Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

He knelt again in the grass. Hinyan struggled as he tightened his embrace. Wanikiya began to sing as he wound the leather cord tightly around the bird’s throat. Swift, he thought. Make it swift. This I bring before You, my offering. This that I hold beloved above all things, for You who made all things. Even the breath in my lungs. Such were his thoughts as he wound the cord tighter and tighter and felt the bird beat its wings, one talon hooking into the boy’s bare chest. Hinyan did not go quietly to her death. She fought as every living thing did, and the boy whispering the whole time, pleading that its spirit would forgive him, dwell with him, until he wound the cord so tight that the bird’s neck broke and Hinyan went still against his skin.

  He laid the corpse before the place where once there had been a god. It does not matter that You are not here , he thought. You are not in stones and men only . His eyes brimmed. Why did he still feel nothing, only regret that what he loved was dead?

  In his half-blindness he stood and movement from the trees drew his eyes. A quick flicker: The girl from the cabin who had seen Hanyokeyah and him watching that day at the river. She was breathing hard, as though she had witnessed something terrible. And then he knew that she had seen it all, had shared in this moment. His throat swelled. His cheeks were warm and bright with tears. The girl stepped closer to him, only a span of dark maples between them. She was coming his way and then he saw her brothers were behind her and that the blond one carried a rifle. Before he could raise it to his shoulder, Wanikiya was running back to the river and the fallen limb that would take him across.

  THE CHILDREN

  OF LEAVES

  HE WOKE WITH a warm cloth over his eyes and the reedy voice of a man threading into his ears. The greasy smell of onions frying in lard saturated the air. He heard them hiss in the pan, felt the wind blow through the chinking of this cabin. The floor below him was packed dirt, well-tamped. After he removed the cloth, Jakob let his eyes adjust to the shadows. There were hewn stumps for chairs, a low pallet against the side of a wall. It was dark in the cabin, which had no windows to let in the light, but Jakob could see pelts of animals tacked against the wall—a mink, a fox, the matted silver-black fur of a wolf—along with the iron teeth and blunt chains of the traps used to capture them. The floor sloped downhill, as if the place was leaning sideways, or was that a trick of his mind? His eyes rose up from the floor and across the room he saw a man watching him, and the slash of a smile which framed brown-stained teeth.

  “You’re awake,” the man said. He had the palest skin Jakob had ever seen, so pale he could make out the network of blue vessels beneath. The man had white hair, pinkish-bloodshot eyes, and just the stub of a nose. He was dressed in dark wool pants and a dark vest, but barefoot, his toenails yellow and curving, as long as claws. In his lap he cradled a raccoon that had rolled over on its belly and was purring like a cat. Beside him a rushlight burned on the table, a crude, oily light that consisted of a wick burning inside tallow. “Awake, just in time for dinner.”

  “Where am I?” Jakob asked. He was wrapped tightly in a striped wool blanket that itched his skin. Next to him there was an open hearth, a chimney of mud and wattles that blackened the walls around it with smoke. A Dutch oven squatted in the embers of the fire and it was from this that Jakob heard the onions sizzle and smelled the melting lard. The man set down the raccoon and let it hobble across the floor and Jakob saw that the creature only had three legs, but managed to move nimbly as it scurried past him.

  “You don’t know?” the man said. “You’re just outside Milford. I found you in my river.” Jakob struggled with the memory. The cow ripped open. Wolves. The bodies in the trees. The blindness and the pain that came with it. The shadow form. And then the river and the taste of the water.

  “Who is Ruth?” the man asked.

  “Ruth?” Jakob said, and then he remembered. The drowned slave. He had felt her terror as the river tugged him down. Then the voice calling to him from shore, a voice at first he had thought was only in his mind: Stand up! You’re in shallow water. And Jakob had found a purchase in the sweeping river, wedged his boots between some rocks and felt his ankles twist. Standing, he was only waist-deep in the current, coughing and gagging out the water, and his vision dwindling down a single string of light. So weak. So much fire in his brain. “I never seen a man almost drown in three feet of water,” the voice was saying now and Jakob remembered the hands grabbing him by the shirt, pulling back onto the creaking sheet of ice and toward the shore.

