Читать книгу The East Side of it All - Joseph Dandurand - Страница 8

The rains wash the moment away that I would stop if I could, to be a moment of silence for the ones we lost this year.

We buried them across the river. There they rest with our ancestors. Now the river flows by them and today the water is a muddy brown.

We used to place our dead in cedar boxes and put them in trees. The missionaries made us take them down and bury them in dirt.

We knew we certainly did not come from dirt. The missionaries would sing songs from the good book they carried around and we would cry as we covered up another relation from the sky.

(If we could, we’d dig them up and lay them in cedar boxes in a good tree up high.)

Still the muddy waters flow on as the rains wash away our tears. And we burn plates of their favourite foods for them. Sometimes we add a cigarette or even a can of beer to quench their thirst.

As we put our brother to the ground all the eagles begin to circle overhead. We know they are the ancestors who fell from the sky. One eagle dives and takes a fish from the muddy waters as the rains fall from the sky where we all at one time began.