If the other warriors discovered what she had done, she would be killed. She didn’t know how much time had passed since she had first come down to the river. Far above her in the camp, she heard a dog barking and knew other women would be headed down here soon to gather firewood and water. The men coming back from their raids would have to be fed. She let the awl drop the ground and waded into the shallows where Tatanyandowan floated face down. She smelled the iron sweet odor of his blood. Along with river water it dripped from the fringes of her dress.
She pulled him by his shoulders into the swirling current of the deeper water. As she tugged, the long jagged tear in his throat was exposed, a wide mouth drinking in the river. She remembered the heaviness of him pressing her down against the silty shoreline. Now he was light, a ghost weight in the water. The current took hold of her and she released him to the river.
On shore again, she watched him for awhile longer, the marionette jerk of his arms and legs as the current tried to pull him further down-river, but a tree branch had hooked him. Then the current caught him and he was floating once more. She watched until he drifted around the bend, his body sinking into the river.
Her other senses sharpened while she listened for anyone coming her direction. Now, she was filled with the horror of what she had done. She looked down at her thin, birdlike arms, saw what a small, insignificant thing she was against the backdrop of the looming trees and the wide brown river. Yet she was still alive. The sunlight felt good on her skin. She felt the spreading necklace of bruises Pretty Singer had left on her throat and she enjoyed even that. All these contrary things blazed inside her. Terror at discovery. Joy to be alive. Her power to kill or to heal.
Even in the summer heat, she was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered. She took off the torn white doeskin dress, crouched naked by the shoreline and rubbed sand along the bloody fringes, rinsing it in the river until the stains were pink.
Then she put the dress back on and rounded the bend, where other Indians crouched filling their skin bags, a few old women who frowned at her. Hazel held the frayed doeskin against herself. She was so weary that her eyelashes were fluttering but she knelt to retrieve the awl and staggered back up the hill. Later she would wonder why she had not chosen to escape. She could have drifted with the river; the fort was not far. Her feet did not take back to her own kind, but to Blue Sky Woman’s teepee.
Her new mother found her there as dusk was falling. Hazel had curled up on one of the grass mats and let sleep take her. Her dream-self hovered over her and watched the pretty woman with the heart-shaped face bend and take the awl from Hazel’s fist, watched the woman hold the awl and study the serrated skin still clinging to the edge, saw her take this piece of skin and cast it into the fire. Blue Sky Woman undressed her and studied the stains on the torn dress in the firelight, then wrapped the shivering girl like a swaddled child in a thin blanket. She was singing a song to herself, something low and barely audible, a song for protection as she folded up the dress and put it away for good.
Hazel slept far into the afternoon of the next day to be awakened by Blue Sky Woman gently shaking her. The skin of the teepee shimmered in the afternoon brightness, the painted figures indistinct. Everything that had happened the day before seemed unreal, until Hazel again felt the bruises encircling her throat and remembered the pressure of his fingers. She looked down and saw that she was naked beneath a blanket. Blue Sky Woman nodded toward a ruddy-red broadcloth skirt and a calico shirt fringed with courie shells. How much did she know? Hazel remembered half waking once to hear Blue Sky Woman singing, watching her clean the blood from the awl.
This morning Blue Sky Woman fed her a bowl of mashed corn and then helped Hazel into her new dress and cloth leggings. She put her cool hands to Hazel’s cheeks. Her round dark eyes brimmed with moisture. In English she said, “You no safe here,” and then bent to pass under the teopa.
Hazel followed her across the camp. That Blue Sky Woman had spoken English to her seemed a kind of death. She knew that Hazel was not her daughter. They walked the circle of teepees where the akicita, the soldier’s lodge, set their dwellings, at the camp’s center. Blue Sky Woman paused before one of the dwellings, a greasy, traditional buffalo-skin teepee painted on the outside with the colors of the four directions.
