The Cure for Death by Lightning (40 page)

“I thought you weren’t coming,” I said.

“I saw Granny and everybody walking home,” she said. “I thought we could spend some time together, alone.”

“I saw it,” I said. “I saw Coyote Jack change. He pushed me down. He changed. I saw him change. Into a coyote. Billy’s right.”

Nora watched my face but didn’t say anything.

“You don’t believe me!”

“I believe Coyote Jack came after you. He followed me a few days ago. Came too close. I threw a rock at him and he took off.”

“You don’t understand. He changed. You’ve got to be careful.”

“You want to leave?” she said. “We could leave. Today.”

“I can’t go. What would my mother think?”

“You’re old enough to decide for yourself,” she said. “We’ll go to Vancouver. We’ll say we’re sisters.”

I laughed a little because we looked so unalike.

“We’ll become nurses,” she said. “Or get jobs in the factories. We’ll take care of each other.”

“No,” I said, and when I said it Nora became suddenly angry.

“You don’t love me,” she said.

“Sure I do.”

“No. Nobody loves me.”

Nora closed the window before I could say anything more and ran around the side of the house to follow the trail beside the root cellar. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, he was there, at the window. I screamed and backed against the wall, knocking against the coyote skins. Outside the window, Coyote Jack held up his hand in a wave or a threat.

S
OMETHING IN ME TURNED.
I got angry, angrier than I’ve ever been in my life. I yelled at him and ran at the window.

“Get away!” I said. “Get the hell out of here!”

Coyote Jack disappeared as soon as I went for the window, but I went on yelling at him anyway, and kept on yelling as I took down my brother’s rifle, loaded it, and pocketed a box of shells. I yelled as I threw a halter on Cherry and jumped on her, bareback. She pranced sideways across the yard, and I had to kick her to get her up the road. I whipped her side with the reins until she was galloping and went on whipping her as we followed Blood Road, then the old Indian trail, ducking branches. I rode her all the way to Coyote Jack’s cabin, and left her standing there free. I carried the gun as my brother carried it and pounded on the door to Coyote Jack’s cabin. He didn’t come to the door. I pushed it open and there he was, sitting on a little neatly made cot, with his head in his hands. He looked up as I came in. I pointed the gun at him.

“You stay away from me,” I said. “So help me God I’ll shoot you.”

Coyote Jack held out his hands, palms up, and looked at me. That was the first and only time I ever got a really good look at him. He was a little man and had keen blue eyes rimmed in red and watery — the eyes of an old man, though he was the Swede’s son and couldn’t have been more than forty-five.

“You have no idea,” said Coyote Jack. “I try to stop it. I try to keep to myself.”

I lowered the gun a little.

“Bertha says you’ve got some ghost thing riding you,” I said. “I didn’t believe it before. But I don’t want any part of it. You understand me? You quit following me. You stay away.”

Coyote Jack covered his face with both hands and sobbed. I’d seen my father cry over music, but even then only a few tears had rolled down his face. This man sobbed, his shoulders heaved, and he cried out. It made me so angry I wanted to shoot him there, as he sat on his cot. Instead I backed up to the door, still pointing the gun at him.

I said, “Stay away. Just stay away!”

He didn’t look up. He went on sobbing. I closed the door behind me and found that Cherry had taken off on me. It was only then that I became afraid again — the anger had carried me. I ran home convinced that Coyote Jack would come after me, appear on the trail as he had done before, take some form, and eat me as I was now convinced he’d eaten Sarah Kemp.

It was that night, Christmas night, that Coyote Jack hung himself, I’m sure of it, though it was a week before anyone thought to go looking for him. Scared to death and chased by shadows, I had run from Coyote Jack’s cabin all the way down the mountain and down Blood Road and across the field to the hired hands’ cabin. Home wasn’t safe. Billy seemed the only safety offered to me. So I had run to him. He was there all right, tying up his pant legs for the night, but so was Dennis. It was Dennis who opened the door when I knocked. He was wearing only a pair of wool trousers and a sleeveless undershirt so thin I could see his dark nipples through it. A man didn’t show his chest then any more than a woman would now. Dennis might as well have been standing there naked.

“Well, my girlfriend’s here,” he said. “Sure your mum don’t mind?” “I’ve come to see Billy,” I said.

“Billy?”

I waved for Billy to come outside and turned my back on Dennis’s nakedness. Billy threw on a jack shirt and his rattlesnake hat and met me outside over by the fire. I sat on the log I’d sat on at Halloween and hugged myself. The first wave of panic was wearing off, leaving me cold. Billy sat next to me, so our arms were touching. We huddled
together like that as I told him what I thought I’d seen, as night closed in on us.

“That wasn’t (fuck) smart — chasing him up there,” said Billy.

“What am I going to do?” I said.

“I figure (shit) you’re safe for tonight,” said Billy. “He’s not so different (fuck) from them coyotes you catch in your snares. (Shit) He’s okay if it’s him doing the (shit) chasing, but if he gets chased, then he gets scared (fuck) and stays away, for a while anyway. You’ll be okay tonight, but (shit) we got to do something soon.”

My mother was still milking when I reached the barn. I took up my stumping powder box and started in on the cow beside her.

When she saw me come in the barn, she said, “Thank God! Cherry came back by herself. I’d thought you’d been hurt.”

“I fell off in the bush,” I said. “She took off on me. Something spooked her.”

“Where were you?” she said.

“Just out riding.”

“I didn’t see you go.”

“Do I have to tell you everything?” I said.

