The Cure for Death by Lightning, page 1
Praise for The Cure for Death by Lightning
“Those who go hunting for ‘the next Margaret Laurence’ or ‘the next Alice Munro’ might find themselves perusing Gail Anderson-Dargatz.… If Margaret Laurence were alive today, she’d be looking over her shoulder — not with worry, but anticipation. Anderson-Dargatz is the real thing.”
Calgary Herald
“A mysterious, engaging coming-of-age story.… A superb showcase for Anderson-Dargatz’s writing, an enticing blend of rich poetry, magic, and realism that bewitches all our senses.”
Times-Colonist (Victoria)
“Like lightning in the distance, Anderson-Dargatz’s novel signals a strong force on the literary horizon.”
Maclean’s
“A remarkable story.… It is a truly gifted writer who can relate complex emotions, relationships, and situations without rendering them chaotic.”
The Toronto Sun
“Unusual and stimulating.… Intriguing.… The dialogue is excellent, the characters well-drawn. The novel has real depth and integrity of voice. Its world is compelling, unusual, and emotionally haunting.”
The Vancouver Sun
“A lively and absorbing novel.”
Winnipeg Free Press
“An amazingly good read.… Anderson-Dargatz’s book is original and compelling.”
London Free Press
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1997
Copyright © 1996 Gail Anderson-Dargatz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1999. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 1998, and simultaneously in the United States by Houghton Mifflin, New York in 1996.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 1963–
The cure for death by lightning / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36388-6
I. Title.
PS8551.N3574C8 1997 C813 54 C95–932876–9
PR9199.3.A53C8 1997
v3.1
FOR FRANCES HICKLING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people offered encouragement, suggestions, and practical help as I wrote this book. I thank Jack Hodgins, Denise Bukowski, Floyd Anderson-Dargatz, Bill Chalmers, Allen Looy, and Dagmar Round. I especially thank Irene Anderson and Eric Anderson for answering my many questions, and the First Nations Canadians and pioneer women, including my own grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Humphrey, whose recipes and remedies inspired those found in this book.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
THE CURE for death by lightning was handwritten in thick, messy blue ink in my mother’s scrapbook, under the recipe for my father’s favorite oatcakes:
Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more.
Beside this, some time later, my mother had written Ha! Ha! in black ink. The same page contained a tortoiseshell butterfly, pressed flat beside the cure for death so the wings left smudges of burgundy and blue on the back of the previous page. The bottom of one wing was torn away. My mother said that she’d caught the butterfly and pressed it between the pages of her scrapbook because of this torn wing. “Wonderful,” she told me. “That it could still fly. It’s a reminder to keep going.”
The scrapbook sat on my mother’s rocking chair next to the black kitchen stove and was hers just as the rocking chair was hers. I didn’t sit in her chair or touch her scrapbook, at least not when she was in the room. My mother knew where to find a particular recipe or remedy by the page it was written on, because every page was different. She compiled the scrapbook during the Depression and into the Second World War when paper was at first expensive and then impossible to buy, so she copied her recipes on the backs of letters, scraps of wallpaper, bags, and brown wrapping, and on paper she made herself from the pulp of vegetables and flowers. The cover was red, one of the few bits of red my father allowed in the house, cut from the cardboard of a box of crackers. The book was swollen from years of entries. Pages were dusted with flour, stained with spots of tea, and warped from moisture. Each page had its own scent: almond extract or vanilla, butter or flour, the petals of the rose it was made from, or my mother’s perfume, Lily of the Valley.
My mother didn’t keep the book as a diary. If she kept a diary at all, I never found it. But she wrote brief thoughts along the margins or at the bottom of a page, as footnotes to the recipes and remedies, the cartoons and clippings — footnotes to the events of the day. She was always adding a new page, and it didn’t matter how many times I stole the scrapbook from her chair and pilfered my few minutes with it, there was always some new entry or something I’d missed.
I still have my mother’s scrapbook. It sits inside the trunk that was her hope chest. I sometimes take out the scrapbook and sit with it at my kitchen table, by the stove that is electric and white. Even now I find new entries in the scrapbook, things I’ve never seen before, as if my mother still sits each morning before I wake and copies a recipe, or adds a new page made from the pulp of scarlet flax.
My name is Beth Weeks. My story takes place in the midst of the Second World War, the year I turned fifteen, the year the world fell apart and began to come together again. Much of it will be hard to believe, I know. But the evidence for everything I’m about to tell you is there, in the pages of my mother’s scrapbook, in the clippings describing the bear attacks and the Swede’s barn fire and the children gone missing on the reserve, in the recipe for pound cake I made the night they took my father away, and in the funeral notices of my classmate Sarah Kemp and the others. The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen, or that it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I remember them all.
