Night Birds, The (17 page)

Just before dawn, when the light in the room took on a translucent gray sheen and the shadows withdrew to the far corners, Hazel slept. She lay on the oaken floor beside the boy, one of the muslin cloths still in her hands. And while she dreamed the boy’s hands reached under the cloth and traced the new geography of his scar and wondered over the lack of blood. He had been awake for hours now, dizzy with the sound of her whispering in his ears. Though it had made no sense he knew she had been telling him her life story and that it had just as much joy and sorrow as his own. He didn’t know why he pretended to sleep except to see what she would do next. And then she had undone the breechclout and he had frozen, feeling a quick hot spread of shame that she should see him like this, feeling the cool cloth against him. Not knowing what else to do he remained still, wondering what sort of people these
wasi-cun
were. The moment spread out as if she had paused in her cleaning to study him. He was tempted to open his eyes, afraid of what she would do next, but then she had finished and put his stained breechclout back in place.

This girl must be
wakan
, he thought, a medicine healer. Only someone with strong medicine could keep him from succumbing to the wound. What had happened? He had been poised to shoot and then felt a bullet rip through him. The blond boy, he remembered catching sight of him out of the corner of his eye. The boy who slept so near him, no longer looking fierce. Why they had gone through all the trouble to heal him?

He looked at the girl asleep beside him, lying with her head pillowed by her hands, her hair so dark in the half-light that it had a blue gleam. Her skin was as pale as birch bark. Yet he had felt her touch upon him and in that touch a hidden strength. Watching her gave him something to fear for besides his own life. Looking at her he found he was frightened for her. Would Tatanyandowan really have stabbed one of them? His brother had been enraged at the council, spoke strongly of Inkpaduta’s leadership on the prairies. Would they really become another band of renegades and flee out past the wide river where there were still buffalo but also the Pawnee and the Crow and so many other tribes much stronger than their own?

On the broad grasslands he heard what at first sounded like the prairie chickens calling to one another. A moment later he realized it was the warriors imitating the bird’s song as they crept closer in the grass. There were only children here. Would his people react with rage because of what happened to him? Wanikiya carefully sat up on his elbows and felt the wound strain beneath the cloth, a raw tearing in his brain. In his mind’s eyes he saw it opening like a third eye, a spout of blood shooting out. His mind flared with pain, but he bit down on his tongue and kept himself from crying out. The blanket doorway was tacked into the floor, a thin tissue through which the first light had begun to seep. Before they could enter and possibly harm one of this family, Wanikiya had to make it outside. He tugged at the tacks that held the blanket to the floor, freed enough that he could crawl beneath. One last glance at the girl showed she was awake and watching him, her lips parting slightly. She said something to him in her own language and he shook his head, nodded out toward the prairie where the calls continued.
I must go
, he told her with his eyes. Holding to his wound, he crawled out the door.

Hazel couldn’t get his blood out of the puncheon floorboards where stripes of it remained behind like a permanent shadow. The morning he had left she’d seen him squeeze underneath the blanket-door and then heard, faintly, other voices greeting him as they carried him back across the river. The children kept near the cabin all the next day, driving the oxen down to the flooding river, fetching water and wood. They ate their pink-eyed potatoes and smoked pigeon breasts and longed for salt and seasoning. Fear came inside them like the stains of the boy’s blood, something they couldn’t wash out.

When Caleb spotted his father moving down the road, leading two shaggy creatures behind him, at first they didn’t believe him. “Come quick,” he said, “It’s Pa.” He knew this even though Jakob was distant, a man moving toward the setting sun and his own cabin poised at the edge of the grasslands.

On the fourth day, Jakob returned to them, leading two milking goats he’d purchased on credit in town. They ran to greet him, the youngest boys clinging to his legs, the oldest taking hold of his shirt and arms, only the girl hanging back. “Hello, Father,” she said. She looked no different than before, thirteen years old and dressed in an apron drizzled with frightening rust and yellow stains. He had been waiting patiently all these years for her voice to come back, not wanting to press her, knowing eventually she would speak, and now it had returned. He could see that they were all changed, even in their joy. “Don’t go away again,” said Daniel. “Promise us that you’re never going to leave.”

