Night Birds, The (12 page)

In case she might run and tell the others and they had dogs or worse, Hanyokeyah took the boy away. There were enough lessons for him already in this encounter. They ran quickly through the tallgrass, keeping low. The old man cast one backward glance and saw the girl as she came out of hiding. Afterward he would wonder at her strange behavior and the gesture she made: the fingers spreading open and waving back and forth as though to clear the air around her.

After they were gone, the girl came down the slope and crossed the frozen river. The golden grass was pressed to the earth on this far side and she knelt and touched the ground and felt the remains of their bodies’ warmth. She was not frightened even though the shopkeeper had shown them the article about Abbie Gardner seeing her entire family killed before her eyes. They had been hiding so close she could see the shine of the bear grease in the boy’s braids and the glint of something silver. She thought if the Indians were going to kill them all they would not send one grizzled looking old man in dark paint and a boy. They had just been crouching there in the grass, black and glossy as crows. She hadn’t sensed any menace in them.

A spotted white feather was nestled in the boy’s place. Hazel knew when she took it in her hands that she would see him again.

STRANGERS
IN THE
TERRITORY

T
HE SENGER FAMILY
had arrived on a bitter day in April of 1859. Snow whirled out of low clouds before the wind caught it and whipped it past their eyes, the flakes small and hard as fragments of broken glass. They could hear the ice breaking up like bones beneath the hull of their steamer, the
Independence
, the first boat to make it upriver to New Ulm that spring. The family hunched down behind rain barrels to keep out of the wind. In the tallgrass prairies along the shore the wind moved like a ghost army, bending down the stalks in a relentless march, flowing and moaning as they came, before dying with one final shriek. The sun was a white disk above them that vanished in clouds of mixed sleet and snow.

When the wind relented the children stood again near the rails as the steamer carried them into a heavily treed valley terraced by grassed knolls. Jakob called it a vision of the Old Country, the way his father had always spoken of it. If there had been stone castles on the highest hills, the vision would have been complete. They would have traveled from their old home, a family on the run, into a place out of a tale.

But instead of castles there were scaffolds: lean structures of lashed beams tied with fluttering red cloths where a man told them the Dakota laid their dead. They hadn’t seen a single live Indian but their dead were all around the family, and when the great droves of blackbirds took flight from the leafless woods, the children were left with an uneasy sense of eyes watching from the trees. This was the false spring the girl had dreamed about when she touched the Judas flower. In a few days the river would grow a new skin of ice and trap the steamer upriver in New Ulm.

They came here, all the way to Minnesota, because of Jakob’s paper. Back in Missouri, while recovering from his burns, Jakob had picked up the advertisement for the escaped slave, trying to remember her face. He saw this ad printed beneath it:

Land out of the Bible! Rich virgin prairie soils are now open to homesteading after Dahcotah Indians sign peace treaty.

Wooded draws and dark, alluvial soils capable of growing the crop of your dreams. Good wheat country and river transportation.

Come to land where sickness is unknown and the summers cool and bounteous.

The advertisement included a man’s name: Flandrau of New Ulm. With his printing press wrecked and an entire town incited against him, Jakob did not have to think long about taking his family to a new place only a month’s travel out of St. Louis.

There were few difficulties but along the way they lost Kate, his wife of two years. One morning, soon after they set out, while traveling wet spring Missouri roads and camping out beneath the buckboard by night, they awoke to find her blankets empty, and Jakob reasoned she’d gone back to her father and the only home she knew. But she’d left her children with him, and for Jakob there was no going back to Saline Springs. A month’s travel took him to meet Flandrau, the land agent, face to face, and from him he bought a section of land abandoned the previous winter and, with the last of his wife’s money, supplies. He was told that there was a cabin already on the property.

It was also from Flandrau they first heard the name of Inkpaduta and of the massacre his tribe caused: forty settlers dead down near Spirit Lake in Ioway territory.

Hysteria had gripped New Ulm. The streets were empty and quiet. The newspapers the children read in the store while their father haggled over land and supplies, told only half the story. The children saw Inkpaduta, drawn to look like a monster, and the picture of Abbie Gardner. “She looks like you,” Asa told Hazel. While snow dripped from their patchwork cloaks as they huddled around a cast-iron stove in the store, they read of Inkpaduta’s rage. His brother, Sintonamaduta, was murdered by the horse trader, Henry Lott. Lott was a man of wicked inclinations and deserved punishment. When Inkpaduta took his complaint to Granville Berkley, the prosecuting attorney, the man responded by nailing Sinto’s head to a post.