WHEN IT CAME LOOKING for me I was in the hollow stump by Turtle Creek at the spot where the deep pool was hidden by low hanging bushes, where the fishing was the very best and only my brother and I figured we knew of it. Now, in spring, the stump blossomed purple and yellow violets so profusely that it became something holy and worth pondering. Come fall, the stump was flagrantly, shamefully red in a coat of dying leaves from the surrounding trees. This was my stump, where I stored my few illicit treasures: the lipstick my mother smuggled home for me in a bag of rice; the scrap of red velvet that Bertha Moses tucked in my pocket as she left the house on the day of my fifteenth birthday; the violet perfume I received as my gift at the Christmas pageant the year before; and the bottle of clear nail polish my father threw into the manure pile after he caught me using it behind the house, the bottle I had salvaged, washed, and spirited away.
I was in there, hiding, my knees up to my nose, listening to the sound of it rushing, crashing through the bush, coming for me. A cobweb stretched over my face, an ant roamed over the valleys in my skirt, spiders invaded my hair, and an itch started on my nose and traveled to my arm, but I stayed still. I closed my eyes and willed it away, and after a while the sound of crashing did move off. It became nothing but wind playing tricks on me, a deer I scared up with my own fear.
I waited, listening, until my leg cramped up, then climbed from the stump and wiped off my skirt. The weight of my body had pushed the perfume bottle and lipstick into the earth. I brushed off the scrap of velvet, smoothed it across my face, and rubbed it down the inside of my bare leg. I imagined I was touched that way, by a city man — no farmer’s hands were like velvet — a man who worked in an office with clean papers, whose polished heels clic
I opened the bottle of violets and sniffed them, took off my rubber boots and socks and touched a little perfume to the cracked soles of my feet where my father wouldn’t have a chance to smell anything sweet after I’d done with chores. I rolled up my sleeves and applied a blush of red lipstick to the inside crook of my arm, then kissed those secret lips. I leaned against the stump with my skirt hiked up and my bare legs open like a whore and wished for nylons and red shoes, a pretty dress for dancing. Once the weather warmed up I went around barelegged most of the time. Now, with the war on, silk, like all good things, was rationed and wouldn’t be wasted on a girl my age. Nylons were expensive and hard to get. Even my mother didn’t own a pair of nylons. I looked out over the creek at the sun shining off the sprouting leaves and breathed in the too sweet scent of my feet. The perfume had gone a little bad, maybe, from all that time in the stump, but it was my perfume on my feet and my father didn’t know a thing about it. After a while I hid away my little bottles and the red velvet as soft as a city man’s skin, washed the perfume from my hands in the water, and followed the creek home.
Turtle Creek was a shallow, fast-moving stream, except for the pool at the hollow stump, and was filled with large smooth stones that I could skip across without getting my feet wet. Where it wound through our property, the stream was overhung with hemlock, alder, and pussy willow, and framed with watercress and forget-me-not. Violets and wild strawberries were slow-moving scavengers licking up everything dead along the creek shore: fallen trees, the mess of dead leaves turning to dirt, and the heap that, the summer before, had been a dead squirrel possessed by squirming white maggots.
I heard it again in the bush, where the path split from the creek and headed back to the farm. I held my breath and listened. It could be anything: a man like the ones my mother’s friend Mrs. Bell warned of, who would catch a girl in the bush and do unspeakable things to her. Or a bear gone crazy, like the bear that had killed Sarah Kemp just that week, or like the one that attacked our sheep camp in June of the year before.
It was after that bear attack that my father sold the sheep and went into dairy cows. We had spent the late spring and much of the summer living out of a tent on Adams Plateau or Queest Mountain, herding sheep from one grazing area to the next. We all slept together — my mother, father, Daniel, and myself — in a big stiff canvas tent, on bedrolls of canvas over balsam fir boughs. The tent, our clothes, and our hair were fragrant with balsam for the whole summer. The night the grizzly attacked our camp, the dogs woke us, and we left the tent together as a continuous black shadow. We were already dressed because on the mountain we slept in the clothes we spent our days in. Each of us, except my mother, had a gun in hand. It was a clear night with a quarter moon that reflected off the backs of the sheep.
The sheep were running. In their midst a great bear rose up on its hind legs, roaring and swatting. The sheepdogs were on him, but the bear paid them little mind. As my father aimed his rifle and tried to call back the dogs, the grizzly wrapped his huge jaws around the head of a full-grown ewe and shook her from side to side as a coyote shakes his prey. My father fired, and fired again, missing both times. The grizzly dropped the ewe and charged, first at the dogs and then at us.
