The world was soaked with gray light, mist rising from the pale brown river. I moved through it half asleep on my feet. From the marshlands I heard whippoorwills calling and thought of a huddle of children driven out in the dark, listening. Oh-you’re-kilt, Oh-you’re-kilt. I knew hearing it that the past was no longer the past. I had crossed over as I walked through this mist-hung morning and I was moving into a new country, a place of bad men and violence, a place my parents had hidden from me but that had been there all along. I had to keep walking, tired as I was, much as I wanted to curl up beneath one of those trees and sleep until the sun burned away the mist and gray and chill. I was afraid that something terrible might happen to Hazel if I tarried in my journey. I had resolved to stay away from the main road that crossed the flat prairie and instead stick to the bends and twists of the old Indian trail beside the river. It would take longer, but I was less likely to get caught.
The Waraju River had carved a shallow canyon through the prairie and I walked on the upper ridge, floating above the trees, miles of shapeless prairie surrounding me. My mother would find the coins missing soon after waking. She could smell a theft and would know her own future laudanum supply was in danger. But she would also wake with a headache that only her opiates could soothe and I knew she wouldn’t search for me for long. I walked past the stump where my grandmother had trapped herself in a living tomb, past the town rising on its humpbacked hill, past what was once a cornfield that my namesake and my aunts and uncles had fled through to escape men seeking to kill them.
Such thoughts whirled inside me when I heard the husky cough of a man moving toward me on the trail. I felt all sorts of illogical fears. My mother had somehow sent out men after me. Or this man might be a warrior from the past, painted in ghoulish colors. I made for the trees, wanting to get out of his way. Even if he was just an ordinary man, he might report what he saw in town and maybe my mother would hear of it and convince men to search for me.
I lay down in the dew-wet grass and watched the man pass. He wore a chambray shirt and carried a haversack. His hat was pulled low to hide his features and he lurched down the path as though sleepwalking. Then he seemed to smell something in the mist and raised his head and I saw his features clear for the first time, that familiar hawklike nose, those dark searching eyes. My heart began to thump in my chest. Caleb, my papa. I almost cried his name aloud I was so happy to see him. Papa would know what to do about Hazel. Papa would have money earned in the North. But for some reason, maybe the memory of the scalp dream, or perhaps because of my own tiredness, I just lay there. His eyes passed over me and then he pulled his hat low and continued on into the morning.
I waited for my cowardly rabbit-heart to slow and then climbed out of my hiding place. Why had I not greeted him? As I walked following the river to New Ulm, I understood the real reason: I hadn’t done anything good in my lifetime. In one summer I had released an Indian from prison, robbed my mother, burned a treasured book, and allowed hatred to be directed at Hazel while doing and saying nothing. If I had greeted my Papa he would have made me return home with him. He might not have agreed about the bromide. He might decide to send Hazel back to St. Peter. No, this was something I had to do alone. As I walked I was conscious of the faint pressure of the doeskin bag against my chest. It belonged to a man who was a stranger to me. Within lay owl’s down and stones said to find the lost and to prophesy. I didn’t feel like a boy who had been awake all night with a fifty mile journey ahead of him. I felt as though I carried a lodestone close to my heart and it was pulling me north.
Midafternoon I came to a place where the trail dipped down into a hollow to reveal a small tallgrass meadow left alone by the locusts. Such spared places were charmed, the way a survivor was charmed. I lay down in the wet grass and as the wind came through the bluestem I thought of Hazel’s nightmare in Missouri: If only men knew what I knew , wasn’t that what the wind in the grass had whispered? I ate some of the salt rising bread, chewing slowly to stretch the meal out.
Then, I shut my eyes, meaning only to rest for a few minutes with my head pillowed by the grass. As my mind drifted, I thought of the Indian belief that everything was alive. From dust to the stars, it was all connected. Locusts, crows, thorns, and hemlock. Butterflies, meadowlarks, strawberries, and sweet grass. I held up the things of night and the things of sunlight, weaving together words in a whispery incantation. Why had God made the world knowing all the time it would fall? And even as I thought of all that was poison and peril, my head growing heavier as sleep descended on me, I also wondered why God allowed such sweetness into a world we were called to leave behind.
