Night Birds, The (14 page)

Thinking he was being tested, Wanikiya picked up where the old man had left off. “Iktomi made a great pile of mussel shells and when Eya appeared he called him ‘Younger brother.’ This infuriated Eya, who claimed to be among the first creations, older than the moon and stars. Iktomi shrugged and told Eya he knew what he searched for. ‘They are very close now.’ Hearing this, the people shuffled in the woods, thinking they were betrayed. Iktomi picked up one of the mussel shells and pretended to swallow it whole, smacking his lips. ‘If you share your meal, then you I will let you have some of these shells.’

“Eya huffed. ‘I will take what I want.’ He grabbed handfuls of shells and inhaled them like berries. When he was stuffed, his empty eyes rolled back in his head and he swooned on his stumpy legs. His skin went green and then black. He had been tricked into eating poison. He collapsed and the villagers came forth from their hiding places and with bone knives sliced open the distended belly and released the trapped people inside. And they were singing in their joy, because the Devourer was dead, and they had been spared.”

The boy shifted and watched the old man, wondering why he had chosen this story for this night. Did Hanyokeyah mean for him to trick his brother, the way Iktomi had in the story?

After a time, Hanyokeyah spoke. “There are some who say the
wasi-cun
are like Eya. They came to our villages helpless as children and we gave them what we had. But they only want more and more and soon there will be none of us left.”

Wanikiya swallowed and looked away. He had not thought of the story in this fashion. The old man continued. “It is hard to know the way. Your brother believes such things, maybe even believes that the white people can be cut open and that afterwards things will be as they were before. The
wasicun
are not foolish like Eya. We may trick them for a time, but they will come back again. I do not think your brother’s way is right. And now there is this new family living on the other side of the river. They are very strange to me, like all the
wasicun.
I knew them when I was a boy and lived among the black robes. It is true that they are greedy. But the Maker also gave them strange magic and I would like to understand them better.”

The boy covered his mouth so the old man would not see him yawning. He shifted on the buffalo robes. When it came to the
wasi-cun
the old man’s thinking became clouded. The boy sensed that he was both afraid and captivated by them. He sensed that Hanyokeyah would not want his older brother to kill them all.

Wanikiya watched the cedar smoke rise to the starlit opening above. In the distance a few wolves sang out to their brothers. He was thinking of the family on the other side, afraid of what Tatanyandowan had done. Jakob wasn’t sure how long he had been unconscious. The pain flaring behind his eyelids had grown to such an intensity that he had knelt in the cottonwoods and vomited until his throat burned and his mind went dark. When he came to, he was still blind. In the distance he heard the sound of the wolves feeding, the faint tick of the wind in the cottonwoods around him. Bodies, he had seen them, before the cloud came down over his eyes. There were still faint needles of pain prodding behind his eyes, but it had lessened. He could see enough to make out the rough bark of the trees and the scaffolds nearby. It was like looking on the world through smoked glass, and the strain of it caused the pain to come back. He could see enough to know he had woken while it was still dark.

It was not a pure blindness. The moon was out and Jakob knew only that he wanted to get away from this village and these trees freighted with ghosts. Jakob made a wide circle around the pond where the wolves continued their feast and headed in the direction he thought was home. He could not see to pick his way through the deeper drifts and he sank into these like a drowning man and had to pull himself along.
Keep moving
, a voice said inside him.
If you stay still you will die
. He was walking inside of a fever dream, the air moist and warm in his chest. He thought of the children and found the will to keep his muscles in motion. Somewhere out on the prairies he had the sense of the footsteps again, something walking behind him. “Who’s there?” he called, but there was no answer.

He walked on through the night. Through the dark gauze of his vision he saw the sun rise. Jakob no longer knew the direction he was headed, but in the distance he smelled a wood fire and his stomach grumbled.

Ahead there must have been the bend of a river, a dark clutch of trees. Jakob moved toward this place, thinking,
I am home. Oh thank God, I have made it back to my children.

He slipped while crossing the icy river, cried out as his sore hip crunched into the old ice with a splintering sound that at first he mistook for his own bones. But the sound spread in concentric ripples, a brittle crackling, and then the ice broke and Jakob fell through.

