The Cure for Death by Lightning (19 page)

“You just want to get out of chores,” she said.

“You don’t go to school?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Don’t tell nobody. My mum’s scared somebody’s going to find out, but she’s scared of Granny too and Granny won’t let me go. I don’t want to go. I’m not real Indian anyhow. Now I’m too old and she can’t tell me to do nothing anyway.”

“I hate school,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t mind going, but not to the residential school. They made my mother crazy. They beat my uncle. They wouldn’t call him by his real name. They called him Samuel. What kind of place takes away your name?”

M
Y FATHER
was standing on the porch when I reached home. “Where in God’s name have you been?” he said. “You’ve been keeping your mother waiting. She goes and makes you dinner and you don’t have the decency to be here to eat it? Where the hell have you been?”

Something got a hold of me and I just walked right by my father without saying a word, just like Dan. I walked right by him and into the house. He watched me go inside and didn’t immediately follow. My mother was just putting dinner on the table. Everything was steaming hot. She smiled at me.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “How was school?”

My father stomped into the house and grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around. He slapped my face. “You answer me when I talk to you. Understand? Where the hell were you?”

I looked right at him and didn’t answer. He went to slap me again, but my mother said, “John!” He lowered his hand and sat at the table. Then my mother lied for me. “After school, Beth took some bread to Mrs. Slokum,” she said. “How was Mrs. Slokum?”

The Slokums were farmers with property next to the Boulees. We never went to visit them anymore.

“Fine,” I said and held up the jam Bertha had given me. “She gave me this jam.”

“Go wash up,” she said.

Filthy Billy was calm that night, too tired for nerves, likely. He sat through almost the whole meal without scratching and he ate with a
delicacy that didn’t fit with his whispered profanity. His face was sundark and unlike Dennis he’d taken the time to wash up and shave. He caught me looking at him and smiled shyly. Dan gave him a little nudge in the ribs and they exchanged a grin.

My father finished off the last of the water in his jug and reached for the teapot.

“I’m going to get that Swede,” said my father. “He went and dammed the creek off the north field. Dead fish floating everywhere, stinking up the water. It’s a good thing we got the well. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s going to pay for it, I can tell you that much.”

I looked sideways at Dan. He had a grin on his face that I wanted to slap off.

“You see what he’s done to the fence now?” he said. “Planted bramble all over. That’ll be a mess coming into my field.”

“You don’t know it was him that dammed the creek,” said my mother.

“I know.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I’ll get him all right. Don’t you worry.”

“Please don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

My father slammed down the cup he’d been drinking from, and that set Filthy Billy to scratching his face, his arm, his legs. “I don’t do anything stupid,” said my father.

“What did the homesteader children die of?” I asked.

The question was so out of place and so unexpected in the silence surrounding my father’s anger that everyone looked at me. My mother stopped clanking dishes and wiped her hands on her apron.

“What do you want to know that for?” she said.

I shrugged.

“I guess they died of the usual things. Whooping cough, measles, scurvy, fevers.”

Dennis shook his head.

“What does it matter what they died of?” said my father.

“Just wondering,” I said. “Bertha says they died like Sarah Kemp.”

“They did,” said Dennis. “Like I told you. They were picked off one by one by some crazy bear or cougar or something and found half eaten.”

“That’s nonsense,” said my father.

“No,” said Billy.

We all turned to him and watched him scratch. He looked at each of us and at the table and scratched harder. He stood up, scraped his chair loudly on the floor, and ran outside crying out a string of curses loud enough to wake the dead. Somewhere back of the sheep pasture, a coyote yipped.

A
FTER SUPPER
, as she washed and I dried the dishes in the kitchen, my mother said, “Where were you off to today after school, making me lie like that?”

“I went walking. Met up with Bertha’s granddaughter. The one with the bells. Her name is Nora. She took me to her place, Bertha’s place. They don’t have much. They live poor. A lot of the little kids are sick.”

“Well, that’s the way it is. They live their way. We live ours.”

“We don’t live so different,” I said. “Bertha’s house is nicer than ours. She’s got colors up all over. It’s so dark in here, I feel like I’m suffocating.”

“Do something with your room, then. Put up curtains.”

“I don’t have any material.”

“Use scraps. You got that blue dress to cut up.”

“Bertha thinks Dad is possessed, doesn’t she?”

“Bertha says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”

“There’s a child missing,” I said. “On the reserve.”

“Whose child?” asked my mother.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything more than that. Bertha’s daughters were talking about it.”

“Well, there’s always something going on there,” she said. “We don’t hear the half of it.”

I didn’t say anything to that. On impulse I flipped open the scrapbook lying on the kitchen table.

“Leave it!” said my mother.

“Okay, okay.” I slammed the scrapbook shut.

My mother took down the jar of marbles she kept in the cupboard and gently poured them into the big pot she used for canning. As the water got low, the marbles would begin to rattle and bang against the bottom of the pot, letting my mother know the pot would run dry and burn if she didn’t add more water. After a time, she said, “I didn’t mean to snap.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I’m canning peas tonight. You want to help?”

“Dan and me are shooting some targets.”

“Is that really necessary?”

I wiped my hands, took down my coat and gun, and left the kitchen without saying any more to my mother. Dan was standing by the implement shed, cleaning his gun. He was letting his beard grow a little, against my mother’s wishes. In his ragged field clothes, he looked like the hobo characters we used to dress up as at Halloween.

“Ready?” he said.

Together we walked through the orchard grass, following the Swede’s fence to Turtle Creek. The Swede’s goat stared at us from the other side of the fence, curling his lip and sniffing the air as he did when checking a nanny for heat. He stank.

