up and the fall crops went in, turnips and potatoes and peanuts. Leroy came out of the hospital with bulky white bandages and many bottles of solution for treating his burns. Doctors kept a careful eye on him and decided no skin grafts were needed. Each night Elsie bathed the bad places and soaked and replaced his bandages and taught him to peel away the smelly dead skin. Some days there was pain and he took a pill from one of the
plastic bottles that came home from the hospital with him, and those days he took long naps. Pink new skin grew over the charred places on Leroy's hand and foot. Before he knew it, the bandages were off altogether, and this made Leroy happy. Leroy and Laurie started thinking about school starting. They described their teachers as Old Mrs. So and So, names they used to get themselves ready for all the time they'd have to spend away from home soon. Leroy was glad for school to start this year, but a little scared, too. It didn't seem possible that he was in the seventh grade already. He would be in a different building this year. He wouldn't get to see Laurie at recess. Uncle Harris was gone, no longer living in the attic, so Leroy was both happy and sad about that. Harris had moved out soon after the night when Leroy was struck by lightning. He seemed in a pretty big rush to go. You could tell he didn't want to have anything to do with Elsie for a while. Leroy knew about the things that had happened in the attic, it all came out, everybody knew. “Me and Hannah, we worked it out,” Leroy heard Uncle Harris telling his daddy. “Having a telephone made all the difference. I want to thank you for the exclusive use of that telephone, Donny, it truly made all the difference.” He said, “Actually, I'd have to leave anyway, Donny. You do understand my position here, don't you, I wouldn't want to seem ungrateful. It's like a nuthouse around here, you know. It's hard to get any rest. I don't mean to be critical, but Elsie is a little unbalanced, I'd say, you may have noticed, just a layman's
opinion, I'm no psychiatrist, as you well know.” Swami Don said he understood, he had no hard feelings, didn't hold a grudge, but yeah, it was probably better for Harris to leave now, it was time to go, but no, he didn't agree that there was anything wrong with Elsie, he just couldn't agree with Harris about that. Harris said, “I didn't mean a thing by those kisses, you know that.” Swami Don said, “I know.” They gave one another stiff hugs. There was no party when Harris left, Leroy hardly had a chance to say good-bye. Leroy was still a little sore at this time, he still had a low fever some days, so he didn't even get to walk out to the car with his uncle and watch him throw his carpetbag into the back and drive away. Harris did stop by Leroy's room, though, and fluffed up his pillows and mussed his hair and punched his arm a couple of times before he left. They said good-bye, that was about it. No big hugs or kisses. The leaves fell, and stalks of corn and sorghum and sugarcane turned golden brown in the fields. Wasps became noisy and sluggish in the eaves. The fireflies disappeared from the yard. The wind began to carry a chill.

Two more of the young llamas turned up dead in the pasture. This time it was pretty clear that Leroy's daddy had been mistaken when he said wild dogs make quick work, that the beasts didn't suffer. These had been run down, torn apart, anybody could tell these deaths took a while, they were not easy. Swami Don had never moved so slowly, had never seemed such a slow and clumsy beast himself. He wandered about the farm, aimless as a blind man. He was thinking,
maybe praying. Leroy knew what this meant. His daddy had to admit that something had to be done, the dogs were on the move again, fall was the worst time for wild dogs around a farm. The dogs would have to be killed, the pack thinned out at least, in order for the llamas to have a chance at survival. Swami Don would have to do the killing himself, there was no other way. Leroy watched him, he knew he was coming to this decision, it was painful to watch.

Leroy watched his daddy take the rifle down from its safe place in the closet. He watched him sit out on the porch with it across his knees for a long time. He looked like a man preparing to go to his own death instead of somebody ready to do the natural work of caring for livestock. That night after the moon was up, Swami Don left the porch and made his way through the pasture to a rise where he could survey the hillscape and shallow valleys. He did this after Leroy had already gone to bed, but Leroy knew, listened carefully and heard him leave the house, heard the sound of the screened door closing. Later he heard his daddy tell these things, in sadness. At midnight Swami Don spotted a single wild dog, one skinny white old thing, with one brown ear. He could see this much, even so far away, in the bright moonlight. The dog put its nose into the wind, which was in Swami Don's favor. He felt sorry for the dog. He wanted to feed it. Another dog stepped from the brake and stood with its fur riffling in the wind. Then other dogs came out, frisky and nervous in the autumn air. They prowled and pranced at the edge of the pasture.
Swami Don was nervous, he was licking his lips. The moon was high and white. The dogs grew calmer and began to bunch up. They scratched at fleas, licked a paw. Swami Don sat down with his back to a tree. He moved the Winchester with great care into position at his shoulder. The rifle was steadied on his knees. The leather thong hung down. The rifle began—that was how he told the story later—the rifle seemed to begin firing without him. Later he told everybody he couldn't remember beginning to pull the trigger. He shucked the lever of the carbine and fired again. He was surprised at his own agility, his swift recovery after each shot, firing, cocking, over and over, in his one-armed way. Brass casings leaped from the rifle and brushed his cheek as he fired. The crack of gunfire was startling in the nighttime wilderness. Two dogs fell and did not get up. The others scrambled, frantic, soundless, trying to become invisible in the moonlight, not even howling, not even those the bullets hit. Swami Don swung the barrel this way, that way, with amazing skill. Four dogs were dead. He stood up and walked until he had covered the distance from his ambush to the canebrake where the bloody dogs lay. Two of them lay there wounded, with their clear eyes open. Later Leroy's daddy said, “I put the rifle to each head and closed the eyes.” About a quarter of the pack, maybe more, Swami Don thought. Not bad, not bad shooting for a one-armed man, he said he found himself thinking. He dragged the dogs to the ravine and flung them in. When he
got back to the house, he didn't wash himself at the spigot where the children sometimes got a drink of water, he said it didn't seem right. He went to the old out-of-use cistern and dropped the zinc bucket to the bottom and drew it back, brimming, on the pulley and washed the blood away. He slipped back inside the house and got into his bed and said nothing at all to anyone that night, and maybe Leroy heard him in there crying, it was hard to tell.

