Night Birds, The (31 page)

When Caleb had approached Lieutenant Sheehan and asked for permission to leave and search for his brothers and sisters, the man didn’t even bother to meet his eyes. “Absolutely out of the question,” he told him. “We’ll need every man that can still shoot straight.” So he stayed outside here with Noles and chatted about the weather and all the things a man could buy with $71,000.

Caleb looked out over the waving gold-tipped grasslands. There was nothing to stop Little Crow if he came with enough warriors, just a few scattered buildings: a barracks of sturdy granite, officer’s quarters made of flimsy clapboard, low log houses for the hospital and laundry. All sited on a grassy plain surrounded by ravines and deep woods that provided an enemy with perfect cover. Couldn’t he pretend to head down to the well and just keep walking? He could swim the river and then search for his family. But a whole day had passed without any more refugees trickling in. If they were not here, Noles had said, then they were dead.

Caleb saw a flicker of movement in the grasses at the same time as he heard one of the scouts cry, “Indians. Oh my God!”

Scattered gunshots strafed the prairie, men firing at phantoms in the grass. Here and there Indians rose from the tallgrass and loosed flaming arrows that thunked into the shingled rooftops of the fort. Caleb paused then, entranced by the slow arc of the burning missiles which hissed like fire serpents as they came. The arrows dropped in the grass, struck rooftops, met rain-damp surfaces, and went out. A moment after the fiery barrage, the grasslands parted to reveal more and more braves, screaming high and shrill, as they charged the fort. Some of the Indians crouched to fire their shotguns and the air whistled with shredded lead. Caleb opened fire alongside Noles, whose answering explosion instantly deafened him.

He heard that same oceanic roaring in his ears and for a moment entertained the wild thought of charging out among the Indians alone, swinging his rifle butt. He knew in those moments what his father Jakob had written about, the thing that had come inside him at faraway Chickahominy River. His blood throbbed in his chest and head and each thing he saw out there in the grassy plain imprinted onto his brain, so that he would remember ever afterward the sound of his heartbeat in his eardrums and the way the grass seemed to grow limbs and arms and painted faces distended in howls, as though the prairie itself were come for them now. Caleb was made for this violence, but he was no fool. It was safe here with his face in the black mud. Noles, somehow, still had his pipe gritted in his teeth, and he hooted when McGrew and Jones opened up with the mountain howitzers and the shells howled among the Indians. The artillery broke their charge and the Indians retreated back into the woods

“Like a gold wave,” said Noles. “Pretty to see ’em comin’ on. Even prettier to see ’em fall.”

Beside Noles and Caleb, there was a farm boy in honey-colored homespun. The boy looked even younger than Caleb, his face grimed, eyes a cool German blue. This boy propped up his rifle and spat out the gunpowder that blacked his teeth and tongue. “Will they come again?” he asked. “Too many of them to shoot.”

His answer arrived when a group of Indians charged the stable and took cover there. Rifle fire failed to bring them down, but McGrew had also seen them go inside and the resounding blast of the howitzer split the barn in a great ball of flame, scattering fragments of burning wood and torn limbs. Twice more this happened. As the Indians gained an outer building, artillery demolished it.

Then it was raining again: thunder in the sky, thunder on the ground. The Dakota boiled up out of a ravine at the southern edge, shrieking like catamounts, faces smeared with wet and colored paints. Caleb tore open the gunpowder papers with his teeth and poured in the powder and rammed home the cut slug. Again and again, he did this, not bothering to aim, discharging his rifle at the oncoming wave. The artillerists found them, too, and when the explosions fell among them, the Dakota broke and fled for the woods.

After an hour of this, it grew still and the roaring in their ears was replaced by the pattering of rain. An aproned woman climbed out among the boys, distributing new cartridges she and the blacksmith had whittled down, promising coffee if they stayed steady. Caleb swallowed and felt his stomach turn over from the gritty taste of the gunpowder. He leaned his head back and drank in the rain. It had seemed that every Indian in the entire valley had come against them, and they were still alive.

