Night Birds, The (40 page)

But skin and bone were only a vessel for the eternal. He had been converted by Father Ravoux, the Black Robe who came among them before the hanging. God would know him for his heart. If there was such a life beyond this one, she would be able to find him again. It was Wanikiya who brought her out of silence; for him she began praying again.

For a few words he might have been saved, but the commission in charge of separating the guilty from the innocent, deciding who among the Dakota was guilty of the 485 recorded whites dead on the prairies, would not hear her speak. She was a girl. Henrietta had told them what she had done. If anything she would be tried beside him.

Wanikiya was no innocent and there was blood on his hands. The Stolten boy remembered him, testifying that Wanikiya was there the day his family was massacred, his father run through with a pitchfork. And Wanikiya said nothing in response, even though he knew enough English to answer their charges. So many whites had died, he must have intended to offer up his own death, life for life, a balance, as it was in their ancient conflict with the Ojibwe. There was no record of him saying a single word in Dakota or in English. In that room of killers, white and red, he was called to account with no one to speak for him. She believed he meant himself to be a sacrifice, but she was not there, and perhaps could not have changed things if she had been. She could pretend to send out the stones, but she could not bring him back, could not unmake the lies that broke his neck.

When her child was born she heard it cry before it was carried from the room. She never held him.

Ida had run cool, damp cloths across her forehead, the water dribbling into her mouth. Hazel crumpled the sheets in her fists, gritted her teeth, and pushed. She was sitting all the way up, her face near her kneecaps, when she saw that head crown, a circle of dark hair emerging, and she felt a rush of renewed strength and lay back and pushed. She swore she heard it cry, but later Ida told her the child was born dead, strangled by the umbilical cord. A death like its father’s. Dr. Kolar held it muffled against his chest as he carried it from the room. Hazel’s dark hair was pasted to the healing wound on her forehead and her vision clouded. She felt she was looking down a swirling tunnel narrowing to a pinprick of light. At the end of the tunnel she saw Leah in the doorway; the girl flashed the sign for good, the sign for baby, and then the tunnel closed.

A fever burned in her afterward and she dreamed that dark circle of hair was a raven she had birthed, a bird out of legend. It perched there on her knee, waiting for her die, a night bird slick with her own fluids.

Leah stopped coming, either forbidden or because there was no more child to listen for. Hazel could no longer hear George below her and wondered where he had gone. She passed in and out of the fever, once imagined her stepmother Kate in the room looming over her. “It’s better this way,” Kate was saying. “The child would only have reminded you every living day what you had been through.” Hazel blinked and she was gone, a feverish phantasm.

During a warming spell in April, Ida and Dr. Kolar took her to her child’s grave. A drenching rain lashed the cobbled streets and rinsed wet snow in gritty funnels down the hill. Hazel was still too weak to walk without the support of their arms on either side, Dr. Kolar on her left holding a small umbrella that only partially shielded them from the rain. Ida pointed out a cairn of stones beneath three oak trees, told her that Leah had made the cross of woven willows. They heard her sob, a choked sound as though a corset was binding her too tightly. When they relaxed their grip, Hazel lunged forward and began to throw the stones aside.

She slipped in the mud, her fingers clawing at slick rocks, exposing packed solid ground beneath. Ida was shouting; Dr. Kolar had hooked his arms around her waist and was pulling her away. Hazel strained with all her might, arms outstretched, a high-pitched wail escaping her throat. She fought them all the way back down the street, her blows landing without any force, until Dr. Kolar carried her back up the narrow stairwell to the attic room where she was kept.

Locked in the room, she continued to wail. Her voice was the voice of those mothers in Matthew, chapter two. At first it was wordless, but then that passage swam into her head, the memory of what happened after Christmas, and she was furious with God. She raged in the low-ceilinged attic room, her blood throbbing in her temples, the dress plastered to her shivering skin. All her remaining strength was channeled into her scream. Her hands curled into such tight fists that her fingernails pierced her palm. In the midst of her outcry, as she was pacing, her boots clacking the floorboards, chewing her lip so hard that she tasted blood inside her mouth, she was upright one moment, and then brought to her knees. The answer came to her like the prairie fires that sweep through the tallgrass in high summer, sucking the air from the lungs of any creature caught in its path. It put her on her knees, her palms against the floorboards. Rising up in her chest she felt her guilt over Wanikiya’s death, her sorrow over the lost child. These dark feelings were rooted in her belly one moment and then torn out of her, as though a hand had literally reached down her throat to yank them out, held each thing up to the fire, one by one, each ugly as chaff, until they were charred away and she was emptied out. A purgative flame. She was emptied out and yet there was still this presence inside her, speaking, undeniable.

