Night Birds, The (29 page)

Only then did Hazel see one of the scalps they carried was white-blonde, a boy’s scalp, pink with skin and brain matter. Daniel!

She turned away from the woman’s hateful glance and ran into the tallgrass where she vomited and heaved until her throat felt scorched and inside she was as empty as a field stripped by fire. How far had she run? She turned back toward the camp and saw the many cookfires glowing against the underside of the clouds. No one had seen her. Thunder groaned in the sky and the rain came harder now, thrashing through the tallgrass. In that moment, she smelled Winona’s skin against her own.

Below her lay a creek and a steep ravine and across that the Lower Sioux Agency, charred stone buildings still smoking in the rain. How long ago had Asa seen the smudge of smoke against the sky and begun to reckon the danger coming their way? All around the agency were fields of corn ready for the harvest and across the grassy lawns Hazel saw a gathering of crows picking at the dead left out in the open and carrying hunks of flesh away to the woods.

Why had the Indians stayed here after the slaughter? Weren’t they afraid the federal soldiers would come? She didn’t care anymore. The sight of the scalp resolved her for what she had to do next. She didn’t want to be alone in this world. Hadn’t she been given this strap for a reason? Now she was sure she smelled Winona’s skin, her hair and sweetgrass fragrance. She was no longer herself in this moment. Winona was inside her, but not the girl she knew once, a gentle girl who had broken open a cottonwood branch and shown her the pale white star inside the pulp and explained why the tree was sacred: a tree that sheltered her ancestors close to earth, where she might tie a prayer. It was from such a tree that Winona hanged herself. Now her voice came inside Hazel, stripped of its quiet cadence.
They all hate you
, it said.
It’s your fault they died.
The words rolled out, heavy with malice.
If you hadn’t fallen, Asa would still be alive.
And that was true. The voice kept on and then it took up a tone like the fat woman’s, saying,
Look at you
over and over.
Look at you.

Hazel walked past another corpse, a headless body riddled with arrows. She stumbled over the head and saw how the jaws were cracked open and stuffed with grass. In place of eyes, gold coins shone in the sockets. She kept going directly into the rain, keeping her head lowered to avoid seeing any more of the dead, until she found a cottonwood tree.

It was easy enough to make the buffalo strap into a noose and find a stump where she could balance herself. She could have run away then, but where to, when all was ashes and corpses, a prairie littered with bodies? Where, when all the world had turned to blood and hate and fire?

She slipped the knot around her throat. Her skin felt hot and fevered, all thoughts dwindling down to just one. Even in the shadow of the tree the rain found her and she felt it down inside her bones. Then she realized it was not thunder she heard in the clouds, but distant cannon fire. Fort Ridgely must be under attack, surrounded by warriors who would overwhelm the defenses in minutes. No hope even for them.

She kicked away the stump and felt the cord cinch tight around her throat. The branch crackled but held. She was choking now and as her legs swung out what she saw before her was the body of Winona, her face blotched, tongue distended. Winona stood directly in front of Hazel, beckoning. Hazel heard a screaming void in her ears as though a hole had opened in the ground below her. She remembered only then that suicides were said to go to Hell. In death, Winona’s hair and fingernails had continued to grow, or maybe it was only her skin that had shrunk. Winona’s hair whipped around her as she reached one long, horny fingernail toward Hazel. Even as she choked, Hazel was swept with terror and tried to twist away. Her face purpled as it filled with blood and spots burst before her eyes. Her mind was full of blue fire. And then the cord snapped and she fell.

Wet tallgrass cushioned her fall. She lay in the rain and mud, gasping as the air burned down her injured throat. When she felt a hand on her shoulder she shrieked, remembering her vision of Winona. The rain thrummed in the cottonwood leaves. Wind bent the grass around her. She kept her eyes shut and waited for the ghost to leave. But when she opened her eyes, the figure was still there, holding a bone knife she had used to cut the cord, a knife to give second birth. It was Blue Sky Woman and she had followed Hazel out of the camp.

