The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Online Free Page B

because all my history and all my future were captured in that moment. My mother was dressed in the drab nurse’s outfit she wore to drive the horse-drawn ambulances during the war. My father wore his army uniform and the same puttees he now wound around his legs to do farm chores. In the photograph, his head was still bandaged. They had met when my mother drove my father from one London hospitalto another. How my mother came to visit him as he lay for months in that hospital, I never knew. As the eldest daughter, my mother had nursed my ailing grandmother right up until the week of her own wedding, so perhaps she was at her strongest, at her most sure serving sickness. Later I would come to believe that she was.
    I put down the photograph of my mother and father, went back into the kitchen, and took up my mother’s scrapbook. There was a new page in it, made from brown wrapping, onto which she had glued Sarah Kemp’s funeral notice from that week’s newspaper. Beside the notice, my mother had added a story warning of bear attacks and an increase in livestock loss to coyotes. Next to this my mother had written my name, “Beth,” in bold lettering, followed by an exclamation mark.
    I slapped the scrapbook shut, convinced that my mother knew I peeked at it and that she was trying to lecture me in this sneaky way about walking alone in the bush. I placed the scrapbook as it had been, sitting on the rocker, and guiltily, angrily, I wiped down the oilcloth on the kitchen table all over again and washed all the spoons and cups.
    Bertha’s visit had set the day back; she’d come at a time when there were chores to be done and, as if she didn’t know it, she and her family had waltzed themselves into the house, drunk our coffee, and wasted the time away with talk. Now chores weren’t done and supper would be late and there’d be hell to pay when my father came in from the fields. Earlier, before I had started to clean up, my mother had grumbled all these things under her breath to her own mother, who’d been dead twenty years but was still watching over her, as she caught up a chicken in the coop, then killed it, cleaned it, and sat it in a bucket of cold water in the pantry. Then she’d saddled up the little mare, Cherry, and taken her up to the benchland to bring down the cows while I’d cleaned house. There’d been a coyote in the chicken house; coyote tracks and bloodied feathers were all over. The chickens were panicked, chasing each other in circles as if one of them had a worm. The rooster didn’t have any rooster left in him. Most times he leapt up and showed his spurs to any passing shadow, but now he hid in a corner, nursing a wing. Lord knows how a coyote got in the coop, but he did, and how many he got was anybody’s guess; there’s no counting in a coop full of chickens.
    My mother had carried the chicken, our supper, by its feet and wingtips so it would calm down before she reached the chopping block behind the house. A chicken that flaps its wings flaps itself into panic, and there’s nothing as frustrating as trying to kill a panicked chicken. Mum took up the ax, laid the chicken’s head over the edge of the chopping block, and eased the chicken back until its neck was stretched out. She slammed the ax through the chicken’s neck into the chopping block, and flung the chicken’s body onto the grass in front of the root cellar so it wouldn’t flap itself into the mud. The chicken body danced a circle in the grass, spewing blood every which way, and fell on its back. The air left its lungs in a squawk, and the head still lying on the block opened and closed its beak as if trying to claim the noise. I watched the chicken head, waiting to see the point of death, something I was never certain of.
    Mum was a master at the art of cleaning a chicken, and if you don’t think it’s an art, you watch, you just watch Mum heating up the kettle until it’s good and hot but not boiling, and pouring the water