Hazel ducked inside and waited for her eyes to adjust. The teepee, shadowed and dim, reeked of cedar smoke, rotting wounds, and urine. On the other side of the room, reclining against a woven backrest, was the oldest Indian Hazel had ever seen. Her first impression was of a grotesque. The old man had iron-gray braids and the folds of his skin were so deep it looked as though his face had been carved by an ax. His umber throat flesh swung like turkey wattles when he turned to observe her. His black eyes were small and glittering, partly hooded by puffy eyelids. He wore a headpiece of buffalo horns and around his throat a shining gold medal with an eagle on it. His breechclout was fringed and beaded, and other than a dirty blanket twisted around his waist, it was the only thing he wore.
She was sweating in the smoky teepee, the memory of yesterday still swirling within her. The old man inspected her, his eyes surveying the dark necklace of bruises on her throat before he looked away. He raised one hand, the fingernails so long and yellow they curved like claws, and pointed to another backrest. Blue Sky Woman lit a tomahawk pipe, one edge a blade, the head a bowl for kinnikinnick, and smoked from it ceremonially before passing it to him.
No expression darkened his features as Blue Sky Woman knelt at his side and peeled away the blanket, yellowed by the man’s pus and blood. Hazel smelled the festering wound. She watched while Blue Sky Woman knelt, chanting under her breath, and pressed her mouth to his leg, making a sucking sound as she drew out things with her teeth and spit them into a wooden bowl: a shred of shrapnel, a fragment of sapwood, human skin. The old man shut his eyes, his breathing measured and calm while he smoked the pipe. Blue Sky Woman swirled around the things she had drawn out of his leg wound, chanting once more, her lips dark with fluid, before casting it into the smoky fire.
The old man continued to smoke silently. His eyes closed as he exhaled through his nostrils, his breath occasionally wheezing. Minutes passed while he drowsed and Hazel waited, not knowing who this was or why she had been brought here. He did not seem to be in any hurry to punish her for her crimes. She waited for him to question her, for sentence to be pronounced. Her palms felt clammy and she could smell her own sweat.
From the lodge poles hung the scalps of his enemies, the scalplocks decorated with feathers, roached forelocks, and designs Hazel had never seen: Pottawatomie she guessed, Winnebago, Chippewa, Sac. His bow and accouterments of war were suspended from another pole.
The old man set the pipe aside and began to weep, but Blue Sky Woman did not seem concerned. The old man wept until his voice went hoarse, an old Dakota custom to show that he had a true heart, and then he wiped his long nose on his arm and began to speak. “Daughter of Blue Sky Woman,” he said. “I am called Tamaha. My heart is weary from this war I did not ask for. I have fought on the side of the long knives ever since I was a boy, in the battle by the big waters when we fought the red-dressed ones from Grandmother’s country.”
He paused. Now his eyes were dry. Was he speaking about the war of 1812? She looked with new respect on this wizened man before her. She was sure he meant the British; it was said many Dakota had fought on their side. Hazel looked at the gold medal on his chest. She realized that Blue Sky Woman had brought her to a friend.
“But now my people’s hearts have hardened against the Ameri-cans,” he continued. “The traders and agents they send speak with forked tongues. They are not like Taliaferro or Clark, who spoke with true hearts. And so the young ones have gone to war and made much suffering in the valleys even though there are those who spoke against it. I have seen the great villages of the Ameri-cans. The young braves are not making a war, but their own death song. Like wolves who fight the grizzly for a scrap of meat, t
hey will make a few scratches before they are ended. So I have spoken.”
“Ukana ,” said Blue Sky Woman. Grandfather. “This girl has nothing to do with these things.”
“Yes,” he said, waving her away with his long yellow fingernails. “I know who she is.”
While Tamaha was speaking a man shuffled past outside, throwing his shadow against the teepee. He was dragging a wounded leg and Hazel was filled with the sudden fear that he was Pretty Singer, risen from the river. But she’d seen the torn flesh along his throat. Tamaha was smoking his tomahawk pipe in the dimness. “I have heard what you did for the boy. Would you do the same for me?”
