Night Birds, The (34 page)
Authors: Thomas Maltman
O
TTER BROUGHT NEWS
of the failed second attack at New Ulm the day before. The warriors had returned with a single captive: a boy with sunlit hair. Otter watched Hazel warily, his hands behind his back, as though she might attack him at any moment. “Soon we will leave for the Yellow Medicine country where the Sisseton live,” he told her. “They will most likely kill you, especially since you bite like a dog.”
He had a mouth harp given to him by some warrior, what Hazel’s father would call a Jew’s harp. He plucked at the twanging metal and danced a mocking jig around the teepee, overturning a pot of quills in the process.
Blue Sky Woman set down her pipe, crying “Puck-A-Chee!” as she chased him out of the teepee. Otter grinned openly, backing away. He glanced once toward Hazel. “Wanikiya looks for his brother,” he said to her. “He is not in his teepee.” With these words, he ducked under the teopa and was gone.
Hazel went outside in search of the new captive. A blond boy, Otter had said. Maybe her Daniel had come? Cicadas churred in the hot tree- shadows. There was no wind this afternoon, only a glaring white heat as Hazel moved toward voices on the other side of a hill. She paused near a grove of red sumac and looked down into the gathering below.
The Indians had taken the captive child to a meadow of short razor grass. At first Hazel was disappointed the boy was not Daniel; his hair was too dark and he was older. The captive had been stripped of his clothing and stood pale as a gosling in the sun, his hands sheltering his privates. Like many other farm children, his neck and arms were a dark red color from repeated sunburning, and the rest of him moon-pale. His skin looked striped in the glaring light. His eyes searched the crowd for help as he tread carefully on the razor grass under his feet.
The Indians had surrounded him with children of their own. While the adults, both men and women, stood in an outer circle, boys and girls picked up sharp rocks. Then the boys began to hurl their stones. Hazel cried aloud and covered her mouth with her hands. Otter was with the others, his mouth harp swinging by the cord from his neck. One stone struck the boy in the head and dropped him to his knees. He knelt there and touched the wound on his forehead and when he took the hand away a squib of blood leaked down his cheek.
Blood changed the game. The children quit laughing. They found larger stones and hefted them. Boys shouted their war cries as they rushed toward the child and hurled the rocks as hard as they could. Welts and wounds opened on the boy’s shining skin. Each time a rock dropped him to his knees, he climbed back to his feet. And though the adults had to urge them on at the beginning, once blood was spilled, the children didn’t hesitate. Otter picked up a stone like all the rest.
Hazel’s stomach churned. When she tried to back away she ran straight up against a solid wall of flesh. Henrietta had come up behind her. The woman clamped her hands onto Hazel’s shoulders. “Why aren’t you down there with the other savages?” she said. Hazel tried to pull away, but Hen-rietta dug her nails in harder. “Stay,” she said. “This is what your kind does.”
Hazel stopped resisting. Henrietta wouldn’t allow her to leave. The blond boy climbed to his feet more slowly. His entire skin was slick with blood. At this distance, the stones didn’t make a sound. There were only the cries of the shouting children, an almost tangible hum spreading through the air.
Once the boy looked in their direction. His eyes lingered on the two of them, a woman and a girl, both obviously white. Behind her, Hazel heard Henrietta’s voice catch. “Oh child,” she said. His mouth made a small O shape; Hazel could guess the word he cried.
Mother.
And though he was not Henrietta’s child, Hazel knew the woman behind her was reliving the death of her own. Henrietta dropped to her knees, weeping. Hazel was free to leave now, but couldn’t. Transfixed, she watched until the end, when one of the children picked up a large, melon-sized rock and heaved it at the captive. The rock struck with an audible crack, a sickening sound she heard all the way up on the hill. The blond boy fell to the ground, dead. The adults melted away. For a while, children continued to pelt his shattered body.
Hazel left Henrietta sobbing in the grass, her face glazed with tears and snot. She went down the hill. She didn’t know why, but she felt bidden. The boy had looked into her eyes and she had not raised a hand to stop what was happening. She had looked on, helpless, while he was killed.
