Night Birds, The (19 page)

“Sleepy?” she asked.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

Back in the loft, we crawled beneath our separate blankets. I wanted to ask her about the men, about why she was afraid of me talking to them. I rolled over to speak, felt my head against the sweet coolness of the pillow. I was asleep before the question ever left my mouth.

It was noon by the time I woke up and Jordan Jackson and his men were long gone. They left no note and no trace that they had ever been in the barn.

With so much of our grain gone, for the next few days, I walked to a small wood-encircled lot the locusts had left alone to cut hay for our draft horse, Moses. Swinging the heavy scythe in the sun allowed me to forget about those men, how I had embarrassed myself before them. Haying in the heat took muscle and endurance. It made me feel strong. That rare summer storm having passed, puddles evaporated and a July sun turned the earth tawny and boneyard brittle once more. Nights I drifted off and dreamed of the men. Their horses were black with eyes of fire. We were pounding over a wet road at full speed and I had to cling to the man in front of me. Hail sliced into my skin. I shouted at them,
Where have you taken me? Why did you choose me?
The wind swallowed up my voice. I only knew in the dream that we were running away and that we’d done something terrible and I was just as guilty as they.

One night as we got ready for bed I got up the courage to ask Aunt Hazel about her story again. “My father,” I said. “You don’t talk about him much.” When she didn’t say anything, I rushed on. “I wish I could see
The Book of Wonders
,” I told her. “I could teach myself the country spells inside there and then I wouldn’t be ordinary anymore.”

“You’re far from ordinary,” Hazel said, laughing. Then she paused. “Is it true that Caleb keeps scalps in his jail?”

I wondered how long she’d been listening while I talked to the men. I nodded. Though I had been bragging to those men about it, in truth the scalps made my skin prickle.

“Will you show me them?” She didn’t look into my eyes. Her hand smoothed over the quilt on her bed. I wondered why she would want to see something so terrible. But I agreed to show her what she wanted to see.

She patted the bed and I sat down. “I could tell you about all of us as we were then, if I only had those journals my pa made us keep our first summer. He was worried about us turning wild, you see. But those journals and Pa’s book were lost in the fire.”

MILFORD PRAIRIE
1859

THE
PARABLE OF
THE SOWER

JAKOB
M AY 12, 1859

S
PRING RAINS ARRIVE
nearly every night and wash down through the holes in the shingles to pelt the children while they sleep. The rain pings in the copper pots we set on the floor and soaks into our blankets. Rain and sun and wind: I feel this country stripping away what we once were. In the sunlit mornings we stretch the blankets out on the prairie grass to dry.

Along with the iron plow I bought in Milford, I have carried back these blank journals and a book by a man named Thoreau for myself and the children. What we will become frightens me. As the boys cut wood for the worm fence they are building to keep the stock out of our fields, they catch glimpses of the Indian boys running in the woods. Leaf children, Hazel calls them. I can see the bitterness in Asa and Caleb’s face as they hack at the forest and drag up heavy limbs. How they long for such freedom yet there is so much work to be done. I tell them those boys are like the grasshopper of Aesop’s fable. They play now and will not be ready for winter. I tell them whatever I can to keep them working, even as I wonder. Who is wiser after all? We who plant more than our family needs for the sake of commerce? Or they who take what nature provides? Who has greater faith?

This is what we’ve lost: two mothers. One printing press. One milch cow. Clean summer clothing. Ordinary life, predictability. I am afraid the children have lost faith in me.

This is what we’ve gained: a daughter who speaks, two milking goats, four laying hens, four oxen, friends beyond the river.

Hazel neatly folded away her winter petticoats and the bonnet that should keep her skin like milk. She braids her hair Indian-style down either side. Her skin turns coppery in the sun. The boys strip off their shirts. Asa burns and freckles. Caleb’s skin is a deep golden brown and there is golden hair on his mouth and chin and his eyebrows have darkened. Darkening. They are turning wild, my children, after only a season in this territory.

And so the journals. The days before I sent my children to Kate’s school seem a long time ago. Then the only lessons they had were practiced in my printing shop. I taught all three of my own children to read, taught them what mathematics they needed to sell the papers in the streets. I can teach them all they need to know once again. We have the Grimm brother’s fairy tales from which they can learn German. We have the book by Thoreau and a Bible.

I read them a section of Thoreau each night and ask them to respond in kind. Tonight I read to them this passage: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt?”

