Eating With the Dead

My two previous ramblings about the Indian Funeral had a point. And that point is, the tribe of my husband believes that in the hours after the burial the dead will share with the family a last meal, a feast.

We shared a meal with my husband's grandmother, after her family took up shovels and rakes, took off jackets and hats, and buried her themselves. The men dispatched by the county to take care of such things stood in the background in their faded denim, watching the family take up their shovels.

Grapes of Wrath dirt makes a terrible lonely and hollow thud when it hits a casket 6 feet deep. Being Baptist, I'd never heard such a sound. Baptists don't usually bury their dead. We don't eat with them either...

But my husband's tribe does. And during the feast, while I sat behind my husband, spouses can't sit beside the blood-kin, I thought about our little one, gone too soon. The family probably wondered why the white girl was crying on her fry bread.

I didn't just eat with his grandmother. I ate with my baby too.

Driving To The Funeral And Green Men

My husband and I went to an Indian funeral. 

He's Native American. If you want to know blood quantum, he's a lot Native. One-half to be exact. His grandmother, who passed away, is of two specific bands who celebrate a warrior existence. 

My husband is Indian, but he is also very white. And I don't mean the color. 

The day before the funeral my husband said, "there's going to be a feast."

"A feast?" I was shocked at the use of the word "feast." Who seriously uses that word in an everyday sentence. 

"Yeah," he said, "I guess we're eating afterward." 

That's what I mean when I say my husband is white. He didn't get the significance of the word "feast." And of course I didn't either. I'm raised Southern Baptist, I've never been to a non-Baptist funeral in my life. In my world, after a funeral, we eat casserole. So I thought, cool, can't wait for some chocolate pie.

The day of the funeral my husband and I drove from our cozy suburban neighborhood into the autumn colored hills of back wood country. 

The town we drove to stopped growing twenty years ago. Maybe even thirty or forty years ago. 

The first road sign I saw was, at first, unrecognizable. It made me disoriented, like the "off" feeling you get when you glance at your living room right after rearranging the furniture.  

The sign was not like the typical stop sign. It said, "Sook So <ee <it." I think the octagon shape made it feel familiar. And maybe the red color.

After the sign we crossed a bridge. It was metal, and painted a hunter green. Later, driving from the cemetery in the back of the car, my husband's Aunt told us she used to be afraid of the bridge. 

"Our people called this the Green Bridge. We had a story for the bridge," she said, "our people would say a little green man lives under the bridge. When my father would take his post at the gate into town I would bring him food, and I when I got to this bridge I would always run because I didn't want to see that little green man." She chuckled, and then in a soft voice, in a tenor and a pitch I think only native peoples have she said to the glass of the car window, "We Indians are a scary people."