“I won’t,” Jakob told his son, chucking him under the chin. “I give you my word.” He looked across at his oldest boy and then again to his daughter. Her voice had sounded just like he’d expected. She spoke as her mother Emma had spoken, a husky voice that was not a girl’s. He looked across at her in this moment of joy and wondered why her green eyes had clouded over at his own words.

This was their first spring. May was the planting moon for the Indians, too, a lean time of waiting when they subsisted on fish from the rivers and maple sugar. Only a narrow strip of hardwoods and one mud-swollen river separated Jakob’s family from Hanyokeyah’s band. Uneasy after the death of their cow and the shooting of the Indian boy, Jakob replaced the tacked blanket doorway with a sturdier construction of adzed-oak slats he discovered in the root cellar. He even rigged a leather latch that could be pulled inside at a moment’s notice. He hung bells around the goats and oxen’s throats so the children could track their movements through the tallgrass. The half-stock plains rifle was kept primed and hanging above the mantel and every night on the stove he melted down lead for bullets which he then cooled and kept in a leather sack like a child’s collection of marbles. They settled down and prepared for a war that never seemed to come. Five thousand Indians, Silas had said, but all of them divided into separate tribes and bands and families. All of them independent, unpredictable, and one of the smaller bands lived just across from his family.

While Jakob traded for supplies in Milford he had been warned that the Indians were “ravenous as wolves.” In addition to the two goats, Jakob had purchased a bull plow to break the ground. In town, he’d heard rumors about Inkpaduta; there had been cattle mutilations on the other side of Palmer’s Ferry. Twice in the last month the entire town had retreated into the mill after a horseman passed through warning that the Dakota were on the warpath. “Just imagine them crammed inside that building,” Jakob told his children. “The women indecent in their caps and gowns, men in long johns with scythes and pitchforks for weapons; all of them straining to hear every hoofbeat or creak in the dark, and then the women screaming fit to bring down the ceiling! Of course morning came and their scalps were still intact, but they were no less angry.”

Jakob laughed and stroked his dark beard. In the lamplight, he’d been telling them stories of his long journey, lying about the cow, and the pale, sickly man with his stolen god. The children only knew for sure that he’d been gone so long because he’d fallen through the river ice. He was trying to build a different story around his journey, a tale to take away their fears. He had made friends on his way back from Silas’s when he stopped in a town not far from New Ulm. Dark had been failing and he’d been afraid to continue on, afraid of a return to blindness. He never wanted to be lost again and so he stayed at Traveler’s Home, where he met the shopkeeper Gustave Driebel. Milford, as it was called then, was primarily inhabited by ’48ers, Germans who had taken part in the failed revolution to bring Democratic reforms to the Old Country. Many of the Germans he had met had spent time in prison because of their fierce belief in reform. They abhorred the practice of slavery and bent a sympathetic ear to Jakob’s stories of his troubles in Missouri. All of them, it seemed, were on the run from previous failures in their old lives. Jakob had lingered there in the town, thinking that one more night away would not make any difference. Perhaps the children resented him for this.

Jakob hit it off with the portly shopkeeper and livery owner who talked him into buying the goats. “I spoke with Herr Driebel who runs the general store. He said to me, ‘
Mein Gott
! I won’t be running to the mill ever again. Let those red devils murder me in my bed. Better to die there than crammed like a herring in a salt barrel. Better to die in my own bed than with sawdust up my heinie.” Jakob laughed, but saw the children avert their eyes, glancing down at the stains on the floor.
I must earn back their trust
, he thought. But even as he thought this, he kept things to himself. He didn’t tell them about what else Herr Driebel had said after Jakob showed him the smudged map of his homesteading. He didn’t tell them what had happened to the people who had lived here before.

Why did I not rush back?
he thought. The boys had done well; he would have acted the same, he assured them. And it was good that the girl was talking once more. Wonderful what they had done with those pigeons. “You got along better without me here,” he told them. Tonight though, the conversation was decidedly one-sided. Even the candies he had brought back, horehound and licorice, seemed to cheer them little. “I tell you,” he was saying, “the newspapers here are of a poor quality. One even carried an article about a headless Indian seen in the woods. A headless Indian!” he said, shaking his head. “If only I had my press, I would give them real news.” Again the curious flatness in the eyes watching him, the unspoken recognition that Jakob’s press was part of the reason for their present predicament.

“But Pa,” the girl said, speaking for all of them, her green eyes flashing, “your newspaper carried exactly those kinds of stories!”

