Night Birds, The (26 page)
Authors: Thomas Maltman
Mother came up beside her with water drawn from the springhouse. “You shouldn’t be talking,” she told Hazel.
“Asa,” Hazel said. “Open up my bag.”
I did as she asked. Within there was only the yellow-print dress she had come with and a small doeskin bag. I took out the bag and brought it over. Hazel did her best to smile. “I have to tell you about the one who carried this,” she said.
“It can wait,” said Mother.
“No,” said Hazel. “The story’s not done yet. And I’m afraid I don’t have very much longer. Before the seizures come, I see this radiance spreading through all the world. There are wings behind it. Angels, I think. Or birds made of light. It sweeps over me and takes me away with it.” She spoke slowly, the words coming out slurred. Her eyes watered with the effort.
“To someplace terrible,” I said.
“No,” she said. “But not someplace for mortal flesh.” Her hands wrapped tightly around the beaded doeskin bag and she looked over at me. “I need to tell you something, but the story won’t come easy.”
“You need to just rest,” my mother said in a low voice.
“In a few days, when my mouth heals right,” Aunt Hazel said. “It begins one summer, a hot summer much like this one. Even the wind in the tallgrass seemed to whisper:
If only men knew what I know.
The adults went about their business, hearing nothing. But I was sixteen, half child, half woman. I listened close.”
I
N THE MONTH
of the harvest moon, a Dakota youth named Otter told the Senger family that Indians were coming to kill all the white people in the valley. After three years of living just on the other side of the silt-laden Waraju River, a shallow boundary that separated them from the Dakota bands, the children were used to such warnings and paid this one little heed. Other matters weighed on them. They had been banished from the cabin where their stepmother tended their youngest brother, Matthew, sick with a fever that speckled his face and throat with white pinprick sores.
Caleb cut a swath through wavering bluestem grasses and made a bed for the four of them. They spread quilts over the fallen grass, knowing that Caleb would leave them as soon as Asa returned from the creek bearing buckets of water. Caleb was sweet on Cassie, who lived with her sister at a nearby farm. One night the previous winter, her father, Hans, had poisoned himself with his own liquor. He had been ladling small doses of strychnine into the rotgut he sold the Indians, just enough to give it kick. His own distillation he kept pure. How Hans confused the two still troubled Caleb. He remembered digging the grave during a Jan- uary thaw, a shallow grave they layered with stones to keep the wolves from unearthing it. Once he’d looked up to catch Cassie’s mother, her hair streaming in the keening wind, looking off toward Milford, pale eyes shining. Caleb had the sense that this woman wouldn’t stay in the territory much longer. He’d gone ahead and bought a ring for Cassie, a used silver ring he wasn’t sure would fit, as well as a crate of table wine from New Ulm, now hidden away in the root cellar for the wedding.
Near the children a smudge fire burned to keep off hovering mosquitoes. A hot summer wind fanned clouds across a moon that hung like a glimmering talon in the dark. Clouds drifted, low-bellied and pregnant with rain, over the fields of waiting corn. The corn raised leaves like green arms that sought to stroke the rain from the passing clouds. Around them a few drops spattered the dust.
“Will it rain?” Daniel asked in his quiet voice. His white-blond hair caught what light there was from the smudge fire.
“Not tonight,” Caleb said. “Not yet.”
Caleb knelt to be closer to his siblings. Here he was, eighteen years old, about to be married, but he wasn’t ready to leave them yet. Not with his father Jakob away in Virginia fighting the rebels. He thought of that wine down in the cellar and how in church it represented God’s forgiveness and he wondered if there was enough of it to take away the sin of the things he knew and had done. Cassie had reached the stage where her swelling belly was difficult to disguise.
His younger sister, Hazel, glanced at him once, her dark green eyes unreadable. She lay between Daniel and six-month-old Ruth and she was looking at him as though trying to divine his thoughts. The look disquieted him. There were things she shouldn’t know.
The slow-moving clouds parted to reveal a scattering of stars. Caleb pointed out
Mato
, the Bear Star, to his siblings. He told them how the Bear Star died each autumn and painted the leaves red with blood. Or so the old medicine man Hanyokeyah had told him. Red leaves from a bear dying to prepare the way.
