Night Birds, The (6 page)

Making the galleys was all about space and order, whether she was printing recipes for winter hotch-potch or poetry. With her hands she brought meaning and harmony into a world where sometimes these things seemed not to exist. She saw that there were patterns in a person’s life that were not discernible until the experience was over. She possessed clever hands, but she didn’t always understand the articles she printed. When a slave was tied to a tree and burned alive in the woods after being accused of “touching” a white girl, her hands set the type for the story without pictures forming in her mind. All sorts of terrible things were told of during these years.

When the abolitionist John Brown and his sons used swords in Pot-tawatomie Creek, Kansas, to chop four pro-slavery men to pieces, her hands set the type without registering the import. Whether Kansas would become a free or slaveholding state would be decided by the incoming settlers according to the Missouri Compromise. Radicals from both sides flooded the state. Bands of border militia rode from Missouri to harass and burn out free-soil settlers. Senator Atchinson vowed to drive the abolitionists and “horse-thieves” into Hades and carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean. Abolitionists smuggled boxes of breech-loading Sharps Rifles for the war sure to come.

The girl’s hand passed over all these stories, and didn’t fathom how deeply their import would one day affect her family. Her father’s paper remained neutral for now. The only stories the girl read with understanding were the ones Jakob invented along with fanciful woodcuts he drew late at night to accompany them: There was the cat-woman seen in St. Louis; the witch of Clove Tree Hollows; a naked man-child that ran with wolves in the hills bordering Boonville.

In the afternoon he hitched the brood mare to the phaeton and set out to find and interview soothsayers. The brood mare was a fine roan named Cinnamon. As soon as the horse felt the harness in place and Jakob half-seated in the phaeton, it took off like a pack of wolves were on its tail. They shot through the narrow limestone streets, the girl clinging tight to Daniel, her brother Caleb whooping with joy. Their iron-sheathed wheels bounced and clattered over the stones. All her pa could do was hold tight to the reins. Every day the horse took off like this and barreled straight out of town for a good mile, the phaeton tossing and bobbing behind like a child’s forgotten bauble, before the roan became winded and slowed to a more respectable trot—high-stepping fully lathered through a roadway canopied by dark spreading oak trees. Pa said the roan was just spirited, but it frightened Hazel. It also frightened Frau Volsmann, who begged Jakob to leave the baby with her. Caleb took up with a group of town boys and began staying behind, so that Hazel often rode alone with her father through the
hexenwald
.

Only once did one of those country healers touch her: a midwife who lived near the ferryman in Boonville and who was said to stop the flow of blood with only her hands and a verse from Ezekiel. That night she greeted Jakob and the daughter wearing a light-blue dress of linsey-woolsey worn through to transparency and showing the pendulous swing of her breasts beneath the material. She had nut-brown hair, the bangs uneven, as though shorn with a knife. She had a child, but no husband.

On this still night the air was close and heated in her shanty. The girl smelled the melting tallow of the candles that burned along the edge of the wall, a sick, sweet odor of animal fat burning. The healer kept a hearth and a floor of packed dirt with a single handwoven strip of carpet. She had gray eyes and pale, elegant hands. When the child began to cry she pulled down the left corner of her dress and suckled it in front of them. The healer smiled when Jakob turned away. “Fetch me some of that yarrow that grows in the truck garden,” she told him. “And then I’ll show you what I know.”

The father left without asking how she knew he would be able to tell yarrow from mustard flowers in the dusk. The walls of her dwelling were tissue-thin. Night air seeped in around them. Something in the woman’s eyes bid the girl to stay and not follow her father outdoors. The baby made loud, sucking noises. Beyond the shanty the girl heard the sound of the wide dark river eating away the shore. Then the healer came toward her and she went stock still. The woman touched her under the chin and forced Hazel to look up into her eyes. Her hand was warm, close to the pulse in the girl’s throat. She saw a pale mirror of herself reflected in the woman’s gray eyes. She saw this and knew the woman would follow after her and haunt her in some way. The healer’s voice was husky when she spoke again. “You walk in the dark,” she said. “I see it. While kith and kin sleep, you walk abroad. Be careful you know the way home again, child.”

