Waubgeshig Rice - Moon of the Crusted Snow

“Making houses!” Nangohns replied.

“Oh, ever good houses. We’ll need to give youse guys a job next summer!”

Tyler turned to Nicole.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Is Ev around?”

“No, he went out into the bush to check some snares.”

“When do you think he’ll be back?”

“I dunno. Probably soon. He left pretty early this morning. What’s going on?”

He sighed, and his broad shoulders drooped. “Auntie Aileen died.”

Nicole covered her mouth. Tears welled in her brown eyes.

Evan ran the back of his moose-hide glove across his face. The rabbit-fur trim collected his tears. He struggled not to sob as he and Tyler pulled Aileen’s body across the heavy snow. His chest felt tight, his arms heavy, and his legs burned as he lifted each snowshoe forward.

He had arrived home from his trip into the bush the day before to find Tyler walking down the steps. Aileen’s niece Amanda had gone to check on her and found her dead, bundled in her bed at home.

Evan had felt numb at first and he hadn’t cried over Aileen’s death until later at night. She had been his surrogate grandmother, his go-to elder whenever he had questions about the old ways, and he had loved her. He hoped she had enjoyed his visits, for they had always been special to him. He had known she would go eventually, but he had hoped that it would not be this soon.

The smell of sage smudge lingered in his nose, and the travelling song her family had sung for her rang in his ears. Before Evan and Tyler had shown up, her children and grandchildren had debated over where she should go. Tradition called for four days of grieving and celebration before giving a body back to the earth, but the ground was still too hard for burial. So her family had spent the night singing songs and making initial preparations for her journey to the spirit world, outfitting her with the traditional medicines and tools she needed to cross over safely.

Their snowshoes flapped against their boots. Tyler cleared his throat. “Uh, so how are we supposed to put her in there?” he asked nervously. Neither wanted to look back at the elder’s body wrapped in dark grey blankets on a bed of cedar boughs.

“I think we’re just supposed to smudge around her,” Evan answered, patting his front left pocket to feel for the sweetgrass Amanda had handed him. “Then we have to put down tobacco and ask for her to be safe there.”

“Okay. Are we supposed to do a song or anything else?”

“No, Amanda said they’d come down later to do another song.”

“Alright,” Tyler said in obvious relief. These protocols were new to him too.

They walked up over the hill that used to be the driveway to the office. The road lay at least a metre and a half beneath the snow, but it was easier to walk across now that it was late winter. The powder had compacted and they sank less each day. The walls of the band office came into view, and Evan took a deep breath.

The air was damp. The sled glided along with a muffled whoosh. Evan and Tyler guided it carefully towards the building that once bustled with life but now only housed the dead. Their regular trips here throughout the winter had made trails and a clearing in the snow in front of the garage door that clanked and rattled as Tyler pulled the chains from the inside.

Their sorrow kept them silent. Evan pulled the sled slowly onto the cold concrete floor. He dropped the yellow rope and finally turned to look at the elder’s body. The rolled blankets fit snugly around Aileen’s small frame. He pictured her resting peacefully on her bed of cedar.

“I hate to say this,” Tyler said, breaking the silence. “But I think we’re gonna have to do some rearranging in here.”

Evan looked back to the three rows of bodies that stretched wall to wall, and from the back nearly all the way to the door. “Goddamn, I think you’re right.”

The death toll had reached twenty-two. Twenty-three, if you counted Mark Phillips, the man Justin Scott had killed at the beginning of winter. But his body was not here. It still lay on the outskirts of the reserve, frozen and buried in snow where it had been left in the moments after he was shot. There was still some room at the front, but it was small and cramped by the door, and both men wanted to give Aileen the dignity of sufficient space.

“Alright, let’s go see how we can do this.” Evan stepped through the bodies to the back. It was darker the deeper they went into the garage, and the bodies that lay towards the far wall were no more than silhouettes in the dim light.

The friends remembered exactly which person lay where, the circumstances around their death, and the day they brought them to this unfair and uncertain industrial tomb. Both thought of the spring to come, of the necessity of digging twenty-three plots by hand, and burying each person in the rez cemetery. It would be a daunting, traumatic task.

Evan sighed. “Well, let’s move them all a bit closer together to make more room at the front.”

“Yeah, that’s probably the best way to do it,” Tyler agreed. “If we just move them all a little bit to the side, that’ll open up some room on the ends.”

Evan nodded. Tyler continued, “And I hate to say this too, but there’ll probably be at least a couple more people who won’t make it out of this winter alive.”

Evan didn’t want to think about this so instead he said, “Help me over on this end,” and walked carefully to the far corner, where they positioned the winter’s first fatalities. He stopped at Jenna Jones’s feet to face Tyler, who stood at her head. Tyler grimaced and shrugged. They squatted and Evan patted the sides of the young woman’s stiff, frozen legs to find a good grip. His gloves and the few blankets around her buffered his hands from her dead limbs. This is only her body , he thought. Her spirit is gone. We will return her to Mother Earth as soon as we can. He cupped his hands under her Achilles tendons and nodded to Tyler, who shoved his hands under her shoulders. They heaved her frozen frame off the floor. It seemed lighter than when they had put her here.

Evan told himself it was like lifting a few sheets of drywall: long, heavy, and unbending. He tried to chase the memories of the night of her death from his mind. He couldn’t. He felt her petite heels — the flesh of her feet now hard as stones — on the outsides of his palms, and remembered her face as he stared down into the dark cloth that wrapped her legs.

Jenna had been beautiful. Her high cheekbones accentuated the natural tan of her face and her almond-shaped eyes were nearly black. She had exuded a confident intelligence. As they set her down lightly just a foot from where she had originally lain, Evan wondered who she would have become.

“Next one?” Tyler asked. Her cousin Tara was next. They picked her up, stiff and heavy as ice, and moved her the same distance, turning quickly to the next one. The lingering misery of the community’s tragedies was suffocating.

They moved down the line methodically, trying not to acknowledge or remember the people they rearranged and the subsequent dead that were still to come. They finished squeezing together the corpses in the first row, leaving space on the end for another.

Then they hoisted the corpse closest to them and moved it into the cleared spot at the end of the first row. The young men went through the three rows, squeezing the rest of the bodies tightly together. They stood back to look at their work before moving Aileen into place.

“Wait a second,” Evan said. He did a quick count. “Weren’t there twenty-one here before?”

Tyler counted. “… nineteen, twenty. Yeah, there’s twenty there.”