HAZEL DID NOT sleep the rest of that night. Alongside Blue Sky Woman she poured lead for bullets that would be used against her own people. She pounded plum stones into grit and mixed it with sun-dried pork for the men to carry in their parfleches, meat so that they would not go hungry while they tried to kill those inside the barricades.
Bonfires speared the dark while men dipped their bare hands into steaming dog stew to lift out hunks of meat. And they told stories of what they’d done and how easily the whites had died while Hazel kept her eyes on the ground and tried not to hear.
She made the bullets well, felt their cool weight in the palm of her hands. Bullets made to pierce flesh, to burrow into bones and vital organs. She contemplated tossing them into the darkness where they would never be found again. But then she would be seen, then she would have shown herself to be of little worth. It was better to do what was asked of her. In this way she hoped to be spared so that, in turn, she might save others. Daniel and Ruth were still out there. The young blond boy and his russet-haired half sister. Daniel had always been good at hiding. She closed her eyes and tried to picture where he was now. Maybe he had made it across the river to the fort. But if that was true, if somehow he’d found his way to Palmer’s Ferry, then one of these bullets might find him.
When she stopped working, the song of the wailing dancers came to her. She heard the death songs and the telling of the deeds and her hope faded. Hazel did not see Wanikiya among the dancers. She sought to lose herself in her tasks, to pour the lead into molds and hear the metal hiss and cool into casings, to keep pounding the meat until her shoulders and arms were raw and sore from lifting the heavy stone. Not to think of her dead stepbrother. Her mind swam with the songs around her, with the memory of Wanikiya close to her, the way he had taken one of her tears into his mouth, as though he had wanted to taste her sorrow. As though in the years that passed he too had not stopped thinking about her.
In the morning, captives joined the long train to Fort Ridgely. Arrayed on horseback and on foot, the warriors were painted in many shades, charcoal to vermilion, a glorious sight in the morning sun. Hazel could not count their numbers, lost in the dust their ponies and wagons kicked up. The warriors sang as they came through the valley toward the fort, certain of victory. She moved as part of that train, knowing that her hands had made some of the bullets in their guns; her hands had tied the ribbons to their festive ponies bearing the bells that now jingled and glinted.
In all that long train, Henrietta found her and limped by her side. Hazel saw that the woman had bound her swollen feet in white linen. She gritted her teeth with each step she took across the razor grass. Hazel’s own soles had been toughened from summers running barefoot to spare her worn leather shoes and now she wore moccasins to complement Winona’s doeskin leggings. She moved with ease beside the crippled woman dressed in broadcloth and fraying calico. When Henrietta was side-by-side with her, she hissed, “Squaw.” The word had an ugly sound in her mouth. “You are not the only one who has friends.”
Henrietta squared her broad shoulders and looked around to make sure no one was listening. Wherever captives gathered there were also half-breeds who could report their words and plans back to their captors. The woman stepped on a shard of rock and snarled. She stopped and Hazel stopped by her side, instinctively reaching out to a person in pain. Henrietta’s face, glazed with sweat, glistened like a ham hock in the sun. The skin along her cheeks and arms had pinked and burned away in layers. Her bandages were soiled with dirt and yellow ooze. Henrietta gritted her teeth and told Hazel that she had bribed some of the half-breeds to protect her by promising them there was buried treasure on her land and only she could show them the place. Hazel thought at first she was being accepted into the woman’s confidence, but then she saw how the woman looked at her with blazing eyes, her fat chin quivering. “I saw you making those bullets,” she said. “One day the soldiers will rescue us. You don’t really think a tribe of savages can humble the United States military? And I will be alive to tell what you did. I will live to see you punished for your treachery.”
Hazel left Henrietta to hobble behind her and caught up with Blue Sky Woman, who was walking beside a lumbering ox that dragged along travois poles loaded down with her teepee and sinew-bound belongings. They trundled up a steep ridge through dark oak forests until they rose to a flat prairie tableland. Below her Hazel saw the spread of the river valley and the brown curve of the river. A half-mile wide, the valley rose up in heavily-treed ridges on either side until it met prairie. To the west, thunderheads percolated on the horizon. East of her, where the tableland fell away into steep ravines, she thought she saw thin ribbons of smoke that marked where the fort stood. Hazel tried to imagine the refugees and soldiers crouched within the low stone buildings.
