Night Birds, The (32 page)

Her hands moved in time with the story, the awl punching neat holes through the skin. She was finished with preparing the soles of the shoes. Her heart-shaped face was downcast and Hazel wondered what other stories the woman held inside her. The story of the man she loved, a soldier at the fort her people had just attacked. Of Winona.

Blue Sky Woman nodded at the porcupine quills, as if this were any other day. Hazel looked at her, thinking,
will I be like her one day, having forgotten the people I was born among
? Would her English fall away along with her white skin and clothing until she too became inseparable from the leaf-dwellers? It was not a terrible thought. She would do whatever it took to survive.

SONGS
IN THE
TALLGRASS

H
AZEL CONTINUED TO
muse over these things as she walked down to the river. Where was she now in the valley? How far away from home? In the heat of midafternoon the entire camp seemed to be drowsing. Despite losing two battles at the fort, the Dakota evidenced no fear of soldiers. Sunlight glared from stolen mirrors, copper pots, and silver tureens carried as booty from the traders’ stores and settlers’ cabins and strewn about the camp. The half-wolf curs the Indians kept lay sleeping in the hot grass.

The only thing stirring was a group of girls playing with toy teepees who did not look up at Hazel. The teepees were exact canvas replicas and they played with dolls of twined grass with intricate beadwork dresses and dolls of cornshuck dressed in shreds of calico. When Hazel came past them the girls were holding a pretend council with the grass dolls debating what to do with the ugly shuck dolls. She hurried on before they looked up and noticed her. No other captives were around and she wondered if they were all still in hiding. Her mind reeled from the kinnikinnick smoke and the story Blue Sky Woman had told.

Past grazing speckled ponies, Hazel went down a long sloping hill that took her a quarter mile to the Minnesota River. A light wind touched the oak treetops into motion and dappled the light. The river was gilded by the afternoon sun. In the wind Hazel heard a woman singing a hymn and caught her breath. The woman was singing “What Wondrous Love is This?” a sweet sad hymn that Hazel’s mother Emma used to sing to the children in the cradle, willing them to grow with her voice. The song came to her now, rising up from the golden river, and filled her with a longing to see her family again:

And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on;

And when from death I’m free I’ll sing on; And when from death

I’m free I’ll sing His love for me, And through eternity I’ll sing on,

I’ll sing on, And through eternity I’ll sing on.

The woman’s voice held the last note before fading off. Around Hazel the shadows of the trees flickered in the wind. On either side of the river, banks rose up toward plateaus of swaying tallgrass. Where had the woman’s voice come from? It came and went, leaving a hollow space within Hazel. And what she thought she heard was the ghost of her mother. This filled her with hope.
My mother lives inside of me. There is yet beauty in the world. There is no place I can go where she will not find me.
It could not have been an actual woman she heard singing. Who among the captives would sing in these circumstances?

The brown river below glimmered in the sun, curling around a bend that would eventually lead to Palmer’s Ferry and the bluff high above where the children came to watch the steamboats wind toward the agency in early summer. She thought she could keep walking now, follow the bend of the river toward home, searching after that lost voice again. If home still remained. If any were alive. Wanikiya had said that she was safest here. Abroad on the prairies roamed warriors who had been turned back twice from the fort and now still searched for vulnerable settlers.

Hazel waded in the warm tea-brown water and dipped in her container. The reflection of the sun blinded her. Her stomach felt full, content, and she was at peace kneeling in the water. She felt the ridged shape of Winona’s awl, which she had tucked into her sash, poking her in the side. All she noticed in that moment was the faint pressure of the awl, the curious silence along the river now that the woman’s voice had come and gone, and the sun on her skin.

When she turned back to shore, she saw Tatanyandowan there, watching her. She mistook him at first for Wanikiya and her heart skipped a beat. The two brothers had the same facial features, but Pretty Singer’s headband rode lower to hide his torn earlobe. Besides his war shirt he wore only breechclout and leggings. His eyes, pulled into slanting angles by the tightness of his braids, narrowed to slits as he watched her in the water.

