The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Online Free

had become. The laughter became huge and shook the house and hid the sound of my father’s boots on the porch. The screen door slammed shut and my father was there in the kitchen, a giant over us, dressed in the denimpants and jacket that were his field clothes, and his puttees from the Great War. His boots smelled bad, of dog shit.
    “What’s this about?” said my father. “What are you laughing at?”
    There was a pause. One of Bertha’s daughters said, “Nothing.”
    My father pushed me out of his way and stood over Bertha Moses. Bertha became an old woman in my father’s shadow. He sucked the air from her cheeks and made her eyes dull. “You told Dennis not to work,” he said.
    My mother said, “John,” but he just stood there with his hands on his hips and his feet planted as if nothing could move him. Bertha Moses looked at my mother, then up at my father, and we all listened for a while to the noisy birds. Then Bertha stood and her daughters stood behind her. The sound of their chairs scraping against the floor drowned the birdsong and made my father appear smaller, as if he were an ordinary man. He held his forehead at the sound, flinched at it. The women’s combined shadows pushed my father’s shadow against the wall.
    “I said he deserves more for the work he does,” said Bertha. “I said he doesn’t have to work into the night.”
    “You don’t know nothing,” said my father.
    “There’s a war on,” said Bertha. “Dennis doesn’t have to work for you. Billy neither.”
    “They’ll get no better work.”
    “You hire our boys because they don’t know how to ask for what they’re worth,” she said. “You treat them as if they were slaves.”
    “Shut up.”
    “They’re not slaves.”
    “Get out of my house!” said my father.
    The women moved forward and surrounded him. Bertha Moses’s shadow gripped my father’s shadow around the throat, forcing blood into his face. He began to shake and his face grew redder and redder until I thought he might explode. He stepped back through the women and pushed open the screen door.
    “You get out of here,” he said, and fled from the house.
    My mother looked at her shoes. Bertha sighed.
    “We should be going,” said Bertha Moses.
    “Yes,” said one of the daughters, and the women made the motions of leaving.
    “It was good to have you,” said my mother.
    The daughters and the daughters’ daughters filed out the door, and the girl with the bells smiled and jingled her necklace as she went by. Each of her eyes was a different color, one blue and one green. She was a half-breed, then. Bertha stayed behind.
    “Come again,” said my mother. “Please. He won’t remember. He gets angry and it washes away.”
    She tapped her forehead in the place where there was steel, not bone, in my father’s forehead, where a scar marked his injury from the Great War. During that war my father had been running through a graveyard when the shells hit and buried him alive among the corpses. A second round of shells hit, at once unburying him and saving his life, and wounding him with shrapnel. Bertha knew this story, as everyone did.
    “No,” said Bertha. “I don’t think it’s that. I think what’s got hold of Coyote Jack’s got hold of your John.”
    When my mother laughed and looked puzzled, Bertha Moses took my mother’s hand in both of her own. She glanced at her daughters waiting by the flower bed and lowered her voice. “John didn’t turn until that bear attacked. You said so yourself. Something got him in the bush. You be careful. You and the girl.”
    But then she smiled, as if it were all a joke, and winked at me so her face crinkled up to nothing. She took a pinch of tobacco from a pouch in her apron pocket and rolled a skinny cigarette as she walked down the path to where the women waited. One of the daughters, a woman with a large strawberry birthmark on her cheek, lit a match on the side of her shoe and held it up to Bertha’s