The two youngsters watched him row away from shore and out beyond the shoal water with his dead wife. ‘Will I come out with you?’ Evered asked. Their father slumped against the gunwale to catch his breath. They set it in the boat along with half a dozen stones scavenged along the shore. He and Evered shifted the covering of reeds and alders away from the overturned boat and hauled it down to the landwash before they carried the corpse from the house. The ground was frozen solid when she died and even if their father had been well enough to shovel there was no digging a grave for her. The woman was deathly sick herself by then, coughing up clots of blood into her hands. Their mother laid the infant in a shallow trough beside the only other grave in the cove and she sang the lullaby she’d sung all her children to sleep with, which was as much as they had to offer of ceremony. They lost their baby sister before the first snowfall.
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