Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  He thought again of his brothers and sisters, shut his eyes, as he used to be able to do when he was a boy. Then he had a sight, a way of finding people and things that were lost. But now he saw nothing, only felt the rain chilling his skin, the gunpowder raw in his throat.

  If Blue Sky Woman suffered from a delusion, it was elusive and inconstant. After the second attack at the fort failed, the warriors, so radiant that morning, returned wet and grumbling, the echo of artillery shrill in their eardrums. Hazel’s heart rose at this news and then fell with the next words of the crier. One of the chiefs demanded payment in blood, and would take it from the captives. Many of the captives who were being protected by sympathetic Dakota were sent out to hide in rain-chilled ravines. It was said only two warriors had been killed by the “rotten balls,” but there were many injured and soon some of these would come to Blue Sky Woman’s teepee for healing. Hazel could not be there when they came. She found herself wondering about Wanikiya, if he was among the wounded.

  Blue Sky Woman ducked under the teopa, rattling the elk hooves hung above the entrance. She said all the captives were to be “Pa Baska,” heads chopped off. Her face was glazed with rain. Hazel wondered how she could still call her Winona if she recognized at heart who she was. “My daughter,” the woman said. “You must hide. Come, I know a place for you.”

  She took Hazel to the teepee of Spider Woman, an old widow the girl had sometimes seen at the Episcopalian Church near the agency. Spider Woman had a Bible, though she could not read, and spoke fondly of the Holy Spirit, calling him Taku-skan-skan, the same name the Dakota had for the god of motion. Her English was limited to three words. Her teepee, like Blue Sky Woman’s, was made of buffalo skin, tattooed with blurred symbols of Dakota and Christian belief. Hunched like her namesake, Spider Woman pulled aside a long strip of carpet laid under a ratty buffalo fur. She had been busy digging the hole that Blue Sky Woman had asked her to make.

  As bidden, Hazel crawled into the hollowed-out hiding place. Fibrous roots spread out below her. The smell of wet earth tickled the insides of her nostrils. Blue Sky Woman handed down a skin of water, some pemmican they had pounded together earlier while listening to the thundering artillery, and, more ominous, the bone knife. “Sleep, daughter,” she said. “It won’t be long.” Then she went away to tend the wounded. Hazel stared up at the buckskin dress and wrinkled moon-face of Spider Woman. When the old woman smiled her black eyes disappeared into a nest of wrinkles. “I pray thee,” she said, and then pulled the covering over the hiding place.

  Time blurs when you are under the earth. She thought of a Poe story her Pa had reprinted in the days when he had his press, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the great beating heart the murderer went on hearing in his sleep. Questions swirled inside her. Did the warriors’ defeat mean they would have to leave this valley soon? How could Blue Sky Woman know that Hazel was not her daughter and yet continue to act as though she was Winona? Above her, Hazel heard low muttering, a gruff male voice addressing Spider Woman. She tightened her grip on the bone knife. Dirt sprinkled down in clumps from the low ceiling.

  No light could penetrate the covering. It was so dark she could not see her hand before her face. When the voices stopped, she nibbled some of the pemmican and swallowed a sip of water. She waited. Gradually, she became aware of other sounds down in the ground with her. Through the holes made by snakes or some large rodent, a cooling wind blew that chilled her to the marrow. She felt goosepimples rippling along her arms and thighs. In the blackness the fibrous roots fanned out beneath her like long-nailed fingertips. Hazel squeezed her eyes shut. She could hear her heart beating in her ears. Her breath came short. Calm yourself , she thought. You can’t panic down here.

  Faces swam out of the pitch before her. She saw Winona with curving yellow nails and long, streaming hair. Asa with his staring eyes and slack jaw. The soldier who floated past her in the river, his face gnawed by fish. Something seemed to be crawling out of the hole and she rolled and felt the roots scrape her like claws, like the corn leaves that had torn her dress as she ran blindly behind her stepbrother. She began to panic, her lungs constricting in her chest.

