The Cartographer's Daughter

5. Funeral

Every year since my mother's death, following the tradition, my father and I would hike into the meadow to gather flowers. It took us most of the day to trek to the spot where she met him, her favorite spot to rest as she herded sheep; the trees kept the herd penned in and it was easy to protect them on all sides.

This was the place where he came crashing out of the underbrush and she, thinking it was a bear, loaded her sling with a hard stone that she flung into the trees. Luckily the brush softened the blow--with a clean shot she could have killed him--but he claims he had a purple lump on his shoulder the size of a grapefruit. When he came out of the branches, bedraggled and cursing and holding his swollen shoulder, she yelped an apology. She plucked yellow arnica, pounded the leaves with a flat stone, and smeared the green juice over his arm. She liked to tell of how wounded he looked, not just from the injury she inflicted but from a deeper pain behind his eyes, that he was trying to cover up with a wild beard and mussed hair. But it was his eyes, she said, that grabbed her: so deep green they looked almost black, with red flecks like embers burning in them--

"Your eyes," she would tell me.

"She healed more than my arm," my father would say.

Each year we gathered thick bunches of arnica flowers, and purple lupines and white sage. She always came back from the meadow with the smell of white sage clinging to her hair. I bound the bundles with blue yarn and hung them like talismans around our camp. We slept in the meadow and hiked out early, the dew clinging to our legs until we were drenched, looking as though we had walked on water.

When the breeze blew through our blue house, it sounded like the wind rustling the grass in her meadow.

#

There is no body for the funeral, and so a bundle of sticks stands in for my father. Following tradition, we lash reeds together with coarse twine. I wind the cords so tightly in my fingers that there are angry red marks crisscrossing my hands when we are done. Wordlessly, Moira brings over a bowl of ice water. She plunges my hands in. The cold stings so much I clench my teeth, but the red marks fade. As my hands numb, all my emotions slide away with the pain, until I feel stony and calm. But I suspect the sorrow has simply leaked and is pooling unchecked somewhere in the pit of my stomach.

Bami and Moira and Ingo, the mason, each lay a dried bouquet on the raft, and so does each member of the village. After the circle of weavers lay their flowers down, and the shepherds bring their tufts of mountain bluebells, and the herbalist dedicates a bundle of balm to the afterlife, we pull the flower-strewn raft to the edge of the water. Ingo and Bami step into the ocean, towing the raft out until they are waist deep, their tunics billowing up near the surface.

From a bonfire on the shore, I light my bunch of white sage. I hold it close under my nose, inhaling the warm scented smoke as I walk out to meet my father's shrine. My eyes feel like wild animals trapped behind my numb face, and I keep them pinned on Bami as I walk toward him. He looks back without sympathy or pain, without flinching. And he steadies me.

I place my bundle on the pyre. The flowers below it catch, slowly turning my father's memory to uniform grey ash that dissolves into the ashes of all the losses that have come before. Bami and Ingo release the raft. I dunk my head under, symbolically washing off the ash so that what he was, and not what he became, will remain. And how could that cycle ever be reversed? Is there a way I could come up from the water to see my father's face and his steady hands waiting to pull me into his boat? I stay under a little too long, until my lungs crush from their need for breath. I open my eyes and look up to see orange fire dancing on the surface. And it is Bami's steady hand, not my father's, that reaches down to pull me up to my feet, up to breath, up to a life without my father.

We watch the pyre float further out on the calm sea until it becomes small in the distance. Then, it must burn through the bottom of the raft, because all at once the fire sinks into the ocean.

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