Night Birds, The (36 page)

They found Matthew partly buried in the vegetable garden. The grave had been unearthed by small animals, feral dogs likely, and the boy’s face was gone. The sight sickened him, but he did not mourn this strange child. Touched by God, Hazel would say, a boy with one foot already in heaven. Caleb hoped his death had been quick. In the turned soil of his makeshift grave Caleb had found one broken, bloody fingernail. “She’s still alive,” he told Noles, knowing who had dug this grave with her bare hands. “My stepmother.”

They had searched in the prairie, found bent tunnels in the bluestem, and bloodstains, turned to rust by days of sun, in the golden grasses. Caleb called his stepmother’s name but there was no answer. In the garden there had been more signs of her, carrots uprooted, a woman’s large bootprints crossing and recrossing the furrows. “She may have been alive once,” Noles agreed. “But she was wounded bad if she’s the one who made them tunnels.”

They had reburied Matthew and afterward Caleb knelt beside the grave. When it became clear that Caleb wasn’t going to speak, Noles cleared his throat and then began to sing some somber Welsh tune in his gravelly voice:

To all, life thou givest, to both great and small;

In all life thou livest, the true life of all;

We blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree,

And wither and perish, but naught changeth thee.

Afterward it was silent. Nothing remained of the cabin but a burned husk, the timbers fallen into the root cellar. Caleb lowered himself into the mess, casting aside heavy charred logs. Noles, standing over the gaping hole, called down to him. “Leave it, lad. You’ll not find anything worth our lives. It’s time for us to head back.”

He searched at first for bones, thinking that some of his brothers might have been burned alive here. Underneath a scattering of blackened shingles, he found the crate of wine intended for his and Cassie’s wedding. The ashes were thick in his lungs. Sweat stung his eyes. When he moved aside the shingles and wood, it was all there, bottles packed carefully in hay. Caleb dusted one off and held it up in the light, the wine ruby-red in the sun.

“Glory!” cried Noles. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were after?”

Caleb coughed again and before he knew it he was weeping. The tears carved channels in his grimed, sooty face. He held the bottle, cool glass against his chest, and knelt beside the crate. His weeping was convulsive and cleared the ashes from his lungs, even as it dropped him to his knees. He was ashamed to be caught like this, the first time he could remember crying since the war began. And it was not the finding of his dead stepbrother, the bodies lying in the fields, or the condition of his fiancée, still in the fort’s hospital two weeks later, that churned his insides. It was the wine and everything it stood for. The wine intended for his wedding. All of that life, lost now. For this he allowed himself a moment of self-pity and he wept until he felt Noles’s hands in his hair and then the two raised the crate of wine and loaded it onto the mule.

It was the first of September and night was coming on. The whippoorwills that had haunted the children’s imaginations one month before had already fled south to escape the coming cold. The two men walked beside the lumbering mule hearing the clink of the bottles in the crate. As they came through the tallgrasses they did not see a woman’s hand, the fingernails shredded from digging, raise itself above the grass. Kate had been crawling across the prairie ever since she’d heard Caleb call her name, waking her from a near-death stupor. She called after him now, her voice so hoarse that it carried only a little distance. Only the searing pain in her back—where a scattering of buckshot still burrowed under a layer of weeping skin—told her that she was still alive.

Caleb paused once to listen. A feral dog howled out on the prairie. Her voice had just strength enough to make him wonder what he was hearing and pause for a few seconds. Then he continued on beside Noles who was talking again about God’s will. Neither of them turned back to see the hand, just above the tip of the bluestem, waving to call them back.

Wanikiya brought her plums from the forest, the fruit past its prime but still satisfying. They ate the plums together in the teepee after a dinner of roasted corn and beef braised over the fire. When the juice spilled down her chin, Hazel’s mind turned back to the night the uprising began and Asa coming from the river with his strange warning. She wiped her face with a cloth and looked across the fire at Wanikiya. They had spoken very little that night. The other warriors had ridden out, one contingent with Little Crow heading for the Big Woods, another following Gray Cloud, hoping to gather more plunder in towns further down the river. But he was still here and she was afraid to ask him why. He must have seen how she was looking at him, because he stopped eating, letting his half-chewed plum roll into the fire. He settled against his backrest and studied her.

“You did not go?” she said at last.

He shook his head.