The dominating emotion that the local Germans felt for the Indians on the other side of the river was fear laced with a heavy dose of disdain. The Dakota, who sent their children to perform begging dances and trespassed across lands with little understanding of property boundaries, were a lesser race by Old World reasoning. These Indians were “gypsies” not worthy of the rich farming soil they occupied, land in the possession of “beggars and drunken thieves.” While a few did business and maintained relations with their red-skinned neighbors, many chased Indians off their land with pitchforks and axes. It was only a matter of time, they thought, before the governor opened up lands on the reservation in the name of settlement and progress. All of this Jakob had gathered in his conversations with the shopkeeper and others at the store. There was talk of a militia, the men arming themselves to better deal with the Indians, and Jakob went quiet when this was mentioned, his thoughts turning back to Missouri and his own experience with violence.

“You shouldn’t be afraid,” he told the children gathered around him. “This is our adventure. One day you will be glad to have these stories to tell to children of your own. You will be able to speak of a world that no longer exists. And they won’t believe the things you have seen. Why do you look at me like that? Smile, Daniel. There, that’s more like it. I’m not going away again. This place is good. Here a man can be free. Here a man can speak his mind and there are no slaves. . . . Only . . . an adventure, I tell you. Smile all of you. Be grateful. Why are you crying, Hazel? Stop that at once. Come back here.
Mein Gott!
What is wrong with all of you?”

A
CROSSING

J
AKOB’S PLOW TURNED
up soil as dark as molasses; a network of roots as thick as a woman’s hair spread beneath the sod. When the family held the chunks of earth in their hands, moist as leavening dough and brimming with earthworms, they didn’t know it would make them sick.

Jakob felt it first, an itch that spread through his hands and arms like the pox. No sores appeared on his winter-pale skin, but he couldn’t stop scratching. It spread from him to all of them, an invisible rash that burrowed into their veins. Hazel tried everything: a lotion of mullein leaves, tea made from willow bark, but the itch continued to burn beneath their skin like prickles of white-hot flame. The joints in their hands swelled. They felt it down to their marrow. The youngest boys scratched themselves until they bled and Hazel had to bandage Matthew’s hands with socks to keep him from clawing open old scabs and raw tissue beneath. It near drove them mad. They wanted to tear the very skin from their flesh, to strip themselves down to sinew and ligament. At nights they lay awake and tried not to think about the burning sensation. They rinsed their hands with whisky, whale oil, goat’s milk, and lye. They rubbed tree bark on inflamed skin, leaves, green plum juice, and buffalo grass. “It came from the ground,” Jakob said after their third sleepless night. “How do you fight sickness that comes from the prairie itself?”

The next morning they huddled around him, red-eyed and trembling. This was his chance to earn back their trust, prove his worth and strength as their father. “There isn’t any doctor in Milford and it’s a long ride to New Ulm.”

The girl’s voice startled him. His first wife’s voice, smoky, assured of its knowledge. “They won’t know anything, Pa. What do they know about such things in Germany? What do any of us know about this place?”

“We have to do something,” Asa said. “Or I’ll throw myself in the river to stop this itching.”

“The Indians,” Hazel said. “They’ll know.”

“Hazel, we can’t,” said Caleb. “What if they hurt of us because of . . . because the boy was shot?”

“It’s not safe,” Jakob agreed. “We don’t know anything about them.” The image of the cow lowing as the wolves tore her apart was imprinted on his memory.

Hazel went and plucked Matthew from the corner where he was hunched and trembling. The boy had red scratches running from his eyes. “Look,” she said. “Look at him!”

They crossed at the lowest place that very evening, along a fallen cottonwood that bridged the rain-swollen river. Hazel’s bridge, Asa named it. In the west the sun descended like a stone cast into the grassland seas and left a slow fire burning in the clouds overhead. A line of gashes marked the ground, the travois marks of Indians who had used this path for generations, traveling with their dogs and belongings. They followed the path to the threads of smoke from the camp’s fires, a mere half mile. The children were quiet in their misery and listened to the sound of the wind coming through the darkening valley, a gentle hush as it touched the tips of the tallgrass waving around them, sighing against their clothing.