“Oh Jesus,” said my father. “Get down! Get down!”
My mother and father and Dan flung themselves to the ground, but I lost my head and ran back towards the tent and the great black shape chased me, snuffing and rank. I tripped and fell. My brother and father fired in the air, afraid of aiming in the dark and hitting me, but out of panic I aimed from the ground, where I had fallen, and fired at the bear. It was foolish because the little rifle I had would only annoy a monster that size. Yet I know I hit the bear because he howled, horribly, and ran off into the bush behind the tent, pursued by the dogs.
My father was the first to reach me. He fell to his knees beside me and took my shoulders up in his arms and all but shook me in panic. “You all right?” he said. “You all right?”
“I got him,” I said.
“Sure you got him,” he said.
My father left me to my mother’s care and called off the dogs and told Dan and me to stay put with Mum and to keep a sharp eye out. He marched through the white ghosts in the bedding ground and into black.
Dan and I fiddled with our guns as we waited, turning and aiming at every rustle we heard in the bush.
“That was stupid,” said Dan. “We would have had it.”
“I got it,” I said. “I know I did.”
“With that gun, all it’s got is a scratch.”
“Well, if I had a better rifle, that bear would be dead.”
“You can’t hit nothing.”
“Enough,” said my mother. “Stay sharp.”
One shot sounded that made us all stand taller. Then my father came back the way he’d left, across the bedding grounds behind the tent, a black shadow against all those white sheep. My mother lifted the lantern to him. He was shaking and covered in bits of undergrowth and had strange clawlike scratches down each side of his face. Against the darkness his eyes looked big and crazy before he held his hand up against the light.
My mother lowered the lantern. “John, what’s happened?” she said.
My father didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t answer. He stumbled around in front of the tent for a time, and I watched him at it, growing scared. Dan took him by the arm and tried to get him to sit down on a stump, but he pulled away.
“Did you get him?” Dan said.
“I don’t know,” said my father. “So dark. Something came after me. I shot it. I think I shot it.”
We watched for the grizzly all that night, but he didn’t return. The next day Dan and my father tracked the bear’s trail of blood for three miles to a patch of thick bush before giving up. There were too many stories of bears ambushing hunters for them to push farther. We never found the body of the bear, but then we never would. Bears bury their dead, just as they bury their kill.
The grizzly attack on our camp shook us all. My mother wouldn’t let us out of her sight. My brother woke shouting. My father went silent and moody and sat around the camp with his gun over his knees eating whole legs of lamb, whole pots of stew, at a time. We watched him eat, amazed. A week after the grizzly attack, my father drove his entire flock of Corriedales to Salmon Arm, loaded them on a freight for Vancouver, and sold the dogs to a sheep trader named Currie. A month later my father went back to Currie and bought a handful of knotheaded, fence-breaking, black-faced Suffolk from him because he couldn’t think well of himself without sheep and because they were going for next to nothing. When he bought ten Jersey cows from Ferguson to begin his dairy, he put an end to those glorious summers we spent wandering the mountains and began, wholeheartedly, his career of unhappiness.
I was fourteen last summer when the bear attacked, and so a lifetime of those summers on Adam’s Plateau, Hunter’s Range, and Queest had firmly fixed the need in my body to wander. Although I now hiked only within the hilly range that encompassed Turtle Valley, and though I now took my gun almost every time I left the house, I still had reason to fear, even here, by Turtle Creek. Sarah Kemp, who’d been killed by a bear that week, was a girl my age. I’d be going to her funeral in a day. So it was that with every rustle in the undergrowth my body tensed, with every crack in the bush I listened. But this time, this time, the sound of something following became a shushing through the grass, my fear at play. I let out my breath and kept on my way, back home.
The sky over the farm was ablaze with birds. Seagulls and crows jabbered and cawed over the barn, the manure pile, the stack of lumber and fence posts, and the heap of rocks that marked the graves of the homesteaders’ children. Starlings chattered on the poplar that grew through the front end of my father’s old Ford truck. Barn swallows darted between the handful of ewes in the orchard pasture that bordered on the Swede’s property, and over the lake of violet flax past the house. They looped up and formed a circle in the sky for an instant, before diving down for insects between the bodies of the sheep. Swallows zoomed over the heads of my father, my brother, and our hired men, Dennis and Filthy Billy, as they coiled alfalfa hay into haycocks, by hand, with pitchforks. The starlings in the poplar flew up in a great breath, then landed on the roof of the house, enraging the rooster into crowing, and sending the little black lizards that lived around the yard scuttling into hiding. The chatter of birds was deafening, and because of them, I knew we had guests.
