Last Rites

FICTION Last Rites__________________________ Holly Farris I SEE, IN TODAY'S MIDWEEK EDITION of the newspaper, that they buried her on Tuesday. I'm disappointed, but not about missing the funeral or even that it came so soon. It's that the Wednesday paper always showers bright, slick, advertising flyers as soon as I touch it, leaving me nothing but sooty obits. "I'm gonna pee," she had said, her first words to me, the Sunday nurse. A warning would have been nice, especially since I had sat, all white and comforting, for an entire morning beside her wheelchair braked next to her smoky, egg-and-milk splashed, refrigerator. Before I could lift her to the portable toilet, she'd filled my left white shoe with yellow. Where her cotton nightgown rode up, I saw bones looking like they bloomed along their shafts, enlarged and poking out, lively inside papery skin wrapping. "You smoke?" she said, the second thing. "Nah," she answered herself,-"I know from your smell." She was blind, had been before the wheelchair. She couldn't see the family's instructions, her own signature, not to resuscitate if the rescue squad came. The paper was glued, curling and threatening as her old mean fingernails, right to the face of the refrigerator. "Got to get dressed for church," she spouted, and began digging through the topmost buttonhole into her pitiful gray chest. "You're home from church," I said, sounding too final about where she hadn't been seen for years, but I was grateful she drew thin pink blood out of her wrecked carcass. Then she was on to her naked scalp, scratching close to bald eyebrow ghosts, what burnt-out charcoal remained of her eyes. "Look," I nearly shouted, stern before I thought how stupid it was to say it. "Look at your nice hair." I picked up her dead starfish hand, stroking it up and down the thick braid over my shoulder. Freeing the end of the warm rope from its elastic tie, I let strands unravel, curl and stack on her stained nightgown. Hair heaped like cordwood, tangled like last year's twigs snapped for kindling. Her knobby fingers measured the width of strands, plentitude and protection she couldn't hoard against the approaching chill. Her family had pitched the last of 81 her firewood out back into a pickup held together with baling twine weeks ago, desperate to heat themselves at the wake. "See my nice hair?" she had said to the evening nurse as she stepped through the doorway to replace me. "You smoke?" Prophecy Tenskwatawa—Tecumseh's brother—walks into the circle; in his arms he carries a dead man wrapped in muslin. When everyone is quiet, even the babies, he kneels and gently places the body beside the fire, then raises his arms to the shrouded moon. From around his neck, he takes a string of beads— pellets of flesh—and presses it into the outstretched hands of the closest warrior. Tenskwatawa stops and looks all around. With his good eye, he sees the friends who are gathered; with his blind eye, he sees the friends he has lost. As sparks dance skyward, Tenskwatawa— "The Open Door"—speaks: A nation is coming. The people return. Out ofthe shadows the buffalo leads them. They are the hailstorm that darkens the sun. Cast by the firelight, giant shadows snake through the crowd. To the flickering beat of water-drums, phantoms curve across the lodges; the black feathers and horns of the dancers are swallowed in darkness at the edge of the clearing. —Edwina Pendarvis 82 ...