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.
Just before dawn, when the light in the room took on a translucent gray sheen and the shadows withdrew to the far corners, Hazel slept. She lay on the oaken floor beside the boy, one of the muslin cloths still in her hands. And while she dreamed the boy’s hands reached under the cloth and traced the new geography of his scar and wondered over the lack of blood. He had been awake for hours now, dizzy with the sound of her whispering in his ears. Though it had made no sense he knew she had been telling him her life story and that it had just as much joy and sorrow as his own. He didn’t know why he pretended to sleep except to see what she would do next. And then she had undone the breechclout and he had frozen, feeling a quick hot spread of shame that she should see him like this, feeling the cool cloth against him. Not knowing what else to do he remained still, wondering what sort of people these wasi-cun were. The moment spread out as if she had paused in her cleaning to study him. He was tempted to open his eyes, afraid of what she would do next, but then she had finished and put his stained breechclout back in place.
This girl must be wakan , he thought, a medicine healer. Only someone with strong medicine could keep him from succumbing to the wound. What had happened? He had been poised t
o shoot and then felt a bullet rip through him. The blond boy, he remembered catching sight of him out of the corner of his eye. The boy who slept so near him, no longer looking fierce. Why they had gone through all the trouble to heal him?
He looked at the girl asleep beside him, lying with her head pillowed by her hands, her hair so dark in the half-light that it had a blue gleam. Her skin was as pale as birch bark. Yet he had felt her touch upon him and in that touch a hidden strength. Watching her gave him something to fear for besides his own life. Looking at her he found he was frightened for her. Would Tatanyandowan really have stabbed one of them? His brother had been enraged at the council, spoke strongly of Inkpaduta’s leadership on the prairies. Would they really become another band of renegades and flee out past the wide river where there were still buffalo but also the Pawnee and the Crow and so many other tribes much stronger than their own?
On the broad grasslands he heard what at first sounded like the prairie chickens calling to one another. A moment later he realized it was the warriors imitating the bird’s song as they crept closer in the grass. There were only children here. Would his people react with rage because of what happened to him? Wanikiya carefully sat up on his elbows and felt the wound strain beneath the cloth, a raw tearing in his brain. In his mind’s eyes he saw it opening like a third eye, a spout of blood shooting out. His mind flared with pain, but he bit down on his tongue and kept himself from crying out. The blanket doorway was tacked into the floor, a thin tissue through which the first light had begun to seep. Before they could enter and possibly harm one of this family, Wanikiya had to make it outside. He tugged at the tacks that held the blanket to the floor, freed enough that he could crawl beneath. One last glance at the girl showed she was awake and watching him, her lips parting slightly. She said something to him in her own language and he shook his head, nodded out toward the prairie where the calls continued. I must go , he told her with his eyes. Holding to his wound, he crawled out the door.
Hazel couldn’t get his blood out of the puncheon floorboards where stripes of it remained behind like a permanent shadow. The morning he had left she’d seen him squeeze underneath the blanket-door and then heard, faintly, other voices greeting him as they carried him back across the river. The children kept near the cabin all the next day, driving the oxen down to the flooding river, fetching water and wood. They ate their pink-eyed potatoes and smoked pigeon breasts and longed for salt and seasoning. Fear came inside them like the stains of the boy’s blood, something they couldn’t wash out.
When Caleb spotted his father moving down the road, leading two shaggy creatures behind him, at first they didn’t believe him. “Come quick,” he said, “It’s Pa.” He knew this even though Jakob was distant, a man moving toward the setting sun and his own cabin poised at the edge of the grasslands.
On the fourth day, Jakob returned to them, leading two milking goats he’d purchased on credit in town. They ran to greet him, the youngest boys clinging to his legs, the oldest taking hold of his shirt and arms, only the girl hanging back. “Hello, Father,” she said. She looked no different than before, thirteen years old and dressed in an apron drizzled with frightening rust and yellow stains. He had been waiting patiently all these years for her voice to come back, not wanting to press her, knowing eventually she would speak, and now it had returned. He could see that they were all changed, even in their joy. “Don’t go away again,” said Daniel. “Promise us that you’re never going to leave.”
“I won’t,” Jakob told his son, chucking him under the chin. “I give you my word.” He looked across at his oldest boy and then again to his daughter. Her voice had sounded just like he’d expected. She spoke as her mother Emma had spoken, a husky voice that was not a girl’s. He looked across at her in this moment of joy and wondered why her green eyes had clouded over at his own words.
