Kate
KINGDOM TOWNSHIP
1876
INDIAN
SUMMER
“H O CHUNK,” HAZEL said when she was among the scalps in my papa’s one-room jailhouse. I strained to hear the word again, wondering if it was Dakota for violence or revenge. The world outside fell away. Just behind me wagons still creaked along the rutted main road. Squealing children chased one another while frowning women in dark dresses looked on, but I no longer heard any of it. I stayed near the doorway, all my attention fixed on Aunt Hazel standing in a thicket of human hair taken from dead men. Her lips continued to move, but now no sound emerged and it seemed she had forgotten me entirely. Her breath came shallow. She had peeled back her bonnet to see better in the gloom of the jailhouse. My attention was so absolute I could hear a host of bluebottle flies droning angrily in the sallow light of the room’s only window. Somehow the drone of these trapped insects came inside me and it seemed not the flies that were speaking, but the things twisting from the ceiling.
All at once I remembered a nightmare I had last summer when my papa was gone to St. Peter. I dreamed I was in the woods near the river, fishing for bullheads, when I looked up to see my papa coming toward me. Blood saturated his hair and clothing and shrouded even his eyes and at first I thought he had been scalped himself but then I knew that the blood was not his own. Dry leaves crunched under his boot soles as he lurched down the slope toward my spot on the shore. I screamed when I saw the glistening knife he held. “Papa! Papa! It’s only me, Asa. It’s me, Papa!” But he couldn’t see for all the blood and I knew he mistook me for an Indian and was going to kill me like he had done the others. When he was only a few feet away my legs came unfroze and I threw away my fishing prong and ran into the woods. The trees closed in around me; branches raked my arms. I ran until I could no longer see him, but as I fast as I went I always heard him coming on behind me, crashing through undergrowth and snapping branches like old bones. Eventually, I found a hiding place within a mossy log and I scrunched up inside and in the absolute darkness I heard the thudding of the blood in my ears. When my heart quieted, I also heard his husky breathing outside. Occasionally he would let loose a choking sob, a wounded animal sound. I wanted to run out and tell him again that it was only me, to wake him from his killing rage. It’s only me, Papa, not an Indian.
I always awoke screaming from that dream, the pulse hot in my chest, until my mother rushed up the loft ladder to hold me. She could quiet me, but I never slept afterward. These nightmares only came when he was far away. They didn’t make me any more afraid of my papa. Strangely they made me afraid for him, for what he had done and still might do.
These memories coursed through me while I watched Hazel reach up and touch one of the scalps with a finger. Her eyes found me. “Ho Chunk,” she said again. “Oh, Asa, that your father should keep such things.”
I felt sick to my stomach, the dream memory still vivid in my mind.
“Ho Chunk,” she repeated. “Do you understand me? These are not Dakota. The Dakota never wore roaches in their forelocks. These are Winnebago, ‘Ho Chunk’ as they call themselves. He is not keeping these for trophies. It’s to remind him of his sin.”
I nearly jumped out of my boots when I felt a rough hand on my shoulder. “Step aside, boy,” a voice said behind me. The sounds of the outside world came back to me. I looked up to see that the large hand was attached to a hairy forearm that belonged to the blacksmith, Julius Meighen. The storekeeper, August Schilling, stood beside him. I stepped out of their way reluctantly, sensing they didn’t mean my aunt any good. Herr Schilling’s ruddy cheeks were a splotched pink color. He huffed and sputtered at Hazel, still inside the room. “You have no business here,” he said. “This is private property.”
Hazel’s voice echoed in the small room. “You,” she said. “You were there too, weren’t you?”
“Out!” Schilling said. “You are not wanted here.”
“Do as he says,” the blacksmith advised. “I’d hate to have to carry you out of there like a sack of cornmeal, ma’am.”
