The Cure for Death by Lightning Read Online Free PDF Page A

into a bucket and dunking the chicken into it to loosen the feathers, but only for a few seconds. If the water boils, it burns the chicken skin. If you leave the chicken in the hot water too long, the skin tears when you pull off the feathers. The art is in the motion of it, in taking the bird by the legs and plunging it in the hot water without burning yourself; in swirling the bird around in the bucket, as if cleaning the bucket with the feathers; in grabbing the bird’s flight feathers and letting it drop, all in one motion, so the bird’s means of escape come off in your hands.
    My mother hung the bird on the wash line by one foot, where, earlier in the day, she had hung our underwear out to dry inside pillowcases so they would neither entice nor offend a man who might come into our yard. Her hands flew over that bird, plucking the downy feathers and pin feathers until you’d think it was naked, but it wasn’t, not quite. For the chicken’s final humiliation, Mum lit a torch of rolled brown paper wrapping from the perpetual fire in the kitchen stove and ran it along the chicken, burning off the fine hairs that remained without burning the skin, heating the loose skin so that even now, in death, it drew back in horror and puckered tight. She pinched the flesh at the wishbone and cut out the crop, then cut the naked bird down by bending and cutting off its feet. The chicken was nothing now but meat. To clean out its insides, she took the bird into the house, laid iton the cutting board, and, with a knife that she sharpened right then and there, she sliced the bird from breast tip to pope’s nose. This is the feel of the inside of a creature that was alive just a half hour ago: hot and wet, jelly and snakes, soothing for achy human hands. Cleaning a chicken wouldn’t be anything but scrubbing out a particularly messy pot of noodles, if it weren’t for the smell. The smell is what stirs the nausea, but the blood lust too. That lust crawls up the back of your neck and plants itself on you, an old beast excited by the smell of warm blood, the smell of coming-on-sick time and warm liver, of something hungry.
    Once the cleaning was done, my mother rinsed off the chicken, dropped it in a bucket of the coldest water available, and allowed the chicken to stiffen in the pantry off the kitchen because a chicken that isn’t left to die properly isn’t worth eating; it’s as tough as an old laying hen and has no flavor.
    When I’d swept and washed all the evil from the house, I picked the sweet young peas from the garden and sat on the porch and shelled them, popping the end off the pod and running my thumb down the row of peas to loosen them. Peas on the vine are designed to fool you. Go down a row of peas once and you won’t see a pod. Go down a second time and pea pods appear out of nowhere. Go down a third time, and still more appear, where there were none, as if looking for them creates them. I filled a white ceramic bowl with the sweet green peas I’d imagined into existence and picked a few leaves of mint to boil them with.
    Dennis and Filthy Billy came into the house, took their boots off at the door, and sat down at the kitchen table. I didn’t look at them, didn’t even say hi, and kept my head on what I was doing. I washed my hands in the bowl on the bench by the door, made tea the way my father forbade, from the hot water in the stove reservoir, and put tea and cream and cups down in front of the men. I started cutting up the chicken for frying because that chicken was as stiff as it was going to get that night.
    Dennis was also a grandson to Bertha Moses. He was just filling out, cocky as only a man of eighteen can be, and Indian all over. As most young Indian men did then, he wore a cowboy hat, a red plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, and I suppose like all the young menleft on the reserve he hoped to ride the rodeo circuit once the war was over and life could go on. The Indian boys too young to