“You shouldn’t be afraid,” he told the children gathered around him. “This is our adventure. One day you will be glad to have these stories to tell to children of your own. You will be able to speak of a world that no longer exists. And they won’t believe the things you have seen. Why do you look at me like that? Smile, Daniel. There, that’s more like it. I’m not going away again. This place is good. Here a man can be free. Here a man can speak his mind and there are no slaves. . . . Only . . . an adventure, I tell you. Smile all of you. Be grateful. Why are you crying, Hazel? Stop that at once. Come back here. Mein Gott! What is wrong with all of you?”
A
CROSSING
JAKOB’S PLOW TURNED up soil as dark as molasses; a network of roots as thick as a woman’s hair spread beneath the sod. When the family held the chunks of earth in their hands, moist as leavening dough and brimming with earthworms, they didn’t know it would make them sick.
Jakob felt it first, an itch that spread through his hands and arms like the pox. No sores appeared on his winter-pale skin, but he couldn’t stop scratching. It spread from him to all of them, an invisible rash that burrowed into their veins. Hazel tried everything: a lotion of mullein leaves, tea made from willow bark, but the itch continued to burn beneath their skin like prickles of white-hot flame. The joints in their hands swelled. They felt it down to their marrow. The youngest boys scratched themselves until they bled and Hazel had to bandage Matthew’s hands with socks to keep him from clawing open old scabs and raw tissue beneath. It near drove them mad. They wanted to tear the very skin from their flesh, to strip themselves down to sinew and ligament. At nights they lay awake and tried not to think about the burning sensation. They rinsed their hands with whisky, whale oil, goat’s milk, and lye. They rubbed tree bark on inflamed skin, leaves, green plum juice, and buffalo grass. “It came from the ground,” Jakob said after their third sleepless night. “How do you fight sickness that comes from the prairie itself?”
The next morning they huddled around him, red-eyed and trembling. This was his chance to earn back their trust, prove his worth and strength as their father. “There isn’t any doctor in Milford and it’s a long ride to New Ulm.”
The girl’s voice startled him. His first wife’s voice, smoky, assured of its knowledge. “They won’t know anything, Pa. What do they know about such things in Germany? What do any of us know about this place?”
“We have to do something,” Asa said. “Or I’ll throw myself in the river to stop this itching.”
“The Indians,” Hazel said. “They’ll know.”
“Hazel, we can’t,” said Caleb. “What if they hurt of us because of . . . because the boy was shot?”
“It’s not safe,” Jakob agreed. “We don’t know anything about them.” The image of the cow lowing as the wolves tore her apart was imprinted on his memory.
Hazel went and plucked Matthew from the corner where he was hunched and trembling. The boy had red scratches running from his eyes. “Look,” she said. “Look at him!”
They crossed at the lowest place that very evening, along a fallen cottonwood that bridged the rain-swollen river. Hazel’s bridge, Asa named it. In the west the sun descended like a stone cast into the grassland seas and left a slow fire burning in the clouds overhead. A line of gashes marked the ground, the travois marks of Indians who had used this path for generations, traveling with their dogs and belongings. They followed the path to the threads of smoke from the camp’s fires, a mere half mile. The children were quiet in their misery and listened to the sound of the wind coming through the darkening valley, a gentle hush as it touched the tips of the tallgrass waving around them, sighing against their clothing.
They came to the outskirts of the village where a collection of a dozen teepees were arrayed in a loose circle. Spotted ponies cropped grass along the sides of a winding creek while dark birds rode on their haunches and pecked insects from their hides. A group of boys spotted the family first. Though evening fell with a touch of chill in the wind, they wore nothing but breechclouts and carried toy-sized bows and arrows. The girl didn’t see the boy she’d helped among them. There were six boys, and at the sight of the Sengers they scattered and raced ahead of the white family into the camp, raising the alarm in high-pitched voices.
“Keep walking,” Jakob said to the children arranged behind him. “If there’s trouble, run back home.” Against his better instincts, he’d left the rifle there. His hands were too swollen to fit inside the trigger guard. Besides, there was this knowledge: each time the gun had been taken up in a moment of need it had been fired, almost as if the weapon had a will of its own to do harm. They carried one sack of potatoes to trade for medicine. In short, they were at this tribe’s mercy. Jakob was not afraid for his own skin, but his children were another matter. He must protect them from harm; he could not fail them again.
Campfires burned in the dusk and iron pots shaped like large spiders squatted over the flames. Dakota women in loose dark-colored skirts and billowing calico blouses hunched over the fires while a few old men sat outside the teepees and smoked in the gathering dark. They stood as the family passed, a few with brows furrowed, but none of them looked violent. In the gaunt faces that watched the family, the girl saw an emptiness. It was as if these people had been stolen out of a land and time they understood and dropped down into this one, hungry and desperate. In that sense, she felt, they were kindred.