The shock of the frigid water revived him. He went under and windmilled his arms until he climbed back toward air and brightness. The current flowed quick beneath him, pulled at him like a hundred hands. He fought his way to the churning surface, choking out the bitter water. The surging river carried him into a shelf of ice and Jakob grabbed at it and held on to keep from being carried under, felt slick stones beneath his boots and the rip of the ice shredding his fingertips. And then within him he had a vision of the slave girl, Ruth, and saw her body draped over the mule, the mud beneath her shredded fingertips. This was the terror she had known when she jumped in the river to escape the slave catcher’s hounds. This was how he had failed her. He was shouting, half-blinded and desperate, and the river had him in its grasp.

Wanikiya came to the sacred place as his father had come before him. This was part of knowing the Great Mystery. Hanyokeyah had told him he must make a sacrifice here if he was to become a warrior like his father.

Over centuries the stone had been hewn down from a pinnacle to an orb with channels and hewn features like the face of an old man. Now he saw that it was gone from its place in the center of the meadow. A circle of dead grass framed where it once stood. There was a sense of absence here, of violation.

All around the absent stone were the scattered gifts and offerings that Wanikiya’s people had left here: a binding of tobacco, a grandmother’s awl, an amber hunk of maple sugar. For generations they had passed the stone going from their winter camps out to hunt muskrat and turtles and ducks in spring, north to fight their enemies, the Ojibwe. Always, the warriors stopped here and prayed, for the stone was sacred, among the first things the Mystery created. And now the stone was gone.

Wanikiya’s owl, Hinyan, perched on the boy’s shoulder, made a chirping sound as if he shared his dismay. The old man had spoken of stones moving in the dark and carving furrows in the earth. Of stones that went among the stars and knew all things, and men like his father who learned their language. But this stone had not flown. Someone or something had taken it.

Wanikiya set the owl on his finger and huddled it against his chest, feeling the downy feathers close to his skin. This bird had been with him for three years, his lone companion with his brother gone. He had long preferred Hinyan’s company to that of the other children, the boys racing through these woods, heedless, hunting squirrels and blackbirds with their small bows. He had never been the same as them, though he wanted to be. A quietness inhabited him. And the bird was his connection to the night he’d escaped, the night in which he heard his mother inside him.

Wanikiya took out the leather cord he had brought for this purpose. He felt Hinyan rustle against his chest, a muffled chirp, as the boy studied the place around him. The river was a subdued roar in the distance. Had a cottonwood tree not fallen along a narrow channel and formed a natural bridge, then he wouldn’t be here. As it was, he had sat on the log and inched his way across, chill brown water and debris raging below him, the bird circling his head as if calling encouragement, shaking him out of his terror. He heard the river even from this distant high spot, the river loud with snowmelt as hunks of ice carried along the current battered trees on the tree line. He smelled a wood fire from the white family’s cabin. Softer, he smelled the maple woods that surrounded the meadow and its stone god where the maidens did their dance in the summer.

Would there be any dance this year? Winona was of the age when she would dance and touch her palm to the stone, asking aloud to be crushed by it if she were not pure. Wanikiya looked at the blank spot in the grass. The stone would not be coming back. It had not gone among the stars. He glanced off toward the
wasicun’s
cabin with its thin thread of smoke rising above the trees and hoped they had not been the ones who stole it.

Again Hinyan chirped close against his chest, asking to be let free. The bird shuddered and made a small squawking sound. Wanikiya knelt in the dead grass before the spot where the stone god had been. Now there was no chance to learn its language, to discover if he had his father’s gift. Wanikiya was free to return to the village with his beloved bird still alive. He stood and prepared to head home, but in his mind’s eye he saw the old man smoking his red stone pipe patiently waiting for him. He saw Hanyokeyah’s eyes darken with disappointment that he had lacked courage and was not becoming like his father. They were in danger, all of them, and the boy had to learn to choose well.

He knelt again in the grass. Hinyan struggled as he tightened his embrace. Wanikiya began to sing as he wound the leather cord tightly around the bird’s throat. Swift, he thought. Make it swift. This I bring before You, my offering. This that I hold beloved above all things, for You who made all things. Even the breath in my lungs. Such were his thoughts as he wound the cord tighter and tighter and felt the bird beat its wings, one talon hooking into the boy’s bare chest. Hinyan did not go quietly to her death. She fought as every living thing did, and the boy whispering the whole time, pleading that its spirit would forgive him, dwell with him, until he wound the cord so tight that the bird’s neck broke and Hinyan went still against his skin.

