Night Birds, The (23 page)

Then we came back to our place. As the wind abated ranks of mosquitoes hummed through the moist, gray air. A moment later we saw the ruined fields below, and I heard Papa calling my name. I started to run to him and turned back to look at Wanikiya. He stayed where he was. “Come on,” I called, but he only shook his head and nodded in the direction of his own people. I shrugged and ran to my father.

The hailstorm had shredded every living crop in the furrows, the pretty green rows of wheat and corn. Only the potatoes and pumpkins survived. All the rest of that day Papa wandered the rows searching for one undamaged line of crop. Inside the cabin our blankets were soaked and the storm had ripped shingles from the roof and exposed gaps of sky. I swept water out of the cabin while the boys helped Papa out in the fields.

I didn’t think things could get any worse, but I was wrong. While I write this Papa sits before the open maw of the stove and he is tearing out Thoreau’s book page by page and feeding it to the fire.

ASA
J
ULY 23, 1859

I knew she would be here and so, after the hailstorm, I came searching. The river was up and the crazy-looking medicine man has been across to tell us they fear Winona was swept away in the rising water because none could find her. Only I could guess where she was hiding and so I went alone to the meadow.

On the edge of the meadow a towering tree she calls Waraju grows. Waraju just means cottonwood, as I understand it. She showed me the perfect five-sided star that lives within that hoary branch. It was she who told me that the tree was sacred.

An emptiness here. A group of crows flew cawing away as I came to the meadow. In the wake of the storm there was no wind. All I heard in the distance was the faint surge of the river and on the other side the sounds of her people calling her name as they walked the shore. At first I thought she wasn’t here, but then I heard the creaking sound in the cottonwood as I came around to the meadow.

She had hanged herself with that buffalo strap that they use to carry water up from the river. Her face was dark with blood and her tongue was pinched between her teeth. She was looking down; I won’t forget that. Those cow-brown eyes bulged in their sockets and stared right at me so that at first I called her name thinking she was still alive. From the cottonwood tree white fluff drifted down around us like snow. I kept hearing her kin across the river calling her name. At first I was sorry, but the longer I looked at her ripe body twisting by the leather strap, the more angry I became. My stomach turned over and there was hot bile in my throat. Why? I might have even said this aloud. Why would you do this to me? I heard water splashing in the distance and turned to move away. Suddenly I didn’t want to be found here with the body; they might blame me for it. But I was thinking too slowly and the crunch of footsteps crossing through the tallgrass came behind me. Wanikiya. He saw me first and then the body behind me and his mouth fell open and a high plaintive cry came from his throat. He dropped to his knees. I was running before I knew it, running back through the woods.

There is only a thin stretch of trees along this riverbank. I kept reminding myself that soon I would be out of this oppressive gloom. Creaking sounds followed me as though every tree held a hanging body. The crows cawed and cawed. I ran and the branches reached out to scrape through my shirt and claw my face. I tripped, got turned around. Overhead, a dense canopy of leaves. Mosquitoes swarmed to feed on the blood that dripped from my skin. And this was strangest of all: There was a little man in the forest, no bigger than a raccoon. He was laughing and his mouth was filled with razor teeth. I knew then that this was the tree-dweller, the one Winona taught me leads children into the woods until they are lost forever. Tatanyandowan’s spirit brother. I knelt and prayed that God would take the vision away but there was only the tree-dweller’s laughter and rank clouds of bloodsuckers. Thick bile rose hot in my throat until I couldn’t breathe right and I knelt in the woods and purged myself and when I was done the little man was gone. I knew that it was not God’s doing but my own willpower and I walked out of those woods resolved. Let someone find this journal and see me for what I am, a strong boy who is not a fool. A boy innocent of blood who will put all of these stupid people behind him.

JAKOB
A
UGUST 1, 1859

A disaster in every way. I can’t imagine what drove that girl to hang herself, but her death changed things for good. For whatever reason the Indians blame us, as if she might have acquired the idea from the words and letters that Hazel was teaching her. She was going to be married according to Dakota custom. I do not blame the girl, but in town I have heard it is fairly common among her people because the women have no other way out of sick relationships. When we let our passions rule our thoughts, such tragedies are bound to result.

Every night Blue Sky Woman comes down to the river to cut the backs of her legs and the soft inner flesh of her arms. Her hair is sheared down to ragged edges. Like a widow, I am told, she has given away all of her belongings. Our cabin stands secure behind this knoll, a few hundred feet from the river. But all night long we go on hearing her, the pathetic, trilling wails, a sound ripped from her throat. Her wailing haunts our dreams.

The first time we heard it Daniel ran away into the tallgrass and Caleb had to go find him. The boy was red-eyed from crying, snot running from his nostrils, and he had shorn his blond hair in Indian fashion using a buck knife. What an ugly thing is true grief, the way it crumples a human being. Asa was enraged when he saw what Daniel had done, but when he tried to say something Caleb took him by the hair and threw him against the wall. I jumped in to stop the fight, but not before Caleb whispered something angry into Asa’s ears that made Asa clench his teeth and go pale.

JAKOB
A
UGUST 15, 1859

Asa ran away, but didn’t get far. Farmers from the militia brought the boy back a week later after they found him hiding within the hayloft of a settler’s barn. The boy caused a rash of reported thefts—eggs gone, corn missing from cribs—to spread through the county and be blamed on the Indians. One farmer told me it’s lucky the boy had such fire-red hair, otherwise he might have been taken for Indian and shot. I have never seen the boy look so ravaged. The skin along his cheeks was sunken, cadaverous. His eyes seemed to be receding into his skull. He looked as if he had been pursued the whole time he was away. After the militia rode away, he hung his head. “Does she still wail every night?” he wanted to know when I asked if he was going to run away again.

