The Weight of the Dead by Brian Hodge

 
    As was their custom, as the law said, as it came down yesterday in judgment, they strapped her father to the corpse at midday, when the sun was at its highest overhead.
    Melody had spent the night wondering, well, what if it was cloudy. Hoping for this like she’d never hoped for anything. Maybe it would make a difference if nobody could see the sun. The law seemed firm about where it had to be. If they didn’t know, maybe they’d have to wait, if only another day. But when it came to a death sentence, one more day was everything.
    By the time she’d awakened this morning, she was ready to admit that it wouldn’t have made any difference. No sun, just clouds—this was something a kid would pin her hopes on, and Melody was no kid. She was fourteen, almost, and maybe she’d never been one to begin with. She held Jeremy’s little hand snug as they watched the straps come out, feeling him grind the bones in her fingers together, and thought maybe there were no such things as kids at all in this world.
    Kids were just something that used to live in the World Ago, before the Day the Sun Roared.
    â€œIn life, each of us must make room on our back for our brother, for our sister,” Bloomfield was saying. He was a big, stooped man with a big head. He postured like he was reading from a bulky book he held in front of him, but he never seemed to actually look at it. “Carrying one another toward each and every tomorrow is the only way we’ll continue to survive. It’s the only way we ever have.”
    Here in the center of the village, gathered around the Thieves Pole, they had her father kneel, leaning forward onto his knuckles. Melody supposed it went easier this way, but then, how would she know? This had never happened as far back as she could remember. Only about once every ten years, her grandmother had told her. That was about how long it took for somebody to forget. Forget the lesson that the entire village was obliged to turn out and watch. Forget what the punishment was like, really like, in the end. Somebody was bound to forget, eventually.
    But why why why did it have to be her father?
    â€œAs in life, then, so in death,” Bloomfield said.
    Her father didn’t look up at her, at Jeremy, just knelt on the ground staring at the browning October grass, his hair hanging down in front of his forehead. Three hundred pairs of eyes all around him, gazing in pity and horror and hatred, depending on how they’d felt about the dead man.
    Probably not a lot of hate, come to think of it.
    She wanted him to look at her, and she didn’t. What if he saw that she wasn’t crying and thought she no longer loved him? She’d cried over her dog—she couldn’t cry for him? Could be she was still too shocked to cry. She’d never believed it would actually come to this.
    While her father posed like a tilted table, they draped Tom Harkin’s body over his back, the dead man’s sightless eyes staring at the back of her father’s head, the near-naked corpse’s belly to his spine. The straps they used were designed to not be cut—not easily, anyway—made of rough rawhide that surrounded a core of chains. They looped the first strap over the both of them like a belt that wrapped around and around and around, then padlocked it to itself. There were more straps that crisscrossed at the shoulder, others that cinched the living and the dead arm-to-arm and thigh-to-thigh. Tom Harkin’s chin draped over her father’s right shoulder, like a friend whispering something in his ear. His arms trailed down along her father’s side, and when her father struggled up to his feet again, the dead man’s legs dangled in back, ready to kick him every step along the way.
    â€œIf a man robs his brother of all his tomorrows, then that man’s own tomorrows shall be spent carrying his brother in death as he failed to do in life.”