Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  There is only a thin stretch of trees along this riverbank. I kept reminding myself that soon I would be out of this oppressive gloom. Creaking sounds followed me as though every tree held a hanging body. The crows cawed and cawed. I ran and the branches reached out to scrape through my shirt and claw my face. I tripped, got turned around. Overhead, a dense canopy of leaves. Mosquitoes swarmed to feed on the blood that dripped from my skin. And this was strangest of all: There was a little man in the forest, no bigger than a raccoon. He was laughing and his mouth was filled with razor teeth. I knew then that this was the tree-dweller, the one Winona taught me leads children into the woods until they are lost forever. Tatanyandowan’s spirit brother. I knelt and prayed that God would take the vision away but there was only the tree-dweller’s laughter and rank clouds of bloodsuckers. Thick bile rose hot in my throat until I couldn’t breathe right and I knelt in the woods and purged myself and when I was done the little man was gone. I knew that it was not God’s doing but my own willpower and I walked out of those woods resolved. Let someone find this journal and see me for what I am, a strong boy who is not a fool. A boy innocent of blood who will put all of these stupid people behind him.

  JAKOB A UGUST 1, 1859

  A disaster in every way. I can’t imagine what drove that girl to hang herself, but her death changed things for good. For whatever reason the Indians blame us, as if she might have acquired the idea from the words and letters that Hazel was teaching her. She was going to be married according to Dakota custom. I do not blame the girl, but in town I have heard it is fairly common among her people because the women have no other way out of sick relationships. When we let our passions rule our thoughts, such tragedies are bound to result.

  Every night Blue Sky Woman comes down to the river to cut the backs of her legs and the soft inner flesh of her arms. Her hair is sheared down to ragged edges. Like a widow, I am told, she has given away all of her belongings. Our cabin stands secure behind this knoll, a few hundred feet from the river. But all night long we go on hearing her, the pathetic, trilling wails, a sound ripped from her throat. Her wailing haunts our dreams.

  The first time we heard it Daniel ran away into the tallgrass and Caleb had to go find him. The boy was red-eyed from crying, snot running from his nostrils, and he had shorn his blond hair in Indian fashion using a buck knife. What an ugly thing is true grief, the way it crumples a human being. Asa was enraged when he saw what Daniel had done, but when he tried to say something Caleb took him by the hair and threw him against the wall. I jumped in to stop the fight, but not before Caleb whispered something angry into Asa’s ears that made Asa clench his teeth and go pale.

  JAKOB A UGUST 15, 1859

  Asa ran away, but didn’t get far. Farmers from the militia brought the boy back a week later after they found him hiding within the hayloft of a settler’s barn. The boy caused a rash of reported thefts—eggs gone, corn missing from cribs—to spread through the county and be blamed on the Indians. One farmer told me it’s lucky the boy had such fire-red hair, otherwise he might have been taken for Indian and shot. I have never seen the boy look so ravaged. The skin along his cheeks was sunken, cadaverous. His eyes seemed to be receding into his skull. He looked as if he had been pursued the whole time he was away. After the militia rode away, he hung his head. “Does she still wail every night?” he wanted to know when I asked if he was going to run away again.

  “No,” I told him. “I haven’t seen Blue Sky Woman in three days.” I tried to put my hand on his shoulder and he shrank from me.

  “Will you send Hazel out to talk to me?” he asked.

  “Hazel? Why?” The other children had not come out to greet him. The boy averted his eyes and said nothing. His clothes were filled with needles of straw, his pale cheeks speckled with acne.

  The girl came out and they went away into the ruined wheatfield where an ancient cedar tree stands. I watched them the whole time. Asa was telling her something, but the wind stole his words. Once she glanced in my direction as if she wanted to run away. Then he knelt on the ground before her and grabbed hold of one of her legs. His chest and back heaved up and down while he wept. She looked frozen there, unable to move, but at last she knelt beside him, touched his hair, and held him.

  This is how Asa came back into our family. All the hostility is gone from his eyes. He keeps quiet and seems resigned, waiting for something to happen.

  JAKOB A UGUST 30, 1859

  We began early one morning when the Shepherd’s Star watched from an ash-colored sky. I’d seen catfish and large-mouthed bass all summer long and hunted them without success. In this dry spell the river thinned down and exposed wide sandbars on either bank. With the boys beside me, I used the oxen to drag heavy logs across the shallowest crossing place, where the river formed a natural bow. For each log we dug post holes on either side and buried them firmly in the ground. Into the slow-moving current we embedded a series of wood stakes in the sandy soil. Between the stakes the boys packed in stones and clumps of wet clay. The river began to back up behind this dam and deepen to fill a broad pool. We could not fully contain the river even in its wasted condition and water ebbed and dribbled around the posts.

  The leaf dwellers, as I still think of them, came down to observe at different stages of our project. The warriors, Blue Face among them, watched from a high bank. I have not seen a friendly face in a long time. I tried to cross once before and speak with the old man, but the younger ones turned me away from the camp with their cries of “Puck-a-chee,” which means go away. A few even menaced me with the glinting tips of their bone knives.