He thought again of his brothers and sisters, shut his eyes, as he used to be able to do when he was a boy. Then he had a sight, a way of finding people and things that were lost. But now he saw nothing, only felt the rain chilling his skin, the gunpowder raw in his throat.

If Blue Sky Woman suffered from a delusion, it was elusive and inconstant. After the second attack at the fort failed, the warriors, so radiant that morning, returned wet and grumbling, the echo of artillery shrill in their eardrums. Hazel’s heart rose at this news and then fell with the next words of the crier. One of the chiefs demanded payment in blood, and would take it from the captives. Many of the captives who were being protected by sympathetic Dakota were sent out to hide in rain-chilled ravines. It was said only two warriors had been killed by the “rotten balls,” but there were many injured and soon some of these would come to Blue Sky Woman’s teepee for healing. Hazel could not be there when they came. She found herself wondering about Wanikiya, if he was among the wounded.

Blue Sky Woman ducked under the teopa, rattling the elk hooves hung above the entrance. She said all the captives were to be
“Pa Baska,”
heads chopped off. Her face was glazed with rain. Hazel wondered how she could still call her Winona if she recognized at heart who she was. “My daughter,” the woman said. “You must hide. Come, I know a place for you.”

She took Hazel to the teepee of Spider Woman, an old widow the girl had sometimes seen at the Episcopalian Church near the agency. Spider Woman had a Bible, though she could not read, and spoke fondly of the Holy Spirit, calling him Taku-skan-skan, the same name the Dakota had for the god of motion. Her English was limited to three words. Her teepee, like Blue Sky Woman’s, was made of buffalo skin, tattooed with blurred symbols of Dakota and Christian belief. Hunched like her namesake, Spider Woman pulled aside a long strip of carpet laid under a ratty buffalo fur. She had been busy digging the hole that Blue Sky Woman had asked her to make.

As bidden, Hazel crawled into the hollowed-out hiding place. Fibrous roots spread out below her. The smell of wet earth tickled the insides of her nostrils. Blue Sky Woman handed down a skin of water, some pemmican they had pounded together earlier while listening to the thundering artillery, and, more ominous, the bone knife. “Sleep, daughter,” she said. “It won’t be long.” Then she went away to tend the wounded. Hazel stared up at the buckskin dress and wrinkled moon-face of Spider Woman. When the old woman smiled her black eyes disappeared into a nest of wrinkles. “I pray thee,” she said, and then pulled the covering over the hiding place.

Time blurs when you are under the earth. She thought of a Poe story her Pa had reprinted in the days when he had his press, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the great beating heart the murderer went on hearing in his sleep. Questions swirled inside her. Did the warriors’ defeat mean they would have to leave this valley soon? How could Blue Sky Woman know that Hazel was not her daughter and yet continue to act as though she was Winona? Above her, Hazel heard low muttering, a gruff male voice addressing Spider Woman. She tightened her grip on the bone knife. Dirt sprinkled down in clumps from the low ceiling.

No light could penetrate the covering. It was so dark she could not see her hand before her face. When the voices stopped, she nibbled some of the pemmican and swallowed a sip of water. She waited. Gradually, she became aware of other sounds down in the ground with her. Through the holes made by snakes or some large rodent, a cooling wind blew that chilled her to the marrow. She felt goosepimples rippling along her arms and thighs. In the blackness the fibrous roots fanned out beneath her like long-nailed fingertips. Hazel squeezed her eyes shut. She could hear her heart beating in her ears. Her breath came short.
Calm yourself
, she thought.
You can’t panic down here.

Faces swam out of the pitch before her. She saw Winona with curving yellow nails and long, streaming hair. Asa with his staring eyes and slack jaw. The soldier who floated past her in the river, his face gnawed by fish. Something seemed to be crawling out of the hole and she rolled and felt the roots scrape her like claws, like the corn leaves that had torn her dress as she ran blindly behind her stepbrother. She began to panic, her lungs constricting in her chest.

