Night Birds, The (35 page)

Throughout the journey elders from the Wahpetons and Sissetons rode up on their ponies and visited with Tamaha. One of the warriors greeted Hazel in English, a short black-skinned Indian in white man’s trousers, topped with a beaver hat like a gentleman. “I am called Paul,” he said. “You have not been hurt?”

Hazel shook her head. Indeed she had been lucky, protected. Paul turned back and continued to talk with Tamaha in Dakota. Little Crow and the Lower Sioux had not consulted before attacking the settlements. The majority of the Upper Sioux had no intention of taking part in the war. They were angry. When they made camp the Sisseton and Wahpetons separated themselves and went to the other side of the river. They declared themselves the “peace party.” With them the captives could find safe treatment. With each passing day Little Crow’s hold on his own people diminished.

In the Yellow Medicine country they camped in a valley. The teepees were set up near a set of undulating hills of grass where it was said the ancients had buried their dead in elaborate mounds. The Dakota claimed the ancients lived in the time of giants,
Unkteri
, and hunted great beasts, twice the size of buffalo. In time the ancients acquired such powerful magic they learned how to cross over into the other world and they left this one behind, not knowing if they would ever be able to get back. Sometimes they managed to cross back over and visit their dead, lonely for the valleys they once knew. It was said the men and women wore headdresses made of antlers and were fleet as deer. If they encountered Dakota warriors or maidens they would lure them away with the secrets of this other world and those people would never be seen again.

In this haunted place, they set up camp. On the hill above them, clearly visible in the twilight, Hazel saw the tall, whitewashed buildings of the Upper Agency. A brick warehouse was flanked by a schoolhouse with a pretty steeple. Hazel felt herself standing between two worlds. On one side there were the mounds of a people long since passed away; on the other, all that remained of her own people, the empty buildings they had left behind.

WEDDING
NIGHT

B
LUE SKY WOMAN
was waiting for her when she came back to the teepee, a blood-red woolen blanket folded in her lap. Hazel went to arrange her grass sleeping mat and saw that this was rolled up and tied with a sinew along with Winona’s awl. She looked back at Blue Sky Woman who held out the blanket silently. “Tonight,” she said as she rose and folded the red blanket around Hazel’s shoulders, “will be your
wowinape
.”

It was late and the only sounds in the camp were distant gunshots, some of the braves drunk now with liquor taken from agency stores. Here and there the half-wolf curs took up their wolf song.

Blue Sky Woman drew a hot needle through Hazel’s earlobes, her voice soft as breath, saying, “Yes, it will be like that, pain and joy together.” Then Winona’s tin earrings, bells and crosses, were hanging from Hazel’s ears. She felt the weight of them, felt the dull pain that remained even after Blue Sky Woman dabbed the blood spots with balm. She felt somehow that her disguise was completed. She was transformed.

The violent winds of the night before had died down. Her wedding night was nothing like other Dakota weddings. There was no pony for her to ride to her suitor’s teepee. There were no crowds of people waiting on either side to watch and cheer the bride. Most of the village was sleeping. There was no nearest relative waiting to greet Hazel at the entrance of the teepee, to fire off a gun over her head and signal that the ceremony was complete. Only Blue Sky Woman was there and Otter as she walked through a damp summer night, the blood-red bridal blanket around her shoulders. Hazel turned to look back at the woman who had been her protector for these last few weeks, and then ducked under the
teopa
to meet her husband.

Wanikiya sat across from her, his braids undone, his hair coppered by the near firelight. He looked composed and otherworldly, as though he shared none of her fears. His eyes didn’t meet hers at first. The air was so damp out that she could see her breath in the room. Was it really completed now? Is this all it took for her to become a bride? Despite all she had seen and done, she was still only a sixteen-year-old girl. But her mother had been a child bride; Hazel remembered the daguerreotype portrait and the sense of her mother’s fierceness. What would her pa do when he heard she had married an Indian?

Swaying on her feet, the wool blanket itching her shoulders, she waited for her groom to speak. At last, he said, “Sit,” so quietly that he had to repeat himself.

Hazel let her eyes fall. He was looking at her intently. “I remember the first time I heard you speaking English the night when you stopped my wound. You whispered in my ears and I could hear the unwinding of your life story, a thread somehow I could follow. Your story has been threading into mine ever since, as tightly as those that make your blanket. Even when I was away from you I went on hearing your voice. All these winters that I have been with Tatanyandowan, learning how to be brave, I haven’t stopped thinking of you. You said you do not know me anymore. It is true. I also do not know you. But your cord is bound with mine and so now you are here.”

