Grandma Magpie pointed to the stairs. My uncle visited with her. “Go on, son,” he had said to me. I needed coaxing. The steps held no railing, just a steep box of stairs turning toward a hole in the ceiling. There was a powdery smell along the stairwell, a smell I knew had not been there before. I had gone to many wakes. I had shaken the hands of the dead but the dead I had seen were prepared for viewing. Annie White Elk had just passed away. There was a smell in the room I have come to recognize as death. There is no other smell like death, though some things can remind me of it. My uncle told me we were like animals because we can smell death for the first time and know what it is. When I reached the last step I looked down to see my uncle looking back up at me. He nodded his head and then looked away from me.

I could hear their voices. They were saying something about how Indians begin to see ghosts just before they die. To this day I dislike the sayings that accompany visits to the dead. The hallway was dark. Through a crack in the ceiling, a thread of silver light traced the path I walked to the small room. It was cold upstairs because the rafters weren’t sealed. When the wind began blowing it made a sound that caught inside me, and then a scent filled the hall, sudden and sweet in my throat. It wasn’t home like I knew. It wasn’t the hiss of day-old coffee on a hot stove. Not that smell. It wasn’t the quiet heartbeat of clocks that has its own smell, too, or the smell of fry bread put to grease. Not that either. It was the damp smell of cold rain, water stains and water-swollen wood. I could smell pine needles and alcohol. I remembered my mother had told me that Annie White Elk had rubbed vanilla into the heat of her wrists, and my mother had frowned on that luxury for a woman who had little to eat. I heard the wind again and the smell was gone as suddenly as it had shown up. The back of my throat was tight. There was only this small house for them that the wind claimed like a channel. Rain bled the walls to rust, and the newspaper wallpaper curled back from the ceiling. There were spots along the hallway, like warm spots in water, then a coolness again that made me gulp breath. I walked slowly down the hall, stalling, feeling my way with my hands.