The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Free

with porcupine quills and embroidery, strings and strings of brightly colored beads, and even now — out visiting — a pink apron filled withtobacco and papers and matches, bits of fabric, threads and beads, and a few dirty, crumpled dollar notes.
    Nevertheless Bertha and my mother had a good deal in common. My mother had driven an ambulance and nursed during the First World War, and, until my father’s jealous rages had flared up over the last year, she’d been called on by white farmers in the valley to nurse away simple ailments. Bertha was a midwife for women on the reserve and for white women too, farmwomen who lived in the valley. Bertha had known me before I’d known myself. She’d attended my mother at my birth, a potentially difficult birth because my mother was forty. Bertha wasn’t that much older, but the deference her daughters treated her with and the authority she carried in her walk made her seem much older. She had lost her status as a Treaty Indian at fourteen when she’d married an elderly white man named Watson who owned a farm next to the Turtle Creek Reserve. She had three daughters by him. After Watson died of simple old age and was buried in the reserve graveyard when Bertha wasn’t yet twenty, Bertha married an Indian man who’d taken the white name Moses. They lived on the Watson property, Bertha’s property. A year into their marriage, Moses shot himself accidentally as he climbed over a fence with a gun, and died a half mile from home of blood loss, but not before he’d fathered a son Bertha would name Henry.
    Now Henry, too, was dead and Bertha had no husband and no son. Her house was a house of women. One of the daughters’ daughters was pregnant, another had webbed fingers, and some of the younger girls had blue or green eyes inherited from white fathers, farmhands likely. Each girl’s hair was black, oiled with bear grease so it shone, and tied back with all manner of barrettes and ribbons. The daughter with webbed fingers wore a bolero jacket and skirt skillfully fashioned from an edge-to-edge coat. The sewing was Bertha’s handiwork; with the war on and fabric hard to come by, Bertha was making a good living remaking new ladies’ garments from old. Someone wore violet-scented talc. One of the daughters’ daughters wore boys’ jeans and a western shirt that stretched a little at the buttons across her breasts. She was my age and she wore lipstick and a necklace of bells strung together. I coveted that necklace. She saw me looking at it and jingled it, and the room filled with tinkling notes that lit up everyone’s face. She lifted thenecklace a little so light reflected from the bells onto my own face. I squinted and grinned at her. The room grew womanly.
    “He any better?” said Bertha.
    “No,” said my mother.
    They were speaking of my father, of course, as they always did now, on these visits. A head injury from the Great War had left my father sensitive to sound and bright lights and he had sometimes been irritable and demanding. But I had never really feared him, not until the bear attacked the camp the spring before. Now I feared his temper in public. I feared finding myself alone with him.
    In the spring of 1941, not a month after the bear attacked our camp, my father had waltzed into the general store and punched Morley Boulee, the teacher’s husband. The Fergusons, who had sold us our dairy herd, were close friends of Morley Boulee, and a week after my father hit Boulee, Mrs. Ferguson had caught me on the street in front of Bouchard and Belcham’s general store and told me I had no right to hold my head up and walk that cocky, not with a father like the one I had, no right at all. I had watched her lips telling me what my father had done. She had one crooked bottom tooth, so tea-stained that it appeared, at first, to be gold.
    “All Morley Boulee did was tip his hat to your mother, tip his hat! A neighborly thing! And your father yelled at your mother, right