Back at camp, he heard a wounded man asking the chaplain who’d ridden along with the cavalry, a man named Joshua Sweet, for wine. He was dying, he said, and he wanted communion. “I don’t have any,” the chaplain told him. “I’m sorry.”
Caleb heard the man’s quiet weeping and knew then what he had to do. He walked forward and touched the chaplain’s shoulder. “I know where there is wine,” he said.
CAMP
RELEASE
SHE THOUGHT OF red leaves on snow, of a cleaved apple. Her skin was so pale against his. Snow on copper. Water and earth. By night they were one breath and she clung to him as though they were falling from a great height, a hole that had opened in the center of the clouds, down and down, and he within her, and she within him, his breath her breath, lips, hands, touching and kissing until they were sated with the smell and salt of one another. The fire burned down while they lay together in the red bridal blanket. Stars swirled above in the smoke hole’s opening. A north wind breathed against the canvas. It was early September, she thought. The Long Trader, Colonel Sibley, was coming with his army to end the war.
After their first night together, the entire camp had awakened to a changed world, leaves turning red a full moon before their time. The old ones said it was a sign the spirits were angry. It was a mistake to leave their homes and come here. Some said it was the white captives’ fault and they should be killed to keep from slowing the Dakota down. The spirits were angry because the whites had polluted this valley.
Each day that passed the scouts came back with reports of troop movements, a great river of men and guns and horses that would come for the Dakota. “But Little Crow is not afraid,” Wanikiya told her that night as they lay together, naked beneath a blanket. “He thinks that he will surprise them as they did the soldiers at the river. Like what happened at the prairie. He has nothing but scorn for the way the wasicun fight.” He’d come back from Birch Coulee. Wanikiya was sure that he’d seen Caleb there from a hiding place in a tall tree. “Your brother fought well,” he told her, the admiration apparent in his voice. “He did not tire.”
Caleb. Her blood brother. Hazel was so filled with joy to hear that he was alive. And yet it was bittersweet. For seeing her brother again meant the end of this life. She ran her hands through Wanikiya’s hair, one long unbroken sheen. It fell in his eyes and veiled his expression. She brushed it away, kissed his cheek, the center of his forehead. He had smooth skin, smooth and supple and always smelling of the river and crushed leaves. A leaf child. But he was no elf out of Old World folklore. A man the same as any other, naked except for the medicine bag that hung by a cord around his throat. Her hands found the old wound in his side, the delicate web of flesh, and his breathing quickened. “When I carried you from the corn,” he was saying, “I thought that made us even and that you would no longer hold a place in my heart. But I did not stop thinking of you. And now, when you are gone, I will continue still.”
“Gone?” she said. Both had been too frightened to speak of the future. She had hoped that together they could make a family, something that would be safe from the destruction sweeping the world they knew. That they could go someplace, maybe to the far North where the Metis hunted the buffalo, and not live in fear.
“When it comes to the last battle you must go to Little Paul and the Sisseton. They will keep you safe. We have already spoken.”
“But you?”
“I will go to fight, but not like Little Crow thinks. I will not allow him to surprise the soldiers. I will make sure a shot comes to warn them. This war must end.”
“They will shoot you down. Either the white soldiers or your own people.”
He touched her hair. “I am not afraid,” he said.
“Let us run away,” she said, “where no whites or Dakota will find us.”
He scoffed at this. “Where would we go? Among the Tetons?”
“I will be a good wife for you.”
“You are that already. No. I must stay and fight now. ”
Her fingers continued to circle around his abdomen and then descended lower, touching his bony hip, the smooth skin of his buttocks. She gently pulled him toward her. “Stay here,” she said.
He responded to her touch, beginning to slide his fingers along her backbone, his hands coming up to caress her arms, fingertips circling her nipples. His face was close to hers and she saw herself below him in the opal mirrors of his eyes, her black hair fanned around her, her tongue touching the tip of her parted lips. She felt him stiffen and felt the damp heat in her own center longing for him. They stopped speaking in words for a long time and it was strange to her how familiar his body had already become, how naturally he fit within her, gliding in and out, while she placed the backs of her heels against his buttocks, ran her fingers up and down his spine. With her feet and hands she pulled him closer, slowed his rhythm. His mouth parted and his eyes went cloudy and she brought her hands around and touched his face at this moment of release, telling him, “Look at me. Be lost within me as I am within you.”
Afterward he lay with his face pressed to hollow of her throat, his breath warm against her breasts. His face was damp. She loved him even more for that. How afterward each time, his eyes would glisten as though the moment had so filled him that he overflowed. As though to hold her so was both joy and sorrow.
That night while he lay beside her, the stones within his medicine bag grew light as the feathers that surrounded them. In his dream, the bag tugged at the cord around his throat and pulled him out of the blankets, the bag flying out before him and he rising with it out into a country of tallgrass pulsing in the night wind. There was no moon, only a multitude of stars as far as his eyes could see. While he watched, one of those stars flew closer, swimming down and taking shape as it approached the grasslands, growing white wings until he saw again the bird he had sacrificed so long ago. The burrowing owl perched on his shoulder and studied him with its great yellow eyes.
