Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  Ashes drifted past them like flecks of dark snow. Jakob had to coax the oxen to get them over the top of the next rise. What spread out in the valley below them could not be possible: An entire field of dead blackbirds, acre upon acre, the cloud-light glossy on their still quivering wings. The dead birds made a sound in the girl’s mind, a keening of betrayal at being called down to this place. Despite the stench, she held her hands over her ears to stop their cries. The boys scrambled back in the wagon. In her mind she kept seeing the vision from back in the store, the head nailed on the post and the blackbirds eclipsing the sun. It seemed as if they rode through the aftermath of a great battle between the creatures of the air. Hazel imagined clouds of them at war, beaks and talons speckled with blood, as they fell upon one another and dropped from the sky in a dark rain.

  From the far fields smoke rose from tin barrels. They made out human forms moving through the carnage, children in gray sackcloth trousers, red kerchiefs tied around their mouths like masked outlaws, each carrying a wooden bucket stacked with dead, quivering blackbirds. A gaunt scarecrow of a woman in a faded calico dress, holding a pair of dead blackbirds in each of her hands, stopped her work to watch the Sengers ride past. Her face, lost in the deep shadows of her slat bonnet, had a forlorn cast, the mouth opening without words at this distance.

  Ahead of them in the road, a sallow-faced man in a bowler hat stood before a dray cart where the birds were piled high as hay mound. He was red-eyed from the fumes, his skin and face the color of a shriveled pear. He scowled at the approaching caravan.

  After Jakob drew the wagon to a halt, neither man spoke at first. Jakob caught his breath. “What is the meaning of this?” he said. “How could so many birds die?” His hands shook while he held the reins.

  The man pointed to a silver canister beside him. “Strychnine,” he said. “I laced the seeds with strychnine. Two years running these birds have stolen the seeds before they touched the earth. The birds got fat while my children starved. This year they are paying twenty cents a bushel for dead blackbirds in town. This year my harvest will come from the sky.”

  Jakob glanced behind him at the poisoned fields and the masked children plucking the poisoned birds from the ground. “You’ll make them sick,” he said. Softer, under his breath, but loud enough for the man to hear, he said, “Madness.”

  He geed the oxen into motion, whipping them with the reins. The man shouted after them. “Don’t act like you’re better than me. You don’t know what it’s like out here. You don’t know.” His cry followed them like a chant, this Hans Gormann and his fair-skinned wife, and his daughters, Cassie and Sallie. And then they rode over the next hill and saw, for the first time, the cabin they would call home for the next four years.

  The wind came out of the west and they could no longer smell the field of dead blackbirds, but the clouds moved in squalls now, and there was the metallic taste of coming snow on the edge of their tongues. This was their first night in the new territory.

  The new cabin squatted stump-like at the base of a hill. The first night they came here the girl was relieved it bore no resemblance to the sod-roofed house she’d seen in her nightmare. The shutters banged and flapped in the wind as though the house was stretching to take flight and vanish over the horizon. Only tatters of leather hinges hung where there once was a door. Jakob tacked a blanket over this opening so they would feel less exposed.

  An untilled field encircled the cabin; a lone cedar tree stood at its center. There was a leaning structure of clapboards that yawned over an open pit. The sod barn proved to be a tight, cozy enclosure for the animals but Jakob had to manhandle the milch cow—shoving it by the rump while Caleb whipped it with a quirt—to get it inside. Something frightened the creature. That night as Hazel milked it the cow continued to make a mournful lowing sound with each tug of the teats. “Is she sick?” Caleb had asked, thinking maybe the calf she carried inside her was turned around the wrong way.

  “Maybe she doesn’t like this place,” Asa said. “It’s gloomy in here. Like being buried alive.” None of them said anything about the coppery scent that burned inside their nostrils, a scent that had soaked into the walls and the packed soil.

  By night the wolves came to serenade them. They slept fitfully, Hazel thinking of the two Indian watchers she had seen earlier on the prairie and wondering why they had come.