Hazel came slowly, drawing the bonnet back up to shadow her face. In the streets beyond people had turned to look at us, the men outside the store forgetting their game of checkers, a few gaggles of women huddling together in gossipy circles. The whole scene reminded me of the day my papa dragged the Indian into town on a leash. Only now all that unfriendly attention was fixed on me and Hazel. On her way out, the blacksmith gripped her by the arm and he leaned in close to whisper something to her that I could not hear.
We didn’t speak until we were away from the town and heading back home across the prairie. “I don’t understand,” I told her. “I thought those scalps were from the Devil’s Lake campaign. Has Papa been lying all this time?”
It was the middle of the afternoon and a dry summer heat baked the barren landscape. Locusts, my teacher once told me, came from the Latin locus ustus , meaning burned place . I can’t imagine a better description for a summer landscape after the locusts are gone. It’s as though as every living thing has been purely scorched. “ It’s best you ask him yourself, Asa. I don’t know what happened. After the war, there was a group of men calling themselves ‘The Kingdom of Jones,’ that organized for protection. People were still so very terrified of Indians. They hadn’t yet caught Little Crow.”
She took my hand and squeezed it and looked at me with those serene, sea-green eyes. “Let’s not talk about this anymore, huh? I need to think this over. I only know that Caleb has been carrying far too great a burden.” Away from town she peeled back the bonnet to feel the sun on her freckled face. Squinting in the hard light, she looked both willowy and frail. I was afraid to let her be alone. “The first settlers here thought these prairies were a desert. They always settled the wooded valleys first, thinking that the absence of trees meant poor soil. But there was such good black ground under the grasslands. It was a living skin. You could see why the Indians called it ‘Grandmother,’ why God shaped us from dirt.”
She led me toward the river where a copse of oak trees had been left untouched by the locusts, the leaves coated in a film of August dust. In the stubbled gold grasses she found an empty carapace of a locust, a dry thing like a withered leaf or the abandoned skin of snake. It quavered in the palm of her hand. “Their time is done,” she said.
“Oh no,” I told her. “They’ve been coming back for years. If you were to dig your fingernails under this ground you’d find a river of their eggs. They’ll hatch again come spring.”
She was looking toward the river. “They thought that about the passenger pigeons in my time. And the storms of blackbirds. Wolves. But these locusts are things that take and take and never give anything back.” She made a fist and crumpled the carapace. When she opened her hand what remained blew away like chaff. “They will spend themselves with their appetite.”
With the toe of my boot, I was drawing a pattern in the dust. I didn’t care much to contradict her, wrong as she might be. We walked until we came to a marsh that had once been surrounded by cattails. A thick carpet of dead locusts clustered on the surface. Aunt Hazel sat on the shore, untied the laces of her shoes, and took them off. Barefoot, she pulled up the hem of her dress and waded into the murky water. “There might be leeches,” I called to her. I was frightened that someone might see her like this, unashamed as a child. If they did, it would be all the confirmation they needed to prove her madness and send her back to St. Peter.
“No,” she said. “Not here. This is spring-fed. I know this place. Join me. The water feels nice.”
I hesitated. This wasn’t how a woman was supposed to behave. They didn’t go wading into black water, exposing the wintry skin of their thighs. But I didn’t have to think long. A line of sweat snailed down my back. The hot sun stole all the shadows from this bare country. I kicked off my boots and followed her into the pond.
She had the bonnet slung behind her, her black hair woven into two braids tha
t swung rhythmically as she moved. This is how I like to remember her: water lapping at her knees, her dress fanning out to almost touch the surface, and sunlight blazing on the small pond and turning the water to gold. Her eyes were shut while she moved her feet through the cool mud. A moment later she let her dress hem fall into the water and brought up something between her toes. She plucked it out triumphantly. It looked like a gray human fist, knotted with roots. “Teepsinna,” she said. “Swamp tubers. They taste better than any potato. C’mon, there’s plenty more.” The mud felt wonderful between my toes as I felt along the silken ground for the lumplike root. I completely forgot the dead locusts floating on the surface. My patched pants were soaked by the time I found my first one.
