The Great Death (3 page)

In their sickness, both parents were using a bucket, too weak to walk to the outhouse.

Maura went to the door, opened it, and looked out over the village to the milky blue-gray lake beyond.

“I wish Father would get better,” she said sadly. “If he did, we could all go away somewhere. Mother can still walk a little. We could all go away.”

She twirled some hair that hung limp over her shoulder. She often did that when she was nervous or afraid.

“Wishing will not make Father better,” Millie replied. “We have to keep him clean and warm and offer food. We have to get water and firewood and empty the honey bucket. Mother is too weak to do it.”

Millie turned back toward her father and felt the burn of tears welling up, not for her father or mother, not for herself, but for her little sister, who stood like a shadow in the doorway. Suddenly she no longer hated the idea of watching after Maura, who was too small, too young, too frightened, and who now must help care for their parents. She wanted to help Maura.

Maura turned from the door and stood over the bucket, holding her breath as she looked at the contents. Emptying the honey bucket was the worst chore. The sloshing liquid always threatened to spill out. When Millie came over to her, Maura gripped her sister's forearm.

“Are they going to die?” Maura whispered, looking at their sick parents, her voice rising slightly.

“Stop it, Maura,” Millie said gently but firmly, pulling her arm free. “We need to fetch water and firewood. We must do what must be done.”

Millie gingerly lifted the honey bucket, and Maura grabbed the empty water pail. They would go together. The girls always left the house together now. They had heard the sounds of bears splashing in the river, prowling near the village, and the sounds of weeping and lament from nearby homes. They were afraid to go outside, especially very early or very late. Everyone in the village was afraid. They feared each day as much as each night.

Horror is most visible in daylight.

As they moved quietly toward the door, so as not to disturb their parents, Father sat up, coughing, and pointed toward the corner. “Wait. Take my rifle,” he said hoarsely.

Millie carefully set down the honey bucket, picked up the rifle by the barrel with both hands, and carried it to her father.

“But I don't know how to shoot it,” she said.

“Bullets,” he croaked, motioning to where the box lay on the ground beside a double-headed ax.

Maura brought him the box.

Although he was very weak and his spotted hands shook terribly, Father took a bullet from the box and slid it into the loading gate.

“You try,” he said, addressing Millie.

Maura watched intently, setting down the empty water pail. Mother leaned up on her elbow and watched too.

Millie tried to force the cartridge in backward.

“The other way.” Father coughed, his body trembling.

Millie turned the brass cartridge around and pushed it into the loading gate until it clicked shut.

“It holds five,” Father said softly, closing his eyes while Millie loaded more bullets into the rifle. Then he opened his eyes again, startled, as if he had forgotten something.

“Load a round into the chamber,” he said. “Grab that lever and pull down on it.”

Millie held the rifle against her thigh and pressed down on the lever, which broke open easily. The whole top of the gun seemed to slide apart.

“Now pull it back up,” said Father. “Good. Careful. It's loaded now.”

Father taught Millie and Maura how to safely lower the hammer when they weren't ready to shoot. He showed them how to aim, warning them to hold the butt firmly against their small, bony shoulders, and how to look down the barrel to align the sights. He taught them never to aim the barrel at anything they didn't want to kill. He was too weak to take them outside to practice. Besides, he had only half a box of ammunition. He had meant to trade some furs for more.

After the short lesson, Father fell asleep, his breathing hard.

Millie slung the rifle over her shoulder and lifted the sloshing honey bucket. She felt safer with the gun firmly pressing against her back. Maura grabbed the water pail, and together they stepped outside. No one was moving about. It was as if the entire village were asleep or, perhaps, abandoned. First they emptied the honey bucket in the outhouse, returning afterward to set the empty bucket outside the door. Then the girls walked toward the lake to fill the water pail. Now they could hear wailing and crying as they passed cabins. Death was everywhere.

When they stopped by one house to check on a friend of Millie's, they learned that another infant and two elders had died in the village during the night, too young or too old or too weak to fight off sickness for long. Millie's friend had the red spots, and she was weak and coughing. She was looking after her mother, who was lying on the bed, covered with spots and shaking terribly.

“She'll be all right,” she said, wiping her mother's forehead with a wet rag. “I think she's a little better than she was this morning.”

Millie and Maura thought the woman looked worse than their mother.

“Where is your father?” Millie asked.

“He died yesterday,” she said. “My uncles took his body away.”

Millie worried about her own father, and she wanted to hurry back to him.

“We have to go now,” she said, nervously. “We must take care of our parents.”

Though neither said a word as they left the cabin, Millie and Maura felt guilty that they didn't have any sign of the sickness. As far as they knew, they were the only ones in the entire village.

The People had always buried their dead, but since the sickness arrived, no one was strong enough to drag away the corpses or to dig the many graves. Instead, they tried to burn the corpses, thinking it would kill the disease, but no one was strong enough to gather the great quantities of wood needed for funeral pyres. As the girls slowly passed nearby houses, they saw partially burned corpses lying scattered atop too-small fires, some still smoldering. They even saw the scorched body of Millie's friend's father. Millie and Maura turned their heads, frightened by the burned and disfigured faces of people they had known all their lives, many of them relatives.

They were too shocked to speak. Maura vomited twice. Millie held it back, barely, though more than once she felt it rush up into her mouth.

The dead lay everywhere—inside, outside—the dying sitting or lying beside them, the living brushing away flies from the bodies and holding cloths to their faces to lessen the stench of decay that rose from their dead and from the rotting salmon along the creek. The village that was all the girls knew of life and place and home had transformed into a smoky shadow of death.

Millie and Maura walked close together, careful to step around the dead. Millie halted when she saw the body of an older boy whom she had liked. Then she pushed on. The girls made their way down to the lake, wary of bears, filled the pail with water, and collected dry driftwood from along the beach.

