Free The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

father had pulled the horses up short on the swamps just past our driveway, stepped down from the buggy, and held his hand out to help my mother down. Hehad gestured for Dan and me to get down, so we stood a little way behind my father and mother and leaned on the siding of the democrat. My father had put his arm around my mother’s shoulders and together they watched the turtles climb from the swamp into the ditch, and then up onto the road. These were painted turtles, with yellow and olive-black shells that were edged with bright red crescents. They moved across the road in a slow, stubborn parade. Occasionally a little black lizard scuttled among them and hurried off into the cover of a ditch. That day Dan had picked up one of the turtles and turned her the other way. The turtle spun around slowly, using one front foot like an oar to push herself in the red dirt and paddled her way back in the direction she intended to lay her eggs. My brother turned around another turtle and another, and we watched them methodically right themselves. After a time my father told us all to pick the turtles from the road and put them to the side, and through the path we created he led the spooked horses down Blood Road until we were past the swamps.
    But not this year, not on this trip to Sarah Kemp’s funeral. The strange compassion my father once had for turtles and other things — the young robin that hit the window and lay dazed on the ground until he warmed it in his hands, the heifer born with a bum leg which he didn’t kill but put a splint on, the newborn lamb he carried around all morning in his jacket to keep alive — had been broken up somehow, cracked into little pieces that made no sense to me. This year my father slapped the reins against the horses’ haunches, forcing them, as they whinnied and shied sideways over the moving road. Rocking beside Dan, I held the side of the democrat against the swaying and jolts, clenched my fist, and closed my eyes against the sight of turtles cracked and bloodied in the ruts the wheels created. But I couldn’t shut out the crunch and slide of them under the wheels and the hooves of the horses they crazed with their turtle selves. I opened my eyes long enough to see a turtle with her back legs crushed pull herself by the front legs over a last red rut and up onto the sandy banks where thousands had laid their eggs before her.
    Promise was all the way down Blood Road, past the small acreages and fields, then down the new highway two miles. We made this journey every couple of days to take the cream to the train station, but we rarely went as a family. My mother and father went, or my brother went, or I went with my mother. But this day was different. This wasthe day of the funeral of Sarah Kemp, a girl I’d seen almost every day of my school days, and never talked to, not even once. She had sat in the corner of the one-room school, on the other side of the big wood heater, with her head down, her face towards the front of the room where Mrs. Boulee paced, but her eyes were always in the rapture of a daydream, and her arms were folded against her breasts, bracing whatever it was that would otherwise flow out and cause a thousand deaths of embarrassment. She was as unpopular at school as I and for that reason I thought of her as my secret sister, and I did not believe her dead. The story of her death was too fantastic; it was the sort of story told around the table on Halloween. She would be sitting there, I was sure, in the corner of the dark schoolroom opposite mine on Monday, and this day, this day, as I had promised myself every day this last year, I would conjure up the courage to go over to her where she sat alone, reading on the back steps during lunch, and touch the flowered material on the arm of her dress and tell her my name, as if she didn’t know it, as if we were just now introducing ourselves.
    We dropped the cream cans off at the train station and picked up the empty ones.