The Cure for Death by Lightning (18 page)

“I helped make that,” said the girl.

“My mum used to quilt,” I told her. “Used to get the neighbor ladies over and set up the quilting frame in the parlor. I used to play under the quilt like it was a tent and pick up all the scraps and pretend to make quilts for my dolls. She hasn’t made a quilt for years.”

“No use quilting by yourself,” she said. “Come on.”

We entered the house smells of strong coffee, bacon, and women’s sweat and talc. More clothes were strung from wall to wall across the stove. The cabin was divided into several small rooms with partitions that didn’t quite reach the ceiling; clothes were draped over the spaces between the walls and the roof. A ladder by the stove led up to a square hole in the roof; each rung of the ladder held some garment drying. There were objects everywhere, hanging from nails or dangling from the ceiling or over chairs: half-finished baskets, bundles of grass, skeins of wool, bundles of fabric, a flour sack full of socks. There were several braided rag rugs on the floor. The door to the room behind the stove was open; the room contained a bed that filled almost the whole room and was covered in piles of fabric and clothing, books, magazines, boxes, brown bags, and sugar and flour sacks trailing fabric and bits of yarn. Bertha Moses slid past the bed and came out of the room, concentrating on threading a needle. She looked up and smiled at me.

“Beth!” she said. “Come sit down, sit down.”

She offered me one of the many chairs crowded around a table no bigger than the one we ate at in our kitchen. Several of Bertha’s daughters and granddaughters appeared from the rooms; the granddaughter with webbed fingers climbed down the decorated ladder in her stocking feet. They all took a chair and sat without saying anything, watching their hands and snatching looks at me. Bertha picked a piece of fabric from the table, the beginning of a red dress, and threw it on the
mattress under the window beside the door. The mattress was covered in a blanket made from strips of rabbit fur and on top of that were several worn copies of movie tabloids with the faces of movie stars on their covers. A few coyote pelts were nailed to one wall. Like many of the women on the reserve, Bertha and her daughters ran traplines over Bald Mountain and parts of the benchland. On the reserve the women trapped and the men hunted, although in Bertha’s house, as in our house, the women hunted too. The house had to be fed. One of the daughters opened the window, looked around outside, smiled, and sat down again.

“You watch that window,” said the girl with the necklace.

“How come?” I asked.

“Just watch.”

“Why aren’t you in school today?” said Bertha. I shrugged. “Well, you tell your mother and I won’t have to, eh? Nora, get me the coffee going, and there’s those cookies in the tin.”

The girl with the bell necklace jumped up and busied herself around the kitchen. Her name was Nora, then. I tried it out. “Nora showed me the old house in the ground,” I said. “She said you lived in it.”

“Sometimes,” said Bertha. “We moved around a lot more back then. Before, in my mother’s time, there were winter houses like that all over, and every year we rebuilt them. Now it’s all caving in. I think sometimes I should rebuild it, but what good is that? No one wants to live in the ground.”

“I’d live in the ground,” I said. “Sometimes I go into the root cellar. It feels safe.”

“My mother used to say the winter houses were safe like a mother’s hug,” said Bertha.

“I’d die from the smoke,” said Nora.

“There’s that too, isn’t there?” said Bertha. She took her tobacco and papers from her apron pocket and winked at me.

“Granny, ladies don’t smoke,” said Nora.

Bertha Moses pointed over at the pile of magazines on the bed. “Them movie stars smoke,” said Bertha.

“They aren’t ladies,” said Nora.

“You getting to sound more like your mother all the time,” said Bertha. She looked over at the woman who had pulled Nora away
from me when they last visited, the woman with a man’s voice. The woman looked away and unfolded her hands. For the first time I saw she had an extra little finger on her right hand. Behind her a window looked out over a ragged pasture with a few fat cows and skinny horses grazing on it. Over her head there were two clocks with two different times, neither of them anywhere near right. One clock was more than an hour ahead, the other more than an hour behind. A plaster of paris Christ on a crucifix hung between them.

“Your clocks don’t keep time,” I said.