Her other senses sharpened as light faded. She smelled the strange odor of the meat in the pots, the sweet sage smell of kinnikinnick in the men’s pipes. Lean, mongrel dogs barked and snarled and began to follow in the family’s wake. The boys’ shouting echoed around them. First the old men rose, still carrying their pipes, and then the women joined them, so that as they moved toward the camp’s center they became a procession, dogs and old women and men, and the noise and shouting gathered strength. They were drawn especially by Hazel and some of the older women reached out and touched the girl’s dark hair as she passed, saying wah-kun in low, reverent voices as they ran a hand across her hair or let a finger graze against her frayed dress, a cry the smaller boys picked up and repeated in a chant, wahkun, wahkun. The smell of so many Indians so close, like smoke and singed grass and human sweat, the circle tightening, was overwhelming. Daniel clung tightly to Hazel’s skirts, his eyes rolling back in fear. It was impossible for them to go further: They were surrounded.
Jakob had his bandaged hands raised and was speaking, but the words were lost in all the noise. Then the crowd parted, and the old man Hazel had seen on the prairie and that day after the flight of the passenger pigeons came forward. He was a lean, tall old man with a string of crow’s beaks for a necklace and copper bracelets encircling his arms. His chest was bare and there was an aura of quiet competence about him, as if he’d been expecting the family all along.
Jakob continued to hold up his bandaged hands as he made signs to indicate their need. The Indians closed around them in a curious circle, pointing and talking in their own language. One of the mongrels whined and growled before someone kicked it away. “Hold out your hands,” Jakob said. “Let them see the marks.”
Still the old man moved toward them without speaking. He came close to Jakob and pulled one of the upheld arms down and unwound the bandage. He said a word in Dakota when he saw the red streaks marking the skin. A younger woman had come to his side, her eyes lowered. The two of them conversed in Dakota and then she looked up at Jakob with her dark eyes, appraising him. “Itches?” she said in clear English.
“Most terribly,” Jakob said.
“You come,” she said and they followed her into a teepee, ducking under a skin doorway over which two deer hooves hung. It was dim within the interior, but roomier than it looked from the outside. The children seated themselves on buffalo robes and mats of woven grass, grateful to be sheltered from the crowds outside. They watched the smoke of the woman’s fire rise up the cedar lodge poles into the indigo sky and tried to not to s
cratch themselves. The inner side of the teepee was painted with scenes of battles: painted men on horseback carrying feathered lances while the sky above them rained arrows. There were figures in the clouds, black riders gripping thunderbolts in their fists. Great lakes and turtle-shaped islands. Children coming down from the stars. The skin of the teepee moved in the wind and the figures shimmered in the firelight. It was the closest the children had been to a church in some time. “A tapestry,” Hazel said. On the other side of her, a man hung from a tree, nails visible in his palms. In the next scene he was taken up into the clouds along a ray of light. The Indian woman saw her watching. “Tunkashila,” she said to Hazel. Then she turned back to her work, taking the bag of potatoes they had brought and burying them one-by-one within the embers of her fire. After she did that she stood and dusted the ashes from her hands.
A girl entered the teepee and stood alongside her, her daughter apparently. They each wore a skirt of red broadcloth, tied around their waists, and beaded shirts. The girl had tin earrings that tinkled when she moved her head from side-to-side, and she had gray eyes. The older one touched her daughter’s shoulder, “Winona,” she said. Then she touched her own chest, “Blue Sky Woman,” she said and then the two ducked out of the teepee and re-entered the swirl of noise outside. A moment later, the flap opened again and the old man came inside, now dressed in his finery, soft leggings of doeskin, a beaded war shirt with long fringes, his hair braided with mink-fur strips. He carried a pipe and seated himself across from Jakob. The children shifted uncomfortably, Matthew pawing at his bandages. This old man had glittering black eyes, a strong nose. He lit the long red stone pipe, held it up in four directions and to the earth and sky, and then passed it to Jakob. Not knowing what else to do Jakob did the same, coughing out the odd, sweet smoke. After a long moment of silence, the old man spoke. “I am Hanyokeyah,” he said. “Flies in the Night in your tongue.”
“You speak English too?”
“We live long time near the wasicun , many winters.” He nodded toward the section of the teepee where the Christ figure had been painted. “I live with missionaries one winter. Away from my people. I am only this tall.” The old man held his hand a few feet off the ground. “They give me new name, Elijah. I do not know what this name means, but they say is great white man.”
“A prophet,” said Jakob. “It is a good name.” He sensed there was something else to the story, asked, “What happened?”
“Our men grow tired of the missionaries speaking against the dances, the face painting. The women . . . they miss children. They come, take boys back.” Hazel noticed that Hanyokeyah could only speak English in the present, and sometimes it was hard to tell from his speech what happened in the past and what was happening in the now. There were long silences before the woman and her girl returned with a collection of roots. She took out a trader’s knife and shaved the outer bark before setting the pale root to heat beside the fire.
