Their response was immediate. “I don’t like wolves,” said Daniel.
“No, not me either,” I told the boy.
“Pa, that man wouldn’t build a worm fence. He wouldn’t have any oxen to break up the fields.” Caleb, never much for academics, had seized upon a key point. In fact, I regretted somewhat reading this Thoreau, since he would disapprove of much of our present enterprise. Lacking a suitable response, I bid Caleb to set down his thoughts in his journal, which he did with a sour expression marring his facial features.
Each night, when we come home weary from the fields, after the table is cleared and the dishes washed, we write. A lantern smokes with whale oil. The heat in the cabin is stifling. I pick passages out of the books we have left and order them to copy down the words, hoping the wisdom will sink in. Five goosequill pens dip dripping into the inkwell and stain the pages. Daniel often draws instead. Caleb yawns, writes slowly. Against the ocean of grass and the span of sky, we have these journals. If we stop writing and reading, stop planning for the winter, strip off our pasts the way we have stripped off clothing, what will we become then?
JAKOB M AY 19, 1859
My furrows are the most crooked in the county. They wind through the rich black fields like twisting rivers. The prairies grasses have roots that reach deep beneath the earth. Despite the great force of the two oxen it is hitched to, my iron plow comes to a stop. I strike stones and skip to the side; the soil opens in a furrow like a dark skin, underneath this network of root and earthworm. I had to seat Daniel on the hatch to get the blade to bite deeper. His skin burned away in layers until I gave him one of my hats. Now he rides the plow, eating dust the oxen kick up, bumping over stones and thick roots until his teeth chatter in his skull.
It took an entire week just to break four acres. This is what we sowed: King Phillip corn, four kernels per hole in the ground. Durham wheat. Potatoes cut into eyes. Garden squash and pumpkins to keep out weeds. We sowed when the moon was waning, which is how The Book of Wonders promises we will get a good crop.
“So, we are told,” I read them from Walden , “the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man?”
Such questions ring through me. Our farm is at a point where shallow sandbars gleam now that the spring melt has receded. Every morning the Indians come down to the river to bathe. Women stoop to fill skin bags which they carry on their backs, the weight balanced by a buffalo strap around their foreheads.
Twice an old woman with a spotted white dog has herded a group of children across to dance for us. They stamped their feet slowly in the dirt, one boy singing in a high pretty tone. When they finished they waited with outstretched hands and we were made to understand that we should pay them for the entertainment. One night the men came back from their war party in the north. The flames of their bonfires leapt higher. All night the beating of the drums throbbed in the dark and made sleep difficult. My mind was filled with the images of fiends dancing around a fire.
For the most part, I do not fear them. There is one who wears cobalt face paint and three feathers in his hair. The right side of his face is deformed by some injury, the ear shredded. If I see him at the river or in our woods, he pauses to study me, making low sounds in his throat. I feel that I know him from some previous encounter and the thought chills me. When our eyes meet, I stand my ground. This act does not grow out of courage, however. I stand my ground, because my blood has gone cold and I can’t move.
The old man with the copper armbands comes some nights with the young boy and a half-breed girl who is the daughter of the medicine woman that healed us, Blue Sky Woman. I sit and smoke with him out on the porch, a smudge fire burning nearby to keep off the mosquitoes. He has asked me to teach this boy and girl to read “the tracks in books” and so I assigned Hazel, thinking she would enjoy the task. In return the boy teaches us sign language and words in his own tongue. I have been across the river to see the gardens their women plant, simple circular gar- dens of beans and squash that are raised above the ground. They build slender scaffolds of lashed willows nearby where the boys keep watch for blackbirds. Such economy, I am certain, would meet Thoreau’s approval, and yet I am told in town these people are dying out.
When I asked him if he was chief, the old man nodded. “I lead the people until one greater than me comes along. We are a small band. It is not how you think, the missionaries not understand. Sometimes the people listen to me. Sometimes not.” I could only nod at the answer. Cryptic as it was, he seemed unwilling to say anything further. I surmised that his people are less like a kingdom, more like a large, bickering family presided over by an uncertain patriarch. Though he does not speak of the past I gather that the Wahpekutes were once greater than they are now.
The girl’s mother, Blue Sky Woman, sometimes accompanies the old man too. She sewed me a set of moccasins which fit my feet like a second soft skin. Turtles were beaded into the upper lip and when I asked her what the animals meant, she lowered her eyes. I like the look of her, in truth. She is not so stoop-backed as some of the hags you see about their camp. She has a strong nose, black, shining eyes, and a sense of fierceness behind her quiet manners.
HAZEL M AY 20, 1859
Papa told us to keep these journals so we wouldn’t forget our learning. After dinner each night he reads us short passage from Walden , which I find I like very much. Afterwards he bids us to write. We are told to set down whatever comes into our brains. Tonight he read: “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. . . . Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.”
