Night Birds, The (27 page)

Your loving father,

Jakob

“Pa sure can write pretty,” Daniel said. “Do you think you will write like that one day?”

“No,” said Asa. “There’s no future in writing. Besides, only Hazel can write like him. I’d like to live in such a way that others put down on paper the things I do. First I’m gonna take my fiddle and join Pa with the First Minnesota.”

“I hope I can recall words like you when I’m grown up,” said Daniel. Asa’s teeth flashed in the firelight. “Always did have a good memory. Jakob says a man with fine recall will be good at speechifying. An orator. Maybe when the war is done I can come back and be mayor of Milford.”

“Or the governor,” said Daniel. “Now that we’re a state.”

Silence fell over the children as again they heard the distant drums. Unlike the boys, Hazel was bothered by her father’s letter. What was this thing that came inside him during the rain? She remembered him in Missouri, spread out on a kitchen table, his arms bruised by tar, and her just a girl, passing her hand over a shadow spot she saw on his throat, and knowing one day he would die. Four years had passed since they’d fled here to Minnesota. And if something came inside him, it could only be rage, and she feared what that would do to her father.

Asa lay down on the other side of Daniel. The children’s ears were pressed close to the earth so they could hear the wailing of the Dakota dancers moving around their fires. They knew the words of their death song.
I am here
, the warriors sang as they danced,
I am here
.

They all sat up when they heard a rustling in the grass and a moment later the lean wolfish snout of their dog, Turnip, emerged. This half Newfoundland, half-wolf puppy they had purchased from Cassie’s father three summers before had grown into a huge, lumbering bear of a dog. Her playmate, a brindled male with a distinct limp, had disappeared the previous winter. “Did Ma exile you as well? said Asa when he recognized the familiar, shaggy form. Turnip loped forward and stuck her moist black muzzle into the baby’s blankets. Hazel swatted her away before the dog woke Ruth up. Turnip seemed continually mystified by the presence of a baby in the household and never missed a chance to sniff or lick the child, who did not enjoy this attention. After circling their nest of blankets three times, Turnip lay down, but kept her long wolfish ears perked and listening to the drums. She whined uneasily.

“Asa,” Daniel said after they had lain back down. “Don’t go away just yet.”

“Go to sleep,” Asa told him. The web of speech the boys had made, a netting of words, spread out over the children and dispelled their fears: the wailing dancers, their missing father, the dying brother. Through it all Ruth slept, a quiet baby who woke only for occasional feedings before retreating back to her dreams.

Wind stirred in the tallgrass and the sliver of moon came and went, the talon of a dark bird descending. Soon, the children slept too.

Ruth woke crying sometime before dawn. The smudge fire had burned down and mosquitoes descended on the children. Ruth’s tiny hands clawed at her face and eyes where the buzzing insects clustered. The sun had not yet risen, but the morning was already hot and sticky. They walked through a cloud of mosquitoes—Ruth hungry, inconsolable— back to the cabin from which Kate had banished them. No sound came from within the thick log walls. Kate had left the latch on the outside.

Within, they found the woman leaning on a wall near Matthew’s pallet. Her jaw hung slack and there were deep shadows beneath her shut eyes, the haggard look of a woman who has bargained with angels and paid some price in return. She woke when she heard Ruth crying and signaled Hazel to hand the baby over. As Hazel passed the child to her Kate must have seen the imprint of her hand on Hazel’s face, for she inhaled sharply. It was like that sometimes. Kate was fierce in her love and hate. She possessed the strength to stay up all night with a sick boy, but lacked the restraint to stay her hand when one of them crossed her. And her stepdaughter, Hazel, seemed always to be working at some cross-purpose to hers.

Of the children, only Ruth belonged to both Kate and Jakob. Jakob’s children never forgot it and were wary of their stepmother. They never quite forgave her for leaving them for a time when things went wrong in Missouri.