Then came a winter with snowdrifts as high as the cedar hills, a time when the settlers and a renegade band of Indians living outside the reservation boundaries were forced close together. Corn disappeared from cribs. In their hunger and fear, the whites took the Indians’ guns and forced them to go alone out onto the prairies, unarmed and exiled, possibly to die in the snow. But Inkpaduta and his Wahpekutes, the leaf dwellers, had no intention of leaving.

As she read, the girl could see it. In her mind’s eye she saw the severed head of Inkpaduta’s brother leering eyeless from the post, a tongue swelling from the jaws. She saw grim, white-faced women rustling past in dark dresses, shielding their children’s eyes when they walked by the head. Her awareness of her physical surroundings vanished. She couldn’t feel her feet or hands. She was inside the vision and the severed head turned to watch her, as in her dream, and then turned past her to gaze at the horizon where darkness spread like spilled ink. Behind them a dark swarming cloud blotted out the sun, birds and more birds descending, and people turning toward this eclipse of the light, their faces pale with terror.

Forty dead when Inkpaduta’s men were done, and the girl carried out onto the far prairies after seeing her family slaughtered. A troop from Fort Ridgely sought to track down the outlaw band, but all they caught was frostbite, two of their own men vanishing in the treacherous pools of snow on the prairie.
Inkpaduta
. The name haunted those frightened people in New Ulm and would haunt the Senger family.
Don’t stay out too late, they haven’t yet caught Inkpaduta. Don’t play with Indians or you’ll end up like Abbie Gardner.

The family didn’t know what to expect when they came through the valley. Hazel rode in the buckboard beside her father while the boys ran alongside the wagon, anxious to arrive. Back in New Ulm they had purchased a new wagon, an iron stove, various pots and pans, one washboard, tin plates and cups, a barrel of buckwheat flour to grind in the coffee mill, salted pork, and the seed potatoes and corn they hoped to plant in May. They had four oxen to pull the wagon, a brindled milch cow tied to the back, and four laying hens in wire boxes. The cow moaned, pained or homesick, while they rode along. Of Kate’s four hundred dollars, they had a smattering of silver remaining.

As they rode along, shafts of sunlight split the clouds hovering low over the prairie and touched the bluestem grasses with tawny light. The oxen came along, slow and relentless, following grooves in the ground marked by Indians’ travois in their ceaseless migrations. Clouds of prairie chickens erupted in front of the wagon wheels. Colors sharpened in the unseasonable cold, ice glazing the gold grass, stark black trunks of trees bordering rigid creeks and steep sloughs. There were no people visible. Smoke spiraled from an occasional cabin set near the road. A few mangy dogs came out and barked at the entourage, but were too lazy to give chase.

Ashes drifted past them like flecks of dark snow. Jakob had to coax the oxen to get them over the top of the next rise. What spread out in the valley below them could not be possible: An entire field of dead blackbirds, acre upon acre, the cloud-light glossy on their still quivering wings. The dead birds made a sound in the girl’s mind, a keening of betrayal at being called down to this place. Despite the stench, she held her hands over her ears to stop their cries. The boys scrambled back in the wagon. In her mind she kept seeing the vision from back in the store, the head nailed on the post and the blackbirds eclipsing the sun. It seemed as if they rode through the aftermath of a great battle between the creatures of the air. Hazel imagined clouds of them at war, beaks and talons speckled with blood, as they fell upon one another and dropped from the sky in a dark rain.

From the far fields smoke rose from tin barrels. They made out human forms moving through the carnage, children in gray sackcloth trousers, red kerchiefs tied around their mouths like masked outlaws, each carrying a wooden bucket stacked with dead, quivering blackbirds. A gaunt scarecrow of a woman in a faded calico dress, holding a pair of dead blackbirds in each of her hands, stopped her work to watch the Sengers ride past. Her face, lost in the deep shadows of her slat bonnet, had a forlorn cast, the mouth opening without words at this distance.

Ahead of them in the road, a sallow-faced man in a bowler hat stood before a dray cart where the birds were piled high as hay mound. He was red-eyed from the fumes, his skin and face the color of a shriveled pear. He scowled at the approaching caravan.