Their response was immediate. “I don’t like wolves,” said Daniel.

“No, not me either,” I told the boy.

“Pa, that man wouldn’t build a worm fence. He wouldn’t have any oxen to break up the fields.” Caleb, never much for academics, had seized upon a key point. In fact, I regretted somewhat reading this Thoreau, since he would disapprove of much of our present enterprise. Lacking a suitable response, I bid Caleb to set down his thoughts in his journal, which he did with a sour expression marring his facial features.

Each night, when we come home weary from the fields, after the table is cleared and the dishes washed, we write. A lantern smokes with whale oil. The heat in the cabin is stifling. I pick passages out of the books we have left and order them to copy down the words, hoping the wisdom will sink in. Five goosequill pens dip dripping into the inkwell and stain the pages. Daniel often draws instead. Caleb yawns, writes slowly. Against the ocean of grass and the span of sky, we have these journals. If we stop writing and reading, stop planning for the winter, strip off our pasts the way we have stripped off clothing, what will we become then?

JAKOB
M
AY 19, 1859

My furrows are the most crooked in the county. They wind through the rich black fields like twisting rivers. The prairies grasses have roots that reach deep beneath the earth. Despite the great force of the two oxen it is hitched to, my iron plow comes to a stop. I strike stones and skip to the side; the soil opens in a furrow like a dark skin, underneath this network of root and earthworm. I had to seat Daniel on the hatch to get the blade to bite deeper. His skin burned away in layers until I gave him one of my hats. Now he rides the plow, eating dust the oxen kick up, bumping over stones and thick roots until his teeth chatter in his skull.

It took an entire week just to break four acres. This is what we sowed: King Phillip corn, four kernels per hole in the ground. Durham wheat. Potatoes cut into eyes. Garden squash and pumpkins to keep out weeds. We sowed when the moon was waning, which is how
The Book of Wonders
promises we will get a good crop.

“So, we are told,” I read them from
Walden
, “the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man?”

Such questions ring through me. Our farm is at a point where shallow sandbars gleam now that the spring melt has receded. Every morning the Indians come down to the river to bathe. Women stoop to fill skin bags which they carry on their backs, the weight balanced by a buffalo strap around their foreheads.

Twice an old woman with a spotted white dog has herded a group of children across to dance for us. They stamped their feet slowly in the dirt, one boy singing in a high pretty tone. When they finished they waited with outstretched hands and we were made to understand that we should pay them for the entertainment. One night the men came back from their war party in the north. The flames of their bonfires leapt higher. All night the beating of the drums throbbed in the dark and made sleep difficult. My mind was filled with the images of fiends dancing around a fire.

For the most part, I do not fear them. There is one who wears cobalt face paint and three feathers in his hair. The right side of his face is deformed by some injury, the ear shredded. If I see him at the river or in our woods, he pauses to study me, making low sounds in his throat. I feel that I know him from some previous encounter and the thought chills me. When our eyes meet, I stand my ground. This act does not grow out of courage, however. I stand my ground, because my blood has gone cold and I can’t move.

The old man with the copper armbands comes some nights with the young boy and a half-breed girl who is the daughter of the medicine woman that healed us, Blue Sky Woman. I sit and smoke with him out on the porch, a smudge fire burning nearby to keep off the mosquitoes. He has asked me to teach this boy and girl to read “the tracks in books” and so I assigned Hazel, thinking she would enjoy the task. In return the boy teaches us sign language and words in his own tongue. I have been across the river to see the gardens their women plant, simple circular gar- dens of beans and squash that are raised above the ground. They build slender scaffolds of lashed willows nearby where the boys keep watch for blackbirds. Such economy, I am certain, would meet Thoreau’s approval, and yet I am told in town these people are dying out.

When I asked him if he was chief, the old man nodded. “I lead the people until one greater than me comes along. We are a small band. It is not how you think, the missionaries not understand. Sometimes the people listen to me. Sometimes not.” I could only nod at the answer. Cryptic as it was, he seemed unwilling to say anything further. I surmised that his people are less like a kingdom, more like a large, bickering family presided over by an uncertain patriarch. Though he does not speak of the past I gather that the Wahpekutes were once greater than they are now.

The girl’s mother, Blue Sky Woman, sometimes accompanies the old man too. She sewed me a set of moccasins which fit my feet like a second soft skin. Turtles were beaded into the upper lip and when I asked her what the animals meant, she lowered her eyes. I like the look of her, in truth. She is not so stoop-backed as some of the hags you see about their camp. She has a strong nose, black, shining eyes, and a sense of fierceness behind her quiet manners.

