The Cure for Death by Lightning

T
HE CURE
for death by lightning was handwritten in thick, messy blue ink in my mother’s scrapbook, under the recipe for my father’s favorite oatcakes:

Beside this, some time later, my mother had written
Ha! Ha!
in black ink. The same page contained a tortoiseshell butterfly, pressed flat beside the cure for death so the wings left smudges of burgundy and blue on the back of the previous page. The bottom of one wing was torn away. My mother said that she’d caught the butterfly and pressed it between the pages of her scrapbook because of this torn wing. “Wonderful,” she told me. “That it could still fly. It’s a reminder to keep going.”

The scrapbook sat on my mother’s rocking chair next to the black kitchen stove and was hers just as the rocking chair was hers. I didn’t sit in her chair or touch her scrapbook, at least not when she was in the room. My mother knew where to find a particular recipe or remedy by the page it was written on, because every page was different. She compiled the scrapbook during the Depression and into the Second World War when paper was at first expensive and then impossible to buy, so she copied her recipes on the backs of letters, scraps of wallpaper, bags, and brown wrapping, and on paper she made herself from
the pulp of vegetables and flowers. The cover was red, one of the few bits of red my father allowed in the house, cut from the cardboard of a box of crackers. The book was swollen from years of entries. Pages were dusted with flour, stained with spots of tea, and warped from moisture. Each page had its own scent: almond extract or vanilla, butter or flour, the petals of the rose it was made from, or my mother’s perfume, Lily of the Valley.

My mother didn’t keep the book as a diary. If she kept a diary at all, I never found it. But she wrote brief thoughts along the margins or at the bottom of a page, as footnotes to the recipes and remedies, the cartoons and clippings — footnotes to the events of the day. She was always adding a new page, and it didn’t matter how many times I stole the scrapbook from her chair and pilfered my few minutes with it, there was always some new entry or something I’d missed.

I still have my mother’s scrapbook. It sits inside the trunk that was her hope chest. I sometimes take out the scrapbook and sit with it at my kitchen table, by the stove that is electric and white. Even now I find new entries in the scrapbook, things I’ve never seen before, as if my mother still sits each morning before I wake and copies a recipe, or adds a new page made from the pulp of scarlet flax.

My name is Beth Weeks. My story takes place in the midst of the Second World War, the year I turned fifteen, the year the world fell apart and began to come together again. Much of it will be hard to believe, I know. But the evidence for everything I’m about to tell you is there, in the pages of my mother’s scrapbook, in the clippings describing the bear attacks and the Swede’s barn fire and the children gone missing on the reserve, in the recipe for pound cake I made the night they took my father away, and in the funeral notices of my classmate Sarah Kemp and the others. The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen, or that it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I remember them all.

W
HEN IT CAME LOOKING
for me I was in the hollow stump by Turtle Creek at the spot where the deep pool was hidden by low hanging bushes, where the fishing was the very best and only my brother and I figured we knew of it. Now, in spring, the stump blossomed purple and yellow violets so profusely that it became something holy and worth pondering. Come fall, the stump was flagrantly, shamefully red in a coat of dying leaves from the surrounding trees. This was my stump, where I stored my few illicit treasures: the lipstick my mother smuggled home for me in a bag of rice; the scrap of red velvet that Bertha Moses tucked in my pocket as she left the house on the day of my fifteenth birthday; the violet perfume I received as my gift at the Christmas pageant the year before; and the bottle of clear nail polish my father threw into the manure pile after he caught me using it behind the house, the bottle I had salvaged, washed, and spirited away.

I was in there, hiding, my knees up to my nose, listening to the sound of it rushing, crashing through the bush, coming for me. A cobweb stretched over my face, an ant roamed over the valleys in my skirt, spiders invaded my hair, and an itch started on my nose and traveled to my arm, but I stayed still. I closed my eyes and willed it away, and after a while the sound of crashing did move off. It became nothing but wind playing tricks on me, a deer I scared up with my own fear.

I waited, listening, until my leg cramped up, then climbed from the stump and wiped off my skirt. The weight of my body had pushed the
perfume bottle and lipstick into the earth. I brushed off the scrap of velvet, smoothed it across my face, and rubbed it down the inside of my bare leg. I imagined I was touched that way, by a city man — no farmer’s hands were like velvet — a man who worked in an office with clean papers, whose polished heels clicked along the pavement, and whose hands never dug into manure.

I opened the bottle of violets and sniffed them, took off my rubber boots and socks and touched a little perfume to the cracked soles of my feet where my father wouldn’t have a chance to smell anything sweet after I’d done with chores. I rolled up my sleeves and applied a blush of red lipstick to the inside crook of my arm, then kissed those secret lips. I leaned against the stump with my skirt hiked up and my bare legs open like a whore and wished for nylons and red shoes, a pretty dress for dancing. Once the weather warmed up I went around barelegged most of the time. Now, with the war on, silk, like all good things, was rationed and wouldn’t be wasted on a girl my age. Nylons were expensive and hard to get. Even my mother didn’t own a pair of nylons. I looked out over the creek at the sun shining off the sprouting leaves and breathed in the too sweet scent of my feet. The perfume had gone a little bad, maybe, from all that time in the stump, but it was my perfume on my feet and my father didn’t know a thing about it. After a while I hid away my little bottles and the red velvet as soft as a city man’s skin, washed the perfume from my hands in the water, and followed the creek home.