Night Birds, The (28 page)

“Run now!” Asa shouted.

He leapt down from the buckboard and made for the cornfield, Daniel and Hazel racing behind him. Cut-Nose was busy slashing at the snarling dog with the butt of his shotgun to keep his companions from getting mauled. Turnip lunged at him, while the oxen lowed in panic and surged forward, dragging the wagon behind them.

The children were running blindly through the corn when the blast that silenced the dog reached them. They ran on with their blood hot in their ears. The leaves of the corn tore at their clothing and scraped their skin. Heavy as stone, Ruth began to slip from Hazel’s arms as she stumbled along, her lungs burning. She would see this cornfield in her dreams the rest of her life, Daniel running ahead of her, Asa, white-faced, urging them to move quicker.

Before them, a gathering of blackbirds feeding on the tassels stormed out of the corn, their many wings making a locomotive roar. Birds and more birds, singing around her a nightmare song. Halfway into the field, Hazel tripped in one of the furrows and Ruth’s screams turned to shrieks as she was crushed to the ground. When Hazel tried to stand again, a white-hot pain shot up from her ankle and sang in her skull. She thrust the shrieking baby into Daniel’s arms and pushed him ahead of her.

“Keep running,” Asa shouted. Behind them, one of the Indians ran crouched, low and quick, parting the corn as he came. Asa knelt in a furrow, the rifle at his shoulder. He fired and the resulting acrid cloud of gunpowder stole their sight. When the cloud cleared, the Indian was gone.

Asa dropped the half-stock rifle and grabbed Hazel’s hand. She could recall the feel of his fingertips—warm, slick with sweat as he tried to pull her along—and then the terrible shudder as a shot from behind tore away the back of his skull, and twisting, he fell on top of her, his legs folding beneath him.

She was blinded by his blood and had to wipe her eyes to try to see around her. Daniel was gone and she could no longer hear Ruth crying. She sat in the corn and held her stepbrother’s ruined skull in her lap and waited for his killer to find her. Asa’s blood soaked through the linsey-woolsey dress she wore, gluing them both to the black earth. His legs lay twisted beneath him. The front of his face was unmarred, his jaw clenched tight. She shut his eyes and placed his bloodied hands over the shirt pocket that held her father’s letter. Ashes fell around them, dropping down through the corn leaves, and streaking Asa’s hair with gray. She hoped they would be quick when they found her.

She heard stalks of corn being crushed in the chase. Someone shouted something in Dakota. The smell of blood and gunpowder burned in her nostrils. Where were the Indians who had been behind them, cutting off their hope of escape?

Then the corn parted and revealed one of the Indians, bright and terrible in his war paint, face charcoaled, owlish circles of white around his eyes. She looked up to meet her death. He was only a boy, his ribcage prominent. In her terror she failed to recognize him at first. He was breathing hard from the long chase. Smoke streamed from the barrel of the rifle he carried.

She held her brother’s head in her lap and looked up into the face of Wanikiya and saw that his eyes were dark with what he had to do next. Her lips parted to say his name, but no sound came out. Behind him there was more shouting and he turned once in that direction. When he turned back toward her, his jaw was set, his nostrils flaring. He swung the barrel of the rifle around and hit her square in the forehead with the stock of the gun. Hazel heard the crack of the impact at the same time her mind flooded with shadows. She was unconscious before the back of her head struck the harrowed ground.

THE
CAPTIVE

S
HE LAY DIRECTLY
across the withers of a skinny pinto pony, its spine against her ribs, the smell of sweat and fear that rose from its hide filling her nostrils. The ride jostled Hazel and worsened the pain behind her eyes where it felt as though a nail had split her flesh and bone. Beyond the animal’s fear she smelled a world on fire. The boy’s voice, speaking in Dakota, drifted to her at times. It was not to Hazel passing in and out of consciousness that he spoke, but to encourage his pony as they rode past burning cabins and dead settlers by the roadside.
Waditanka sunghuna
, he said:
My brave pony, their ghosts will not hurt you.

When she came to next, she found herself alone in the teepee of Blue Sky Woman. She had dreamed of birds again, twin ravens that led her through a dark wood. In the dream a dense canopy of leaves above them occluded the sunlight, the birds before her little more than liquid shadows flitting from branch to branch, urging her on. And then the woods opened unto a cornfield, green-gold in the sun, and somehow it was snowing in the dream though there were no clouds. There were children playing in the corn, a boy singing to a child, his voice high and sweet. Hazel would wake with his song in her mind, not knowing at first where she was. She woke in the gray time before first light. The pain in her skull receded to a dull ringing as the song of the boy faded. Below her she felt the itch of wool trader blankets. Someone had wound a light cloth around the wound on her forehead. Smoke spiraled and twisted up the cedar lodgepoles and rose out the smoke flaps. Her dream rose with the smoke until it vanished. Outside, rain pattered against the lodging.

