Scapegoat

            A winter wind blew the day that Tiyo's mother was buried, even though by the calendar it should have been spring.  Tiyo shivered in the cold, dry wind and watched his sister throw the stone into the crevice .  It landed on top of the others that already covered his mother’s body.    Tears ran down his older sister’s cheeks and her eyes were red from crying, but Tiyo had no tears inside him pushing to get out.  His younger sister, only five,  sobbing audibly, staggered under the weight of a stone that filled her arms and heaved it into the crack between the rocks.

            When it was Tiyo’s turn,  he  hurled his rock with such a force that it hit the pile and then shattered into pieces.  He took another and then another, smashing them down as hard as he could onto his mother’s rocky grave, only stopping when his uncle grabbed his arm and held him back..

 “Enough,” his uncle said.

            Tiyo struggled for a moment, trying to jerk his arm free, but the look on his uncle’s face stopped him.  He stood motionless then, and watched as the others filled the crevice with rocks until there was no hole left, no sign that under the crushing weight of stone, his mother’s body lay cold 
and lifeless.  (Burial rites here?)

            Then they walked back to the village, through a wall of wind that made every step an effort, past the house where he and his sisters had lived all their lives, to their uncle’s house on the opposite side of the square.  It was warm inside because his aunt already had a fire in the wood stove, and the scent from the pot of  beans cooking on the stove's top filled the room. Tiyo sank down onto a worn couch that was spilling out its stuffing: a remnant from the days before the war, long before he was born.

            His uncle sat beside him and Tiyo wished he'd taken a spot on the chilly stone floor away from the stove, it would have been warmer than on the couch, looking as his uncle's cold face. 

            "Can you take the herd after dinner?" his uncle asked after a long silence.

            Tiyo nodded.  The goats had to be moved.  There wasn't a blade of grass or branch of a 
bush within half a day's walk of Oraibi.

            "Take them toward Nuvatakovi?  There's a waterhole not too far from where they can graze." 

            He nodded again, and then his aunt brought the pot of beans and set it on a leaning table made from juniper wood.  His mother had had one of the old tables—solid oak, she used to proudly say--and four chairs whose legs constantly required mending.  Tiyo wondered if his uncle would take his mother's furniture now that no one would be in the house to use it.  The thought of the house, empty and desolate, left him cold inside.

            Outside, the wind howled and Tiyo was grateful for the warm beans, a funeral gift he knew, from his aunt who had used some of the scare wood supply to cook them.  Most meals were eaten cold, especially in the winter when they could cook up extra food and set it outside, it could keep 
for days.