  One. Two. She kept counting until the images went away. She whispered The Lord’s Prayer and heard the dim echo around her. The sound of her own voice soothed her and so she continued to recite things in the dark, stories her Pa had spoken to her while they rode in the hexenwald. Words became fluid, shifting from English to Dakota and the stories changed too. There were princes who hid from their own brothers coming to kill them, a man who could change himself into a crow, a Dakota girl kept captive in a low square soddie by a blond ogre. As long as she murmured these things she was not swept up in the fear of being buried alive. She told the stories, picturing imagined worlds shaped by her voice, a lulling that eventually allowed her to sleep.

  In the morning the old woman lifted the lid from the hiding place. Even the muted morning light within Spider Woman’s teepee blinded Hazel. She smelled sunshine and dew evaporating outside. Blue Sky Woman reached down a hand and helped her out of the hole. Hazel’s limbs were stiff and swollen; minutes passed before she could stand straight.

  Things had quieted throughout the camp. Blue Sky Woman told her the warriors had left to raid New Ulm a second time now that they had failed to take the fort. There were no big guns at New Ulm. If this attack did not succeed, soon they would leave for Yellow Medicine country. Blue Sky Woman took her back to her dwelling and fed her a stew of stringy meat and bitter roots. Hazel was afraid to ask her about Wanikiya. When the two were done eating, she handed Hazel Winona’s awl, a curved elk antler used for sewing.

  Notches ridged the edge. Just as the warriors gained eagle feathers each time they counted coup in battle, the women kept measure of their accomplishments on the awl. Each notch stood for a thing made. Hazel let her finger run along the grooved bone and remembered the moccasins Winona had made for Asa. A girl that gives such a gift means for the boy to become her protector. Had Asa known this? After she hanged herself, he threw them away in the river. There were three notches in Winona’s awl. What else had she made?

  Blue Sky Woman passed her an old red stone pipe with a two-foot-long willow stem, a pipe just like hers, so they could both smoke kin-nikinnick while they sewed, holding the stem gently between their teeth and exhaling the sweet herb while their free hands stitched together the garments and clothing their loved ones would need most. Blue Sky Woman had brought Hazel a few long strips of white doeskin and some colored beads. She spread buckskin containers of earthy pigments and a scattering of porcupine quills before her. Hazel was practiced with a needle and thread, but the awl felt clumsy in her hands, more like a weapon. She looked over at Blue Sky Woman, who smiled back, eyes crinkling, smoke curling around her. The sunshine coming through the teepee skin was a liquid amber. It was easy to believe that there was no war. She was content for it to be just like this, no difficult choices, no hiding in dark holes, no blood or terror. How often had Blue Sky Woman and Winona sewed, mother and daughter, in a comfortable silence? She gave Hazel a nod of encouragement and the girl began to make a set of moccasins for Wanikiya, unsure if he would even accept them.

  She did not possess Winona’s skill with an awl. The holes she punctured in the doeskin were jagged and uneven. She didn’t punch through the material so much as stab at it, as if it was still alive, and she was afraid of it. After a half hour of mangling the leather she threw the deformed fragments down in disgust.

  Blue Sky Woman didn’t seem to notice. “I will tell you,” she said, “how I came to belong to the leaf-dwellers.” She took up the damaged pieces of leather and rubbed tallow into the skin to stretch and reshape it. “It was summer near the big waters, a day of sun after rain like this one. I was only this tall.” She held her hand about two feet above the grass mats where the two sat working and she went on to tell of her childhood with the Ojibwe, her mother warning her not to cry out as she hid Blue Sky Woman under a buffalo
blanket during a nighttime raid by Dakota warriors. This is how she came to live among the leaf-dwellers, after all her family were killed. This is how she came to love her enemy.

  Her hands moved in time with the story, the awl punching neat holes through the skin. She was finished with preparing the soles of the shoes. Her heart-shaped face was downcast and Hazel wondered what other stories the woman held inside her. The story of the man she loved, a soldier at the fort her people had just attacked. Of Winona.

