The Book of Shila

I had four sons and a husband, all of whom were killed by

Lamanites in the battle that left so many dead that the bodies
were left where they were or made into mounds and covered
with dirt because there were too many to bury.
I could not bear the thought that my dear sons and hus-
band did not even have a burial plot, so I left my home and
gave all that I had to my sons’ wives and their children told
them that I would go and find their bodies and bury them
properly. At first I thought that I might bring them back with
me and bury them where we could visit the graves, but that
was not to be.
By the time I arrived at the battleground, there were
already vultures there tearing at the flesh of the bodies and
poking out eyes and devouring noses and cheeks and necks.
The smell was so enormous that most people could not bear
to come within a mile of this place and the bodies were begin-
ning to sag into each other and become indistinguishable.

49
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I knew immediately that it would be impossible to find

my sons and my husband in this morass. I would not be able
to tell one body from another. I was not sure that I could even
tell the difference between the Lamanites and the Nephites,
except for the symbols on the armor that they wore, and even
that might be a mistake, since I had heard that many soldiers
had stolen armor from the dead that were nearby, whichever
army they were part of.
For a mother, there is nothing like knowing that she can
no longer recognize her own sons, that they have moved past
the bodies that she birthed into this world and have become
no more than dead, rotting flesh I thought that hearing they
were dead was the worst sorrow I would ever feel, but this
was much worse. I could do nothing more for them.
I had prayed for their souls when I was at home, but I
admit that I could not feel that spirit of God in the mountain
of the dead. I could not feel hope here. I could not imagine any
goodness that would ever compensate for this horror. This is
what we mortals were, it seemed to me. We were worse than
animals, for animals killed to survive, and this had not been
about survival, but about hatred.
I wanted to go home then. I knew that my daughters-
in-law would not blame me for giving up on this impossible
task. I wept and was ready to leave, but in the morning, when
I woke amidst the bodies, something had changed in me.
The smell was no longer so terrible, and the bodies that had
seemed nothing like my sons now seemed to be so similar
that I realized the truth—they were all my sons.
Thus began my great work. I buried them all. Thousands
upon thousands of them. Nephites and Lamanites. Young
men and old. I used the weapons that they had waged this war
with to dig into the ground. When I had been at the work for
The Book of Shila  51

a month, people came to offer me better tools, but I refused.

This was right. This was what should be done.
Every time I laid a body into the ground, I tried to find
something that was unique about this man, this son, this
brother or father. I did not know if anyone else would ever
try to find them. I didn’t blame them if they didn’t, but just in
case, I placed a marker over each grave with a ring on it, or a
helmet or a shield or a bit of cloth that they had worn and that
looked like someone had made for them with love.
I hadn’t thought about food, but after three days I fell into
a faint. I woke up with a woman beside me who offered me
bread and wine. I drank eagerly, then tried to eat the bread. It
was hard to remember what eating was for. I didn’t have any
love for life.
“Do you want to finish your work?” she asked, nodding to
the bodies.
I did, and I had at that time made no visible difference in
the number of bodies. I had started counting, though I lost
count later, and had reached sixty bodies buried. There were
thousands, and I saw hat it was going to take me years to fin-
ish this task. I couldn’t simply ignore the needs of my living
aging body. So I found my way to the river and rested there. I
caught a fish to eat raw, then I grabbed some herbs and some
roots to cook over a fire that night.
Over the next year, people would often come and offer me
food—enough for a day or two so that I didn’t have to stop my
work to feed myself. But there were also times when I worked
alone for days on end, silent and mourning in my heart all of
my sons, for they were all my sons now.
One day I found a Lamanite woman who dared not speak
to me. She was dressed in ill-fitting Nephite woman’s cloth-
ing, but I could see from her blunt facial features, even when
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she tried to hide her head, that she was a Lamanite. I think
she expected me to shout at her, to blame her for this war, but
I did nothing of the kind. She was a mother, as I was.
She walked through the graves I had dug and looked at
each of the markers, but she did not find her son. So she
worked with me. By now, the bodies had stopped smelling,
but there was little that seemed human left of them. They
were skeletons with bits of flesh and armor and skin on them.
It was easier to bury them like that, not thinking of their lives
so long lost.
This Lamanite woman helped me with the bodies for
weeks. We did not speak even during that time, and I still do
not know if she found her son among the bodies we buried
together. She left one day and did not return. If she gave up at
the sheer enormity of the task, I do not blame her. Or if she
found her son and left because she was finished, I also do not
blame her.
After a full year, I realized that this work would take me
twenty years or more, the rest of my life. Some part of me
hoped that it was long enough to stop further wars from
breaking out. I prayed to God to make the Nephites and the
Lamanites sit in peace until I was finished. It seemed the only
gift I could give to my people, to all my people.
Then one day I woke and there were a dozen people
there to help me, some men, some women. They looked to be
Nephites, though I wasn’t particular about such things any-
more. They were stronger than I was, and they worked more
quickly than I was able to. I let them continue as I rested
midday and went to the river, not just to drink, but to put my
aching, swollen feet and hands into the cool water.
The Book of Shila  53

When I went back, I was half afraid that they would be

gone, but they weren’t. They stayed with me for one full week,
and then another.
“Don’t you have to go home now? Don’t you have families
who are waiting for you?” I asked one of the women then. She
was very small, but she had a radiant smile.
“My family isn’t waiting for me anymore,” she said.
I thought at the time that she meant that they had all
died, as my family had died. But I later learned that I had
misunderstood.
The truth dawned on me one day as I sat back and watched
these helpers work. They didn’t just work faster than I did.
They worked impossibly quickly. As if they had no muscles or
weight of their own bodies holding them down, as if the tools
they held did not hurt their arms and cause them to wince at
the blisters and wounds left in their flesh.
They were not human. They were angels, and God had
sent them to me, though I had never asked for help.
With their help, we finished near the end of my third year
of work. I wept and collapsed, thinking that they would take
me with them when they returned to heaven. I had no rea-
son to want to continue to live. I was ready for death. I had
already said all my goodbyes to my grandchildren when I had
first come here. I had given away all that I owned.
But the small woman who was an angel sat over me and
waited for me to finish weeping. Then she held my hand and
kissed it. “You will be welcome when it is your time, but you
must tarry here for a little while.” Then she disappeared.
I looked around and saw that all the others had disap-
peared, as well. I tried many times to tell the story of the
angels who had come to help me, but no one believed me.
They thought that I could not count how many bodies there
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had been, or understand how long it would take me to bury

them all. They did not know how long each grave took in the
hard dirt. It was not like digging to grow a harvest, because
you had to dig so much deeper.
But then I met a woman who told me she was a record-
keeper, that she held the stories of women in her mind and in
her tongue, and that she would pass them along to others. So
I told her my story in the hopes that such a thing would never
happen again.
Of course, there was another terrible battle soon after
I had finished with the first one. I knew then that God had
called me once more to the work of burying the dead, and I
began to travel from battlefield to battlefield to bury the dead.
Sometimes God sent angels to help me, and sometimes He
did not—or I did not perceive them.
I had prayed for there never to be another war, but God
did not answer that prayer. Instead, I was given the gift of
finding strength in myself to continue to do the work that I
had never wanted to be called to. I buried sons and fathers
and brothers and husbands again and again and they kept on
dying and our kingdom kept weeping. Because no one would
stop the wars.