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

Like the other dairymen in the area, we shipped our cream by train to Palm Dairies in Kamloops and received payment once a month, by check, in the mail. Once we had made our delivery, my father drove the buggy back up the street to the store and tied up the horses. His sheepishness had drained away. He said to my mother, “I want to see you at that church in fifteen minutes, not a minute longer,” before he turned his back on her and strode over to Reinert’s blacksmith shop. I followed my mother into the store. My father wouldn’t enter the general store; he wasn’t welcome there and he knew it. The last time he’d set foot in Bouchard and Belcham General Merchants was the day after the Dominion Day picnic, 1941, nearly a month after the bear attacked our camp. That day he walked into the store with my mother to buy the hard pink candy he loved so much, and when he stepped out of the store into sunlight again he had managed to start a fistfight with Morley Boulee, the teacher’s husband, and to knock over a rack of ladies’ silk stockings.
    My mother and I, on the other hand, were welcome in the store, as long as we came without my father. My father had given in and let my mother go to the store alone over the necessity of having flour in the house. Bouchard and Belcham’s was the only store in town. We eitherbought supplies there or made the daylong trek into Kamloops. The store was old, one of the first buildings in Promise. It smelled of sawdust and smoke from the big woodstove that the old men sat around. It had a very worn oiled wood floor and the walls were plastered with government posters. Some said DON’T BE A CUPBOARD QUISLING ! and warned of fines up to five thousand dollars and imprisonment for hoarding food; others advertised Victory bonds or demanded that we all DIG FOR VICTORY and grow a garden plot, or KEEP IT DARK and cover our windows at night and close our mouths. Other posters explained the latest rationing regulations, which seemed to change monthly, on tea, coffee, and sugar. Sugar was limited to half a pound per person per week that month, down from three quarters of a pound.
    Belcham sold everything in that store: coal oil, feed, dried fruit, split peas, beans, rice, barley, sugar and sago sold by the pound from hundred-pound gunnysacks, yard goods, galvanized tubs, milk pails, pitchforks, tools, binder twine, nails in bins, newspapers and magazines, tobacco, bluing, coffee, tea, canned vegetables that we never bought, and a few ready-made clothes. There was a cheese as big as a washing machine that we cut chunks from, wrapped in wax paper and then again in brown paper. In the back corner of the store was the post office wicket where everyone in the valley and in town went to pick up their mail. Belcham ran the wicket himself while his wife ran the till. Bouchard was long dead.
    I waited on my mother, as she chatted with Mrs. Belcham, reading the covers of the magazines and newspapers that offered stories on how to grow a Victory garden and how to knit ten pairs of socks a day for the boys overseas, yet another way to eat rhubarb, and how to turn old pajamas into housedresses. I fingered the few pricey packages of nylons that Belcham kept in the store, until I noticed the old men around the stove staring at me. I stared back until they looked down at their feet and then went outside and sat on the steps. I pulled my skirt over my knees and hugged my bare legs. Dan had gone off someplace; he’d jumped off the democrat before my father had even pulled Cherry and Chief to a halt. But where he’d gone, I didn’t know. There were few enough places for him to hide — the town was nothing but one long street of false-face businesses. It was framed by the United Church at one end, and the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches facing offat the residential end. Bouchard and Belcham’s was just about in the center of town, across from the motel. The ancient little motel was then owned by the elderly