  Blue Sky Woman nodded at the porcupine quills, as if this were any other day. Hazel looked at her, thinking, will I be like her one day, having forgotten the people I was born among ? Would her English fall away along with her white skin and clothing until she too became inseparable from the leaf-dwellers? It was not a terrible thought. She would do whatever it took to survive.

  SONGS

  IN THE

  TALLGRASS

  HAZEL CONTINUED TO muse over these things as she walked down to the river. Where was she now in the valley? How far away from home? In the heat of midafternoon the entire camp seemed to be drowsing. Despite losing two battles at the fort, the Dakota evidenced no fear of soldiers. Sunlight glared from stolen mirrors, copper pots, and silver tureens carried as booty from the traders’ stores and settlers’ cabins and strewn about the camp. The half-wolf curs the Indians kept lay sleeping in the hot grass.

  The only thing stirring was a group of girls playing with toy teepees who did not look up at Hazel. The teepees were exact canvas replicas and they played with dolls of twined grass with intricate beadwork dresses and dolls of cornshuck dressed in shreds of calico. When Hazel came past them the girls were holding a pretend council with the grass dolls debating what to do with the ugly shuck dolls. She hurried on before they looked up and noticed her. No other captives were around and she wondered if they were all still in hiding. Her mind reeled from the kinnikinnick smoke and the story Blue Sky Woman had told.

  Past grazing speckled ponies, Hazel went down a long sloping hill that took her a quarter mile to the Minnesota River. A light wind touched the oak treetops into motion and dappled the light. The river was gilded by the afternoon sun. In the wind Hazel heard a woman singing a hymn and caught her breath. The woman was singing “What Wondrous Love is This?” a sweet sad hymn that Hazel’s mother Emma used to sing to the children in the cradle, willing them to grow with her voice. The song came to her now, rising up from the golden river, and filled her with a longing to see her family again:

  And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on;

  And when from death I’m free I’ll sing on; And when from death

  I’m free I’ll sing His love for me, And through eternity I’ll sing on,

  I’ll sing on, And through eternity I’ll sing on.

  The woman’s voice held the last note before fading off. Around Hazel the shadows of the trees flickered in the wind. On either side of the river, banks rose up toward plateaus of swaying tallgrass. Where had the woman’s voice come from? It came and went, leaving a hollow space within Hazel. And what she thought she heard was the ghost of her mother. This filled her with hope. My mother lives inside of me. There is yet beauty in the world. There is no place I can go where she will not find me. It could not have been an actual woman she heard singing. Who among the captives would sing in these circumstances?

  The brown river below glimmered in the sun, curling around a bend that would eventually lead to Palmer’s Ferry and the bluff high above where the children came to watch the steamboats wind toward the agency in early summer. She thought she could keep walking now, follow the bend of the river toward home, searching after that lost voice again. If home still remained. If any were alive. Wanikiya had said that she was safest here. Abroad on the prairies roamed warriors who had been turned back twice from the fort and now still searched for vulnerable settlers.

  Hazel waded in the warm tea-brown water and dipped in her container. The reflection of the sun blinded her. Her stomach felt full, content, and she was at peace kneeling in the water. She felt the ridged shape of Winona’s awl, which she had tucked into her sash, poking her in the side. All she noticed in that moment was the faint pressure of the awl, the curious silence along the river now that the woman’s voice had come and gone, and the sun on her skin.

  When she turned back to shore, she saw Tatanyandowan there, watching her. She mistook him at first for Wanikiya and her heart skipped a beat. The two brothers had the same facial features, but Pretty Singer’s headband rode lower to hide his torn earlobe. Besides his war shirt he wore only breechclout and leggings. His eyes, pulled into slanting angles by the tightness of his braids, narrowed to slits as he watched her in the water.

