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

before Sarah Kemp’s funeral and together they went out, once again, to cut down the Swede’s living fence. The dispute between my father and the Swede had begun that spring with a notion that took hold of my father and wouldn’t let go: he believed he owned a piece of land on the Swede’s side of the fence. Long before my father bought the farm, the Swede had built a fence of living trees, in the style of his homeland, on what my father was now convinced was our property. My father had in fact bought the farm from the Swede’s in-laws.
    Johansson was fond of telling how he’d bought a ticket on the
Titanic
and missed the boat because he got drunk the night before at his sister’s wedding. He took another, less ill-fated boat to the New World, and, after shifting around the continent working where he could find jobs, he took on the homestead in Turtle Valley next to another Swede by the name of Olsen, whose bad luck was legendary. Olsen had married a Turtle Creek Indian woman named Mary and had had eight children by her, but each and every one of the children had died. Everyone seemed to have a story about it. I’d heard from Lily Bell, Mrs. Bell’s silly daughter, that the children had come down with an illness that took their minds, and made them see things that weren’t there, before it took their bodies. Dennis had told Dan and me that the homesteader’s children had been attacked, one by one, by a bear or a cougar, something that had left the children half-eaten in any case. Ithought these were just stories, and the children had died of childhood diseases. All the children were buried on what was now our property, off beside the barn.
    By the time Johansson had moved to Turtle Valley, the only child left to the Olsens was Caroline, a sweet, frightened half-breed Johansson married when she was sixteen and he was twenty-seven. Caroline died a year later of consumption, three months after giving birth to a son the Swede named Jack, because he liked the sound of it. After Olsen died, his widow took up with an Indian fellow, moved back to the reserve, and put the farm up for sale. That was when my father purchased the farm. He added on to the house, and put up a new barn, picked rocks from the field and piled them to hide the graves of the homesteader’s children and to rid himself of their bad luck.
    My father swore that the titles office clearly showed the land on which the Swede had built his fence was now ours, although he brought home no proof of it, and that spring after he sold the flock was the first we’d heard of it. The piece of land in dispute was one mile long and one foot wide.
    He and the Swede had never argued the point; they had never even discussed it. Every few nights my father went out and took down a section of the Swede’s living fence and put up his own barbed wire. Every few days I’d find the Swede had undone my father’s work and tried to replant the section of his strange fence where he figured it should be.
    The night before Sarah Kemp’s funeral, my brother and father dressed to cut down the Swede’s fence under the weight of my mother’s protestations. My mother stood in the doorway of the bedroom she and my father shared, and amplified my father’s foolishness so God could hear she had no part in it.
    “At least talk to the man,” she said. “You haven’t talked to the man. Maybe he’ll sell the land. Look at you! Building fences in the middle of the night!”
    I shuffled into the corner of the parlor and leaned against the dish cupboard, in the dark, so they wouldn’t see me. My door opened on the parlor, as did all the rooms of the house: my parents’ bedroom, my brother’s, and the door to the kitchen. From my bedroom door I could see into the kitchen and straight across to my parents’ room. The househad once been the Olsens’ cabin, onto which my father had added our bedrooms and the kitchen; the parlor was the only original room. Sometimes when the house was