The river sloshed against the shore. Hazel looked back toward camp and saw that they were alone. The man who watched her had vacant, empty eyes. Every fiber of her being strained to run, but her feet were planted in the deep river mud, her muscles rigid. Pretty Singer came toward her holding out his hands to show that he didn’t mean harm. Hazel’s stomach lurched at the sight of him and the blood flooded back through her locked muscles and allowed her to move at the same time as he sprang for her. Even injured, he was too quick. An arc of water trailed after him; his outstretched hands hooked like talons and one caught her by the hem of her dress. She pulled away, wild to get back up the hill and take shelter in Blue Sky Woman’s teepee. The dress tore open and his hand slipped free.

She was running, the water spraying around her, a shout for help rising in her throat. Then the next moment his arms were around her waist and she was lifted and carried from the water. She struck along his abdomen with the flats of her hand but this just made him squeeze her tighter until she couldn’t breathe anymore.

He hurled her down on the silty shoreline and the breath was jolted from her. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw the skin container floating off down the river, in the same direction she had contemplated escaping moments before. Pretty Singer took off his war shirt and breechclout. His body was scarlet in the sun, his muscles taut, but her eyes were drawn to the side of his leg where the blood crusted around a recent wound. The wound her stepbrother had made just before he died. She turned away from his nakedness. His breathing came in hoarse gasps. He reached down and pulled up Winona’s one-piece beaded doeskin dress, the cloth ripping as he yanked and tugged.

And the thought came to her: this cloth had been torn in such a way before, and Blue Sky Woman had mended it. The sash fell away with the dress. Hazel’s throat felt charred, her breath weak and light inside her chest. Even as she felt the warmth of the sun on her exposed skin, her blood was chilled. Pretty Singer knotted his fist in her hair and forced her to look at him. She shut her eyes. His breathing continued to rasp. She felt the warm grains of sand along the backs of her thighs and arms.

Pretty Singer began to talk to her in a hushed voice, as though she were a child. “Be still,” he said to her. “I am Tatanyandowan.” He continued to repeat his name as he pried apart her legs and took away the hands she was using to hide herself. She lay supine on the ground. He ran his hands along her stomach, saying, “Sh . . . sh.” His voice thickened. And then her name, as she was known now, “Winona.”

This had happened before. The thought filled with her renewed horror. This was why Winona had hanged herself. Asa.

Then Pretty Singer touched her at her very center, the core of her most intimate self, and her stomach clenched. Like that day below the tree, when she had wound the cord around her throat and kicked away the stump, Hazel stepped outside of herself, a shrieking in her ears. It was Winona whom she carried inside her now. Was not this her dress, had Hazel not taken her place? Her scream filled her veins and gave her a strength she did not possess. Beside her, in the undone sash, lay the horned bone of Winona’s awl. She felt her hands wrap around the handle. Then she swung the awl with all her strength.

Like a falcon’s beak the awl found the cords of muscle within Pretty Singer’s throat. It punctured skin and artery as easily as it had the dressed hides. The hook snared in his windpipe. Pretty Singer pulled away from her, but Hazel hung onto the awl. A warm jet of blood drenched her arm. Hazel pulled the awl toward her and Pretty Singer fell over backward into the water.

His legs thrashed. An oily slick of blood blossomed around him. He wrapped his hands tightly around his throat, desperate to staunch the pumping fluid.
This should not happen
, the slanted, staring eyes said.
My power comes from the tree-dweller. My own death should come in battle.
He sank down on his knees, the river swirling around him. His face was the color of ashes, his arms red to the elbows. He tried to stagger out of the river, to come toward her, but the effort made more blood spurt. His head drooped low; his mink-fur-entwined braids touched the water. Then he sank face down in the shallows. Rosettes of blood continued to flower around him.

When Hazel’s breathing had calmed she wrapped the torn dress about her and stood shivering in the warmth of the sunlight. One hand still gripped the awl. The sunlight glittered on the water and she saw herself reflected, the spots of vermilion painted on her cheek, the twin plaited braids, her skin dark skin. Winona. The Dakota sometimes left offerings of food outside their teepees to entice ghosts of the recently departed to return to dwell inside their own children. It was forbidden to speak the names of the dead aloud. It had seemed a strange practice to Hazel before now, but this afternoon she wanted more than anything for Winona to go on living inside her.

