Carry the Dead

A short story from the Writing Battle Contest

Jonas had settled before the fire, tamping tobacco into his pipe, when a blow sounded against the door. His wife, Ruth, flinched and rose from her chair.

“Fetch the rifle,” Jonas said. He gripped the iron poker from the hearth.

He would not have known the visitor if not for Ruth’s gasp of recognition. White frost clung to his beard and dusted his coat. His sunken eyes stared under the shelf of his brow. In the night behind him, snowflakes as large as doves fluttered.

“Samuel!” Ruth lowered the rifle.

Jonas pulled the man, their neighbor, into the house. What terrible mission had brought him four miles to their home?

Trembling, Samuel set down his lantern. “We’ve lost Aaron.” Samuel turned to Jonas. “I need your help to bury him.”

“The ground’s too hard. Wait until the sun warms the soil…”

“It’s been two nights already. I waited, hoping the snow would stop.”

Ruth grasped Jonas’s arm. “He must be buried before the third day.”

The last coffin Jonas had carried had been his mother’s. She passed in the spring, when his shovel turned the ground as easy as planting a field. They buried her right after her last breath. Sometimes, he heard her voice call his name.

“We’ve hours until dawn, but we’ll need a fire to warm the ground.” Jonas shrugged into his coat.

“Wait!” Ruth scurried off and came back carrying two bundles. “Take this.” She thrust the packages at Samuel. “Salt pork and hardtack. Sorry I don’t have more to send.” Color rose in her face. “Tell Mary I’ll be around when the roads clear.”

Samuel tucked the food into his pockets. “I’m grateful. Truth is, we’ve run short of supplies.”

Jonas paused in the doorway when Ruth called again. She rushed to him and wound her wool shawl around his neck. “Stay safe, Jonas.”

The wind ceased when the men were halfway to Samuel’s home. Clouds scattered, revealing the moon, like a white pearl in the indigo sky. No sound but the crunch of their boots across the snow-covered fields. Their breath hung like smoke overhead.

At Samuel’s home, they found Mary’s mother seated in a rocker at the hearth with the younger child, a girl, playing on a rug at her feet. Samuel handed the old woman the food. “From Ruth.”

The grandmother rose. “She’s with him still.” She gestured to the closed door across the room. Her wrinkled face knotted in anger. “The devil takes us if we’ve come to this. No bread to fill our sorrow, no drink to wash our pain.” She motioned to Samuel. “Go fetch Mary.”

“I’ll go,” Jonas said.

The boy lay on his parent’s bed in the cold room. They had dressed him in black pants that stopped short of his ankles and a white shirt that matched the pallor of his face. His mother slumped from her chair and rested her cheek on the mattress. She clutched one of the child’s hands. 

Mary jumped when Jonas touched her shoulder. “Please, not yet. Would it be bad to have him back?”

Jonas thought of all the ones he had lost. Would it comfort this family, to be haunted by their child? “You shouldn’t tie him to this earth.”

“I’d do anything to keep him longer.”

Jonas eased her to her feet. “The dead are never gone. We carry them with us always.”

Samuel hitched a horse to their sleigh while Jonas carried the boy outside. He wrapped the body in Ruth’s shawl. Bundles of firewood rested in the back of the sleigh. Rather than put the boy there, his father held him in his lap while Jonas drove the sleigh.

At last, they reached the graveyard behind the church. The moon cast the snow in blue light. Bare-branched trees cast long shadows on their work as they stacked wood on the grave’s soil. The fire lit, the men warmed their hands in its heat. A howl sounded from the woods on the other side. Jonas glanced at the horse tethered on the cemetery’s fence. “We shouldn’t leave them there, with hungry wolves near.”

While Jonas tended to the horse, Samuel laid his son beside the fire, as though to warm him. He brushed aside the shawl and cupped the boy’s cheek. “If he died in the spring, we’d live with his ghost.” Samuel drew the cloth back over the boy. “But I couldn’t bear the guilt of it, to face him now. He’d been sick. When he died, I felt relief that there would be one less mouth to feed.”

“Hunger makes wolves of us. You can grieve the dead and worry for the living.” Jonas rested his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

When the fire had died to coals, Jonas swept them from the grave and sunk his shovel into the ground. Samuel staggered to his feet, but Jonas waved him away. He dug, mindful of the passing hours and disregarding the blisters that burned on his hands.

Jonas finished digging as a line of burnt orange stretched across the horizon. A blanket of soft gray fog rolled in. Together, Jonas and Samuel eased the boy into his resting place. The sun rose, scattering the mist and warming the earth. The ice melted from the tree branches and clear droplets of water fell over the grave.

THE END