The healer taught her something else before her father shouldered back into the room with yarrow clenched in his fist, something the girl would only dare try years later when a boy lay bleeding to death on a puncheon floor.

The schoolteacher, a widow named Kate Moriah, took an interest in Jakob’s children. Kate was the daughter of Josiah Kelton, a slave-owner from Virginia who owned the salt mines, sawmill, and four hundred acres of good bottomland where he grew fat hemp forests to make rope and twine. Mainly Kate was concerned that Jakob’s children were being allowed to run free instead of being kept captive in a hot, one-room schoolhouse—captivity being a natural state necessary for both children and “darkies.”

Kate came into his office one summer afternoon, after the schoolbell had sounded and the limestone cobbles rang with clatter of bootheels and squealing children released for a few precious hours before they had to start evening chores. She frowned at the black-haired girl whose face was smudged with ink as she set type. The man before her was half a foot shorter than Kate, with hairy forearms and thick limbs. Dark locks of his hair fell in his eyes while he worked the press, the iron clacking down with a sound like an angry mouth. He was comely in a certain way, a small black bear.

Kate coughed politely. She wore a brown-checked gingham dress with leg of mutton sleeves. Her auburn hair was pinned up in an elegant coiffure. Her cheeks looked flushed or sunburned, but really this was just her temper rising, for after several coughs the man still kept his back to her. Finally, the girl went and tugged on his apron and only then did he take notice. In fact, he stepped back and caught his breath and the color rose in his own cheeks. He had only seen this woman from afar before this moment and admired her. “Ma’am?” he said. He bowed in an old-world fashion. His own grandpapa had been a serf in Bohemia. “How may I be of service?”

“I’ve come about your children,” said Kate, fanning herself with one of the newspapers. She leaned against the hellbox table and the girl noted with satisfaction that one of the woman’s leg of mutton sleeves was smudged by the slag type. “You are aware that county laws stipulate that these children should attend school?” Kate did not mention that the county laws also forbade a once-widowed woman with children of her own from teaching.

Jakob smiled and wiped his hands on his greased apron. “I did not know this,” he said, exaggerating for her sake the Germanic lilt of his English. It was sometimes useful to play the dumb foreigner, though more often than not Jakob spoke in a precise, deliberate manner. He was known for his stories, in print or otherwise. “You see, these children are vital to my enterprises. They learn both reading and arithmetic through their everyday efforts. I provide all they need.”

“Don’t be insulted,” said Kate, “but having perused this publication and seen the many grammatical offenses and wild flights of fancy it contains, I doubt their education is sufficient.”

To Kate and the girl’s surprise, Jakob’s smile only broadened. He stepped closer to the woman and his nostrils flared. Kate’s eyes shone in return. A look passed between the adults that disturbed the girl. In the woman’s fine auburn hair and high cheekbones she was reminded of the brood mare. A handsome thing from afar, if it ever broke free from the traces it would keep running roughshod over everything beneath its hooves and never look back. Hazel had expected her father to put up a better fight than this. “Perhaps we can make some arrangement,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I . . . feel a bit faint just now. It is ever so hot in here. Might you have some refreshment?” The woman looked anything but faint to the girl. Her eyes were blue with flecks of gold in them, and right now they were fastened to her father.

“Certainly,” Jakob said. “Allow me a moment to clean up and I will meet you next door at Burton’s. Frau Volsmann makes the finest ginger soda. It will cure whatever ails you. Then we can discuss these arrangements in more detail.”

“That will be acceptable,” said Kate and she walked out of the shop, her whalebone hoopskirt and bustle so wide she barely fit through the door.