“Why?”

He thought for a long time before speaking. She had always liked that about him, the careful way he considered his words. “There is nothing brave in what they do,” he said. “At first I went because Tatanyandowan said I would be killed if I did otherwise. When it began they were going to kill all the farmer Indians and half-breeds along with the whites. To purge this valley with blood.”

Hazel shuddered. When she looked at him again, he was gazing intently into the fire, watching the embers blaze and darken to ash.

“The blond one . . . Cassie? She told me that the Creator made the red man dark on the outside because our hearts were dark inside. She said we were children of darkness and had no soul. That the Our Father prayer you taught me was a sin from my lips.” He spoke the words
soul
and
Our Father
and
sin
in English.

“She was wrong.”

“Hanyokeyah taught me that each of us has two souls. One soul must travel a perilous journey after death. Even in death the Dakota must face enemies and cross a great river to reach the afterworld. But the other soul stays here, close to earth. Like Winona.”

Hazel was quiet, thinking of that sense she had had, down at the river.

“I did not think I would be sorry to have killed Asa.” He told her of seeing Asa beneath the tree where Winona hanged herself and knowing he’d had something to do with her death. He’d told Tatanyandowan, who said that Wanikiya would be haunted by the girl’s ghost unless he avenged her. “Winona did not deserve to have her spirit roaming, never able to rest.”

She already knew this and wondered that she could accept it and not hate Wanikiya for what he had done. “Did you kill others that day?”

Wanikiya went on to tell her about the Stolten’s farm and how he’d come across it with his brother and found Mr. Stolten in the hay meadow impaled by his pitchfork, lying next to a dead son. The Stoltens lived near the Sengers, and were known to both Hazel and the Indians. Mr. Stolten had begged Wanikiya for mercy. Then the youngest girl, Aschendel, had come up from the cellar where she had been hiding and Tatanyandowan had gone to kill her. Wanikiya was left alone with the man, made sick in his soul by the very sight. And so he had done it, drawn his tomahawk and buried it in the skull and somehow Mr. Stolten had not died even then, but continued to scream and Wanikiya had to work to free the blade from the ridged bone of the skull and buried it again, this time ending the man’s life. Then Tatanyandowan returned from the cabin and Wanikiya had looked up to see a white face watching from a near grove of trees, another son, and he’d looked away hoping his brother would not also see the last remaining child.

That son, he told her, must have seen the entire thing happen, including what Wanikiya did. Had he known it was for mercy? “Next we saw a wagon on the road, the oxen slow and stumbling. That was you. The world was on fire. Tatanyandowan was already running and I did not want him to be the one who caught you first. I regret ending Asa’s life. Revenging Winona has not brought me any peace. I keep on seeing the way you held him.”

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about such things anymore. I would not be here tonight, alive and whole, if you had not carried me from the cornfield. Sometimes I wish that I wasn’t, but then tonight, eating these plums, being with you near a warm fire, I’m glad you saved me. I’m glad that you did not leave that man to suffer.”

He nodded at this and rolled over, so that his back was to her again. Hazel climbed under her own blankets. What he wanted, she thought, was absolution. The quiet boy she had known had been replaced by this young man who let words spill from him in a breathless rush. He had no one else to talk to, to tell these things. He wanted to be forgiven for shooting Asa. Hadn’t they each killed for self-preservation?
But I don’t have that power
, she thought.

Several times she heard him turn over and knew that he too was restless. “Wanikiya?” she said after a long time had passed. She had to call his name twice before he would answer. “I’m cold,” she said. “Come over to my side.”

The fire had dimmed to ashes. She could smell the sage braided in his hair, and rolled over so that her body was pressed against his and she felt his bony, boyish hips joined against hers and his breath on her neck. The other captives would hate her when they learned what she had done. Maybe even her own family. But she was thinking about that day in the cave and the storm that swept over the valley and how she had longed for it to carry both of them away. She felt his heart beating close to her breast. He breathed in time with her. She ran her hands along his hips, along the sharp jut of his ribcage and the lean muscles of his torso. When she touched her face against his she felt that his cheeks were warm and damp and she knew that he had told her all that he had because he was wounded inside. She knew that she could offer him healing just as she had a long time ago. She pressed her lips to his cheek and tasted his salt, the way he’d done after first bringing her here but she continued, kissing his mouth and throat and when she did speak at last her voice sounded husky in her own ears. “Husband,” she breathed, her hands continuing to touch him.