One. Two.
She kept counting until the images went away. She whispered The Lord’s Prayer and heard the dim echo around her. The sound of her own voice soothed her and so she continued to recite things in the dark, stories her Pa had spoken to her while they rode in the
hexenwald.
Words became fluid, shifting from English to Dakota and the stories changed too. There were princes who hid from their own brothers coming to kill them, a man who could change himself into a crow, a Dakota girl kept captive in a low square soddie by a blond ogre. As long as she murmured these things she was not swept up in the fear of being buried alive. She told the stories, picturing imagined worlds shaped by her voice, a lulling that eventually allowed her to sleep.

In the morning the old woman lifted the lid from the hiding place. Even the muted morning light within Spider Woman’s teepee blinded Hazel. She smelled sunshine and dew evaporating outside. Blue Sky Woman reached down a hand and helped her out of the hole. Hazel’s limbs were stiff and swollen; minutes passed before she could stand straight.

Things had quieted throughout the camp. Blue Sky Woman told her the warriors had left to raid New Ulm a second time now that they had failed to take the fort. There were no big guns at New Ulm. If this attack did not succeed, soon they would leave for Yellow Medicine country. Blue Sky Woman took her back to her dwelling and fed her a stew of stringy meat and bitter roots. Hazel was afraid to ask her about Wanikiya. When the two were done eating, she handed Hazel Winona’s awl, a curved elk antler used for sewing.

Notches ridged the edge. Just as the warriors gained eagle feathers each time they counted coup in battle, the women kept measure of their accomplishments on the awl. Each notch stood for a thing made. Hazel let her finger run along the grooved bone and remembered the moccasins Winona had made for Asa. A girl that gives such a gift means for the boy to become her protector. Had Asa known this? After she hanged herself, he threw them away in the river. There were three notches in Winona’s awl. What else had she made?

Blue Sky Woman passed her an old red stone pipe with a two-foot-long willow stem, a pipe just like hers, so they could both smoke kin-nikinnick while they sewed, holding the stem gently between their teeth and exhaling the sweet herb while their free hands stitched together the garments and clothing their loved ones would need most. Blue Sky Woman had brought Hazel a few long strips of white doeskin and some colored beads. She spread buckskin containers of earthy pigments and a scattering of porcupine quills before her. Hazel was practiced with a needle and thread, but the awl felt clumsy in her hands, more like a weapon. She looked over at Blue Sky Woman, who smiled back, eyes crinkling, smoke curling around her. The sunshine coming through the teepee skin was a liquid amber. It was easy to believe that there was no war. She was content for it to be just like this, no difficult choices, no hiding in dark holes, no blood or terror. How often had Blue Sky Woman and Winona sewed, mother and daughter, in a comfortable silence? She gave Hazel a nod of encouragement and the girl began to make a set of moccasins for Wanikiya, unsure if he would even accept them.

She did not possess Winona’s skill with an awl. The holes she punctured in the doeskin were jagged and uneven. She didn’t punch through the material so much as stab at it, as if it was still alive, and she was afraid of it. After a half hour of mangling the leather she threw the deformed fragments down in disgust.

Blue Sky Woman didn’t seem to notice. “I will tell you,” she said, “how I came to belong to the leaf-dwellers.” She took up the damaged pieces of leather and rubbed tallow into the skin to stretch and reshape it. “It was summer near the big waters, a day of sun after rain like this one. I was only this tall.” She held her hand about two feet above the grass mats where the two sat working and she went on to tell of her childhood with the Ojibwe, her mother warning her not to cry out as she hid Blue Sky Woman under a buffalo blanket during a nighttime raid by Dakota warriors. This is how she came to live among the leaf-dwellers, after all her family were killed. This is how she came to love her enemy.