He laid the corpse before the place where once there had been a god.
It does not matter that You are not here
, he thought.
You are not in stones and men only
. His eyes brimmed. Why did he still feel nothing, only regret that what he loved was dead?

In his half-blindness he stood and movement from the trees drew his eyes. A quick flicker: The girl from the cabin who had seen Hanyokeyah and him watching that day at the river. She was breathing hard, as though she had witnessed something terrible. And then he knew that she had seen it all, had shared in this moment. His throat swelled. His cheeks were warm and bright with tears. The girl stepped closer to him, only a span of dark maples between them. She was coming his way and then he saw her brothers were behind her and that the blond one carried a rifle. Before he could raise it to his shoulder, Wanikiya was running back to the river and the fallen limb that would take him across.

THE CHILDREN
OF LEAVES

H
E WOKE WITH
a warm cloth over his eyes and the reedy voice of a man threading into his ears. The greasy smell of onions frying in lard saturated the air. He heard them hiss in the pan, felt the wind blow through the chinking of this cabin. The floor below him was packed dirt, well-tamped. After he removed the cloth, Jakob let his eyes adjust to the shadows. There were hewn stumps for chairs, a low pallet against the side of a wall. It was dark in the cabin, which had no windows to let in the light, but Jakob could see pelts of animals tacked against the wall—a mink, a fox, the matted silver-black fur of a wolf—along with the iron teeth and blunt chains of the traps used to capture them. The floor sloped downhill, as if the place was leaning sideways, or was that a trick of his mind? His eyes rose up from the floor and across the room he saw a man watching him, and the slash of a smile which framed brown-stained teeth.

“You’re awake,” the man said. He had the palest skin Jakob had ever seen, so pale he could make out the network of blue vessels beneath. The man had white hair, pinkish-bloodshot eyes, and just the stub of a nose. He was dressed in dark wool pants and a dark vest, but barefoot, his toenails yellow and curving, as long as claws. In his lap he cradled a raccoon that had rolled over on its belly and was purring like a cat. Beside him a rushlight burned on the table, a crude, oily light that consisted of a wick burning inside tallow. “Awake, just in time for dinner.”

“Where am I?” Jakob asked. He was wrapped tightly in a striped wool blanket that itched his skin. Next to him there was an open hearth, a chimney of mud and wattles that blackened the walls around it with smoke. A Dutch oven squatted in the embers of the fire and it was from this that Jakob heard the onions sizzle and smelled the melting lard. The man set down the raccoon and let it hobble across the floor and Jakob saw that the creature only had three legs, but managed to move nimbly as it scurried past him.

“You don’t know?” the man said. “You’re just outside Milford. I found you in my river.” Jakob struggled with the memory. The cow ripped open. Wolves. The bodies in the trees. The blindness and the pain that came with it. The shadow form. And then the river and the taste of the water.

“Who is Ruth?” the man asked.

“Ruth?” Jakob said, and then he remembered. The drowned slave. He had felt her terror as the river tugged him down. Then the voice calling to him from shore, a voice at first he had thought was only in his mind:
Stand up! You’re in shallow water.
And Jakob had found a purchase in the sweeping river, wedged his boots between some rocks and felt his ankles twist. Standing, he was only waist-deep in the current, coughing and gagging out the water, and his vision dwindling down a single string of light. So weak. So much fire in his brain. “I never seen a man almost drown in three feet of water,” the voice was saying now and Jakob remembered the hands grabbing him by the shirt, pulling back onto the creaking sheet of ice and toward the shore.

“You saved my life,” Jakob said.

A thin, reedy laugh. “You were delirious, kept babbling about your blindness and someone named Ruth. Did you lose her?”

“She was a slave who drowned,” Jakob said.

“A slave,” the man said. “They don’t keep slaves around here, and it’s a pity they don’t, if you ask me. Those Germans over in Milford, they hate it. Even just the talk of it makes them bilious.”

“Can’t say I’m fond of slavery either,” Jakob said.

