Night Birds, The (41 page)

After Jesse stitched the wound shut, I wept for my own cowardice. “I wish you would go ahead and shoot me,” I said. “You probably will anyway.” Red-hot embers pulsed like hearts in the remains of the fire. The storm had lifted and there were stars between the shredded clouds. I lay on the wet ground near the fire, exhausted.

“No,” Jesse said. “I made a promise. Besides, I like a good story. Imagine what the newspapers will print.”

“No one will ever believe it.”

“No, I suppose not.” Jesse was quiet for awhile. “What were those words you were muttering while you searched for the bullet? That was a fine bit of doctoring for a boy. I couldn’t have done it. You were whispering something about blood. ‘When I saw thee and past thee,’ you said. I didn’t hear the rest. It sounded like witchery.”

“A prayer,” I said. “One from Missouri.”

“Sounded far older than Missouri.”

“I’m just as wicked as you,” I said. I was thinking on the dream I’d had after they left the farm, the feeling that I’d done something terrible. Now these men, if Frank lived, would be free to ride again, to kill again, and I had helped them. What would Hazel say if she saw me now? Would she be ashamed? How could anyone find the good road, when every choice was bad? “You ought to take me with you.”

“No, you don’t belong with us.”

I shivered, cold even by the fire. I drew my knees up to my chest. Jesse’s voice often sounded far away when he spoke. He was watching the east where in a few hours the sun would rise. It’s always coldest right before dawn. “Why do you do what you do?” I asked. “Why did you kill that man in the bank?”

“He got in the way,” Jesse mused. He cast something out into the river, the bullet from his brother’s leg, I guessed. “You know I wasn’t much older than you when the Union militia came into my yard. Frank had joined up with the Raiders and it was him they were after. None of the rest of us had done any wrong, but that didn’t stop them from stringing my stepfather up by a rope and torturing him until he almost breathed his last. He wasn’t right ever after. They damaged him forever. I fell in with Quantrill’s Raiders after that. Been trying to set the world right ever since.”

“By murder?” All of this talk made me weary. I felt chilled to the marrow.

“Yes, I’ve seen and done terrible things. We had a taste of it just a couple of days ago. We aren’t anything before what’s coming. An age of machines. The great plains tribes will fall before the Gatling gun. Wires will whirl a voice across mountains and deserts in a blink. The railroads and steamships will go on reducing ocean and distance into nothing. I stand in the way of such an age. I want to throw a cog into the churning wheels of these machines. Such things will consume us.

“There’s more money out there than I could ever steal. The tracks will cross buffalo country, the herds vanish. And I can’t go back to being what I once was, a boy on a clear morning standing in the knee-high corn while riders approach on the trail. To come up from the fields and not let my heart be turned to hate. I long to ride into the past, but that’s a lost territory. I can’t go back. Now, I suppose, neither can you.”

I never even saw the pistol. He said those words and then he brought the butt of the gun against my skull and I saw a quick imprint of light and then nothing.

EPILOGUE

J
ESSE JAMES DID
what he did so I wouldn’t see the direction they rode off in. Still, it about killed me. He hadn’t needed to tie my hands and feet. The blow to my head left me dizzy and the rain had soaked into my soul. I woke the next morning fast in a fever, my hands bound behind me. He’d taken out my knife and buried it blade up in the soil, a few feet away. I only needed to crawl over and saw away the ropes. Galloping consumption, people called it in town. You could catch it from getting chilled and be dead within a day’s time. I liked the name of it. Galloping spoke of hard journeys and horses crossing vast territories, like the journey Indians said we take after we breathe our last and must find the good road.

But I don’t like what it did to me. I don’t remember sawing away the ropes that bound me. I don’t remember climbing the steep slope up to the trail, dragging the pillowcase behind me. I only remembered waking to find my papa, Caleb, standing over me. He reached inside my shirt and pulled out the doeskin pouch that Hazel had given me. I opened my mouth to tell him about the James gang, everything I had seen or done the last few days. Then I remembered the whole reason that I was out here.

“Aunt Hazel,” I whispered.

Papa said nothing. His eyes seemed to glisten in my feverish vision. “She told me where I might find you,” he said. Then he gave me water and slung me over the saddle of our draft horse and led me home.

