by Roger Wall
“You remember lying together, Otis, in the garden?”
I slid under the rabbit-skin blanket and nuzzled against him, spread a leg and an arm over him, pulled him close to me and smelled his sick body—urine, feces, phlegm. He relaxed and emitted little grunts and moans. I tried to make out what he was trying to say, but none of the sounds formed into words that I could understand. He took my hand, and we fell asleep.
I woke up some time later, midmorning. Sunlight edged into the cave. I had rolled to the outside, away from Otis. He was still on his back but had straightened both arms down along his sides. I slipped my hand inside his shirt and touched his cool dry skin. There wasn’t a heartbeat. A surge of panic flooded me: I had failed to keep him warm.
I climbed on top of him and pulled the rabbit-skin blanket around us so the heat from my body and my hot breath, trapped under the quilt of rabbit pelts, could revive him.
He didn’t stir, and after a few minutes I pushed myself away, terrified, and studied the yellow skin of his face. It had acquired a greenish-blue cast, as had his scalp, giving his white hair a greenish tinge as well. His mouth was frozen open in the shape of an “O.” His teeth were bared as though his last words had been painful and lodged in his throat, suffocating him. I had failed to keep him warm.
I whipped my bow and stick until smoke and then fire filled the stove. I added driftwood until a blaze leapt up the chimney. I stoked the fire until dampness fled the air, the timbers of the cave creaked from the heat, and the insects and spiders hiding against the cool earth behind the junipers began to fall to the floor. Sweat ran down my arms and chest. I set my chair beside Otis’s bed and watched his still body for motion, wondering what he had been trying to say when he last exhaled. Something about his wife? Something about make love? I gripped the edge of the chair until my damp palms turned purple from the June berry stain. The cave took on the atmosphere that had accompanied our lapses in conversation, our silences.
Perhaps it was the dimness at the back of the cave or the creases of the rabbit-skin blanket, but as I scanned Otis’s body, I thought I saw his chest rising and falling. Was this his spirit leaving his body, already starting its journey to search for Malèna?
“Are you ready, Otis? Do you want me to take you down?” I asked him.
I began pacing. The low ceiling of the cave seemed to bear down on me, and I ducked as though the timbers were falling. I touched my drawings in the soot on the ceiling, the stick figures of men and animals that I had made in childhood. What was I doing? Otis’s spirit was flying around the cave, struggling to find its way out, and I was trying to avoid it, dipping down when it came too close. In the piece of mirror resting on the dresser and propped against the wall I saw it, there in the glass: dark streaks painted on a brown face, black eyes, a long nose.
“Otis!” I shouted, and then recognized my hands in the reflection, touching the greasy smears and June berry stains on my cheeks. By the middle of the following day, Otis’s corpse had begun to rot, and the green-headed flies arrived, attracted to the fluids that he had released when his muscles relaxed. This same type of fly buzzed over my feces in the woods. I hated them and their vicious noise. I wouldn’t let them land on Otis. The only way to protect him was to wrap his body in the deerskin.
I dragged him to the front of the cave and unfolded the large skin that we had sewn from several hides and used to cover the cave’s entrance in the cool season. I spread it over the willow mats and aligned Otis near the center, then, after waving my arms to clear the air of flies, threw a flap over Otis and rolled him up into a tight bundle. The orange rope was in the broken cart in the garden along with the tools; the yellow one would have to do. I tied a bowline with a long tail so the slippery rope wouldn’t come unknotted and fed the other end of the rope through the loop. I folded excess deerskin over Otis’s feet and another flap over his head and then wound the yellow rope around him, finishing the job with four half-hitches. The flies couldn’t penetrate this cocoon and soon departed.
The bundle was too heavy and awkward to carry, so I towed Otis outside the cave to the ledge and pushed him over the lip. He started to slide along the steep sandstone slab of the butte, then stopped, snagged on a rock protrusion. After a moment, as though he were deciding whether or not to continue, the bundle rolled free until a sandstone pedestal, a hoodoo, stopped it. I scrambled down the butte and jockeyed it loose. With a light tap of my foot, Otis continued his journey, twisting, bumping, and tumbling toward the grassy terrace. Near the bottom the rope caught again, and Otis pivoted and wedged into a crack.