They came to the outskirts of the village where a collection of a dozen teepees were arrayed in a loose circle. Spotted ponies cropped grass along the sides of a winding creek while dark birds rode on their haunches and pecked insects from their hides. A group of boys spotted the family first. Though evening fell with a touch of chill in the wind, they wore nothing but breechclouts and carried toy-sized bows and arrows. The girl didn’t see the boy she’d helped among them. There were six boys, and at the sight of the Sengers they scattered and raced ahead of the white family into the camp, raising the alarm in high-pitched voices.

“Keep walking,” Jakob said to the children arranged behind him. “If there’s trouble, run back home.” Against his better instincts, he’d left the rifle there. His hands were too swollen to fit inside the trigger guard. Besides, there was this knowledge: each time the gun had been taken up in a moment of need it had been fired, almost as if the weapon had a will of its own to do harm. They carried one sack of potatoes to trade for medicine. In short, they were at this tribe’s mercy. Jakob was not afraid for his own skin, but his children were another matter. He must protect them from harm; he could not fail them again.

Campfires burned in the dusk and iron pots shaped like large spiders squatted over the flames. Dakota women in loose dark-colored skirts and billowing calico blouses hunched over the fires while a few old men sat outside the teepees and smoked in the gathering dark. They stood as the family passed, a few with brows furrowed, but none of them looked violent. In the gaunt faces that watched the family, the girl saw an emptiness. It was as if these people had been stolen out of a land and time they understood and dropped down into this one, hungry and desperate. In that sense, she felt, they were kindred.

Her other senses sharpened as light faded. She smelled the strange odor of the meat in the pots, the sweet sage smell of
kinnikinnick
in the men’s pipes. Lean, mongrel dogs barked and snarled and began to follow in the family’s wake. The boys’ shouting echoed around them. First the old men rose, still carrying their pipes, and then the women joined them, so that as they moved toward the camp’s center they became a procession, dogs and old women and men, and the noise and shouting gathered strength. They were drawn especially by Hazel and some of the older women reached out and touched the girl’s dark hair as she passed, saying
wah-kun
in low, reverent voices as they ran a hand across her hair or let a finger graze against her frayed dress, a cry the smaller boys picked up and repeated in a chant,
wahkun, wahkun.
The smell of so many Indians so close, like smoke and singed grass and human sweat, the circle tightening, was overwhelming. Daniel clung tightly to Hazel’s skirts, his eyes rolling back in fear. It was impossible for them to go further: They were surrounded.

Jakob had his bandaged hands raised and was speaking, but the words were lost in all the noise. Then the crowd parted, and the old man Hazel had seen on the prairie and that day after the flight of the passenger pigeons came forward. He was a lean, tall old man with a string of crow’s beaks for a necklace and copper bracelets encircling his arms. His chest was bare and there was an aura of quiet competence about him, as if he’d been expecting the family all along.

Jakob continued to hold up his bandaged hands as he made signs to indicate their need. The Indians closed around them in a curious circle, pointing and talking in their own language. One of the mongrels whined and growled before someone kicked it away. “Hold out your hands,” Jakob said. “Let them see the marks.”

Still the old man moved toward them without speaking. He came close to Jakob and pulled one of the upheld arms down and unwound the bandage. He said a word in Dakota when he saw the red streaks marking the skin. A younger woman had come to his side, her eyes lowered. The two of them conversed in Dakota and then she looked up at Jakob with her dark eyes, appraising him. “Itches?” she said in clear English.

“Most terribly,” Jakob said.

“You come,” she said and they followed her into a teepee, ducking under a skin doorway over which two deer hooves hung. It was dim within the interior, but roomier than it looked from the outside. The children seated themselves on buffalo robes and mats of woven grass, grateful to be sheltered from the crowds outside. They watched the smoke of the woman’s fire rise up the cedar lodge poles into the indigo sky and tried to not to scratch themselves. The inner side of the teepee was painted with scenes of battles: painted men on horseback carrying feathered lances while the sky above them rained arrows. There were figures in the clouds, black riders gripping thunderbolts in their fists. Great lakes and turtle-shaped islands. Children coming down from the stars. The skin of the teepee moved in the wind and the figures shimmered in the firelight. It was the closest the children had been to a church in some time. “A tapestry,” Hazel said. On the other side of her, a man hung from a tree, nails visible in his palms. In the next scene he was taken up into the clouds along a ray of light. The Indian woman saw her watching. “Tunkashila,” she said to Hazel. Then she turned back to her work, taking the bag of potatoes they had brought and burying them one-by-one within the embers of her fire. After she did that she stood and dusted the ashes from her hands.

