Night Birds, The (24 page)

I was not aware even of picking up the pitchfork. I only wanted to make an example, to frighten them. When they saw me coming—red-faced, the tine of the blade sun-tinted, a hoarse shouting in my throat— they ran for the woods. All except that Hissing Turtle, who tried one last leap. My shout at the moment of his jump must have distracted him just enough because the boy slipped and tumbled downward, heedless, with nothing to stop his momentum, hay whirling around him. He fell from the highest point in the stack, down and down to the hard ground where he landed at an awkward angle. I don’t think I even heard the break. My own momentum carried me toward him. It was only when I saw the awful glistening shine of the bone in his dusky skin and the blood around it that I stopped and let the pitchfork drop. A shout came from Caleb and I saw Cut-Nose coming on with Tatanyandowan and retreated back to my children. They bundled the boy in their arms and were gone.

That night we smelled burning. I woke from a deep sleep to see a glowing orange light dancing along the sides of the inner cabin wall, illuminating the puncheon shelves, our meager belongings, glaring against the copper pots. My sleep-fuddled mind took a few moments to register what was happening and then I was shouting for the children, rousing them from their beds.

The Indians had set fire to all five stacks and each blazed in the dark, a mountain of surging flame. The fire spread down into our grove of hardwoods, down into the marshlands where the cattails exploded like firecrackers, hissing
pft
!
pft
!
pft
! as they blazed like torches. Only the dead fields and the river stopped it. The stars above us were lost in the falling ashes. Daniel’s dogs circled on the porch whining and growling. The night was filled with the sounds of the prairie chickens as they sang out in terror before the fire. Long-eared jackrabbits flashed from the tall-grass, a few red-eyed wolves, eyes rolling back in terror, and one great stag with a fine rack that bounded away, whitetail twitching, ahead of the flames. The fire swept through the bottomlands and rose up at the edge of the black waters before seeming to doubt itself, run out of rage or breath, and gradually hiss into smoke and steam and nothingness.

In the morning we saw how close we had come to destruction. In the morning I started over again, moving to the field on the far side of the bottomlands, where the tallgrass had been untouched. The smell of smoke saturates our cabin and clothes and hair. We breathe ashes each night we strive for sleep. But I will not leave this place. If there had been no hailstorm to destroy our fields, I don’t think I would be writing this now. I’ve been running since Missouri and I am determined to stand steadfast here. Whatever I build, this land tears down or destroys. What is not destroyed, the Indians ruin. Wild. It’s still too wild. All I have are my children and I am weary of life.

ASA
S
EPTEMBER 20, 1859

Since I told Hazel the whole story about the girl and how I was the one who found her I’ve been able to sleep at nights again. Jakob went to the fort to report our losses and I went alongside him. We never were able to lay up enough to match our previous efforts and it will be thin eating for the oxen come winter. If it gets too hard for us, we may have to slaughter one of them. I drive them through the burned lands and into the tallgrass to water in the bottomlands and they have stupid cow eyes, glazed over, and do not know what is coming.

HAZEL
S
EPTEMBER 21, 1859

I can scarcely believe that only two months have passed since we ran as children in the woods. I hate nights in the fall. That crispness in the air that means winter will arrive and turn the ground to a sheet of black metal ice.

I have taken to going down to the river to watch for him, but he has not come. A section of burr oaks and sugar maples escaped the fire and in the early cold the leaves are beginning to turn. I stood on the frontier between the black swath of burned land and this place that is untouched. What random destruction a fire brings. There are trees that are crisped and torched beside trees still green with sap. I stood beside one burned tree by the river bend that leads to our secret place and when I looked up he was there, appearing as if from nowhere. They always come so quietly, a habit they have learned, I suppose.

He paused about ten feet away from me and didn’t come any closer. My throat felt thick and I couldn’t find any words. Then he pointed to a burned burr oak beside me and I turned to see that while I was daydreaming a thousand monarch butterflies had filled the barren branches. Once they sensed me moving they took flight and swirled around me, a vortex of black and orange, wings of light, wings of pollen, myself in the center, and I held my hand against my lips, aching to speak to him but not finding any words sufficient, and Wanikiya, watching me, mimicked my gesture. The butterflies swirled around me and then lifted up and I shut my eyes wanting to go on seeing them, keeping my arms folded and when I looked again he was gone as if he had never been there.

I will remember. Fall is coming and then the long winter. A range of mountains may as well stand between us, a river with torrents. I know I will not see him again for a long while and that he is gone with his brother, Tatanyandowan, to learn what it means to be a warrior. And if I see him again how will he be changed and will he remember the night of the healing and the cave where I breathed his breath? Or will we both be so changed that there will be no language to bridge our differences?