No wind blew over the land. The surface of the lake was flat. A raft of mud ducks bobbed on the milky-blue water.

Millie motioned for her sister to pause with her before turning back. She looked around, at the hills, the distant mountains to the south, the broad, flat, silent lake. To Millie it seemed almost beautiful, in spite of the horror. On such a day, village children might have played in the lake or along its banks, staying close to shore, frightening one another with stories of monsters that were said to live in the lake. Father had seen one when he was a young man. He had told the story of how he was paddling his canoe along the western shoreline, looking for caribou or moose or beaver, when a giant, scaly fish, longer than his canoe, swam alongside, splashed, and dived. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. Others had seen it, too.

Was the great fish also dead, killed by the red spots?

Was all the world dying?

Denc
'
i

(Four)

“There is a steep cliff two days up the coast,” said that sly Raven. “You must make camp at the bottom of the cliff and await my signal.” Raven smiled as he lied to the chief, happy that his deception was working. He was an accomplished liar.

A
DOG TROTTED BY
on the beach carrying something in its mouth. It lay down and began eating, tearing off pieces with its teeth. The girls thought it was a salmon at first, but when they were close enough, they realized that they were wrong. They could see fingers.

Millie picked up a stone from the beach and hurled it at the dog, striking it squarely in the side. But it didn't move. It kept eating, greedily gulping pieces. Both girls dropped their bundles of firewood and ran at the dog, yelling and waving their arms.

“Go away!” they shouted. “Go away!”

The dog stood up, growling at the meddlesome girls. Millie picked up another stone and hurled it with all her strength, hitting the dog again. This time it dropped the arm and skulked back toward the village with its tail between its legs.

The dogs were eating the dead. For many days, no one had been feeding the dogs, and so, hungry as they were, they turned to the only food they could find.

Millie and Maura picked up their bundles of wood and the pail of fresh water and returned to their house. Father was still asleep. Mother was awake but too weak to sit up.

“Daughters,” Mother said hoarsely, as if her words were dying, as if they too had red spots, “go check on my sister and her baby.”

Auntie had given birth in early spring, when the ice melted on the lake. Both mother and child had caught the sickness the day after Millie and Maura's father first showed the spots. Uncle had been among the first men to die.

Before leaving as Mother asked, the sisters rekindled the fire, warming the cabin. Maura washed her mother's face, tried to get her to drink some water. She studied the tattoo on Mother's chin: three blue-black lines running vertically from just below her lower lip. All the women in the village had tattoos on their faces, some of the lines solid, some dotted, but all the same color. It was a sign of beauty and maturity, of reaching the marrying age. The lines were made by stitching strings of gut smeared with bear grease and ash into the skin, leaving the permanent blue-black lines after the stitches fell out.

“Are you cold?” Maura asked Mother gently.

“No, child.” Her mother did not open her eyes to speak, but she trembled from time to time, as if shivering. Maura pulled the blanket a little higher and looked closely at her mother's face, tracing the tattoo softly with a finger.

One day,
she thought,
Millie and I will have tattoos.
Then she began to cry a little, quietly, not letting her sister see her. It was a mother's role along with her sisters and other women of the village to sew the stitches. Maura worried that her mother wouldn't be here to do this for her. She was afraid that no one would be here.

Father was asleep. As Millie checked on him, his lungs rattled in his chest like a crumpled, dry fish skin. When she was certain he was still alive, she took up the rifle and motioned to Maura that it was time to leave.

Mother spoke to Millie. “Watch after your sister.”

She said that whenever they left the house.

“I will, Mother,” Millie replied sadly. She wondered if this might be the last time she answered her mother's constant demand. Though she could not cure her mother, Millie could promise this one thing to her.

Auntie lived on the far side of the village. On the way the two sisters saw more partially burned bodies of friends and relatives, blackened and rank, dogs feasting on the charred remains, ravens and magpies picking at them. Each time the girls approached, the birds fluttered away momentarily and then resettled on their meals. Millie thought about using her gun to stop the animals. But was Millie to shoot them all? Every dog? Every bird?

There were bear tracks all around the village. No sounds came from inside the cabins they passed. Either no one was alive or no one was speaking—no one comforting the dying. Comfort didn't help anyway.

The living still died. The dead stayed dead.

And the stench!

The smell of rotting flesh, both salmon and human, crouched on the village like a thick, living fog, so full of decay it was as if the air itself were squirming with maggots. Occasionally, a breeze would arise and sweep the pungency from the village and out across the lake.

Although little else stirred, the maddening clouds of mosquitoes still whined and bit.

When they approached Auntie's cabin, the girls were relieved to hear the muted sound of a baby crying weakly. At least two other people in the village were yet alive, they thought. But when they opened the door, their relief fled like squirrels from an angry dog. Auntie lay sprawled on the earthen floor, her blouse open, her naked baby lying atop her, suckling listlessly on a spotted, lifeless breast, crying because he was hungry, his little shuddering body covered with the red death.

Maura picked up her cousin, laid him on the bed, wrapped him in a blanket, and sang to him softly, trying to calm him, while Millie tried to feed him water squeezed from a dampened rag. His entire body was covered with red spots, even his eyelids. This was the same baby they had played with joyously during the potlatch celebration the night the strangers arrived. After a few minutes, the baby stopped crying. Darkness was gathering outside. It was getting quite dim in the cabin. Millie lit a candle and brought it close to the bed.

The two girls sat on the rickety bed while Maura held the baby, watching helplessly as his breathing slowed and then stopped altogether, his fixed brown eyes staring at the dark.

Maura suddenly grasped her sister's arm.

“He isn't dead, is he? He'll be all right, won't he? We can take him with us. He'll—”