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

quiet at night, or when I walked past the rock pile by the barn that marked the Olsens’ graves, I imagined I heard their footsteps, the noise of their play, or the sound of a child crying. There was no upstairs and only one doorway out of the house, the one in the kitchen, though each room had a window. We all had to pass through the parlor and then through the kitchen to leave the house. The parlor was dark, though my mother had boarded up the log and chink walls and covered the boards with wallpaper. The floors of all the rooms were of the same dark unfinished wood that my father had laid when he built onto the house.
    My mother followed my father through the parlor and into the kitchen. Her hair fell to her hips, the buttons on her nightgown were done up her neck, and her sleeves were pulled down to her wrists. She hugged herself. My father carried a kerosene lamp, but he stumbled into chairs and tables anyway, thrown by my mother’s complaints. My father looked like a hunkered monster; my mother’s face was that of a ghost.
    “Don’t do this,” said my mother. “Please.”
    My father set the lamp on the kitchen table and put on his boots.
    “Let me talk to him,” she said. “It’s all a mistake, I’m sure of it.”
    When he didn’t reply, my mother lifted the lamp to the corners of the kitchen to hunt out spiders. She found one, lifted the lamp higher, and the spider became drunk on the fumes of the lamp. It dropped into the flame and sizzled briefly before turning to smoke. My brother came into the kitchen and slid on his boots without tying them. My father got up, took down a gun from the wall rack, and pulled the lamp from my mother.
    “You don’t need a gun,” she said. “Why are you taking a gun?”
    “I may need it,” said my father.
    When my mother tried to block their exit through the kitchen door, my father tightened his lips and pushed past her. Dan scratched his hair into a haystack and rubbed the day-old beard growing on his big jaw. He smiled a sweet apology at Mum, but he went with my father.
    “He’s got every right to shoot you,” my mother shouted after them. “Every right.”
    She banged around in the dark kitchen for a time, stoking up the firein the stove. She would keep it burning even through the brightest heat of the coming summer and would go on stoking it all fall and all winter and into next spring.
    “He hasn’t got the sense God gave a goose,” she said out loud. Then she mumbled, as she tended the fire, so the words only sometimes drifted up to be heard.
    “Hell to pay,” she said, and the words faded again. Then “Fool” and “Wasn’t I right?” She looked up briefly, as if listening to someone talking, and said, “No, no, I can’t do that,” and went back to poking at the fire.
    I knew who she was talking to. She had told me once, as we baked bread together. The day she told me, her hair had been pinned up into an unruly knot, and her hands were so muscled from milking and kneading bread that they made me think of knotted wood. Her face was red from the heat and work. She had mumbled under her breath as she kneaded the dough, as if I wasn’t right there, trying to knead the dough in unison with her. My hands ached from the labor.
    I said, “Who are you talking to all the time?”
    She stopped kneading and looked up at me a little dazed, as if surprised to see me in the kitchen with her. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, well, that’s my mother.”
    “What do you tell her?”
    “Things. About the day,” she said.
    “Does she answer?”
    “Oh, well,” said my mother. “If I said yes, you’d think me crazy.”
    “No, not crazy,” I said.
    “I think she’s here with us,” my mother had said. “Sometimes I think that.”
    My mother chilled me when she talked to my dead grandmother. This night, as she finished stoking up the fire and took her place in her rocking chair, hugging her scrapbook, I hid myself deep in my bed and eventually slept. I dreamed