Night Birds, The (39 page)

Hazel stopped talking again after she had failed Wanikiya at his trials. What had words mattered then? She knew she was reverting, recalling the long four-year silence that followed her mother Emma’s death. But sign language had been her first language with Wanikiya. As her hands carved patterns in the air, she could remember him beside her.

Leah waited for a moment to see if Hazel would show her any more signs and then came forward and lay her head against Hazel’s belly to listen for the child. Hazel did not mind this. If there was a thump or kick Leah would squeeze her hand. She would stand again and make the sign for baby, a right closed fist across a left hand, palm up, as though holding something fragile, like water sifting through fingers. Leah’s mother would not like it if she knew she was here, for she suspected that seizures were contagious, perhaps demonic in origin, and that Hazel should be locked away from the world for her sake and others. To suffer from both an indelicate condition and “nervous instability” made her troublesome.

“Leah,” her voice sang from below. “Leah, we are going now, come here at once.” Leah left the door open as she tiptoed down the narrow stairwell. Hazel watched the light seeping through the open doorway for a long time, listening to the bustle of the family getting ready, and then the house was silent except for the raspy breathing of George.

It was the morning after the hanging. Hazel had been a ward of Dr. Kolar for two months and had not left this room. She had thought herself as a prisoner for so long, first with the Dakota, and now here, a girl in a high tower surrounded by thorns, that she was afraid for a moment of venturing outside. She slid the worn carpetbag that contained her belongings from under the bed and put on the clothes her stepmother had sent with her: the green gingham dress, a scarlet cape, a homespun lavender shawl, and a bonnet trimmed with roses. Hazel’s swollen feet would not fit into her narrow black leather boots and she had to strain to pull them on. She could not see over the rise of her belly to tie the boots so she limped out the room and down the stairs with her laces trailing behind her. She knew where she had to go.

Before she left, Hazel stopped to look in on George. She had heard him all this time and wondered what he looked like. The old man turned over on his side and regarded the girl with gunmetal blue eyes. Beneath a cotton shift his great barrel chest rose and fell with each breath. His right eye winked uncontrollably and that side of his face was sealed in a rigid grin. Hazel didn’t know what to do now that she was in the room with him. He struggled to open his mouth, to make his lips form words. “Go,” he said. “Go and don’t come back.”

Hazel went out the back door and made her way through a side garden stripped clean in winter and sheathed in potato sacking. She clopped unevenly down the street, avoiding long patches of ice that glimmered in the frozen, cratered muck. She came down Front Street to the square where they had hanged Wanikiya and thirty-seven other Dakota.

In her left hand she carried with her the beaded moccasins she had embroidered during the summer of her captivity in Blue Sky Woman’s teepee. She meant to leave these as an offering at the grave, a gift meant to help him cross over into the other world. She had seen his name listed in the
Leslie’s Illustrated
Leah brought her. The account said that one of the Dakota had prayed the Lord’s prayer instead of a death song. If he was being called to account for his deeds before the white God, he would go to Him speaking their tongue. This knowledge twisted cruelly inside her; when she taught him that prayer their first summer she had not known he would remember so well, had never envisioned him speaking it at such a moment.

The wind streamed out of the north and hurled sharp flakes of ice that chased away the few stragglers still gathered around the spectacle of the scaffold, a huge structure of pine clapboards with severed ropes swinging in the wintry wind. One of those ropes had held Wanikiya. She could not bear to look at the scaffold for long. People hunched past, unseeing, hats pulled low over their eyes, cloaks and coats cinched tight.

Hazel wandered down toward the river and there she found the remains of the mass grave where the thirty-eight had been buried. It was a gaping mouth that breathed steam in the cold. There were dark scattered impressions in the sandy ground, like snow angels left behind by children. The soil smelled fresh and damp, even a day later.

“They’re gone.” When the boy spoke it startled her so badly she almost fell into the grave. She turned a questioning gaze toward a tow-headed child clad in long woolen shirts and patched pantaloons. A boy of thirteen perhaps, fists clutching a hidden object, grimy toes poking out of undersized, handmade boots.