Hazel’s vision blurred with sudden tears. Until this moment she had never heard him speak at length. Their relationship was based on glance and gesture, touch and quiet. He was no longer the boy she knew. She was overcome with the sense that she had made a mistake; maybe this ceremony could be undone. She did not belong here with him. She would go back to Blue Sky Woman.

“Where are you going?” he said as she ducked under the door and went out into the dark.

In the distance she heard the continued chucka-chucka sound of the drunks firing their shotguns at shadows in the trees. A lone dog howled at the outskirts of the camp. The ponies, in a corral of loose brush, stirred restlessly. The planet her father called the Shepherd’s Star, Venus, was low on the horizon. She heard Wanikiya’s voice behind her. “You can’t go back,” he said. “Blue Sky Woman can’t keep you safe any longer. You’re with me now.” He was close to her now, his breathing audible. He touched her arm and she allowed herself to be led back into the teepee.

He unfolded one of the buffalo blankets and stifled a yawn. Was she expected to sleep with him this night? Hazel hesitated. How did a man and woman fit together? Would it be violent like with Tatanyandowan at the river? If Emma had lived would she have told her such things so she would not have to be afraid?

“Come,” he told her. “I am tired.”

She knelt on the blankets and then felt his hands touching her sore ears as he took off the tin earrings and lay them gently to the side. Wanikiya undid her tightly wound braids, the ribbons that Blue Sky Woman had woven through her hair. He laid her back against the softness of the blankets. His fire had dimmed to ashes. He folded a blanket over her and then moved away. In this way only did he touch her the first night.

She lay awake for a long time, looking at his back in the shadows, thinking:
This is what it means to be married?

She didn’t meet his eyes when he returned. She had their fire going, and had placed cedar flatboards near the heat on which she was baking mashed cornbread, the sweet smell filling the enclosure. His hair was dark and wet and he smelled of the river. He wore a doeskin bag around his throat, his medicine bag she knew, something she wasn’t allowed to touch because a woman’s menstrual blood could strip away a warrior’s power. The doeskin bag was beaded with the shape of an owl’s watching yellow eye. She knew that it contained owl’s down and a few pebbles darkened with pictograms. She knew as well that the pebbles had belonged to his father, Seeing Stone, who spoke the language of stones. Hazel wondered if he had come to understand his father’s magic in the time they had been apart or if the stones were still silent when he held them in the palm of his hand. She remembered the second time she had seen him, crouched above the tiny body of an owl he had killed, grief raw in his voice. While she watched him, Wanikiya went to his corner and cast aside the rumpled blankets.

What he uncovered horrified her. It was a totem figure carved of knobby cottonwood bark. The feet were made of severed raccoon paws, webbed for swimming. The face looked like the skull of some creature, a baby possum with bared teeth, but the carved torso was that of a man, its phallus elongated and distended. Glued to the skull was black hair—human, she realized—perhaps cut from an Ojibwe scalp. The figure was both crude and disturbing.

“Do you know this?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“I took it from Tatanyandowan’s teepee. It’s the Canotina. The tree-dweller. Sometimes he danced with this totem strung around his throat.” The cornbread had begun to smoke and blacken at the edges. She took it from the fire and passed one of the boards across to him. The bread had burned along the bottom but it tasted sweet and warmed her throat on the way down.

“My first memory is of my mother and sister drowning. I should not remember it; maybe it is only that I have heard the story so many times, how I was left tied to a tree in my cradleboard and saw them break through the ice. You see, the Canotina gives power to warriors like Pretty Singer, but in turn it asks the names of those you love and it takes their lives. The Canotina is one of the most terrible spirits.”

“I know,” she said. “You told me once. Would you really want such power?”

He pinched away a thumbnail of crumbling cornbread and swallowed it. She watched him to see if he was pleased. He said nothing and washed the bread down with a swig of water. Was it too dry, had she left it to cook too long? “Last night the Canotina came to me in a dream,” he said. “It spoke about my brother’s death.”

“Wanikiya. . . .”

“I know what you did,” he said. “I am not sorry.” He set down the cedar board that held the bread. “After Winona died, Hanyokeyah left with Tatanyandowan to search for Inkpaduta. He never returned. I knew when Tatanyandowan came back alone that the old man was dead. I waited for my brother to kill me too. But that is not what he wanted. What he wanted was for me to become like him.”

“You’re not him,” she said, thinking of the emptiness in Tatanyan-dowan’s eyes.