“No,” I told him. “I haven’t seen Blue Sky Woman in three days.” I tried to put my hand on his shoulder and he shrank from me.

“Will you send Hazel out to talk to me?” he asked.

“Hazel? Why?” The other children had not come out to greet him. The boy averted his eyes and said nothing. His clothes were filled with needles of straw, his pale cheeks speckled with acne.

The girl came out and they went away into the ruined wheatfield where an ancient cedar tree stands. I watched them the whole time. Asa was telling her something, but the wind stole his words. Once she glanced in my direction as if she wanted to run away. Then he knelt on the ground before her and grabbed hold of one of her legs. His chest and back heaved up and down while he wept. She looked frozen there, unable to move, but at last she knelt beside him, touched his hair, and held him.

This is how Asa came back into our family. All the hostility is gone from his eyes. He keeps quiet and seems resigned, waiting for something to happen.

JAKOB
A
UGUST 30, 1859

We began early one morning when the Shepherd’s Star watched from an ash-colored sky. I’d seen catfish and large-mouthed bass all summer long and hunted them without success. In this dry spell the river thinned down and exposed wide sandbars on either bank. With the boys beside me, I used the oxen to drag heavy logs across the shallowest crossing place, where the river formed a natural bow. For each log we dug post holes on either side and buried them firmly in the ground. Into the slow-moving current we embedded a series of wood stakes in the sandy soil. Between the stakes the boys packed in stones and clumps of wet clay. The river began to back up behind this dam and deepen to fill a broad pool. We could not fully contain the river even in its wasted condition and water ebbed and dribbled around the posts.

The leaf dwellers, as I still think of them, came down to observe at different stages of our project. The warriors, Blue Face among them, watched from a high bank. I have not seen a friendly face in a long time. I tried to cross once before and speak with the old man, but the younger ones turned me away from the camp with their cries of “Puck-a-chee,” which means
go away.
A few even menaced me with the glinting tips of their bone knives.

Using the oxen we were able to complete the project in a day. The boys still didn’t know what was happening until I showed them the final feat of engineering, just as I’d seen it down in the country around Saline Springs. I had been weaving a network of willows into a large basket. I took away one of the stones to allow the water to flood through and then bound the basket into a kind of sluiceway. Most of the fish came through this opening. Basket after basket were filled, the fish flopping on the shore. We took more than we could possible eat, more than we could dry over a fire for our winter stores. “Now we will be able to eat in winter, children,” I told them. “We don’t need any crop.”

I thought the Indians would be happy and would share in our feasts, but they came in the night and reduced the entire day’s labor to debris. The young warriors of the soldier’s lodge watched us from that same high bank. They’d taken all the fish rotting on the shore. In the early morning light, they looked glossy as crows. A menacing presence.

I did not try to rebuild the dam.

How will I feed my children? The only things that survived the hailstorm were the pumpkins and gourds I planted to keep down weeds. Hazel says we should not worry. This land that kills our milch cow and pillages our crop with hailstorms is also rich. She has gathered the plums along the river and works every day boiling the fruit into jam. Daniel wades into the marshlands to gather teepsinna, the Indians’ potatoes. And the Indians themselves, they are still here, though now it is not the children we see, or old men like Hanyokeyah. The ones who come on our land are younger, like Blue-Face, and they do not ask for what they take. They love to eat the pumpkins sprouting in our fields. There is one called Cut-Nose who will seat himself in a furrow and eat a pumpkin raw, slice by slice, tonguing the orange flesh from his knife.

I’ve begun to think of the militia, of answering strength with strength. I am convinced there are few families out here as exposed as we are.

In the meantime there is haying to be done in the bottomlands. On these hot dry days we work to cut the long-stemmed bluegrasses. Caleb and I cut down the stalks with scythes while Asa and Hazel follow behind with the hay cradles and the youngest, Daniel, keeps watched over Matthew. Hazel carries cool water up from a secret spring and we drink it by the bucketful in this heat.

What relentless work is haying. The hay needles into our clothing and skin until we go home a mass of welts and wheals. It sticks to our faces and pokes through shirts and hair and soft tender places. We breathe the dust and heat and grass yet forget our troubles in the intensity of this labor. Rain is a sweet dream in our minds. There is nothing in these days but sun and swinging scythes, a summer stillness before what is to come.

This new feat of engineering holds me in thrall. Each stack must be laid up just right so that when the rain and cold comes the hay does not mildew and rot. In three days of cutting we made two house-sized stacks, Caleb climbing to the top of each one and tamping it down. “You ought to see the view from up here,” he said. “I can see clear to Tatanyandowan’s camp.” That name seemed to chill Asa and made him drop his cradle and leave us for a time. Tatanyandowan’s camp. So it is true that the old man and his medicine society do not run things anymore. In place of fellowship we have the sound of their drums in the night like some great throbbing heartbeat of the prairie itself.

The scythes flashed silver and the grass lay golden in the sun. Silver and gold and the hot wind in the grass, a gold river of light that flows into our tired muscles and out through us.

After a week of backbreaking work, we had made five high bundles, neat mounds of hay impervious to sleet and rain, enough to feed our stock through winter.

The next morning we woke to find Dakota children playing in the stacks. As they jumped from stack to stack, shouting with glee, a golden rain sprayed downward. My precise mountains were tumbling apart. They were mostly small children with the mischievous Hissing Turtle for their leader. Dressed in their breechclouts, they leaped from mountain to mountain, wild with joy as the gold grass cushioned each landing. A few slid all the way down, dragging clots of hay in their fingers, before scurrying back up to leap to another mountain.