“The doctors took them,” he said in a high, piping voice. “They cast dice for the corpses. Dr. Mayo won the body of Cut-Nose.” He leaned over and spat into the grave. “When they catch Little Crow I hope they leave him hanging so’s the birds can peck out his eyes.” It was then that Hazel noticed what he clutched in his hands, a small leather bag the size of a coin purse, embroidered with yellow beads in the shape of an owl eye. Before he could tuck the object away, she seized his wrist with her right hand and squeezed with her long fingernails. “Ouch!” he hissed, dropping the tiny bag. It was a cruel thing to do, but she knew if she had asked for it the boy would have dashed away with his stolen treasure. She plucked the object from the ground.

“That’s mine,” he said. “I found it at the bottom. There’s nothing else left.” He rubbed his wrists where tiny droplets of blood began to bead and drop to the snow. “The others took everything.” His jaw trembled with anger, this boy who had nothing. “Give it back,” he said. “It’s mine.”

Hazel held the leather bag close to her and turned away from him. The bonnet shadowed her face and she was grateful he could not see her tears.
He was here
, she thought,
there can be no doubting it now. He’s dead and it’s my fault for not speaking up for him. My fault he turned himself in.
It was forbidden that she should show any sorrow for the Indians, even to this child. The prairies west of here were littered with the countless shallow graves of settlers. Two of her brothers had gone under the scalping knife, their bodies bloating and blackening under the August sun. A few on each side did evil and the rest of them had been left to struggle through the wreckage. All those Dakota hanged. All those in filthy, measles-infested prison camps who had risked their own lives to save whites like Hazel.
I will not lay blame. The word for anger and sorrow is similar in Dakota,
woiyokisica,
and I will cling to that dark energy. I will keep my sorrow, because I was there and I was one of the few who understood what was lost. I know this bag, the smooth stones within a pocket of owl’s down, just as I knew the owner and his longing for a previous age.
She looked up once more at the boy in time to see him kneading a rock-sized hunk of snow and ice.

“Witch!” he shouted. “You dirty thieving witch.” His eyes watered with anger and he wiped them with his shirt before cocking his arm. Hazel took a halting step back as he unleashed the ice ball. It caught her square in the forehead, tearing loose the bandage and knocking off her bonnet. She felt needles of ice and grit explode in the wound as her head whipped back. Stumbling, she caught herself at the lip of the shallow grave, dropping the moccasins, but keeping the bag sealed in her fist. Another fit began to flicker like heat lightning inside her. These seizures started with just a faint tremor behind her left eyelid, an innocent twitch that spread to the left side of her face when she clamped her jaw down.
Oh no
, she tried to say as the shuddering possessed her body, but the words came out as vapor that passed before her and dissipated.

“Lady, what’s wrong with you?” she heard the boy say, his anger turning to concern, before he saw the whites of her eyes rolling back. Dimly, she heard his cry and the footsteps stamping away and that’s the last thing she remembered.

The sign for
forget
and
night
is the same: a still left hand, palm downward with the right hand sweeping over it. She would forget the next two months if it were in her power. They found her rolled inside the grave, the leather bag of stones knotted in her fist. The sandy soil that had briefly held her husband’s remains had to be picked out of the reopened wound with tweezers. She woke to that sensation, like wasp stings on her forehead, as Dr. Kolar cleaned the wound. Her eyes followed the rise and fall of his arm to the stained apron he wore, white cloth dappled with yellow blood. A butcher’s apron. She sat up in fear and looked at her swollen belly.

“Easy now,” the doctor said. “You’ve had quite a shock. What did I tell you about leaving here? Any change in surroundings is likely to produce delirium and fits of apoplexia.” Hazel’s hands were trembling. She reached out and touched the soft fabric of her chemise where the smooth hill rose. Deep within her she sensed the child, a silent, waiting hum of energy. Beyond the doctor she saw her gingham dress hanging from the rafters, the material darkened and dripping clots of bloodlike soil to the floor. Ida was cleaning the cloth with a brush, sweeping fragments into a pan. Her slender beaklike nose wrinkled as though she were a bird pecking at unsavory crumbs.