HAZEL
M
AY 20, 1859

Papa told us to keep these journals so we wouldn’t forget our learning. After dinner each night he reads us short passage from
Walden
, which I find I like very much. Afterwards he bids us to write. We are told to set down whatever comes into our brains. Tonight he read: “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. . . . Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.”

I am positive Kate would shriek if she could see me now. I tend the goats, named Pifpaf and Clever Elsie by Daniel, and milking takes talent. I have to stand over the top of them and pinion their bony ribs between my legs while I reach down from behind, my face pressed close to the flickering tail, and squeeze the udders. Any other method and the goats shoot forward and overturn the bucket. I am sure there is a better way no one has taught me. Each goat can fill a bucket by itself. By the time I am done I reek of goat hair and souring milk and the excrement-laced mud I step in while holding onto the beasts. The goats have lively, intelligent eyes. Pifpaf stalks after Daniel in the yard waiting for an opportune moment to skewer the wary boy with her horns. Once Papa took after her with a board she gave up that particular pastime, but sometimes she lifts her head while munching the grass and you can see a glint in her eyes, a wicked squinting, while she plots against her blond enemy. Pifpaf will also get into the wild onions if I don’t watch her, and turn her milk into sour vinegar.

Papa is not very good about his own journal. Raw sores opened up in his hands from clinging to the plow all day. I soaked his hands in liniment and bound them in gauze. I was afraid to pray out loud over them. I was afraid the prayer wouldn’t work. Each day he goes out and reopens the wounds in his hands. All at once he looks old to me. There is gray hair in his temples, crow’s feet around his eyes. I don’t remember seeing those before.

Each night I sit between Winona and Wanikiya while Papa smokes out on the porch with Hanyokeyah. For an hour each night we work on the alphabet and I show them words. The boy has such serious eyes. The lantern catches the russet color of his skin, the lock of silver in his hair. Thoreau says we are like birds in our season of crisis, shedding feathers to grow into something else. For this boy I would gladly shed my apron and grow new clothing that would capture his attention. Is that so terrible? When he teaches me the sign language, sometimes he touches my hand and my fingers tingle along the places where our skin is joined. It seems a long time since that night he lay bleeding on our floor.
Boy run fast
, I can say in sign.
Why not here
?

So far, their education goes slowly due to the exasperating presence of my brothers. I taught them the 23rd Psalm. Caleb teaches them dirty words in English in case “their honor is insulted.” I taught them both the Lord’s Prayer. Caleb taught them a boast that begins with the words: “You yellow-bellied, lily-livered, clod-pated, son of Jehosophat . . .” Asa loves to play on his fiddle and sing for Winona. A captive audience. She has learned some of the words and sings along with him.

Afterwards, when they have recrossed the river, Asa will go on about the thinness of her shirt, how the girl is not even aware of what she reveals when she leans over and her blouse falls open. “A pretty sight,” he says, “for a prairie nigger.” I hate such talk and told him so, but he only sneered and said I was jealous because I didn’t have any.

The next day I let Pifpaf into the onions. After milking her and letting the milk sit a good long while in the sun, I gave Asa the first taste of it when he came in thirsty from the fields. He drank down the entire mug full in that greedy way of his. Oh, how green his gills turned when he realized the milk was sour; he rushed outside and vomited in the grass. He was down on his knees, gripping the bluestem by the roots. I stood over him. “Those sounds are prettier than the things you said last night,” I said when he was done with his misery.

DANIEL
J
UNE 4, 1859

A boy has many enemies. Pa gave me and Matthew copper pots to bang to chase blackbirds out of the corn and wheat. Matthew is no fun. I tried to show him how to clap the pots together and yell like a injun. He just stands there. I had to do all the work by my lonesome. I ran. I howled and made noise to scare them out of the fields. But there were birds and more birds. They went over and landed by Matthew and ate the wheat right next to him. I told him we wouldn’t get any bread on account of the birds ate it all. But he just smiled and let out some drool. Pifpaf did something funny. I showed her the pan and said I would knock her to Missouri if she hooked me with her horns, but she wasn’t interested. Her and Clever Elsie went into the tallgrass where I couldn’t see them. I was nervous because that is where the wolves are, but Hazel told me to watch them good, so I followed.