The boy was surrounded by stones and pebbles, his legs splayed out. His face no longer looked human. One cheek had been crushed; his nose clung to his skull by a single shred of glistening cartilage. His eyes continued to stare back at Hazel, their color already fading, while sunlight beat down on his blood-splotched skin. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw crows descending to watch from the red sumac. The birds looked glossy and fat, so heavy that thin branches of the sumac bent under their weight, and Hazel wondered how they had arrived so soon.
A moment later Henrietta stood beside her, looking down on the fallen child. She was red-eyed from crying. “First the birds and then the wolves. I had to leave my own out in the sun like this. Oh God. Nothing to cover them.”
“We can’t bury him,” Hazel said, thinking of her own dead, guilty that she had felt relieved the boy was not Daniel. She remembered Asa and wondered when he would be found and if the ashes, falling like snow, had hidden his body. “But we could put him up in those trees,” she said, recalling Asa’s strange request their first winter here.
With fragments of their own clothes and spit from their mouths they tried to clean his torso. Mostly the blood smeared and pinked on his skin. It was matted in his hair. Henrietta shut his eyes and then, grunting, lifted the child in her arms. They left him in the boughs of a low burr oak and chased off the crows with stones. They paused below the tree. Henrietta tried to pray but the words got stuck in her throat. “Lord, we ask . . .” And finally. “I can’t anymore.”
Hazel spoke for both of them, remembering a prayer her mother had taught her. “Our Father, who art . . .” She paused. She couldn’t say the word father without choking up. She didn’t know if she was crying for the boy or the things the prayer reminded her of. When had she last remembered to pray?
Henrietta picked up where she left off and they finished the prayer together
“Thank you for that,” Henrietta said.
Dark was falling. They walked back to camp side-by-side, Hazel dwarfed by the large German woman. The dogs milled at the outskirts of the camp and a few of them slouched out to sniff them. Henrietta smacked them away with her large meaty hands. At the edge of camp they parted ways. “I will remember this day,” Henrietta said. “I will see every one of them burn for it.”
“Not all of them,” Hazel said. Only a small group from the camp had been involved in the stoning.
Henrietta took her by the arm. “All of them,” she said. From the hill above, Blue Sky Woman called for Winona. Hazel flinched. There was quavering note of fear in the woman’s voice. She must have heard what had happened to the captive child. Hazel twisted away from Henrietta. “All of them,” Henrietta called after her. “Even you, if you get in the way.”
That night her thoughts turned toward her brother Daniel and her baby sister Ruth. Daniel’s features blurred into those of the boy she had seen killed. Ruth appeared newborn, still bloody with afterbirth. The images scared her and to stop them she began to weave a story around the children. For some reason it seemed to her that they would live as long as they lived inside her mind. The moment she stopped imagining the story, they would die.
That evening she imagined her brother and the baby as she lay across from Blue Sky Woman. The night wind moving through the camp smelled of cinnamon and cloves, an impossible aroma in this valley. It gathered strength as it channeled down the open river, passing the charred hulls of the agency buildings, the dead in their half-mown fields. A ghost wind that smelled of baking cinnamon. Some heard voices in it. Hazel heard Asa reciting the letter her Pa had written from Chickahominy River. Wanikiya, turning over in his sleep, heard his brother Tatanyandowan singing of the tree-dweller. Blue Sky Woman heard Winona bidding her keep this girl safe. Across the encampment the wind picked up intensity and tore down teepee after teepee as though the voices of all of the dead were contained within it and bent on vengeance. Then the wind rose to the starry darkness and the great open mouth of heaven.
Hazel woke that morning with her throat parched. She felt the buffalo skin flapping against her; the teepee poles had blown down in the dark. Their fire was already ashes. The two women had snuggled together during the windstorm in the early dawn hours.
Hazel felt tired and stiff as she surveyed the wreckage. All across the camp, teepees had been blown over and captives and Indians had taken shelter under wagons and trees. The wind was still sibilant in the grasses, passing over in gusts that Hazel felt swish through the broadcloth of her skirt. She stretched and yawned and then helped Blue Sky Woman collect their belongings. Today was the day of the journey. They were going to Yellow Medicine Country and, despite Otter’s dire predictions, Hazel found she looked forward to it. She couldn’t wait to leave this valley where she’d seen and done terrible things.