“You really have to do that?” I asked, pointing at the damage Dan and my father had done to the Swede’s fence.

“Sometimes it’s just easier to give in, you know?” said Dan.

“I know,” I said.

“Anyway, it doesn’t hurt me none.”

We reached the creek, and I followed my brother across it, hopping from stone to stone.

“Where you been going in the evenings? You got some girl?”

“No girls,” he said. “Nothing’s going to tie me down here.”

“Where then?”

“Just walking. I shoot coyotes if I see them. Sometimes I spend some time with Dennis and Billy. I got to get away from here, you know?”

“I know,” I said.

He looked back at me and slowed his pace so I could catch up and walk beside him.

“You ever see anything weird?” I said. “Something following you?”

“No. Well, a cougar once. And every once in a while I see Coyote Jack out there. He’s pretty weird. Why, what’d you see?”

“I don’t know. Something. Most of the time I think I’m imagining it.”

We reached the clearing where we had set up tin cans as targets, and loaded our guns. Dan took a couple of shots at the cans, hitting both times. I fired once and missed, shot again and hit a can. We went together to set them upright again.

“You take that gun with you when you go out?” he asked.

“Sometimes. Most times.”

“Take it all the time,” he said. “Dennis and Billy have been telling me stories like maybe that bear Morley Boulee shot wasn’t what got Sarah Kemp. They say there’s this animal out there, like what I was telling you. A ghost that takes men over, a shape-shifter.”

“Yeah? You believe that?”

“No! I don’t know. Just take the gun, okay?”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“Dennis is sweet on you,” said Dan. “He took the job this summer because of you.” When I didn’t say anything to that, he said, “Billy likes you too, I think.”

“Billy!” I said and slapped him on the shoulder.

“What? You don’t want to go out with Billy? You’d make a sweet couple. Made for each other.”

He took a step back when I slapped him again and he pushed me to the ground. We horsed around for a while, then he sat on me and held down both my shoulders. I struggled to get up and then I panicked. He didn’t see my panic and went on holding me, giggling. I struggled to get my breath and my face went red.

“Stop!” I said. “Stop!”

“Say ‘uncle,’ ” he said. “Say it.”

“Uncle!” I said.

He rolled off me, still laughing. I was suddenly angry. I slapped him hard on the side of the head and picked up my gun and popped off the tin can targets one after the other, not missing even one.

“What was that all about?” he said, holding his head. But by then the anger had already faded, and I couldn’t remember what had caused it. I put my gun down and held my face and started to cry, hard.

“Hey,” said Dan. “Hey, there. What’s up?”

He took me by the shoulders and tried to get me to look at him. When I wouldn’t, he put his arm around me and held me until I stopped crying.

“You’re getting to be a good shot,” he said. “Eh? You’d outgun Filthy Billy, even. You two would make a good match.”

I hit him in the chest. He laughed, and got me laughing and crying at the same time. “I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“Why you think I’m still here? Can’t leave you with him. He’s crazy. You’ve got to think about leaving yourself. Find someplace to go. There’s lots of jobs now, in Vancouver, Calgary. They say all a girl’s got to do is walk up to the factory door and she’s got a job.”

I shrugged.

“I can’t stay here forever,” he said.

Dan set up the cans and shot them down. A coyote howled someplace off towards the reserve and that started all the dogs up and down the valley barking.

“You know what Billy says?” said Dan. “He says a coyote howling sounds like a whole bunch of them howling because a coyote howls from both ends.”

He passed wind and I laughed at that. Dan set the tin cans up once again and together we shot every single one of them down.

In the morning, instead of going to school, I slipped across the orchard, heading for the bush. Something dead was stinking up the orchard. I followed the smell and wasn’t surprised to come upon the body of the old white tom. There wasn’t much left to identify him except the white fur in the tail. Maggots were squirming all over him, so many moving so fast that they made a rustling sound. The maggots had taken over the head of the old tom and eaten it down to nothing. One tooth stuck out of the squirming mass.

I put my hand over my mouth and left following the orchard fence line bordering the Swede’s property, heading towards Turtle Creek. After the storm that took out all the flax crop and much of the corn, you’d have thought my father wouldn’t have had the time for replanting and messing around with the Swede’s fence too. But he had found time for both, and more, because he stepped up the pace of dismantling the Swede’s lovely living fence. I hardly ever saw him at it, but
the evidence was there. The Swede’s fence along that property line was either lying on the ground as next winter’s firewood or was new growth wilting to nothing in the summer heat. There was only one precious chunk of that Swede’s fence left alive, down near where our cherry trees now held out hard green marbles of promise, and it was thriving. Wild rose crawled up and blossomed pink and fragrant all over the crooked and reaching trees that made up the fence. Honeysuckle and morning glory wound around everything, and the low morning sun shining through it cast a shadow of lace all over the pasture grass. Along one section of fence that my father had dismantled, the Swede had planted several thorny blackberry bushes. The bushes were drooping and would soon die, but they were still a huge tangled mess covered in delicate pink and white blossoms. I foolishly moved in to smell them. The prickly tendrils grabbed my socks and bound my skirt and when I pulled my skirt away, the bramble caught my blouse and tugged at my hair. I struggled, trying not to snag my clothing and only getting more entangled, and in the midst of it my lightning arm went dead again. I turned to stretch it and work out the tingling, and I saw a motion in the grass coming towards me, a splitting of the grass as if an animal or a man were running through it, but there was nothing there. Terrified, I pulled harder from the bramble, tearing my skirt. The swishing of grass filled up my ears and came at me faster than anything possible. Then a hand was on my shoulder.