Outside a keening wind began to blow through Yellow Medicine country. The wind seeped under the teepee skin where the lovers touched and pressed together until they were sated and in this mutual heat did not feel the falling chill. Only when they were finished could they hear the horses whinnying from the corrals down by the river. Wanikiya raised himself on his elbows to listen carefully.

“Is it a storm?” she asked, pressing her face close to the hollow in his throat.

“No,” he said. “It’s the lost ones. They are crying because they can’t come back to this valley ever again. The horses sense them in the wind.”

She clung to him and drew one of the buffalo furs over them as though to hide their nakedness from the spirits coursing outside. They didn’t sleep that night, limbs entwined. They traded stories, Hazel describing her father, Wanikiya telling her how Hanyokeyah had protected him throughout his childhood. Her body ached sweetly where he had entered her. Her blood had dried on the robes beneath them, one more thing that joined them. Outside the maple hardwoods lining the river began to change color a month early so that in the morning they found the leaves in red drifts, dappled spots against the goldenrod.

BIRCH
COULEE

I
NSIDE THE CIRCLE
of wagons, Noles bid Caleb stay close. They had joined the other men after sundown and crossed the river to rejoin Captain Grant’s infantry. More than 160 men and a dozen wagons, the horses restless and whinnying in the dark. The men talked loudly and joked to forget the sights they had seen on the prairie. Each seemed grateful for this darkness, but was afraid to go to his own bedroll, afraid of what he’d see when he shut his eyes. A few had found what they feared, their wives or sons and daughters. These sat in the short grass, holding their knees to their chests, rocking back and forth while they stared vacantly into the dark.

Caleb was nervous about his wine. If the men found it, they would drain the entire crate full of bottles in no time. He must bring it back for Cassie, who was not speaking to him. She’d stopped eating, would only allow water to be poured down her throat. Her skin was clammy to the touch. “I can’t feel the baby anymore,” she’d told him. “It’s gone quiet inside me.” The next day she still would not eat and the skin began to shrink around her dark blue eyes. If he could bring back the wine, the bottles whole and shining, then she might see that child or no child, they still had a future together.

He kept the crate close to him while he unrolled his blanket. Noles was smoking in the dark.

“Stick close,” he said again, “there’s a man from the Cullens who said he’s seen signs of Indians. A half-breed named Joe. Can you trust even the half-breeds now?”

“Joe?” Caleb said. “That man is missing his two daughters. He’s desperate as the rest of us.”

“Well, this Joe says he’s seen bark shaved from a tree, kinnikinnick, that they like to smoke. If it’s true, and we get surrounded, what a pretty spot this will be. Idiots. To camp on the open prairie. Why, look at that treeline where the moon hovers. All around us there’s place for murderous braves to take cover. We don’t have the howitzers, nor any big guns. Dead, that’s what we’ll be if the half-breed speaks true. They’ll overrun us in a minute.”

Noles coughed and hacked up phlegm. His throat had gone raspy from talking too much.

“I’m tired,” Caleb told him. “If the Indians come and kill us, so be it.” “Aye. You’re a fatalist. How I fell in with such as you I don’t understand.”

Caleb grunted and pillowed his shirt under his head. Prairie grass poked through his wool blanket and itched his skin.

“O Most High,” Noles continued, taking up his monologue again since Caleb had proved a poorly conversationalist. “Raise up officers with some sense in their noggins. Your creation is overrun with idjuts, and if there’s killing to be done, let the bullets find
them
. Let not your children’s fates be determined by imbecilic . . .”

“Noles?”

“Yes, Lord? Oh, it’s only you.”

“Listen. If we get out of this, I want to marry that girl I left behind at the fort. I’ll need a best man.”

“I’d be honored,” Noles interrupted. “I’ll start composing my speech right away. It must have the right blend of humor and solemnity. Matrimony, after all . . .”

“There’s one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Be quiet, so’s I can sleep.”