  Using the oxen we were able to complete the project in a day. The boys still didn’t know what was happening until I showed them the final feat of engineering, just as I’d seen it down in the country around Saline Springs. I had been weaving a network of willows into a large basket. I took away one of the stones to allow the water to flood through and then bound the basket into a kind of sluiceway. Most of the fish came through this opening. Basket after basket were filled, the fish flopping on the shore. We took more than we could possible eat, more than we could dry over a fire for our winter stores. “Now we will be able to eat in winter, children,” I told them. “We don’t need any crop.”

  I thought the Indians would be happy and would share in our feasts, but they came in the night and reduced the entire day’s labor to debris. The young warriors of the soldier’s lodge watched us from that same high bank. They’d taken all the fish rotting on the shore. In the early morning light, they looked glossy as crows. A menacing presence.

  I did not try to rebuild the dam.

  How will I feed my children? The only things that survived the hailstorm were the pumpkins and gourds I planted to keep down weeds. Hazel says we should not worry. This land that kills our milch cow and pillages our crop with hailstorms is also rich. She has gathered the plums along the river and works every day boiling the fruit into jam. Daniel wades into the marshlands to gather teepsinna, the Indians’ potatoes. And the Indians themselves, they are still here, though now it is not the children we see, or old men like Hanyokeyah. The ones who come on our land are younger, like Blue-Face, and they do not ask for what they take. They love to eat the pumpkins sprouting in our fields. There is one called Cut-Nose who will seat himself in a furrow and eat a pumpkin raw, slice by slice, tonguing the orange flesh from his knife.

  I’ve begun to think of the militia, of answering strength with strength. I am convinced there are few families out here as exposed as we are.

  In the meantime there is haying to be done in the bottomlands. On these hot dry days we work to cut the long-stemmed bluegrasses. Caleb and I cut down the stalks with scythes while Asa and Hazel follow behind with the hay cradles and the youngest, Daniel, keeps watched over Matthew. Hazel carries cool water up from a secret spring and we drink it by the bucketful in this heat.

  What relentless work is haying. The hay needles into our clothing and skin until we go home a ma
ss of welts and wheals. It sticks to our faces and pokes through shirts and hair and soft tender places. We breathe the dust and heat and grass yet forget our troubles in the intensity of this labor. Rain is a sweet dream in our minds. There is nothing in these days but sun and swinging scythes, a summer stillness before what is to come.

  This new feat of engineering holds me in thrall. Each stack must be laid up just right so that when the rain and cold comes the hay does not mildew and rot. In three days of cutting we made two house-sized stacks, Caleb climbing to the top of each one and tamping it down. “You ought to see the view from up here,” he said. “I can see clear to Tatanyandowan’s camp.” That name seemed to chill Asa and made him drop his cradle and leave us for a time. Tatanyandowan’s camp. So it is true that the old man and his medicine society do not run things anymore. In place of fellowship we have the sound of their drums in the night like some great throbbing heartbeat of the prairie itself.

  The scythes flashed silver and the grass lay golden in the sun. Silver and gold and the hot wind in the grass, a gold river of light that flows into our tired muscles and out through us.

  After a week of backbreaking work, we had made five high bundles, neat mounds of hay impervious to sleet and rain, enough to feed our stock through winter.

  The next morning we woke to find Dakota children playing in the stacks. As they jumped from stack to stack, shouting with glee, a golden rain sprayed downward. My precise mountains were tumbling apart. They were mostly small children with the mischievous Hissing Turtle for their leader. Dressed in their breechclouts, they leaped from mountain to mountain, wild with joy as the gold grass cushioned each landing. A few slid all the way down, dragging clots of hay in their fingers, before scurrying back up to leap to another mountain.

  I was not aware even of picking up the pitchfork. I only wanted to make an example, to frighten them. When they saw me coming—red-faced, the tine of the blade sun-tinted, a hoarse shouting in my throat— they ran for the woods. All except that Hissing Turtle, who tried one last leap. My shout at the moment of his jump must have distracted him just enough because the boy slipped and tumbled downward, heedless, with nothing to stop his momentum, hay whirling around him. He fell from the highest point in the stack, down and down to the hard ground where he landed at an awkward angle. I don’t think I even heard the break. My own momentum carried me toward him. It was only when I saw the awful glistening shine of the bone in his dusky skin and the blood around it that I stopped and let the pitchfork drop. A shout came from Caleb and I saw Cut-Nose coming on with Tatanyandowan and retreated back to my children. They bundled the boy in their arms and were gone.

  That night we smelled burning. I woke from a deep sleep to see a glowing orange light dancing along the sides of the inner cabin wall, illuminating the puncheon shelves, our meager belongings, glaring against the copper pots. My sleep-fuddled mind took a few moments to register what was happening and then I was shouting for the children, rousing them from their beds.

