Despite Tyler’s optimism, Evan doubted the lights would ever come back on. Hockey as we know it is done, he thought. He shook off that notion and focused on the job they had to do: today it was Johnny Meegis they would lay to rest in the garage.
“So how was it, getting old Johnny here?” Evan asked, jutting his chin towards the black body bag on the sled. It was difficult for him to square the long black lump before him with his mental image of the elder.
Isaiah twisted to look back at the sled. “He was pretty stiff by the time we got there,” he said. “We had trouble getting him into the bag.”
“All his kids and grandkids were there,” said Tyler. “They were all pretty upset. It was a rough scene.”
“Do they know what happened to him?” asked Evan.
“They think it was his heart, or his diabetes.”
“Probably a combination of things,” added Isaiah, matter-of-factly. He was never one to reveal much emotion.
“Yeah, I guess we won’t really know,” stated Tyler. “Too bad, anyways.”
They left it at that and pulled the sled into the garage. It was a tragic routine the three had been assigned earlier in the winter, and it had become one of their primary jobs now that there wasn’t any more ploughing to do. When word got around that there was a death, it was up to them to collect the body and bring it here to the garage, where it would wait out the winter. The community would bury their loved ones after the spring thaw.
Evan squatted at the head of the body and slid his hands underneath the shoulders. Tyler positioned himself to pick up the legs. They gave each other a quick nod and heaved upwards. Evan took a few steps backward and to his left, and they carefully placed Johnny beside Mark Whitesky, Evan’s older cousin who had frozen to death not far from his house a few days earlier. Evan hadn’t decided if he thought his cousin had had an accident or if he had killed himself by walking out into the cold.
After they had settled Johnny, they surveyed the room to ensure everything was as they left it last time. The makeshift morgue housed twenty-one bodies lined neatly in three rows. Johnny Meegis closed out the third. The garage had room for at least three more, and they could squeeze in more with some rearranging. But with each body, the three friends hoped it would be the last.
In the back left corner lay young Jenna and Tara Jones, the first to go. Their bodies were moved here after the leaders had come to the grim realization that there would be more deaths over the winter and that they would need somewhere cold to keep them until spring.
Soon after, Jacob McCloud was found hanging from a tree in the bush behind his parents’ house. Friends said that he’d been overwhelmed by the guilt of letting the young women walk home drunk on a frigid night. They’d been his close friends. His body lay beside theirs. But dispute lingered over what exactly had happened to the girls. Word trickled through the rez that Scott somehow got hostile that night, but when asked about it, Cam and Sydney either wouldn’t talk about it or they’d say they didn’t remember. Scott had allies on the rez now and it was hard to get answers. He and his cronies lived in the duplexes that had been abandoned when families began consolidating as the blackout wore on.
Next to Jacob’s body, wrapped in old, tattered blue sheets, was his cousin, Dion McCloud. He had shot himself a few days later, near the tree where Jacob had died. One suicide often led to another among the young people, and the compounding tragedies squeezed the stammering heart of the reserve.
In the next row were mostly people who had died of natural causes. Many were elderly. Johnny Meegis was neatly lined up with the rest of them.
“Journey well, Johnny,” said Tyler.
“He’s definitely on his way to a better place than this,” muttered Isaiah. “We don’t gotta do anything else, do we?”
“You said they had a ceremony at his house?” asked Evan.
“Yeah.”
“Nah, I don’t think we gotta do anything. Just pay your respects on your own, I guess.”
Isaiah and Tyler nodded silently.
“Might as well go home.”
Evan pulled at the chains to shut the large garage door, shrouding the bodies once again in darkness. He knew they’d be back, likely sooner than later.
Twenty-Three
Nicole looked out the front window at the still trees and the settled snow. It looked calm. She opened the door and took a step halfway out to gauge the temperature. It felt relatively mild, given the frigid weather they’d endured so far this winter. It seemed like a good afternoon to take the kids for a walk.
She bundled up Maiingan and Nangohns and sat them on the front porch while she put on her snowshoes to walk around the house to get the wooden sleigh from under the back steps. The thin wooden straps of the basket were blistered and worn, but its long skis slid smoothly across the thick snow. It still seemed to work well, but Nicole wondered how much her son and daughter would weigh it down.
“Aambe maajaadaa, binoojiinyag,” she said. “Let’s go, kiddies.”
The boy bounded down the stairs, while Nangohns hesitated. She whined as she saw her brother take a seat at the front of the sleigh. Her pleas verged on tears before her mother decided to step in.
“Give your sister the front,” she commanded. “You’re taller. You can see over her head.”
He shimmied back in his thick blue snow pants to let his sister onto the sleigh. She nestled in for the ride as Nicole called out, “Okay, you guys ready?”
With the leather strap wrapped around her thick deer-hide mitts, Nicole tugged at the sleigh. It moved easily across the snow; the load of children felt a lot lighter than she expected. Maybe we’ll go a little farther then, she thought.
The thick cloud cover insulated them from the stinging air of a clear, windy day. It reminded Nicole that there would be an end to this season, as there always was. At times, though, she wasn’t so certain. Everything was different. Things they had come to rely on had fallen apart and their community had been turned upside down. There were days when she wasn’t sure if she was awake or dreaming.
But this was real, and she was sure of it. She was sure of her children’s warm skin and beating hearts. She had felt their breath close to her as she dressed them for this trip outdoors. She was determined that they would survive and thrive on this land, despite the building sickness and despair around them. She turned to look behind her. “You guys doing okay?”
“Yeah, Mommy.”
“Okay, good. We’ll just go a little bit down the road. Maybe we’ll go see Grandma and Grandpa.”
That meant her parents. Evan’s parents were known by the Ojibwe words for grandfather and grandmother — mishomis and nookomis (or kookom, which was interchangeable) — while Gary and Theresa McCloud went by the English words. It was really just to differentiate the sets of grandparents, although there was some logic to it, given that Dan and Patricia spoke more of the language in their home.
Up the road, Nicole noticed someone crouched over in the ditch, digging at something. She could only make out a blue figure, but as they approached she recognized Meghan Connor, the sole woman from the group of refugees who had come after Scott.
Meghan heard the sleigh on the snow and stood up to see them coming. “Hey there.”
“Hi,” replied Nicole. “Staying warm?”
“Yeah, I’m just checking on some rabbit snares. No luck so far.”
Nicole scanned the snow-covered ditch in both directions. “I don’t think the rabbits make burrows this close to the road. It might be a while before they come back this way.”