Night Birds, The (16 page)

Her brothers crashed through the prairie grass behind her, still calling her name. Hazel held up a hand, “Stop,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

Her voice was a clear alto. All these years of silence and suddenly she spoke.

Caleb was shaking. He’d really done it, pulled the trigger. And he felt no exhilaration, only regret. Ahead of him he saw his sister kneel. There was the boy and the rusty shotgun lying beside him. There was his dark-haired sister cradling the boy’s head in her lap and the boy’s blood staining her apron. The boy was still alive. His skin was the freckled color of a fawn, his black eyes like mirrors, glazed with pain. Caleb saw the stark jut of the boy’s ribs, each one like a curving blade. The boy was much younger than he’d imagined. His sister was studying him with her clear green eyes. Again she spoke, and her voice in all of this was the strangest thing in his ears, “Help me carry him inside,” she said.

BLOOD
PRAYER

T
HEY MADE A
space for him beside the stove, cleared the floor of blankets and laid him down. In the shadows of the cabin the blood pooling below him looked black, a ceaseless trickle from his abdomen. “The lantern,” Hazel said. “Bring it here.” She undid his medicine belt, felt the boy shudder when she pressed a hand to his chest. Lines of goosepimples rippled along his arms. When they fluttered open, his eyes were dark lakes, all pupil. Hazel was kneeling in a warm pool of his blood. She saw that the bullet had passed through the lower right abdomen at a downward angle. She heard her voice, a tinny sound in her own ears, so long unused, as she gave commands, sent Asa to gather wood for the stove, set Caleb to tearing strips of cloth and helping her pick up the grunting weight of this boy so she could study the exit wound. And the blood continued in a ceaseless stream, each breath a shudder. Hazel smelled the boy’s fear and her own that matched it.

I am the daughter of a healer
, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to remember Emma, but the voice she heard in her mind was not her mother’s but that of the blood healer she and her father had visited one night on the river, the only one of them that ever touched Hazel. That night her father had left Hazel alone with the woman. He had been a long time gathering yarrow flowers.

She saw the reflection of herself in the boy’s black pupils and this image, herself within the eyes of another, cast her mind back to the close-smelling room of the healer. She shut her eyes, remembering how the woman’s tallow candles smelled of the animal they once were.

That night the woman had withdrawn her hand from Hazel’s throat and studied the girl before her. “I will tell your pa what he came to hear,” she said. “But it is useless to him.” The woman’s baby continued to suckle at her breast while she spoke. Hazel heard the river all around them, ever-rushing like a heartbeat. The woman’s gray eyes, the color of stone, held Hazel transfixed. “He is only a man and what do men know of the blood hours between birth and death? They go through this life as warring children. But you, child, will know both in this lifetime. Hold out your hand.” Hazel’s hand had shaken as she stretched it out. When the healer touched her palm, the skin felt fevered. Her fingers were long and fine. “You must understand that there is no magic. Do you hear me?” The girl nodded, mesmerized by her touch. “There is only belief, something far more powerful. Even demons believe in the Son of Man. They know his name and fear it. The yarrow flowers and the Bible verse are only a ritual. Power comes from your touch, skin against skin. Power comes when your belief joins with theirs. If belief is powerful enough to build and destroy nations, then surely it might command the blood in its narrow travels from heart to wound.” She withdrew her hand from Hazel’s and when she stepped away Hazel’s reflection faded from her eyes.

The skin along her hands prickled now with the memory of the woman’s touch. She had wanted to ask how it was possible for her to do such a thing if she had no voice. She was only a child and didn’t understand all of what woman meant. If you cannot pray aloud, how can others share what you hope? Before she could find a way to communicate the door had creaked open as her pa shouldered back into the room with useless yarrow in his fist.

The memory lived within her as she knelt by the boy and saw her own reflection go dim in his eyes. Hazel felt her breath burn in her throat. It was that simple after all. The thing her mother would have wanted Hazel to do more than anything. She only needed to continue speaking.