  In the wake of their April arrival, the weather turned for the worse. That first morning they woke to knee-deep drifts beyond the cabin and a scouring wind that blew through gaps in the cabin’s chinking. When the wind allowed the snow to settle, the children were awed by the spread of grassland and sky. Their old lives had been hemmed in by hills and hollows. Now there were endless seas of grass, broken only by small rises and groves of sheltering woods along the serpentine bends of the river. They stood at the edge of a raw country, a place of wind and storm, shifting and changing before their eyes.

  By morning Hazel woke to the noise of wind howling as sunlight streaked through clanging shutters and gilded the sleeping children. They had kept the smaller animals they purchased inside with them. Four laying hens clucked from their wire cages. Freyja, a striped cat with tawny fur they had also bought from the shopkeeper, yawned and displayed rows of sharp teeth.

  Hazel had been dreaming the ice dream again. In the dream her mother lay on the block of ice, her skin shining with blue light. A red sash coiled around her throat. Her fingers were gray, drained of blood, the fingernails as long as talons. What happened to you? Hazel said in the dream and her voice echoed through the cavernous barn: What happened, happened to you . Hazel awoke and felt icy drafts pooling on the floor below her. She woke thinking she was sleeping on a bed of ice. I wish this winter would leave us, she thought. I am not my mother. What happened to her is not my story.

  She listened to her father splitting kindling. Only after she heard the flare of the lucifer match did she dare rise in the freezing room. Jakob’s beard looked wild and tangled; locks of his dark hair fell in his eyes while he labored to get the fire going. But he seemed rested, content, even as the moisture of his breath formed ice beads in his mustache. All of them had been thinned down to an essence of lean muscle by the journey from Missouri. Thinned down and strengthened, Hazel hoped.

  She helped Jakob get the bacon started, standing on a low stool, the heavy iron skillet popping with grease. This would be her job now with Kate gone. She would have to feed and clean for four boys and a man. None had marked the passage of her twelfth birthday in late March as their steamboat took them through Keokuk. She bit down on her lip, thinking what a petty concern this was when so much else was happening. While she forked over the bacon, Jakob ground beans in a mill and got the coffee started. When he looked at her his black eyes glittered under his heavy brows. “Mein apfel,” he said, his endearment for her. She loved to be spoken and sung to in the language of the Old Country. “We are a long ways from God’s country now,” he said.

  What is hardest to believe is that for a short time they were happy. Without shingles to repair the roof, they ransacked the canvas from their Conestoga wagon and stretched it across. This kept out the snow, but at nights when the wind stirred and rustled the canvas it seemed their cabin was alive and adrift, rushing across the dark toward some unforeseen destination. They burrowed under their blankets and didn’t get up at night since they didn’t have chamber pots and none wanted to brave the icy trek to their tottering outhouse.

  The cold relented and lamplit nights passed as Jakob read aloud to them from The Book of Wonders to remind them of home. Always plant potatoes in the dark of the moon, he’d read. It’s safe to plant beans when you hear whippoorwills in the rushes. When planting peach trees, bury old boots near the roots. Hazel ground buckwheat in the coffee mill while Jakob chanted his litany. It sounded pretty read aloud, even if it wasn’t true. What they heard in his voice was a spell to ward off ill-fortune. What they heard was a shared dream for a crop that would feed them through the
next winter.

  At night Hazel lay on the floor near her brothers with the cat, Freyja, nestled on her chest, purring like a small steam engine, a second heartbeat in time with her own. They listened, the cat and she, to the wolves down in the grove. The wolves didn’t sound so lonesome after a time. I amm heerre , the wolves sang. I am alive and a part of these stars, this April moon, this land dreaming under the snow . The girl watched moonlight streaming through the canvas and listened. I am here now , they bayed, I won’t be forever, but tonight I am, under these April stars, in my warm fur coat and I am alive and glad of it. I am here, and this life is savage, and this life is good . Once Hazel heard the joy in their singing she stopped thinking this was such a terrible place. She lay quietly with the fat tabby purring on her chest, warm in her burrow of blankets, and willed her thoughts to travel out to their voices resounding through the prairie darkness: I am here, too. I don’t know why or for what reason, but I am alive and all is well.

