The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Read Free Book Online

enters your body someplace else,” said Dennis, and he grinned at me wickedly.
    I grew shy and watched as Filthy Billy tied the other pant leg tight around his ankle until Dennis pointed at the campfire a few yards behind the cabin. Filthy Billy and Dennis had set up a circle of stones in which they sometimes broke the blackout and lit fires. I’d watched the fire from my bedroom window at night and heard their laughter.Around the fire they’d placed several logs for sitting, and about a cord of carefully stacked firewood stood between two paper birch nearby. The cabin was at the far edge of the flax field from the house, set up against the bush, and the yard around the cabin was no yard at all, just the crazy mix of growth found at any field edge: young pine, aspen and brambles, milkweed and purple-headed thistles, wild strawberry and lamb’s-quarters. The hearth in the circle of stones still smoked.
    “Billy built a fire and jumped over it,” said Dennis. “To confuse the lizard, so he’d follow Billy into the fire and get burnt up.”
    I laughed.
    “You don’t believe me?” said Dennis. “I’ll show you!”
    He took my hand and that sent my heart rocking and knocked thoughts of Sarah Kemp flat. My hand became a huge thing inside his; I knew every tingle, every squeeze, and was aware of little else. He walked me to the forest edge, squatted in the grass, and pulled me down next to him. He still held my hand, cupped it, in fact, in both his hands. I leaned into him because I could do nothing else, and breathed in the sweetness of his sweat. Then I caught a whiff of the sour smell, from milking, on myself. It embarrassed me and brought me back to myself; I began to fear my father.
    Dennis pointed out a thing on the ground. It was a forked stick jammed into the earth. Tied between the tines, pieces of grass cradled something I was unsure of at first.
    “That’s one of them lizards,” said Dennis. “That’s one I caught. Billy’s too scared to go after them. You go after them and tie them up like this, then they can’t come and eat your heart.”
    Held above the moisture of the ground, the lizard hadn’t rotted, but mummified. Dennis stood and held out his hand and helped me up. “Anyway,” he said. “Did you want something?”
    I looked at my feet, and then at the remnants of the fire. I shook my head.
    “Just come for a visit, eh?” said Dennis.
    I shrugged and immediately regretted it. Mrs. Bell said shrugging looked slovenly. Dennis watched for a time as I looked down at my feet, embarrassed by my sour milk clothes and my weak attempts at vanity, the perfume on my feet, the lipstick in the crook of my arm. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He patted me on the shoulder as mybrother might and that hurt worse than any spoken rejection. Nevertheless he said, “You just come over any time, any time.”
    I walked home through the twilight and the field of violet flax, feeling the tiny blue flowers with the palms of my hands, no longer chased by bloody images of Sarah Kemp, but by a blood heat of another kind, one I didn’t have words for yet, but one that had everything to do with Dennis.
    As I passed the barn, my father stepped out of the dark, scaring my heart into my throat. He pushed me up against the barn wall and pressed his weight against me. “You don’t ever go to that cabin,” he said. “Hear me?”
    His fried-chicken breath in my face and the dog shit still on his boots made me think of the chicken killing that day, and with that came, clear and unwelcome, a picture of Sarah Kemp’s face, blood-smeared and chewed. I looked up at the stars past my father’s shoulder and willed myself there. My mother called from the house, “John, cocoa’s ready!” and my father let go, looked me down for a time, and then strode around the barn and across the yard to the house. After a little while I straightened my blouse and followed him.

M Y FATHER woke my brother in the middle of the night