The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [46]
He poured the girl the last of the thawed pear syrup. “Here,” he said, “have more juice.” She took it without saying anything, drank it, and moved off to the bedding in the corner of the house.
“All night,” the old woman said, “the village was so quiet that night they all went to the school. I stayed in the steam bath. I heard some drumming for a while. Like they were having Eskimo dance. Then singing, mostly church songs. I wanted to go to them so bad. I wanted to see what those sounds were. I fell asleep. Then late, I woke up because I heard dogs barking and snow machines, and then motors. Then in the morning—nothing. They never came out from that place.”
“The generators,” he said. “There were two generators in the gym. The doors were locked from the inside. Keeping someone out, or making sure no one changed their mind. They probably ran the generators, and died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“I should have been there with them. I should have stood up to those who were afraid of the sickness. Some of them would have lived. The children could have lived. Look at me. Look at you. Even I’m old, I’m still alive. I should have stopped them. How could they just let them all die like that? We survived other diseases. We don’t need to die like that, killing ourselves. Yup’iks were once warriors, you know? We fought to survive. We fought to protect the village. We didn’t just give up.”
“I saw what happened in some of the other villages,” he said, removing the pot from the stove, “what happened in ours. And Nunamuit. Maybe what happened in there wasn’t so bad. They would have just fallen asleep. No coughing. No fighting. No starving.” He began cutting apart the chicken with his grandfather’s old knife.
“Yup’ik people don’t steal from the dead,” the old woman said.
“I didn’t steal this from them.”
“You shouldn’t eat it,” the old woman said.
“That’s what I said about your duck soup.”
“It’s okay,” the girl said, sitting up. “Assirtuq. We can eat it. I told him we could take the food. It’s okay with them. I know it is. Maybe they left that food there for us. Maybe they protected it for us. So we can live. So we can fight back.”
“They used to say if we took things from the dead they would come back and haunt us,” the old woman said. “People had respect for the dead. You used to even see guns and valuable things at the cemetery and no one would touch them.”
The girl felt her way back to her spot near the stove. He held a bowl out to her and she took it. She inhaled deeply from the bowl, reached in with her fingers and removed a leg. The meat was lukewarm. She took a bite and chewed without looking up.
“How do you know this food is okay?” the old woman asked.
“Some things I just know,” the girl said. “Like I knew someone good would be here for us. Like I knew you would be here.”
They ate in silence until the girl set her bowl down and turned to him. She seemed to stare at him with her white eyes until he set his own bowl down, finished chewing a mouthful of chicken, and asked, “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“My little cousin Winnie, did you see her there? She had long, really long hair, almost to here.” The girl brought her hand to her waist.
John picked up his bowl and took another sip of the broth. His stomach churned and gurgled. He didn’t know if he could keep it down.
“Or Kall’aq, my other cousin? Really short, but tough. He had a big scar on his cheek, here,” she said.
“No,” John said. There were so many bodies.
“Or the twins. Gina and Paula. They’re two or three,” she said.
“I don’t know. How could I know?