I believe I galloped through a whole landscape during my illness. Once I saw a man coming toward me, crossing no-man’s land. Dust devils skirred around him. He was not like the Indian Papa and I had captured earlier that summer. His face was a boy’s face, dark and serious. A lock of silver shone in his hair. He wore the same pouch Aunt Hazel had given to me, and he took out the stones from inside it and loosed them into the sky. They changed shape as they lifted into light, growing dark wings that fanned them out over the prairie. Two crows dipped on a hot breeze and whirled toward me. They swooped so close I felt the touch of their feathers on my cheeks and then they rose into the hot sky and were gone. The countryside that had held a man moments before was empty and I was alone again in a barren place. But I didn’t feel afraid because I knew this barren territory was inside me and I knew I’d be seeing the man again.

Daniel had carried Ruth all the way down the Minnesota River. A sixty mile journey, on foot. A seven-year-old boy carrying a baby. They lived off what the birds left behind, leaves of wild grapevine, hazelnuts, crabapples, and green corn from the unharvested fields. At the end of his journey he didn’t weigh any more than a bag of leaves. His skin was livid with insect bites. He’d walked sixty miles through hostile country, chewing the fruits he found and spitting them into the baby’s mouth. In bustling St. Peter he handed Ruth into the stunned arms of the first woman he found and then sank down on a plank walkway and fell into a coma. His breath grew shallow and then stopped. Kate read about his story in the paper and left to find Ruth in November. A year or so later Kate took Ruth and went back to Missouri. She lives there still. Her father Josiah was killed by vengeful Jayhawkers after the war.

I have often thought of journeying there to see the town where the Sen-gers came from. I have no desire to see Kate, however.

I didn’t make it as far as Daniel. Papa later told me that I had only walked six miles north of Kingdom Township. Had I made it to Mankato, it wouldn’t have mattered. In my absence, my mother had already arranged to have Hazel sent back to St. Peter. I didn’t get the chance to tell her goodbye.

The first day the fever broke, my room felt like the lonesomest place in the world with Hazel gone. I stood holding the doeskin bag in my hand and remembering dimly the vision I had seen. I knew it contained owl’s down and two stones. There would be figures of birds etched into their surface. When I clutched the bag in my palm it felt warm, as if the stones had been heated. I shut my eyes, the way Hazel told me the stone dreamers had. What was it I had lost?

My papa’s voice surprised me. I hadn’t heard him climb up the ladder. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “Your father would want you to have that,” he said.

“What?” I was puzzled.

“That’s the second time I’ve found you in the woods,” he continued. “The first time, you were only a baby. When Kate came back from Mankato after visiting Hazel, she told us the baby and Hazel had both died. I didn’t believe her. I had seen the way she watched Hazel touch the growing mound of her belly. Cassie had already lost our baby and the doctor told her she would never have another. Those two women watched Hazel with murderous eyes. Each had died a little during the war. Then Hazel was wounded in the New Ulm riots and had to be sent to the doctors. I had the feeling I wouldn’t ever see my sister again.

“It was April, in a spring of warm rain. The very day Kate told me Hazel and her baby were dead, I left to see for myself. I had to see my sister once more, or her grave. Halfway past New Ulm I camped in the woods. I had only my bedroll, some jerky to chew on, flint and puck to start a fire. A family came along in a Conestoga wagon. Settlers moving in to take the place of those who had died. The mother held up a child, dark as a prairie nigger, saying some Indian must have left it as they fled the army. The baby had been bundled in a blanket and placed in a crate that was left in the woods. I begged them for the child and they were glad to give it up since they had too many mouths already to feed. You see I knew who the child was, this swaddled boy with a crow’s dark hair. My knack for finding things had worked once more. I recognized the crate the child had been left in. It was an old wine crate, one that I had kept to remind me of Birch Coulee. One meant for a wedding. You were inside it. You, the baby who Kate had left either to die or to be rescued by someone happening along. You. Hazel’s boy.”

Light filters through a stained glass window at an old stone church named for St. Joseph. The window was paid for by Indian children picking berries and selling them in town. Within the stained glass you see lambs lying in the tallgrass, the picture dedicated to the memory of all those children who never made it to this place. I sometimes wonder what the Indians must think of the lambs, for they have never seen such a creature on the reservation. I do not know if lambs would fare well drinking from the alkaline streams above Sisseton, but I have often been surprised in this life. I am told the man who founded this church, Bishop Whipple, was called Straight Tongue by the Dakota. It is said they sang him into the ground with Christian hymns in their own language. Like the saints of old he was entombed beneath the altar.

