Night Birds, The (33 page)

Hazel ducked inside and waited for her eyes to adjust. The teepee, shadowed and dim, reeked of cedar smoke, rotting wounds, and urine. On the other side of the room, reclining against a woven backrest, was the oldest Indian Hazel had ever seen. Her first impression was of a grotesque. The old man had iron-gray braids and the folds of his skin were so deep it looked as though his face had been carved by an ax. His umber throat flesh swung like turkey wattles when he turned to observe her. His black eyes were small and glittering, partly hooded by puffy eyelids. He wore a headpiece of buffalo horns and around his throat a shining gold medal with an eagle on it. His breechclout was fringed and beaded, and other than a dirty blanket twisted around his waist, it was the only thing he wore.

She was sweating in the smoky teepee, the memory of yesterday still swirling within her. The old man inspected her, his eyes surveying the dark necklace of bruises on her throat before he looked away. He raised one hand, the fingernails so long and yellow they curved like claws, and pointed to another backrest. Blue Sky Woman lit a tomahawk pipe, one edge a blade, the head a bowl for kinnikinnick, and smoked from it ceremonially before passing it to him.

No expression darkened his features as Blue Sky Woman knelt at his side and peeled away the blanket, yellowed by the man’s pus and blood. Hazel smelled the festering wound. She watched while Blue Sky Woman knelt, chanting under her breath, and pressed her mouth to his leg, making a sucking sound as she drew out things with her teeth and spit them into a wooden bowl: a shred of shrapnel, a fragment of sapwood, human skin. The old man shut his eyes, his breathing measured and calm while he smoked the pipe. Blue Sky Woman swirled around the things she had drawn out of his leg wound, chanting once more, her lips dark with fluid, before casting it into the smoky fire.

The old man continued to smoke silently. His eyes closed as he exhaled through his nostrils, his breath occasionally wheezing. Minutes passed while he drowsed and Hazel waited, not knowing who this was or why she had been brought here. He did not seem to be in any hurry to punish her for her crimes. She waited for him to question her, for sentence to be pronounced. Her palms felt clammy and she could smell her own sweat.

From the lodge poles hung the scalps of his enemies, the scalplocks decorated with feathers, roached forelocks, and designs Hazel had never seen: Pottawatomie she guessed, Winnebago, Chippewa, Sac. His bow and accouterments of war were suspended from another pole.

The old man set the pipe aside and began to weep, but Blue Sky Woman did not seem concerned. The old man wept until his voice went hoarse, an old Dakota custom to show that he had a true heart, and then he wiped his long nose on his arm and began to speak. “Daughter of Blue Sky Woman,” he said. “I am called Tamaha. My heart is weary from this war I did not ask for. I have fought on the side of the long knives ever since I was a boy, in the battle by the big waters when we fought the red-dressed ones from Grandmother’s country.”

He paused. Now his eyes were dry. Was he speaking about the war of 1812? She looked with new respect on this wizened man before her. She was sure he meant the British; it was said many Dakota had fought on their side. Hazel looked at the gold medal on his chest. She realized that Blue Sky Woman had brought her to a friend.

“But now my people’s hearts have hardened against the Ameri-cans,” he continued. “The traders and agents they send speak with forked tongues. They are not like Taliaferro or Clark, who spoke with true hearts. And so the young ones have gone to war and made much suffering in the valleys even though there are those who spoke against it. I have seen the great villages of the Ameri-cans. The young braves are not making a war, but their own death song. Like wolves who fight the grizzly for a scrap of meat, they will make a few scratches before they are ended. So I have spoken.”

“
Ukana
,” said Blue Sky Woman.
Grandfather.
“This girl has nothing to do with these things.”

“Yes,” he said, waving her away with his long yellow fingernails. “I know who she is.”

While Tamaha was speaking a man shuffled past outside, throwing his shadow against the teepee. He was dragging a wounded leg and Hazel was filled with the sudden fear that he was Pretty Singer, risen from the river. But she’d seen the torn flesh along his throat. Tamaha was smoking his tomahawk pipe in the dimness. “I have heard what you did for the boy. Would you do the same for me?”

A healing. That was what she had been brought for. After the summer she had healed Wanikiya, other Dakota had come to their cabin, men with abscessed teeth, squaws unable to conceive. Hazel had prayed over all of them in her own tongue and they went away again. But each passing month fewer and fewer had come. “No,” she told Tamaha. “It will not work for you.”

The old man coughed. “You are afraid of yourself,” he said. “That is what Hanyokeyah told me.” Hanyokeyah, their first friend, who had disappeared in the summertime after relations went bad between her family and the Indians. They had never heard what happened to him. “Come here,” Tamaha bid. “The eyes of my head no longer see as far as the eyes of my heart.”

