Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  When we were close to home, she took my hand. Her palm was cool and dry. “Shameful,” she said. “To send boys to do a man’s work.”

  Yes, I thought. But no one will punish these boys. They can say what they wish and likely do far worse. I felt a simultaneous pride in Aunt Hazel along with a sense of helplessness. What could one boy do to defy an entire town? We walked the rest of the way home, hand in hand.

  Later that night, Aunt Hazel left the house after dinner to go wandering. I didn’t think she should be out by her lonesome, in case those boys were waiting, but she wasn’t afraid. Alone in the loft, I decided to break my promise and look through Aunt Hazel’s private things. I noticed that the bowl that had held her medicine was empty before I fetched out the book from her carpetbag. Seated on the edge of her bed, I turned the wrinkled pages. The book was a heavy, warm weight against my legs. I don’t know what I was looking for. I was angry at myself for not doing more in the woods. I could bear up under any abuse; this was my own private battle with cowardice, the way I let people hurt me without retaliating.

  The cross-hatched page was difficult to read. What had she been writing here? Had she been hoping to recapture her pa’s Book of Wonders ? That book had been supposed to keep her family safe, to mark out a path in a perilous world. It was a dark, cloudy night and I had to squint to decipher my aunt’s printing. From downstairs, my mother called up and asked what I was doing. I shifted and set the book on the nightstand and went over to call down my answer.

  I don’t know how it happened exactly. The book was heavier than I thought. Its presence on the nightstand must have disturbed the wooden candle-holder, which made no sound as it turned over and touched the edge of the book. The flame caught one of the brittle pages and a brightness filled the room while I called down my answer. There was a smell like burning applewood, or sugar maple, overpowering and pungent. Even from downstairs my mother smelled it, and called my name again in a questioning manner. The scent came to my nostrils at the same time my head turned and I saw the book engulfed in flames.

  I leapt for it and tried to beat out the fire with my bare hands, but the flame coiled through those pages like a prairie fire in a quick, hot wind. I threw the burning book down on the floor and stamped on it with my feet. Dimly, I smelled my own skin burning along with those pages and then my mother was in the room with a washbasin of sudsy water that she threw on the flaming mess. The water splashed up and soaked my nightshirt and bare legs as it put out the fire.

  I remember standing there over the blackened remains of the book and looking across the room at my mother and the O shape of her mouth. Moments later her shock turned to anger and her cheeks flamed with color. I don’t know what called for such fury. Earlier that summer, I had saved a letter she meant to burn and in doing so brought a woman she never wanted to see again. Now, I had burned up something she wanted to save, a book that she might have hoped would bring us coin in a hard season. A few senseless words sputtered from her mouth and hung there, suspended like spittle. She began to hit me with the flat of her palms, striking me in the face and along the top of my head. She grabbed hold of my hair, shrieking, and tossed me against the back of the wall, knocking the breath from my chest. Too much was happening too quickly. I began to feel the searing ache along my palms and feet and knew that I was already hurt. I curled into a ball and tried to protect myself as best I could while she swung for me. How much time passed I am no longer sure. Neither of us heard Hazel hurrying up the loft ladder to pull my mother off me.

  My next memory is of Aunt Hazel later that night, bent over my bed, wrapping a cool cloth around my burned hands. Even in the dark I could see pouches under her eyes. She had been crying. I opened my mouth and tried to tell her just how sorry I was, but my tongue was thick and no words came out. I wanted to tell her how much I longed to be like Peter from the Gospels, fierce and brave, and sometimes stupid. Someone who would draw his sword when the Roman soldiers came for what he loved. Instead, I was Judas. I had proved a poor friend to the one who trusted me; my own hot tears shamed me. She touched a finger to my lips and shushed me before I could speak.

  Then she rose again and went over to her side of the room and stood by the window so that the wind caused her nightgown to billow around her. I could still smell the sweet applewood char of the lost book. The aroma swam in my nostrils, filling me up like breath. Along with the scent, I heard the voices of my grandfathers and uncles. I saw the ghosts of their journeys and trials. Hazel was looking out the open window and seemed to be listening too, as though she had summoned the voices here to take the place of the book. I had the sense of them all around us, here in the room for only a moment before they rose like smoke and out the window into the pure darkness of a country night. She started singing so quietly then. I strained to catch the words.

  What though my joy and comforts die? The Lord my Savior liveth.

  What though the darkness gather round? Songs in the night He giveth.

  No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging

  Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?

  Aunt Hazel had a habit of grinding her teeth at night, like a rabbit worrying a branch to keeps its molars short. The sound grated on my ears as I tried to sleep. I lay awake in the dark, thinking about those boys shadowing us in the woods and wondering what they would try next. Sometime past midnight, Hazel stopped grinding her teeth. A moment later she rolled all the way out of bed and clumped down to the floor.

  “Aunt Hazel?” I asked.

