There they
dug a grave in a small, unused sementera plat where only the old,
rich men of the pueblo are buried. A group of twenty-five old women
gathered standing at the front of the house swaying to the right,
to the left, as they slowly droned in melancholy cadence:
You were old, and old people die. You are dead, and now we shall
place you in the earth. We too are old, and soon we shall follow you.
Again and again they droned, and when they ceased others within
the house took up the strain. During the singing the carabao head
was brought from the house, and the horns, with small section of
attached skull, chopped out, and the head returned to the ceiling of
the dwelling.
Presently a man came with a slender stick to measure the coffin. He
drove a nursing mother, with a woman companion and small child,
from comfortable seats on the upturned wood. The people, including
the group of old women, were driven away from the front of the house,
the coffin was laid down on the ground before the door, and an unopened
8-gallon olla of "preserved" meat was set at its foot. An old woman,
in no way distinguishable from the others by paraphernalia or other
marks, muttering, squatted beside the olla.
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