She knew where she was only by the constellation of markings painted on the inner skin of the room. Unlike the newer canvas teepees, Blue Sky Woman’s dwelling was made of brain-tanned buffalo. Most Dakota marked their teepees on the outside for all to see. This was a private display. Here, in Blue Sky Woman’s dwelling, tradition and the new religion intermingled. Though Hazel’s head faintly ached, she watched the figures on the tapestry, a strange mixing of Christian and Dakota spirits now animate in the firelight. Then she swallowed, fully aware of her surroundings, as she remembered all that had happened the day before. No angels had come for Asa in the cornfield.

The memory stopped the breath in her chest. She touched the light-blue dress where her stepbrother’s blood had soaked through the material. She remembered the sensation of his fingertips. Why had he waited for her? She recalled Daniel’s face, white with terror, the baby howling in his arms as he turned to run deeper into the corn. What had happened to them? The last thing she remembered was the corn parting to reveal Wanikiya, and then later, waking tied to his pinto pony.

When she shut her eyes briefly she saw Asa reaching down for her once more, and then her mind blurred. Her memory let her step near the horror of his end and then reeled back. Her eyes flashed open again, her gorge rising. A knot began to swell in her chest as though she had swallowed a seed of ice and now it spread tendrils through her blood.
Don’t recall him that way
, she thought as the numbness spread. Instead, she tried to remember his words of the night before as he sat near the smudge fire and recited Jakob’s letter, a proud boy, full of himself and his plans. Only when she thought of him this way did she realize that she herself couldn’t recall what words the letter contained.
My dearest family
, he’d recited, and then there was a blank space in her memory. And the realization of this small loss amidst so many great ones burned through her and allowed her to cry. Hot and quick, the tears washed Asa’s blood and her own from her face. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. She cried until the ice tendrils in her chest cracked open, until her sides ached and her head throbbed. Tearful gasps shook her whole body. She was alone in a room of painted angels, grieving for her stepbrother.

She didn’t know how long she cried but eventually, through the blur of tears, she saw a small goblin kneeling before her, a child-sized creature with black hair and glimmering eyes. The thing talked but the words made no sense. The world seemed to rotate around him, and Hazel shut her eyes and let her other senses spread out. The fire that burned nearby smelled of cedar, smoke to chase away evil spirits. Her body was slick with sweat and tears. When she opened her eyes again, the goblin resolved into Otter, the boy who had brought the warning to Asa. The boy whom none of them had believed. Otter’s skinny body was mottled with paint the rain had blurred. He held a hand to his mouth, signaling quiet. “You must not cry,” he said to her in Dakota. “Some of the warriors want to kill all the white captives. The women they took cry too much.”

He kept his voice at a whisper. Smoke from the cedar fire billowed around him before rising past the lodgepoles. Where was Blue Sky Woman or Wanikiya? Sheets of rain came and went against the outer skin of the teepee, but here she was warm and safe. Caleb had said the rain would come. The last time she saw him he had stalked away into the tallgrass, furious with Asa. Had the Indians killed Caleb as well? If he was alive, her brother would come for her. Caleb was the hunter, the finder of lost things. Is that what she was now, a lost girl? She was beginning to think more clearly and realized she had cried her throat raw. She signaled this to Otter by touching her neck. He nodded and ducked past the teepee flap out into the rain.

While he was gone the heat in her throat spread through her like fever. A name rose up from memory, a name she had learned when they first entered this valley: Abbie Gardner, who had seen her entire family clubbed to death before her eyes by Inkpaduta’s tribe in the Spirit Lake Massacre. A woman who became a warning for the children.
Be good or you’ll end up like Abbie. Don’t play with Indians; remember what happened to Abbie. Inkpaduta is still out there so you best come home before dark
. But the more they talked about her the more it became a tale, not something that happened to a real person.

An image of Abbie floated through Hazel’s mind, the girl with her hair in a bun turning away from the artist, her lips barely opening as though she were seeing what happened again in her mind’s eye and crying for help.
Only I have returned to tell these things
, she was about to say. The Senger family had seen this portrait their first day in the valley, more than four years before, on a wintry afternoon standing near a stove, a clutch of frightened children who could not fathom the new place they would call home. It had been Asa who said then, “Why Hazel, she looks just like you.”

Again the breath stilled in Hazel’s chest. She went on hearing her stepbrother’s voice and the loss of him struck her once more, a fresh wave of sorrow sweeping through her.

By the time Otter returned with water she had been crying until her chest burned. The boy knelt beside her and tried to put his hand over her mouth. She tasted the salt of his palm through her tears. And suddenly she was angry with him, this boy who had tried to warn them of what was coming, who had done all he could to keep her safe. She bit down on the hand held over her mouth hard enough to draw blood. Otter shrieked and withdrew his hand. The anger which brought color to her cheeks, a pulse threading through tired flesh, made her feel strong. If he came near her again she would bite him like a wolf girl. Otter held his wounded hand against his chest and said, “Please, they will hear you and come.” She let out a cry that was part animal and Otter ran out of the room still holding his wounded hand. When Hazel’s throat was too raw to cry, she slept.