“Hinyan?” he asked it. “Why have you come back now?”
The bird did not speak but spread its wings and flew out over the grassland. He had to run quickly to keep up, his feet light, the grass swishing as he passed through it, parting like water. He ran by places he’d known as a boy, the river where his mother and sister drowned, the dark center of it where his brother had overturned the canoe. In his dream, his mother and sister were running beside him, fleet as does. Then they passed the spine of rock where Tatanyandowan had bound him and the blackbirds that came down from the stars were there again, one of them larger and darker than the others. “Hanyokeyah,” he said, knowing that he was alive because the old man had come as a spirit and unbound his ropes. They went further into the past, to the winter encampment where his father, Seeing Stone, struggled against the speckled sickness, further back to when the people lived beside the great waters. Other things came out of the stars. Unktahe, a great coiling serpent, brown as the river it came from. Stones rising up from their furrows. The tree-dweller in his cottonwood home. Thunderbirds and riders from the clouds. “Why?” he asked the bird. “Why are you showing me all this?” For a moment he was part of one great story, a river of spirit flowing out through the grassland to the place where it joined the stars.
He couldn’t run fast enough to keep up and the figures around him began to grow indistinct. They were fading back into the darkness. His breath turned to fire in his lungs. The stones in his medicine bag grew heavy again. “Come back,” he called to them, but they were gone and there was only the wind in the grass. Then he knew why the bird had appeared to him, knew that he had one thing left to do. He must make a sacrifice before it would end. Only then would his spirit be allowed to enter the same country where those he loved had gone before.
In the morning a crier moved through the camp warning that Long Trader and his many wagon guns and soldiers had come to Yellow Medicine country. Every warrior would be needed to fight. Men painted themselves and sang their death songs.
Withi
n their teepee, Wanikiya knelt beside her, braiding her hair, as was custom. “Remember,” he was telling her. She loved the feel of his hands smoothing out the snares in her hair, the way her own mother had brushed her hair. “Remember to go the Sissetons when the fighting starts.”
“Will you come then? Will you come and find me when the battle is done? Turn yourself in. Turn yourself over to the soldiers. When I tell them how you have protected me they will not hurt you.”
Her braids were finished. He painted the stripe of vermilion down the center of her parted hair, but could not dab her cheeks because her face was wet with tears. He squeezed her hands and then rose to fetch his rifle and the parfleche filled with dried meat. “Turn yourself in,” she repeated. “I won’t let them hurt you.”
His adam’s apple bobbed up and down and his eyes were bright. He nodded once at her and then ducked under the teopa and was gone. Hazel forced herself to watch him walk away, across the river running quick through the woods, a red rain of leaves coming down around him and the other Indian soldiers. There was a blue-gray light in the east, but the sun was not up yet. False dawn , she thought, not knowing if she would ever see him again.
She found Otter near the river, his skull crushed by a large stone. His body had been covered with a hasty matting of wet maple leaves. She knew him only by the mouth harp strung like a medicine bundle around his throat. The impact of the stone had caused him to bite through his tongue and the leaves around him were reddened. Hazel held him as though he were her own Daniel, the brother she missed most. She did not care if his blood darkened her broadcloth skirt. Her mind was filled with the memory of him that first day in the teepee, trying to shush her so she would not be hurt further, a goblin-child whom she had bitten in her anger and sorrow. Wanikiya’s messenger boy. The one he had sent to warn the Sengers of what was coming. Otter had been full of mischief, but there was not a harmful bone in his body.
Hazel heard the crunch of footsteps in the newly fallen leaves at the same time that she realized who had done this. Henrietta. The woman loomed over her, fist still wrapped around a blood-soaked grinding stone. Her face was streaked with grime, leaves and twigs jutted from the wires of her hair. Arms red to the elbows, face mottled in the tree-shadows. The calico blouse she wore draped loosely, exposing one heaving, muscular shoulder. “I told them,” she said, breathing heavily, “I told them I would break them like twigs.”
From miles distant the sound of the battle drifted their way and Hazel turned involuntarily toward the sound. There were more cannons and howitzers than at Fort Ridgely. Even here Hazel felt the faint reverberation of their explosions in the ground beneath her. When she looked again at Henrietta, the woman was smiling. “Our day of deliverance,” she said, her eyes blazing. “We are free.”
“I will tell them,” Hazel said. “I am going to tell what you did.”
Henrietta advanced toward her with the stone gripped in her fist. Hazel held her ground, crouched over Otter. “He was harmless,” she said, words that Henrietta repeated back to her in a mocking tone.
“None of them are harmless. We will cull the children before they can become adults. A weed must be taken from the furrow before it puts down roots. Cull them like weeds. It’s their way. It’s the reason I no longer have children of my own. I will have vengeance. Don’t you know how we have watched you with that warrior? Disgusting. You’re a traitor to your own kind. To bed a with murderer. You, a little whore.”
