Night Birds, The (38 page)

The woman blocked out the sunlight leaking through the canopy of red leaves. Hazel flinched from her words. What could she say to defend herself? Everything the woman said was true. She had forsaken her own kind and now must face the consequences. Wanikiya would not come back from this battle. The guns would shred the warriors, no matter how fleet their ponies. If the whites did not kill him, his own people would for his betrayal of them. Henrietta raised the stone, saying, “I’ve waited for this moment, ever since I first saw you.”

Hazel sensed the stone rushing toward her, and then heard a crackling split, the sound of a maul cleaving a stump. Her eyes were shut against the impact. In her mind she saw her skull caving in like Otter’s, saw in that one moment the leaves continuing to come down in a red rain.
And they will never find me here
, she thought,
neither Caleb, nor the soldiers, nor anyone. I will be left with this leaf-child, in this valley of spirit
.

There was no blinding light, no flare behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes again and saw Henrietta still looming above her, the stone loose in one hand, swaying back and forth, her mouth locked in a snarl. Her eyes fluttered as a seam of blood appeared on her forehead and began to pour down. Then the earth shook again and Henrietta fell onto a crushed heap of leaves.

Hazel saw Blue Sky Woman holding Tamaha’s tomahawk. The woman came over and knelt beside her to take the boy, holding his ruined skull in her palms and wailing. Together they raised his body and left him in the limb of a low-hanging oak tree. They found one more child, his skull also crushed in. Blue Sky Woman took a lock of hair from each. Hair to keep in a medicine bundle so she could pray for their journey through the afterworld. It would be a hard journey for boys so small.

When they were done, they cleaned their hands and arms in the river and walked back toward camp, Hazel pausing over the crumpled form of Henrietta. “She still breathes,” Blue Sky Woman said. “What strength she has.”

Henrietta’s broadcloth skirt had ripped as she fell, exposing two solid stumpy legs bristling with hair. The woman’s tresses were dark with blood, her breathing husky. For a moment, Hazel considered asking for the tomahawk pipe. Hazel could make sure that she didn’t kill again. But how many other Henriettas were out there? How many survivors, certain that the only thing that would bring them rest at night was to answer blood with blood? Hazel had seen enough killing.

She left Henrietta in the woods and walked beside Blue Sky Woman into the camp of the Sisseton. There they dug entrenchments alongside the other captives, working with tomahawks and stolen hoes to make deep holes where Paul and the so-called band of “friendlies” could take cover if Little Crow tried to steal the captives back. Her face close to the earth, Hazel went on hearing the sounds of the battle until late afternoon when the artillery went silent. Far off, she heard what sounded like fife music. Infantry. The Long Trader, here at last. But Sibley had not come that day. Ever-cautious, even after he crushed the Dakota at the Battle of Wood Lake, he took his time coming for the 170 or so captives at the Indian camp.

Like the rest of the women, Hazel’s braids were taken out. She cried when they unplaited her hair and washed the sacred paint from her face. They were erasing the memory of him as they did so. Hazel was given a plain green gingham dress, and a slat bonnet. All the captives were dressed in the best clothing the Dakota could find to show that they had been treated well. Inside the bonnet, she felt blind. Only a child again, returning to blinded existence and a world where her voice did not matter.

It took Sibley ten days to come for them at Camp Release, the infantry playing fife music and marching in formation. The new clothing she had been given was infested with fleas and she scratched herself until she bled. The other captives kept clear of her. Henrietta had staggered back to camp and taken charge. Every hour more Indians came to them, hoping to ingratiate themselves and prove they had been friends to the whites all along. The Indians had learned that the color white meant surrender and so everywhere in the camp strips of white canvas fluttered from the tips of teepees. Men tied frayed cotton through their headbands and along the tails of their ponies. All semblance of native pride was banished as they sought mercy. The worst of them, the Indians who had started the killings up north in Acton, the reluctant leaders like Little Crow, escaped out onto the prairies. True friends like Blue Sky Woman, Spider Woman, and Tamaha stayed in the camp, uncertain of their fates.

Even the soldiers kept clear of the captives after they arrived, as if they might have been infected by their close association with Indians. Hazel was not certain of time, had lost all perception of days, weeks, months. She woke nauseous each morning, felt the world spinning around her, and could not keep her breakfast down. No blood stained the petticoats she had been given, though she was certain the time for her monthly had come and gone. She began to hope.

On the eleventh day, Caleb found her. His wheat-blond hair had darkened in a single month. She was at the edge of the encampment, looking not in the direction of home, but toward the great western oceans of grassland. She was touching the flat of her stomach, her hands smoothing the cloth down, before she felt his eyes on her. She turned, a name rising in her throat. It was not the name she had been hoping to speak, and he knew that, too. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her; his features were set into a hard mask, the light brown eyes drained of emotion.

