Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  The entire camp was alive and stirring, morning turning into a bright afternoon. Wanikiya stood and put the Canotina totem into the fire. Its black hair curled around the skull, yellowing, then darkening in the flames. The fire hissed around it. They watched it burn together. Soon all that remained was the charred skull and the heart-shaped embers of the torso.

  “Come, Caleb,” Noles encouraged. “I wouldn’t like to be caught out here alone.”

  Caleb paused and wiped the sweat from his brow with a kerchief. It was late afternoon, the cicadas humming electrically in the tallgrass, their insect song reverberating in his eardrums. He ran the palms of his hand along the hickory shovel handle, felt the smooth wood against his coarse and blistered skin. Beside him, Noles took a long swig from the canteen. “’Tis deep enough,” he said, “for your brother to have his rest.”

  The two men had joined the Cullen Guards to help buttress Sibley’s Sixth Minnesota Volunteers. Most of the volunteer guards had left immediately to gather what harvest they could this late in season, but Caleb and Noles followed after the burial detail and crossed the river with Captain Anderson and his cavalry. It was grim work. Caleb had lost track of the men, women, and children they’d put under the ground in shallow, quickly dug graves. They’ll never know for sure how many were slaughtered . The corpses bloated in the heat, blackened under the sun. Not something you’ll ever forget, this stench. And the small animals, maggots, huge bluebottle flies spinning in funnels, and most terribly, the monarch butterflies fluttering in the open wounds. Why God allows such a thing I’ll never understand. Children. Do you think He’s weeping up in Heaven? Lot of good that does us down here. Shut up, you. He’s right. Noles, be quiet for once. You’re not helping things. But when they were alone, Noles started again with his one-sided diatribe against God. As far as Caleb was concerned, you might as well spend the day wondering about the lost annuity payment. Can you blame God for what a man does to another man? Free will, some will say. Ach, I say.

  Truthfully, as irritating as Noles was now that his facial wounds had healed, Caleb was glad not to be alone. Noles could have left with many of the other Cullens to harvest his fields. Instead, there was this dark harvest. He stayed with Caleb, bringing the one mule he owned, becoming his shadow, one that was never quiet and reeked of bitter English tobacco. He’d even crossed the river, leaving the rest of the detachment back at the Lower Agency to help search for Caleb’s family. They had less than an hour remaining. Once the sun fell below the trees they had to get back to the rest of the men, recross the river, and make camp for the night. Scouts said the Indians had gone far north to the Yellow Medicine country, but Noles was nervous, stopping his shoveling often to cock his head and listen, his nostrils flaring as if he might smell them in the wind.

  They found Matthew partly buried in the vegetable garden. The grave had been unearthed by small animals, feral dogs likely, and the boy’s face was gone. The sight sickened him, but he did not mourn this strange child. Touched by God, Hazel would say, a boy with one foot already in heaven. Caleb hoped his death had been quick. In the turned soil of his makeshift grave Caleb had found one broken, bloody fingernail. “She’s still alive,” he told Noles, knowing who had dug this grave with her bare hands. “My stepmother.”

  They had searched in the prairie, found bent tunnels in the bluestem, and bloodstains, turned to rust by days of sun, in the golden grasses. Caleb called his stepmother’s name but there was no answer. In the garden there had been more signs of her, carrots uprooted, a woman’s large bootprints crossing and recrossing the furrows. “She may have been alive once,” Noles agreed. “But she was wounded bad if she’s the one who made them tunnels.”

  They had reburied Matthew and afterward Caleb knelt beside the grave. When it became clear that Caleb wasn’t going to speak, Noles cleared his throat and then began to sing some somber Welsh tune in his gravelly voice:

  To all, life thou givest, to both great and small;

  In all life thou livest, the true life of all;

  We blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree,

  And wither and perish, but naught changeth thee.

  Afterward it was silent. Nothing remained of the cabin but a burned husk, the timbers fallen into the root cellar. Caleb lowered himself into the mess, casting aside heavy charred logs. Noles, standing over the gaping hole, called down to him. “Leave it, lad. You’ll not find anything worth our lives. It’s time for us to head back.”

  He searched at first for bones, thinking that some of his brothers might have been burned alive here. Underneath a scattering of blackened shingles, he found the crate of wine intended for his and Cassie’s wedding. The ashes were thick in his lungs. Sweat stung his eyes. When he moved aside the shingles and wood, it was all there, bottles packed carefully in hay. Caleb dusted one off and held it up in the light, the wine ruby-red in the sun.

  “Glory!” cried Noles. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were after?”

  Caleb coughed again and before he knew it he was weeping. The tears carved channels in his grimed, sooty face. He held the bottle, cool glass against his chest, and knelt beside the crate. His weeping was convulsive and cleared the ashes from his lungs, even as it dropped him to his knees. He was ashamed to be caught like this, the first time he could remember crying since the war began. And it was not the finding of his dead stepbrother, the bodies lying in the fields, or the condition of his fiancée, still in the fort’s hospital two weeks later, that churned his insides. It was the wine and everything it stood for. The wine intended for his wedding. All of that life, lost now. For this he allowed himself a moment of self-pity and he wept until he felt Noles’s hands in his hair and then the two raised the crate of wine and loaded it onto the mule.