We gathered these marsh tubers along with water lilies. She taught me where to find wild grapevines that the locusts left alone. We gathered all these things into a wooden bucket she had brought along for this purpose. This was my last good day with her. I learned to see a living layer beneath what appeared to be a wasteland. I think she foresaw what was coming. On the way back home I asked her what the blacksmith had whispered into her ear, not expecting an answer.
“No crows,” she told me. “There will be no crows in the Kingdom.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“He meant Little Crow,” she said. “He meant Indians, or those who like them.”
Hearing this made me angry enough at the town to wish it all burned to the ground once more. If only they knew her as I did. They didn’t have any reason to fear one small woman. And I didn’t think she had any reason to be ashamed of her past. Hazel continued talking as we found the path. “Crows are often misunderstood,” she said. “The Dakota also have a story of a great flood that drowns the entire earth. The Creator sends it because he is angry at mankind. But no humans survive and nothing is spared save a single, solitary crow flying over a wilderness of water. It is this crow that begs the Creator to have mercy, to restore humanity. Only the crow is there to see the earth destroyed and then made again.”
After the jailhouse incident, things got worse for my family. My mother had already used a good portion of her remaining coins to restock her laudanum supply. She didn’t care that Aunt Hazel called it a demon potion. She said it was the only thing that made her feel right inside. In town Herr Schilling stopped buying my mother’s eggs. He raised prices on any calicos or salted meats she requested. I was glad not to be there to witness the confrontation between those two. Mother threatened to ride to Sleepy Eye, but that was just talk. We only had one draft horse, good mostly for field work. She might as well have threatened to ride to the moon for what our family needed. Herr Schilling had us where he wanted.
Two days later, I spotted Orlen Meighen and Franz Schilling watching me from outside the schoolyard’s white picket fence. Both boys had dropped out of school earlier that summer. I had long been invisible to such rough-and-tumble older children unless they needed a sacrificial victim to swing from a rope. They lazed now, smoking cigarettes in the spare shade of a crabapple tree. Wherever I turned in the schoolyard during our lunch break, I felt their hot eyes boring into me.
After lunch, Mr. Simons delivered an interminable lecture on the Sioux Uprising, his voice a droning monotone of dates, numbers, and facts, while the students fanned themselves and hunched under the oppressive summer heat in the small room. Mr. Simons paced the rows, his eyes dreamy, as students sank lower and lower in their desks, their spines turning to butter in the humidity, their eyelids drooping. Then, he must have caught sight of Orlen and Franz outside the window. Those boys, sons of important town citizens, had tormented Mr. Simons with their constant misbehavior. The sight of them kindled something inside our teacher. “Most people,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp, “died like cattle in a slaughterhouse.”
He was no longer lost in dreamy abstractions. The students straightened. “What a fine fever swept this country in 1862. There were parades, marching bands, brave speeches. Like any patriotic young man, I went to war against Johnny Reb that year, not knowing the home I was leaving behind would be washed away in a river of blood.”
His good hand stroked the sleeve of his missing arm. He didn’t sound like he was addressing children anymore. “A body doesn’t know what it will do until the moment arrives. That’s how it was all around this country when the Indians rose up with their shotguns and scalping knives. In terror, some men ran and left their wives and daughters behind to be killed. Some sank to their knees in the red grass, their eyes glazing over, too stunned even to beg for mercy. They went to their deaths thinking, this can’t be happening. This can’t be happening to me. ”
Mr. Simons continued to look out the window, lost in his recollection. My throat felt dry. “What does it mean to have courage in such a time? Far away in Virginia, when boys your own age occupy a stone wall at the top of a hill, their guns trained on your advancing line of infantry, do you walk into that withering fire because you are brave, or because you do not want to be trampled by those marching behind you? And when the minié ball shatters your forearm and you feel the hot metal burrow inside, are you secretly relieved? Do you huddle against the scarred ground while your friends fall around you, praying only that you will live and your war will be done?”