“Hmm?” said Bertha Moses. I pointed at the clocks. Bertha and several of the daughters laughed. “Whites and your clocks,” said Bertha. “You’ve got a love affair going. Got to go. Got to be on time. Rush, rush.”

Nora came close to refill my cup with coffee and for the first time I smelled the talc on her, violets, cheap violets like my secret bottle of perfume. Under that the smell of liver, the smell of coming-on-sick time, warm though, not unpleasant.

Bertha reached across the table and patted my hand. “I think it’s just time runs different for you people.”

You people. I looked around at the women, and they stole quick shy looks at me that made me sit up straighter and start judging the room as if I were a stranger. I didn’t know what to say so I took sips from Bertha’s coffee. The coffee ran through me and got my hands shaking and my skin prickling. Nora brought out bread and cheese and bully beef and we ate. The women began talking quietly among themselves. Then there was a flap and hullabaloo and a chicken flew in the window. The women all laughed. I started to get up, to help catch the chicken, but Nora held my arm. We all watched the chicken nestle a place for herself among the magazines and rabbit fur on the mattress, cluck and croon and lay an egg. The women all laughed again and watched me watching the chicken. When the hen had done her business, she hopped back up onto the windowsill and flew off. Nora picked up the egg and gave it to me. It was warm and still a little wet.

“How’s that for service?” she said.

“Your daddy sent us some missionaries the other day, eh?” said Bertha. “They come to my door and want to make me listen and then they want handouts. Crazy people. I told them to go away, and then
they tell me I got to get born again. I tell them I had enough trouble getting born the first time.”

“You sent them away, all right,” said Nora’s mother. “With jam and bread and eggs.”

“No one leaves my house empty-handed,” said Bertha. “Speaking of which, you take that back with you.”

Bertha reached over to the crowded little table behind her and slid a jar of huckleberry jam across the table to me. Nora watched my cup and filled it with coffee as soon as it was half empty. She filled the cookie plate and placed more bread and cheese in front of me. She smiled at me under those strange two-woman eyes and watched for my every need, in the way my mother now served my father.

“I heard you go walking lots in the bush,” said Bertha.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes I go up to watch the wild horses.”

“You be careful running around in the bush.” said Bertha. “You’ll end up like that Kemp girl. She’s not the first to go like that. You got some kids buried on your place that went the same way.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Just be careful,” said Bertha. “And don’t go out after dark. You neither, Nora.”

“There’s nothing else to do,” I said. “There’s no place to go.”

“Listen to me, Beth,” said Bertha. “Those Christ people rule this village here, but Coyote owns the bush. He always has.”

“Coyote Jack, you mean?” I said, but she didn’t answer. She took up the red dress from the mattress and went back to her sewing. Nora patted my arm.

“Is the smoke getting too much?” Nora said. “Granny’s always got to have a cigarette in her mouth.”

She got up to open the window by the stove, and I put my hand up to stop her. “No, I’m fine,” I said.

“Cookies?” she said.

“I’m full,” I said. “They’re good. I’m just full.”

“I see John’s been at that Swede’s fence again,” said Bertha. I drank my coffee and didn’t look at her. “No good can come from that,” she said.

Nora and I sat in silence for a long time listening to the other women chat quietly about their neighbors, chores to be done, the sickness that
was coming over several of the children, the young child who had gone missing the day before, and their fears for their own children, how they weren’t letting them out past dark. I watched Bertha sew.

“I’d like a red dress like that,” I said. “I’d make it from velvet — like that piece you gave me — and I’d buy a pair of nylons and red shoes and I’d go dancing.”

“You want to be a stepper, eh?” said Bertha.

“No, not that,” I said. “Just to dress up, you know? Be someplace with people. We never go out anywhere, except church sometimes. Dad won’t let me wear anything red. Like it’s some kind of sin. He made Mum send back a coat she ordered for me once, just because it had red pockets. It was supposed to be my school coat.”

Bertha nodded. “When I was a girl I wasn’t allowed to wear red either,” she said. “You never knew who had a wild animal for his spirit. If somebody had a predator for a spirit, a bear or a coyote or a cougar, and he saw red, he might think it was blood and go crazy, eat you up. So no girl wore red. Now I wear red any chance I get.”