The boy’s eyes blinked open and his lips curled over gleaming teeth while his hands probed the wounds below and tried to brush away the cloths Caleb was pressing there. The blood ran black through his fingers. Hazel saw the small, coin-shaped hole and the burned tissue that puckered the edges of the wound. With each breath the boy took, a new stream slicked out to join the widening pool beneath him. All her life she had only been a witness for the things that happened, never someone with the power to shape events.

Hazel shut her eyes, imagining that she was that healer with the pale elegant hands. When she opened them again, she was certain what she must do. The boy had curled onto his side below her. Her thin fingers slid perfectly into holes of the boy’s body as though made for the wound. Into either side of him she slid one index finger and felt the warm jelly of his tissue and the quick pulse of his blood. The boy shuddered but did not cry out. In the six years since her mother, Emma, had died Hazel had not spoken a single word before this afternoon, but now she began to pray aloud, imagining the healer’s husky voice and her words, imagining the healer’s touch moving down through her and into this boy. She spoke the verse from Ezekiel that the woman had taught her:
And when I past thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live: Yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live!
Over and over she said these words like the men in revival tents who prophesied in spirit languages not heard since the beginning of time. The words were old King James and nonsense to the boy, and yet she felt him respond below her as though his blood recognized this language. She kept her eyes sealed shut and prayed that prayer into the room. Her head felt filled with light like a song, a chant of becoming. Hazel felt Caleb press his hand over the top of her own, applying more pressure, his touch cool while the blood between her fingers was thick as heated jelly. She forgot about the room and the boys gathered around her and felt the words travel like smoke through her own blood and down into her fin- gertips, until she could no longer feel the blood spilling. How long she prayed, she didn’t know, but when at last she eased her fingers out of the hole in his body, the flow had slackened and congealed. Caleb pressed fresh cloth around it.

The Dakota boy’s eyes were shut, his jaw clenched tight even in unconsciousness, but in the frail light of the cabin his chest yet rose and fell. Hazel held up her own fingers in wonder. Both she and the boy had been transmuted by this moment. He would continue on some underworld journey and come back no longer a boy, the gray in his lock burnished to silver. And what had she become, a girl long used to silence, yet capable of such utterances that blood spoke unto blood?

A humid night and the snow a distant memory. A half moon swelled over the far prairies and touched the grasslands with silver light. Within the cabin, a radiant slat of light coming through the shutter touched the boy asleep on the floor. He lay there, utterly still, as though the shock of his injuries had caused his spirit to retreat so deep inside him that there was only the shell of his body before her.

She left his side only for a few minutes to walk down to the river and fetch fresh cool water in a bucket. By his side again she dipped muslin cloths into the water and ran them over his heated skin. The moon made tall shadows in the room around them and dusted his body with silver. Through the muslin she dripped droplets of water into his open mouth and then let the cloth settle on his broad forehead. Everyone slept but Hazel and Caleb, surrounded by the whispery breathing of their brothers in the dark.

“Will he live?” Caleb asked. She saw his eyelashes flutter; the warm night was lulling him into sleep.

She nodded.

“Do you think they’ll come for him?” The gun lay across his lap.

“Yes. You should put that away. If they see we have been trying to help him, they might not hurt us. You only have one shot with that.”

Caleb grumbled, but did as she asked. It was true that if the entire tribe decided to come after them, they stood no chance. Asa had been for going to the fort, but what would they tell the soldiers? After all, now that the moment was done, Caleb could no longer recall in what direction the boy had been aiming his gun. “Hazel?” he said. “Hazel, is it a miracle that he’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“There was so much blood, so much in the tallgrass, on the cabin floor. But you stopped it, and now he’s breathing just fine. And I don’t know what happened. In your hand there was this warmth. You didn’t speak in English only. And now he’s not bleeding anymore. How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Such terror in his eyes. If he hadn’t lived I would have gone on seeing them. Do you think God would send me to hell for a thing like that?” This time she said nothing and to fill the silence, Caleb added. “Make sure he keeps on breathing. Make sure he lives.” He’d shot without being certain. And now their father was still gone, somewhere out on the prairies and Caleb had only deepened the danger of their situation. Their one chance, he thought, was if the girl, his odd sister, could heal the boy. Such thoughts circled and circled inside him until eventually he grew drowsy with them and fell into a troubled sleep.

