Night Birds, The (21 page)

The old man came here again that night and I stayed out on the porch because my brothers and sisters inside were all still afraid of me. I don’t know how, but it was like the old man knew what happened with the puppies and the chickens and me. He told Papa a story about a witch that put a spell on this place after the last white people wouldn’t let her come across anymore to visit the burying ground. He said that the woman is dead now, but that her spell and her spirit are still hovering around us. Papa asked how to take it away and the old man promised to do a dance.

The next night he came back with his body drenched in black paint. He was naked except for a breechclout and there were scarlet streaks along his chest and face like some great creature had scraped him bloody with claws. It frightened Daniel considerable. He made a fire of cedar brush and danced around it. The sounds he made were even more frightening than the paint. The surviving puppies whined and pressed their snouts close against the porch and put their paws over their ears. I thought it was working but then Asa started laughing. Asa looks like a fox with his red hair, and even his laugh, a yipping bark, sounds like a fox. Papa glared at him and told him to hush so the old man could finish but once Asa started he couldn’t stop. Eventually even the old man noticed and must have thought we were treating him with disrespect. He stamped out the fire with his bare feet and took the children back across the river and was gone.

I believe in the curse, especially now that we are stuck with it. This land made us sick the first time we touched it. This land killed our cow and made our Papa blind and almost killed him too. And yet it sent passenger pigeons after our pork went bad. It sent us to the old man to get healed when we were sick. I hope we come to know this place well before it hurts us too badly.

Eventually, Daniel allowed me to come close. He showed me the bruise my fist made on his chest. I apologized and swore I would do anything in my power to make up for it. I even knelt down on the ground in front of him, but that seemed to bother him too. When I looked up there were tears in his eyes. “Caleb,” he said. “If something bad was to happen, you wouldn’t let it hurt me, would you?”

I saw he wasn’t afraid of me anymore and felt relieved. “I swear by everything I know to be true.”

“You ain’t supposed to swear.”

“Well, I promise then.”

“Good,” he said, and then went off without telling me what it was that made him afraid.

The old man came back after a few days. And to my surprise, Cassie and her sister Sallie have also begun to visit again, arriving in the nights at the same time as the Indians. Cassie with the dark blue eyes. Cassie who touched the gold letters of Kate’s family Bible and said, “I would like to know what is inside this book. I don’t know any of the stories. I haven’t ever been to school.” Cassie with her dark blue eyes who brought a tarnished silver cross and gave it to Hazel, and insisted she take it, saying: “A trade. If you can teach Indians, you can teach me and Sallie to read. But I am not a beggar and this is all I have to give.”

HAZEL
J
ULY 8, 1859

Wakan
. There are many meanings for this word. Holiness, sacred, wonder. Wanikiya says that the prayer I taught him is wakan. He touches the four points of the cross Cassie gave me and says this same word. He touches my hand, the fingers that once touched his wound. Then he looks up past the cabin ceiling and says
Wakan Tanka
, which I take to mean their name for God. Less than two months have passed and we know nothing for certain of one another. He and Winona know our curses and boasts thanks to my brothers. They know our names for what is holy. How strange it is than when two races first meet they trade in both the sacred and the profane.

We do commerce in the words for food as well. Winona’s mother, Blue Sky Woman, speaks the best English of the lot. She taught me how to find strawberries among the tall bluestem grasses and pointed out the new growth of plum bushes that border the river. This is what I have learned: Blackberry juice cures a sour stomach. Mullein leaves are best for wiping. Boiled willow bark soothes aching teeth and heads. Sumac branches can be woven into a garden fence to keep out rabbits. Sap from milkweed takes the sting out of poison ivy. Songs in Dakota keep the blackbirds out of the corn. Blue Sky Woman worked a salve of comfrey into my Papa’s bleeding hands. He shut his eyes while she did this, his lips falling open as he loosed a long breath of relief.

Papa and Blue Sky Woman. Caleb and Cassie. Asa and Winona. Me. Wanikiya. We wake each morning to the sound of the prairie chickens, the roosters drumming the ground and calling to their mates with throaty, vibrating songs that resound even within the cabin. In the hot humid nights our corn swells and ripens as thoughts and feelings swell inside of us. There are fevers in this land, a miasma that clouds our reasoning. The air is already sultry when we wake in the morning, thinking we are not ourselves, thinking what once was not permissible is now possible. We wake thinking of the other.

My mother, Emma, was a child bride. One of the possessions Kate threw away after she married my pa was a daguerreotype taken just after Emma ran away with my father to Missouri. Emma was only fourteen. In the picture she tilted her chin, like she was looking back at the camera with challenge, her eyes narrowing. Papa, six years older than her, boyish without his beard, looked the more innocent, his eyes blank and uncertain. I miss that picture, but I know this: I am my mother’s child. I am thirteen but if you could take a daguerrotype of me wearing my fraying summer muslin dress, I swear I would look back at the camera with just such an expression of challenge.

I am a child but I am not a child. There are secrets I keep from the men, secrets that have do with blood. I was not afraid when I felt the quickening cramps and found the spots on my chemise. This stain that did not wash out no matter how much I scrubbed, as if to say there is no going back; what you were you cannot be again. The healer with the pale, elegant hands had told me as much. It is one of the ways a woman learns to speak with blood. So much depends on me now. Winona and Wanikiya have begun to arrive earlier in the afternoon and I am teaching Cassie and Sallie as well. Our cabin has become a regular schoolhouse. If there is a breeze we sit outside on the porch and work with the slate boards and reading materials.