I am positive Kate would shriek if she could see me now. I tend the goats, named Pifpaf and Clever Elsie by Daniel, and milking takes talent. I have to stand over the top of them and pinion their bony ribs between my legs while I reach down from behind, my face pressed close to the flickering tail, and squeeze the udders. Any other method and the goats shoot forward and overturn the bucket. I am sure there is a better way no one has taught me. Each goat can fill a bucket by itself. By the time I am done I reek of goat hair and souring milk and the excrement-laced mud I step in while holding onto the beasts. The goats have lively, intelligent eyes. Pifpaf stalks after Daniel in the yard waiting for an opportune moment to skewer the wary boy with her horns. Once Papa took after her with a board she gave up that particular pastime, but sometimes she lifts her head while munching the grass and you can see a glint in her eyes, a wicked squinting, while she plots against her blond enemy. Pifpaf will also get into the wild onions if I don’t watch her, and turn her milk into sour vinegar.
Papa is not very good about his own journal. Raw sores opened up in his hands from clinging to the plow all day. I soaked his hands in liniment and bound them in gauze. I was afraid to pray out loud over them. I was afraid the prayer wouldn’t work. Each day he goes out and reopens the wounds in his hands. All at once he looks old to me. There is gray hair in his temples, crow’s feet around his eyes. I don’t remember seeing those before.
Each night I sit between Winona and Wanikiya while Papa smokes out on the porch with Hanyokeyah. For an hour each night we work on the alphabet and I show them words. The boy has such serious eyes. The lantern catches the russet color of his skin, the lock of silver in his hair. Thoreau says we are like birds in our season of crisis, shedding feathers to grow into something else. For this boy I would gladly shed my apron and grow new clothing that would capture his attention. Is that so terrible? When he teaches me the sign language, sometimes he touches my hand and my fingers tingle along the places where our skin is joined. It seems a long time since that night he lay bleeding on our floor. Boy
run fast , I can say in sign. Why not here ?
So far, their education goes slowly due to the exasperating presence of my brothers. I taught them the 23rd Psalm. Caleb teaches them dirty words in English in case “their honor is insulted.” I taught them both the Lord’s Prayer. Caleb taught them a boast that begins with the words: “You yellow-bellied, lily-livered, clod-pated, son of Jehosophat . . .” Asa loves to play on his fiddle and sing for Winona. A captive audience. She has learned some of the words and sings along with him.
Afterwards, when they have recrossed the river, Asa will go on about the thinness of her shirt, how the girl is not even aware of what she reveals when she leans over and her blouse falls open. “A pretty sight,” he says, “for a prairie nigger.” I hate such talk and told him so, but he only sneered and said I was jealous because I didn’t have any.
The next day I let Pifpaf into the onions. After milking her and letting the milk sit a good long while in the sun, I gave Asa the first taste of it when he came in thirsty from the fields. He drank down the entire mug full in that greedy way of his. Oh, how green his gills turned when he realized the milk was sour; he rushed outside and vomited in the grass. He was down on his knees, gripping the bluestem by the roots. I stood over him. “Those sounds are prettier than the things you said last night,” I said when he was done with his misery.
DANIEL J UNE 4, 1859
A boy has many enemies. Pa gave me and Matthew copper pots to bang to chase blackbirds out of the corn and wheat. Matthew is no fun. I tried to show him how to clap the pots together and yell like a injun. He just stands there. I had to do all the work by my lonesome. I ran. I howled and made noise to scare them out of the fields. But there were birds and more birds. They went over and landed by Matthew and ate the wheat right next to him. I told him we wouldn’t get any bread on account of the birds ate it all. But he just smiled and let out some drool. Pifpaf did something funny. I showed her the pan and said I would knock her to Missouri if she hooked me with her horns, but she wasn’t interested. Her and Clever Elsie went into the tallgrass where I couldn’t see them. I was nervous because that is where the wolves are, but Hazel told me to watch them good, so I followed.
Pifpaf was making grunting noises like something was hurting her. Something big was coming out of her rear end. A big green blob. It looked like the biggest poop ever. It was quivering. She kept on moaning and bleating like she was gonna die. There was blood too. Then it come to me that it was stuck inside her, that she wasn’t making a poop but having babies. I did not know what to do. The noises she was making hurt my ears. I thought the wolves were going to hear her and come for us. Nobody else was around. So I went up to her and put my hands into her opening. It was squishy and it did not smell just like poop. But I could also feel something moving so I pulled on it. Pifpaf bleated and made gnashing sounds with her teeth. Then it all come it out with a sucking sound and I fell over and the whole mess come down on top of me. Next I knew it was squirming and there was not one but two of them and Pifpaf was licking off the blood. They were all wet from being inside her. They could hardly walk. She lay down with them. But I was afraid that wolves would come so I tried to make her get up. Then I took her babies and she came after me in the grass making angry sounds. But I made it to the cabin. Now me and Pifpaf are friends. Everybody agrees that I am a hero but I don’t feel no different.