I woke disoriented, sometime near sunset, my head throbbing. Moments later I realized part of that throbbing was the drumming approach of a fast-moving horse. A rider came pounding down the trail on a skinny dun, raising a cloud of dust behind him. Other than my papa he was the only one I had seen the entire day. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and swung around and brought his old mare trotting back. I thought of running, but knew that would make me look suspicious. I was a stranger here but I could pretend I was just over from the next farm. His mare foamed at the mouth and its great black eyes bulged in its sockets. The man’s hat was behind him as he leaned forward in his saddle to address me. “You boy,” he called, half out of breath. “Is this the old road to Kingdom?”
“I think so,” I said, “Just keep heading south a ways.”
He caught his breath. “You heard the news? I don’t think a boy like you should be abroad on the prairies by his lonesome.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s in all the papers by now. Happened two days ago, the whole damn countryside is afire with the story. The James-Younger gang tried to rob a bank in Northfield. There were eight of them, must have figured us Yankees had gone soft. But nobody in town turned tail. Some of the men knocked out windows from hotel rooms to shoot at the gang with Henry repeaters and shotguns. Bloodiest firefight we seen since the Indian Uprising.” He paused again for breath. “Would you have any water?”
I gave him my canteen, the whole time thinking: Eight men, my Lord those must be the very ones who we put up in our stable that night. No wonder they had laughed at my Missouri stories. That was Jesse James who asked about my papa being a lawman. I had been face to face with killers.
The man took a good long swig and didn’t notice how pale I’d gone when he handed back the canteen. “What carnage,” he continued. “Inside the bank, a teller refused to open the vault and one of the gang blasted out his brains across the desk. Outside it was blood and bullets. Two of the outlaws were shot so many times they hardly looked human. But the rest of the gang got away on their horses. They’re running scared back toward Missouri. Word is a few of them are wounded bad.”
The man’s horse sagged beneath him and tried to crop some grass. He pulled her up by the reins. “I’ve stayed long enough. Say boy, you should be heading home. There’s no telling where those men are now. The only thing we know for sure is they were headed in our direction.” He tipped his hat and without a goodbye spurred his horse on down the road.
As twilight descended I kept close to the river. I managed to spear two large crawdads in the shallows. Dusk came and I stood in a woodland stripped by the locusts. I gathered dead wood, but hesitated before making a fire. Anyone might be out here in the woods with me. But my stomach grumbled and I wanted something with my bread. I used the pronged spear for a post and lashed the other end of the oilskin slicker to a tree to make a small tent. A soft rain fell after dark and I huddled near my smoking fire and strained my ears, listening. A night hawk keened and swept out over the river and then it was quiet again. I should have been tired after the sleepless night before, but my long nap had done some good. There was too much going on in the world for a boy to sleep. When the hawk keened once more farther off I realized how alone I was and how vulnerable. To keep my mind from fear, I crouched near the fire and mulled over Hazel’s story. It h
ad taken her days to get it out and I still puzzled over the meaning of it all. I watched the dancing fire and thought of the end of things, letting my imagination settle back into the stream of her story. I figured that escaped outlaws would make a thunderous amount of noise moving through woodlands at great speed. I escaped such fears by letting my mind settle back into a story I had longed all my life to hear.
MILFORD PRAIRIE
1862–1876
YELLOW
MEDICINE
COUNTRY
OTTER BROUGHT NEWS of the failed second attack at New Ulm the day before. The warriors had returned with a single captive: a boy with sunlit hair. Otter watched Hazel warily, his hands behind his back, as though she might attack him at any moment. “Soon we will leave for the Yellow Medicine country where the Sisseton live,” he told her. “They will most likely kill you, especially since you bite like a dog.”
