It was a combination of the tears on their faces and the high, warbling wail that ran chills down my back.

It’s a bit odd, from our cultural standpoint, to just turn up at the funeral of some guy you’ve never met. Nicholas assured us it was fine, expected even, and that the more people turned out the more honored were the dead man and his family. Nonetheless, it felt awkward to pass beneath the balcony with black veiled woman weeping and be escorted to our seats by a son-in-law of the deceased.

We drank the obligatory tea, cloyingly sweet, and munched on a plate of finger food that our hostess provided: some delicious cake, two sorts of psuedo-rice krispie treats and the rice flour and palm sugar snacks rolled in sesame seeds that I can’t quite quit thinking of as sweet cat turds. The boys quickly made friends while Nicholas brought us up to speed on Torajan funerals and this particular family.

This was day three of an upper class family’s funeral for a grandfather who had died over a year ago.

He’s been carefully treated with “traditional medicine,” wrapped up like a mummy and kept in the kids bedroom since he passed. They insist that so long as he is inside the house, he’s only “sick.” And they make offerings to him of the things he liked best in life, like tea, or betel nut, or cigarettes. Today, when he was taken out and placed in his casket, he is officially dead. He may not be taken back into the house.

Grandpa is inside a red casket that is tied into a carved wooden “house” based on the traditional houses and rice barn design. That whole contraption is fastened with rattan straps to a grid of green bamboo and is sitting in the center of the courtyard.

We sip our tea, Nicholas pushes more of the cookies down our throats, people arrive bearing gifts: Water buffalo and pigs. We brought a carton of cigarettes, as we were told is “traditional” for travelers; Ezra was sorely disappointed. He had plotted, all of the day before, on how to “arrange a pig.”

Our boys are swept off with the local boys to supervise the buffalo and appraise their fitness for the occasion. They swoop in periodically to check for food. Lunch is served. Miraculously, the boys remember to roll their rice balls and pop them in their mouths with only their right hands. Elisha whispers about the meat looking a lot like the slabs we’ve seen laying out by the side of the road on tin roofs drying in the sun. He asks Nicholas, “So… when they dry that meat in the sun, don’t the bugs get in it?” Nicholas looks puzzled, and answers in that quintessential adult tone of “duh!” “Well, yes!” We tuck into our meat and rinse our fingers in the plastic bowl provided.

We count nine water buffalo.

Nicholas points out, approvingly, that there are two “expensive ones with very good colour” in the bunch. He tells us that tomorrow, as the ceremony continues, they’ll sacrifice 30 buffalo. Today, they’ll sacrifice one, to help Grandpa’s spirit get to Puya, the region in southern Toraja that is “paradise” according to  the Aluk Todolo, the old traditions.

“We are Christians, but we hold to the old beliefs,” Nichola explains. “When the first Dutch came with missionaries, the Torojans, we killed them all. When the next ones came, with education, they sneaked the religion into the schooling of the children. We killed many of them too. We hide in the jungle and we wait for them to pass by. Many people died. The third time the Dutch came, with the priests, the head mans have a meeting with the priests. They explain the priests that it is possible that we might change over to Christians, but that we must be allowed to keep our Aluk Todolo. The priests think about this, and they say, “Ok.” And so, we become Christians.”

An announcement is made and Nicholas tells us to eat faster and hurry up, they are about to sacrifice the buffalo. He shoos us into our shoes and off of our platform, down to the end of the village center, in front of the red tower, where Grandfather will be placed, to preside from on high over his funeral, following the official procession.

And there she is: the buffalo, black as night, standing placidly next to a bamboo stake in the ground. She has that look about her, as water buffalo do, that makes us incline a bit and wait, sure she’s about to remember to say something profound. She says nothing. No last words.

Two things surprise me about her death:

1. How quickly and deeply the butcher cuts with one, lightning quick, stroke of his razor sharp knife.
2. How long it takes her to die.

Her eyes widen with the first slash, as if she really didn’t see it coming. Her throat erupts in a wide, arcing spray of wine red blood. She staggers, blood spurts again, coming in repeated gushes with every beat of her heart. She falls. She gets up. She strains at the rope tied to her ankle. She stumbles again. The butcher reaches in beneath her deadly horns and makes another quick swipe across her jugular. Blood gushes anew as she swoons like a drunkard, no doubt lightheaded from her exsanguination. She is laying on the ground now, sides heaving. She loses her bladder and thrashes her leg.

The women of the family have started drumming, with long bamboo poles inside a wooden trough filled with rice. This symbolizes the wealth of the family, Nicholas tells us. Young men are hoisting Grandfather’s casket house onto their shoulders, women are unrolling yards of blood red fabric, they are laughing and queueing up for their procession. The buffalo is not yet dead. Her final moment she suffers alone. The last sounds she hears: laughter.

“I hope we don’t have to finish lunch, Mama,” Elisha whispers to me. I share his sentiment.

When I go out, you can skip the buffalo sacrifice, if there’s a heaven I’ll find it on my own two feet, thank you, but please have a procession!Make sure you bounce me up and down, shout, yell, laugh and play tug of war with my dead self, trying to run roughshod over one another while hooting and hollering your way down the street. Have the flags and a gong too. Make sure not to forget the water fight mid-way and walk with your arms slung around each other. Make sure there’s a little old man who will come boldly up, take my hand and parade me through the crowd like he did today. I will feel most honored, as I’m sure this grandfather did.

You might, however, want to measure the height of the contraption you’re carrying me in before trying to walk me up the 12 foot tower to my seat of honor. It was amusing, but also a bit embarrassing to see the lads having to chop up the bamboo, wedge Grandpa at a 45 degree angle while they discussed the conundrum and eventually solve it by flipping his whole casket house on it’s side and poking him through the opening like a log into a wood stove… “They didn’t consider the 7 P’s,” Elisha giggled at my shoulder. Indeed they did not. **

A wild cheer went up from the young men who had managed victory in setting the old man in his seat of honor. Having been a young man once, I can imagine that he didn’t mind so much. It was a festive scene, in the midst of which a buffalo cooled beneath a cloud of flies, weeping from her neck into a sea of her own blood, excrement dripping from the other end, children standing around, poking at her with sticks and fingers.

If I go the whole rest of my life without seeing another water buffalo sacrificed to be a spiritual conduit to the next world, that will be okay with me.

** The Seven Ps, a la Uncle Dick: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Wanna see the video… wailing, buffalo sacrifice and 7 P’s fiasco: