Under the old council trees, the dark men opened the grave.
As they lowered the small, plain coffin holding Mary Naquma into its final resting place, three crows, sitting high in the oak above, cawed mournful caws. They cawed again as the drumming began, and then flew off.
To one side of the small grave, a mound of sandy dirt stood waiting. It didn’t feel unnatural to me—the heap of dirt beside the hole in the ground. No artificial grass covered over what it was and no barriers hid where the mouth of Mother Earth lay open, ready to accept her dead.
Around all of us, gathered to witness that she had lived, the beat of the drummers played a quadruple cadence along my bloodstream. As though my arteries and capillaries carried sound, my heart picked up the beat. Up through my shoes, my feet, my legs; up through my body, into my neck, my head, my ears—the beat played until my body was a drum.
Alfred Naquma, in full Indian dress, began his own beat around his sister’s grave, bending and dancing and bending and dancing around the grave. Soon the gimoa followed. Lewis George, with no hesitation, no doubt at his footing, in his own world, joined the man he thought of as his son in mourning for one of their family.
Behind the others—all the Indian women and men and the white women and men, behind a Catholic priest who said prayers and sprinkled incense on the wooden box holding the bones of Mary Naquma—Christine, small in her plain leather dancer’s dress reaching down to her moccasins, began a sweet lament. Her voice followed the drum then rose above it and deepened into dark places the drums had opened.
I could hardly breathe. Dolly, beside me, stood with her head bowed and her hands crossed in front of her. She was here, she had told me on the way from town that morning, because the Indians had come for Chet. And more than that. When you know the sad story of a life that should have been happier, she had said, you owe that person not mourning but a celebration. She stood next to me, celebrating in her own way. We didn’t dance. We didn’t sing. We didn’t have real prayers to recite. But we had our bodies as witness. So we were there.
After a time the drums stopped, though the beat echoed on over the ridge of white crosses. An old woman stepped from the crowd and sang a song so sad I didn’t need words to know her heart was breaking.
At the end, Lewis George tore tobacco to pieces and let it sift down on Mary’s final resting place. Alfred picked up a shovel and threw shovelfuls of dirt onto the box. Christine took the shovel next. Then Lewis George. Then the singing woman who, I had been told, was an old aunt of the Naqumas. Then Lena Smith. The others followed. Christine came to where Dolly and I hung back and led us forward, seeing that we each shoveled dirt into the grave. I could barely see. My eyes burned. I let the tears run down my face. I had never felt so much a part of ceremony, of a true seeing to the other side.
When the grave was covered, women came forward to pat the earth into place the way they might care for a baby, almost with soothing motions, giving no offense to the earth, to Mary, to the people who loved her.
A group of young women then picked up drums again and began an intense drumming with long spaces between the beats as Alfred lifted Mary’s white cross in his large hands and pushed it straight, and firm, into the ground.
Christine stepped forward holding a small brown doll she carried, first above her head, then down to her lips. She set the worn child’s doll, dressed in beaded leather, beneath the cross, straightening the doll’s skirt and propping her better to sit upright.
People began to leave silently. Dolly and I exchanged a glance then tiptoed away with the others, leaving brother and sister behind us, feet planted on either side of their sister’s grave, hands entwined across it, all three together for a last time.