“Oh,” Noles said. He tapped out the ashes of his pipe, muttering under his breath, and still muttering climbed into his bedroll. Caleb’s thoughts turned to the broken fingernail they’d found by Matthew’s too-shallow grave. Grant’s men had found a woman in the tallgrass, a survivor after all this time. Krieger, was her name, or something like it. Half-dead, she slept now in the bed of one of the Conestoga wagons.
I should have stayed longer out there. They can’t all be dead like Matthew. All those countless others. I wish I had the sight back.
He tried to find it within him, to get some sense of his sister and brothers out there in the broad darkness. Straining, he thought he heard something beyond the wind in the grass. He pictured Kate, her dress worn to rags, crawling on bloodied hands toward him, a curse on her lips that he had left her behind.

All the night birds had gone quiet. Noles had rolled over in his sleep, snoring like a wounded moose, his breath rancid. Caleb jabbed a hard finger into the man’s ribs and forced him to roll back. He burrowed into his blankets, trying to find what he had been thinking about, his mind too restless for sleep.

Wanikiya had left to fight with the rest. It was important he stay near the other braves. He knew that Cut-Nose and others, like Running Rattler, had spoken of killing all the captives if things went poorly in battle, that if they must die they would take as many whites as they could along with them. He knew that Little Paul and the Upper Sioux were trying to offer a safe haven in their side of the camp, hoping to rescue as many whites as they could. Wanikiya feared that before all the fighting was done the Dakota would turn against one another.
Another civil war
, Hazel thought, when he told her. Men in this age find such simple reasons to kill one another. Even the Tetons, when they heard of this uprising, had fled further out on the prairies, not wanting any part of the destruction. And so it was important that he stay close to the Medewakanton and Wahpekutes who trusted him because of his brother, Tatanyandowan. If they planned something, he would hear of it first. Wanikiya went forth to the battles and loaded his gun. But he would not kill.

He had fled that dream of the tree-dweller.

Caleb woke before first light in the early gray of morning, the hiccup of a single shot startling him from the dregs of his dream. He reached for his rifle, tucked near his blanket, and tried to stretch a kink of out of his neck. He had little time to dwell on his discomfort.

Noles, caught out by the perimeter of the sentries relieving his bladder, was running back through the tallgrass with his pants still around his ankles. He tripped and went down while still fifty yards away. The single rifle shot called down a rain of gunfire. A raveling cloud of blue smoke erupted from the treeline Noles had pointed out the night before. Where had Noles gone? He’d disappeared in the grass. Two sentries raced back toward camp, screaming about Indians as they came. One of them sat down in the grass a second later, as if pausing to catch his breath, his mouth falling open in surprise while a scarlet blot spread out on his white shirt. His boyish face contorted; his hands touched the dark spot and then he fell forward into the grass.

Caleb quickly forgot the fallen sentry as the first gunshots were followed by war whoops and shrieks from the coulees and ravines and woods. The air
boiled
with lead. Horses, hobbled to wagons, screamed and fell, blood frothing from their mouths. The lead shredded white-topped wagons and dropped men where they stood around the ashes of their night fires, tin cups of steaming coffee held in their hands.

“Down,” an officer screamed. “Take cover!” Caleb pressed his face against the dew-wet grass until he heard a rustling directly in front of him. He cocked back the hammer and prepared to shoot. The short grass parted to reveal Noles, breathing hoarsely, as he spidered his way back into camp, his breeches left behind on the prairie. Noles rolled to a spot beside Caleb and fumbled for his own rifle. Bullets thunked into the crate of wine and scattered wood splinters around them. “Hellfire and damnation!” he crowed. “Must be the entire Sioux nation come for us.” He checked the priming of his rifle, climbed onto his knees, and squeezed off a shot. Smoke and the familiar, acrid stench of gunpowder roiled the air. “What are ye waiting for?” Noles called to him. “If we don’t shoot back we’ll soon be overrun.”

Caleb shook free from his paralysis and crouched beside him. He sighted down the rifle and picked out one spot of grass moving in the gray light, the dark grass-entwined headband of an Indian just peeking above the crest. The head vanished seconds after the shot, but Caleb had no idea if he’d hit him. Noles took cover to reload.

Behind them chaos reigned in the camp. Captain Grant, his shirttails untucked, was shouting hoarsely for the men to assemble in a line. Spittle was flung from his mouth with each shout of “Here,” and “To me!” while he waved his saber. A group of men responded, but when Caleb tried to rise he was pulled down by Noles. The men never had a chance to form their line. They were priming their rifles one moment and cut down the next, five falling like saplings before an ax, and Grant, still shouting, still untouched by gunfire, was left waving his saber at nothingness.