I imagined the spirits of the animals we had trapped and eaten, the deer, rabbits, birds, and fish, stirring inside this fracture in the butte, wondering what was blocking their exit. I inched down the slope and whipped the free end of the rope, sending Otis on to the terrace, where he rolled to a stop. The yellow rope had loosened, some of the strands were cut, and the deerskin was abraded. If I had used only a single wrap, the bundle would have come unraveled and Otis would be lying before me, cut up and broken.
I wanted to haul him up Cemetery Butte as fast as possible, so I fashioned a harness from the excess rope, with loops that I could slip my bare arms through. The weight of his body pulled at my back, and the rope cut into my flesh. The sound of the deerskin flattening stalks of flowers, bumping along hillocks of grass, crunching over the dirt and stones of the road, and catching and releasing on the knotholes of the footbridge’s planking tortured me.
At the trail junction to Cemetery Butte, I wiped sweat off my chest and brow and massaged the red indentations on my shoulders. Thick clouds and the close, moist air at least protected me from the sun.
It had been easier carrying Otis up Cemetery Butte on my back, and as I panted and leaned into the last steep section before I hauled him over the crest and onto the prairie, I wondered why a dead body seemed so much heavier than a living one.
I decided to rename the butte Otis Butte. Otis would lie forever under its grasses and weeds, or in the juniper tree, if his spirit made it there. It was his butte. I never knew the other people buried in the cemetery, and no one was left in the town to bury there, anyway.
I couldn’t decide whether to unwrap Otis from the deerskin. Considerable work had gone into fashioning it—the hides of four animals and several nights’ sewing with thread of tendons. To give it up now would mean creating another problem in the cool season, how to cover the cave entrance, that I might not be able to solve on my own. I was afraid to see Otis’s face (what if it were bashed in?) but at the same time wanted to, one last time, and if decay were a precondition for turning into a spirit, Otis might never decompose wrapped in layers of deer hide, bound with a yellow rope, and covered with dirt. He might never be able to find his wife.
That was it, then.
I untied the yellow rope and shook the deerskin as though I were airing out a blanket. As Otis rolled onto the trampled grass, I almost expected him to open his eyes and start breathing, but he was soft and motionless, his face undamaged from the battering descent.
I’m sorry that I no longer have the old photographs, from the time when Otis was young and strong and living with Malèna in Bismarck. Of course, those photographs wouldn’t offer much of a clue to what he looked like when he died: an emaciated old man, with yellow-greenish skin tight over high cheek bones, a mouth open in a painful “O,” teeth bared and crooked, a nose beaked like that of a hawk, and silver hair flowing to his shoulders so he seemed like a cross between an animal and a spirit. If I had had a camera, this is the photograph I would have made: Otis lying east to west at the foot of the juniper on Otis Butte above the White Earth River. No fancy clothes, no plates of food, and no wife to hold hands with. Just him alone in his tattered and dirty clothes.
Wrapping Otis in his sheet would have made the burial more dignified, but running back to the cave to fetch it would leave him unwatched under the lowering sky. I braided his hair instead and tied it with a section of yellow ro
pe.
The bottom of the grave was dark, with roots crossing from one wall to the other that Otis would have to pass under. And then there was the dirt to shovel. I shuddered at the thought of throwing spadefuls of the rocky soil on his face. We didn’t bathe often, but Otis was always fastidious about washing his face, and shaving the few hairs off his lip and chin with a knife, as though his face were sacred. This was something I never asked him about: Is the face sacred? I sat on the ground, my bowed legs dangling in the grave and held his cold forearm.
I pushed off and wrestled him down into the earth. His body became entangled in the roots, and I let go of him, throwing my hands against the damp soil to steady myself while I gagged and spit out the sour fluid that had come up from my stomach. I drew my knife and hacked at the roots. Otis’s corpse dropped and landed with a thud on my feet. There were words that the ancestors, someone’s ancestors, at least, used to chant to speed the deceased on to the next life, but I forgot to recite these. My throat burned. I straightened his twisted body and climbed out of the hole. I wiped my hands on my pants and brushed the dirt from my shoulders and chest as though I were shooing death away.