The woman set the knife down and reached for the girl and Hazel did not find Blue Sky Woman’s delusions terrible any longer. Hadn’t she longed for one of the other captives to touch her, to take her into her arms like a daughter? Blue Sky Woman held her, rocking back and forth, a low rattling wail in her throat, the same sound she must have made when she had seen Winona dead in the tree three summers before.

Hazel’s mind filled with the sound of her sorrow and the distant can-nonfire from the fort, miles downriver. Briefly, she tried to imagine the outer buildings, squat structures of stone in the wind and rain, crammed with refugees and soldiers shouting orders, but her mind couldn’t form the images. There was the distant thunder, an unstoppable storm that had only now started to touch red and white alike. And Hazel was a survivor, now twice borne from the wreckage. As was Blue Sky Woman, left behind by a husband and daughter.

Soaked with rain, her throat raw and bruised, Hazel shivered in the arms of a madwoman and for the first time didn’t feel so lost and alone. She reached up a hand to touch the woman’s face and felt hot tears against her palm. Blue Sky Woman stopped wailing. She held the hand pressed to her face and drew deep breaths. Then, as though Hazel were no more than a child, she carried her back down the hill to her teepee painted with thunder beings and angels, a place where the two might heal together.

To walk down to the river, the captives passed the agency whose charred stones stood like ancient ruins. Like the rest of the captives, Hazel learned to mark the places in the grass where the dead lay. Crows rose before them. A few Indian riders watched to make sure none of them tried to run. Hazel was the same as the others and yet not the same. The fat woman, she learned, was named Henrietta Grolsheim, and she reigned over the other captives like a petty tyrant. Very few of the other captives spoke to Hazel, following Henrietta’s lead. Dressed in white doeskin, a quiet girl fluent in the Dakota tongue, she was separate from them, but like them she did chores and walked past the killing ground to carry water up from the river.

In the river itself there were bodies. Once a soldier in a brass-buttoned uniform floated past, his face eaten away by bullheads and sunfish. Hopeless. The captives had heard by then about the ambush on the other side of the river and how the soldiers had been lured down into a roadway surrounded by tallgrass and slaughtered there. But they had also heard that the first attempt to take the fort had failed, rain arriving in wind-driven gusts just as Little Crow’s warriors shot their fire arrows at the buildings’ shingled roofs. They would attack again soon, in greater numbers, sweeping away Fort Ridgely and New Ulm and driving the last of the whites from their valley. The captives did not think much about this as they walked past bodies blackening in the August sun. They thought, mostly, of themselves.

The woman who had kept the baby under her shawl disappeared before Hazel could learn her name. Killed, some said. Escaped, said others. Rumors came and went: All the hostages would be killed. They would be traded to the Lakota on the far plains or sold to other horseback tribes. Each was to be given a new husband. Some said there was a low building of green boughs into which women were brought and all that was later seen of them were their empty dresses, folded and laid in the sun. Hazel listened to them all, hoping for news of her family, hoping that she was not the only one left alive. As her skin began to darken she learned to respond to the name of Winona.

Hazel admired Henrietta’s courage even as she feared her. When the captives came down through the corn fields and the killing ground, Henrietta intoned the twenty-third Psalm, her voice calm and assured. Henrietta did not deal in rumors like the others. The women’s fine silk dresses and whalebone hoopskirts were taken from them and they were dressed in broadcloth skirts and loose, billowing sacques. Even in this crude costume, Henrietta carried herself like a woman in charge.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow.
Some of the captives rubbed dirt into their pale skin to darken themselves and blend in.
I shall fear no evil.
A few went mad. The thin, frightened woman took off her saque dress one morning at the river and crouched there naked, the sunlight harsh on her bony body.