Across from him Hazel was lost in thoughts of her own. She turned from Caleb and looked at her sister Ruth, barely breathing in her bundle of blankets, and remembered the day of the girl’s birth. She had been born during the same three-day snowstorm during which Hans Gormann had died. There had been no way to fetch a doctor. Hazel was the one who cut the cord and felt the infant life quicken in her hands. In that moment when Ruth first began to howl, she had hesitated before handing her to the waiting arms of her stepmother. “Hazel, give her over,” Kate had commanded, sweat-soaked hair pasted to her skull. Hazel had paused because something in her said if she handed the girl over she wouldn’t live. But she did. Ruth had Kate’s copper hair and green eyes like Hazel. Did she know who had nudged the air into her lungs? Now the baby slept while the boys watched for what stars the clouds might reveal.
Hazel tried to imagine what was happening back in the cabin where her stepmother tended Matthew, a boy already blind from scarlet fever. This new fever that held him didn’t have any name. Around the edges of his lips the sores looked hot and angry and bled with pus. Matthew muttered in a heated dream language that was not English or Dakota, but sounded like prophecy. Once he said the word
fire
and Hazel had dripped water down his throat to quiet him. When his skin took on a smell like side meat cooking in the sun, she felt sure he wouldn’t live past the night. Kate’s bloodwort teas, the cloths soaked with liniment she lay across his chest, could not stop his breath from becoming more labored. On this humid summer night the cabin reeked with the smell of his dying. Kate had known it, too; that was why she sent them outside. When Hazel tried to stay, thinking she could be of some use, Kate slapped her so hard her ears rang. Hazel knew she didn’t mean it, but hated her just the same. Matthew needed her; her touch could soothe him. Blinded by her own tears, she had felt Kate press little Ruth into her arms and thrust her out the door with her brothers.
After Caleb led them to this cool spot by the river where they could no longer hear Matthew crying, Daniel fetched some plums from a nearby bush. Hazel was sixteen years old, too old to cry. The sour juice spilled down her cheek and made her feel still and calm on the inside. The imprint of Kate’s hand burned on her skin, the bruise ripening and swelling in the dark.
Across the Waraju River lay the Dakota reservation and even this late the cookfires of their camps shone. Drums began to throb in the west, low tomtoms that sounded like the beating of a great heart, before they went still again.
Asa returned with water from the creek. He set the yoked buckets down and stood in the smudge smoke swatting away troublesome mosquitoes. At sixteen he was the second oldest boy, old enough to join Jakob in the war against the Secesh. Asa carried Jakob’s last letter in his shirt pocket. His sweat had stained and smudged the ink, but he had the words memorized by now and he often spoke of joining Jakob with the Minnesota 1st volunteers; he hoped Johnny Reb wouldn’t be licked before the year was out.
The two oldest stepbrothers stood together, one short and redheaded, the other tall and broad-shouldered, and looked out toward the aurora hovering over the reservation.
“Something’s stirring,” said Caleb.
“That’s what took me so long,” Asa said. “I ran into Otter down by the creek.” Though they were alone in the dark, Asa whispered the last.
“What mischief is he up to now?”
“He was excited,” Asa said. “His whole body was smeared with black paint and all I could make out was the whites of his eyes. When he called my name I would have jumped out of my boots, had I been wearing any. He was on the other side of the river. He told me the soldier’s lodge had met and decided to kill the white people in the valley the next day.”
“Not that again,” said Caleb. “Every year they get riled when the annuity payment’s late.”
“That’s what I told him,” said Asa. “But then his voice got low and he asked in Dakota:
Kinnesagas
? Are you afraid? Before I could answer he ran off into the dark.”
From her spot on the quilt, Hazel perched on her elbows and listened closely. Would Otter have come if the threat was real? Wouldn’t Wanikiya, their closest friend, have been the one to warn them? Her cheeks flushed to think of him out there before a fire, his face painted. And did he think of her, too, and would he remember the promise he had made?
Caleb didn’t say anything. This last year he had grown moody and quiet as he approached eighteen. He looked back toward the cabin where one window guttered with candlelight like a single blinking eye. “Your ma won’t run,” he said. “She won’t let us hitch the wagon.”
“On account of Matthew?”
“Even if he was well, she wouldn’t go.”
“Maybe I could swim acrost the river, and tell the soldiers at the fort?” Asa said.
