In the Darkness Visible - Elk Riders Volume One

Chapter 3: Illicaine

The undertaker and his two sons had carried Sade's mother out of the house, her body wrapped in the sheets from her bed. She had become so thin in those final weeks that the pointed angles of her bones were visible even through the fabric. Erasmus, the landlord, was waiting outside for them and swiped the key from Sade's hand. "Not enough that she couldn't pay rent for the last six months but now I have to pay for her to be carted away. Turn your pockets out boys."

Sade did as he was instructed, then pulled Vondales' pockets inside out, for he was crying too much to do it himself.

"Not a pence between them. Worthless. I'll take any animals and the furniture as well, even if it's only good for firewood."

"There is only Bea the mule left," Sade said. They had slaughtered and eaten all the chickens, goats, and the cow. Erasmus took one look at the gaunt old mule with sagging skin next to the barn, cursed, then spat at Sade and his brother's bare feet.

"Worthless," he said again, then gestured to the undertaker and his two sons. "I can't afford three of you. Make the boys here help."

The wiry undertaker muttered something to his two sons and walked off. Sade and his younger brother took up their mother's feet and helped the other boys, not much older than them, carry her to Skull Point. It was a short walk but a long way to carry your dead mother as a newly orphaned child. The undertaker's boys walked in silence out of respect for Sade and his brother. Vondales was little help, bawling as he was.

"There, there, we'll be all right," Sade said, even he did not believe it.

The path up to the point was sunken deep into the earth by previous processions so that the four of them moved with the ground near their shoulders. This was not how Sade's mother had wanted to die, leaving them, with no mourners along the path, no one to take care of her sons. The hillside was bleak, empty, the sky low with dark clouds, and the air wet with the beginning of a rainstorm. Although they were quiet, the two other boys walked at a quick clip so as to avoid the rain. For them, they could not quit themselves of this body soon enough. It wasn't their mother; it was another job.

They reached the top of the hill. The gray sea opened from one end of the horizon to the other. Sheets of rain were visible on the wind. The undertaker's sons set down their load. Vondales had snot dripping from his nose. Tears ran down his face. One of the undertaker's sons began to take stones from the cairn at the end of the path and set them in the sheet while the other wrapped the body tightly in string. Sade pulled the sheet aside, just to see their mother's face once more.

It looked like her and didn't. It was their mother, but as she looked in those final weeks as the wasting disease had taken her, hallowing out her cheeks, deepening her eye sockets, turning her hands into an old woman's. Her lips were purple, like a drowning victim's. Her oily unwashed hair stuck to the side of her face. She would want them to remember her differently. Nonetheless Sade stared at her until the undertaker's son closed the corners of the sheet over her and pulled the ends of the string tight. Both of the undertaker's boys stood at either end of the body, looking back and forth between Sade and his brother.

"Any words," the older one said to Sade. Sade realized that was supposed to happen now. Someone was supposed to say some words over the body as it was thrown into the sea. But an emptiness as immense as the gray ocean below opened up inside of him. He found no words. He simply shook his head no and swallowed the shame of it. The young men carried her to the cliff's edge, swung her three times between them, and let her go into the sky where she floated just before she disappeared over the lip of the earth.

Vondales sobbed anew and the sound was like a knife to Sade's heart. He began to cry as well, both of them weeping into the other's shoulder. Sade thought that he felt one of the other boys pat him on the back as he passed. He welcomed the touch, any touch, any sign that this world was not empty of love. But when he looked up, the two boys were already down the hill. The tap between his shoulder blades had just been a fat drop of water as the rain began to fall.