I am called Tun-kan-wan-ya-kapi, after my grandfather, Seeing Stone, by those who still wear-the-blanket and follow old traditions in the privacy of their homes. I have kept the medicine bundle, though so many have cast their own into the fire to appease the missionaries. Like my mother, I am Christian, but it would feel wrong to destroy something sacred to my ancestors. Nothing I read in the Good Book calls for such a sacrifice; the God I serve is not half so jealous. Like my mother, I also have a knack for healing, though there is nothing magical in the doctor’s bag that I carry from home to home, the crude, square sod houses the Dakota have come to inhabit. There are things inside this bag she would not recognize: the stethoscope made of metal and rubber, the bottle of synthesized aspirin. She would not recognize me either, for I have let my hair grow out, and wear it in two braids, one down either side.

The Sisseton Reservation is a hard country of wind and bitter salt streams. Even the cattle are thin. Before the turn of this century, many Dakota followed a chief named Good Thunder back to Minnesota where they bought land around Birch Coulee with long overdue money from the government.

I pass through Yellow Medicine country every year when I travel to St. Peter, bumping over dusty roads in a Model T. I pass the new Dakota settlements in the river valley. I pass through a country she came through as a captive, follow a river my uncle Daniel followed in his own flight.

Kingdom Township is not along my way. I lived with Caleb and Cassie until I went off to school. I remember one particular afternoon when Caleb and I took the scalps from his jail out onto the plains and made a bonfire. He wept when we burned them and told me these were all that were left of a band of Winnebago that had been luckless enough to pass through the territory after the uprising. There is no smell worse than smoke from burning skin. It is the smell of hatred. The smoke from the fire obscured the sun. Then we walked away from the remains, Caleb leaning on my shoulder. My uncle, who saved me. He went on going to church, refusing communion. But there were always tears in his eyes when he was done praying. And I like to think he found some forgiveness there, even without blood or bread. As for Cassie, she and I were never close, before or after.

Jesse James was killed by Bob Ford in 1882. I can’t speak to the legends that grew up around the man, except to say that there was a charm about Jesse that made you like him, even though he might kill you. His brother Frank turned himself in to the Missouri governor, was acquitted, and went on to live a long life hosting a Wild West show with the former outlaw and partner Cole Younger.

Today, in April of 1908, my own son Jakob White Bear Senger rides besides me in the motor car. He is ten years old. His head tilts back to watch the screel of dust following us in a low cloud. We pass farmers driving teams of draft horses through wet black fields, harrowing the ground with loud metal machines in preparation for the planting. Jakob is a quiet child. His mother, Cloud Woman, gave him his high cheekbones and shining black eyes. The German measles nearly carried him away last winter and he has come through a long season of sickness with a new reckoning of this world.

We pass through canopies of ancient burr oak forests, the tree limbs gnarled and tangled above us, through light which dapples the roadway. When I halt on a high place overlooking the St. Peter Hospital, at first the boy does not follow me into the graveyard. He has fallen asleep with his face against the window, so I quietly remove the gardening trowel and small shovel I have brought with which to tend grave number 121, the small fist of granite that marks where she went to rest. It’s a hot spring afternoon, the kind of humid day that will crack open the seeds in their hard shells, causing them to reach up through the dark soil toward light.

A year’s time is enough for the weeds to collect and obscure the stone. Sometimes, I don’t know whether I come here out of habit or to do penance. That same winter Hazel returned to St. Peter in 1876, she contracted tuberculosis from another patient. Three years later, on my way to Carleton College to begin my studies, I found a nurse who remembered her. She told me Hazel was often seen holding the sick patient’s hand, kneeling by her bedside and praying with her. The other patient survived the winter; Hazel did not. I had been angry at her before I came and heard this story. She had responded to none of my letters that told her how much I longed to see her again, how unbearable my life seemed without her. In April of 1877, when Governor Pillsbury exhorted Minnesotans to fast for four days and pray for release from the locust scourges, Hazel was already gone. She was not there to feel the late frost that stole down from the north, killing the larvae where they waited in their furrows, turning them into so much dust. She was not there to know that she had spoken truly.

I wonder when I am here if she would be satisfied with the life I lead now, tending to the Dakota that she longed to return to. I have become fluent, as she once was, in their tongue. I am regarded as
tioysape
, a medicine healer. Usually when I am here I hold long conversations at her headstone. I tell her about the book I am writing that records stories the blanket-Indians tell me during long winters. I tell her about my wife and my son. I tell her that I have begun to try and remake the book of her stories I accidentally burned that summer. Page by page, I am bringing the book back. This is what you hold in your hands now.

“Papa?” a voice calls behind me.

I turn toward my boy, seeing his winter-pale skin. “Where are we?”

I point down toward the hospital where there is smoke rising from the chimneys of white buildings and from the stovepipes of the tin shacks along the ravines outside it. Like a citadel unto itself, she once told me.