Hazel did as he asked. He smelled of the sweet herb he smoked and his rotting wound. Her knees sank into the mounds of buffalo robes. Tamaha reached out one palsied, umber hand and felt along her face and throat and Hazel steeled herself to keep from flinching when he touched her bruises. “Who hurt you?” he asked.

“Nobody,” she lied.

“You speak Dakota well,” he said, his hands to falling away.

“Yes.”

“You know how we do
wowinape
?”

Tamaha turned to Blue Sky Woman. “She is old enough, yes?”

“Yes, she is of the age.”

The glittering dark eyes turned back on her. His hands were trembling. Hazel was stricken with revulsion, thinking the old man meant that she should marry him. He must be a hundred years old, she thought. She shivered to think of those callused hands touching her again. “I will not marry you,” she said.

This made him laugh. “It is not for myself I ask. My days beneath the blanket are done. I see clearly what has happened to you, woman. Do you understand that captivity is bad both for captor and captive?” These words were so similar in Dakota that only later at night was Hazel able to realize what he had said. “The other braves will not harm you if you belong to one. Is there not one of us who your heart speaks for?” Hazel mumbled a word.

“Who?” Tamaha asked again.

And she said his name once more, her throat thick, her mind turning back to the press of him as he held her in the teepee, as he had held her so long ago in the cave where they’d sheltered from the storm. Wanikiya, brother of the man she had killed at the river. Blue Sky Woman’s kin. The killer of her stepbrother.

The old man laughed again. “It is fitting,” he said. “The child beloved and an Ameri-can.”

Blue Sky Woman took Hazel back to the teepee and undid her braids. “Will you run away?” the woman asked. “Are you hurt in any other way?”

Hazel shook her head. “You do not look well, daughter,” the woman said. Hazel wanted only to sleep and put this day behind her. And yet there was a nervous fluttering in her stomach, fingers of excitement tapping up and down her spine. Wasn’t this what she had wanted all along? To be free to love the boy whom she had healed so long ago. Her mind spun. Something else struck her, too. The other captives would learn of the marriage ceremony. They would despise her and call her a traitor. What would happen when was reunited with her own father and stepmother? If they were still among the living. And then there was Wanikiya. Did he still want her? Would he, if he knew what she had done?

In her dream that night Tatanyandowan pressed her against the shore. He traced his fingertips along her abdomen, speaking her name, Winona. He called her “wife,” promising not to harm her. He promised to be a good husband, to care for the children they would make together.

Lies
, she told him.
All lies.
She brought the awl from the sash, watching its slow swing. As it traveled through the air, Tatanyandowan’s face shifted to become Wanikiya’s.
No
, he cried as he saw the hook coming for his throat.
Stop.
But it was too late. The awl struck his throat and he stumbled backward.

Why?
his eyes asked. He was slipping away from her, the river rising all around them.
Why have you done this to me?

KINGDOM TOWNSHIP
1876

THE NEW
COUNTRY

I
DIDN’T SLEEP
well for the week because sometimes Aunt Hazel moaned softly in her sleep and the pain in her cry went right through me. Somehow I thought if I stayed awake, keeping vigil, I could make sure that another fit didn’t come on and steal her away from me. I wondered if in her visions she ever traveled back in time to that summer of terror. After the sores on her tongue went away, she had started into her story once more. The words spilled out of her, as though she were afraid something might happen to her before she could finish. The more I heard the more I understood my parent’s reluctance to speak on these matters.

Past midnight my mother carried up a cup of tea that she bid Hazel drink. Hazel blinked sleep out of her eyes, sat up in bed, and let my mother tip some of it down her throat. Hazel’s reaction was both instant and violent. She swatted the cup away, spilling dark fluid across the floorboards. Then she spat out the liquid to the floor, making horrible retching sounds. Mother backed away. I went to Hazel and stood by her bedside. When she was done spitting out the last of it, she leaned back against her pillow. “No laudanum, Cassie,” she said. “I can’t abide opiates.”

Mother held the cup against her. “I thought it would help,” she said. “I thought you’d be grateful.”

Hazel’s voice was so soft I had to lean close to hear her. “To dream the dreams of Lethe. The dark river of forgetting.”

Mother drank down what remained of her own tea. “Suit yourself,” she said. “I’m going back to bed. Asa, maybe you should keep your distance. Leave her to rest.”

“Why?” I said. “She doesn’t have consumption. I can’t catch anything from being near.”

Mother chewed on her lower lip. “I’m not so sure. They have reasons for keeping people apart from those who get sick like her. Leastaways, put out that tallow before you start more fires.” Mother shook her head and climbed down the loft ladder, muttering darkly about betrayals. I heard the creak of her bedroom door swinging shut a moment later.

Hazel lay in the half dark, her eyelashes fluttering. “Asa,” she said, shutting her eyes, “You need to sleep too.”