  She felt this even as she missed humid Missouri and thought about her stepmother Kate and wondered if the woman was lonesome for them. To her surprise she found that she missed her. There was too much work to be done and she was only a girl and not ready for it. She missed Kate bustling her into petticoats and bemoaning Hazel’s slumping posture and glum frowns. For all her weaknesses and nitpicking, Kate brought a sense of order with her. If only she had loved my father more , Hazel thought. But the woman had seen an opportunity for escape and taken it.

  Each morning Hazel rose and pulled on her night-chilled garments from a box by the stove where the ashes of the night before were banked. She rose and pulled on the one dress she owned and walked down the path to milk their cow, her footsteps crossing over places where paws had trod the night before.

  After a week in the unseasonable cold, the cow went dry. She bawled at Hazel while the girl tugged on her teats and ducked the lashing tail. The girl’s mittenless hands were freezing. She pressed her face against the warmth of the flank and listened for some clue to what was wrong. They brought the cow fresh grain, wrapped her in an old blanket, rubbing down the hide, but nothing worked. Jakob said the cow was homesick. He said it was a foolish and sentimental creature, but that it would get over it and not to worry.

  The next morning the cow disappeared. They found the frayed rope in the barn and the splintered beams around the door as though she’d panicked in the night and smashed her way out. Flecks of blood speckled the beams of her stall. The wind had been up the night before and they hadn’t heard a single thing. It howled around them now, a springtime wind out of the south to quicken the pulse of sap in sleeping trees and soften the ground. The wind seethed, melting snow, erasing all tracks of what had happened the night before. In the grove, the wind pruned winter-killed branches from the trees. They heard limbs crashing down in intervals while they paced around the sod barn and tried to make sense of the animal’s disappearance.

  It looked as though the milch cow had rolled across the damp ground, throwing up great drifts of snow and mud. Only one set of tracks led away from the barn and down toward the river.

  “Do you think the wolves got to her?” Caleb asked.

  Jakob shook his head. “I think she just run off. She’s been raising a ruckus to beat the band, crying like she wanted to be back home. She’ll be calving soon. Maybe there’s something wrong. Either way she’s acting crazy and I’m gonna have to track her. If I don’t find her, I’ll go to Fort Ridgely and file a report. They pay settlers out of the Indians’ annuity funds for things that get stolen. Depredations, they call it.”

  “You ought to take me, Pa,” Caleb said. “I’m good at finding things.” It was true. Back in Missouri, if one of the milch cows wandered away, Caleb would find a daddy long legs and whisper a ditty: Old Man Spider, so many eyes, tell us where milch cows hide. He’d screw up his face tight as if listening for the spider’s response, but this was just to impress his younger brothers, especially white-haired Daniel. Really, Caleb just read the tracks on the ground and knew the cows would head for the mud wallows when the flies got mean. Still there was something instinctive in how he hunted and found the lost.

  Jakob studied him for a moment, this boy who had already grown taller than him. A boy with his first wife’s gold-brown eyes and sharp features. “No, I’ll need you to stay here,” he said. “I’ll be leaving the rifle with you. I don’t want you to leave these premises, you understand? No matter how long it takes me, you are to stay here.”

  LOST

  JAKOB WALKED ON water to find their lost milch cow. How the cow was lost and how he came to find it might have become the stock of Senger family legend had things turned out differently. He walked on water because the river froze once more and allowed him to pass over it.