“In the moon when the wind shakes the leaves from the tree, Tatanyandowan took me north. We were not hunting deer to provide for our camp. We hunted Ojibwe. We found what we searched for when one old man and a boy left their camp. The old man went down trying to shield the boy. Though the boy had only a knife, he did not run. He stayed near his dying grandfather until Tatanyandowan gunned him down. My brother cut the old man’s scalp from his head while he was still alive and then we fled. I counted coup with my brother. I touched the dying man and dead child, wishing that one day I would be as brave as that boy.”

“You are,” she said, “though you don’t know it yet.”

From the gathered belongings he also took his headband with its two feathers that he’d earned from counting coup. “The canotina,” he continued, “promised me even greater power than my brother, power to destroy. In my dream he looked just like this figure that Tatanyandowan made. I’ve been wanting a dream of power for so long. Twice in the past summers I have gone alone in the woods for four days as the Zuya Wakan instructed and dug a hole and listened in the clouds and winds. Twice, no vision has come to me. And now I saw the canotina and it told me I will be a great warrior. But one of the names it asked for was yours.”

Hazel felt the corn bread go dry in her throat.

“I told it no and it attacked me and drove me from the woods, laughing the whole time. And it said that you would cause my death. It said that you would kill me just as you had killed my brother.”

Hazel sat back on the blankets and buried her face in her knees. She remembered Pretty Singer at the river and the dream she had had later.

When she looked at him again she saw him through a blur of tears. “Then you should stay away from me.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I tried in the beginning, after I brought you here, just as I’ve tried in each battle to be faithful to my people without hurting any more of the whites. I’ve seen enough killing. It doesn’t change things. Tatanyandowan said that when we drove the whites from the valley, my father’s stones wouldn’t be silent anymore. The old magic would be alive again. He said the buffalo would return to the prairie. He said there would be no more sickness. But he lied.”

“Will you still go with them to fight?” Hazel couldn’t stand to think of making more bullets for him that might be used against her own people.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The entire camp was alive and stirring, morning turning into a bright afternoon. Wanikiya stood and put the Canotina totem into the fire. Its black hair curled around the skull, yellowing, then darkening in the flames. The fire hissed around it. They watched it burn together. Soon all that remained was the charred skull and the heart-shaped embers of the torso.

“Come, Caleb,” Noles encouraged. “I wouldn’t like to be caught out here alone.”

Caleb paused and wiped the sweat from his brow with a kerchief. It was late afternoon, the cicadas humming electrically in the tallgrass, their insect song reverberating in his eardrums. He ran the palms of his hand along the hickory shovel handle, felt the smooth wood against his coarse and blistered skin. Beside him, Noles took a long swig from the canteen. “’Tis deep enough,” he said, “for your brother to have his rest.”

The two men had joined the Cullen Guards to help buttress Sibley’s Sixth Minnesota Volunteers. Most of the volunteer guards had left immediately to gather what harvest they could this late in season, but Caleb and Noles followed after the burial detail and crossed the river with Captain Anderson and his cavalry. It was grim work. Caleb had lost track of the men, women, and children they’d put under the ground in shallow, quickly dug graves.
They’ll never know for sure how many were slaughtered
. The corpses bloated in the heat, blackened under the sun.
Not something you’ll ever forget, this stench.
And the small animals, maggots, huge bluebottle flies spinning in funnels, and most terribly, the monarch butterflies fluttering in the open wounds.
Why God allows such a thing I’ll never understand. Children. Do you think He’s weeping up in Heaven? Lot of good that does us down here. Shut up, you. He’s right. Noles, be quiet for once. You’re not helping things.
But when they were alone, Noles started again with his one-sided diatribe against God. As far as Caleb was concerned, you might as well spend the day wondering about the lost annuity payment.
Can you blame God for what a man does to another man? Free will, some will say. Ach, I say.

Truthfully, as irritating as Noles was now that his facial wounds had healed, Caleb was glad not to be alone. Noles could have left with many of the other Cullens to harvest his fields. Instead, there was this dark harvest. He stayed with Caleb, bringing the one mule he owned, becoming his shadow, one that was never quiet and reeked of bitter English tobacco. He’d even crossed the river, leaving the rest of the detachment back at the Lower Agency to help search for Caleb’s family. They had less than an hour remaining. Once the sun fell below the trees they had to get back to the rest of the men, recross the river, and make camp for the night. Scouts said the Indians had gone far north to the Yellow Medicine country, but Noles was nervous, stopping his shoveling often to cock his head and listen, his nostrils flaring as if he might smell them in the wind.