The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Free Page B

deer did, on what they could find; they often ate off the stores of farmers’ hay. Several families on the reserve made their living by capturing the wild horses, fattening them up, breaking them, and selling them.
    “I think it’s a foolish idea,” said Bertha Moses. “Once those horses are gone, then what?”
    “There’s all those people starving in Europe,” said my mother. “They must be fed.”
    “There’s people starving right here,” said Bertha Moses. She tapped the table with her finger. My mother said nothing and we spent a long silence listening to the crowing rooster, the cackling chickens, and the songs of many birds. The women shuffled and looked around and the room began to feel cramped. The woodstove became too hot, and my mother’s prize Hosier cupboard towered over the kitchen table and the women standing around it. I leaned against this cupboard because Bertha’s family had taken up every chair and stood around the room besides. No one else in the valley had anything like my mother’s cupboard. It had a built-in flour container with a sifter, a pull-out cutting board and shelf, a sugar bin, a porcelain counter, and drawers above and below for pots and tins and foodstuffs. The very top shelf was stocked with the remedies for illness: honey and horehound candy wrapped in cheesecloth and tucked in a Nabob tea tin, a can of hot dry mustard ready to mix with flour and water for the chest of whoever got the cough this year, likely all of us; a pile of life-preserving flannel with which to apply the mustard paste and goose grease; black currant jam to make tea for colds; brown sugar to sprinkle over hot coals and thenhold under boils, and cedar slivers, to break the infection; soda to mix with water, for stomach ailments.
    The silence stretched on, filled with the complaints of chickens. I played with the little bird on the lid of the sugar bowl on the counter. My mother’s best teaspoons were fastened on clips that ringed the bowl. Our everyday teaspoons were scattered over the white oilcloth on the table, leaving brown pools where the women of Bertha’s household had placed them after stirring their coffee.
    The girl with the bell necklace looked at me, then smiled at the floor. She drew circles on the floor with her bare feet. I grew shy and looked out the kitchen window at the woodshed and the blue lake of flowering flax. Beyond the flax, in the field of alfalfa, the three figures of my brother Dan, Dennis, and Filthy Billy labored away, shimmering in the heat. I strained to see my father and when I couldn’t I grew uneasy.
    I pushed myself away from the cupboard and filled a plate with the last of the oatcakes as my mother told the story of how my father tried to fool the hired help, Dennis and Filthy Billy, who were both Bertha’s grandsons. My father hired older Indian boys who ran away from the residential school. He said he was doing them a favor, but the truth of it was that almost all the young men in the valley, white or Indian, had enlisted and those who hadn’t had taken factory jobs in the cities. Now, with the war on, there was no shortage of jobs. The only men left were the native boys who hadn’t yet enlisted or the old bachelors who couldn’t be worked hard. Even before the war, my father hired Indian boys because they worked for cheap and didn’t talk back unless they got drunk. If they got drunk, my father fired them.
    “John brought home a porcupine yesterday,” my mother told Bertha. “He skinned it, cleaned it, and said, ‘It’s chicken.’ I said, ‘That’s not chicken.’ He said, ‘I said it’s chicken, so it’s chicken.’ I said, ‘Fine, it’s chicken,’ and cooked it as if it were chicken. Dennis and Filthy Billy come in for dinner, and John says, ‘Maudie cooked chicken for dinner.’ Everyone helps themselves, and then Dennis whispers, ‘Porcie,’ and Filthy Billy whispers, ‘Porcie.’ ”
    Everyone laughed because they knew what my father