  “You saved my life,” Jakob said.

  A thin, reedy laugh. “You were delirious, kept babbling about your blindness and someone named Ruth. Did you lose her?”

  “She was a slave who drowned,” Jakob said.

  “A slave,” the man said. “They don’t keep slaves around here, and it’s a pity they don’t, if you ask me. Those Germans over in Milford, they hate it. Even just the talk of it makes them bilious.”

  “Can’t say I’m fond of slavery either,” Jakob said.

  The man rose from the log stump where he had been seated and came over to crouch beside Jakob. “Do you feel strong enough to stand?” he asked and Jakob nodded. His bones creaked in the cold of the room, but it felt good to be up off the dirty floor. The man pointed over to a rafter where Jakob’s clothes hung. Jakob turned away from him and let the blanket fall. He felt a tightness in his hip, remembered the shadow he’d seen and wondered at it. He could feel the other man’s eyes on him while he dressed and suddenly only wanted to be away from this place. His clothes reeked of the smoke and the muskrat odors of this room. He dressed quickly and turned to see the man carrying over a loaf of bread on a slab of charred wood. Then he brought the Dutch-oven to the table and cut out ragged slices of dark bread and ladled the onions and lard over this, saying, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Jakob shrugged and came over for a bite. The bread and grease slid down his throat and he felt his stomach turn over. He was famished and began to eat more quickly. “It’s not much,” the man said, “but I lived off this buckwheat bread and lard for many a winter.”

  Jakob wiped some of the grease from his chin and held out his hand. “Jakob Senger,” he said. The man’s grip was firm, his hands frigid. “I’m a newspaperman. Well, I was for a time. But now I’m going back to farming.”

  The man laughed. “Out here!” he said. He shook his head. “Well, Jakob Senger, my name is Silas Macaby. From the Maine shores. And pulling you from the river is the only good thing I’ve done in the three years I’ve been here.” While he spoke, the raccoon swirled around his ankles and Silas passed down dribbles of bread and grease the creature took in its webbed paws. “In fact I was just waiting for the weather to break and then I was headed back for Maine. I’ve been lonely for the sound of the sea. For the taste of oysters. And sick, I’ve been. Sick of Indians, the flea-bitten beggars.”

  “Indians,” Jakob said. “I think it was one of them who stole my cow.”

  “Likely,” said Silas. “They’ll steal anything not nailed down. Steal the shirt off your back and then taunt you with it. No, I won’t miss them. Living near them for these three years has been a torment.” The man seemed to eat very little of his own meal, passing much of it down to his fat hobgoblin of a raccoon.

  “Why?”

  “They might have been noble once. You can see flashes of that in them, a fierce pride. But now they are confined to the reservation to live like beasts, caught between the liquor traders on one hand and the government on the other. Now they drink their summers away and suffer through winter until another payment arrives.” While Silas spoke, flecks of food dribbled from his mouth. A pulse came and went along his pale jaw line. Silas raged on, describing the degraded society he had witnessed, the raw fish–eating feasts and face-paintings and the way the German settlers in Milford had settled on illegal land that belonged to the Indians and made other plans, plotting to get their hands on land inside the reservation. “I don’t blame the Indians for stealing. They’ve trapped this
country clean out. Hardly enough game around to feed one man, much less the five thousand of them on the other side of the river.” Silas slapped his knee and laughed his reedy laugh. “But I got even. Wait until they see.” A glint in the pink eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  Silas nodded over to his bed where there was a skull-sized package wrapped in cloth and ropes. “Taku-skan-skan,” he said. “Go look.”

