Night Birds, The (25 page)

No one was drowsing in that room now. Every one of us had turned toward Mr. Simons, our breaths hushed. Watching the other students, I knew I was not the only one who had grown up with silence. What he told us was forbidden knowledge. “Some of your friends get sick. Dysentery. They die of scratches, infections. Some, you suspect, die out of plain homesickness. But not you. Later that evening when the doctor saws at your ruined arm, you’re awake to feel every terrible second. And the angry sound of that saw is branded into your brain. You pray for death then, but your prayer isn’t answered.

“No, you get to go home. And that vision of home and hearth is what keeps you ticking. It’s something that will make you whole again. But your home doesn’t exist any longer. Your entire town was destroyed one fiery August day while you lay in the hospital on the other side of the country. The mother and younger brother who stopped returning your letters occupy unmarked graves. Killed by Indians who thought they could take back what once was theirs.”

Mr. Simons swallowed, was quiet for a solid minute. The others began to shuffle, one boy’s cough echoed through the room. “The survivors left behind are so very afraid. You think it should kill you, the loneliness. But deep inside you feel a small red flame of hatred awakening in the emptiness. It keeps you warm. You fall in with men who are as hateful as you, as haunted as you. You don’t call each other by name. Everyone is Jones. You are men of the kingdom, the Kingdom of Jones. And you wait for the Dakota Sioux to come back, because you’re ready this time, armed and vigilant. Wanting death, ready to kill. Days pass, weeks, soon a whole year of waiting. Then one day they come, a small band passing through. . . .”

Mr. Simons turned and scanned the room. Then he scratched his jaw, his train of thought lost. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to tell you all that.” He shook his head slowly and then waved us away with his good hand. “Class dismissed.”

We filed out silently into the schoolyard, some of the students forming into groups gossiping in low tones. I went out alone, and Franz and Orlen fell in close behind me as I walked out of town. I didn’t know where to go. Papa, my main protection, would likely be away for another month. These boys meant to fall on me when we were alone in the woods. They meant to punish me because Aunt Hazel had come to live with us. She had unsettled our household, unsettled the town. She even unsettled quiet Mr. Simons, who must have heard through gossip what Hazel had said about the scalps in the jailhouse. Scratch the skin of this ground and you’d uncover locust eggs. Scratch the skin of these peo- ple and you’d uncover feelings they thought were buried far deeper. I mulled over Mr. Simons’s words while I walked, trying not to act afraid when the older boys closed the distance between us, until I swore I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. What had the men of the Kingdom of Jones done? That was the second time in a week I had heard that term. What did it mean to have courage?

I didn’t have much time to think on these matters because at the base of the hill Aunt Hazel waited for me near the old German graveyard. She was carrying her customary grubbing stick and bucket, squinting up into the hard afternoon light. I saw her take stock of the boys behind me, Orlen with his long troll-like arms, Franz with his thin boyish beard. She peeled back her bonnet and gave them a narrow-eyed glare. I felt the boys hitch to a stop. How had she known that I might be in danger?

“How was school?” she asked when I was close.

“Different,” I said. “Frightening.” She didn’t ask what I meant. We fell in side by side and headed for the old Indian trail along the river that would take us home. Orlen and Franz shadowed us through the woods. Aunt Hazel stopped walking and turned to face them. They stopped too. They didn’t speak a word.

“What do you want?” Aunt Hazel called. Thirty feet separated us, and the boys’ faces were splotched by tree shadows. “You leave us alone, hear? We aren’t frightened of you.” They watched her, empty-eyed and silent. As soon we turned around they started walking too, always keeping a careful distance. Aunt Hazel stopped to tie the laces of her boots. Then she plucked her stick from the ground and whirled around to advance on the boys. They held their ground at first. She was a little woman, whittled down by her lost years, but she held that stick before her like a sword and I could imagine the grim expression on her face. When she was ten feet away, they broke and ran away, laughing. They mocked us from a distance, following us the whole way home. They called her a whore. Injun-lover. Witch. No expression showed on her face.

When we were close to home, she took my hand. Her palm was cool and dry. “Shameful,” she said. “To send boys to do a man’s work.”

Yes,
I thought.
But no one will punish these boys. They can say what they wish and likely do far worse.
I felt a simultaneous pride in Aunt Hazel along with a sense of helplessness. What could one boy do to defy an entire town? We walked the rest of the way home, hand in hand.

Later that night, Aunt Hazel left the house after dinner to go wandering. I didn’t think she should be out by her lonesome, in case those boys were waiting, but she wasn’t afraid. Alone in the loft, I decided to break my promise and look through Aunt Hazel’s private things. I noticed that the bowl that had held her medicine was empty before I fetched out the book from her carpetbag. Seated on the edge of her bed, I turned the wrinkled pages. The book was a heavy, warm weight against my legs. I don’t know what I was looking for. I was angry at myself for not doing more in the woods. I could bear up under any abuse; this was my own private battle with cowardice, the way I let people hurt me without retaliating.

The cross-hatched page was difficult to read. What had she been writing here? Had she been hoping to recapture her pa’s
Book of Wonders
? That book had been supposed to keep her family safe, to mark out a path in a perilous world. It was a dark, cloudy night and I had to squint to decipher my aunt’s printing. From downstairs, my mother called up and asked what I was doing. I shifted and set the book on the nightstand and went over to call down my answer.

I don’t know how it happened exactly. The book was heavier than I thought. Its presence on the nightstand must have disturbed the wooden candle-holder, which made no sound as it turned over and touched the edge of the book. The flame caught one of the brittle pages and a brightness filled the room while I called down my answer. There was a smell like burning applewood, or sugar maple, overpowering and pungent. Even from downstairs my mother smelled it, and called my name again in a questioning manner. The scent came to my nostrils at the same time my head turned and I saw the book engulfed in flames.