“Sure,” I said, as I released a big yawn. Hazel’s breathing deepened as she descended into sleep. I didn’t go back to bed like I’d promised, however. Instead, I gathered up my things in a pillowcase, including a rusty pocketknife I’d found once in an abandoned cabin, my canteen, and some Lucifer matches. I made for the loft trapdoor, creeping on my tiptoes.

Hazel’s quiet voice stopped me in my tracks. It was as if she knew all along what I was intending. “Asa,” she said, calling me over. She held up the embroidered doeskin bag. “I want to give this to you,” she said. “It’s yours rightfully.” She managed a wan smile. I bent my head and she slipped the leather cord around my neck so that the doeskin pouch touched my chest. I wondered if Hazel thought there might still be some magic in it. I tried to take it off, but she shook her head. “You don’t give back a gift. Anyhow, I said it was yours.”

I hadn’t known what I intended until I was next to her. I leaned in and kissed her in the center of her forehead. A shiver passed over her. She grabbed hold of my hand and squeezed and then held it close to her cheek which was warm and damp with tears.
“Tachunkwashta,”
she said. “That means ‘I hope you find the good road.’”

With my mother fast under the spell of the laudanum, I didn’t have any trouble finding the last of the thirteen silver coins under her jar of sarsaparilla, coins meant originally for our long-forgotten ginseng enterprise. I took them, hoping that I could buy bromide with what remained. Aunt Hazel had said you couldn’t get any from a catalogue, but I knew Mankato was a big river town. It was fifty miles from here. A hundred miles there and back. Mankato, where they hanged the thirty-eight Dakota warriors four months before I was born. Mankato, where surely they would have the healing medicine for Hazel. If not there, then I could go across the river to St. Peter and beg more medicine from that doctor who had been fond of Hazel. I only had to follow the Waraju River down to New Ulm and the Minnesota River. Maybe from there I could catch a boat or a steamer.

Dawn came with red clouds that meant rain and I was glad I had swiped my pa’s old oilskin slicker as I passed through the barn. The only other thing I had grabbed was my three-headed prong to fish for bullheads in the shallows. I had enough bread to last me through a day.

The world was soaked with gray light, mist rising from the pale brown river. I moved through it half asleep on my feet. From the marshlands I heard whippoorwills calling and thought of a huddle of children driven out in the dark, listening.
Oh-you’re-kilt, Oh-you’re-kilt.
I knew hearing it that the past was no longer the past. I had crossed over as I walked through this mist-hung morning and I was moving into a new country, a place of bad men and violence, a place my parents had hidden from me but that had been there all along. I had to keep walking, tired as I was, much as I wanted to curl up beneath one of those trees and sleep until the sun burned away the mist and gray and chill. I was afraid that something terrible might happen to Hazel if I tarried in my journey. I had resolved to stay away from the main road that crossed the flat prairie and instead stick to the bends and twists of the old Indian trail beside the river. It would take longer, but I was less likely to get caught.

The Waraju River had carved a shallow canyon through the prairie and I walked on the upper ridge, floating above the trees, miles of shapeless prairie surrounding me. My mother would find the coins missing soon after waking. She could smell a theft and would know her own future laudanum supply was in danger. But she would also wake with a headache that only her opiates could soothe and I knew she wouldn’t search for me for long. I walked past the stump where my grandmother had trapped herself in a living tomb, past the town rising on its humpbacked hill, past what was once a cornfield that my namesake and my aunts and uncles had fled through to escape men seeking to kill them.

Such thoughts whirled inside me when I heard the husky cough of a man moving toward me on the trail. I felt all sorts of illogical fears. My mother had somehow sent out men after me. Or this man might be a warrior from the past, painted in ghoulish colors. I made for the trees, wanting to get out of his way. Even if he was just an ordinary man, he might report what he saw in town and maybe my mother would hear of it and convince men to search for me.

I lay down in the dew-wet grass and watched the man pass. He wore a chambray shirt and carried a haversack. His hat was pulled low to hide his features and he lurched down the path as though sleepwalking. Then he seemed to smell something in the mist and raised his head and I saw his features clear for the first time, that familiar hawklike nose, those dark searching eyes. My heart began to thump in my chest. Caleb, my papa. I almost cried his name aloud I was so happy to see him. Papa would know what to do about Hazel. Papa would have money earned in the North. But for some reason, maybe the memory of the scalp dream, or perhaps because of my own tiredness, I just lay there. His eyes passed over me and then he pulled his hat low and continued on into the morning.