  Jakob stood and wiped his hands on his pant legs. He looked back at Silas and saw the grin and the brown teeth. Whatever he tells you, it can’t be true , he thought. They said the same things about the slaves in Missouri. Degraded. Lesser men because of the darkness of their skin. I don’t believe it. I remember the dogwood flower and how within each petal there is a cross, a rusty nail, the sign of Christ. If God inhabits a flower, so must he inhabit men. This man, this pale echo of my own search for good country, has not seen right. I will find the way to speak to them as Paul discovered the unknown god and learned to speak to the Greeks. Jakob halted before the bundle. The sheets on the rope-spring bed stank of the pale man’s musty skin. He didn’t want to look inside. “Go on, now,” Silas encouraged.

  Jakob touched the bundle, felt the hard shape of it beneath. A skull , he kept thinking. Has this man murdered someone, an Indian trespasser? His fingers slowly unbound the ropes and the cloth fell away. Jakob didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he exhaled. He took another deep breath, steadied himself. It was only a stone, after all. A red stone carved with marks. “Do you know what it is?” Silas said. “I may not have made a living here, but I have this. It’s their god, Taku-skan-skan. I mean to sell it back East. There’s many a museum that will buy it.”

  “You stole their god?” Jakob backed away. “I’ll leave you then,” he said, thinking he owed the man at least this acknowledgment. The bread and grease he’d eaten churned in his stomach and made him feel queasy. “I should be getting back.” The children , he thought once more. They will be waiting . A new question climbed up inside him. “How long,” he said. “How long did I sleep?”

  Silas showed his brown teeth. “You slept like the dead, my friend. Three whole feverish days after I pulled you out.”

  The second morning of his absence came with clouds liquid as quicksilver moving in the sky. All the world seemed to be on the move with spring here and the snows a memory. The children kept busy, cutting wood for the stove, leading the stock down to the river. Morning came with another dire discovery: a rime of green fungus scummed the surface of the salt pork. The entire root cellar smelled of rotting meat and they had to take the barrel and leave it out on the prairie, a month’s worth of food left to the wolves. At least the hens had finally laid some eggs, which Hazel managed to fry without burning. Their bellies full, they felt hopeful and Caleb stood out on the porch side-by-side with Asa. “I’ll tell you,” the younger one was saying. “When I am dead I want to be buried like those Indians we saw along the river. Put me in a tree somewheres.”

  Caleb looked off toward the horizon where movement began to flicker. “Birds will get your eyes,” he said.

  Asa shuddered. “It’s better than being put into the ground still alive. If I was in a tree, I wouldn’t feel as bad. You know I don’t like root cellars or other dark places. You could all come visit me and leave me plates of food, the way the man on the boat said the Dakota do for their dead. Strange, huh? To believe that the dead hunger?” Asa peered over at his brother, who only grunted in response. “The man on the boat said that when they mourn their relatives they all cut their hair and charcoal their faces. He said the women wail like banshees and go down to the river and cut the backs of their legs until the water is pink with blood.”

  “You’re about the grimmest boy I ever knew,” Caleb said. “I might jest be glad not to have someone around talking about such things all the time. Can’t say it will matter where you end up. Dead is dead.”

  Asa’s thin lips pinched together and he frowned. “Well, anyhow, put me in a tree. A big oak with lots of shade. I don’t want to go down under the ground.”

  “Hush,” said Caleb. A rushing noise in the south had drawn his attention. Far off in the south they saw a squall line stretch out along the horizon and move toward them. Asa stepped from the porch and knelt to fan his hand over the still grass, one eye on the approaching clouds. The noise, though distant, was like a shriek combined with the rumbling of some great steam engine. And yet, if it was clouds, how did it move without any wind? The squall line splintered and fanned out in shapes like arrows and behind the initial line they saw more and more coming, some dropping lower to the ground, some rising high to blot out the sun. Lines coalesced into denser, darker spirals and one such thick flying ribbon came over their grove and circled back around.

