Night Birds, The (37 page)

Grant shrugged. He had a long, aristocratic nose and a high, needling voice. “We’ll be here the afternoon at least. Unfortunately, the wagon that holds our supplies is outside our circle. It’d be suicide to go to it now. And there’s more bad news,” he added, calling for a man at a near barricade—an overturned wagon—to bring them fresh ammunition. “We brought along .62 caliber bullets for .58 caliber rifles. You’ll have to whittle them down. Make every shot count.”

“Mmph!” Noles said again, glowering darkly at the man. Through the bloody gauze Caleb heard him cursing,
You shit-for-brains.

“Yes, sir,” Caleb said, speaking quickly. “Used to it by now.”

“And there’s another thing,” Grant continued. “We have only one canteen of water and one head of cabbage. It will be around shortly. Each man gets a leaf of cabbage and one swallow. No more than that.”

“Mmpher!” Noles said, preparing to raise his rifle.

Grant put his hand atop Noles’s greasy black head. “God give you strength. And remember, make every shot count!” He was already ducking and running to the next group of men, his saber clattering behind him in the dust.

Noles made the sound in his throat again.

“I know,” said Caleb. “But it would be a waste of a bullet with so many Indians coming to kill us.”

His head felt light and he wondered faintly if one of those splinters had gone straight into his brain. Last night he hadn’t cared whether he lived or died. Now—beside this grotesque, wounded figure, this strange friend whose life had become bound with his—he no longer felt afraid. He would fight until the end.

Noles gave Caleb his extra swig, since the water would have done the gauze in his mouth little good, but Caleb refused it. There were men dying not far away, gut-shot, and crying for water. Leave it to them. A sheen of dust and blood and sweat covered everything. Through the passing clouds of acrid gunpowder, Caleb lifted himself up on the haunches of the dead horse and shot at the Indians trying to establish sniper positions from higher ground. Noles whittled the bullets and crammed in fresh powder and rags with the ramrod, trading rifles with Caleb after each shot.

Morning turned to afternoon and the sun climbed to its apex and turned a harsh light on the camp. It was too hot to think, too hot even to fight. The Indians seem to have lost interest, retreating, Caleb imagined, to their own well-fortified positions to drink spring water and eat red meat dripping from sticks and ladles full of stew. The saliva pooled at the back of his throat just thinking of it.

The day turned brilliant with white heat. The huge horse they crouched behind swelled with fly larvae and gases as the afternoon passed. Across the camp horse carcasses bloated in the September sunshine, empty cavities inflating and filling like balloons. The heat grew so intense, the carcasses so swollen, that some cracked open, the dead lungs breaking the rib cage with an audible noise, and filled the air with fetid, boiling gases. Men retched in the trenches they had dug and held useless handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses to try and stifle the smell.

Occasionally this suffering was broken by moments of terror as Indians from different positions—the southern ravine, the western woods near Caleb and Noles—launched a yipping attack and charged toward the camp. They turned away again while still out of range, but not before the men had fired a few useless shots to stop the charge. Immediately, the Indians would spring up in the grass, taunting, and calling them women and children in their own tongue.

“Fill it with a double load of powder,” Caleb said, watching one brave caper near the edge of the woods. Noles did as he asked. Each time Caleb leaned on the horse they huddled behind he forced heated air from its nostrils, the horse continuing to breathe in death. The Indian pounded his chest and then whirled around. Caleb watched him from the end of his barrel, his blood leaking down again, freckling the edge of the rifle. He squeezed off a shot and the double load of powder actually kicked him off his knees and spilled him over backward.

Noles made an appreciative sound in his throat. Caleb climbed back up and looked over at the distant woods. The Indian he had shot at was gone. It was difficult to tell whether his aim had been true, but at least no more of them approached close enough to taunt.

Afternoon climbed into evening and the men heard cannonfire in the distant ravines. A few began to shout encouragement, knowing this was their reinforcements, but as the hours passed the sounds came no closer.

