The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Online Free Page A

cigarette. I followed the women a little way down Blood Road; the birds followed them too, attracted to their glittering jewelry and bright ribbons. Purple swallows zoomed around them. Bertha Moses and her daughters and her daughters’ daughters sang hymns of praise all the way into town.

I STOKED the fire in the kitchen stove, cleared the cups from the table, and scrubbed the sticky spots of evil on the oilcloth where Bertha Moses and her daughters had left their coffee spoons. Mrs. Bell said all dirt was evil, and it was a Christian woman’s duty to scrub away evil and never turn her back on it. Evil was what made you sick. Evil was what crept into your night dreams and made a sinner of you. A dirty house was an evil house, and a woman must guard against the evil men brought into the house on their boots. Mrs. Bell was the one town visitor we got those days, so what did I know? I scrubbed the evil from the oilcloth and from beneath the water tub in which we washed dishes; dusted it from the kitchen chairs, the gun cupboard, the parlor table, and from the family photographs sitting on the buffet; and swept it from the floor under the coat hooks where my father left his boots.
    There were no photographs on the buffet of my brother and me, only pictures of my mother’s family and the one photograph of my mother and father, taken on the day of their engagement. I knew little of my father’s history, other than that his mother had died giving birth to him and that he had worked from the time he was ten until he was fifteen leading the pack ponies down into the black mouth of the mine. The ponies knew enough to come back up by themselves, hauling rock, but needed convincing to go back down again. There was a photograph of my mother with her parents, taken during the Great War. My mother wore a nurse’s uniform and stood very tall over her own tinymother. My grandmother was dressed in dark and lacy Victorian garb and looked very old and tired, but my grandfather, an engineer, looked quite dapper. He was smiling and had his hand around my mother’s waist. Neither my grandmother nor my mother was smiling. About the time my mother became a woman, my grandmother took sick with an unexplained series of niggling illnesses, stomach complaints and headaches, weakness and malaise. My mother became the woman of the house then, making the meals and tending her mother and looking after her two younger sisters. As my grandmother became increasingly bedridden, my mother also became her father’s escort to plays and concerts. She became his favorite of the three daughters. He bought her silk stockings, boxes of candy, and called her dear. There were two photographs of my mother’s sisters: Aunt Lou, who sent Christmas packages each year from England, and Aunt Amy, who lived with her pastor husband in Australia. I had never met either of them, and my grandparents were long dead. When the great fire of polio still raged over Australia, my mother carried Aunt Amy’s letters into the house in the manner I’d seen her carry out dead rats. She put the letters in the roasting pan and into the hot oven for a time, not so long that the letters burned, but long enough to kill the polio spirit that might have lived in them. When we were very young children, it was my mother’s worst fear that she might put Dan or me to bed healthy only to have one of us awaken with a useless arm or leg that we could no more command than we could command a chair to dance. Infantile paralysis was what they called it then, and next to nothing could be done for it, though people believed in all manner of cures. The things you could believe then … that heating up a letter from the bottom of the world would stop a deadly bug from entering your house. If you could believe that, you could believe in ghosts. My mother did that too.
    That other photo on the buffet, the one of my mother and father, was the one I dusted longer and gazed into with a kind of wonderment