“Don’t talk about that,” said Nora’s mother.

“Why not?” said Bertha. “That was the way. I tell you something else. We had parties in those underground houses. Sometimes forty people in there, dancing and eating and having a good time. But it was sacred too, like going to church. When I was little, I saw a man dancing with a rope tied around his waist and four men pulling on each end of the rope. Those men pulled that man’s waist in two so his legs were dancing at one end of the winter house and his chest and head were dancing at the other. When the dance was over he was back in one piece again.”

“Nonsense,” said Nora’s mother.

“You talk worse nonsense than that,” said Bertha. “Baby born with no man fathering him. Man comes back to life after three days dead. Man walking on water.
That’s
nonsense. I was there. I saw that man dancing in two pieces.”

“There’s nothing here to go to,” said Nora. “No dances, nothing. You got to leave the valley to see anything at all. I’m going to leave, get out of here. I’m going to get a factory job. Live in Vancouver.”

Nora’s mother didn’t say anything to that, but she set her coffee cup down a little too hard and stared at Nora.

I became drowsy from lack of sleep, too much food, and the warmth of Bertha Moses’s house. My eyelids began to fall, and I jerked awake when Nora lightly touched my shoulder.

“I’ll walk you back,” she said.

We walked the way we came, back through the trees behind the church, and down the trail to Blood Road. I followed behind as the girl broke branches off the trees and placed them in the crooks of others. “What’re you doing?” I said. “With the branches.”

She shrugged. “It’s something my mother did, and my grandmother. Only they did it at night. My uncles won’t let me out at night. They watch so I don’t go. They’re afraid of Coyote Jack.”

“He’s just scared,” I said. “He’s a silly old man.”

“Not so old,” she said.

“Anyway, the sticks?”

“It’s a thing you do when you become a woman. It’s a kind of marking. You go out at night and you leave a trail.”

“For who?”

“Nobody, I guess. I don’t really know.” After a while she said, “I just like the walking. To get away, you know?”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m kind of old, I guess. I already had regular periods for a long time. But I didn’t hear about it ’til now. My grandmother never told me. She thought my mother told me, but my mother thought it was stupid. She said going out at night into the woods would only get a girl pregnant or eaten by a bear. She says almost everything my grandmother says is stupid. They fight a lot. My grandmother says the worst thing she ever done was let my mother go to that residential school. She said it poisoned everything for my mother. They told my mother everything was stupid. I’m never going to that school.”

I heard all this, but I was still vibrating from the word
period
. In my house no one talked about that. Sometimes Mrs. Bell complained about “coming on sick,” and my mother blushed at that and said nothing.

“Your mum’s got an extra finger,” I said.

“What about it?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“You ever see things?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Things in the bush.”

“Sometimes I think I’m being followed,” I said. “I never see it, exactly. But it leaves footprints. It’s got hands.”

“You got the invisible man following you?”

I didn’t answer.

After a while, Nora said, “You think you got that following you, you should talk to Granny. That’s Coyote.”

“Coyote Jack?”

“Kind of. Just talk to her, eh? She’s got stories. Spook you silly.”

After a time, she said, “I just seen a ghost.”

“Really?” I said.

“I got out past my uncles and went out walking and there was this sound and then a thing, like a light, like a blue light or white went up this tree, zoom, and went up into the sky and was gone, and I knew it was a ghost. That was the night Sarah Kemp got killed.”

“No,” I said.

“Really.”

“You know her?” I asked.

“Nope. Just to see her.”

“How did you know it was her ghost?”

“ ’Cause it was right near where they found her dead.”

“You were out there? You could’ve come across her dead there at night. You could’ve got killed.”

“Yep.” She smiled. “I still go out, you know, at night, when I get a chance.”

“You’re crazy,” I said, but I thought she was brave and she knew it.

“Sometime maybe I’ll come to your place at night,” she said.

“You be careful of my father,” I said.

“Always,” she said.

“I got hit by lightning.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes! Came at me on the ground. Got me in the arm, so I can’t hold nothing. Now I can’t milk very well. My arm goes numb. It takes off by itself.”