She sensed the girl watching her and set her pan down to join the doctor and pat Hazel’s hair. “You poor, dumb thing,” she said. “The things you must have seen.” Hazel felt a knot forming in her chest, for even this touch was a kindness she craved. “They say the lucky ones are those that died. A woman shouldn’t let herself be captured alive by those red devils.” She held Hazel in the gaze of her fierce brown eyes. “We’ll take care of you now, dearie,” she said. Hazel wondered why the woman did not mention the child inside her. Ida continued to stroke her hair, smoothing out the tangles while Dr. Kolar brought forth a hollow, wooden cylinder tapered at the end.

“To listen to your heart,” he said when he saw the fright in her eyes. He moved the scope from the girl’s chest and then listened for a time at her belly. Hazel watched his expression carefully, but his pale features betrayed nothing. He turned his back to her and it was then that she realized where the blood on his apron came from. He was one of the doctors who had been at the grave on the night of the hangings. In the cool darkness of his basement some warrior had been carved up and would have to carry those mutilations with him into the afterlife as his spirit traveled the path across the Milky Way. Hazel pictured Wanikiya stripped of his beaded breechclout, the sacred paint washed from his face, soft flesh of his neck serrated with rope’s imprint, while the doctor hovered over him with a toothed saw. She pictured the wound in his side, the pretty hollow where his throat joined his chest, a place she would lay her own head and listen to the drumming of his heart.

Horrified, she tried to sit up again. Ida’s caressing hands turned instead to talons, pinning Hazel back to the bed. Her mind flickered with blue fire, the remnant of her seizure. She was too weak to fight them, too weak to do anything but lift her arms, his name in her throat. Dr. Kolar carried over a long-needled syringe filled with milky fluids. It entered her skin and she stopped thinking for a time.

Two lost months. She did not run. Ida became kinder, stopping each morning to brush out the tangles from her hair. The seizures stopped as though Hazel had emerged from the grave a new creature, and they did not tie her to the bed each night. The nausea passed, too, and she felt the child moving about within her. How would she keep it safe once it breathed the cold air of this world alone? “A boy,” Ida said. “Only the boys cause this much trouble. A little savage doing a scalp-dance in your tummy right now.” Hazel’s hands and feet swelled with water weight, fingers and toes becoming fat, throbbing sausages as though the child’s liquid environs had leaked into her blood. The baby within her was restless, pressing down on her bladder at night so that Hazel stained the bedsheets. Her belly was not round exactly, more oblong. She should have run, she knew it in her heart, but where could she have gone in a strange town in the middle of a Minnesota winter?

Listen. The old ones spoke of stones raining from the firmament at night and plowing furrows in the earth. This was the spirit who moved in all things, even rocks, and the stones traveled between heaven and earth, and knew the language of the sun and moon and could teach it to a few. These were the stone dreamers who carried round pebbles wrapped in swan’s down and could send out the tiny stones to find missing children, lost treasures, the impending future, for the stones were everywhere and could see all things. Wanikiya’s father was such a medicine man, but died before passing the knowledge on to his son. Wanikiya carried the embroidered bag, a relic of the vanishing past, but the stones were inanimate in the palm of his hands.

Hazel passed her days reading the Bible again, especially Old Testament stories of captivity. She heard Job crying out, “Where is God, my Maker, who gives songs in the night?” She thought,
What song will my Maker give to me?
She took out the smooth stones from their bed of down and imagined them bringing Wanikiya back. When the child kicked and tumbled inside her, she soothed it by running a hand over her belly, pretending that it was his touch on her skin. The low slanting roof of this room became their shared teepee, the window an aperture above the lodge poles where stars swam, her steaming breath in the cold, smoke from the fire to warm them. A part of her knew these were delusions, but they allowed her to forget what went on in the lower regions of this household, his body, or perhaps another’s, being diced up, his journey no longer possible.