I grabbed the shovel and with a grunt rammed its blade into the pile of dirt. As I heaved the yellow-brown soil into the grave, I closed my eyes and listened to it fall on Otis’s body and pretended I wasn’t the one filling his grave.
I didn’t stomp down the mound of dirt over his grave for fear of crushing his body. Rain and time would eventually settle the fine particles of soil and rocks. I stepped back, easing my weight onto the long handle of the shovel. The sharp dense leaves of the juniper bent in the wind. I thought of all the adversity we had suffered since the Event: food shortages, sickness, cold, heat, storms, bad water, bugs, boredom, and fear. Sometimes I was miserable, barely able to tolerate our life, but this moment was the worst. I let go of the shovel, and as it fell, I looked toward the dark, cloud-filled sky and cried:
Granddaddy, the earth’s on top of you now!
But I still hear your voice and see your face.
I’m here, and you’re somewhere else.
Is that what you meant by lives?
Tell me, what’s a spirit?
I’m the only one left!
Why did you do this to me?
It wasn’t what Otis had taught me to sing. It wasn’t even a song, just random words that barely expressed the desperation I felt. Rain began to fall and dampen the raw earth of the grave. I told myself then that I would dig my own grave next to Otis’s and wait for death at the bottom, with dirt piled along the four edges so the rain could wash it down over my body. I wanted Otis to be the first one to greet me in death.
I knocked dirt from the shovel and rolled up the deerskin. The bundle was tighter and narrower without Otis inside, and I wouldn’t need to unroll it until the cool season. I left the yellow rope on the ground. I never wanted to see it again.
PART II:
WHITE EARTH RIVER (ALONE)
For the first days after I buried Otis, I didn’t want to leave the cave. I spent mornings in bed as the dim light of dawn grew to the full sun of midday, when the sand on the ledge outside the cave became too hot for bare feet. Some days I stayed in the shade of the cave’s opening, sitting in my chair, my elbows on my knees, and my head in my hands while I stared stupidly out at Otis Butte until the earth rolled into night. The time between dusk and sleep was cursed with the sounds of deer and pronghorn, their hooves striking the firm ground as they thundered down the butte to the valley meadows. But when I stepped outside the cave and peered over the ledge, I couldn’t see them; perhaps I had heard only the spirits of these animals out on an evening prowl.
I called to them, as one animal would to another, in grunts, barks, hoots. I remembered the tune to the song I was supposed to chant for Otis’s burial. But despite the months of practice, my mouth had forgotten how to form Otis’s made-up Hidatsa words, and they came out as angry moans and groans, throaty monotone lines, broken up shouts and yells. I screamed in high pitches until my throat hurt and I exhausted myself. I danced in the sand outside the cave’s entrance. As long as I was moving, loneliness couldn’t settle on me and I could trick myself into believing that I was performing this ritual for Otis and that he could hear me.
Birds seemed to be the only ones who answered my singing—with a loud burst as they took off from their roosts in trees lining the butte’s gullies and flew into the night. Perhaps my singing frightened them. Or maybe they thought the echo bouncing off Otis Butte was Otis’s spirit answering me? The thought of this made me shout with greater fury. But I heard only my voice.
My voice didn’t hold up. It became raw and sore. During the day, when I talked to myself, my words sounded like pebbles rattling in a rusty can. I began to think I was sick but couldn’t bear the silence that came from not talking or singing. I brewed red root tea to soothe my throat. I began to hate living in the damp, heavy air of the cave, which still smelled of Otis. I packed a rucksack, not with much, just the essentials, and headed to the grove of cottonwoods and set up camp.
The route down the butte seemed steeper than usual and the distance to the valley greater than I had remembered. I barely recognized the garden as the one I had planted just a few weeks ago, perhaps because the weeds were as high as the plants. I felt alone and exposed in the openness of the valley, which had become foreign to me.
