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kneeled beside Mary and joined her in her lamentation. A tall man, a priest, ducked as he entered the low threshold, crossing himself as he moved to mother and child.
    Flora went back outside. Two women approached from another cabin and began to chant, Nesika papa and kloshe kopa , a language Flora had not heard Indian people speaking before. Gus took her arm and said quietly, “They are speaking Chinook. That’s the Lord’s Prayer in Chinook.”
    â€œChinook?” Flora asked. “But aren’t they Shuswap Indians here?”
    â€œIt’s a way they talk between different tribes and among traders and such. Not a language exactly—it uses words from a number of languages. English, French, various tribal ones. There was a lot of it around Victoria when I was a boy. Here, too, because the Oblate missionary Father LeJeune in Kamloops had a newspaper that used it. But you don’t often hear it anymore. Those women were probably students of LeJeune, maybe at the school in Kamloops.”
    â€œI don’t think we belong here right now, Gus,” said Flora softly, and the two of them walked over to the river to wait for whatever might be required of them.
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    Back under the shade of the cottonwoods, Flora began to weep. She was remembering the warmth of Grace’s naked body as she carried her around the garden, the child’s voice like rustling leaves. She remembered the sight of Grace drinking from her mother’s breast and wept harder for Mary who had given birth to the infant, cared for her and her siblings, and who had carried her, damp with fever, on her horse to Flora’s veranda so that she would not lose a precious day’s pay. She remembered drawing the bath for Grace, small tufts of cattail clinging to her buttocks until Flora brushed at them and they drifted away in the dry air. Is that what was left of Grace now, seeds on the wind? A faint odour of urine in a soft towel?
    One by one, the people of the village arrived at Mary and Agrippa’s cabin. The wailing continued, the prayers in Chinook, the priest coming out of the cabin and kneeling with the others. It was no time for strangers or employers to witness a family’s sorrow. After ensuring that there was nothing they could do, Flora and Gus mounted their horses and quietly rode away towards Walhachin, following the river again for the cool air occasionally drifting up from its surface. Flora wept, taking a hanky from her sleeve to wipe her eyes. To lose a child! And it was not the first taken from them, the earlier child buried within its spirit house in the cemetery bowing both to the Christian god and to the God who dwelt within the red hills, the wash of the river over sandbars, the scent of sun-struck sage.

FOUR
    1962
    It was best to ride a bike alone on the narrow lanes through the cemetery. Trees leaned over some of the paths to make dark tunnels and you could smell their branches, a bitter smell, like cough syrup. When the other kids came on their bikes, there was always lots of shrieking and talk of ghosts—“Look! There’s one now! It’s reaching for you. Aiiiii!”
    Certain areas were to be avoided because of the density of growth around the stone houses that Tessa knew were called mausoleums. There were other houses, lower, which her father told her were sarcophagi; the bodies were placed within them rather than being lowered into the ground in coffins. When she was with the other kids, Tessa would shriek too and pretend to have seen a white form hanging from a tree or to have heard creepy voices calling from under the new graves.
    Alone, however, she was not afraid. Of course there were ghosts! It was a cemetery after all. They were not white shapes like children wearing a sheet over their heads. That was for Halloween. But she could tell when one was around. It was . . . well, it was like being in the same room with someone else.