Night Birds, The (5 page)
Authors: Thomas Maltman
T
HERE WERE THOSE
who said Judas hanged himself from a redbud tree and ever after it grew stunted and strange. If you were to touch one of the flowers when the tree blossomed in April darkness you would see a vision of the devil. In the spring of 1859, the redbud that grew along the pasture fence put forth its blossoms a month early. Windstrewn, the red petals nestled against the cabin walls of the Senger family and lay like drops of blood in the dormant grass.
There were many things said and some were true and some were foolishness. Children of this age and place went about with muslin bags of live crickets strung around their throats to cure the whooping cough. They forbore from killing bullfrogs, fearful that such butchery would cause the cows to give bloody milk. When the moon waxed, they crept up on their reflections in still pond waters and waited for the image of their true love to rise to the surface. And they believed that in the center of a dogwood blossom, if you looked closely, lay the image of a crown of thorns and a brown stain like rusty nail.
All these things were said and many more, and they were written down on loose-leaf vellum pages that a Bohemian immigrant named Jakob Senger cobbled together and called the
Book of Wonders
. A short bow-legged man with a dark, bristling beard, his one hobby was the collection of this folklore. In any weather he would hitch the brood mare to the swift phaeton buggy and set out to interview soothsayers, water-witches, and country healers. He never brought the book along, for his subjects would sink into sullen silence if they suspected he meant to write their secrets down, and in so doing destroy their magic.
Sometimes, he brought his
kinder,
especially his silent, black-haired daughter, Hazel. The presence of this quiet child seemed to quell the hill people’s mistrust of strangers. Eleven years old, the girl had not spoken a single word since her mother, Jakob’s first wife, Emma, had died of consumption four years earlier.
Both father and daughter understood that these journeys had much to do with Emma’s death. To stand in a healer’s cabin, where roots were draped from rafters, and inhale the redolence of earth and boiling sassafras, returned them both to the time when Emma was still alive. She had been such a country healer, but none of her potions, her bloodwort teas and salves of mullein leaves, could save her from the consumption that stole her voice and then her breath. Emma used up the last of her remaining strength to give birth to Daniel, Hazel’s youngest brother, and then died a week later on a frigid day in January.
As dense as iron, the earth resisted Jakob’s pickaxes and shovels. The ground would not be soft enough to bury Emma until March. He hauled ice up from the river, a great slab like a bed made of crystal, and laid her down in the stable with the horses. The girl went with her father and oldest brother Caleb each evening to kneel in the hay and pray for her mother’s soul. The girl prayed with her eyes open. She watched the rising ghosts of their mingled breath. In her mind she tried to reconcile this blue-skinned vision of her mother—a figure in an indigo silk dress with her hands folded neatly over her chest, two silver coins for eyes, and a hollow purpling cavity where her cheeks sank in—with the one she had known in this life, a woman with chestnut hair who loved to sing.
Hazel had prayed that God would give her mother back her voice, and when it didn’t work, she stopped speaking herself. Her father went a little mad that winter; they all did. Jakob kept that stall like a shrine and the girl could hear him go inside it and talk to her mother, and in the silences between his voice, guess the words Emma was answering. Only the thin, needling sound of newborn Daniel crying kept him sane.
Even on that bed of ice the corpse still had a slight odor of rot that made the horses nervous. Jakob rinsed the body with rosewater which froze to her skin, blue and pale in the poor light of the barn. The girl would dream of her mother at night, dream of her rising from the ice bed, breaking the thin lacing of frozen rosewater like a coffin of glass falling away, and grabbing hold of one of the terrified horses to ride through the snowbound hills and beyond. Every winter for the rest of her life she dreamed this dream when it turned cold.
And then in March, when the ground softened, the neighbors came with their shovels, and Jakob had to be physically restrained while they put Emma to rest under the ground and planted an ash tree over her grave.
Father and daughter rode together over hunched hills and through damp hollows. As they came through the woods he sang to the brood mare and described the shape of the world for the girl. He told her the world had been broken at the beginning of time and that we were all marked by Adam’s fall. Plants and stones waited for the end of the Age, nursing poison and thorn, balm and flower. Such secret knowledge was like pollen on her tongue. The world was sown both with the seeds of God’s love and thorns of man’s age-old rebellion. And she thought she could keep her family safe if she knew enough, and could mark out a secure path through such a world. She thought her father possessed some kind of magic and when it turned out that he was only human, limited in knowledge and capable of failing his children and leaving them, as surely as Emma had, it nearly broke her. But for now he was the talespinner, the one who took them on journeys to visit places and characters long since passed from this place and time.
He would recite stories during these trips, especially
Der Marchen der Bruders Grimm
, a book of fairy tales he carried with him from the Old Country. Passed down from his own father, the stories were in part responsible for awakening his interest in local lore. He wanted to do for this new country what the Grimm brothers had done for his old one. Terrible things happened in these stories, but they were about knowledge as well. His favorites featured the night birds,
der nacht vogel
, birds that led humans out of sorrow. It was these birds that foretold Snow White’s awakening from the coffin of crystal, these birds who guided the prince to Sleeping Beauty, who gave solace to poor
Aschen putel
, Cinderella. He liked to begin these stories with a question. “Have I told you the story of the three ravens?” he would say, while the mare trotted over the red-packed roads of Missouri clay. The girl would shake her head. He had told them that story many times, but she never tired of it. It began as they all did: “In the time of dwarves and mermaids, when plants and animals shared a common destiny with humans, and a common tongue, stones cried out, and the ravens spoke in prophecy.”