Despite the two defeats at Fort Ridgely and two at New Ulm, despite the strange night wind and their morning stiffness, the air rippled with excitement. Barking dogs ran among the fallen teepees. Everywhere people moved in the tallgrass and prepared for their journey.
Blue Sky Woman sent Hazel down to the river to gather water. On the way back, the strap tight around her head, she was surrounded by boys with stones. A tall, lean boy flung one that struck her in the shoulder and dropped her to her knees. Others raised their arms. As a few pebbles skittered past her, Hazel threw off the headstrap and splashed the contents of the skin container on the boy who had hurled the rock. “Shame on you!” she shouted at the others in Dakota. “I am
tioysape
. I am the wife of Wanikiya. When he returns he will punish you. He will tear your braids out by the roots!”
It was an empty threat, but the children shrank from her. Hazel picked up the handful of pebbles they had thrown and hurled them back, all the time shouting and calling them dogs and mice. The children scattered before her anger. She was breathing hard, her face hot and red. Another shadow appeared on the hill above and she looked up into the sun, her arm cocked back and ready to throw.
“Wife?” said the voice in Dakota. Wanikiya’s voice. Hazel let the stone drop. He must not have heard yet. This was not the way she envisioned him finding out what Tamaha had said. With what dignity she could muster, she gathered the spilled container and headstrap and walked past him.
Wanikiya stepped aside to let her pass, watching her with curious eyes.
Many images troubled Hazel during the Dakota’s long flight into Yellow Medicine Country. The first was of a white-spotted dog that lay in the crushed grass near Pretty Singer’s fallen teepee. Long ago, when they had first come among the Dakota, Hazel had seen this old hound nuzzling Tatanyandowan’s hand. The dog’s ears were lowered; it showed no signs of joining the train. The rest of the encampment had been bundled up, ready for the journey. The canvas fluttered white and ghostly in the morning wind, the cedar teepee poles sheared off in some places by the night storm. It was as if the wind had carried him off. Not a trace of Pretty Singer anywhere. None remembered where he had last been seen. He was a headstrong warrior, known to ride off alone, obeying only his own impulses. But his accouterments of battle, his tree-dweller totem—a hag figure sewn with raccoon skin, hoary cottonwood bark and Ojibwe scalps—and other belongings had been left behind.
Blue Sky Woman whispered something to Wanikiya. The boy glanced at Hazel and then back at the remains of the teepee. She waited for the Indians to decide to search the river, to find the body. But it was time for them to go. Pretty Singer had left them once before without explanation and perhaps he had done so again. Only Blue Sky Woman, and now perhaps Wanikiya, guessed at the truth. Only that white-spotted dog, which remained behind while the rest of the camp rode on, seemed to care.
Hazel rode in the back of an ox-cart beside Tamaha, who was somber, fully dressed in his regalia topped off by the cap of buffalo horns that made him look fierce and devilish.
It was rumored that the Long Trader, Colonel Sibley, was coming for them with wagon guns, but the Indians did not hurry. Again the ponies were decked with festive ribbons, the spotted horses neighing with excitement, tails and manes tied with bells that jingled as they pranced among the dust-clouds raised by the bawling oxen. Even some captives couldn’t help smiling at the sight unfolding before them: warriors dressed in their captured booty, wearing women’s bonnets and silken pantaloons tied around their shoulders, streaming behind them like nobleman’s capes. One warrior wore a necklace of gold pocket watches strung around his throat. The cases of the watches had been emptied out, stripped of the innards that once gave them purpose. Boys blew on tin horns and clapped copper pans together and there was a constant ululation, the women trilling victory songs, the sounds rising and falling in waves along the mile-long line of ox-carts, livestock, and riders. Men wore American flags sewn into war shirts, fancied themselves in white-crepe shawls wound like turbans around their heads. They raised such a cloud of dust in the bright morning stillness Hazel was sure they would be seen from miles away. Around them clouds of blackbirds erupted from the burr oak forests and Hazel’s mind was cast back to their first sight of the valley, that snowy day they rode on the steamer to New Ulm, to see only the birds, alive and moving like so many dark leaves.