“Water’s too high. It’s been storming upriver. Besides you don’t swim so good.”
“Do so,” Asa said, but neither had the energy to argue as usual.
A whippoorwill started up in the rushes. In the stillness the song of that night bird magnified in their imaginations. Instead of whip-poor-will it sounded like the bird’s song was oh-you’re-kilt. Oh-you’re-killed, oh-you’re-killed, echoed through the dark and they didn’t know if the bird sang for Matthew, or their father far away in Virginia headed toward Miller’s cornfield and Antietam, or for them now, in this flimsy shelter of grass. Asa threw a plum stone in the direction of the bird and chased it away. “That wasn’t any natural bird,” he said. “Pa told me the whippoorwills turn to nighthawks past twilight.”
“Hush,” said Caleb. “That’s just a story.”
After some time, Asa turned to his brother and asked, “Will you go to her tonight?”
“Yes,” Caleb said.
Asa took a deep breath, said, “It’s not fitting. You aren’t married yet.”
Caleb’s face darkened. “Don’t tell me what’s right and what’s not.”
“It’s a sin,” Asa said.
Caleb hand’s curled into fists. With his moodiness there had come inside him a sense of restrained violence. He didn’t know what he was capable of anymore. Cassie had kept him out of the war this far, saying the fight was really just over niggers. His stepmother Kate also grew angry when the subject came up and talked about herself and the children as though Jakob had abandoned them. In this, the two were unlike most women in the territory. Out of pride and patriotism, most women begged their men to go. “You’re only jealous is all,” Caleb said bitterly.
“Not of her,” Asa said. He saw something brewing in his stepbrother’s lean hawklike features.
Caleb exhaled deeply then and let his fists drop. He turned and walked away from all of them, not caring what happened anymore. He had a life to live separate from theirs.
“Not of her!” Asa cried again, his voice high and petulant, as Caleb disappeared into the tallgrass prairie that would take him to Cassie’s farm.
Asa paced in the dark and threw the remaining pile of plums, one by one, out onto the prairie where they landed without a sound. “You’re wasting them,” said Daniel.
“I don’t much care.”
When the drums started again in the distance, Daniel, disquieted by his oldest brothers’ inability to get along, asked about Jakob’s letter.
“Too dark to read,” said Asa.
“You know it by heart,” Daniel said. “My dearest children” he began. “I write you now beneath the shelter of my overcoat, warmed by the fire of a split-rail fence. I have not slept since Chicohema.”
“Stop,” said Asa. “That’s not how it goes.”
“Then tell us,” said Daniel.
Asa began to recite, lowering his voice to sound more like Jakob’s. As he spoke the other children forgot the beat of the war drums and heard only him:
My dearest family,
I write from the shelter of a rubber overcoat by the dim glow of a rail-fence fire. After a year of inactivity, slogging through mud fields, we fought the Secesh at Chickahominy River. Twice since the fight I have been caught walking in my sleep, Sharps rifle slung around my shoulder, and I fear that I will be shot by one of the pickets if I don’t learn to sleep better. In my memory the fight is only a fever-dream. With the falling rain came artillery and through the wet leaves minié balls whistled and searched for soft flesh. I don’t remember the charge up the field. I can only recall that there was so much rain our guns stopped firing: the powder was too damp. The fighting turned close up, men grappling in mud and rain. The Rebs screamed their battle yell and I screamed back, holding my bayonet like a spear. . . .
It does me no good to remember now except that something came inside me during that night of rain that I have not been able to shake loose. I cannot believe months earlier we met the Rebs at Edward’s Ferry and even shared dinner with them. I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that even now across the miles of rain-soaked fields some Rebel soldier sits writing to children of his own. But then I find the newspapers that advertise escaped slaves. Then I remember why I am here, all that violence that chased us so many years ago from Missouri. Our cause is just.
What I wouldn’t give now for some of Kate’s fried doughnuts. What I wouldn’t give to see Daniel running through the fields, towhead flashing, as he chases the hated blackbirds from our corn. How is the crop this year? Has Caleb broken ground on the south pasture, put in potatoes like I said? This war will not last forever. I will return soon. Look for me in the East where the sun rises. Look for me at the dawn and one day you will see my weary silhouette as I walk the trail that at last brings me home.
