Read The Cure for Death by Lightning for Free Online Page A

newsprint letters. This recipe was in her handwriting: “
Melt butter, sugar, and treacle, and add essence. Take off the fire, add oats. Mix well, pour into a greased baking dish, and bake in an oven with a moderate fire for half an hour. Let cool. Cut into squares.”
    “Add essence.” By this she meant “add almond extract,” but when she made oatcakes she did add essence, her own essence. When I made oatcakes, they didn’t taste anything like my mother’s, though I followed my mother’s recipe to the letter. They tasted good enough, but they tasted of my essence, not my mother’s. There are no two cooks that can make the same dish; you’ll find that essence in one and not the other. Or the essence in each is just different. I don’t know. But you’ll know the essence of a good cook when you find it in a dish. You’ll just know. It was there in my mother’s cooking. My father knew it. He’d eat the oatcakes my mother made, but not the oatcakes I made.
    My mother began mixing the oatcakes as I finished up the dishes. I went into my bedroom, passing by my father and the voice of Enrico Caruso, who had the power to make my father cry. My father jerked awake as I walked by and wiped the moisture from his eyes.
    The window of my room looked directly over the garden, farmyard, and barn. I had no curtains and very little furnishing: a chair in the corner opposite my bed, a vanity my father made for me from orange crates, hooks on the wall in the corner next to the window, on which my dresses hung, and below this a basket that Bertha Moses had made and sold some years before to my mother. The basket held my socks and sweaters, the underwear my mother made for me from soft sugar sacks, and my few pairs of stockings. In the summer I went barelegged, but in the winter I wore itchy wool stockings, or stockings made of cotton or lisle. I wished for silk stockings or, better yet, the new nylon stockings. My Aunt Lou in Britain all but begged my mother to send her a pair of nylons — a woman couldn’t get a pair of them at all over there unless she had a doughboy, an American soldier, for a boyfriend — but my father said no to that, and no to a pair for my mother. They were too expensive, and nylon was better used in the war effort, to build aircraft and weapons. So I wouldn’t be seeing a pair of nylons for a very long time.
    Over the chair hung a pair of my brother’s old denim pants, a pair he’d long ago outgrown. I put these on under my skirt, chose a sweater, and inspected my hair in the hand mirror on my vanity. This much my father had allowed, even given to me: the hand mirror, brush, and comb that came as a set and a packet of Jo-Cur, a powder I mixed with water to form a jelly that I combed through my hair before setting it in rags, as I would do before bed this night. I had a bottle of hand lotion that my mother made herself from six ounces of mutton tallow that she strained and cooled until it thickened and mixed with three ounces of glycerine and a few drops of oil of geranium and then whisked with an egg beater into a soft cream.
    I owned no jewelry, no make-up my father knew about, or fragrances, except the secret bottle of violet perfume in the hollow stump. I had no pictures on the walls, not even a calendar. My bedclothes were flannel sheets, two gray camp blankets, and a blue quilt my mother had made during the Depression from the printed fabric of old dresses and flour sacks. The only decoration in my room was the circle of blue forget-me-nots painted on the brown metal headboard of my bed, and the two ceramic dolls, past Christmas presents, that sat on my vanity.
    I didn’t think of myself as pretty, though now I look at the pictures of myself in my mother’s scrapbook and see that I was. I shared myfather’s large-boned features, but I had blond hair that I wore past my shoulders and rolled at my temples in the style of the times, fine full lips, and blue eyes. I was a big girl, muscular from