Maybe the Plains Indians were more in tune with their psyches using calendar hides than we were using our almanacs. Lacking written language, they made annual decisions on the most memorable event of the year and drew a small picture on a tanned hide adjacent to the last year's picture. In that way a calendar hide became a history of the tribe. The outstanding event for our tiny tribe, on the third day after the initial nuclear strikes, was the death of Mrs. Baird.
None of us could say when her body finally yielded to hopeless odds. It happened during the night, the thread of her life parting as silently as a single strand of cobweb. She was already cold at seven in the morning when Devon awoke for his turn at the pump. He must've mourned through the entire hour, unwilling to wake the rest of us, because he was all cried out by the time I woke up.
Though I could have carried her body out to the basement alone, Devon insisted on helping; his right, his duty. I almost had to fight him to prevent him from going outside to dig a grave.
"She took the chances she did," I reminded him, "because she wanted you to live. Don't make hers a wasted sacrifice, Devon."
Shar convinced him that several hours outside, especially with the dose he had already sustained, would positively kill him. "Anyway, we've got a better way. We can preserve her remains until we can give her a proper burial," she said with a motherly hug.
I didn't dwell on the mechanisms of dehydration or putrefaction; only told him we should follow the ways of early Americans with an elevated burial and claimed a false certainty that the body would be well preserved. Devon Baird honored me by pretending to be wholly convinced.
By midmorning Shar and Devon had done the best they could with the emaciated, stiffening body, sprinkling it with cologne I never used anyway. The most grotesque moment came when we carried the body upstairs to my maple dining table and began to roll it into its shroud of screen. Ern had the presence of mind to take a reading in the dining roomabout four rems, a reminder that we must not let our pitiful service become a drawn-out affairand he had the good sense to stand aside until the precise instant when the body rolled off the table.
Ern kept the body from thumping the floor. Devon reacted quickly enough but was so weak that he sat down hard on the floor, his mother's head in his lap. "I'm sorry, mom," he whispered, and caressed the dead face. He was unable to rise without help. The kid was much closer to total physical collapse than I'd thought, running on sheer guts.
At last we got the screen rolled around the body and snugged it with wire, and while it may seem ludicrous to hold a funeral service over a roll of screen, that's what we did, holding lit candles. Shar had told me it was my job to say the right words. Devon would want a man to do it, and Ernest McKay would've frozen solid trying.
I said: "Lord, You've heard it all before. You must be hearing it from a hundred million throats today. For which we give no thanks."
I saw Shar's startled frown, her silently mouthed "Oh," or maybe it was "no." But I saw Devon nod, eyes closed, knuckles white on the fists at his sides. I continued.
"You gave this good woman the terrible gift of free choice, Lord, and she exercised it to keep her son alive, knowing it might kill her.
"And it did. Greater love than this hath no man and no woman, and for this alone we would ask You to cherish her. It's said that you can't take it with you, but Mrs. Baird beat the odds. She takes with her our greatest respect, and our hopes for her everlasting grace.
"If I misquote Khayyam, I crave Your understanding:
O Thou who woman of earth didst make,
And in her paradise devised the snake,
For all the freely-chosen horror with which
the face of mankind is blackened,
Our forgiveness give. And take.
Into-Your-hands-O-Lord-we-commend-her-spirit-Amen," I ended quickly. I half-expected a lightning bolt before I finished. I didn't care.
We persuaded Devon that it wasn't strictly proper for him to act as pallbearer; that Ern and I wanted that honor. That way he didn't have to watch us hauling the screened bundle to an upstairs window, where, after a little cursing and prying, we got the old-fashioned window raised enough to slide our burden onto the gentle slope of the roof. We bound the screen in place with baling wire, working as fast as we could. It would've been more coldly sensible to place Mrs. Baird's body on insulation in the attic, but it seemed necessary, somehow, that we place the dead outside the lair of the living.
And then we resealed the window and went back to the tunnel with a side trip to get a bottle for the wake we held. And yes, I got shit-faced and no, not too shit-faced to take my turn at the pump. Devon got his chance at the bottle, too, and he was more sensible about it than I was.
It seems that I had a meal that day, a soupy stew with half-cooked veggies and more carbonized biscuits. I suppose Shar or the girls cooked more horsemeat, because the following day there was plenty of it, sprinkled with brine and folded in film. My last clear recollection was of Shar draining the water from that jugful of damp alfalfa seeds and putting them away again.
I don't justify getting drunk; I merely record it. If we'd had another emergency that afternoon, I probably would've paid for it with my hide. As it was, the big trouble came later.