Here on the prairie, only a mile from the fort, the Indians began to establish their camp under a hazy mid-afternoon sun. Hazel helped Blue Sky Woman set up the teepee. A cool breeze graced the bluestem grasslands. She saw beads of moisture quivering on the strands of grass, the remnant of the previous day’s storms. If the rains came again, the Dakota would not be able to use their fire arrows. Their earlier jubila- tion would soon be replaced by the low keening of death songs as the men prepared themselves for battle. Hazel held the teepee poles while Blue Sky Woman drove in stakes, and she glanced up from her work to watch the men weaving gold grass in their headbands so the soldiers would not see them coming. It was so quiet during these preparations that she could hear a meadowlark singing in the grass. Even the dogs had ceased their barking. Her own breathing was still and measured.
How many? Hundreds and hundreds of warriors with shotguns and bows, all gleaming now in shades of ochre and yellow-green. When the men moved into the tallgrass only their feathers and grassy headbands were visible. A sea of dark-haired warriors, moving across the prairie so that it looked like the land itself had come to life and was boiling down in an unstoppable wave to smother the fort. Who could stand against so many? Then there was only the dust following after them in low brown clouds and Hazel waited for the shooting to begin.
Caleb stood next to man a named Noles or Noel, he couldn’t be sure which. In the first battle, two days previous, Noles had been shot through the mouth, the bullet passing through each cheek, grazing a few teeth along the way, but leaving the gums untouched. The wound had not stopped him from talking. Noles had a flowing black beard and wore a blue kepi he had taken from a wounded soldier. “Seventy-one thousand in gold coin, did you see it?” (Except it sounded like “Ssseveny-one ousan in ole oin, d’ ya sssee eh?” because of his injury.)
Caleb said nothing. The annuity payment that had arrived by stagecoach the day before was a favorite subject of Noles. He had seen the glittering coins after one of the soldiers lifted the lid of a keg to show boyish Lieutenant Gere. Sick with mumps, the Lieutenant had blanched at the sight. Captain Marsh and twenty men had been annihilated in an ambush down at the ferry, and if the Indians chose to attack there were only a smattering of soldiers and civilians armed with muskets to defend more than two hundred women and children fled from prairie massacres. “Seveny-one ousan,” he said again, loosing a choked whistle. “All for lousy savages.” Noles loaded a pipe with a dark plug of tobacco and then squatted in the grass trench to light it with a lucifer match. The bitter smell of English tobacco drifted up to Caleb a moment later. Noles rose again and breathed out a cloud of smoke from his nostrils. Thin streams of smoke also spiraled from the hole in either side of his cheek. Noles swore the tobacco was keeping him from infection.
Caleb judged him to be about forty by the gray hairs woven in his beard. A forty-year-old Welsh bachelor farmer who for some reason had taken to Caleb and followed him everywhere he went about the fort. Unlike the other shocked settlers, Noles had been preparing for this war all along. His cabin had been carved from the side of a hill, the windows mere slits, just large enough for a man to steady his rifle. But the Indians had set fire to his gra
ss roof and left him to burn to death. Noles, hidden in the root cellar, had dug his way out with a cracked plate.
Caleb didn’t believe what the others said about the gold. If this was all about the $71,000, he would fight to deliver it to Little Crow himself. But no amount of gold could stop what had started now. He tuned out Noles’s chattering. Around them soldiers and civilians scurried up from the ravines carrying all the water they could in tubs and buckets and basins. There were women in aprons working side by side with men to whittle down slugs that would fit the rifles. Caleb’s hands were blistered from helping dig trenches in the parade yard. “Will rain ’gain,” Noles was saying, his teeth gritted around the pipe stem. “Look at them thunderheads buildin’.” Caleb nodded. Swift dark clouds had already eaten away fringes from the blue sky and obscured the sun.