  There was no response. I could hear her feet kicking against the bedpost. I called her name once more and then came around the side of the bed. What I saw in the moonlight flooding through the window I will never forget. Her eyes had rolled back in her head and there was pink, blood-flecked foam on her lips. Her torso jerked like a hook had been pulled through her spine and her arms bent at odd, insectlike angles, a locust. She was not breathing. Gurgling sounds frothed in her throat while she threshed in spasms on the floor. There was a terrible sense of absence here, of violation. I screamed for my mother and knelt beside her on the floorboards.

  Mother came rushing up the ladder with a lit lantern. She sucked in her breath when she saw Hazel and then set the lantern down on the floor. Minutes had passed without Hazel inhaling. She continued to twist on her spine as she struggled to draw a single breath. All at once, I saw what my life would look like with her gone, the space she would leave within me. There would be no stories, no laughter in the household. She could die before I ever had the chance to tell her what she meant to me. I was petrified by the thought. Mother came and knelt beside me. I thought of all the stories Aunt Hazel had told me. Now she lay before me like the Indian boy Caleb had shot so long ago. I put my hand on her stomach then and began to pray. “Breathe,” I commanded. “Breathe in God’s name.” That’s the only part of the prayer I can remember, for I was chanting you see, half addressing her, half addressing God. It was less a prayer than a command, my own fierce desire to call her back into this world. One of them, Hazel or God, must have heard, for her stomach rose to meet my hand. Mother joined my prayer and we continued to encourage her. Hazel’s breath returned in short, ragged gasps. Her eyes were huge, the pupils coin-sized. She didn’t seem to recognize us and at first kicked as if she wanted us to go. Mother stroked her hair, saying, “It’s okay, dear. You’re safe now.”

  We helped her back up into the bed and I turned away while Mother stripped off Hazel’s gown, which she had soiled during the seizure, and then wrapped her in the blanket. Waves of shuddering passed through her. Mother and I took turns keeping watch, but Hazel didn’t seize again that night and sometime in the early gray hours her breathing deepened into true sleep.

  In the morning Hazel could hardly speak because her mouth was filled with raw sores. She had chewed up her tongue and the insides of her cheek during the seizure. Her voice came thick. “I scared you,” she said.

 
I felt a warm rush of tears and blinked them away. She reached out to touch me with a cool hand. “You see,” she said in a thick whisper, “I’m all out of medicine. I can’t stay here much longer.”

  I squeezed her fingers. “You can’t go away.”

  Mother came up beside her with water drawn from the springhouse. “You shouldn’t be talking,” she told Hazel.

  “Asa,” Hazel said. “Open up my bag.”

  I did as she asked. Within there was only the yellow-print dress she had come with and a small doeskin bag. I took out the bag and brought it over. Hazel did her best to smile. “I have to tell you about the one who carried this,” she said.

  “It can wait,” said Mother.

  “No,” said Hazel. “The story’s not done yet. And I’m afraid I don’t have very much longer. Before the seizures come, I see this radiance spreading through all the world. There are wings behind it. Angels, I think. Or birds made of light. It sweeps over me and takes me away with it.” She spoke slowly, the words coming out slurred. Her eyes watered with the effort.

  “To someplace terrible,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “But not someplace for mortal flesh.” Her hands wrapped tightly around the beaded doeskin bag and she looked over at me. “I need to tell you something, but the story won’t come easy.”

  “You need to just rest,” my mother said in a low voice.

  “In a few days, when my mouth heals right,” Aunt Hazel said. “It begins one summer, a hot summer much like this one. Even the wind in the tallgrass seemed to whisper: If only men knew what I know. The adults went about their business, hearing nothing. But I was sixteen, half child, half woman. I listened close.”

  MILFORD PRAIRIE

  1862

  THE

  NIGHT BIRDS

  IN THE MONTH of the harvest moon, a Dakota youth named Otter told the Senger family that Indians were coming to kill all the white people in the valley. After three years of living just on the other side of the silt-laden Waraju River, a shallow boundary that separated them from the Dakota bands, the children were used to such warnings and paid this one little heed. Other matters weighed on them. They had been banished from the cabin where their stepmother tended their youngest brother, Matthew, sick with a fever that speckled his face and throat with white pinprick sores.

  Caleb cut a swath through wavering bluestem grasses and made a bed for the four of them. They spread quilts over the fallen grass, knowing that Caleb would leave them as soon as Asa returned from the creek bearing buckets of water. Caleb was sweet on Cassie, who lived with her sister at a nearby farm. One night the previous winter, her father, Hans, had poisoned himself with his own liquor. He had been ladling small doses of strychnine into the rotgut he sold the Indians, just enough to give it kick. His own distillation he kept pure. How Hans confused the two still troubled Caleb. He remembered digging the grave during a Jan- uary thaw, a shallow grave they layered with stones to keep the wolves from unearthing it. Once he’d looked up to catch Cassie’s mother, her hair streaming in the keening wind, looking off toward Milford, pale eyes shining. Caleb had the sense that this woman wouldn’t stay in the territory much longer. He’d gone ahead and bought a ring for Cassie, a used silver ring he wasn’t sure would fit, as well as a crate of table wine from New Ulm, now hidden away in the root cellar for the wedding.