Blue Sky Woman came at last, carrying the childhood garments of her dead daughter. A short woman with a round face, she had been a captive herself long ago when the Dakota took her from the Ojibwe. She had black, lustrous hair and a pretty, heart-shaped face. Three summers had passed since Winona hanged herself with the buffalo strap used to carry water from the creeks. Asa had been the one to find her body. Winona had loved Asa. After the day he found her swinging from the branch he ran away. A week later he came back and confessed to Hazel what he’d done to the girl in the quiet of the meadow. He told her this and then never spoke of Winona again. At the time Hazel had wondered how men and boys grieved, if it was possible to cut someone out of you so you never thought of them when you turned over in the dark.

Blue Sky Woman was rough with her. She shushed her cries and pulled her up from the grass mats and trader’s blankets where she lay by the fire. Too numbed to fight her, Hazel did as she was asked. She undressed Hazel, pouring water on the places where the linsey-woolsey dress had gummed to her skin, the dried blood like a second flesh she peeled away. The layers of her white self, her memory, Hazel thought. Blue Sky Woman had to use a knife on the blood-soaked petticoats that wrapped her so tightly. Naked in the firelight, Hazel held her hands over her breasts. Then she pulled on the beaded doeskin dress that had belonged to Winona, a costume that most Dakota didn’t wear anymore, so common was the cotton and calico they purchased by trade or with their government annuity. The garment smelled faintly of earth and was cool against her skin.

Only when Hazel had sat again and Blue Sky Woman began to braid her hair did she at last understand what was happening. “Winona,” Blue Sky Woman told her, “How long will you punish me with your silence? The white boy does not love you.” Blue Sky Woman drew a vermilion streak down the center of her forehead and touched a red dot to either cheek. When she was done she sat back and studied her handiwork. This is how Hazel came to change places with a dead girl, even though she was no longer certain she wanted to live herself. “Oh my daughter,” Blue Sky Woman said, her eyes glazed in the firelight, “my heart fills with happiness to have you here.”

After Blue Sky Woman sent her out with a buffalo strap to gather water, Hazel discovered the other captives, none of whom she’d seen before. They numbered a quarter of the village, in fact—white women in frayed dresses, here or there a few surviving children, and one Bohemian man called Pieter the Indians kept alive because he was good with the many oxen they had taken. Hazel came down through a circle of teepees arranged around the brick house where Little Crow kept his wives. And though she was dressed like an Indian, her pale skin, previously hidden from the summer sun by a slat bonnet, showed her for what she was. The buffalo strap wrapped around her skull like a headband and behind it she felt the slight weight of the empty skin container she was to fill with water. The headache from her wound throbbed, but Winona’s beaded doeskin dress felt soft and cool against her skin.

When she first encountered the other captives they were seated in a circle of wet grass shucking corn for the soldier’s lodge. They would soon be sent out into the agency fields to gather more. Faces smudged by smoke, the women looked haggard and dirty. One of them had a long shawl beneath which she nursed a child. Most didn’t notice Hazel or bother to look up as she approached them. A cadaverous woman cowered when she heard Hazel’s footsteps and dropped her shucking pin. The others looked at the clothes she wore, brilliant with beads and rain, and scowled.

Hazel wanted one of them to be her mother, for one of them to rise and hold her, saying:
It will be all right. We’ve come through something terrible, but you’re with me now and things will be fine.
Hazel wanted to speak them, to ask them:
Have any of you seen my brother Daniel? Were any other babies spared?
She begged them with her eyes.
Oh please, oh God. Tell me they are still alive.
But the women looked away, except for the nearest one, a large woman in a ruined black silk dress who spit on the ground before Hazel’s feet. “Look at you,” she said. “A little Indian princess. Folks not even in the ground and already you’ve forgotten them. Disgraceful.”

Her words cut into Hazel like a rusty saw. Hazel turned away from her, tears spilling down her cheek and blurring the vermilion dots Blue Sky Woman had painted there.

“Leave her be,” said the woman with a baby sheltered beneath her shawl.

“For shame,” the big woman repeated, her voice low and hissing.

It seemed then that she might rise and strike Hazel, for she shifted her heavy rump on the grass and grunted like she was going to get up. Hazel stayed where she was, ready to receive the blow, a part of her wanting the pain even as the buffalo strap tightened around her forehead. But at that moment a group of young warriors returned from the prairie bearing scalps. The young men glistened in the rain and shouted for a crier to carry news of their deeds through the camp, of the whites they had killed like dogs. The array of scalps they carried were tied to their medicine belts and sashes and they had painted themselves with the blood of those they killed. Four of them danced around the circle and let the blood drip down from the scalps and shook stained tomahawks in the frightened women’s faces. The emaciated woman fainted dead away while the other women held each other, eyes shut tight. But the fat woman set her jaw and looked only at Hazel as if the girl was to blame for what was happening now, as if this display confirmed every word she had spoken. The warriors ignored Hazel, catching sight of her dress only out the corners of their eyes and not recognizing her for the captive she was. An old man with iron-gray braids shouted for them to leave the women alone. He was hungry and the women could not shuck corn if mistreated. They should not have taken scalps. Were any of those killed warriors? There was no honor in the taking of
these
scalps, he told them. The warriors grumbled at the old man, but did as he asked and stalked away. Soon a crowd of young boys with toy bows surrounded them and filled the air with high trills.