A healing. That was what she had been brought for. After the summer she had healed Wanikiya, other Dakota had come to their cabin, men with abscessed teeth, squaws unable to conceive. Hazel had prayed over all of them in her own tongue and they went away again. But each passing month fewer and fewer had come. “No,” she told Tamaha. “It will not work for you.”
The old man coughed. “You are afraid of yourself,” he said. “That is what Hanyokeyah told me.” Hanyokeyah, their first friend, who had disappeared in the summertime after relations went bad between her family and the Indians. They had never heard what happened to him. “Come here,” Tamaha bid. “The eyes of my head no longer see as far as the eyes of my heart.”
Hazel did as he asked. He smelled of the sweet herb he smoked and his rotting wound. Her knees sank into the mounds of buffalo robes. Tamaha reached out one palsied, umber hand and felt along her face and throat and Hazel steeled herself to keep from flinching when he touched her bruises. “Who hurt you?” he asked.
“Nobody,” she lied.
“You speak Dakota well,” he said, his hands to falling away.
“Yes.”
“You know how we do wowinape ?”
Tamaha turned to Blue Sky Woman. “She is old enough, yes?”
“Yes, she is of the age.”
The glittering dark eyes turned back on her. His hands were trembling. Hazel was stricken with revulsion, thinking the old man meant that she should marry him. He must be a hundred years old, she thought. She shivered to think of those callused hands touching her again. “I will not marry you,” she said.
This made him laugh. “It is not for myself I ask. My days beneath the blanket are done. I see clearly what has happened to you, woman. Do you understand that captivity is bad both for captor and captive?” These words were so similar in Dakota that only later at night was Hazel able to realize what he had said. “The other braves will not harm you if you belong to one. Is there not one of us who your heart speaks for?” Hazel mumbled a word.
“Who?” Tamaha asked again.
And she said his name once more, her throat thick, her mind turning back to the press of him as he held her in the teepee, as he had held her so long ago in the cave where they’d sheltered from the storm. Wanikiya, brother of the man she had killed at the river. Blue Sky Woman’s kin. The killer of her stepbrother.
The old man laughed again. “It is fitting,” he said. “The child beloved and an Ameri-can.”
Blue Sky Woman took Hazel back to the teepee and undid her braids. “Will you run away?” the woman asked. “Are you hurt in any other way?”
Hazel shook her head. “You do not look well, daughter,” the woman said. Hazel wanted only to sleep and put this day behind her. And yet there was a nervous fluttering in her stomach, fingers of excitement tapping up and down her spine. Wasn’t this what she had wanted all along? To be free to love the boy whom she had healed so long ago. Her mind spun. Something else struck her, too. The other captives would learn of the marriage ceremony. They would despise her and call her a traitor. What would happen when was reunited with her own father and stepmother? If they were still among the living. And then there was Wanikiya. Did he still want her? Would he, if he knew what she had done?
In her dream that night Tatanyandowan pressed her against the shore. He traced his fingertips along her abdomen, speaking her name, Winona. He called her “wife,” promising not to harm her. He promised to be a good husband, to care for the children they would make together.
Lies , she told him. All lies. She brought the awl from the sash, watching its slow swing. As it traveled through the air, Tatanyandowan’s face shifted to become Wanikiya’s. No , he cried as he saw the hook coming for his throat. Stop. But it was too late. The awl struck his throat and he stumbled backward.
Why? his eyes asked. He was slipping away from her, the river rising all around them. Why have you done this to me?