When my hunger finally spiked, I dropped to my hands and knees and grazed like a four-legged animal. I ripped dark-green leaves of spinach from their stalks and stuffed them in my mouth; snapped off asparagus stalks, tearing clean the tender tips with my teeth and chewing the fibrous stems into a pulp; pulled peas by the handful from their vines and crunched them to a mash; ate young onions and cloves of garlic until my mouth screamed.
I wished for a deer but knew that even a newborn fawn would require a brutal struggle and produce more venison than I could eat in a week. Instead of setting traps for small game, like rabbit, I let myself become distracted by a gopher that had tunneled under the black mesh netting meant to protect the garden from deer. Perhaps I thought he’d be easy to catch. His tracks led to a den in a corner of the cornfield. A light wire snare would surely catch him.
In the afternoon heat I sat in the grass and stared at the den’s opening and sweated, believing my concentration would raise the animal from the ground. “Gopher, gopher resting below, you’ll soon be dead, and roasting over a fire,” I hummed, my song keeping me company. Shortly before dusk the animal waddled into the snare. As it struggled against the wire, I clubbed it with the blunt edge of the machete and then quickly dragged it away from its tunnel; other gophers might still be underground that I could later trap.
Its meat was greasy and gamey, not as delicate as rabbit or grouse, or deer killed quickly before fear spread through muscle and spoiled the taste. Cooking it hadn’t been worth the trouble. I threw its small carcass into the fire and smelled the foul, lowly spirit of the animal. I added wood to make the fire burn hotter and rid the air of its putrid odor.
At night, under the trees, I wrapped myself in a deerskin, not just as a precaution against snakes and insects, but also to remember the sensation of Otis’s tucking me in bed when I was a child. Beside a low fire I lay sweating, with the river of the Milky Way spread over me and the long night before me. I searched the sky for satellites—Otis had sworn they were up there, watching everyone, polluting the constellations—but all I could see were the familiar Big Dipper and an occasional dying star. Morning light could not arrive soon enough, and when it did, I shivered over a small fire and cup of tea, thankful for the strenuous labor and heat that the day would bring to distract me from my life.
I attacked the garden in a campaign to restore order. I crouched over the rows of plants and tore out weeds, in my haste leaving behind roots. My back ached from the hours spent leaning over, and my skin smarted from the sun, but I was grateful for the exhaustion and distraction that came from the labor. Oti
s’s carefully thought out schedule of staggered planting had seemed so easy to follow when he was alive, but now remembering the scheme taxed my nervous mind and I had to run up to the cave in midday to consult old sketches of the plan to avoid making mistakes in the second phase of planting.
As the days passed, with a second then a third weeding, I began to see a fitness return to the garden. The rows of plants looked neat and tidy, almost happy. The leafy stalks of cottonwood saplings, driven into the ground and arching over the bedding plants, provided shade for the young growth until I thinned and transplanted the seedlings into full sun to mature. I staked the beans and reinforced the black mesh netting surrounding the garden, the same type of netting I used to trap deer, with lengths of straight green wood. With the bladders we had made from the mottled inner tubes in the boathouse, I hauled water from the river and irrigated the crops. I spread compost around the plants.
The days of hard work brought calmness, and I began to crave a reward, something sweet, for my effort. The honey in the beehives was ready, but Otis had always been the one to risk getting stung as we gathered the thick liquid and waxy combs. June berries were too green to release their nutty flavor. Chokecherries and wild plums weren’t ripe.
An apple would have to do. I waded through grassy meadows to the road and walked north up the widening valley to the abandoned orchard. As the grass brushed against my legs, I remembered how I’d hold Otis’s hand when I was young. For a moment, I didn’t feel alone. He took me to the orchard only once a year, at the end of the warm season, declaring that in venturing so far we risked being detected. Of course, his lectures never stopped my running ahead and grabbing the low-hanging green and red fruit. He and I would fill the wheelbarrow and our packs with apples, dry some to cache for the cool season, and eat others over the course of several weeks, sometimes cooking them into a sweet, concentrated sauce. But that day, when I wanted a treat, the apples were barely fruit at all, just small, swollen balls on the stem, with none rotting on the ground to scavenge.