Hazel wept. When she was done weeping she saw the ragged edges of her fingernails against the floorboard, saw the black dirt beneath them. And had her answer.
He is alive. My child lives.
She began to pray again.

The Great Sioux War. The Sioux Uprising. Little Crow’s Revenge. The Indian Massacre. These are the names history assigned to what she endured. That evening Ida entered the room after Hazel had quit making such terrible noises. She brought tincture of laudanum, a hairbrush. Ida let the door creak open, warily, as if afraid that Hazel would assail like her some demon. But the girl was lying quietly on top of the sheets, dressed only in her chemise, humming something under her breath that sounded like a hymn. The girl let Ida put the tincture in her mouth and she swallowed as she bid. There was something different about her. Her dark green eyes flickered with pale fire. Ida wiped away blood at the corner of the girl’s mouth.

Had the girl gone mad? She was changed, though Ida couldn’t put her finger on it. Hazel’s forehead blazed. She looked like a picture Ida had once seen of Joan of Arc, a stylized portrait, a peasant woman in a rude shift in the midst of the fire. Then she realized what she was seeing. The girl lay with her arms rigid at her sides. She would endure these things, her eyes told Ida. She would outlive Ida, all of them. Even when laudanum mellowed her facial features, unlocked her jaw, she looked no less fierce.
I hold something
, her eyes said,
you will never touch, never have yourself.

When I dreamed I dreamed in Dakota. Eventually, the Kolars decided they could do no more for me and I was released in late May. Ida gave me a few dollars to buy passage back upriver and find my family. Instead I went looking for the Dakota, but their winter camp south of Mankato had been abandoned, the Indian prisoners transferred down the Mississippi to Davenport, Iowa. I wanted to find Blue Sky Woman, to have her braid my hair, sing to me, heal me.

I lived hand to mouth as I made my way downriver. The foxes have holes, the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head and rest. I made it as far as Winona, Minnesota, where, half-starving, the seizures began to afflict me again. Someone found me, dirty, convulsing in the street, and took me to the Langley Home, a makeshift hospital. They could not coax a single word from me in English. The Civil War raging in the east consumed their attention. One madwoman was of little concern and so I was kept fed and cleaned and confined by four walls, an unlocked door. With nowhere to go, I retreated so far inside myself I lost even my name for a time.

When the St. Peter Hospital for the Insane opened in 1866, I was among the first patients. Ten years of my life. But inside there, no one looked at me any differently, or cared about my history. I had a room that overlooked a garden. I learned I had a talent for growing things, could show them how to sprinkle hay among the tomato vines to keep down weeds, singing softly in Dakota against the blackbirds that came to thieve the corn. Long periods passed when it even seemed they forgot I was one of the patients.

Always the seizures came like heat lightning flickering just behind my eyes. Oh, they left my physical body ravaged. But in a way I have missed them. Most of what we know of God in this world is His absence. Don’t think that I mean any sacrilege. If faith were easy, it would have little worth.

There is a place inside us beyond blood and breath. Picture rolling grassland spilling over the edge of a cliff in a green wave. The other side of the cliff is molten with rivers of light winding toward the jaws of the mountains. All around you smell the rain, and in the wind there are voices of those you lost.

You are afraid of this edge inside you, of what will happen when you step over. Maybe in your ordinary days you forget it even exists. Children know it, and the elderly.

I go there just before each seizure. I step over, but it is not like in one of those dreams where you fall and fall and wake just before impact. A warm wind courses beneath me and I move like a cloud. There are ridges and ridges of mountains and beyond them a place of energy, lightning boiling inside thunderheads. The backbone of the world. A place of both fear and awe. Even the animals glimpse it when they feel their deaths rising up inside them and shamble off to be alone. But I am never afraid. For what I feel then is His presence. And I know that I will pass over unharmed. I know I shall not be cast down.