A girl entered the teepee and stood alongside her, her daughter apparently. They each wore a skirt of red broadcloth, tied around their waists, and beaded shirts. The girl had tin earrings that tinkled when she moved her head from side-to-side, and she had gray eyes. The older one touched her daughter’s shoulder, “Winona,” she said. Then she touched her own chest, “Blue Sky Woman,” she said and then the two ducked out of the teepee and re-entered the swirl of noise outside. A moment later, the flap opened again and the old man came inside, now dressed in his finery, soft leggings of doeskin, a beaded war shirt with long fringes, his hair braided with mink-fur strips. He carried a pipe and seated himself across from Jakob. The children shifted uncomfortably, Matthew pawing at his bandages. This old man had glittering black eyes, a strong nose. He lit the long red stone pipe, held it up in four directions and to the earth and sky, and then passed it to Jakob. Not knowing what else to do Jakob did the same, coughing out the odd, sweet smoke. After a long moment of silence, the old man spoke. “I am Hanyokeyah,” he said. “Flies in the Night in your tongue.”

“You speak English too?”

“We live long time near the
wasicun
, many winters.” He nodded toward the section of the teepee where the Christ figure had been painted. “I live with missionaries one winter. Away from my people. I am only this tall.” The old man held his hand a few feet off the ground. “They give me new name, Elijah. I do not know what this name means, but they say is great white man.”

“A prophet,” said Jakob. “It is a good name.” He sensed there was something else to the story, asked, “What happened?”

“Our men grow tired of the missionaries speaking against the dances, the face painting. The women . . . they miss children. They come, take boys back.” Hazel noticed that Hanyokeyah could only speak English in the present, and sometimes it was hard to tell from his speech what happened in the past and what was happening in the now. There were long silences before the woman and her girl returned with a collection of roots. She took out a trader’s knife and shaved the outer bark before setting the pale root to heat beside the fire.

With every ounce of their will they strained not to scratch, not to leap forward and seize this healing root. Blue Sky Woman took her time. She fetched out another of the pipes and smoked it over the root, chanting some prayer, clicking her tongue against her teeth. After this ceremony she turned back to the root. Once the tubers were warmed, she ground them into a poultice and rubbed it into their hands and then took the rest of the shavings outside to scatter in the wind.

“It’s gone,” said Asa. “My Lord, the itching stopped just like that.” The old man seemed to smile with his dark eyes, though his face did not alter its expression. When Jakob saw that the woman was busy digging the potatoes out of the fire, he resolved to stay longer. This Hanyokeyah might know who killed his cow. They might be able to reach some bargain that benefited both of them. That night they ate the potatoes Indian style, brushing off the embers and peeling back the flesh to eat the steaming, crumbling nuggets. Another woman carried in boiled water turtles the size of small melons which she cracked open on a sharp rock. The flesh tasted muddy and chewy, but the children were hungry and glad to share in it. From time to time, the skin of the teepee behind the children was lifted up and curious faces peered inside. When they were spotted, the curious howled and scurried away. The teepee flap opened again and the boy whom Caleb had shot came inside and sat beside Hanyokeyah. He was dressed in a soiled shirt and kept his eyes low. Hanyokeyah patted his head and said nothing about what had happened. Only once did the boy glance in Hazel’s direction, quickly looking away again. His cheeks were red in the firelight and he looked to be healed and whole.

The whole time Jakob and Hanyokeyah talked. It appeared all the young warriors in the tribe had gone off on a raid against the Ojibwe in the north now that winter was over and they were done hunting the muskrats. The Ojibwe had staged a surprise attack several moons earlier that had killed two warriors from Little Six’s tribe and now the young soldier’s lodge of the tribe had joined other bands seeking revenge. The Dakota were at a big disadvantage in these battles, for while the Ojibwe could drift downriver in their birch bark canoes with little effort and then flee after setting ambushes, the Dakota used up all their energy just making the long journey north.

Jakob went on to tell about his cow’s disappearance, the strange footprints he had seen alongside her, the abandoned village he encountered in the snow. He worded the story carefully, afraid the children would catch him in a lie.

The old man could only shrug, in turn describing for Jakob a stone where the people came to dance in the summers, that had disappeared. Jakob’s face darkened and he shook his head, but he was thinking about Silas.