Anchorage Daily News

EAGLE -- An old-timer died in Eagle City on April 6. One of the last of the old breed, they say. A poker-playing raconteur who was never without his pocket knife and a piece of diamond willow to whittle into a slingshot, a bow and arrow or a walking stick.

I only knew him in the last few years of his life when we were lucky enough to be his closest neighbors, living a half mile from his simple A-frame in the woods.

We enjoyed stopping in to check on him on particularly cold days, when the small cabin was toasty warm. We'd sit around the round table, still covered with a green felt cloth from the poker game the night before, and listen to his stories of outwitting the game warden back in Georgia or delivering his own daughter in a barn in Eagle using nothing but a pocket knife he boiled in the coffee water.

After a year-long battle with stomach cancer, much of the time spent in Fairbanks undergoing treatment, Al Wiggins came home to die. His funeral was set for Easter Sunday.

Like everything in Eagle, funerals are do-it-yourself affairs. With no funeral homes, no morticians or funeral directors, everything is left up to the deceased's family and friends.

Al's daughter would be arriving from Homer in time for the funeral, but all the preparations would be made by his friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, his body was stored at the airplane hangar at the airstrip.

Al had many friends in the nearby Native community of Eagle Village, and he was given the rare honor of being allowed to be buried in the Native cemetery.

A fine site was selected beneath a towering spruce tree within a stone's throw of the Yukon River.

A new white sheet was donated to make a shroud. Three friends built the coffin of plywood on the village public safety officer's front deck.

Eight men dug the grave, some coming from Eagle City and others from Eagle Village to share the work, stopping for soda and chips and hand-rolled cigarettes as they leaned on their shovels and talked about the old-timer.

When we arrived at the airstrip Easter Sunday afternoon, the plywood coffin with six rope handles had already been brought out and put in the back of a bright blue pickup truck. People stood around and talked quietly.

Al's daughter greeted people she hadn't seen in years. It was easy to tell she was Al's daughter by the way she had a story for each person -- a remembrance of them from her childhood in Eagle.

The road to Eagle, closed all winter, just opened the day before Al died. It is often still icy at this time of year; many people asked about the condition of the road and how her drive from Homer had been.

A man with a long graying beard and a waist-length ponytail erected a tall spruce pole in the back of the pickup.

Three o'clock rolled around, the time for the procession to begin and the pole was still standing bare. At the last minute, a small truck drove up and a burly bald man quickly rolled down the window and thrust out a Confederate flag.

The flag was soon attached to the spruce pole and all was ready.

The assembled crowd -- and crowd it was for Eagle (one man said it was the most people he'd been around since a trip to Fairbanks two years ago) -- piled into a dozen cars and trucks and followed the blue pickup from the airstrip to the Native village three miles away.

Slowly, with hazard lights flashing, rebel flag flying, the pickup circled the village, trailed by the rest of the procession.

We passed the village clinic, the community center and the well house. We passed two outhouses with crescent moons on the doors, swinging on their hinges, a sad-eyed, skinny husky and an abandoned sod-roofed cabin.

We drove past the tiny wooden church on the riverbank and the old one-room schoolhouse with its windows gone.

One cabin we passed had the words "Go Away" spray-painted next to the front door, a message for tourists perhaps.

Today was not the day for going away but for coming together.

The procession ended at the village cemetery, a small collection of graves with homemade white crosses tucked between the road and the river.

Six men carried the coffin and set it on two spruce poles laid over the open hole. It was a beautiful Easter Sunday, a bright blue and white day with the brilliant sky above reflecting off the frozen expanse of the Yukon River. It was in the mid-50s -- sweat- shirt weather.

Most of the people gathered in the muddy, slushy graveyard wore sweat shirts and jeans.

I was the only person wearing black, and even that was black jeans. Al's daughter wore a green sweater, a green and white striped dress and jeans.

A 6-year-old wearing his father's oversized hat stood soberly watching the events.

A simply fashioned wooden cross was nailed flat to the top of the coffin. Tucked beneath the cross was a hand of cards, a combination of aces and eights known in poker as a dead man's hand.

The poles were removed and the coffin lowered into the grave with ropes.

A village elder directed one of the men to jump down into the grave (it seemed like sacrilege to me but apparently this is how things are done here) -- and cover the coffin with a baby blue blanket.

The other men helped the man in the hole to scramble out, then an outer box of plywood was lowered over the blanket-draped coffin.

The former postmaster and de facto mayor of Eagle said a few words and the daughter made a short statement and read some song lyrics that were meaningful to her.

Then she threw the first handful of dirt. And then everyone -- men, women, and children -- filed past the grave, each throwing in a handful of dirt, some pausing to say a silent word.

One woman, a member of the poker playing crowd, threw in several new packs of cards. "That ought to keep you for a while, Al."

The men took turns shoveling dirt into the grave, the first few shovelfuls hitting the plywood box with a muffled thump.

There were plenty of able-bodied women around, but it was unquestioned that it was the men's role to fill the hole, as it was their duty to build the coffin and dig the grave. And so it was the women's role to make the shroud, to sing and to cook the food for the meal that followed at the community hall.

The men and women in Eagle fell easily into these roles unquestioningly. This is the way it has always been done, as it has in communities across the country.

The only difference is that here it is still done this way, the whole event, from start to finish, carried out by the friends and family of the deceased. Indeed the funeral could be called BYOS, bring your own shovel, as people did.

When the shoveling ceased, the mound was smoothed and the de facto mayor called it good, I joined the daughter and a few other women in the singing of "We Shall Gather at the River," our voices quavering and out of tune.

One woman attempted harmony while the rest of us struggled to stay on pitch. With the end of the song, the service was over, our job ended. My partner Billy stowed our shovel in the back of the truck and we climbed in.

We felt sober but somehow fulfilled that we had seen Al off in a fitting way, that the community -- both white and Native -- had come together to pay our respects to the old-timer on this beautiful Easter Sunday in Eagle Village.

Louise Freeman lives and writes in Eagle on the Yukon River.

ADVERTISEMENT