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

stealing bits of chicken, tugging at my apron strings, while I set a jug of water at my father’s place, and put the cooked peas sweating butter, the biscuits, and the fried chicken on the table before him. Billy held his breath and waited with his eyes closed, and his face red. When I set down the chicken, he grabbed a leg bone, my father’s favorite, and a couple of buns, and ran out the door, knocking over his chair on the way. My father winced at the sound, held the scar on his head, and yelled at my brother, “Pick that goddamned thingup!” But it was Dennis who picked up the chair and put it right, and I watched him doing it, watched the bones in his big hands. Nobody talked for a long time after that. We listened instead to Billy hooting swear words at the owls.
    “Crazy man,” said my father. Dennis looked over at my brother and grinned, and Dan grinned back at him. My brother was still in his field denims, and he’d rolled his shirtsleeves to his elbows, exposing his arms, but my father said nothing about it that night. Daniel was a big man, nineteen already, the image of my father (though my father now denied him during arguments, said he was a cuckolded son, no son of his), but with my mother’s sweet smile of apology always on his face, even when he tormented my father by not giving in. He had my father’s broad, heavy jaw and big features and my father’s hands, hands too huge to be believed, made that way by a lifetime of work. For the two years he’d been out of school, Dan had worked full-time on the farm with my father. He was the only farmer’s son in the valley who hadn’t joined up.
    “I don’t want that squaw here again,” said my father.
    “You like Bertha,” said Mum.
    “I don’t like nobody who tells me how to run my farm.”
    Dennis and Dan exchanged a look and then went back to cleaning their plates with their bread.
    “Goddamned Swede tried digging in the fence again,” said my father. “You see that?”
    My brother grunted.
    “We’ll fix him,” said my father. “Tonight, you hear?”
    Dan went on eating, and my mother played nervously with the rim of her plate. Dennis ate with his face close to his plate and looked from me to my father, from my father to me. I pulled my sweater over my breasts and buttoned it.
    “Is your suit clean for the funeral?” said my mother.
    “Sure,” said Dan.
    “You spilled food on it at the church supper.”
    “I wiped it off. It’s clean enough.”
    “And you’ve got your blue dress,” said my mother. “You should set your hair tonight.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “You still have your boots on,” she said.
    “My feet are cold.”
    “I brushed down the black suit and put the button back on the white shirt,” said my mother.
    My father grunted and kept eating. We ate in silence for a while. Past the barn, Filthy Billy swore at the sheep, God, the Devil, and the stars. Bells on the lead cow and sheep rang out as they ran to escape his profane march through their pastures. My father piled yet another helping of chicken and peas on his plate.
    “Good chicken,” said Dennis. “Almost as good as last night’s.”
    My brother laughed. My father looked up at my brother and at Dennis and went back to refilling his plate.
    “You going to the funeral, Dennis?” my mother asked.
    “I didn’t know her, only to see her,” said Dennis.
    “Terrible thing,” said my mother. “I’m glad they got the bear before it could get anyone else. That could have been you, Beth, if that grizzly reached you last spring. We were so lucky.”
    “I heard Sarah was all scrapped apart,” said my brother. “Her stomach all eaten up.”
    “Enough,” said my mother.
    “Bears go for your head first,” said Dennis, and his eyes lit up. “They try to rip your head off. Nothing like this one. That must’ve been one crazy bear.”
    I put my fork down and pushed my plate away and Dennis grinned at that. Dan leaned across the table and pointed his fork