I long for this place. There was only one thing that kept bringing me back to this world. The story was not finished. Jakob, Daniel, Asa, Matthew, Wanikiya, all the banished Dakota. They had passed from this world without leaving any trace. I was haunted by my own history. So, I made a book of my own, a book like my father once made in Missouri, patching it together from the few pages the doctors parceled to me each month.

Why? Because I knew my child was out there, alive. I pictured him, a fleet runner, dark as his father, but shy and thoughtful like me. I knew that he was growing up with a space inside him he did not understand. One day I would meet him again. I knew it as surely as my father Jakob knew that escaped slave was running his way. Life would bring us together again. “Who am I?” he will say to me when he comes. “Please tell me who I am.”

I set this down now for him, for the day of his return. This was all foretold long ago. A time I saw the world end and walked through the wreckage to witness its rebirth. “This is where you come from,” my book will say, “this is what you are.”

KINGDOM TOWNSHIP
1876

THE
GOOD ROAD

I
T HAD BEEN
dark for a few hours. The rain beat a steady rhythm on my slicker. When I glanced up at the roof I saw a pool forming in the center and the whole shelter preparing to collapse. My fire had dimmed to ashes. I threw on more dead limbs and blew on the embers until it flared up again. Rivulets of rain rinsed down the steep slope to join the swelling river. Some huge thing, a snapper turtle I figured, went into the water on the opposite shore. For a moment I considered dismembering my shelter and using the prong to spear the turtle. Hadn’t the Indians eaten turtle flesh, cracking open the shells on sharp stones? But it was a cold rain and once my clothing got soaked it would be a long while before I got warm again.

I lay back, puzzling over the end of Aunt Hazel’s story, which raised as many questions as it answered. I knew why my papa never stepped forward to take communion, why he didn’t raise his pleasant voice during hymn singing. But that feverish phantasm of Kate, had she been real? These were just a few things I needed to talk over with Aunt Hazel. I had to make it to Mankato. I wanted to touch my hand to the sandy soil where they buried the thirty-eight. I wanted to find medicine so my aunt would go on living with us.

The fire sizzled and complained when the rain grew heavier. Storms had been rare in the years of the locust, arriving with sudden violence, carving streams in the cracked earth, before they gusted away and left the ground as bare as before. From the corner of my eye I saw a finger of lightning on the horizon. I counted to four before I heard thunder. The world was about to get a whole lot wetter and here I was camped at the bottom of a slope beside a surging river. More thunder reverberated through the barren woods. I started to take down my shelter, figuring I would wear the oilskin slicker and crouch next to the fire, when I heard hoofbeats drumming along the shallows of the river. Smoke mushroomed around me and rose up to meet the rain. I hesitated. It could be anyone out there. The man had said that the whole countryside had turned out in search of the James gang. I heard one of the riders shout something as he smelled my smoke. It didn’t sound like more than two horses out there in the night. Six outlaws had escaped the firefight in Northfield, so this couldn’t be them.

I drew up my knees to my chest and waited for them to find me because there wasn’t anywhere to run. The best I could do was pull out the rusty pocketknife from the pillowcase and unclasp the blade. One of the men dismounted and slogged through the muddy shallows. “Who’s there?” he called to me. “Show yourself.” His voice, that easy southern twang, froze me in place. I knew that voice. Jordan, he had called himself when he stayed at our farm. Of course they would come back this way. They had mapped it going north. Maybe the other four were dead. Maybe they had split up. I only knew the voice calling to me now belonged to Jesse James, a known murderer.

All those thoughts flashed through my mind seconds after he spoke. Then I heard him draw back the hammer on his pistol. “I’m gonna count to three and then I need to see you standing by your fire, hands held high. If you don’t come out, I’ll start shooting.”

I tucked the pocketknife within the drawstring of my pants and did as he asked. I knew they could see me clearly standing beside the flickering fire, a boy trying not to shudder in the rain. Beyond the smoke and circle of light they were only shadows on horseback. Jesse dismounted and approached my fire, moving through clouds of smoke as he led his horse. A few feet away he paused to study me again and then laughed. “Well, if this don’t beat all,” he said. Jesse didn’t seem bothered by the smoke that touched him and rose up to meet the rain. He stood there, his slicker smoldering, before calling to the man still down in the river. “Frank, get your carcass up here. I told you this was the river to follow. It’s a boy here. The boy from the farm.”