Their situation no longer seemed so dire. Reinforcements had arrived the previous day, the Renville Rangers from St. Peter, and Lieutenant Sheehan and his men from Glencoe, who had force-marched all forty-two miles in a day’s time. Sheehan inspired more confidence than the mump-faced Gere. He had a bladed, angular face with prominent cheekbones, slate-gray eyes and a well-groomed beard. This was no boy in uniform. Still, if Little Crow attacked again, he was sure to bring overwhelming numbers and the last time the hostiles had only been stopped by the rain and the skill of McGrew and Sergeant Jones working the mountain howitzer. Joined by Jones and O’Shea tossing brimstone from their six-pound hellfire fieldpieces in the southwest corner, the artillerists bombarded the Indians with howling shrapnel.
Caleb was weary from digging the trench, but he didn’t want to go back inside and see Cassie again. Their flight from the woods still haunted him. Caleb had been in the trees cutting wood with the double-bladed ax when the Indians came to the farm. He stopped to study them, small figures from this distance, two of them little more than boys. Otter’s warning played at the back of his mind. A moment later he saw Cassie’s mother fleeing across the prairie, arms wrapped around a jingling jar.
Caleb had huddled in the mosquito-loud shadows, where he saw it all happen. The Indians carried shotguns; his ax would be nothing before them. One of the warriors took Cassie’s little sister by her heels and swung her around in a tight circle until her head dashed against the porch post. Caleb heard the splatter even from the woods. And still, he’d remained hidden. His gorge rose and choked off breath. His arms and legs felt heavy and wooden. He saw them chase Cassie into the garden and grab her by the hem of her dress, hauling her down. She gave one desperate hoarse cry, then called his name. “Caleb! Oh, Caleb.” Two of the Indians had held her against the ground while the other slit open her dress straight down the middle, until it opened to expose her pale naked skin and the mound of her pregnant belly. They had to lay their guns to the side to do this. The one with the knife had looked once in Caleb’s direction and scanned the area around him before undoing his breechclout.
His betrothed. His baby. The thought of what they were doing loosed Caleb from his terror. He came on through the woods, mosquitoes humming around him in rank clouds. He was running by the time he crossed the prairie, keeping low in the swishing grass. If they looked up, at any moment he would be a dead man. He heard Cassie retch and sob, heard the Indians’ low muttering. His momentum carried him directly into their midst, and then he was among them, swinging. His terror turned to rage. He felt the heft of the heavy blade, heard the thunk of it as it burrowed into ribcages and split clavicles and sundered heads like rotten wet lumps of wood. Blood spattered him and he kept swinging, a roaring in his brain and throat, a red haze shrouding his vision.
When his sight cleared, he saw the blood-streaked grass and for a moment feared that he had killed Cassie along with the Indians. Then he saw her, holding the split dress, her face pale with horror. Caleb let the ax drop. He cleaned the blood from his face and wrapped her in a blanket from the cabin. He wanted to leave her hidden in the woods and go for his family, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“Oh, please,” she said. “If you leave, it will be my death. I know.” And so he had carried her, keeping to the woods, as they made for Palmer’s Ferry, smelling the ashes and burning cabins all around them. At a cabin by the river’s edge, he’d found an abandoned birchbark canoe and ferried her across.
She’d been laid up in the hospital ever since. He couldn’t stand to look at her, even as he was sure more than ever of his love for her. The sight of her reminded him too much of how slow he’d been to react.
Around her in the hospital there were dozens of wounded. A woman stabbed with a pitchfork. A hysterical German lady who kept crying out “Mein kinder! Mein kinder!” her arms upthrust, as though she expected them to swim out of the air and join her again. Cassie lay among them, terrified of the cramping she felt ribbon through her womb and abdomen. It was not time for the baby to come. She must will it still inside her. Last night—before the reinforcements had arrived, when all felt sure the Indians would come to kill them before the sun’s rising— she had clung to his shirt sleeve, saying, “Caleb, do you think God is punishing us?”