  Near the children a smudge fire burned to keep off hovering mosquitoes. A hot summer wind fanned clouds across a moon that hung like a glimmering talon in the dark. Clouds drifted, low-bellied and pregnant with rain, over the fields of waiting corn. The corn raised leaves like green arms that sought to stroke the rain from the passing clouds. Around them a few drops spattered the dust.

  “Will it rain?” Daniel asked in his quiet voice. His white-blond hair caught what light there was from the smudge fire.

  “Not tonight,” Caleb said. “Not yet.”

  Caleb knelt to be closer to his siblings. Here he was, eighteen years old, about to be married, but he wasn’t ready to leave them yet. Not with his father Jakob away in Virginia fighting the rebels. He thought of that wine down in the cellar and how in church it represented God’s forgiveness and he wondered if there was enough of it to take away the sin of the things he knew and had done. Cassie had reached the stage where her swelling belly was difficult to disguise.

  His younger sister, Hazel, glanced at him once, her dark green eyes unreadable. She lay between Daniel and six-month-old Ruth and she was looking at him as though trying to divine his thoughts. The look disquieted him. There were things she shouldn’t know.

  The slow-moving clouds parted to reveal a scattering of stars. Caleb pointed out Mato , the Bear Star, to his siblings. He told them how the Bear Star died each autumn and painted the leaves red with blood. Or so the old medicine man Hanyokeyah had told him. Red leaves from a bear dying to prepare the way.

  Across from him Hazel was lost in thoughts of her own. She turned from Caleb and looked at her sister Ruth, barely breathing in her bundle of blankets, and remembered the day of the girl’s birth. She had been born during the same three-day snowstorm during which Hans Gormann had died. There had been no way to fetch a doctor. Hazel was the one who cut the cord and felt the infant life quicken in her hands. In that moment when Ruth first began to howl, she had hesitated before handing her to the waiting arms of her stepmother. “Hazel, give her over,” Kate had commanded, sweat-soaked hair pasted to her skull. Hazel had paused because something in her said if she handed the girl over she wouldn’t live. But she did. Ruth had Kate’s copper hair and green eyes like Hazel. Did she know who had nudged the air into her lungs? Now the baby slept while the boys watched for what stars the clouds might reveal.

  Hazel tried to imagine what was happening back in the cabin where her stepmother tended Matthew, a boy already blind from scarlet fever. This new fever that held him didn’t have any name. Around the edges of his lips the sores looked hot and angry and bled with pus. Matthew muttered in a heated dream language that was not English or Dakota, but sounded like prophecy. Once he said the word fire and Hazel had dripped water down his throat to quiet him. When his skin took on a smell like side meat cooking in the sun, she felt sure he wouldn’t live past the night. Kate’s bloodwort teas, the cloths soaked with liniment she lay across his chest, could not stop his breath from becoming more labored. On this humid summer night the cabin reeked with the smell of his dying. Kate had known it, too; that was why she sent them outside. When Hazel tried to stay, thinking she could be of some use, Kate slapped her so hard her ears rang. Hazel knew she didn’t mean it, but hated her just the same. Matthew needed her; her touch could soothe him. Blinded by her own tears, she had felt Kate press little Ruth into her arms and thrust her out the door with her brothers.

  After Caleb led them to this cool spot by the river where they could no longer hear Matthew crying, Daniel fetched some plums from a nearby bush. Hazel was sixteen years old, too old to cry. The sour juice spilled down her cheek and made her feel still and calm on the inside. The imprint of Kate’s hand burned on her skin, the bruise ripening and swelling in the dark.

  Across the Waraju River lay the Dakota reservation and even this late the cookfires of their camps shone. Drums began to throb in the west, low tomtoms that sounded like the beating of a great heart, before they went still again.

  Asa returned with water from the creek. He set the yoked buckets down and stood in the smudge smoke swatting away troublesome mosquitoes. At sixteen he was the second oldest boy, old enough to join Jakob in the war against the Secesh. Asa carried Jakob’s last letter in his shirt pocket. His sweat had stained and smudged the ink, but he had the words memorized by now and he often spoke of joining Jakob with the Minnesota 1st volunteers; he hoped Johnny Reb wouldn’t be licked before the year was out.

  The two oldest stepbrothers stood together, one short and redheaded, the other tall and broad-shouldered, and looked out toward the aurora hovering over the reservation.

  “Somet
hing’s stirring,” said Caleb.

  “That’s what took me so long,” Asa said. “I ran into Otter down by the creek.” Though they were alone in the dark, Asa whispered the last.

  “What mischief is he up to now?”

  “He was excited,” Asa said. “His whole body was smeared with black paint and all I could make out was the whites of his eyes. When he called my name I would have jumped out of my boots, had I been wearing any. He was on the other side of the river. He told me the soldier’s lodge had met and decided to kill the white people in the valley the next day.”