The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [18]
He held another spoonful in front of her mouth and she lifted her head, opened, and let her dry lips close around the spoon. He scraped the bottom of the can and gave her the final bite.
“It’s hard for me to understand how you survived so long,” he said. “How did you get water? And what about summer? The mosquitoes?”
“For water, I would go as long as I could. Until my mouth burned. Until my tongue bled. When there was snow, I would sneak out at night and scoop some up in a bowl, and after breakup and the ice melted I would sneak down to the river at night. Sometimes I would drink out of the river like a dog, I was so thirsty. I even think about it now and my mouth gets dry. Mosquitoes must have felt sorry for me. You?”
“They almost killed me. Then I found a bug net.”
“Lucky.”
She reached for the water, sitting in a red plastic cup beside her. He helped her hold the cup to her lips. She finished and sighed deeply. The sound of her relief scared him.
“Before my dad got sick. He took all the food out of the freezer and tipped it over. He hid the meat behind it. Said he wanted it to look like people already stole everything. Left a couple old chunks of bad meat. ‘They will get like dogs,’ he said. ‘They will take what is in front of them and leave the rest for me.’”
Tears slipped from the edges of her white eyes and froze to her cheeks.
“Maybe he knew I would live and you would find me. He told me when everyone was gone to hide in the back room under a flippe-dover mattress in the daytime. ‘Eat just a tiny little bit,’ he said, ‘and use your other way of seeing. You’ll be saved.’ That’s what he told me.”
“Where did you put them? Their bodies? There were no bodies in your house.”
More tears. She didn’t say anything for several minutes. He wished he could take the question back, and in his own mind tried not to see the flickering flames on the quilt he had wrapped around Anna. He imagined the blind girl dragging her mother, her father, the brothers and sisters—down the steps and somewhere out on the tundra in the dark of night.
“He took them out to the cemetery, one by one,” she finally whispered. “Until it was just us. Me and him. Then he said he had to try to keep me safe. He was really sick, and I told him to stay. I would take care of him. Keep him warm and he would be okay. But I could hear him loading his guns and he kissed my forehead and said, ‘Tangerciqamken,’ I’ll see you, and he left. I heard a gunshot, not long after he left. Then another. Then another. Then more. One or two shots. Then nothing for a long time. Then three together: pop, pop, pop.”
7
He opened the backpack and began pulling out the contents while the girl and the old woman watched. He set each item on the floor, thinking about the individual weight and usefulness. He could pull quite a bit in the sled, but if he had to carry the pack, he’d need to really think about what would get left behind.
“She wants to know if you’re going to leave me with her,” the girl said, licking the end of one long, flat dried stalk of grass.
“Why would I do that?”
She turned to the old woman and asked a question and the woman responded with a question.
“Because the bad months are coming, and she wants to know where you’ll take me.”
“Where does she think I should take you? Why are you translating for me again?” he asked, and then directed his question to the old woman. “Where should I take her?”
He pulled a knife from the pack and gently set it on the floor. His grandfather had given him the knife. He had always