by Melissa Guthrie
When Hattie woke up in the morning, the first thing she did was check to make sure she was still alive. She had been told a story when she was a child, where her grandmother had woken up in the morning to find that the person she went to sleep with had died during the night. That thought always stuck in Hattie’s mind. A person could die in their sleep. She liked to make certain that it hadn’t happened to her.
Still inhaling and exhaling hot, stale oxygen: check.
Heart pumping blood into her brain, her fingers, her toes: check.
She was lucky to survive the night, she knew. Others were not so lucky. Not everyone was given the chance to greet the dawn.
The air in the small room felt heavy, pressing her lungs. Hattie took in breath after breath of it and still felt as though she was suffocating. She licked her lips and found them dry and cracked. She climbed from her bed and walked into the bathroom, turning a knob to bring brown colored water from the tap. She looked into the kitchen to see her father standing there, dressed in clothes stained a permanent shade of dirt, his eyes staring out into the cornfields that surrounded the house. He held a set of keys to his truck, and without saying a word, she knew, he would go. He beckoned.
Follow.
They were outside before she knew it, into the truck with the vinyl seats that stuck to her legs. The sun was barely up and yet the air was thick, wrapping them both in a stale embrace. They were silent as they left the house behind and drove up a dirt road. The road was filled with cracked holes that should have been filled with water. This summer, the rains had come sporadically, and drenched the earth but never fully satisfied its thirst. The fields of corn turned into fields of soybeans, their leaves curling, brown and gold.
“What’s new?” Father asked, and Hattie shook her head. Nothing was ever new in the village.
This was not the first time Hattie accompanied Father on this errand. He brought her before, when she was a child, when Mother was ailing and there was no one who could be trusted with a child.
When they reached a small pile of rocks, Father allowed the truck to stall and roll forward until it came to a stop. He took out a set of gloves, leather, worn and holey in spots, and put them on as he climbed from the truck. Hattie followed after, watching as Father selected one rock after another from the pile—a round one, colored black, a flat one brown and flecked with something that sparkled in the dawn.
Father acted solely on instinct, drawn to each rock for reasons only the universe knew. He had been coming to this pile long before Hattie had been born. He was the chief cairn builder for the village, building towers of stones to mark places of significance—property lines and places where a sky burial had taken place.
Hattie paused, her hands full of small rocks, and wondered why they had come out there at all. Someone must be near death in the village. Who would be next to starve to death, slowly, and then be given to the massive birds of prey who circled the peaks close by, waiting for their next meal?
Father was always so careful with his selection. Hattie saw it in his face, the hard lines of concentration, and the way each stone seemed to come to him rather than him choosing it. He was not a young man, no, he was as old as the oldest elder in the village, and had been alive long enough to see the second generation die out and the third to begin to die off. He built more cairns than anyone else, and bound more still living bodies with rags than anyone else.
In the beginning, Father said that working with the nearly dead made him appreciate the living. Now, Hattie wasn’t so sure. Father’s back was hunched and his legs were unsteady from moving the rocks. Hattie helped him lift one rock and then another into the back of the truck, the dried mud staining her hands. She ignored the pain in Father’s bright blue eyes and thought about the few pictures she saw of him as a boy, the promise of a life spread out before him. One wife and then another. Children who were born and died before they could live.
Hattie’s heart fluttered once, then twice, as if it were a falcon. A thought of death and what happened after passed through her mind and she dismissed it.
If Father wanted to speak, he would.
Every rock selected would become a part of a cairn, the smallest of them adorning the top of the cairn, each precariously balanced. Mother’s cairn had been the loveliest of all Hattie had seen, stacked two feet high and topped with little stones arranged in a circle on a flat rock the size of a hand. Father used the cairn to honor his wife rather than simply mark her resting place.
Hattie bent over and collected fistfuls of glittering quartz, rough sandstone, and the occasional piece of pink granite that would be too small to be of interest to the elders. She found one small piece of obsidian, black as night and smooth as water, and imagined slipping it into her pocket. She raised her eyes to the soybean fields bisected by the riverbed and imagined picking a handful of the beans. She thought of the boy who had done just that and had taken a bullet to the back of his head.
Hattie heard a quiet gasp and turned to see her father sprawled on the ground, face down. She rushed over to help him to his feet. He did not meet her eyes. There was blood running down his legs, staining his socks, and a rock at his feet he should have been able to lift. Hattie turned away, unable to bear his pain, and pulled her hands from his shoulders.
“That will do, Hattie,” Father said, and walked toward the truck, removing his gloves. Hattie followed after; stones clutched in her palms, and dropped them into the back of the truck, watching the obsidian clatter to the bottom of the bed. She cast one last look at the pile, knowing that all too soon, they would return. More people were dying than were born. When they were close to death, they did the honorable thing by no longer drinking water or consuming their rations, and left more food and water for the villagers and elders.
Hattie thought of last night’s dinner, Father’s nearly empty plate. She thought of the falcon. Its wings beat hard against her rib bones.
They left the field and drove into the foothills of the mountains, silent, before finally stopping in a clearing where no trees grew. Father climbed from the truck, dropped the tailgate, and began moving the rocks with a renewed vigor, stacking them into a pyramid.