Henrietta stopped intoning her Psalm and called, “Clarissa, honey, you come here,” as though speaking to a child, but the woman bared her teeth and a shudder possessed her entire body. When Henrietta approached her slowly, wading into the water, Clarissa turned and ran, kicking up water behind her until she found the center of the broad river and sank. There she flailed out with her scrawny arms, cackling the whole time, before she swallowed a great gulp of water and began to choke. The current took hold of her while they watched and as she rounded the bend only her pale, mouse-brown hair was visible and then, not even that. Henrietta turned, glancing once at Hazel before she spit in the water and went back to the other captives.

The third morning of Hazel’s captivity, Wanikiya came to visit. Blue Sky Woman cooked him pork from one of the many slaughtered hogs—the meat speared on branches and dripping with grease—along with mashed corn. Hazel had not seen him since he’d brought her here on his pony. The last vision she had of him was when he parted the corn leaves and hesitated before striking her with the stock of his shotgun. He brought with him the memory of that pain and those deaths she had been trying to forget. Asa. Daniel. Ruth. He had promised three years ago when they lay together as children in the grass that he would care for her. He was the one who had brought her out of silence. What had that promise meant?

Blue Sky Woman left them alone after the food was cooked. Even though he was seated, Hazel could tell that he had grown taller in the three years that had passed. His skin shone a burnished copper color. He had the same narrow boyish waist, but his shoulders were broader, the muscles thicker along his arms and chest. He had the same black eyes and lock of silver in his hair, but his face had changed. His nose was long and straight, his mouth and chin more aggressive. From time to time he glanced up from his meal, as if he, too, were measuring the changes in her. He was not painted for battle, but there were dark circles under his eyes. She remembered Blue Sky Woman had once braided sweetgrass into his hair and the scent had mixed with his boyish smell. His body now reeked of sweat and a faint acrid smell that reminded her of gunpowder.

This odor brought her back again to Asa’s last moment. When Wanikiya parted the corn, smoke had raveled from the mouth of his gun. Any words she meant to offer him were snared in her throat. A mixture of emotions surged through her now and the one that surfaced, bright and hard, was hatred. Before she knew what she was doing, she sprang across the room and started swinging for him with the flats of her hands. She knocked the bowl of mashed corn from his grasp and tore at his hair. In the back of her mind she heard her own high shrieking. Her hands were curled into claws and she scratched at his face and throat.

He absorbed these blows for only a moment, then caught each of her swinging hands in his own and hurled her to the other side of the teepee. Before Hazel could spring up again, he was on top of her, pinning her to the grass mat. She tried to struggle and felt the lean, corded strength of him holding her down. Along the hollow of his throat she saw how she had laid the skin bare, a long ribbon clawed open. She could smell his blood. “Murderer,” she hissed. “Murderer.” Beneath the sweat she could smell his odor, a sweet fragrance like fry bread. He looked bewildered, his mouth opening and closing. All this time he said nothing, and then he let her hands go. She could strike him again now if she wanted. He stayed on top of her, his hipbones joined with hers. A fleck of blood dropped from his throat and speckled her cheek. She wiped it away.

Another wave of emotion swept through her and this time she wept, a convulsive sound that ripped through her. Her entire body shook. And still he did not release her. She felt his hands touch her hair. He touched the warm tears along her face and then touched his finger to his own lips. How long they stayed like this she didn’t know, but eventually he rose again and stood over her. She wanted to go on weeping, curled into a fetal circle, but all the weltering feelings had drained away. She found, as well, to her dismay, that she missed the gentle press of him against her.

A day later he came again when she was alone grinding dried strips of pork to make pemmican the warriors could carry on their journeys. He sat across from her. With the large stone she used to grind the dried meat she could have hurt him, but all the rage had gone out of her. Wanikiya watched her work in silence. She glanced once at him and saw wounds she had laid open along his throat and chest. She saw too that he wore two feathers in his headdress, one for each coup he’d counted in battle, and did not know if these feathers were for dead Ojibwe, or dead whites.