CALEB J UNE 15,1859
There is both terror and beauty here. Papa reads to us from the book and sometimes my mind can’t wrap all the way around the passage and sometimes it makes a load of sense. “It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.” What I thought when Papa read this was: mosquitoes. They must not have skeeters at Walden Pond like they do here. I too would like to sleep out under the stars but only so long as a good smudge fire burned near to keep off the bugs.
Hans Gormann came onto our land to cross the river. I could tell right off that Papa didn’t like him. Hans was wearing a slouch hat and had lean, spindly arms and small eyes. He had a swaybacked mule that was pulling a dray cart filled with puppies and a barrel of what he called “spirit medicine” for the Indians.
There were two blonde girls following behind wearing come-kiss-me bonnets and lemon-colored linsey-woolsey dresses. The material had been washed so many times you could see their pale white chemises and skin beneath. They each had dark blue eyes, dark as lake water, and were fetching to look at. It was strange to be around white folks again after a month seeing just Indians. All at once I felt embarrassed not to be wearing any shirt and the oldest girl looked at me with a kind of scorn, but I didn’t see any reason for her to be uppity since her Papa had sunk so low as to sell moonshine to Indians.
I recognized them from the first day in the country. These were the ones who’d poisoned the blackbirds and what a load of good that did; we have more birds now than ever . . . as if they’ve come for revenge. The man introduced himself and his daughters, Cassie, the oldest, and Sallie. Cassie did a curtsy and the little girl mimicked her, but the hem of her dress was so frayed with grow-stripes the gesture looked pathetic. I used my deep voice to say my own name and I could see they were impressed and all at once I wished to have a shirt on so I could impress them more. That man Thoreau says we are to beware of enterprises that require new clothes, but just between you and me I think he is a jackass.
Hans had yellow skin like a pear. He offered to sell Papa some of the puppies which he said were well-bred and when Pa said no he offered to sell him some of the liquor. Pa told him he didn’t think it was right to sell moonshine to Indians because in town he had heard it made them crazy. Hans sighed. “You’re a stubborn man,” he said. “I been told me about the wolves getting your cow and I come here with good intentions to help your family.”
Papa swallowed and his face turned red. “My cow drowned,” he insisted. I noticed his lower lip quivered when he said it and then I looked over at my sister Hazel who sees things straight and we both realized that Papa had told us lies that night.
Then Hans lifted out one of the mewling creatures from the cart and held it by the hackles. They were pretty dogs with brindled fur and long ears and snouts. “Drowned or not,” he said. “It’s a shame all these puppies are going to end up in the red man’s stew pots when you might use ’em for protection.” The puppy loosed a high whiny bark to let the man know it didn’t like being held in such a way.
Daniel went into a frenzy. “You mean they eat them? Pa we can’t allow them to get ate up.” He tugged on Pa’s pant legs and Pa’s face went from red to a darker shade of purple and then back to white again. No, he didn’t like this man at all.
“What breed are they?” he asked.
Hans set the puppy back in the cart. “Half wolf, half Newfoundland. They won’t stay scrawny for long.”
“So be it,” Papa said. “I’ll buy two of them.” Then Daniel stepped forward and plucked out one that kept getting stepped on by its littermates and another that nipped his fingers. He said he was going to teach them to keep the blackbirds out of the corn, but only Hans laughed at that. They were done doing business and I could tell Papa was waiting for the man to leave but Hans only shifted his feet in the dirt and nodded over to his girls. “You wouldn’t mind if they stayed here, would you? They could help out around the property.”
“Why?” Papa said.
“They don’t like Indians. Terrified, in fact. I let them to see a scalp dance one time. And well, it frightened them.”
“I reckon,” Papa said, though I could tell he was still perturbed. And with that, Hans drove his mule across the river shallows, the cart of doomed puppies mewling and whining for their mates, as they squirmed to avoid the jug of spirit medicine that rolled in the cart along with them. Papa looked over at us and told u
s to get back to work laying fence.
The girls stayed behind with Hazel to help her with the wash, but it didn’t seem that Hazel liked them much. Women are particular. They get their feathers all in a huff for no reason, so pretty soon I noticed the girls weren’t helping Hazel but just sitting on the porch, with that older one watching me. So I made sure to carry extra-heavy limbs and heft them over my head like they were mere twigs. Cassie came over and said, “My you’re strong,” while I was laying fence. I could only grunt in response because that was clearly God’s truth. “I feel safer here with you,” she continued.
Then Asa came beside us dragging a skinny log through the tallgrass. He grunted as he lifted the branch up onto the fence and then sagged beside me trying to catch his breath. “It’s mighty hot out,” he said. Both girls nodded. I was afraid he was going to make them uneasy by starting to talk about how he didn’t want to be buried beneath the ground or Indian torture practices or some of the other gruesome things he likes to speculate on. Cassie twisted the hem of her dress in her hands and you could see that she had firm, pretty legs. She told us about her pa and how he liked to dress up and play Indian sometimes and how he could be gone for weeks. She wanted to know if our pa was part of the militia in town to protect the white people. “Protect,” Asa said. “From who?”
Night Birds, The Page 18