“They told me where to find you,” he said. He hesitated before approaching her. Had she been violated? He didn’t know if he was afraid for her, or of her and the knowledge she might carry. “Is it true that you married one of them?”

She had not stopped caressing the flat of her stomach. Instinctively, Caleb knew why. He tore her hand away. “Look at me,” he said. “Don’t you want to know about the others?”

“Oh, Caleb.” She wrapped him in her arms, felt him shrinking from her. But she would not let go and eventually the rigid muscles along his back and arms softened. He raised his hands, allowing himself to hold her too.

“Kate won’t let you keep it when she finds out. Those herbs that Cassie’s mother knows about. It’s not for her midwifery that women came to her.” As he said this he realized that Cassie’s mother was likely dead for they had not found her after she ran away. And the names of all the dead rose up inside him. Would he ever see Daniel or Ruth again? What news did Hazel have of Asa? An entire town, he wanted to tell her, Milford, gone as though it never was. Liza and Traveler’s home. The Stoltens. Herr Driebel. And our own dead and wounded. Matthew. Noles. He must tell her about Noles. About what happened with the wine.
Why?
He wanted to ask her that.
Why are we two alive and they are not?
When he found his voice again, he told her about Kate. “She sleeps at night on her stomach because of the suppurating sores in her backside. Every morning the flesh spits out a new hunk of buckshot. She’s living with Cassie and a few others in a canvas tent on our property.” He went on speaking, patting her back, his voice hoarse. “I’ll build over the old place. I’ll try to make things like it was before. But she won’t let you keep it, so don’t get attached to what you’re carrying inside you.”

HEROD’S
JUSTICE

E
VEN THE CHRISTMAS
story found in Matthew, chapter two, failed to bring Hazel peace. She read of Joseph and Mary fleeing to Egypt with baby Jesus, warned by an angel of what was to come. All around Bethlehem, Herod ordered the slaughter of any child under two. He did this because the magi, following a star in the east, told him that a king had been born and Herod was frightened of losing his power. He did it because it was prophesied that Rachel shall weep in Ramah, and not be consoled, for her children were no more. Each time Hazel read this passage, she had to set the Bible down again, unable to read any further, the cries of all those wailing mothers filling up her mind, rising up out of time, rising up even to God.

Ashen sunlight sifted from a high attic window where Hazel sat listening to the brief roar of the crowd, ascending from Mankato public square two blocks below. A cloth bandage coiled around her dark hair to conceal a savage head wound. Now she had seizures; she was epileptic. Locked in this room, she could not see what was happening.

She knew about the gallows—a massive medieval structure built to hold thirty-eight men at one time. A perfect square, a feat of engineering, it was surrounded in concentric rings by rows of soldiers with bayonets. The lines of the soldiers also formed perfect squares, rippling outward, evenly spaced. A few horsemen rode between the rows of men standing at attention. The last row was cavalry, their sabers drawn, the heads of their mounts bobbing in the cold. Flagpoles stood at either end, the flags whipping in an icy wind. All around the men in martial dress were milling crowds, thousands of white onlookers dressed in greatcoats and cloaks and Sunday finery. Clouds of their breath rose to the slate-colored sky. Except for the horses clattering over the stones, the wind quickening the flags, it was a picture of absolute stillness.

She could not see any of this, and yet her mind was filled with images. Hearing the warriors singing their death songs, she imagined them mounting the gallows. Only later would she see a picture of this in
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, and understand how much courage it took for the thirty-eight to keep singing their death songs, known to them as songs of terror, even as the soldiers dishonored them by hooding their faces with white cloths so that the men dropped to their deaths shamed and blinded. Hearing the drumbeat, she thought back to that first night lying out under the stars when Otter came to warn them. When the drum rolls ended, a man whose own family had been killed at Lake Shetek, William Duley, cut the ropes, and the planks opened. The roar of the crowd caused even the high window of her room to shudder. Hazel felt it inside her, a brief lurch that dropped her to her knees. Their roaring stopped as quickly as it began, the crowd now stricken by the spectacle of so many bodies dangling before them in a keening wind.

Hazel rocked back and forth on her knees, holding her belly, willing a prayer to travel to the child inside her.
Do not fear
, she prayed.
There is yet a place for you. I will not let them harm you.