They lay in a miasma, a dense odorous film of foul-smelling dust. Caleb’s throat was raw and thick. Noles napped beside him, his cheek inflamed and festering. The man had dabbed his wounds in gunpowder to stave off infection, but it seemed to do little good. Caleb had an image of the two of them bloating like the horses until their ribcages opened with a crack and spilled out their innards. Such a fate had happened over and over again across the prairies, for those that they had buried had lain in their own filth, in intense heat and showers of rain, in vortexes of bluebottle flies. It filled his heart with hatred to think of it. Each passing second was a torment. Caleb’s skin was peeling and sun- burned beneath his wounds and coating of dust. His tongue, like some great slug, grew until he wheezed for breath. Hatred filled him. He wanted every Indian dead.
If I live past this moment, Lord
, he vowed,
I will live to see my suffering paid for in full.

Before dark the Indians sent one white-flag draped brave asking them to surrender the half-breeds, promising that they “were as many as leaves on trees” and that they would finish their work the next morning. The men had amused themselves by calling back hopeless insults at the brave, even shot out his horse from beneath him when he tried to retreat.

Then darkness fell, releasing them from the burning eye of the sun. The wounded continued to cry for water in parched voices. Caleb’s uneasy mind slouched toward sleep and backed away again with each renewed scream. His brain felt heavy and drugged. Noles was feverish beside him, his forehead blazing like a forge.
Water. The man is dying for a glass of water.
If Caleb had a single container to store it in he would have left the protective circle and run the gauntlet of the guns to bring him water, but he had nothing. He stayed where he was, drifting between alertness and his own fevered dreams of a wounded woman crawling toward him in the grass.

Caleb could see it in their faces when they came. The reinforcements arrived in the morning, a full thirty-one hours after the battle was joined. The men gagged and held camphor-laced handkerchiefs close to their mouths. Caleb lay where he was, beside the decaying horse and his dead comrade. He’d woken earlier and called to his friend, but Noles had quit breathing sometime in the dark. Caleb was given a swig of water and helped to his feet, but he promptly collapsed again. “Leave me!” he cried, but the hands would not. They pulled him to his feet.

One of Caleb’s eyes was webbed shut with dried blood. He looked on the scene, the dead, Noles among them, being dragged into the same trenches where they had sheltered earlier, the officers on horseback riding through the camp, the horrified soldiers, sunstruck and delirious, eyes void of color and feeling. There was no hoarse shouting of men glad to be alive. Thirteen dead out of a hundred and seventy.
Oh it could have been far worse. And have you heard? That woman they rescued, she lived too! The wagon shot full of holes, even the cup of water she held pierced. But she’s alive and well. It’s a providence amidst such suffering.
Caleb kept walking until he could kneel in the grass to vomit, spilling out the water he’d just been given, his chest dry and cracking. Then he wept for Noles. And he wept to be alive. And when he was done he heard the guns being fired off, a salute in their honor. He tried to recall the song Noles had sung at his stepbrother Matthew’s grave. Something about leaves. Something about not changing the mind of God.

Back at camp, he heard a wounded man asking the chaplain who’d ridden along with the cavalry, a man named Joshua Sweet, for wine. He was dying, he said, and he wanted communion. “I don’t have any,” the chaplain told him. “I’m sorry.”

Caleb heard the man’s quiet weeping and knew then what he had to do. He walked forward and touched the chaplain’s shoulder. “I know where there is wine,” he said.

CAMP
RELEASE

S
HE THOUGHT OF
red leaves on snow, of a cleaved apple. Her skin was so pale against his. Snow on copper. Water and earth. By night they were one breath and she clung to him as though they were falling from a great height, a hole that had opened in the center of the clouds, down and down, and he within her, and she within him, his breath her breath, lips, hands, touching and kissing until they were sated with the smell and salt of one another. The fire burned down while they lay together in the red bridal blanket. Stars swirled above in the smoke hole’s opening. A north wind breathed against the canvas. It was early September, she thought. The Long Trader, Colonel Sibley, was coming with his army to end the war.

After their first night together, the entire camp had awakened to a changed world, leaves turning red a full moon before their time. The old ones said it was a sign the spirits were angry. It was a mistake to leave their homes and come here. Some said it was the white captives’ fault and they should be killed to keep from slowing the Dakota down. The spirits were angry because the whites had polluted this valley.