ASA
O
CTOBER 28, 1859

She is coming and nothing will be the same. When we rode into town, Jakob got the letter at Herr Driebel’s store. They talked for awhile and then Jakob bargained for a barrel of flour, trading smoked prairie chicken that Caleb had snared and the jams that Hazel prepared. Just when we were getting ready to leave, Herr Driebel stopped us, squinting behind his spectacles. “Say,” he said. “I have some happy news I almost forgot. A letter came for you the other day. It was addressed to New Ulm and they sent it on to my shop out here, must have remembered you coming through in the winter. I gather it’s from your sister.”

“I don’t understand,” Jakob said. “I don’t have any sister.” I saw how his dark face whitened with this news. He must have feared being found out.

“It’s from someone named Kate Senger,” Herr Driebel said and I shouted for joy. My mother, after all this time. “I thought you told me your wife was dead.”

Jakob looked so stunned he didn’t know what to tell the shopkeeper. He still hadn’t figured out how his wife had found him here. I sprang forward and seized the letter and tore it open. Jakob came and stood beside me, silently reading.

My dearest Jakob,

I have found you at last if you are reading this now. Not a moment has passed since we were separated in Missouri that I have not thought of you or the children. I can only imagine how betrayed you felt to wake and find me gone. The decision cost me dearly. You know how terrified I am of wolves and Indians. I couldn’t bear to leave a land I’d known all my life, this land where some of my children are buried. I tried to picture myself living in a wild place with you, tried to imagine bearing more children and each one tearing away a piece of me as they came into this world and then had their lives snuffed out. As much I love you, I knew that I could not follow.

What I didn’t know was that my father wanted nothing to do with me when I came back to his house. My rightful place is with you and my children, he told me. He said he had washed his hands of me, as well as you. He agreed to give me enough money to journey after you to the place where I belonged. I had no say in the matter.

I don’t know if you will have me still. I don’t know if you love me any more or can bear the sight of me. But I am coming, Jakob, and I will do all in my power to try and make things right between us.

Kate

KINGDOM TOWNSHIP
1876

INDIAN
SUMMER

“
H
O CHUNK,”
HAZEL
said when she was among the scalps in my papa’s one-room jailhouse. I strained to hear the word again, wondering if it was Dakota for violence or revenge. The world outside fell away. Just behind me wagons still creaked along the rutted main road. Squealing children chased one another while frowning women in dark dresses looked on, but I no longer heard any of it. I stayed near the doorway, all my attention fixed on Aunt Hazel standing in a thicket of human hair taken from dead men. Her lips continued to move, but now no sound emerged and it seemed she had forgotten me entirely. Her breath came shallow. She had peeled back her bonnet to see better in the gloom of the jailhouse. My attention was so absolute I could hear a host of bluebottle flies droning angrily in the sallow light of the room’s only window. Somehow the drone of these trapped insects came inside me and it seemed not the flies that were speaking, but the things twisting from the ceiling.

All at once I remembered a nightmare I had last summer when my papa was gone to St. Peter. I dreamed I was in the woods near the river, fishing for bullheads, when I looked up to see my papa coming toward me. Blood saturated his hair and clothing and shrouded even his eyes and at first I thought he had been scalped himself but then I knew that the blood was not his own. Dry leaves crunched under his boot soles as he lurched down the slope toward my spot on the shore. I screamed when I saw the glistening knife he held. “Papa! Papa! It’s only me, Asa. It’s me, Papa!” But he couldn’t see for all the blood and I knew he mistook me for an Indian and was going to kill me like he had done the others. When he was only a few feet away my legs came unfroze and I threw away my fishing prong and ran into the woods. The trees closed in around me; branches raked my arms. I ran until I could no longer see him, but as I fast as I went I always heard him coming on behind me, crashing through undergrowth and snapping branches like old bones. Eventually, I found a hiding place within a mossy log and I scrunched up inside and in the absolute darkness I heard the thudding of the blood in my ears. When my heart quieted, I also heard his husky breathing outside. Occasionally he would let loose a choking sob, a wounded animal sound. I wanted to run out and tell him again that it was only me, to wake him from his killing rage. It’s only me, Papa, not an Indian.

I always awoke screaming from that dream, the pulse hot in my chest, until my mother rushed up the loft ladder to hold me. She could quiet me, but I never slept afterward. These nightmares only came when he was far away. They didn’t make me any more afraid of my papa. Strangely they made me afraid for him, for what he had done and still might do.

These memories coursed through me while I watched Hazel reach up and touch one of the scalps with a finger. Her eyes found me.
“Ho Chunk,”
she said again. “Oh, Asa, that your father should keep such things.”