  It was the first of September and night was coming on. The whippoorwills that had haunted the children’s imaginations one month before had already fled south to escape the coming cold. The two men walked beside the lumbering mule hearing the clink of the bottles in the crate. As they came through the tallgrasses they did not see a woman’s hand, the fingernails shredded from digging, raise itself above the grass. Kate had been crawling across the prairie ever since she’d heard Caleb call her name, waking her from a near-death stupor. She called after him now, her voice so hoarse that it carried only a little distance. Only the searing pain in her back—where a scattering of buckshot still burrowed under a layer of weeping skin—told her that she was still alive.

  Caleb paused once to listen. A feral dog howled out on the prairie. Her voice had just strength enough to make him wonder what he was hearing and pause for a few seconds. Then he continued on beside Noles who was talking again about God’s will. Neither of them turned back to see the hand, just above the tip of the bluestem, waving to call them back.

  Wanikiya brought her plums from the forest, the fruit past its prime but still satisfying. They ate the plums together in the teepee after a dinner of roasted corn and beef braised over the fire. When the juice spilled down her chin, Hazel’s mind turned back to the night the uprising began and Asa coming from the river with his strange warning. She wiped her face with a cloth and looked across the fire at Wanikiya. They had spoken very little that night. The other warriors had ridden out, one contingent with Little Crow heading for the Big Woods, another following Gray Cloud, hoping to gather more plunder in towns further down the river. But he was still here and she was afraid to ask him why. He must have seen how she was looking at him, because he stopped eating, letting his half-chewed plum roll into the fire. He settled against his backrest and studied her.

  “You did not go?” she said at last.

  He shook his head.

  “Why?”

  He thought for a long time before speaking. She had always liked that about him, the careful way he considered his words. “There is nothing brave in what they do,” he said. “At first I went because Tatanyandowan said I would be killed if I did otherwise. When it began they were going to kill all the
farmer Indians and half-breeds along with the whites. To purge this valley with blood.”

  Hazel shuddered. When she looked at him again, he was gazing intently into the fire, watching the embers blaze and darken to ash.

  “The blond one . . . Cassie? She told me that the Creator made the red man dark on the outside because our hearts were dark inside. She said we were children of darkness and had no soul. That the Our Father prayer you taught me was a sin from my lips.” He spoke the words soul and Our Father and sin in English.

  “She was wrong.”

  “Hanyokeyah taught me that each of us has two souls. One soul must travel a perilous journey after death. Even in death the Dakota must face enemies and cross a great river to reach the afterworld. But the other soul stays here, close to earth. Like Winona.”

  Hazel was quiet, thinking of that sense she had had, down at the river.

  “I did not think I would be sorry to have killed Asa.” He told her of seeing Asa beneath the tree where Winona hanged herself and knowing he’d had something to do with her death. He’d told Tatanyandowan, who said that Wanikiya would be haunted by the girl’s ghost unless he avenged her. “Winona did not deserve to have her spirit roaming, never able to rest.”

  She already knew this and wondered that she could accept it and not hate Wanikiya for what he had done. “Did you kill others that day?”

  Wanikiya went on to tell her about the Stolten’s farm and how he’d come across it with his brother and found Mr. Stolten in the hay meadow impaled by his pitchfork, lying next to a dead son. The Stoltens lived near the Sengers, and were known to both Hazel and the Indians. Mr. Stolten had begged Wanikiya for mercy. Then the youngest girl, Aschendel, had come up from the cellar where she had been hiding and Tatanyandowan had gone to kill her. Wanikiya was left alone with the man, made sick in his soul by the very sight. And so he had done it, drawn his tomahawk and buried it in the skull and somehow Mr. Stolten had not died even then, but continued to scream and Wanikiya had to work to free the blade from the ridged bone of the skull and buried it again, this time ending the man’s life. Then Tatanyandowan returned from the cabin and Wanikiya had looked up to see a white face watching from a near grove of trees, another son, and he’d looked away hoping his brother would not also see the last remaining child.

  That son, he told her, must have seen the entire thing happen, including what Wanikiya did. Had he known it was for mercy? “Next we saw a wagon on the road, the oxen slow and stumbling. That was you. The world was on fire. Tatanyandowan was already running and I did not want him to be the one who caught you first. I regret ending Asa’s life. Revenging Winona has not brought me any peace. I keep on seeing the way you held him.”

  “Please,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about such things anymore. I would not be here tonight, alive and whole, if you had not carried me from the cornfield. Sometimes I wish that I wasn’t, but then tonight, eating these plums, being with you near a warm fire, I’m glad you saved me. I’m glad that you did not leave that man to suffer.”

  He nodded at this and rolled over, so that his back was to her again. Hazel climbed under her own blankets. What he wanted, she thought, was absolution. The quiet boy she had known had been replaced by this young man who let words spill from him in a breathless rush. He had no one else to talk to, to tell these things. He wanted to be forgiven for shooting Asa. Hadn’t they each killed for self-preservation? But I don’t have that power , she thought.