It took what felt like hours. None of the rocks wanted to stack; none would lean against one another. Time and time the pile would fall, and each time, Father would stack the rocks again. Hattie ignored Father’s frustration and looked down the path, imagining a procession of people coming up the hill as they did when someone was coming to die. They would play drums and sing soft, ancient songs. To the villagers, death was an incredible sacrifice, one appreciated by all, but appreciated above all by the elders. The elders knew that the village was running out of food, they were running out of water, and that all who knew this must sacrifice if any were to survive.
To prolong life is to be selfish.
Funerals rarely took place after death. Instead, they involved the dying person. Most of that person’s family made banners and flags, and when the time was near, they would walk up the hill with the person, playing music and singing songs. Rather than mourn, a family would celebrate, for death was a sacrifice. There had been a time when death was feared, rather than welcomed.
Hattie strained her ears for music and wondered about Father’s funeral. They had no family left; it was just she and Father. The falcon in her chest twisted his neck and ruffled his feathers, hurting her, as she remembered Father explaining the process of sky burial.
First, place the person in a fetal position. It is best for them to be alive for this part; when rigor mortis sets in, it makes setting the limbs of the person far more difficult.
Bind their hands and feet, lest they panic and try to get free.
Bind their arms to their sides and their legs to their chest; be liberal with the cloth. The tighter the better. Death is death, and suffocating slowly is better than starving.
Wait.
Wait as long as it takes.
Hattie heard a noise and looked over to see Father placing a small rock on the top of the cairn he had created. The rock was pink granite, sparkling, selected by Hattie’s own hands. She looked down the path again, heard no music, and saw no flag. The falcon in her chest stretched its wings and settled, placing his head beneath its wing. It knew.
Father sat beside the cairn he had built and folded his knees to his chest. He looked out over the edge of the mountaintop. Hattie went to the truck and a found flag there adorned with oak leaves and acorns. She pressed its flagpole into the ground beside her father and returned to the truck, finding the cloth strips he’d used for everyone he’d ever done this for. She returned to him and bound his feet and wrists. The fabric became moist in her hands. A lump grew in her throat until it ached and threatened to burst.
“When?” Hattie asked.
“Last week,” Father replied. The elders had visited their home and left flat bread. Hattie saw it when she came from the well with a single bucket of clean water.
“Why?” Hattie asked. She thought of his health, how he had been struggling.
“Because it is time,” he replied. “My death means more for you.”
“For the elders, you mean,” Hattie said. The village elders got fat while the villagers starved. They had brought rations from another villager Father had probably sky buried last week and called it an offering of goodwill and gratitude. The falcon in Hattie’s chest stirred again and she swallowed tightly, wanting to be strong and brave, and believe that her father was making a noble sacrifice.
“My darling,” Father whispered, “you knew this would happen sooner or later.”
“Not now,” Hattie said. Not when she wasn’t ready.
Hattie wrapped another strip of cloth around Father’s chest, pulling it tight, remembering his instructions. Better to suffocate than starve. Her hands worked independent of her mind, knowing that she had been groomed for this very task.
“Don’t bind my eyes,” Father said. A single thought slid through Hattie’s mind, a lie whispering in her ear, promising her that tomorrow at sunrise Father would still be alive.
When she was finished with the binding, Hattie sat beside Father who had gone quiet, his lips taking on a bluish tinge as his lungs, unable to inflate, struggled for air.
Better to suffocate.
Better.
“You’ve done your best, my child,” Father whispered. “No one could have done this better than you. When I’ve gone, you’ll—” He gasped. His neck turned purple and veins revealed themselves.
“We could leave,” Hattie whispered.
“You could,” Father replied. Hattie wanted to keep talking to him; she wanted him to conserve his breath and not hurt.
“Why now?” She asked.
“My darling, it was always now,” he said. He went quiet, muscles flexing against the bindings, throat swelling with the effort of an inhale. Hattie took a breath of her own, imagining that she could breathe for him. She wanted to free him and knew she never could. As the sun crossed the sky, his breathes came slower and more strained, then not at all before they started again. Hattie began to sing softly, her throat thick with tears. She shivered as the sun above made their skin burn.
When the sun dipped towards the distant peaks, Father’s blue eyes searched the horizon, calm and at peace. Hattie felt his soul moving further away; she wanted to reach out and pull it back to him.
He breathed once and then not again. Hattie waited a long while, listening, but no more breathes came. It was merciful that he didn’t have to endure a night on the peak and hear the wild dogs and mountain lions that came sniffing for a meal. They would make things easier on the birds who circled the peaks. Better to suffocate.
Better.
When the sun rose again Hattie would tell herself that this death was better, that her father made a noble sacrifice. The village would be better off with one less mouth to feed, and she would not believe any of it.
Then she would close her father’s eyes and wait for the vultures to come.
Melissa Guthrie has been a lifelong resident of Boardman, Ohio and is a 2009 graduate of Youngstown State University. She has been writing fiction for half of her life. She has a passion for history and obscure facts about random subjects. When not loving her job at the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County, Melissa can be found hard at work on her first young adult novel, set in Mahoning County during the summer of 1863.