There were fireflies in June and in July cicadas churring in the hot tallgrass. Thoreau writes, “I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.”

And if I could write back I would tell him first of Daniel marching out on onto the prairie in the mornings, his barrel-shaped dogs bounding ahead of him through the tallgrass. I would tell Thoreau of the speckled prairie chicken eggs the boy and his puppies find in the nests and bring home and how sweetly they fry in our pan. And I would tell him of how one of the dogs limps, its back leg useless, for their are darker things that move in these woods and sky that do not love human company and darker things still that move in human hearts. I would tell him the Dakota have names for this darkness, that there are tree-dwellers with webbed feet like raccoons who lead children into the woods to be lost. That Unktahe the water monster waits in the rivers and ponds and is jealous when the proper sacrifices are not made. That in the clouds there are thunder beings who ride through the lightning on dark steeds and great shrieking birds who make the thunder. Yes, I would tell him, there is a beneficent society in nature, but loving it can also kill you.

CALEB
J
ULY 12, 1859

I didn’t realize when we first played the game how popular it would become. It started as a lark really, I just wanted to play-act the massacres the winter before down in Ioway. Inkpaduta and the Soldiers. Wanikiya brought over some of his cousins, Hissing Turtle and a slant-eyed boy called Otter. The game works like this. All the girls, red or white, play settlers and sit in the long grass, their skirts cushioned beneath them. They pass time weaving shuck dolls from goldenrod stems and doing girl things while the Indians sneak through the bluestem coming for them.

How real it felt that first time! The girls squinted in the harsh afternoon glare, Cassie and Sallie blind in their bonnets. When the Indians rose from their hiding places and wailed battle cries, I felt a tightening in my throat. What they sing is a death song, the words simple and soft.
I am here
, they sing as they come through the tallgrass,
I am here.

Each Indian carries a loop made from basswood to represent his tomahawk. If he touches the girl with any part of it, she has to fall down as if dead and spend the rest of the game napping in the swishing tall-grass. If he touches the girl with his hands, then she becomes a prisoner and is taken back into the shadowy groves down by the river to await her fate. Here in the gullies, where streams trickle down steep slopes, the girl remains with her captor while the soldiers come searching. The Dakota boys have eaglebone whistles and the high shrill sounds echo through the woods to confuse the searchers.

We play in all weather. Rain drips through leaves. Clouds of gnats spiral in the shafts of light that penetrate the canopy of the deep oak woods. The soldiers come searching carrying sticks and clods of clay. The clay can be hurled from the stick with grim, inaccurate force. Many times we end up hitting the girls alongside their captors. If the soldier misses, the Dakota can spring forth and tap his enemy with the basswood loop. We play until everyone is dead or captured.

The first time there were only a few of us and Sallie got so frightened she started screaming like they were really coming to kill her and she peed in her pantalets. But she got over it. Now more and more Indians are coming to play this game, so many of them I don’t know all the names. Some of them smear their faces with white chalk and join up with the soldiers. I’ve noticed the Indians like playing whites best, while the whites like being Indian. Sometimes my brothers and I put some of the dusky red mud on our faces and play Indians. It doesn’t matter who is who. Most of these Indians don’t even know English and I have to say all things considered they play the game pretty fairly. If I am an Indian I always try to capture Cassie and kill off my sister before Wanikiya can get to her.

I even dream about the game at nights, but there is a question that has begun to trouble me. Had those children in Ioway ever played such games? Did they know the ones who were coming to kill them?

JAKOB
J
ULY 13, 1859

Thoreau says we should not fear if our castles are in the air. “There is where they should be,” he writes. “Now put foundations under them.” I have made a lifetime of building just such fantastic structures. Today, as I scanned the pretty acre of wheat, shimmering in the sundown, I wondered at my own foundations. Against circumstance, the children prosper and the crops that have survived incursions of ravenous geese, ducks, and blackbirds, glistened healthy and green in the last light. As I set these words down, I can still smell the kinnikinnick in Hanyokeyah’s pipe, a sweet, peppery herb. I have not seen the blue-faced Indian with the damaged ear for some time now and when I asked Hanyokeyah about him, he told me that the soldier’s lodge of the tribe was preparing to leave along with Little Crow and leaders of other bands to hunt for Inkpaduta. He said he would have to join them.

“But he is from your tribe, am I right?” I asked. “And the army is sending your people to hunt their own down? The army is making brother fight brother?”

“They withhold the moneys and food and the children go hungry,” the old man said. “For what one does, all are held guilty.”

I agreed that such thinking wasn’t right and asked if he had known Inkpaduta and if he was always such a monster as the newspapers make him out to be. Dark was coming on and the whippoorwills had begun to sing in the lower marshlands. A shadow passed over the old man’s face as he turned away and breathed out a tendril of smoke. Within the cabin we could hear the chittering voices of the children. When he spoke the old man did not answer my question directly. “The army no be afraid of Inkpaduta.”

“Oh, but they are,” I said. “It’s all anyone can talk about. They want to ferret him out before other young bucks get the same idea.”

He was quiet for some time before adding, “The army make more Inkpadutas.”

“What do you mean? You mean like Blue-face?”

“Him, others.”

I stood up and began to pace along the porch. “Have you heard anything in your camp? Do you know of some plan? We are friends, right?
Ho Coda
as you say in your tongue. ‘Yes, friend.’”

“Ho Coda,”
he said. “I hear many things. I dream many things. I dream of your daughter. She stand beneath a tree and all around her there is black. The leaves are orange and black and come to life. They fly around her, so many, dark as birds.”