  The Indians had set fire to all five stacks and each blazed in the dark, a mountain of surging flame. The fire spread down into our grove of hardwoods, down into the marshlands where the cattails exploded like firecrackers, hissing pft !pft !pft ! as they blazed like torches. Only the dead fields and the river stopped it. The stars above us were lost in the falling ashes. Daniel’s dogs circled on the porch whining and growling. The night was filled with the sounds of the prairie chickens as they sang out in terror before the fire. Long-eared jackrabbits flashed from the tall-grass, a few red-eyed wolves, eyes rolling back in terror, and one great stag with a fine rack that bounded away, whitetail twitching, ahead of the flames. The fire swept through the bottomlands and rose up at the edge of the black waters before seeming to doubt itself, run out of rage or breath, and gradually hiss into smoke and steam and nothingness.

  In the morning we saw how close we had come to destruction. In the morning I started over again, moving to the field on the far side of the bottomlands, where the tallgrass had been untouched. The smell of smoke saturates our cabin and clothes and hair. We breathe ashes each night we strive for sleep. But I will not leave this place. If there had been no hailstorm to destroy our fields, I don’t think I would be writing this now. I’ve been running since Missouri and I am determined to stand steadfast here. Whatever I build, this land tears down or destroys. What is not destroyed, the Indians ruin. Wild. It’s still too wild. All I have are my children and I am weary of life.

  ASA S EPTEMBER 20, 1859

  Since I told Hazel the whole story about the girl and how I was the one who found her I’ve been able to sleep at nights again. Jakob went to the fort to report our losses and I went alongside him. We never were able to lay up enough to match our previous efforts and it will be thin eating for the oxen come winter. If it gets too hard for us, we may have to slaughter one of them. I drive them through the burned lands and into the tallgrass to water in the bottomlands and they have stupid cow eyes, glazed over, and do not know what is coming.

  HAZEL S EPTEMBER 21, 1859

  I can scarcely believe that only two months have passed since we ran as children in the woods. I hate nights in the fall. That crispness in the air that means winter will arrive and turn the ground to a sheet of black metal ice.

  I have taken to going down to the river to watch for him, but he has not come. A section of burr oaks and sugar maples escaped the fire and in the early cold the leaves are beginning to turn. I stood on the frontier between the black swath of burned land and this place that is untouched. What random destruction a fire brings. There are trees that are crisped and torched beside trees still green with sap. I stood beside one burned tree by the river bend that leads to our secret place and when I looked up he was there, appearing as if from nowhere. They always come so quietly, a habit they have learned, I suppose.

  He paused about ten feet away from me and didn’t come any closer. My throat felt thick and I couldn’t find any words. Then he pointed to a burned burr oak beside me and I turned to see that while I was daydreaming a thousand monarch butterflies had filled the barren branches. Once they sensed me moving they took flight and swirled around me, a vortex of black and orange, wings of light, wings of pollen, myself in the center, and I held my hand against my lips, aching to speak to him but not finding any words sufficient, and Wanikiya, watching me, mimicked my gesture. The butterflies swirled around me and then lifted up and I shut my eyes wanting to go on seeing them, keeping my arms folded and when I looked again he was gone as if he had never been there.

  I will remember. Fall is coming and then the long winter. A range of mountains may as well stand between us, a river with torrents. I know I will not see him again for a long while and that he is gone with his brother, Tatanyandowan, to learn what it means to be a warrior. And if I see him again how will he be changed and will he remember the night of the healing and the cave where I breathed his breath? Or will we both be so changed that there will be no language to bridge our differences?

  ASA O CTOBER 28, 1859

  She is coming and nothing will be the same. When we rode into town, Jakob got the letter at Herr Driebel’s store. They talked for awhile and then Jakob bargained for a barrel of flour, trading smoked prairie chicken that Caleb had snared and the jams that Hazel prepared. Just when we were getting ready to leave, Herr Driebel stopped us, squinting behind his spectacles. “Say,” he said. “I have some happy news I almost forgot. A letter came for you the other day. It was addressed to New Ulm and they sent it on to my shop out here, must have remembered you coming through in the winter. I gather it’s from your sister.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jakob said. “I don’t have any sister.” I saw how his dark face whitened with this news. He must have feared being found out.

  “It’s from someone named Kate Senger,” Herr Driebel said and I shouted for joy. My mother, after all this time. “I thought you told me your wife was dead.”

  Jakob looked so stunned he didn’t k
now what to tell the shopkeeper. He still hadn’t figured out how his wife had found him here. I sprang forward and seized the letter and tore it open. Jakob came and stood beside me, silently reading.

  My dearest Jakob,

  I have found you at last if you are reading this now. Not a moment has passed since we were separated in Missouri that I have not thought of you or the children. I can only imagine how betrayed you felt to wake and find me gone. The decision cost me dearly. You know how terrified I am of wolves and Indians. I couldn’t bear to leave a land I’d known all my life, this land where some of my children are buried. I tried to picture myself living in a wild place with you, tried to imagine bearing more children and each one tearing away a piece of me as they came into this world and then had their lives snuffed out. As much I love you, I knew that I could not follow.

  What I didn’t know was that my father wanted nothing to do with me when I came back to his house. My rightful place is with you and my children, he told me. He said he had washed his hands of me, as well as you. He agreed to give me enough money to journey after you to the place where I belonged. I had no say in the matter.

  I don’t know if you will have me still. I don’t know if you love me any more or can bear the sight of me. But I am coming, Jakob, and I will do all in my power to try and make things right between us.