“I’d just like to know,” she said. “In case something happens.”

I grunted, but my mother didn’t say any more.

After I’d finished separating the cream and cleaning out the machine, I took my brother’s rifle down from the rack by the stove. Mum was sitting in her rocker, gluing Bertha Moses’s Christmas card to a new page in the scrapbook.

“Where are you going with that?” she said.

“Cleaning it,” I said.

I took the gun and a second lamp to my room and lit both lamps so there were no shadows but the ones under my bed. I loaded the gun, locked my bedroom window, and fastened a blanket over it. I tucked my chair under the doorknob to keep anyone from coming in. Then I sat on my bed with my back against the wall and the gun in my hands and waited.

B
ILLY CAME IN
for breakfast on Boxing Day wearing a bloom I’d never seen on a soul before or since. He didn’t say a word, not even a cuss word, but a grin stayed on his face for the whole meal. He shook his head at some thought he’d had and laughed out loud. Sleepy and relieved that no nightmares had visited me, I grinned back at him and that only got him laughing more. Dennis chewed his food and turned from Billy to me, from me to Billy, and then raised his eyebrows at my mother.

“What’s so funny?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

Dennis caught my eye and looked a question at me, but my mother saw that and started talking about what needed to be done for the day. She had Dennis out of the house and cleaning calf stalls before Billy had even finished his eggs. She went out there with Dennis herself and gave him a list of jobs that would keep him busy from now ’til the new year.

After she’d gone outside, Billy took my hand, and said, “He’s gone.”

“Who?” I said.

“Coyote. He didn’t come last night. He didn’t take me over. I think you scared him off. Maybe for good.”

“Coyote Jack?”

“No, no. Coyote. Last night he didn’t come. Listen! I’m not swearing! He’s gone!”

“I don’t know.”

“You got to believe me. You saw Coyote riding Coyote Jack, shifting him around. That’s what Coyote does. He made me his house, but now he’s gone!”

“I don’t know what I saw,” I said. “It feels like a nightmare. The whole thing, one long nightmare.”

“Well, all I know is last night I got the first good night’s sleep in a long while.”

Whatever it was that had haunted Billy and tried to track me down didn’t turn up again that winter, and neither did Coyote Jack. No one saw him lurking around the edges of their fields or trying to steal a chicken from their coops, or inching open the doors to their root cellars for a taste of strawberry jam. It was New Year’s Eve before the Swede finally got suspicious enough to go up to Coyote Jack’s cabin, and what he found then hanging from a beam was half eaten by maggots. It was these strange facts — rot on a body in all that cold, maggots at a time of year you couldn’t find a fly if you wanted to — that the Swede came back to, over and again, when he sat in our kitchen on New Year’s Eve, shaking and drinking my mother’s medicinal rum.

“I thought he might want to share a drink with me,” he said. “A drink with the old man, to bring in the year. And there he was hanging from the ceiling. He must’ve been there for a week or more. But rotting, can you believe it? Frozen solid and rotting. Full of maggots this time of year. I never seen the likes. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

More than a week after the Swede found his son dead and raising a stink, Coyote Jack was buried by the church he’d never once set foot in, in the grave next to Sarah Kemp. The only ones there were the Swede, Bertha Moses and her girls, me and Mum, and the old men who sat around the stove in Bouchard and Belcham’s. The old men came because they remembered Coyote Jack when he was a boy, and it was their job to fill in the graves. Because of the rot in the body, Coyote Jack had been shipped by train to the nearest crematorium in Kam-loops. Cremations were so rare then that nobody knew what to do with the urn containing his ashes, so it was buried in one of the leaf-filled graves that had been dug by the old men in the fall. Those same
old men lowered the urn into the leaves in the grave next to Sarah Kemp’s and then filled in the grave, leaves and all, with dirt.

When everyone else went back into church for the lunch that followed, Billy and I stayed behind and watched the old men shovel dirt into Coyote Jack’s grave.

“You think he would have killed himself,” I said, “if I hadn’t gone up there?”

“Don’t go blaming yourself for that,” said Billy. “He’s been crazy a long time.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve got nothing to be scared of no more,” said Billy. “Nothing.”

“You think that Coyote thing is gone for good?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe he rode on Coyote Jack’s back into the spirit land. Or maybe he found somebody else to live with. I keep waiting on him, scared, you know, thinking he might come back. But I woke up Boxing Day and I didn’t smell him no more. That dog smell was gone. Now the swearing is gone. The tics and scratching are going. Every day what’s left of him fades away. I’m thinking maybe nothing’s chasing you no more.”

I kicked at the frozen dirt and held myself.

“You still don’t believe any of this, do you?” said Billy. “After everything you seen.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You see it with your own eyes and you don’t believe it.”

“I’m not sure what I saw.”

“Well, I guess it don’t matter much anymore.”

We left the old men to cover the remains of our nightmare and went inside to eat. When I saw that Nora wasn’t in the building, I took my plate and went outside to find her. As soon as I stepped out onto the front steps of the church again, I heard her bell necklace. I followed the sound of bells quietly, thinking to sneak up on her, and turned the corner on the back of the church that was pretty much hidden by bushes. Nora was in those bushes all right. Dennis was holding her there. His face was buried in her neck. Her western shirt was undone, and Dennis was cupping her breast and moving his hips against her. Nora’s eyes were closed as I stumbled on them, but she opened them
slowly, luxuriantly, as she had opened them to look at me on the blanket in the winter house. When she saw me, her eyes opened wide.