After Jakob drew the wagon to a halt, neither man spoke at first. Jakob caught his breath. “What is the meaning of this?” he said. “How could so many birds die?” His hands shook while he held the reins.

The man pointed to a silver canister beside him. “Strychnine,” he said. “I laced the seeds with strychnine. Two years running these birds have stolen the seeds before they touched the earth. The birds got fat while my children starved. This year they are paying twenty cents a bushel for dead blackbirds in town. This year my harvest will come from the sky.”

Jakob glanced behind him at the poisoned fields and the masked children plucking the poisoned birds from the ground. “You’ll make them sick,” he said. Softer, under his breath, but loud enough for the man to hear, he said, “Madness.”

He geed the oxen into motion, whipping them with the reins. The man shouted after them. “Don’t act like you’re better than me. You don’t know what it’s like out here. You don’t know.” His cry followed them like a chant, this Hans Gormann and his fair-skinned wife, and his daughters, Cassie and Sallie. And then they rode over the next hill and saw, for the first time, the cabin they would call home for the next four years.

The wind came out of the west and they could no longer smell the field of dead blackbirds, but the clouds moved in squalls now, and there was the metallic taste of coming snow on the edge of their tongues. This was their first night in the new territory.

The new cabin squatted stump-like at the base of a hill. The first night they came here the girl was relieved it bore no resemblance to the sod-roofed house she’d seen in her nightmare. The shutters banged and flapped in the wind as though the house was stretching to take flight and vanish over the horizon. Only tatters of leather hinges hung where there once was a door. Jakob tacked a blanket over this opening so they would feel less exposed.

An untilled field encircled the cabin; a lone cedar tree stood at its center. There was a leaning structure of clapboards that yawned over an open pit. The sod barn proved to be a tight, cozy enclosure for the animals but Jakob had to manhandle the milch cow—shoving it by the rump while Caleb whipped it with a quirt—to get it inside. Something frightened the creature. That night as Hazel milked it the cow continued to make a mournful lowing sound with each tug of the teats. “Is she sick?” Caleb had asked, thinking maybe the calf she carried inside her was turned around the wrong way.

“Maybe she doesn’t like this place,” Asa said. “It’s gloomy in here. Like being buried alive.” None of them said anything about the coppery scent that burned inside their nostrils, a scent that had soaked into the walls and the packed soil.

By night the wolves came to serenade them. They slept fitfully, Hazel thinking of the two Indian watchers she had seen earlier on the prairie and wondering why they had come.

In the wake of their April arrival, the weather turned for the worse. That first morning they woke to knee-deep drifts beyond the cabin and a scouring wind that blew through gaps in the cabin’s chinking. When the wind allowed the snow to settle, the children were awed by the spread of grassland and sky. Their old lives had been hemmed in by hills and hollows. Now there were endless seas of grass, broken only by small rises and groves of sheltering woods along the serpentine bends of the river. They stood at the edge of a raw country, a place of wind and storm, shifting and changing before their eyes.

By morning Hazel woke to the noise of wind howling as sunlight streaked through clanging shutters and gilded the sleeping children. They had kept the smaller animals they purchased inside with them. Four laying hens clucked from their wire cages. Freyja, a striped cat with tawny fur they had also bought from the shopkeeper, yawned and displayed rows of sharp teeth.

Hazel had been dreaming the ice dream again. In the dream her mother lay on the block of ice, her skin shining with blue light. A red sash coiled around her throat. Her fingers were gray, drained of blood, the fingernails as long as talons.
What happened to you?
Hazel said in the dream and her voice echoed through the cavernous barn:
What happened, happened to you
. Hazel awoke and felt icy drafts pooling on the floor below her. She woke thinking
she
was sleeping on a bed of ice.
I wish this winter would leave us, she thought. I am not my mother. What happened to her is not my story.

She listened to her father splitting kindling. Only after she heard the flare of the lucifer match did she dare rise in the freezing room. Jakob’s beard looked wild and tangled; locks of his dark hair fell in his eyes while he labored to get the fire going. But he seemed rested, content, even as the moisture of his breath formed ice beads in his mustache. All of them had been thinned down to an essence of lean muscle by the journey from Missouri. Thinned down and strengthened, Hazel hoped.