Asa and Daniel hung back near the stove, uncertain, not wanting to see Matthew if he was dead.

He wasn’t. Whatever Kate had done after she sent them out had worked. The angry ring of sores around Matthew’s mouth had dimmed. His breathing yet had a raspy quality, but his skin no longer smelled so sour.

“Don’t touch him,” Kate cautioned Hazel. “I don’t want any of you to get like him.” Any new sickness that came through the valley, Matthew caught first. Years of sickness had left the child with one foot in this world and one in the next.

Kate stood and undid her dark dress of green silk, exposing pale skin and the aureole of a nipple to which she guided Ruth. Sometime in the night her auburn hair had sprung free from its tresses and now hung in listless curls about her brow. In the children’s happiness to see their brother still among the living they briefly forgot the strange night and Otter’s warning. Kate took inventory and prepared them for their chores. “Caleb?” she asked, looking around. Asa shrugged and said nothing. It was the morning of August 18, wash day for the Sengers. The goats needed milking, the stock had to be watered and loosed on the prairie, eggs gathered, the garden weeded.

Outside the night clouds had dissipated, but there was a heaviness to the air. After milking the goats, Hazel busied herself at the churn and watched Asa return from the grove carrying a bundle of ash branches. He kept looking behind him. A moment later the girl’s sleepy eyes registered the pall of smoke that darkened the western horizon. Three years had passed since a prairie fire had nearly taken the farm. This smoke seemed far off, just a distant threat, but like Asa, she remembered the warning of the night before. Asa set his bundle of wood on the porch and went inside to speak with his mother. A moment later she came out of the cabin, Ruth balanced on her hip, one hand held over her eyes as she scanned the horizon.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, “but that smoke is right where the agency stands.” As she spoke Asa lay down on the ground and pressed his ear to the earth. “Sounds like gunfire,” he reported.

“That’s ten miles away,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly hear anything.”

Daniel lay beside his brother and pressed himself to the ground. “I hear a popping like fireworks,” he said.

“You get up out of that dirt,” she said. “I’ve got enough to do today.” But she kept looking toward the horizon, chewing on her lower lip. “Asa,” Kate said as the boys stood and dusted off their homespun, “why don’t you hitch the oxen and take the others into town. See if anyone there has heard something. You take that ginseng and sell it to Herr Driebel. Don’t take less than four cents a bushel, no matter how he gripes.”

“Won’t you come?” Asa said.

“Your brother wouldn’t survive the trip,” she said. “I need to stay here.” She turned and went to finish making their breakfast: fried prairie chicken eggs and biscuits greased with lard.

Asa was neither strong nor good with livestock, so it took some time to get the wagon hitched. His freckled face was sweaty and mottled with purple splotches from straining to make the uncooperative oxen, who didn’t seem to hear his high-voiced commands, move. Asa cursed Caleb under his breath for not being there to help, while Daniel and Hazel loaded ginseng root into the wagon box.

Dug from the loamy river soils, the ginseng they sold to Herr Driebel had helped them through the lean years, which had been every year save this one summer of plenty. After the hailstorm the first year, they had a summer of rain that rotted the crops in their furrows and the next year an infestation of cut worms blighted their wheat. Now with their father gone to fight in the war, the corn grew eight feet tall, a vast green forest tipped with bright tassels, and at last it looked like they would prosper.

As they loaded the ginseng, Hazel thought of her pa’s last day here, the autumn of the previous year. It was not his promise she remembered, how he told Kate he was going to take her out of this territory when he returned, a mistake to come here before it was settled. When she thought about his last day she remembered the sound of him cutting wood for the coming winter, the heavy ax splitting good oak, and Kate too pained to watch, listening within the cabin, her face pressed to the coolness of the wall, one hand on her belly where Ruth was yet a seed. Kate knowing, surely, he would not come back.