Frank stayed motionless, slouched over his horse, while the shallows coursed around his mount. Thunder crackled downriver and Jesse’s horse whinnied softly but did not try to pull away. When Frank didn’t respond, he turned to study me again. “Who else is out here with you, son? Speak quick. Your pa. Is he up in those trees?”

“No, sir,” I said, “I’m by my lonesome.”

The barrel of Jesse’s gun was trained on me while he scanned the woods around us. He tipped his hat and let rain dribble from the brim then smiled. I saw the glint of his teeth reflected in the firelight. “I have a good sense for people,” he said. “So I think you’re telling the truth. While I’d like to conversate about what brings a boy out to camp in such weather, I’ve got bigger concerns. Has the news spread this far . . . what was your name again?”

“Asa,” I said, drawing a deep breath to steady my voice. “And yes, the whole countryside is turned out to look for you.”

“That’s fitting,” Jesse said. “Well then, we don’t have much time.” A sudden gust scattered sparks from my fire all the way down to the shore. Lightning slivered into the river somewhere close, outlining the quick silhouette of the other rider. For a moment, I thought he was dead. Then came roaring thunder, though this time neither horse stirred. Jesse’s eyes never left me. “Asa,” he said softly. “I’d rather not have to kill you. You seem a good boy. My brother down there is hurt bad. He’s shot in the leg and the bullet has burrowed inside. Riding this far has been a torture. The bullet’s got to come out, and it’s gotta come out tonight before infection sets in. Do you understand me so far?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

“Good,” he continued. “Because I’m going to need your help. I’m going to go fetch my brother from his horse and carry him to your shelter. You’re going to hobble these horses, though I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere soon. If you try to run away, you just might escape. But I know where your live, and in my rage I would find your family and hurt them. I am capable of this.”

I swallowed.

“So, I’m going to make you a deal. If Frank lives, you live. If he dies, you die with him. You see that I’m a fair man. Take care of these horses now,” he said, handing me the reins of his mount.

Away from the fire, I recognized the bay I had helped Jesse brush down in my stable, though all the shine had gone out of her fine coat and brimming black eyes. Her teeth frothed with pink blood around the bit. Each breath gurgled wetly. Underbrush had scoured long gashes along her hide and when my hands passed over her flank I touched something wet and warm that was not the rain. I led her to a thicket of willows and hobbled her. Jesse had already helped his brother to my shelter, so I went for the other horse, a large gray charger whose hooves were implanted in the sandy shallows. The horse was rooted there and I had to stroke its withers, gentling it with touch and talk, before it awakened to follow my lead. Both mounts had been ridden beyond exhaustion. I came away from hobbling them smelling of horse and blood and the deeper sorrow of an animal that will soon give its life for spur and master.

For a passing moment I thought about running, but I understood instinctively that I would have to think quickly to live through this night. Jesse or Frank had killed that bank teller because he hadn’t followed instructions. Running might be the very thing that got me killed. Jesse’s voice quenched all such thoughts. “Bring me the saddlebags,” he called, “and be quick about it.”

I felt the rain soaking into my shirt, spreading icy fingers down my spine. I wasn’t ready to die. Then I felt the medicine bag within my shirt, close to the hollow of my throat. The light weight of the stones against my skin reassured me. There was medicine in here to guide me; I was not alone.

I brought over each saddlebag while Jesse put more wet wood on the fire. Frank was stretched out on his back on the muddy ground beneath my shelter, his lean face and bushy goatee glistening in the firelight, his eyes flickering open briefly to take me in. Jesse had stripped off Frank’s jeans, an operation that involved much cursing and exposed the man’s pale, hairy legs. “Jesse,” Frank said hoarsely. “You were supposed to find a doctor. The plan was to kidnap a doctor.”

Jesse drew out a whisky bottle from the saddlebag and passed it to his brother. “You take a good long drink of this,” he said. “I’m the only doctor you need.”

Frank sat up and took a slug of the golden liquid, his adam’s apple dancing. “I feel better now,” he said. “Let’s take care of the boy and then keep riding. I don’t want your dirty hands mucking around inside of me.”

All the blood drained out of me when I heard those words. I realized that even if I did everything they asked of me, I might not live. Jesse took off his hat and slicked back his hair. “No, Frank. Those horses won’t go another step. They need rest. Besides, I’m not the one to fetch out that bullet. The wound was made for smaller hands. Someone stronger needs to hold you down.”