I felt sick to my stomach, the dream memory still vivid in my mind.

“Ho Chunk,”
she repeated. “Do you understand me? These are not Dakota. The Dakota never wore roaches in their forelocks. These are Winnebago,
‘Ho Chunk’
as they call themselves. He is not keeping these for trophies. It’s to remind him of his sin.”

I nearly jumped out of my boots when I felt a rough hand on my shoulder. “Step aside, boy,” a voice said behind me. The sounds of the outside world came back to me. I looked up to see that the large hand was attached to a hairy forearm that belonged to the blacksmith, Julius Meighen. The storekeeper, August Schilling, stood beside him. I stepped out of their way reluctantly, sensing they didn’t mean my aunt any good. Herr Schilling’s ruddy cheeks were a splotched pink color. He huffed and sputtered at Hazel, still inside the room. “You have no business here,” he said. “This is private property.”

Hazel’s voice echoed in the small room. “You,” she said. “You were there too, weren’t you?”

“Out!” Schilling said. “You are not wanted here.”

“Do as he says,” the blacksmith advised. “I’d hate to have to carry you out of there like a sack of cornmeal, ma’am.”

Hazel came slowly, drawing the bonnet back up to shadow her face. In the streets beyond people had turned to look at us, the men outside the store forgetting their game of checkers, a few gaggles of women huddling together in gossipy circles. The whole scene reminded me of the day my papa dragged the Indian into town on a leash. Only now all that unfriendly attention was fixed on me and Hazel. On her way out, the blacksmith gripped her by the arm and he leaned in close to whisper something to her that I could not hear.

We didn’t speak until we were away from the town and heading back home across the prairie. “I don’t understand,” I told her. “I thought those scalps were from the Devil’s Lake campaign. Has Papa been lying all this time?”

It was the middle of the afternoon and a dry summer heat baked the barren landscape. Locusts, my teacher once told me, came from the Latin
locus ustus
, meaning
burned place
. I can’t imagine a better description for a summer landscape after the locusts are gone. It’s as though as every living thing has been purely scorched.
“
It’s best you ask him yourself, Asa. I don’t know what happened. After the war, there was a group of men calling themselves ‘The Kingdom of Jones,’ that organized for protection. People were still so very terrified of Indians. They hadn’t yet caught Little Crow.”

She took my hand and squeezed it and looked at me with those serene, sea-green eyes. “Let’s not talk about this anymore, huh? I need to think this over. I only know that Caleb has been carrying far too great a burden.” Away from town she peeled back the bonnet to feel the sun on her freckled face. Squinting in the hard light, she looked both willowy and frail. I was afraid to let her be alone. “The first settlers here thought these prairies were a desert. They always settled the wooded valleys first, thinking that the absence of trees meant poor soil. But there was such good black ground under the grasslands. It was a living skin. You could see why the Indians called it ‘Grandmother,’ why God shaped us from dirt.”

She led me toward the river where a copse of oak trees had been left untouched by the locusts, the leaves coated in a film of August dust. In the stubbled gold grasses she found an empty carapace of a locust, a dry thing like a withered leaf or the abandoned skin of snake. It quavered in the palm of her hand. “Their time is done,” she said.

“Oh no,” I told her. “They’ve been coming back for years. If you were to dig your fingernails under this ground you’d find a river of their eggs. They’ll hatch again come spring.”

She was looking toward the river. “They thought that about the passenger pigeons in my time. And the storms of blackbirds. Wolves. But these locusts are things that take and take and never give anything back.” She made a fist and crumpled the carapace. When she opened her hand what remained blew away like chaff. “They will spend themselves with their appetite.”

With the toe of my boot, I was drawing a pattern in the dust. I didn’t care much to contradict her, wrong as she might be. We walked until we came to a marsh that had once been surrounded by cattails. A thick carpet of dead locusts clustered on the surface. Aunt Hazel sat on the shore, untied the laces of her shoes, and took them off. Barefoot, she pulled up the hem of her dress and waded into the murky water. “There might be leeches,” I called to her. I was frightened that someone might see her like this, unashamed as a child. If they did, it would be all the confirmation they needed to prove her madness and send her back to St. Peter.

“No,” she said. “Not here. This is spring-fed. I know this place. Join me. The water feels nice.”

I hesitated. This wasn’t how a woman was supposed to behave. They didn’t go wading into black water, exposing the wintry skin of their thighs. But I didn’t have to think long. A line of sweat snailed down my back. The hot sun stole all the shadows from this bare country. I kicked off my boots and followed her into the pond.