KINGDOM TOWNSHIP
1876
THE NEW
COUNTRY
I DIDN’T SLEEP well for the week because sometimes Aunt Hazel moaned softly in her sleep and the pain in her cry went right through me. Somehow I thought if I stayed awake, keeping vigil, I could make sure that another fit didn’t come on and steal her away from me. I wondered if in her visions she ever traveled back in time to that summer of terror. After the sores on her tongue went away, she had started into her story once more. The words spilled out of her, as though she were afraid something might happen to her before she could finish. The more I heard the more I understood my parent’s reluctance to speak on these matters.
Past midnight my mother carried up a cup of tea that she bid Hazel drink. Hazel blinked sleep out of her eyes, sat up in bed, and let my mother tip some of it down her throat. Hazel’s reaction was both instant and violent. She swatted the cup away, spilling dark fluid across the floorboards. Then she spat out the liquid to the floor, making horrible retching sounds. Mother backed away. I went to Hazel and stood by her bedside. When she was done spitting out the last of it, she leaned back against her pillow. “No laudanum, Cassie,” she said. “I can’t abide opiates.”
Mother held the cup against her. “I thought it would help,” she said. “I thought you’d be grateful.”
Hazel’s voice was so soft I had to lean close to hear her. “To dream the dreams of Lethe. The dark river of forgetting.”
Mother drank down what remained of her own tea. “Suit yourself,” she said. “I’m going back to bed. Asa, maybe you should keep your distance. Leave her to rest.”
“Why?” I said. “She doesn’t have consumption. I can’t catch anything from being near.”
Mother chewed on her lower lip. “I’m not so sure. They have reasons for keeping people apart from those who get sick like her. Leastaways, put out that tallow before you start more fires.” Mother shook her head and climbed down the loft ladder, muttering darkly about betrayals. I heard the creak of her bedroom door swinging shut a moment later.
Hazel lay in the half dark, her eyelashes fluttering. “Asa,” she said, shutting her eyes, “You need to sleep too.”
“Sure,” I said, as I released a big yawn. Hazel’s breathing deepened as she descended into sleep. I didn’t go back to bed like I’d promised, however. Instead, I gathered up my things in a pillowcase, including a rusty pocketknife I’d found once in an abandoned cabin, my canteen, and some Lucifer matches. I made for the loft trapdoor, creeping on my tiptoes.
Hazel’s quiet voice stopped me in my tracks. It was as if she knew all along what I was intending. “Asa,” she said, calling me over. She held up the embroidered doeskin bag. “I want to give this to you,” she said. “It’s yours rightfully.” She managed a wan smile. I bent my head and she slipped the leather cord around my neck so that the doeskin pouch touched my chest. I wondered if Hazel thought there might still be some magic in it. I tried to take it off, but she shook her head. “You don’t give back a gift. Anyhow, I said it was yours.”
I hadn’t known what I intended until I was next to her. I leaned in and kissed her in the center of her forehead. A shiver passed over her. She grabbed hold of my hand and squeezed and then held it close to her cheek which was warm and damp with tears. “Tachunkwashta,” she said. “That means ‘I hope you find the good road.’”
With my mother fast under the s
pell of the laudanum, I didn’t have any trouble finding the last of the thirteen silver coins under her jar of sarsaparilla, coins meant originally for our long-forgotten ginseng enterprise. I took them, hoping that I could buy bromide with what remained. Aunt Hazel had said you couldn’t get any from a catalogue, but I knew Mankato was a big river town. It was fifty miles from here. A hundred miles there and back. Mankato, where they hanged the thirty-eight Dakota warriors four months before I was born. Mankato, where surely they would have the healing medicine for Hazel. If not there, then I could go across the river to St. Peter and beg more medicine from that doctor who had been fond of Hazel. I only had to follow the Waraju River down to New Ulm and the Minnesota River. Maybe from there I could catch a boat or a steamer.
Dawn came with red clouds that meant rain and I was glad I had swiped my pa’s old oilskin slicker as I passed through the barn. The only other thing I had grabbed was my three-headed prong to fish for bullheads in the shallows. I had enough bread to last me through a day.
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