In this time there lived a soldier in a far off land who was frugal and saved his coins for a time of need. His friends were not so prudent. They envied his small fortune and plotted how to steal it. One night they convinced him to abandon his post and come away with them in the woods. The owls and night birds saw this and followed after the men. The soldier heard their keening cries, but did not turn back. Deep in the woods the men fell upon him and stole all that he had. They were not content to take his gold only. They gouged out his eyes with dirty fingers and left him tied to a gallows to starve. When he awakened, the blinded soldier believed he was tied to a cross and prayed for mercy.
Her father liked to pause in mid-story. He would cluck to the mare and pull back on the reins, slowing her to a trot. He might look out at the thick woods around them—a place he called the
hexenwald
after the black forest, where the
seelenrauber
, the stealer of souls, was said to dwell in the shape of a wolf—as if searching for a missing thread of story. If Caleb was along, he would call out, “Go on Pa. Tell us the rest. How does it end?” But the girl only waited and watched the woods from her seat in the phaeton. “Are you sure I have not told you this story?” he asked her. She shook her head, smiling.
That night three ravens descended, talking amongst themselves.
Oh if only men knew what we know,” each crow sang. They spoke
of a dew that fell from heaven and allowed the blind to see again. Of a sick princess who could only be healed with the ashes of a toad from the pond. Of a village where the well had gone dry. The soldier listened and his face was upturned when the dew rained late in the dark. He was healed and broke his bonds to go abroad in the world, bringing ashes for healing and finding water for the village. The king rewarded him with his daughter’s hand in marriage and the soldier settled into a life of ease.
Later in his life, after all he had suffered, the very thieves who betrayed
him found him once more. The soldier forgave them, telling them that what they meant for evil, heaven had turned to good. He told them of the prophesying birds. The thieves traveled to the gallows hoping to be enriched. There was a rush of wings, but when the ravens returned that night they descended in rage. The thieves were pecked to death and their bodies left to rot in the rain.
The stories fascinated the girl. In her own life, too, mothers died and fathers remarried. And sometimes the wicked were punished. She pictured that soldier beneath the gallows and filled in with her imagination details never meant for a children’s tale: the soldier’s gaping eye sockets, moonlight on the blue-black feathers of the descending birds, the harsh croaking they made in their throats while the thieves cowered below them in the falling rain. But the stories were also about knowledge, and justice, what this world reveals to us. She wanted that sense of order and looked for signs in her own life to show them to be true. She wanted to believe you could make good from evil, and be led, even while blind, out of sorrowful woods.
Spring followed winter and the head editor of the
Saline Springs Luminary
, Isaiah Thompkins, died in his sleep. Jakob, still grieving, sold his farm and bought the business and the 1854 acorn-shaped Franklin handpress wrought from iron that went with it. The family of four lived in a room above the office. A black stovepipe traveled up from the lower room and they laid their goosedown mattresses around it to keep warm. For a year they lived like this, feeding the baby Daniel on grits and goat’s milk. (Once when the brother and father weren’t around the girl tried to breast feed the child, but this effort satisfied neither party.) The oldest boy, Caleb, already taller than his father at thirteen, had wheat-gold hair and Emma’s light brown eyes. He sold coal and firewood and his father’s papers in the streets. People could read the news and then use the sections they didn’t like for kindling, or more commonly, for wiping themselves in the outhouse. Hazel cared for her baby brother and went next door to Merton’s Dry Goods to trade newspapers with Frau Volsmann, a fat mothering hen who gave them two loaves of fresh bread, blackberry preserves, and salted meat each morning. The girl didn’t know what charity this was. But Frau Volsmann loved that baby with its pale white hair and quiet green eyes. She held it to her breasts, each as large as granary sacks, bulging out of either side of her apron, and made cooing sounds and said soft things to the baby in High German.
The town of Saline Springs became rich from settlers passing through from Independence, Missouri to Oregon and along the Santa Fe Trail. The streets were cobbled with limestone, even the gutters designed by slave artisans, and coursed with run-off in March and April. The buildings were all of a soft red sandstone that shone pink and flesh-hued in the first morning light. No one had ever occupied the old stone jail.
Daniel slept for hours and, once he was laid down, Hazel helped her father set type. She had clever hands even at the age of eleven. The type had to be set backward, akin to the way the ancient Hebrews wrote in their Bible. Her father did the muscle work, rolling up his sleeves to pull the rounce and coffin, the crank and bed of the iron handpress. Hazel liked the work and possessed an instinctive gift for composing the galleys in such a way not to make orphans, lone words at the bottoms of columns that took up space. She liked the smell of ink and wet paper which made her feel lightheaded and euphoric.
In return for two dollars a year, subscribers received a copy of
The Saline Springs Luminary
once a week. Jakob wrote stories down by hand for Hazel to set in type or gave her columns pilfered from
Harper’s Weekly
or the
St. Louis Republican
to reprint. Along with the office they had inherited books by Poe and Walter Scott from which they filched stories and poems. They had a Webster’s the girl used to search out words she didn’t know, or alternatives, to make the galleys neater.