She had the bonnet slung behind her, her black hair woven into two braids that swung rhythmically as she moved. This is how I like to remember her: water lapping at her knees, her dress fanning out to almost touch the surface, and sunlight blazing on the small pond and turning the water to gold. Her eyes were shut while she moved her feet through the cool mud. A moment later she let her dress hem fall into the water and brought up something between her toes. She plucked it out triumphantly. It looked like a gray human fist, knotted with roots. “Teepsinna,” she said. “Swamp tubers. They taste better than any potato. C’mon, there’s plenty more.” The mud felt wonderful between my toes as I felt along the silken ground for the lumplike root. I completely forgot the dead locusts floating on the surface. My patched pants were soaked by the time I found my first one.

We gathered these marsh tubers along with water lilies. She taught me where to find wild grapevines that the locusts left alone. We gathered all these things into a wooden bucket she had brought along for this purpose. This was my last good day with her. I learned to see a living layer beneath what appeared to be a wasteland. I think she foresaw what was coming. On the way back home I asked her what the blacksmith had whispered into her ear, not expecting an answer.

“No crows,” she told me. “There will be no crows in the Kingdom.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“He meant Little Crow,” she said. “He meant Indians, or those who like them.”

Hearing this made me angry enough at the town to wish it all burned to the ground once more. If only they knew her as I did. They didn’t have any reason to fear one small woman. And I didn’t think she had any reason to be ashamed of her past. Hazel continued talking as we found the path. “Crows are often misunderstood,” she said. “The Dakota also have a story of a great flood that drowns the entire earth. The Creator sends it because he is angry at mankind. But no humans survive and nothing is spared save a single, solitary crow flying over a wilderness of water. It is this crow that begs the Creator to have mercy, to restore humanity. Only the crow is there to see the earth destroyed and then made again.”

After the jailhouse incident, things got worse for my family. My mother had already used a good portion of her remaining coins to restock her laudanum supply. She didn’t care that Aunt Hazel called it a demon potion. She said it was the only thing that made her feel right inside. In town Herr Schilling stopped buying my mother’s eggs. He raised prices on any calicos or salted meats she requested. I was glad not to be there to witness the confrontation between those two. Mother threatened to ride to Sleepy Eye, but that was just talk. We only had one draft horse, good mostly for field work. She might as well have threatened to ride to the moon for what our family needed. Herr Schilling had us where he wanted.

Two days later, I spotted Orlen Meighen and Franz Schilling watching me from outside the schoolyard’s white picket fence. Both boys had dropped out of school earlier that summer. I had long been invisible to such rough-and-tumble older children unless they needed a sacrificial victim to swing from a rope. They lazed now, smoking cigarettes in the spare shade of a crabapple tree. Wherever I turned in the schoolyard during our lunch break, I felt their hot eyes boring into me.

After lunch, Mr. Simons delivered an interminable lecture on the Sioux Uprising, his voice a droning monotone of dates, numbers, and facts, while the students fanned themselves and hunched under the oppressive summer heat in the small room. Mr. Simons paced the rows, his eyes dreamy, as students sank lower and lower in their desks, their spines turning to butter in the humidity, their eyelids drooping. Then, he must have caught sight of Orlen and Franz outside the window. Those boys, sons of important town citizens, had tormented Mr. Simons with their constant misbehavior. The sight of them kindled something inside our teacher. “Most people,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp, “died like cattle in a slaughterhouse.”

He was no longer lost in dreamy abstractions. The students straightened. “What a fine fever swept this country in 1862. There were parades, marching bands, brave speeches. Like any patriotic young man, I went to war against Johnny Reb that year, not knowing the home I was leaving behind would be washed away in a river of blood.”

His good hand stroked the sleeve of his missing arm. He didn’t sound like he was addressing children anymore. “A body doesn’t know what it will do until the moment arrives. That’s how it was all around this country when the Indians rose up with their shotguns and scalping knives. In terror, some men ran and left their wives and daughters behind to be killed. Some sank to their knees in the red grass, their eyes glazing over, too stunned even to beg for mercy. They went to their deaths thinking,
this can’t be happening. This can’t be happening to me.
”

Mr. Simons continued to look out the window, lost in his recollection. My throat felt dry. “What does it mean to have courage in such a time? Far away in Virginia, when boys your own age occupy a stone wall at the top of a hill, their guns trained on your advancing line of infantry, do you walk into that withering fire because you are brave, or because you do not want to be trampled by those marching behind you? And when the minié ball shatters your forearm and you feel the hot metal burrow inside, are you secretly relieved? Do you huddle against the scarred ground while your friends fall around you, praying only that you will live and your war will be done?”