The man rose from the log stump where he had been seated and came over to crouch beside Jakob. “Do you feel strong enough to stand?” he asked and Jakob nodded. His bones creaked in the cold of the room, but it felt good to be up off the dirty floor. The man pointed over to a rafter where Jakob’s clothes hung. Jakob turned away from him and let the blanket fall. He felt a tightness in his hip, remembered the shadow he’d seen and wondered at it. He could feel the other man’s eyes on him while he dressed and suddenly only wanted to be away from this place. His clothes reeked of the smoke and the muskrat odors of this room. He dressed quickly and turned to see the man carrying over a loaf of bread on a slab of charred wood. Then he brought the Dutch-oven to the table and cut out ragged slices of dark bread and ladled the onions and lard over this, saying, “Aren’t you hungry?”

Jakob shrugged and came over for a bite. The bread and grease slid down his throat and he felt his stomach turn over. He was famished and began to eat more quickly. “It’s not much,” the man said, “but I lived off this buckwheat bread and lard for many a winter.”

Jakob wiped some of the grease from his chin and held out his hand. “Jakob Senger,” he said. The man’s grip was firm, his hands frigid. “I’m a newspaperman. Well, I was for a time. But now I’m going back to farming.”

The man laughed. “Out here!” he said. He shook his head. “Well, Jakob Senger, my name is Silas Macaby. From the Maine shores. And pulling you from the river is the only good thing I’ve done in the three years I’ve been here.” While he spoke, the raccoon swirled around his ankles and Silas passed down dribbles of bread and grease the creature took in its webbed paws. “In fact I was just waiting for the weather to break and then I was headed back for Maine. I’ve been lonely for the sound of the sea. For the taste of oysters. And sick, I’ve been. Sick of Indians, the flea-bitten beggars.”

“Indians,” Jakob said. “I think it was one of them who stole my cow.”

“Likely,” said Silas. “They’ll steal anything not nailed down. Steal the shirt off your back and then taunt you with it. No, I won’t miss them. Living near them for these three years has been a torment.” The man seemed to eat very little of his own meal, passing much of it down to his fat hobgoblin of a raccoon.

“Why?”

“They might have been noble once. You can see flashes of that in them, a fierce pride. But now they are confined to the reservation to live like beasts, caught between the liquor traders on one hand and the government on the other. Now they drink their summers away and suffer through winter until another payment arrives.” While Silas spoke, flecks of food dribbled from his mouth. A pulse came and went along his pale jaw line. Silas raged on, describing the degraded society he had witnessed, the raw fish–eating feasts and face-paintings and the way the German settlers in Milford had settled on illegal land that belonged to the Indians and made other plans, plotting to get their hands on land inside the reservation. “I don’t blame the Indians for stealing. They’ve trapped this country clean out. Hardly enough game around to feed one man, much less the five thousand of them on the other side of the river.” Silas slapped his knee and laughed his reedy laugh. “But I got even. Wait until they see.” A glint in the pink eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Silas nodded over to his bed where there was a skull-sized package wrapped in cloth and ropes. “Taku-skan-skan,” he said. “Go look.”

Jakob stood and wiped his hands on his pant legs. He looked back at Silas and saw the grin and the brown teeth.
Whatever he tells you, it can’t be true
, he thought.
They said the same things about the slaves in Missouri. Degraded. Lesser men because of the darkness of their skin. I don’t believe it. I remember the dogwood flower and how within each petal there is a cross, a rusty nail, the sign of Christ. If God inhabits a flower, so must he inhabit men. This man, this pale echo of my own search for good country, has not seen right. I will find the way to speak to them as Paul discovered the unknown god and learned to speak to the Greeks.
Jakob halted before the bundle. The sheets on the rope-spring bed stank of the pale man’s musty skin. He didn’t want to look inside. “Go on, now,” Silas encouraged.

Jakob touched the bundle, felt the hard shape of it beneath.
A skull
, he kept thinking.
Has this man murdered someone, an Indian trespasser?
His fingers slowly unbound the ropes and the cloth fell away. Jakob didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he exhaled. He took another deep breath, steadied himself. It was only a stone, after all. A red stone carved with marks. “Do you know what it is?” Silas said. “I may not have made a living here, but I have this. It’s their god, Taku-skan-skan. I mean to sell it back East. There’s many a museum that will buy it.”