  They saw individual shapes in the circling clouds, birds with violet-colored bellies and flashing wings, bright and liquid. The birds cried out to one another, the lines swirling like milk in a blue bowl. It was a sound they had never heard before, thousands upon thousands of birds compressed into a single area of sky and land, flying so close together they became one voice and myriad voices simultaneously, a blur of motion and sound. The children could distinguish individual cries, a sharp kee-kee repeated countless times over as the birds focused on the lone grove of trees in the endless span of grasslands.

  “Pigeons,” Asa said when the sound had grown so loud they could hardly hear one another. “Passenger pigeons.” As the roiling cloud of birds swept over them they felt the rush of their passing. The birds filled up the grove in a militant wave, row on row, landing in the branches and sweeping through the woods in search of mast and fallen acorns on the sodden ground. Whump-whump-whump , the sound of a thousand wings beating backward to halt the speed of their flight, a concussive sound that drummed in the minds of the children. The noise of the flock trilled, cooed, and kee-kee-kee -ed in a cacophony of birdsong. They landed in masses on clotheslines and the sod barn and in the trees as far as the eyes could see.

  The children retreated into the cabin where the dense log walls blocked out enough of the sound for them to think again. “I wish that Pa was here,” Daniel said. Their pa would be able to make sense of this wondrous gathering, whether it was a good or ill omen. This prairie with its violent tempers, sending snow in April, wind and wolves, now plagues of birds with equal fervor.

  “Listen,” said Asa. “I read about this in one of Jakob’s papers. It happens along the flyways in Kentucky. We can gather them. They’re supposed to be good eating.”

  “And how?” said Caleb.

  “They’re dumber than sand. You don’t need any more than a stick.”

  “I don’t want to go outside,” Daniel said. “I don’t like this place.”

  “You cut out the breasts,” said Asa. “Then you smoke them over a fire. Listen to the sound of them out there. We could sell in town what we don’t eat.”

  Hazel cinched her bonnet tight and followed her oldest brothers out into the coursing wall of noise. They left the two youngest seated on the porch where they could still see them and headed toward the grove where the birds were thickest. Branches crashed down from the weight of the many birds, often crushing entire congregations of pigeons below. The ground was slippery with white dung and dead birds. Caleb had carried along the rifle and fired once into a dense mass of swirling birds above his head and the resulting rain of blood and feathers drenched him. It was more efficient for him to swing with the butt of the stock and he moved into the woods and did this now. Asa and Hazel also swung staves of wood at the birds on the lowest branches, and true to what Asa said, the birds were stupefied by their own masses and easy to kill. They harvested them like apples from a brimming orchard.

  The sound of the birds’ wings and cries filled up their minds until it seemed like they killed them in a trance. They were hypnotized by the relentless flapping of wings, children moving like ghosts in a world where they made no sound. As many as they killed, more fluttered down f
rom the vast ranks around them.

  There was not a single thought in Hazel’s mind while she killed them. Later this would trouble her, the absence of thought while she struck and struck them from the branches. Is this what the soldier felt in battle, this hollowness of being and thought, all the mind residing in the strength of the arm that swings, the unconscious pleasure of striking true?

  Gradually they became aware that they were not alone in the woodland of pigeons. Creatures close to the ground: foxes bright as autumn leaves, bandit-faced raccoons, and hungry weasels fed next to feral dogs upon the carnage. Crows pecked at the corpses and stole away with gray hunks of flesh. Each animal was blind in its own feeding frenzy; they were joined together by this feast, all the ancient enmities of the animal kingdom forgotten in their common hunger.

  When the Indians arrived, piling the carcasses on canvas sheets and buffalo robes, they didn’t pay the children any mind. There were women and children mostly, and a few old men with white braided hair and leathery skin. They seemed to come from the trees themselves, emerging from the brown trunks to join the harvest.

  The children weren’t in any danger, but once Caleb noticed how surrounded they were, he shepherded them from the forest. They came back a little later with the wagon, dragging it by hand down to the grove, and piled as many of the dead birds on it as they could. Caleb wasn’t sure how to hitch the oxen and it took considerable effort for them to push the wagon back up the small slope to the cabin.