He had a mouth harp given to him by some warrior, what Hazel’s father would call a Jew’s harp. He plucked at the twanging metal and danced a mocking jig around the teepee, overturning a pot of quills in the process.
Blue Sky Woman set down her pipe, crying “Puck-A-Chee!” as she chased him out of the teepee. Otter grinned openly, backing away. He glanced once toward Hazel. “Wanikiya looks for his brother,” he said to her. “He is not in his teepee.” With these words, he ducked under the teopa and was gone.
Hazel went outside in search of the new captive. A blond boy, Otter had said. Maybe her Daniel had come? Cicadas churred in the hot tree- shadows. There was no wind this afternoon, only a glaring white heat as Hazel moved toward voices on the other side of a hill. She paused near a grove of red sumac and looked down into the gathering below.
The Indians had taken the captive child to a meadow of short razor grass. At first Hazel was disappointed the boy was not Daniel; his hair was too dark and he was older. The captive had been stripped of his clothing and stood pale as a gosling in the sun, his hands sheltering his privates. Like many other farm children, his neck and arms were a dark red color from repeated sunburning, and the rest of him moon-pale. His skin looked striped in the glaring light. His eyes searched the crowd for help as he tread carefully on the razor grass under his feet.
The Indians had surrounded him with children of their own. While the adults, both men and women, stood in an outer circle, boys and girls picked up sharp rocks. Then the boys began to hurl their stones. Hazel cried aloud and covered her mouth with her hands. Otter was with the others, his mouth harp swinging by the cord from his neck. One stone struck the boy in the head and dropped him to his knees. He knelt there and touched the wound on his forehead and when he took the hand away a squib of blood leaked down his cheek.
Blood changed the game. The children quit laughing. They found larger stones and hefted them. Boys shouted their war cries as they rushed toward the child and hurled the rocks as hard as they could. Welts and wounds opened on the boy’s shining skin. Each time a rock dropped him to his knees, he climbed back to his feet. And though the adults had to urge them on at the beginning, once blood was spilled, the children didn’t hesitate. Otter picked up a stone like all the rest.
Hazel’s stomach churned. When she tried to back away she ran straight up against a solid wall of flesh. Henrietta had come up behind her. The woman clamped her hands onto Hazel’s shoulders. “Why aren’t you down there with the other savages?” she said. Hazel tried to pull away, but Hen-rietta dug her nails in harder. “Stay,” she said. “This is what your kind does.”
Hazel stopped resisting. Henrietta wouldn’t allow her to leave. The blond boy climbed to his feet more slowly. His entire skin was slick with blood. At this distance, the stones didn’t make a sound. There were only the cries of the shouting children, an almost tangible hum spreading through the air.
Once the boy looked in their direction. His eyes lingered on the two of them, a woman and a girl, both obviously white. Behind her, Hazel heard Henrietta’s voice catch. “Oh child,” she said. His mouth made a small O shape; Hazel could guess the word he cried. Mother. And though he was not Henrietta’s child, Hazel knew the woman behind her was reliving the death of her own. Henrietta dropped to her knees, weeping. Hazel was free to leave now, but couldn’t. Transfixed, she watched until the end, when one of the children picked up a large, melon-sized rock and heaved it at the captive. The rock struck with an audible crack, a sickening sound she heard all the way up on the hill. The blond boy fell to the ground, dead. The adults melted away. For a while, children continued to pelt his shattered body.
Hazel left Henrietta sobbing in the grass, her face glazed with tears and snot. She went down the hill. She didn’t know why, but she felt bidden. The boy had looked into her eyes and she had not raised a hand to stop what was happening. She had looked on, helpless, while he was killed.
The boy was surrounded by stones and pebbles, his legs splayed out. His face no longer looked human. One cheek had been crushed; his nose clung to his skull by a single shred of glistening cartilage. His eyes continued to stare back at Hazel, their color already fading, while sunlight beat down on his blood-splotched skin. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw crows descending to watch from the red sumac. The birds looked glossy and fat, so heavy that thin branches of the sumac bent under their weight, and Hazel wondered how they had arrived so soon.