“You stole their god?” Jakob backed away. “I’ll leave you then,” he said, thinking he owed the man at least this acknowledgment. The bread and grease he’d eaten churned in his stomach and made him feel queasy. “I should be getting back.”
The children
, he thought once more.
They will be waiting
. A new question climbed up inside him. “How long,” he said. “How long did I sleep?”

Silas showed his brown teeth. “You slept like the dead, my friend. Three whole feverish days after I pulled you out.”

The second morning of his absence came with clouds liquid as quicksilver moving in the sky. All the world seemed to be on the move with spring here and the snows a memory. The children kept busy, cutting wood for the stove, leading the stock down to the river. Morning came with another dire discovery: a rime of green fungus scummed the surface of the salt pork. The entire root cellar smelled of rotting meat and they had to take the barrel and leave it out on the prairie, a month’s worth of food left to the wolves. At least the hens had finally laid some eggs, which Hazel managed to fry without burning. Their bellies full, they felt hopeful and Caleb stood out on the porch side-by-side with Asa. “I’ll tell you,” the younger one was saying. “When I am dead I want to be buried like those Indians we saw along the river. Put me in a tree somewheres.”

Caleb looked off toward the horizon where movement began to flicker. “Birds will get your eyes,” he said.

Asa shuddered. “It’s better than being put into the ground still alive. If I was in a tree, I wouldn’t feel as bad. You know I don’t like root cellars or other dark places. You could all come visit me and leave me plates of food, the way the man on the boat said the Dakota do for their dead. Strange, huh? To believe that the dead hunger?” Asa peered over at his brother, who only grunted in response. “The man on the boat said that when they mourn their relatives they all cut their hair and charcoal their faces. He said the women wail like banshees and go down to the river and cut the backs of their legs until the water is pink with blood.”

“You’re about the grimmest boy I ever knew,” Caleb said. “I might jest be glad not to have someone around talking about such things all the time. Can’t say it will matter where you end up. Dead is dead.”

Asa’s thin lips pinched together and he frowned. “Well, anyhow, put me in a tree. A big oak with lots of shade. I don’t want to go down under the ground.”

“Hush,” said Caleb. A rushing noise in the south had drawn his attention. Far off in the south they saw a squall line stretch out along the horizon and move toward them. Asa stepped from the porch and knelt to fan his hand over the still grass, one eye on the approaching clouds. The noise, though distant, was like a shriek combined with the rumbling of some great steam engine. And yet, if it was clouds, how did it move without any wind? The squall line splintered and fanned out in shapes like arrows and behind the initial line they saw more and more coming, some dropping lower to the ground, some rising high to blot out the sun. Lines coalesced into denser, darker spirals and one such thick flying ribbon came over their grove and circled back around.

They saw individual shapes in the circling clouds, birds with violet-colored bellies and flashing wings, bright and liquid. The birds cried out to one another, the lines swirling like milk in a blue bowl. It was a sound they had never heard before, thousands upon thousands of birds compressed into a single area of sky and land, flying so close together they became one voice and myriad voices simultaneously, a blur of motion and sound. The children could distinguish individual cries, a sharp
kee-kee
repeated countless times over as the birds focused on the lone grove of trees in the endless span of grasslands.

“Pigeons,” Asa said when the sound had grown so loud they could hardly hear one another. “Passenger pigeons.” As the roiling cloud of birds swept over them they felt the rush of their passing. The birds filled up the grove in a militant wave, row on row, landing in the branches and sweeping through the woods in search of mast and fallen acorns on the sodden ground.
Whump-whump-whump
, the sound of a thousand wings beating backward to halt the speed of their flight, a concussive sound that drummed in the minds of the children. The noise of the flock trilled, cooed, and
kee-kee-kee
-ed in a cacophony of birdsong. They landed in masses on clotheslines and the sod barn and in the trees as far as the eyes could see.

The children retreated into the cabin where the dense log walls blocked out enough of the sound for them to think again. “I wish that Pa was here,” Daniel said. Their pa would be able to make sense of this wondrous gathering, whether it was a good or ill omen. This prairie with its violent tempers, sending snow in April, wind and wolves, now plagues of birds with equal fervor.