The next day Leroy watched both his parents carefully. He watched his mama smooth flat the wrinkles in a comforter she had taken out of storage and put on the bed. He saw the cloth flatten beneath her hands. He watched as she turned the comforter back. She said, “I got too chilly last night.” The ribbon at the throat of her gown was untied.

He heard his daddy say, “Six of them.”

That was all for a while. She said, “I—well, I'm proud of you.”

He said, “Don't say that, Elsie, please.”

She said, “I am proud of you.”

He said, “All right, Elsie, all right.”

Leroy was sitting on the bed in his room trying to hear. They were quiet for a while. Leroy believed he could feel his daddy's shame through the walls.

He was surprised to hear his mama say, “I love you.”

Swami Don said, “No you don't, Elsie. It's all right. It's nobody's fault.”

She said, “Did they die right away? I mean, did they suffer?”

He said, “They were beautiful, Elsie. I've done something very wrong.”

She said, “You haven't. You have not. Don't say that. It was necessary. I'm proud of you.”

Leroy heard nothing else, he may have slept for a while. When he woke up a little later he heard them talking again.

His mama said, “Today I couldn't find the broom. I didn't really need it, I just didn't know where it was, and it was all I could think about.”

S
oon everybody noticed that there was no more lightning. One day they just realized they hadn't been struck for a while. They didn't remember exactly when this happened, the end of the lightning. For a time it was all they had thought of. After Leroy was struck they were alert to any threat of bad weather. At every cloud they cast a critical glance. Even when Elsie and Swami Don were not speaking to one another they would sometimes share a sentence or two after the weather report. They were not sure when they began to notice less. One day Elsie realized she had forgotten to watch the six-o'clock weather. She said, “Donald, I missed the weather. Are we expecting a storm?” “You know,” he said, “I forgot to watch. I got busy out in the barn.” Eventually they couldn't even have said when the last bad storm had passed through. The storms seemed far away, the summer seemed to have occurred in another life. Leroy's burns healed. On the surface there was little trace.

When Leroy felt like getting out again, he asked to go down to the New People's cottage for a visit. Both Elsie and Swami Don said no.

“Why not?”

Swami Don said, “Not right now.”

Laurie had been sticking close to Leroy since the lightning struck him. She said, “When?”

Elsie said, “We'll see. Give us a little more time.”

One day Laurie and Leroy stood on the edge of the field of sunflowers that the New Guy had planted. The flowers were six feet tall, large and yellow as tigers, with big sad faces and thick necks and sleepy drooping heads. The sunflowers faced the light at sunrise and then again at sunset. In this way they were like the llamas. Bumblebees the color of the flowers buzzed nearby, harmless and tuneful as tiny violins. Laurie and Leroy held sunflower seeds in their palms and small yellow birds flew near them, all around, pine siskins. The New Guy told them that if they did this each day, eventually the curious little creatures would eat from their hands.

School began. Laurie and Leroy walked together to the end of the lane and waited for the school bus. They sat together on the bus seat and jolted along toward town. They didn't say much. They watched out the window, the houses, a country store, the harvested fields. Acorns were everywhere underfoot. Some days they heard the high school marching band at practice and, if they were walking, they stopped for a while to listen. The band played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and
“Are You from Dixie?” and the national anthem. Afternoons, when the bus let them off and they had walked back up the graveled road, they stopped and visited for a while with the New People before walking the rest of the way to their own home. Leroy almost never took a costume from the wardrobe these days, though Laurie did. She always chose the same one, the angel's wings. She wore them around the house, or on walks, wherever they went. Sometimes the pine siskins would land on her wings and ride along. Leroy said, “You're the bird girl.”

Once when they were visiting, the New Guy was sitting in a big cracked-leather chair in the front room of the cottage reading a magazine. The children saw him sit up straight in his seat, as if startled. He began to read aloud from the magazine. Everyone listened. The story began with an account of hikers tramping through a woodland. The hikers were happy and tired, making jokes and enjoying the scenery, the gum trees, a red fox, a bubbling spring. They began to smell something, sweet smelling, they thought at first, then realized it wasn't sweet at all, it was putrid. They found the body of a boy, rotted away and blanketed with flies. There were bullet wounds in the boy's head. The body looked like a mummy encased in green glass there were so many flies. A dusty ruffle of feathers could be heard in the tree branches overhead. When the story was finished you knew that one of the hikers walked along, out of the woods, carrying a guilty secret. This hiker thought
the dead boy was beautiful and envied him and thought he'd like to die, too.

Leroy said, “That's not true, is it?”

The New Guy said, “No, it's not true.”

Laurie said, “It might be true.”

That night when Elsie tucked Laurie into bed, Leroy could hear what they were saying. Elsie said, “Did you have a nice visit with the New People?”

Laurie said, “Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

She said, “If I didn't have Leroy—I don't know—I would die.”