The doctor said there was nothing to do about my vision, but that it would return. He was right, and I was lucky. It came back slowly over the next few days, and I think that moment—that blindness—is the cause of my cataracts. It’s what I’ll tell the eye doctor when I see him in a week. However, I don’t know how much of the story he needs to know—I guess I can tell him that as a boy I looked too long at the sun.

My vision returned fully when we got Bedogi’s body back. It was cold that day, and I remember bringing in a lot of wood with Frick for the woodstove while Mom made whole corn and bean soup. During one trip out back to the blue tarp covering a cord of wood, Marla showed up for the fourth and last time. She waved the coroner’s report and said she wanted to talk with us, said that she had some questions. But we ignored her. She wouldn’t leave, kept yelling from the steps into our home: “He was here, wasn’t he? Say he was here!” Mom wouldn’t. I brought this detail up to Mom once, and all she said was that Marla was out to get her, that Marla was wrong, that I was wrong. But Marla was right, and maybe that’s why Mom flung open the back door and chased her down the driveway with Frick’s skinning knife, screamed she had no business here—“This is a ceremony for the dead!”

Marla left, and on that cold day we buried the boy out back of the house by the tree with the red, white, black, and yellow flags that Frick had tied around a coarse oak. We were supposed to pray for peace, but I don’t remember what I prayed for. It was a long time ago, and somebody else now lives in that yellow house. I wonder if they know a child is buried out back? I once called Paige and asked her that. “Let it go,” she said, and hung up. I know that the family who now lives in that house ripped down the sweat lodge and built a swing set in its place.