Already a winter’s worth of snow lay between her and the surviving members of her family out on the prairie west of New Ulm, their homestead just past where the town of Milford once stood. Four more months would pass before the ice broke on the Minnesota River and her stepmother bought steamboat passage to come for her. The day of the hanging Hazel wished for her father, Jakob Senger of the
Bohmer-wald
, for one of his dark stories, the
Marchen
, that carried them to the edge of destruction but did not leave them orphaned there. She did not know that he was already dead, shot through the throat while crossing Miller’s cornfield at Antietam on September 17, half a world away. If he were there he would have kissed the center of her forehead and whispered some tale from his childhood land, perhaps of the god Woden who carried two ravens on his shoulder, Hunin and Munin, understanding and memory. Each morning he released the birds into the world and waited for the news they brought. When she was a child her father would heft her onto his broad shoulder, a dizzying height near the nest of his dark beard. “Hazel,” he would say, “You are my raven.” The ground spread out below her while he spoke those words. “I will send you out, but you must always return.”

Noah, too, had his ravens and they failed him as surely as she had failed her father, forgetting to think of him during her own summer trials, forgetting to name him in her prayers. Sometimes she pictured herself like one of those birds circling and circling the dark sea below. Jakob’s
nacht vogel
, night birds, the ones who fluttered down to the blind soldier tied to the gallows and spoke of healing rain, of a world where he was still needed. Birds of prophecy in the old stories.

Hazel did not take the laudanum the doctor’s wife, Ida, brought for her each night and morning. Each evening her wrists were tied to the bedstead with loose cloth sashes to still her nightly thrashing. Hazel would stretch forth her tongue so Ida could deposit the bitter liquid there. While Ida tied her she held the opiate tincture within her mouth and did not swallow. When she was left alone, she spit it out onto the wooden planks beneath the bed. She did not wish to lose hold of her memory, her sense of being, and let her body become a poison well for the baby inside. Ida was a small wrenlike woman with light brown hair. She came and went from the attic room in which Hazel was held with the swishing of a long, black silk dress with a worn silver chatelaine that clinked at her waist while she worked.

Morning appeared in the triangle-shaped window, the sun plaiting into a single focused beam of light that touched the girl where she lay in bed. Ida unlatched the door and brought her usual breakfast of salt-rising bread, a single boiled egg, and a glass of sarsaparilla to cleanse her corrupted blood.

“Good morning,” she said, her breath pluming in the cold of the room as she settled the tray on the nightstand without looking at the girl. She touched a chill hand to Hazel’s forehead and then scrutinized her wrists for bruising. “Open,” she said, while deftly hooking her fingers into the girl’s mouth to check for blood. Satisfied that no fit or delirium had come upon her during the night, she untied the cloth sashes and fed Hazel laudanum. Hazel rubbed her wrists, still yellow from past bruising, until the pain lessened and circulation was restored. While Ida turned aside, Hazel hoisted her cotton chemise and crouched low over the bedpan, her long black hair fanning down before her eyes while she spit out the black opiate she had held under her tongue and let it mix with the rising steam of her urine.

If there was blood, Dr. Kolar was summoned for further examination. Only two patients were boarding at this house, she and a gravel-voiced man named George who lived below her. Each morning she woke to the sound of him hacking gobs of phlegm into a bedpan by his side. Each of them was here because of Dr. Kolar, a specialist in mental disorders and paralysis, who paid house calls by day in a black carriage decorated with advertisements for cure-all elixirs. Kate had sent Hazel here at the behest of Dr. Weschke of New Ulm.

Dr. Kolar questioned her in a toneless voice, his gray eyes dreamy and distant. He had long, delicate fingers which felt like the extension of something cold and metallic as they prodded the tender places of her body. He was very concerned with Hazel’s menstrual patterns prior to the pregnancy and her amorous experiences with Wanikiya in late summer, both of which he believed responsible for the nervous condition she suffered from.

When Ida latched the door behind her, Hazel was left to roam the small attic room. The furnishings were Spartan: one rush-bottomed chair in the corner, a rope-spring bed that sagged in the middle and was topped with a straw tic, and a nightstand of light oak. Hazel was not to be trusted with tallow candles or a lamp. The roof was low and slanting and she had to crouch while dragging the chair into the shaft of light lacing through the window. She passed her days reading the Psalms in the King James Bible and writing in a journal on mornings when the ink had not frozen in the inkwell. When she was first brought here, Ida washed her hair in kerosene to kill the lice. Still on some days, Hazel felt a phantom itching beneath the bandage on her head. A restlessness there, like a persistent memory rising to the surface.

Her head wound did not come from the war. The last time she had seen Wanikiya was early November when the army transferred the Dakota prisoners from the walled enclosure at the Lower Agency to Camp Lincoln. Weeks had passed without rain and the land was drained of color, the earth cracking as the river narrowed to a thin artery. The wind painted the leafless trees and dry bluestem grasses pale brown with soil as fine as talcum powder.