  The river sloshed against the shore. Hazel looked back toward camp and saw that they were alone. The man who watched her had vacant, empty eyes. Every fiber of her being strained to run, but her feet were planted in the deep river mud, her muscles rigid. Pretty Singer came toward her holding out his hands to show that he didn’t mean harm. Hazel’s stomach lurched at the sight of him and the blood flooded back through her locked muscles and allowed her to move at the same time as he sprang for her. Even injured, he was too quick. An arc of water trailed after him; his outstretched hands hooked like talons and one caught her by the hem of her dress. She pulled away, wild to get back up the hill and take shelter in Blue Sky Woman’s teepee. The dress tore open and his hand slipped free.

  She was running, the water spraying around her, a shout for help rising in her throat. Then the next moment his arms were around her waist and she was lifted and carried from the water. She struck along his abdomen with the flats of her hand but this just made him squeeze her tighter until she couldn’t breathe anymore.

  He hurled her down on the silty shoreline and the breath was jolted from her. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw the skin container floating off down the river, in the same direction she had contemplated escaping moments before. Pretty Singer took off his war shirt and breechclout. His body was scarlet in the sun, his muscles taut, but her eyes were drawn to the side of his leg where the blood crusted around a recent wound. The wound her stepbrother had made just before he died. She turned away from his nakedness. His breathing came in hoarse gasps. He reached down and pulled up Winona’s one-piece beaded doeskin dress, the cloth ripping as he yanked and tugged.

  And the thought came to her: this cloth had been torn in such a way before, and Blue Sky Woman had mended it. The sash fell away with the dress. Hazel’s throat felt charred, her breath weak and light inside her chest. Even as she felt the warmth of the sun on her exposed skin, her blood was chilled. Pretty Singer knotted his fist in her hair and forced her to look at him. She shut her eyes. His breathing continued to rasp. She felt the warm grains of sand along the backs of her thighs and arms.

  Pretty Singer began to talk to her in a hushed voice, as though she were a child. “Be still,” he said to her. “I am Tatanyandowan.” He continued to repeat his name as he pried apart her legs and took away the hands she was using to hide herself. She lay supine on the ground. He ran his hands along her stomach, saying, “Sh . . . sh.” His voice thickened. And then her name, as she was known now, “Winona.”

  This had happened before. The thought filled with her renewed horror. This was why Winona had hanged herself. Asa.

  Then Pretty Singer touched her at her very center, the core of her most intimate self, and her stomach clenched. Like that day below the tree, when she had wound the cord around her throat and kicked away the stump, Hazel stepped outside of herself, a shrieking in her ears. It was Winona whom she carried inside her now. Was not this her dress, had Hazel not taken her place? Her scream filled her veins and gave her a strength she did not possess. Beside her, in the undone sash, lay the horned bone of Winona’s awl. She felt her hands wrap around the handle. Then she swung the awl with all her strength.

  Like a falcon’s beak the awl found the cords of muscle within Pretty Singer’s throat. It punctu
red skin and artery as easily as it had the dressed hides. The hook snared in his windpipe. Pretty Singer pulled away from her, but Hazel hung onto the awl. A warm jet of blood drenched her arm. Hazel pulled the awl toward her and Pretty Singer fell over backward into the water.

  His legs thrashed. An oily slick of blood blossomed around him. He wrapped his hands tightly around his throat, desperate to staunch the pumping fluid. This should not happen , the slanted, staring eyes said. My power comes from the tree-dweller. My own death should come in battle. He sank down on his knees, the river swirling around him. His face was the color of ashes, his arms red to the elbows. He tried to stagger out of the river, to come toward her, but the effort made more blood spurt. His head drooped low; his mink-fur-entwined braids touched the water. Then he sank face down in the shallows. Rosettes of blood continued to flower around him.

  When Hazel’s breathing had calmed she wrapped the torn dress about her and stood shivering in the warmth of the sunlight. One hand still gripped the awl. The sunlight glittered on the water and she saw herself reflected, the spots of vermilion painted on her cheek, the twin plaited braids, her skin dark skin. Winona. The Dakota sometimes left offerings of food outside their teepees to entice ghosts of the recently departed to return to dwell inside their own children. It was forbidden to speak the names of the dead aloud. It had seemed a strange practice to Hazel before now, but this afternoon she wanted more than anything for Winona to go on living inside her.