“Stay down,” Noles hissed in Caleb’s ear. “I mean to hold ye to yer promise of a wedding.” A bullet shattered the spoke of a wagon beside them and Caleb was blinded by a hail of splinters, live hot spikes of oak burrowing into his cheekbones and forehead. Noles, caught by the same explosion twisted around with a hoarse cry. Caleb couldn’t see for the blood that streamed over his eyes as he clawed at the hot splinters burrowing into his face, pulling each out along with patches of skin. He was stumbling, crawling through the melee, hands still clutched to his smoothbore musket, when he felt Noles pull him down again. Caleb cleared his eyes to see Noles beside him, beard scarlet, spitting blood and teeth and wood fragments into the prairie grass. The ricocheting bullet had ripped a fresh gash in one of his wounded cheeks. The Welshman shook his fist at the howling mass on the outskirts of the camp, shouting “Sons o’ bitches!” and then scrambling, half-dragged Caleb to better cover.

All around camp the soldiers scurried to find a decent position from which to return fire. The most terrible sound was the horses screaming as the bullets and buckshot ripped into their hides and shattered bones. Officers hurried men into groups behind horse carcasses. Other men went from wagon to wagon, overturning them with a clatter, to provide protective cover. The air was thick with blue gunpowder smoke. Men who had passed a sleepless night in horror, remembering the dead they had encountered face-down in ditches and sloughs, now scrambled to avoid a similar fate. The surrounding Indians were firing a withering barrage of buckshot and heavy trader’s balls from their double-barrels.

Noles hauled Caleb through this carnage until they found cover behind a screaming horse, an immense percheron whose intestines spilled in greasy coils on the grass before it. Caleb affixed the bayonet to his rifle in case they were overrun, pausing every few seconds to wipe blood from his eyes. Once the bayonet was affixed he ran the heaving horse straight through the neck, throwing his full shoulder into the strike. The blade pierced the horse’s throat. Man and horse were impaled together. The horse shrieked and then gave its death rattle. Caleb yanked the blade out quickly, wiped another sheet of blood from his eyes, and crouched beside Noles. More bullets thunked into the heavy horseflesh, but could not reach the men in their hiding place.

Noles shook his head, stuffing wads of cotton stripped from his shirt into either side of his mouth, soupy with blood. Splinters bristled from his face like a hedgehog, but when Caleb tried to pull them out, Noles screamed, “Leave them!” and shoved him away. His skinny, hairy legs were tucked under him and his eyes bugged out as he grimaced and stuffed the cloth into his cheek. The initial barrage had diminished and become more scattershot; the men were in a better position to cut down any Indian who left cover to attack. Somehow they had reached a stalemate.

“How long do you think we have?” Caleb asked.

Noles shook his head and pointed at the rags stuffed into his wounds. His cheeks were inflamed and swelling. Caleb tore another strip from his own shirt and tied it around the bleeding gash in his forehead. He laughed then, in spite of his terror. Noles looked so piteous without his pants, the recent wound finally silencing his monologues. Noles turned a questioning stare on his new friend.
Probably thinks I’ve lost my marbles
, Caleb thought.
Oh friend, that happened long before now.
The cloth around Caleb’s forehead soaked up enough of the blood that he could see clearly. He raised himself above the horse from time to time to fire at fluid shapes moving in the treeline a hundred yards away.

The sun rose and through the dust the carnage was apparent all around them. Wagons splintered. Every horse, and there must have been near ninety, dead or barely breathing. The men raising tiny clouds of dust as they scraped up thick prairie roots and tried to dig trenches using tin plates. The wagon that held Justina Krieger was the only one that had not been overturned; its white-topped canvas fluttered in shredded bits from the hoops and the siding was marred with bullet holes and gashes.
She must be dead inside there
, Caleb thought, her life leaking out from a hundred wounds.

Captain Grant, moving from entrenched group to group, his saber clattering in its sheath, ducked over by Caleb and Noles.

“Jesus!” he said, shaking his head at Noles. “This man needs a doctor.”

“Mmph!” said Noles through his bloody teeth.

Caleb coughed out dust. “Do you think they’ve heard us at the fort, sir? How long before we can expect reinforcements?”