  Several times she heard him turn over and knew that he too was restless. “Wanikiya?” she said after a long time had passed. She had to call his name twice before he would answer. “I’m cold,” she said. “Come over to my side.”

  The fire had dimmed to ashes. She could smell the sage braided in his hair, and rolled over so that her body was pressed against his and she felt his bony, boyish hips joined against hers and his breath on her neck. The other captives would hate her when they learned what she had done. Maybe even her own family. But she was thinking about that day in the cave and the storm that swept over the valley and how she had longed for it to carry both of them away. She felt his heart beating close to her breast. He breathed in time with her. She ran her hands along his hips, along the sharp jut of his ribcage and the lean muscles of his torso. When she touched her face against his she felt that his cheeks were warm and damp and she knew that he had told her all that he had because he was wounded inside. She knew that she could offer him healing just as she had a long time ago. She pressed her lips to his cheek and tasted his salt, the way he’d done after first bringing her here but she continued, kissing his mouth and throat and when she did speak at last her voice sounded husky in her own ears. “Husband,” she breathed, her hands continuing to touch him.

  Outside a keening wind began to blow through Yellow Medicine country. The wind seeped under the teepee skin where the lovers touched and pressed together until they were sated and in this mutual heat did not feel the falling chill. Only when they were finished could they hear the horses whinnying from the corrals down by the river. Wanikiya raised himself on his elbows to listen carefully.

  “Is it a storm?” she asked, pressing her face close to the hollow in his throat.

  “No,” he said. “It’s the lost ones. They are crying because they can’t come back to this valley ever again. The horses sense them in the wind.”

  She clung to him and drew one of the buffalo furs over them as though to hide their nakedness from the spirits coursing outside. They didn’t sleep that night, limbs entwined. They traded stories, Hazel describing her father, Wanikiya telling her how Hanyokeyah had protected him throughout his childhood. Her body ached sweetly where he had entered her. Her blood had dried on the robes beneath them, one more thing that joined them. Outside the maple hardwoods lining the river began to change color a month early so that in the morning they found the leaves in red drifts, dappled spots against the goldenrod.

  BIRCH

  COULEE

  INSIDE THE CIRCLE of wagons, Noles bid Caleb stay close. They had joined the other men after sundown and crossed the river to rejoin Captain Grant’s infantry. More than 160 men and a dozen wagons, the horses restless and whinnying in the dark. The men talked loudly and joked to forget the sights they had seen on the prairie. Each seemed grateful for this darkness, but was afraid to go to his own bedroll, afraid of what he’d see when he shut his eyes. A few had found what they feared, their wives or sons and daughters. These sat in the short grass, holding their knees to their chests, rocking back and forth while they stared vacantly into the dark.

  Caleb was nervous about his wine. If the men found it, they would drain the entire crate full of bottles in no time. He must bring it back for Cassie, who was not speaking to him. She’d stopped eating, would only allow water to be poured down her throat. Her skin was clammy to the touch. “I can’t feel the baby anymore,” she’d told him. “It’s gone quiet inside me.” The next day she still would not eat and the skin began to shrink around her dark blue eyes. If he could bring back the wine, the bottles whole and shining, then she might see that child or no child, they still had a future together.

  He kept the crate close to him while he unrolled his blanket. Noles was smoking in the dark.

  “Stick close,” he said again, “there’s a man from the Cullens who said he’s seen signs of Indians. A half-breed named Joe. Can you trust even the half-breeds now?”

  “Joe?” Caleb said. “That man is missing his two daughters. He’s desperate as the rest of us.”

  “Well, this Joe says he’s seen bark shaved from a tree, kinnikinnick, that they like to smoke. If it’s true, and we get surrounded, what a pretty spot this will be. Idiots. To camp on the open prairie. Why, look at that treeline where the moon hovers. All around us there’s place for murderous braves to take cover. We don’t have the howitzers, nor any big guns. Dead, that’s what we’ll be if the half-breed speaks true. They’ll overrun us in a minute.”

  Noles coughed and hacked u
p phlegm. His throat had gone raspy from talking too much.

  “I’m tired,” Caleb told him. “If the Indians come and kill us, so be it.” “Aye. You’re a fatalist. How I fell in with such as you I don’t understand.”

  Caleb grunted and pillowed his shirt under his head. Prairie grass poked through his wool blanket and itched his skin.

  “O Most High,” Noles continued, taking up his monologue again since Caleb had proved a poorly conversationalist. “Raise up officers with some sense in their noggins. Your creation is overrun with idjuts, and if there’s killing to be done, let the bullets find them . Let not your children’s fates be determined by imbecilic . . .”

  “Noles?”

  “Yes, Lord? Oh, it’s only you.”

  “Listen. If we get out of this, I want to marry that girl I left behind at the fort. I’ll need a best man.”

  “I’d be honored,” Noles interrupted. “I’ll start composing my speech right away. It must have the right blend of humor and solemnity. Matrimony, after all . . .”

  “There’s one condition.”