With every ounce of their will they strained not to scratch, not to leap forward and seize this healing root. Blue Sky Woman took her time. She fetched out another of the pipes and smoked it over the root, chanting some prayer, clicking her tongue against her teeth. After this ceremony she turned back to the root. Once the tubers were warmed, she ground them into a poultice and rubbed it into their hands and then took the rest of the shavings outside to scatter in the wind.
“It’s gone,” said Asa. “My Lord, the itching stopped just like that.” The old man seemed to smile with his dark eyes, though his face did not alter its expression. When Jakob saw that the woman was busy digging the potatoes out of the fire, he resolved to stay longer. This Hanyokeyah might know who killed his cow. They might be able to reach some bargain that benefited both of them. That night they ate the potatoes Indian style, brushing off the embers and peeling back the flesh to eat the steaming, crumbling nuggets. Another woman carried in boiled water turtles the size of small melons which she cracked open on a sharp rock. The flesh tasted muddy and chewy, but the children were hungry and glad to share in it. From time to time, the skin of the teepee behind the children was lifted up and curious faces peered inside. When they were spotted, the curious howled and scurried away. The teepee flap opened again and the boy whom Caleb had shot came inside and sat beside Hanyokeyah. He was dressed in a soiled shirt and kept his eyes low. Hanyokeyah patted his head and said nothing about what had happened. Only once did the boy glance in Hazel’s direction, quickly looking away again. His cheeks were red in the firelight and he looked to be healed and whole.
The whole time Jakob and Hanyokeyah talked. It appeared all the young warriors in the tribe had gone off on a raid against the Ojibwe in the north now that winter was over and they were done hunting the muskrats. The Ojibwe had staged a surprise attack several moons earlier that had killed two warriors from Little Six’s tribe and now the young soldier’s lodge of the tribe had joined other bands seeking revenge. The Dakota were at a big disadvantage in these battles, for while the Ojibwe could drift downriver in their birch bark canoes with little effort and then flee after setting ambushes, the Dakota used up all their energy just making the long journey north.
Jakob went on to tell about his cow’s disappearance, the strange footprints he had seen alongside her, the abandoned village he encountered in the snow. He worded the story carefully, afraid the children would catch him in a lie.
The old man could only shrug, in turn describing for Jakob a stone where the people came to dance in the summers, that had disappeared. Jakob’s face darkened and he shook his head, but he was thinking about Silas.
They talked for a while longer. “Is it true that the cities by the big waters have so many white men they build on top of one another, like ants? Wamiditanka see them and say there as many whites as blades of grass on the prairie and they build thunder wagons that roar on tracks across the land.”
It was Jakob’s turn to be silent, thinking of the ancient cities of the Old World and those new ones along the East Coast and of how the cholera and fevers spread through the masses of people, all of them longing for a better life, for land of their own. He was thinking of the Germans in Milford who couldn’t wait to get more land on the reservation opened up for settlement.
“I like to see these great villages,” the old man confided. “But I do not wish for all the white people to come here. I do not wish for my people to become like the whites and cut up the earth, their grandmother, and live like women.”
It was getting late by then, the novelty of the visit already exhausted for the youngest boys who had curled up to sleep on the buffalo robes. They bid each other goodnight and took their leave.
A full moon rose in the west, a pale mirror of their world. Jakob tried to imagine a day when the earth had so many people they ran out of space and had to find a way to cross the great starry darkness to inhabit such a place. Windblown clouds darkened the face of the moon and hid the path before them. Then the clouds passed and the grass appeared once more, silvered with milky light.
Later they would learn that the affliction that had troubled them was called “prairie dig” and that settlers in that county often experienced it the first time they cut the sod. Then the girl’s only thought was how beautiful it was to be out walking on such a night and not feel the terrible itching anymore. For the first time she began to hope they might find peace here. The lull of the moonlight that came and went, and her long tiredness took its toll. She fell asleep on her feet, though she kept moving. She had no memory of walking home, no memory of crossing back over the river at night to sleep in their cabin, as if a part of her dreaming self had never made the journey, but stayed there at the Indian camp beside the boy and the old man.
KINGDOM TOWNSHIP
1876
SUMMER
STORM
THEY CAME WITH the rain. Hadn’t I foreseen them as I stood by the window and Hazel began her story of light and dark? I felt the way Jakob must have felt finding Ruth, the runaway, in his hay
mow, as though words had a summoning power. The more Aunt Hazel spoke, the more it seemed the past was quickening under the surface of the present. I thought of the old medicine man’s tale: all those bodies trapped inside the stomach of Eya the Devourer, quaking to get out. Something was about to break through, something was reaching for me, and I both feared and longed for it. Hazel was just finishing her story now, saying, “A year before Jakob left for the War, Kate came back into our lives.”
The rain swept over the ravaged countryside and turned the Waraju River into a torrent. The wind shrieked through thin spaces in our cabin’s chinking. Here in the loft I felt that Aunt Hazel and I were closer to the storm; we only had to step through the high window into a landscape of cloud and lightning. Occasional spats of hail clattered on the shingles. We passed the long dark night as she told me her story. A candle on the nightstand cast flickering lights and shadows through the room. My hands shook.
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