No one was drowsing in that room now. Every one of us had turned toward Mr. Simons, our breaths hushed. Watching the other students, I knew I was not the only one who had grown up with silence. What he told us was forbidden knowledge. “Some of your friends get sick. Dysentery. They die of scratches, infections. Some, you suspect, die out of plain homesickness. But not you. Later that evening when the doctor saws at your ruined arm, you’re awake to feel every terrible second. And the angry sound of that saw is branded into your brain. You pray for death then, but your prayer isn’t answered.
“No, you get to go home. And that vision of home and hearth is what keeps you ticking. It’s something that will make you whole again. But your home doesn’t exist any longer. Your entire town was destroyed one fiery August day while you lay in the hospital on the other side of the country. The mother and younger brother who stopped returning your letters occupy unmarked graves. Killed by Indians who thought they could take back what once was theirs.”
Mr. Simons swallowed, was quiet for a solid minute. The others began to shuffle, one boy’s cough echoed through the room. “The survivors left behind are so very afraid. You think it should kill you, the loneliness. But deep inside you feel a small red flame of hatred awakening in the emptiness. It keeps you warm. You fall in with men who are as hateful as you, as haunted as you. You don’t call each other by name. Everyone is Jones. You are men of the kingdom, the Kingdom of Jones. And you wait for the Dakota Sioux to come back, because you’re ready this time, armed and vigilant. Wanting death, ready to kill. Days pass, weeks, soon a whole year of waiting. Then one day they come, a small band passing through. . . .”
Mr. Simons turned and scanned the room. Then he scratched his jaw, his train of thought lost. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to tell you all that.” He shook his head slowly and then waved us away with his good hand. “Class dismissed.”
We filed out silently into the schoolyard, some of the students forming into groups gossiping in low tones. I went out alone, and Franz and Orlen fell in close behind me as I walked out of town. I didn’t know where to go. Papa, my main protection, would likely be away for another month. These boys meant to fall on me when we were alone in the woods. They meant to punish me because Aunt Hazel had come to live with us. She had unsettled our household, unsettled the town. She even unsettled quiet Mr. Simons, who must have heard through gossip what Hazel had said about the scalps in the jailhouse. Scratch the skin of this ground and you’d uncover locust eggs. Scratch the skin of these peo- ple and you’d uncover feelings they thought were buried far deeper. I mulled over Mr. Simons’s words while I walked, trying not to act afraid when the older boys closed the distance between us, until I swor
e I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. What had the men of the Kingdom of Jones done? That was the second time in a week I had heard that term. What did it mean to have courage?
I didn’t have much time to think on these matters because at the base of the hill Aunt Hazel waited for me near the old German graveyard. She was carrying her customary grubbing stick and bucket, squinting up into the hard afternoon light. I saw her take stock of the boys behind me, Orlen with his long troll-like arms, Franz with his thin boyish beard. She peeled back her bonnet and gave them a narrow-eyed glare. I felt the boys hitch to a stop. How had she known that I might be in danger?
“How was school?” she asked when I was close.
“Different,” I said. “Frightening.” She didn’t ask what I meant. We fell in side by side and headed for the old Indian trail along the river that would take us home. Orlen and Franz shadowed us through the woods. Aunt Hazel stopped walking and turned to face them. They stopped too. They didn’t speak a word.
“What do you want?” Aunt Hazel called. Thirty feet separated us, and the boys’ faces were splotched by tree shadows. “You leave us alone, hear? We aren’t frightened of you.” They watched her, empty-eyed and silent. As soon we turned around they started walking too, always keeping a careful distance. Aunt Hazel stopped to tie the laces of her boots. Then she plucked her stick from the ground and whirled around to advance on the boys. They held their ground at first. She was a little woman, whittled down by her lost years, but she held that stick before her like a sword and I could imagine the grim expression on her face. When she was ten feet away, they broke and ran away, laughing. They mocked us from a distance, following us the whole way home. They called her a whore. Injun-lover. Witch. No expression showed on her face.
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