When Caleb had approached Lieutenant Sheehan and asked for permission to leave and search for his brothers and sisters, the man didn’t even bother to meet his eyes. “Absolutely out of the question,” he told him. “We’ll need every man that can still shoot straight.” So he stayed outside here with Noles and chatted about the weather and all the things a man could buy with $71,000.
Caleb looked out over the waving gold-tipped grasslands. There was nothing to stop Little Crow if he came with enough warriors, just a few scattered buildings: a barracks of sturdy granite, officer’s quarters made of flimsy clapboard, low log houses for the hospital and laundry. All sited on a grassy plain surrounded by ravines and deep woods that provided an enemy with perfect cover. Couldn’t he pretend to head down to the well and just keep walking? He could swim the river and then search for his family. But a whole day had passed without any more refugees trickling in. If they were not here, Noles had said, then they were dead.
Caleb saw a flicker of movement in the grasses at the same time as he heard one of the scouts cry, “Indians. Oh my God!”
Scattered gunshots strafed the prairie, men firing at phantoms in the grass. Here and there Indians rose from the tallgrass and loosed flaming arrows that thunked into the shingled rooftops of the fort. Caleb paused then, entranced by the slow arc of the burning missiles which hissed like fire serpents as they came. The arrows dropped in the grass, struck rooftops, met rain-damp surfaces, and went out. A moment after the fiery barrage, the grasslands parted to reveal more and more braves, screaming high and shrill, as they charged the fort. Some of the Indians crouched to fire their shotguns and the air whistled with shredded lead. Caleb opened fire alongside Noles, whose answering explosion instantly deafened him.
He heard that same oceanic roaring in his ears and for a moment entertained the wild thought of charging out among the Indians alone, swinging his rifle butt. He knew in those moments what his father Jakob had written about, the thing that had come inside him at faraway Chickahominy River. His blood throbbed in his chest and head and each thing he saw out there in the grassy plain imprinted onto his brain, so that he would remember ever afterward the sound of his heartbeat in his eardrums and the way the grass seemed to grow limbs and arms and painted faces distended in howls, as though the prairie itself were come for them now. Caleb was made for this violence, but he was no fool. It was safe here with his face in the black mud. Noles, somehow, still had his pipe gritted in his teeth, and he hooted when McGrew and Jones opened up with the mountain howitzers and the shells howled among the Indians. The artillery broke their charge and the Indians retreated back into the woods
“Like a gold wave,” said Noles. “Pretty to see ’em comin’ on. Even prettier to see ’em fall.”
Beside Noles and Caleb, there was a farm boy in honey-colored homespun. The boy looked even younger than Caleb, his face grimed, eyes a cool German blue.
This boy propped up his rifle and spat out the gunpowder that blacked his teeth and tongue. “Will they come again?” he asked. “Too many of them to shoot.”
His answer arrived when a group of Indians charged the stable and took cover there. Rifle fire failed to bring them down, but McGrew had also seen them go inside and the resounding blast of the howitzer split the barn in a great ball of flame, scattering fragments of burning wood and torn limbs. Twice more this happened. As the Indians gained an outer building, artillery demolished it.
Then it was raining again: thunder in the sky, thunder on the ground. The Dakota boiled up out of a ravine at the southern edge, shrieking like catamounts, faces smeared with wet and colored paints. Caleb tore open the gunpowder papers with his teeth and poured in the powder and rammed home the cut slug. Again and again, he did this, not bothering to aim, discharging his rifle at the oncoming wave. The artillerists found them, too, and when the explosions fell among them, the Dakota broke and fled for the woods.
After an hour of this, it grew still and the roaring in their ears was replaced by the pattering of rain. An aproned woman climbed out among the boys, distributing new cartridges she and the blacksmith had whittled down, promising coffee if they stayed steady. Caleb swallowed and felt his stomach turn over from the gritty taste of the gunpowder. He leaned his head back and drank in the rain. It had seemed that every Indian in the entire valley had come against them, and they were still alive.
Night Birds, The Page 27