I leapt for it and tried to beat out the fire with my bare hands, but the flame coiled through those pages like a prairie fire in a quick, hot wind. I threw the burning book down on the floor and stamped on it with my feet. Dimly, I smelled my own skin burning along with those pages and then my mother was in the room with a washbasin of sudsy water that she threw on the flaming mess. The water splashed up and soaked my nightshirt and bare legs as it put out the fire.

I remember standing there over the blackened remains of the book and looking across the room at my mother and the O shape of her mouth. Moments later her shock turned to anger and her cheeks flamed with color. I don’t know what called for such fury. Earlier that summer, I had saved a letter she meant to burn and in doing so brought a woman she never wanted to see again. Now, I had burned up something she wanted to save, a book that she might have hoped would bring us coin in a hard season. A few senseless words sputtered from her mouth and hung there, suspended like spittle. She began to hit me with the flat of her palms, striking me in the face and along the top of my head. She grabbed hold of my hair, shrieking, and tossed me against the back of the wall, knocking the breath from my chest. Too much was happening too quickly. I began to feel the searing ache along my palms and feet and knew that I was already hurt. I curled into a ball and tried to protect myself as best I could while she swung for me. How much time passed I am no longer sure. Neither of us heard Hazel hurrying up the loft ladder to pull my mother off me.

My next memory is of Aunt Hazel later that night, bent over my bed, wrapping a cool cloth around my burned hands. Even in the dark I could see pouches under her eyes. She had been crying. I opened my mouth and tried to tell her just how sorry I was, but my tongue was thick and no words came out. I wanted to tell her how much I longed to be like Peter from the Gospels, fierce and brave, and sometimes stupid. Someone who would draw his sword when the Roman soldiers came for what he loved. Instead, I was Judas. I had proved a poor friend to the one who trusted me; my own hot tears shamed me. She touched a finger to my lips and shushed me before I could speak.

Then she rose again and went over to her side of the room and stood by the window so that the wind caused her nightgown to billow around her. I could still smell the sweet applewood char of the lost book. The aroma swam in my nostrils, filling me up like breath. Along with the scent, I heard the voices of my grandfathers and uncles. I saw the ghosts of their journeys and trials. Hazel was looking out the open window and seemed to be listening too, as though she had summoned the voices here to take the place of the book. I had the sense of them all around us, here in the room for only a moment before they rose like smoke and out the window into the pure darkness of a country night. She started singing so quietly then. I strained to catch the words.

What though my joy and comforts die? The Lord my Savior liveth.

What though the darkness gather round? Songs in the night He giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging

Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?

Aunt Hazel had a habit of grinding her teeth at night, like a rabbit worrying a branch to keeps its molars short. The sound grated on my ears as I tried to sleep. I lay awake in the dark, thinking about those boys shadowing us in the woods and wondering what they would try next. Sometime past midnight, Hazel stopped grinding her teeth. A moment later she rolled all the way out of bed and clumped down to the floor.

“Aunt Hazel?” I asked.

There was no response. I could hear her feet kicking against the bedpost. I called her name once more and then came around the side of the bed. What I saw in the moonlight flooding through the window I will never forget. Her eyes had rolled back in her head and there was pink, blood-flecked foam on her lips. Her torso jerked like a hook had been pulled through her spine and her arms bent at odd, insectlike angles, a locust. She was not breathing. Gurgling sounds frothed in her throat while she threshed in spasms on the floor. There was a terrible sense of absence here, of violation. I screamed for my mother and knelt beside her on the floorboards.

Mother came rushing up the ladder with a lit lantern. She sucked in her breath when she saw Hazel and then set the lantern down on the floor. Minutes had passed without Hazel inhaling. She continued to twist on her spine as she struggled to draw a single breath. All at once, I saw what my life would look like with her gone, the space she would leave within me. There would be no stories, no laughter in the household. She could die before I ever had the chance to tell her what she meant to me. I was petrified by the thought. Mother came and knelt beside me. I thought of all the stories Aunt Hazel had told me. Now she lay before me like the Indian boy Caleb had shot so long ago. I put my hand on her stomach then and began to pray. “Breathe,” I commanded. “Breathe in God’s name.” That’s the only part of the prayer I can remember, for I was chanting you see, half addressing her, half addressing God. It was less a prayer than a command, my own fierce desire to call her back into this world. One of them, Hazel or God, must have heard, for her stomach rose to meet my hand. Mother joined my prayer and we continued to encourage her. Hazel’s breath returned in short, ragged gasps. Her eyes were huge, the pupils coin-sized. She didn’t seem to recognize us and at first kicked as if she wanted us to go. Mother stroked her hair, saying, “It’s okay, dear. You’re safe now.”

We helped her back up into the bed and I turned away while Mother stripped off Hazel’s gown, which she had soiled during the seizure, and then wrapped her in the blanket. Waves of shuddering passed through her. Mother and I took turns keeping watch, but Hazel didn’t seize again that night and sometime in the early gray hours her breathing deepened into true sleep.

In the morning Hazel could hardly speak because her mouth was filled with raw sores. She had chewed up her tongue and the insides of her cheek during the seizure. Her voice came thick. “I scared you,” she said.

I felt a warm rush of tears and blinked them away. She reached out to touch me with a cool hand. “You see,” she said in a thick whisper, “I’m all out of medicine. I can’t stay here much longer.”

I squeezed her fingers. “You can’t go away.”