Hazel kept watch, listening for sounds out in the dark. She was surprised by her longing to have this boy stay here. Each time she took away the cloth that covered his wound she marveled at the knob of ruddy-colored flesh already beginning to web over the injury and she felt a tingling along the tips of her fingers. She was bound to this boy in a way she didn’t understand yet. When she’d seen him before, even from a distance, there had been something in the way he carried himself, a quiet intensity that spoke to her. Tonight she had taken possession of him; now he belonged to her in a way that surpassed any spell her father had written down in his book.

She ran her fingers along her own throat. Her brothers seemed wary of her now that she spoke. Hazel had doubts about this. She’d long learned to watch the world in silence; people so often trusted her and told her their secrets. Would that trust continue now that she could answer back? The words she used still seemed like coinage, each one to be spent carefully for moments like this.

But for the boy she would speak at length. She whispered things to him while he slept his healing sleep. She told him about her mother’s gift for healing and how the consumption killed her in the middle of winter, of riding through the
hexenwald
with her father and the conjurefolk they met there, of the escaped slave and the grove of aspen trees that had failed to recognize the Son of Man, and her own family’s flight out of Missouri where they lost home, hearth, and their stepmother. And she told him of her fears for her father, his long absence, her sense of him out there somewhere fighting to get back. Still the boy slept and even had he been awake he would not have understood the words and stories she was telling him. But he had understood the prayer from the King James. He must have in order for the healing to take place.

She stayed awake wondering at what had happened in the grass. Had the boy been hunting something? Why had he carried the shotgun with him onto the Senger land?

The boy spoke back to her in a quiet sigh that sound almost like a word. “You will be whole again,” she whispered to him. “I know it.” He had a bow-shaped mouth which contrasted with his angular face, the high cheekbones, the broad nose, the arch of his dark brow. She had dared to undo the braids he had woven into his hair along with strips of soft fur. She brushed out the knots until his hair settled in an unbroken black sheen that fell past his shoulders. If he awakened would he have memory of the things she had told him? Would he remember the touch of her fingers inside him? She had dared to touch his hair and the supple skin that lined his boyish, slightly concave chest where each rib was clearly delineated. They had taken off his moccasins and leggings and medicine belt, a beaded doeskin bag that contained nothing but feathery down and stones etched with lightning bolts.

He wore only his breechclout, soured and rusty with blood. She had drawn her fingers along his narrow waist and paused here, uncertain. But this was only a boy after all. She had bathed with her own brothers since she was little. They bathed youngest to oldest, each climbing in the steaming tin tub of water, which became steadily grittier and cooler, until their father, last of all, a great shaggy bear, would plunge into the murky water with a wild shout, douse himself with a measure of soap, and then leap back out shaking himself like some half-drowned animal.

She undid the breechclout, feeling how it peeled away like a second skin. The boy’s breathing seemed to quicken and suddenly she was afraid that he was awake. She had not meant to look at him, only wanted to clean away the blood, but the way his breathing changed frightened her. Her hands shook while she cleaned him with muslin cloth. He was beautiful, his waist narrow, the hipbones curving. The sour smell of urine and blood mixed together and she crinkled her nose.
You must do this
, she thought. In her mind she pictured generations of women in cabins just like this, cleaning the wounded, preparing bodies for burial beneath the ground, stripping men of their soiled clothes, bracing themselves. How many of them had paused at this moment just like her? Seen the coiled shape of him, the vulnerability, this boy who was not as young as she had thought. The healer’s voice spoke inside her again, asking,
what are the generations of men who we see before us in birth and in death?
Hazel cleaned him with the cool muslin cloth and then dressed him once more. He had not looked like her brothers, not exactly. She rinsed her hands of his blood and smell.