Jakob watched the vacant doorway a few moments after she went through it. “My,” he said. “That’s some woman.” Maybe he figured a woman like that wouldn’t get sick like his frail, willowy Emma had and leave him alone with children. For the first time ever Hazel regretted her vow of silence after her mother’s death. Not that it would have mattered, for her father forgot she existed during the next three months as he courted Mrs. Kate Moriah and took her on long “sparking” rides in the phaeton and read her poetry, his own and others.

Hazel fought this in her own quiet way. As a new pupil in the schoolhouse, she wrote down charms on foolscap paper and sold them to her classmates for a penny a piece. The charms contained a rhyming ditty and instructions for making a potion with the fingernails of their intended. The girls need only get the poor fellow to drink this concoction, made with his own soiled clippings, and he would be theirs forever. When it didn’t work and the boys continued to ignore them in favor of throwing dirt clods at one another and suchlike, the girls demanded their pennies back. Still without speaking, Hazel refused, even after one of the girls’ mothers wrote a vehement letter to Mrs. Moriah.

When this failed to perturb the teacher, Hazel took to setting aside her
McGuffey Reader
and writing long, morbid stories about a woman with “russet hair” who seduced men to follow her out into the woods where she stole their soul like a
seelenrauber
. She wrote another story about a tall woman “built like a roan” who suffered a series of unfortunate accidents before meeting her untimely demise by falling into the churning scupper of a sawmill. She left the stories near her slate board for Mrs. Moriah to find.

The next day Mrs. Moriah asked her to stay after school. Hazel sat at her desk with her eyes downcast and waited for the woman to commit outrages upon her person which she could run to tell her father about. “I won’t deny that you have a certain imagination and knack for description,” Mrs. Moriah told her, “but these stories won’t do at all. For one thing, I find them to be wholly predictable and ordinary in every circumstance. Like your father’s newspaper, you misunderstand the nature of your reader. A good story defies the reader’s expectations, and in doing so, brings them satisfaction. Do you hear how contrary that sounds? There isn’t anything so contrary as the human heart.” She gave Hazel a copy of Hawthorne’s
The Blithedale Romance
and when she finished that she gave her Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales
, and then a new book, Hazel’s favorite, by a man named Melville.

If they didn’t become friends exactly, through literature they reached a truce. Hazel saw what Kate meant about contrariness when the woman’s father returned from overwintering in St. Louis. They journeyed out to his great stone manse through the bowered lane of elm trees and ate dinner that night and Jakob told Josiah Kelton that he wished to marry his daughter.

Over seventy years old, Josiah had a lean, bladed face and white Quaker-style beard. His skin was chapped and ruddy, the mark of years of fieldwork. One finger lightly traced the gold chain of a new watch tucked in his pocket. These fine clothes fit him well, the same dark suit he had worn to his wife’s funeral this past winter, but he still seemed restless in them as though the wool chafed his skin. His left cheek swelled with a wad of tobacco, which he chewed with the determination of an old bull. His ruddy face reddened further at Jakob’s request. “You really want this?” he asked his daughter and Kate only nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her previous husband had been a carpenter who had drowned along with several other passengers when a ferry overturned in the flooding Missouri River. Without knowing the reason, she married beneath herself each time for the sake of angering her father.

Then Hazel saw two black children come in, twins around seven years old, with eyes the color of ice just like the old man. They helped a slave woman named Lula serve them a dinner of brisket and collard greens. Hazel saw how Kate pretended not to notice when Josiah’s hand lingered on Lula’s and saw how she pretended not to see the two children with haunting blue eyes. Kate’s whole life was a study in contrariness. She despised her father and yet was beholden to him.

Jakob and Kate were married that spring and moved into the house that Kate’s first husband had built, a two-room cabin with finely doweled joists and a neat overlay of walnut siding that just happened to be on Josiah Kelton’s land, past his brick slave cabins on the north side of a cow pasture and tucked into the lee of a hill. Some nights, when Kate grew bored with Jakob, she reminded him that her first husband had possessed more practical skills.