This was their first spring. May was the planting moon for the Indians, too, a lean time of waiting when they subsisted on fish from the rivers and maple sugar. Only a narrow strip of hardwoods and one mud-swollen river separated Jakob’s family from Hanyokeyah’s band. Uneasy after the death of their cow and the shooting of the Indian boy, Jakob replaced the tacked blanket doorway with a sturdier construction of adzed-oak slats he discovered in the root cellar. He even rigged a leather latch that could be pulled inside at a moment’s notice. He hung bells around the goats and oxen’s throats so the children could track their movements through the tallgrass. The half-stock plains rifle was kept primed and hanging above the mantel and every night on the stove he melted down lead for bullets which he then cooled and kept in a leather sack like a child’s collection of marbles. They settled down and prepared for a war that never seemed to come. Five thousand Indians, Silas had said, but all of them divided into separate tribes and bands and families. All of them independent, unpredictable, and one of the smaller bands lived just across from his family.
While Jakob traded for supplies in Milford he had been warned that the Indians were “ravenous as wolves.” In addition to the two goats, Jakob had purchased a bull plow to break the ground. In town, he’d heard rumors about Inkpaduta; there had been cattle mutilations on the other side of Palmer’s Ferry. Twice in the last month the entire town had retreated into the mill after a horseman passed through warning that the Dakota were on the warpath. “Just imagine them crammed inside that building,” Jakob told his children. “The women indecent in their caps and gowns, men in long johns with scythes and pitchforks for weapons; all of them straining to hear every hoofbeat or creak in the dark, and then the women screaming fit to bring down the ceiling! Of course morning came and their scalps were still intact, but they were no less angry.”
Jakob laughed and stroked his dark beard. In the lamplight, he’d been telling them stories of his long journey, lying about the cow, and the pale, sickly man with his stolen god. The children only knew for sure that he’d been gone so long because he’d fallen through the river ice. He was trying to build a different story around his journey, a tale to take away their fears. He had made friends on his way back from Silas’s when he stopped in a town not far from New Ulm. Dark had been failing and he’d been afraid to continue on, afraid of a return to blindness. He never wanted to be lost again and so he stayed at Traveler’s Home, where he met the shopkeeper Gustave Driebel. Milford, as it was called then, was primarily inhabited by ’48ers, Germans who had taken part in the failed revolution to bring Democratic reforms to the Old Country. Many of the Germans he had met had spent time in prison because of their fierce belief in reform. They abhorred the practice of slavery and bent a sympathetic ear to Jakob’s stories of his troubles in Missouri. All of them, it seemed, were on the run from previous failures in their old lives. Jakob had lingered there in the town, thinking that one more night away would not make any difference. Perhaps the children resented him for this.
Jakob hit it off with the portly shopkeeper and livery owner who talked him into buying the goats. “I spoke with Herr Driebel who runs the general store. He said to me, ‘Mein Gott ! I won’t be running to the mill ever again. Let those red devils murder me in my bed. Better to die there than crammed like a herring in a salt barrel. Better to die in my own bed than with sawdust up my heinie.” Jakob laughed, but saw the children avert their eyes, glancing down at the stains on the floor. I must earn back their trust , he thought. But even as he thought this, he kept things to himself. He didn’t tell them about what else Herr Driebel had said after Jakob showed him the smudged map of his homesteading. He didn’t tell them what had happened to the people who had lived here before.
Why did I not rush back? he thought. The boys had done well; he would have acted the same, he assured them. And it was good that the girl was talking once more. Wonderful what they had done with those pigeons. “You got along better without me here,” he told them. Tonight though, the conversation was decidedly one-sided. Even the candies he had brought back, horehound and licorice, seemed to cheer them little. “I tell you,�
�� he was saying, “the newspapers here are of a poor quality. One even carried an article about a headless Indian seen in the woods. A headless Indian!” he said, shaking his head. “If only I had my press, I would give them real news.” Again the curious flatness in the eyes watching him, the unspoken recognition that Jakob’s press was part of the reason for their present predicament.
“But Pa,” the girl said, speaking for all of them, her green eyes flashing, “your newspaper carried exactly those kinds of stories!”
The dominating emotion that the local Germans felt for the Indians on the other side of the river was fear laced with a heavy dose of disdain. The Dakota, who sent their children to perform begging dances and trespassed across lands with little understanding of property boundaries, were a lesser race by Old World reasoning. These Indians were “gypsies” not worthy of the rich farming soil they occupied, land in the possession of “beggars and drunken thieves.” While a few did business and maintained relations with their red-skinned neighbors, many chased Indians off their land with pitchforks and axes. It was only a matter of time, they thought, before the governor opened up lands on the reservation in the name of settlement and progress. All of this Jakob had gathered in his conversations with the shopkeeper and others at the store. There was talk of a militia, the men arming themselves to better deal with the Indians, and Jakob went quiet when this was mentioned, his thoughts turning back to Missouri and his own experience with violence.
Night Birds, The Page 15