Frank sat all the way up. His beard was black with rain, his eyes flashing. “You’re a crazy bastard. This whole goddamn plan might as well been hatched up by monkeys. Too goddamn far, too many goddamn things that could go wrong.”

“That’s three times you took the Lord’s name in vain. You got enough to answer for in the hereafter for blowing out another man’s brains.”

“The dumb son of a bitch died for other people’s money. I would shoot him all over again if I had the chance. I can’t abide stubbornness in people or animals.” Frank took another slug of whisky and sat back again, still grumbling.

“Asa,” Jesse said, “do you believe in fate?”

I shook my head, too stunned to say anything. While Frank knocked back more whisky, Jesse passed a filleting blade through the flames and then gave it to me, handle first. Then I found my voice. “Sometimes,” I said. “But other times there isn’t a reason in the world for things happening.”

“A philosopher,” Jesse said. Frank grumbled something wordless and Jesse turned toward him. “I know. Such talk makes you impatient.” He ran a hand through his thin, boyish beard and looked back at me. “Well, fated or not, I like to believe there’s a reason we ran into you tonight. I can’t dig out this bullet on my own. He’s a big fellow, meaner than a hellcat, and if he jerks the wrong way, I’ll cut too deep. Besides, he has no tolerance for pain. This won’t be easy.”

“You want me to cut him?” I said. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

Jesse smiled. The firelight winked in his pale eyes and I saw my own reflection in the middle of the flames. The image brought my heart up into my throat. “That’s the thing about fate, you don’t get to choose.” He lowered his voice. “I’d sooner wrestle a grizzly bear then hurt my brother. I’ll hold him down. You cut carefully, hear? I don’t think the bullet hit bone. It’ll be there, nestled in muscle. You pluck it out like a pearl. The pearl of great worth.”

Once, as a young boy, I reached under a log where I’d seen a garter snake dart a moment before. My hands found cool, wet mud and slick root and then there was a pain so sudden and sharp it felt like a thousand fangs had pierced my searching hand. I yanked it out and saw yellowjackets boiling over the skin. A cloud of them erupted from the hole and enveloped me, one hellish cloud of stinging rain closing all around. I screamed and ran for the creek.

I expected the insides of a murderer to feel like that, to sting the one foolish enough to reach inside. Frank had drained most of the whisky before Jesse fell on top of him and pinned his arms. Frank’s good leg lashed out, narrowly missing me. Then the pain must have overwhelmed him. He stopped kicking. Smoke from the fire saturated the air. I felt this great stillness all around us, watching. In my hands I held a wicked filleting blade, useful for gutting fish. Despite what Jesse said about fate, I knew I had a choice. Jesse’s back was to me and his brother was unconscious. I could have leaped forward and stabbed Jesse and kept slicing with the knife until they were both dead. Would that have made me a coward or a hero? Neither man had harmed me yet. My hands shook, but not out of fear. And then inside me, I heard Hazel’s voice unrolling a long story, the healer touching her throat and saying,
Even demons believe in the Son of Man. If belief is powerful enough to destroy nations then surely it might command the blood in its narrow travels from heart to wound.
I knew then that I wasn’t capable of any violence. The soul and sinew that made me what I was rebelled against bringing harm, even to someone who deserved it.

What I remembered later is the absolute lack of fear in this moment. I had been raised up for such things; the entire summer had trained me for it. The skin was swollen and taut around the wound. I touched it gingerly with the edge of the blade. I made only one incision to allow my fingers to reach inside, marveling at the steadiness of my hand, how I cut into a man’s leg as though it were no more than thick gristle. There was too much blood for me to see the wound’s opening now and so I searched it out using my hand and then hooked an index finger inside. What a lot of stew and grease is the human body. I shut my eyes and pictured soup bubbling on the stove, soup with a hard layer of lard casing the surface. The more I probed the more the wound widened until I went knuckle deep. I was not surprised when I found the black ball of steel buried in a web of meat, not far from bone. I hooked inside a second finger and pinched it out, like a parent removing a sliver from a child’s hand. Then, I held it up in the firelight, saw my red hand, and the bullet no bigger than a marble. My own voice sounded distant, lower than, and echoing within me. “Here’s your pearl,” I told the outlaw Jesse James.