Each day that passed the scouts came back with reports of troop movements, a great river of men and guns and horses that would come for the Dakota. “But Little Crow is not afraid,” Wanikiya told her that night as they lay together, naked beneath a blanket. “He thinks that he will surprise them as they did the soldiers at the river. Like what happened at the prairie. He has nothing but scorn for the way the
wasicun
fight.” He’d come back from Birch Coulee. Wanikiya was sure that he’d seen Caleb there from a hiding place in a tall tree. “Your brother fought well,” he told her, the admiration apparent in his voice. “He did not tire.”

Caleb. Her blood brother. Hazel was so filled with joy to hear that he was alive. And yet it was bittersweet. For seeing her brother again meant the end of this life. She ran her hands through Wanikiya’s hair, one long unbroken sheen. It fell in his eyes and veiled his expression. She brushed it away, kissed his cheek, the center of his forehead. He had smooth skin, smooth and supple and always smelling of the river and crushed leaves. A leaf child. But he was no elf out of Old World folklore. A man the same as any other, naked except for the medicine bag that hung by a cord around his throat. Her hands found the old wound in his side, the delicate web of flesh, and his breathing quickened. “When I carried you from the corn,” he was saying, “I thought that made us even and that you would no longer hold a place in my heart. But I did not stop thinking of you. And now, when you are gone, I will continue still.”

“Gone?” she said. Both had been too frightened to speak of the future. She had hoped that together they could make a family, something that would be safe from the destruction sweeping the world they knew. That they could go someplace, maybe to the far North where the Metis hunted the buffalo, and not live in fear.

“When it comes to the last battle you must go to Little Paul and the Sisseton. They will keep you safe. We have already spoken.”

“But you?”

“I will go to fight, but not like Little Crow thinks. I will not allow him to surprise the soldiers. I will make sure a shot comes to warn them. This war must end.”

“They will shoot you down. Either the white soldiers or your own people.”

He touched her hair. “I am not afraid,” he said.

“Let us run away,” she said, “where no whites or Dakota will find us.”

He scoffed at this. “Where would we go? Among the Tetons?”

“I will be a good wife for you.”

“You are that already. No. I must stay and fight now. ”

Her fingers continued to circle around his abdomen and then descended lower, touching his bony hip, the smooth skin of his buttocks. She gently pulled him toward her. “Stay here,” she said.

He responded to her touch, beginning to slide his fingers along her backbone, his hands coming up to caress her arms, fingertips circling her nipples. His face was close to hers and she saw herself below him in the opal mirrors of his eyes, her black hair fanned around her, her tongue touching the tip of her parted lips. She felt him stiffen and felt the damp heat in her own center longing for him. They stopped speaking in words for a long time and it was strange to her how familiar his body had already become, how naturally he fit within her, gliding in and out, while she placed the backs of her heels against his buttocks, ran her fingers up and down his spine. With her feet and hands she pulled him closer, slowed his rhythm. His mouth parted and his eyes went cloudy and she brought her hands around and touched his face at this moment of release, telling him, “Look at me. Be lost within me as I am within you.”

Afterward he lay with his face pressed to hollow of her throat, his breath warm against her breasts. His face was damp. She loved him even more for that. How afterward each time, his eyes would glisten as though the moment had so filled him that he overflowed. As though to hold her so was both joy and sorrow.

That night while he lay beside her, the stones within his medicine bag grew light as the feathers that surrounded them. In his dream, the bag tugged at the cord around his throat and pulled him out of the blankets, the bag flying out before him and he rising with it out into a country of tallgrass pulsing in the night wind. There was no moon, only a multitude of stars as far as his eyes could see. While he watched, one of those stars flew closer, swimming down and taking shape as it approached the grasslands, growing white wings until he saw again the bird he had sacrificed so long ago. The burrowing owl perched on his shoulder and studied him with its great yellow eyes.

“Hinyan?” he asked it. “Why have you come back now?”

The bird did not speak but spread its wings and flew out over the grassland. He had to run quickly to keep up, his feet light, the grass swishing as he passed through it, parting like water. He ran by places he’d known as a boy, the river where his mother and sister drowned, the dark center of it where his brother had overturned the canoe. In his dream, his mother and sister were running beside him, fleet as does. Then they passed the spine of rock where Tatanyandowan had bound him and the blackbirds that came down from the stars were there again, one of them larger and darker than the others. “Hanyokeyah,” he said, knowing that he was alive because the old man had come as a spirit and unbound his ropes. They went further into the past, to the winter encampment where his father, Seeing Stone, struggled against the speckled sickness, further back to when the people lived beside the great waters. Other things came out of the stars. Unktahe, a great coiling serpent, brown as the river it came from. Stones rising up from their furrows. The tree-dweller in his cottonwood home. Thunderbirds and riders from the clouds. “Why?” he asked the bird. “Why are you showing me all this?” For a moment he was part of one great story, a river of spirit flowing out through the grassland to the place where it joined the stars.