The woman blocked out the sunlight leaking through the canopy of red leaves. Hazel flinched from her words. What could she say to defend herself? Everything the woman said was true. She had forsaken her own kind and now must face the consequences. Wanikiya would not come back from this battle. The guns would shred the warriors, no matter how fleet their ponies. If the whites did not kill him, his own people would for his betrayal of them. Henrietta raised the stone, saying, “I’ve waited for this moment, ever since I first saw you.”
Hazel sensed the stone rushing toward her, and then heard a crackling split, the sound of a maul cleaving a stump. Her eyes were shut against the impact. In her mind she saw her skull caving in like Otter’s, saw in that one moment the leaves continuing to come down in a red rain. And they will never find me here , she thought, neither Caleb, nor the soldiers, nor anyone. I will be left with this leaf-child, in this valley of spirit .
There was no blinding light, no flare behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes again and saw Henrietta still looming above her, the stone loose in one hand, swaying back and forth, her mouth locked in a snarl. Her eyes fluttered as a seam of blood appeared on her forehead and began to pour down. Then the earth shook again and Henrietta fell onto a crushed heap of leaves.
Hazel saw Blue Sky Woman holding Tamaha’s tomahawk. The woman came over and knelt beside her to take the boy, holding his ruined skull in her palms and wailing. Together they raised his body and left him in the limb of a low-hanging oak tree. They found one more child, his skull also crushed in. Blue Sky Woman took a lock of hair from each. Hair to keep in a medicine bundle so she could pray for their journey through the afterworld. It would be a hard journey for boys so small.
When they were done, they cleaned their hands and arms in the river and walked back toward camp, Hazel pausing over the crumpled form of Henrietta. “She still breathes,” Blue Sky Woman said. “What strength she has.”
Henrietta’s broadcloth skirt had ripped as she fell, exposing two solid stumpy legs bristling with hair. The woman’s tresses were dark with blood, her breathing husky. For a moment, Hazel considered asking for the tomahawk pipe. Hazel could make sure that she didn’t kill again. But how many other Henriettas were out there? How many survivors, certain that the only thing that would bring them rest at night was to answer blood with blood? Hazel had seen enough killing.
She left Henrietta in the woods and walked beside Blue Sky Woman into the camp of the Sisseton. There they dug entrenchments alongside the other captives, working with tomahawks and stolen hoes to make deep holes where Paul and the so-called band of “friendlies” could take cover if Little Crow tried to steal the captives back. Her face close to the earth, Hazel went on hearing the sounds of the battle until late afternoon when the artillery went silent. Far off, she heard what sounded like fife music. Infantry. The Long Trader, here at last. But Sibley had not come that day. Ever-cautious, even after he crushed the Dakota at the Battle of Wood Lake, he took his time coming for the 170 or so captives at the Indian camp.
Like the rest of the women, Hazel’s braids were taken out. She cried when they unplaited her hair and washed the sacred paint from her face. They were erasing the memory of him as they did so. Hazel was given a plain green gingham dress, and a slat bonnet. All the captives were dressed in the best clothing the Dakota could find to show that they had been treated well. Inside the bonnet, she felt blind. Only a child again, returning to blinded existence and a world where her voice did not matter.
It took Sibley ten days to come for them at Camp Release, the infantry playing fife music and marching in formation. The new clothing she had been given was infested with fleas and she scratched herself until she bled. The other captives kept clear of her. Henrietta had staggered back to camp and taken charge. Every hour more Indians came to them, hoping to ingratiate themselves and prove they had been friends to the whites all along. The Indians had learned that the color white meant surrender and so everywhere in the camp strips of white canvas fluttered from the tips of teepees. Men tied frayed cotton through their headbands and along the tails of their ponies. All semblance of native pride was banished as they sought mercy. The worst of them, the Indians who had started the killings up north in Acton, the reluctant leaders like Little Crow, escaped out onto the prairies. True friends like Blue Sky Woman, Spider Woman, and Tamaha stayed in the camp, uncertain of their fates.
Even the soldiers kept clear of the captives after they arrived, as if they might have been infected by their close association with Indians. H
azel was not certain of time, had lost all perception of days, weeks, months. She woke nauseous each morning, felt the world spinning around her, and could not keep her breakfast down. No blood stained the petticoats she had been given, though she was certain the time for her monthly had come and gone. She began to hope.
On the eleventh day, Caleb found her. His wheat-blond hair had darkened in a single month. She was at the edge of the encampment, looking not in the direction of home, but toward the great western oceans of grassland. She was touching the flat of her stomach, her hands smoothing the cloth down, before she felt his eyes on her. She turned, a name rising in her throat. It was not the name she had been hoping to speak, and he knew that, too. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her; his features were set into a hard mask, the light brown eyes drained of emotion.
“They told me where to find you,” he said. He hesitated before approaching her. Had she been violated? He didn’t know if he was afraid for her, or of her and the knowledge she might carry. “Is it true that you married one of them?”
She had not stopped caressing the flat of her stomach. Instinctively, Caleb knew why. He tore her hand away. “Look at me,” he said. “Don’t you want to know about the others?”
Night Birds, The Page 34