The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Free Page A

there, in the store, how she’d been flirting with him, seeing him on the sly. Morley Boulee, we’re talking here! What would he want with a farmer’s wife when he’s got the schoolteacher? Morley stepped in, to defend your mother. He had to! And your father knocked him over, sent the stocking rack flying! What kind of father you got? Don’t you hold your head up to me! Hoarders!”
    When my father knocked over Morley Boulee and the rack of silk stockings, he’d knocked over our good name. In the year that followed, things went from bad to worse. Now the only visitors we got were the gloomy Mrs. Bell and Bertha Moses and her family.
    My mother poured Bertha and herself more coffee and handed me the pot. I went around to the other women to top up their cups.
    “I’ve been thinking maybe his blood’s weak,” said Bertha. “That’s why he eats so much.”
    “Oh, I don’t think he’s anemic,” said my mother. “That would makehim tired, not like he is. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t sleep through the night anymore. He only takes naps. I don’t know what it is. For all the food he eats he doesn’t gain weight.”
    My mother stood and offered the plate of cakes around. The daughter with the webbed fingers held her hand up to the window and watched the strange shadow it left on the floor. She saw me staring and tucked both hands into the pockets of her dress.
    Bertha contemplated her coffee cup for a time and then asked my mother, “You going to the Kemp girl’s funeral?”
    “I guess the whole town will be going. A terrible thing. It’s no way for a girl to die.”
    Bertha Moses nodded slowly for a long time. Fear slipped up on me briefly, even though I knew Morley Boulee, the man my father had punched, had shot the crazy bear who was supposed to have done the killing.
    The girl with the necklace put her hand to her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but she kept quiet. I took the coffeepot around again, then set it back down on the stove and watched through the window as the Swede and his team of horses thundered down Blood Road. He was near the swamps at the far end of the fields and was heading towards us, chased by a red tide of dust. The Swede, a man named Johansson, drove a fine buggy with a fold-down top and a curved front pulled by a smart sorrel he called Old Mare, though she had wings on her hooves. Johansson was a short round-faced man with a red complexion, a white bristly mustache, and eyes so blue you had to look at him twice to believe the color. He kept the fact that he was almost completely bald under a wide-brimmed, greasy felt hat that he almost never took off, even in my mother’s presence. The Swede had a son named Jack, a skinny, skittish man with his father’s brilliant blue eyes. Everyone knew Jack was half-crazy, bushed. Jack had taken to living all by himself in a squatter’s cabin on Bald Mountain after an argument with his father and some time later the Indians began calling him Coyote Jack. He had a way of sliding in and out of shadows, disappearing and reappearing just like a coyote.
    The conversation stopped for a moment as everyone in the kitchen listened to the Swede and his horses thunder by.
    “The government’s talking about rounding up the wild horses,” saidBertha. “They’re going to slaughter them, send the meat over to the war. They’re talking about giving farmers on the reserve money to round them up.”
    On weekends when I wasn’t working on the farm, and sometimes after school, I hiked up to the top of Bald Mountain, where Blood Road pushed up into a blind hill before washing down into the next valley, and watched the horses graze the flat lands of the reserve below. The plain was named for them, Horse Meadows. Sometimes I clapped and the wind carried the sound down onto the plain. The wild horses took off in a group, swooping across the prairie exactly like a flock of birds taking off into the air. The horses belonged to no one and wintered as the