He couldn’t run fast enough to keep up and the figures around him began to grow indistinct. They were fading back into the darkness. His breath turned to fire in his lungs. The stones in his medicine bag grew heavy again. “Come back,” he called to them, but they were gone and there was only the wind in the grass. Then he knew why the bird had appeared to him, knew that he had one thing left to do. He must make a sacrifice before it would end. Only then would his spirit be allowed to enter the same country where those he loved had gone before.

In the morning a crier moved through the camp warning that Long Trader and his many wagon guns and soldiers had come to Yellow Medicine country. Every warrior would be needed to fight. Men painted themselves and sang their death songs.

Within their teepee, Wanikiya knelt beside her, braiding her hair, as was custom. “Remember,” he was telling her. She loved the feel of his hands smoothing out the snares in her hair, the way her own mother had brushed her hair. “Remember to go the Sissetons when the fighting starts.”

“Will you come then? Will you come and find me when the battle is done? Turn yourself in. Turn yourself over to the soldiers. When I tell them how you have protected me they will not hurt you.”

Her braids were finished. He painted the stripe of vermilion down the center of her parted hair, but could not dab her cheeks because her face was wet with tears. He squeezed her hands and then rose to fetch his rifle and the parfleche filled with dried meat. “Turn yourself in,” she repeated. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

His adam’s apple bobbed up and down and his eyes were bright. He nodded once at her and then ducked under the teopa and was gone. Hazel forced herself to watch him walk away, across the river running quick through the woods, a red rain of leaves coming down around him and the other Indian soldiers. There was a blue-gray light in the east, but the sun was not up yet.
False dawn
, she thought, not knowing if she would ever see him again.

She found Otter near the river, his skull crushed by a large stone. His body had been covered with a hasty matting of wet maple leaves. She knew him only by the mouth harp strung like a medicine bundle around his throat. The impact of the stone had caused him to bite through his tongue and the leaves around him were reddened. Hazel held him as though he were her own Daniel, the brother she missed most. She did not care if his blood darkened her broadcloth skirt. Her mind was filled with the memory of him that first day in the teepee, trying to shush her so she would not be hurt further, a goblin-child whom she had bitten in her anger and sorrow. Wanikiya’s messenger boy. The one he had sent to warn the Sengers of what was coming. Otter had been full of mischief, but there was not a harmful bone in his body.

Hazel heard the crunch of footsteps in the newly fallen leaves at the same time that she realized who had done this. Henrietta. The woman loomed over her, fist still wrapped around a blood-soaked grinding stone. Her face was streaked with grime, leaves and twigs jutted from the wires of her hair. Arms red to the elbows, face mottled in the tree-shadows. The calico blouse she wore draped loosely, exposing one heaving, muscular shoulder. “I told them,” she said, breathing heavily, “I told them I would break them like twigs.”

From miles distant the sound of the battle drifted their way and Hazel turned involuntarily toward the sound. There were more cannons and howitzers than at Fort Ridgely. Even here Hazel felt the faint reverberation of their explosions in the ground beneath her. When she looked again at Henrietta, the woman was smiling. “Our day of deliverance,” she said, her eyes blazing. “We are free.”

“I will tell them,” Hazel said. “I am going to tell what you did.”

Henrietta advanced toward her with the stone gripped in her fist. Hazel held her ground, crouched over Otter. “He was harmless,” she said, words that Henrietta repeated back to her in a mocking tone.

“None of them are harmless. We will cull the children before they can become adults. A weed must be taken from the furrow before it puts down roots. Cull them like weeds. It’s their way. It’s the reason I no longer have children of my own. I will have vengeance. Don’t you know how we have watched you with that warrior? Disgusting. You’re a traitor to your own kind. To bed a with murderer. You, a little whore.”