I waited for my cowardly rabbit-heart to slow and then climbed out of my hiding place. Why had I not greeted him? As I walked following the river to New Ulm, I understood the real reason: I hadn’t done anything good in my lifetime. In one summer I had released an Indian from prison, robbed my mother, burned a treasured book, and allowed hatred to be directed at Hazel while doing and saying nothing. If I had greeted my Papa he would have made me return home with him. He might not have agreed about the bromide. He might decide to send Hazel back to St. Peter. No, this was something I had to do alone. As I walked I was conscious of the faint pressure of the doeskin bag against my chest. It belonged to a man who was a stranger to me. Within lay owl’s down and stones said to find the lost and to prophesy. I didn’t feel like a boy who had been awake all night with a fifty mile journey ahead of him. I felt as though I carried a lodestone close to my heart and it was pulling me north.

Midafternoon I came to a place where the trail dipped down into a hollow to reveal a small tallgrass meadow left alone by the locusts. Such spared places were charmed, the way a survivor was charmed. I lay down in the wet grass and as the wind came through the bluestem I thought of Hazel’s nightmare in Missouri:
If only men knew what I knew
, wasn’t that what the wind in the grass had whispered? I ate some of the salt rising bread, chewing slowly to stretch the meal out.

Then, I shut my eyes, meaning only to rest for a few minutes with my head pillowed by the grass. As my mind drifted, I thought of the Indian belief that everything was alive. From dust to the stars, it was all connected. Locusts, crows, thorns, and hemlock. Butterflies, meadowlarks, strawberries, and sweet grass. I held up the things of night and the things of sunlight, weaving together words in a whispery incantation. Why had God made the world knowing all the time it would fall? And even as I thought of all that was poison and peril, my head growing heavier as sleep descended on me, I also wondered why God allowed such sweetness into a world we were called to leave behind.

I woke disoriented, sometime near sunset, my head throbbing. Moments later I realized part of that throbbing was the drumming approach of a fast-moving horse. A rider came pounding down the trail on a skinny dun, raising a cloud of dust behind him. Other than my papa he was the only one I had seen the entire day. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and swung around and brought his old mare trotting back. I thought of running, but knew that would make me look suspicious. I was a stranger here but I could pretend I was just over from the next farm. His mare foamed at the mouth and its great black eyes bulged in its sockets. The man’s hat was behind him as he leaned forward in his saddle to address me. “You boy,” he called, half out of breath. “Is this the old road to Kingdom?”

“I think so,” I said, “Just keep heading south a ways.”

He caught his breath. “You heard the news? I don’t think a boy like you should be abroad on the prairies by his lonesome.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s in all the papers by now. Happened two days ago, the whole damn countryside is afire with the story. The James-Younger gang tried to rob a bank in Northfield. There were eight of them, must have figured us Yankees had gone soft. But nobody in town turned tail. Some of the men knocked out windows from hotel rooms to shoot at the gang with Henry repeaters and shotguns. Bloodiest firefight we seen since the Indian Uprising.” He paused again for breath. “Would you have any water?”

I gave him my canteen, the whole time thinking:
Eight men, my Lord those must be the very ones who we put up in our stable that night. No wonder they had laughed at my Missouri stories. That was Jesse James who asked about my papa being a lawman. I had been face to face with killers.

The man took a good long swig and didn’t notice how pale I’d gone when he handed back the canteen. “What carnage,” he continued. “Inside the bank, a teller refused to open the vault and one of the gang blasted out his brains across the desk. Outside it was blood and bullets. Two of the outlaws were shot so many times they hardly looked human. But the rest of the gang got away on their horses. They’re running scared back toward Missouri. Word is a few of them are wounded bad.”

The man’s horse sagged beneath him and tried to crop some grass. He pulled her up by the reins. “I’ve stayed long enough. Say boy, you should be heading home. There’s no telling where those men are now. The only thing we know for sure is they were headed in our direction.” He tipped his hat and without a goodbye spurred his horse on down the road.

As twilight descended I kept close to the river. I managed to spear two large crawdads in the shallows. Dusk came and I stood in a woodland stripped by the locusts. I gathered dead wood, but hesitated before making a fire. Anyone might be out here in the woods with me. But my stomach grumbled and I wanted something with my bread. I used the pronged spear for a post and lashed the other end of the oilskin slicker to a tree to make a small tent. A soft rain fell after dark and I huddled near my smoking fire and strained my ears, listening. A night hawk keened and swept out over the river and then it was quiet again. I should have been tired after the sleepless night before, but my long nap had done some good. There was too much going on in the world for a boy to sleep. When the hawk keened once more farther off I realized how alone I was and how vulnerable. To keep my mind from fear, I crouched near the fire and mulled over Hazel’s story. It had taken her days to get it out and I still puzzled over the meaning of it all. I watched the dancing fire and thought of the end of things, letting my imagination settle back into the stream of her story. I figured that escaped outlaws would make a thunderous amount of noise moving through woodlands at great speed. I escaped such fears by letting my mind settle back into a story I had longed all my life to hear.