The procession passed through New Ulm on the way, raising a cloud of dust Hazel saw from their homestead. The billowing cloud gave birth to soldiers in soiled blue uniforms, autumn sunlight flashing on brass buttons and Sharps rifles, marching in step, while their Indian prisoners huddled low, shackled, in creaking mule-driven carts. From the hill above Goosetown, this procession seemed to stretch in the shape of a vast blue-brown serpent winding a half mile through the river valley. There were no drums or bugles, the only sound the tread of boots, a mule braying here or there, the groan of the wagon axles.

She came down the hill as fast as she could, hoping for a glimpse of Wanikiya. She wanted to touch her hand to that single lock of silver in his hair, have him turn to regard her with his dark eyes and understand her condition—for him to know that she was determined to obtain his release. They had not allowed her to speak at his trial, before the five-man commission charged with separating the guilty from the innocent. Hen-rietta had been there at the tent door, elegant in a blue delaine dress, a queen presiding over these ceremonies. The woman hooked one of her large hands under Hazel’s throat, saying to the others, “This is the one I told you about. The traitor.” Hazel had fled. She carried a child after all. She was torn between the guilt she felt over what her family endured, renewed with each hateful glance Kate cast toward her swelling stomach, and her desire to still be with the Dakota, with her husband, a prisoner like him. She was no longer certain who her people were.

That day she had run, but she wouldn’t run anymore. Hazel would not let him die; she had promised to protect him if he turned himself in. She hobbled from cart to cart, but the Indians kept their heads low, and she did not recognize a single familiar face. She had given up hope when his cart trundled past. His head was bowed and the two feathers were gone from his headdress. She was out of breath and could not have cried his name even if she wanted to. Her attention was so fixed on him, willing his head to lift and look at her, that she did not see the mob until they were upon them.

The crowd parted the veil of dust the procession raised. They came fresh from reburying their own loved ones. At the head of the mob, Hazel saw Henrietta leading a phalanx of women in dark dresses. They came armed with brickbats and stones which they hurled at the shackled Dakota. The cart drivers hollered and lashed their mules in a desperate attempt to push forward. “Hah! Giddup!” they called. Low, bellowing moans erupted from the frustrated beasts, a sound lost in the high wailing of the descending mob. The soldiers ducked the rain of missiles and advanced with their rifles held out like fenceposts in a futile attempt to restrain the crowd. This mob, women mostly, chests heaving beneath the armor of steel corsets, their wide skirts jouncing over whalebone hoops, surged past the soldiers as though they were a line of scarecrows, a blank unseeing light in their eyes, mouths contorting as they howled and threw stones. A mustached colonel cantered past Hazel on a panicked sorrel, the horse’s nostrils flaring in fright, yellow teeth gritted around a foam-lathered bit. He drew his saber and shouted orders while the horse tried to retreat. “Affix bayonets!” His voice came out reedy and thin amid the clamor. “Fix your bayonets!”

Hazel tasted the grit of the dust billowing around her. She smelled the sweat of the mules and the sour fear rising from dark places in men and women. She could hear the keening cries as stones whistled past. A cart overturned in front of her and spilled prisoners in a heap. The mob fell upon them and a screaming child was raised above their heads and then dashed upon the ground. Its mother, bleeding from her scalp, arms shackled but held aloft, pleaded,
“Me chonk she, me chonk she!”

Wanikiya’s cart was lost to her sight. Across the roadway she spotted Henrietta at the same moment as the woman saw her. Henrietta stood beside a girl in pretty French braids, a small girl screaming while she threw pebbles and debris at the Indians. Hazel’s eyes fixed on the girl, frightened for her, thinking she might be crushed beneath the hooves of a maddened mule. No more than six years old, the child was snarling like the rest of them while she threw what her tiny fists could hold. Too late Hazel looked back to Henrietta, saw the woman heave a brickbat, all her strength behind the throw. The last thing she remembered was her own arms rising up, far too slowly, as the missile struck her forehead.

A light tap came at the door. Hazel heard someone fumbling with the latch outside and knew it was Leah again. The door opened and Leah, with one last gaze down the stairs to make sure her mother had not heard her, stepped into the room. She regarded Hazel impishly with her strange mismatched eyes, one dark green, the other a copper penny. Her hair was pinned on top of her head in a style Leah called “cat,” and her large pointed ears jutted below the intricate braids. Hazel raised a hand in greeting and then made the sign for
cold
, both hands bent close to her body and shivering. Leah mimicked her perfectly and then settled her hands on the frame of the whalebone hoops beneath the skirt. Leah understood that Hazel no longer spoke out loud, and so when she was with her she did not speak either.