A moment later Henrietta stood beside her, looking down on the fallen child. She was red-eyed from crying. “First the birds and then the wolves. I had to leave my own out in the sun like this. Oh God. Nothing to cover them.”
“We can’t bury him,” Hazel said, thinking of her own dead, guilty that she had felt relieved the boy was not Daniel. She remembered Asa and wondered when he would be found and if the ashes, falling like snow, had hidden his body. “But we could put him up in those trees,” she said, recalling Asa’s strange request their first winter here.
With fragments of their own clothes and spit from their mouths they tried to clean his torso. Mostly the blood smeared and pinked on his skin. It was matted in his hair. Henrietta shut his eyes and then, grunting, lifted the child in her arms. They left him in the boughs of a low burr oak and chased off the crows with stones. They paused below the tree. Henrietta tried to pray but the words got stuck in her throat. “Lord, we ask . . .” And finally. “I can’t anymore.”
Hazel spoke for both of them, remembering a prayer her mother had taught her. “Our Father, who art . . .” She paused. She couldn’t say the word father without choking up. She didn’t know if she was crying for the boy or the things the prayer reminded her of. When had she last remembered to pray?
Henrietta picked up where she left off and they finished the prayer together
“Thank you for that,” Henrietta said.
Dark was falling. They walked back to camp side-by-side, Hazel dwarfed by the large German woman. The dogs milled at the outskirts of the camp and a few of them slouched out to sniff them. Henrietta smacked them away with her large meaty hands. At the edge of camp they parted ways. “I will remember this day,” Henrietta said. “I will see every one of them burn for it.”
“Not all of them,” Hazel said. Only a small group from the camp had been involved in the stoning.
Henrietta took her by the arm. “All of them,” she said. From the hill above, Blue Sky Woman called for Winona. Hazel flinched. There was quavering note of fear in the woman’s voice. She must have heard what had happened to the captive child. Hazel twisted away from Henrietta. “All of them,” Henrietta called after her. “Even you, if you get in the way.”
That night her thoughts turned toward her brother Daniel and her baby sister Ruth. Daniel’s features blurred into those of the boy she had seen killed. Ruth appeared newborn, still bloody with afterbirth. The images scared her and to stop them she began to weave a story around the children. For some reason it seemed to her that they would live as long as they lived inside her mind. The moment she stopped imagining the story, they would die.
Th
at evening she imagined her brother and the baby as she lay across from Blue Sky Woman. The night wind moving through the camp smelled of cinnamon and cloves, an impossible aroma in this valley. It gathered strength as it channeled down the open river, passing the charred hulls of the agency buildings, the dead in their half-mown fields. A ghost wind that smelled of baking cinnamon. Some heard voices in it. Hazel heard Asa reciting the letter her Pa had written from Chickahominy River. Wanikiya, turning over in his sleep, heard his brother Tatanyandowan singing of the tree-dweller. Blue Sky Woman heard Winona bidding her keep this girl safe. Across the encampment the wind picked up intensity and tore down teepee after teepee as though the voices of all of the dead were contained within it and bent on vengeance. Then the wind rose to the starry darkness and the great open mouth of heaven.
Hazel woke that morning with her throat parched. She felt the buffalo skin flapping against her; the teepee poles had blown down in the dark. Their fire was already ashes. The two women had snuggled together during the windstorm in the early dawn hours.
Hazel felt tired and stiff as she surveyed the wreckage. All across the camp, teepees had been blown over and captives and Indians had taken shelter under wagons and trees. The wind was still sibilant in the grasses, passing over in gusts that Hazel felt swish through the broadcloth of her skirt. She stretched and yawned and then helped Blue Sky Woman collect their belongings. Today was the day of the journey. They were going to Yellow Medicine Country and, despite Otter’s dire predictions, Hazel found she looked forward to it. She couldn’t wait to leave this valley where she’d seen and done terrible things.
Night Birds, The Page 30