If the other warriors discovered what she had done, she would be killed. She didn’t know how much time had passed since she had first come down to the river. Far above her in the camp, she heard a dog barking and knew other women would be headed down here soon to gather firewood and water. The men coming back from their raids would have to be fed. She let the awl drop the ground and waded into the shallows where Tatanyandowan floated face down. She smelled the iron sweet odor of his blood. Along with river water it dripped from the fringes of her dress.

She pulled him by his shoulders into the swirling current of the deeper water. As she tugged, the long jagged tear in his throat was exposed, a wide mouth drinking in the river. She remembered the heaviness of him pressing her down against the silty shoreline. Now he was light, a ghost weight in the water. The current took hold of her and she released him to the river.

On shore again, she watched him for awhile longer, the marionette jerk of his arms and legs as the current tried to pull him further down-river, but a tree branch had hooked him. Then the current caught him and he was floating once more. She watched until he drifted around the bend, his body sinking into the river.

Her other senses sharpened while she listened for anyone coming her direction. Now, she was filled with the horror of what she had done. She looked down at her thin, birdlike arms, saw what a small, insignificant thing she was against the backdrop of the looming trees and the wide brown river. Yet she was still alive. The sunlight felt good on her skin. She felt the spreading necklace of bruises Pretty Singer had left on her throat and she enjoyed even that. All these contrary things blazed inside her. Terror at discovery. Joy to be alive. Her power to kill or to heal.

Even in the summer heat, she was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered. She took off the torn white doeskin dress, crouched naked by the shoreline and rubbed sand along the bloody fringes, rinsing it in the river until the stains were pink.

Then she put the dress back on and rounded the bend, where other Indians crouched filling their skin bags, a few old women who frowned at her. Hazel held the frayed doeskin against herself. She was so weary that her eyelashes were fluttering but she knelt to retrieve the awl and staggered back up the hill. Later she would wonder why she had not chosen to escape. She could have drifted with the river; the fort was not far. Her feet did not take back to her own kind, but to Blue Sky Woman’s teepee.

Her new mother found her there as dusk was falling. Hazel had curled up on one of the grass mats and let sleep take her. Her dream-self hovered over her and watched the pretty woman with the heart-shaped face bend and take the awl from Hazel’s fist, watched the woman hold the awl and study the serrated skin still clinging to the edge, saw her take this piece of skin and cast it into the fire. Blue Sky Woman undressed her and studied the stains on the torn dress in the firelight, then wrapped the shivering girl like a swaddled child in a thin blanket. She was singing a song to herself, something low and barely audible, a song for protection as she folded up the dress and put it away for good.

Hazel slept far into the afternoon of the next day to be awakened by Blue Sky Woman gently shaking her. The skin of the teepee shimmered in the afternoon brightness, the painted figures indistinct. Everything that had happened the day before seemed unreal, until Hazel again felt the bruises encircling her throat and remembered the pressure of his fingers. She looked down and saw that she was naked beneath a blanket. Blue Sky Woman nodded toward a ruddy-red broadcloth skirt and a calico shirt fringed with courie shells. How much did she know? Hazel remembered half waking once to hear Blue Sky Woman singing, watching her clean the blood from the awl.

This morning Blue Sky Woman fed her a bowl of mashed corn and then helped Hazel into her new dress and cloth leggings. She put her cool hands to Hazel’s cheeks. Her round dark eyes brimmed with moisture. In English she said, “You no safe here,” and then bent to pass under the teopa.

Hazel followed her across the camp. That Blue Sky Woman had spoken English to her seemed a kind of death. She knew that Hazel was not her daughter. They walked the circle of teepees where the akicita, the soldier’s lodge, set their dwellings, at the camp’s center. Blue Sky Woman paused before one of the dwellings, a greasy, traditional buffalo-skin teepee painted on the outside with the colors of the four directions.