  The first time Jakob encountered snowshoe prints beside the cow’s trail he thought of returning to his children. Snow dropped from trees in loud clumps and Jakob heard the subdued surge of the river as the ice plates crackled and separated along the shoreline. The milch cow had crossed and re-crossed the river three times, always coming back to these woods. At last she had barreled up out of them, through a grove of maples, and onto the wide, white prairie.

  The sun came out and turned the landscape into a single translucent glare, a glittering terrain that looked like thousands of mirrors flickering in the light. A layer of sleet had come down in the night and further glazed the remaining snow. Wind had scraped the ground clean of snow in places; pockets of tall golden grass mixed with pockets of snow where Jakob sank to his waist. He had been walking for hours, he thought. It was more difficult to track her with the sun out. Green fires flared at the edge of his vision, and had he been raised out here like the Dakota, he would have known this was the first sign of impending snow blindness.

  He was no tracker, but he knew he had to provide for his children. They needed this cow’s milk to survive. It was here on the prairies that he first saw the snowshoe prints, faint impressions in the melting snow that appeared here and there around the cow’s tracks as though someone were leading her on this crazed journey. He knelt and traced with his mittens the outline of the print, the lace of branches. He held his hand over his eyes and tried to peer into the distance, across the bleak sweep of snow. The cow was not going in the direction he’d expected. Jakob had assumed when he set out to find her that she was headed back for New Ulm, the home that she knew. He’d been sure this stubborn beast had been trying to get back to her old owner, but her trail circled back onto the prairie and there was the mystery of those strange prints beside her.

  Ahead of him he could see a grove of cottonwoods lining a ridge, the limbs leafless and bare; surely the tree line marked the beginning of another river. Something fluttered within the trees, pale pink cloths the color of human skin. His throat was dry. He knelt and cupped some of the snow into his mouth and it chilled him straight down. The cloths beckoned him toward the woods like fingers. Everywhere the land was glazed and glaring with the sun’s reflection.

  He moved toward the woods, discovering as he came closer that the land dipped here into an ice-choked bowl of water surrounded by cattails and marsh reeds. The wind caused powdery snow to glide in serpentine patterns across the frozen pond. Farther out, past the pond’s center, he saw the speckled hulk of the cow. Then he saw the wolves as they lurched to feed on the body, four or five skinny wolves with mottled fur and red snouts. Crows cawed from the edges of the marsh and flew in circles around the scene. His gut churned at the sight below. A fat wedge of blood trailed from the pond’s edge. The wolves had torn her open from her hind end and strewn her intestines in a long red line. There was blood in the snow and gleaming bits of hide and flesh. The cow lowed, a rumbling, forlorn moan. She was still alive.

  The sight filled him with rage and before he knew what he was doing, he charged down the hill, bellowing, waving his arms, and he was among the wolves. He slipped once in the bloody snow and fought his way back to his feet, the briny, sweet smell of her blood
and intestines clinging to his clothing. The wolves ran from him at first, a wild-eyed man hoarse with rage, and then circled back. The largest, a gray with shimmering fur and yellow eyes, trotted around Jakob in an easy circle, its black lips drawing back to expose long teeth.

  Jakob charged them again and again they danced away. The gray snarled. Another began to growl as they reformed their circle. Jakob’s breath wheezed in his chest. All the fury that had carried him into this fight drained from his arms and chest. He could not fight off five wolves with his bare hands. In his mind’s eye he saw their circle tightening and tightening and him at the center. He shouted at them, called them see-lenraubers and other things in a language they had never heard, but still they came. And eventually, in panic, he charged once more to the other side of the pond and broke past them.

  The wolves didn’t follow him. He watched all the while: watched them renew their attack on the fallen cow, tearing out more and more ropes of intestines and then the terrible sac of skin that held the calf, breaking it open like a yolk on the snow, and the wolves drenched and radiant with placental blood, snarling and fighting after devouring the fetus, and then returning to tear out more organs from the still living cow until she loosed one last strangled scream, a sound almost human to Jakob’s ears, one last wail before she lay her snout in the snow and ceased breathing.