By the time they had the wagon ready it was midmorning. Hazel sat in the buckboard with Asa and Daniel and was surprised when Kate again thrust Ruth into her arms. “She likes to be out in the sun,” Kate said. “The fresh air will do her good.” Swaddled in a blanket, with a woman’s slat bonnet to shade her head and torso, Ruth sucked her thumb and stared at Hazel sleepily. Lastly, Kate gave them the rifle. “I primed it,” she said. “In case you see a rabbit for the pot.”

She stood watching them while they rode toward Milford, the oxen slow and stately. Turnip trotted by the side of the wagon, keeping a steady pace, but eventually the heat of the day took a toll on the bear-like dog and she fell behind, her tongue lolling out. She followed them into town every time, never stopping to chase rabbits or investigate strange smells, always keeping the wagon in her sight. Once she got into town she would find herself a shady spot and then fall back behind them again on the way home, singleminded and determined not to let them out of her sight.

Asa, entrusted with a man’s work, held his spine straight and gee’d and haw’d the oxen in an unnaturally deep voice. Soon Daniel got bored of being jostled in the buckboard and climbed out to jog along beside them. They had only covered a mile through green fields fattening in the August sun when they saw smoke up ahead in the direction of Milford’s sawmill.

Wind from the east carried the smell of fire and hurried burning ashes aloft like flickering fireflies. There was so much smoke in the sky that the sun shone through the pall like an ugly, rotten orange. Asa halted the wagon and stood up in the buckboard. He caught one of the ashes in his palm and watched it whiten like a melting snowflake. More and more ashes flared and faded in ditches and green fields
. “
Let’s turn back,” Hazel said to him. Her stomach had knotted into a cold fist. There was something wrong.

The road followed a curve of forest that sloped down to the curving Minnesota River. From the woods came three warriors, greased with war paint. They wore only breechclouts and a few feathers in their headdresses. Their hair was glossy-black and parted in twin braids twined with animal fur. Each carried a shotgun at his side. Asa sat down in the buckboard, unsure of what to do. The road narrowed here and the oxen could not turn around easily. Up ahead the warriors fanned out, blocking the road. “Get back in the wagon,” Asa told Daniel.

Behind them two more Indians appeared moving in a quick trot. Their dog Turnip lumbered along, desperate to catch up. Not knowing what else to do, Asa continued to drive them forward while Hazel took up the rifle and prepared to hand it to her brother. “There’s the Stoltens’ cornfield up ahead,” Asa told them. “If trouble happens we’ll abandon the wagon and run for it.”

As they came closer the individual shapes resolved. In the middle of the trio of warriors stood one they knew as Cut-Nose, his face painted half in bright green, half in vivid yellow. This warrior often came to their farm and ate the pumpkins while they were still green and raw, carving them up slice by slice with his knife. He never asked their permission or spoke to them. Cut-Nose held up a hand to signal for them to stop, so Asa drew the wagon to a halt. Ashes came down around them like falling snow.

Hazel handed her brother the rifle. She saw how his arms shook as he received it. He stood in the buckboard and hailed the Indians in their own language. The men on either side of Cut-Nose were greased with black paint and streaks of white. They came around the wagon and one of them took up the reins, his eyes dark and unreadable. After listening to Asa’s salutation, Cut-Nose told the children not to be afraid. In Dakota, he told them there was a bad bunch of Ojibwe here in the woods that had attacked the sawmill. He asked Asa to set down the rifle.

“He’s lying,” Hazel told Asa under her breath, in case Cut-Nose’s English was better than they thought.

“How do you know?” Asa said through his teeth.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

At that moment, Turnip, barreling down the roadway, caught up with the wagon. The children had been unsure of their danger, thinking Asa could talk their way out of it, but for the dog this roadside encounter, the smell of things burning, the rust-colored bloodstains along the men’s torsos, had little ambiguity. The Indian holding the reins scarcely had time to turn before the great shaggy form slammed into him and bore him to the ground.