In her left hand she carried with her the beaded moccasins she had embroidered during the summer of her captivity in Blue Sky Woman’s teepee. She meant to leave these as an offering at the grave, a gift meant to help him cross over into the other world. She had seen his name listed in the Leslie’s Illustrated Leah brought her. The account said that one of the Dakota had prayed the Lord’s prayer instead of a death song. If he was being called to account for his deeds before the white God, he would go to Him speaking their tongue. This knowledge twisted cruelly inside her; when she taught him that prayer their first summer she had not known he would remember so well, had never envisioned him speaking it at such a moment.
The wind streamed out of the north and hurled sharp flakes of ice that chased away the few stragglers still gathered around the spectacle of the scaffold, a huge structure of pine clapboards with severed ropes swinging in the wintry wind. One of those ropes had held Wanikiya. She could not bear to look at the scaffold for long. People hunched past, unseeing, hats pulled low over their eyes, cloaks and coats cinched tight.
Hazel wandered down toward the river and there she found the remains of the mass grave where the thirty-eight had been buried. It was a gaping mouth that breathed steam in the cold. There were dark scattered impressions in the sandy ground, like snow angels left behind by children. The soil smelled fresh and damp, even a day later.
“They’re gone.” When the boy spoke it startled her so badly she almost fell into the grave. She turned a questioning gaze toward a tow-headed child clad in long woolen shirts and patched pantaloons. A boy of thirteen perhaps, fists clutching a hidden object, grimy toes poking out of undersized, handmade boots.
“The doctors took them,” he said in a high, piping voice. “They cast dice for the corpses. Dr. Mayo won the body of Cut-Nose.” He leaned over and spat into the grave. “When they catch Little Crow I hope they leave him hanging so’s the birds can peck out his eyes.” It was then that Hazel noticed what he clutched in his hands, a small leather bag the size of a coin purse, embroidered with yellow beads in the shape of an owl eye. Before he could tuck the object away, she seized his wrist with her right hand and squeezed with her long fingernails. “Ouch!” he hissed, dropping the tiny bag. It was a cruel thing to do, but she knew if she had asked for it the boy would have dashed away with his stolen treasure. She plucked the object from the ground.
“That’s mine,” he said. “I found it at the bottom. There’s nothing else left.” He rubbed his wrists where tiny droplets of blood began to bead and drop to the snow. “The others took everything.” His jaw trembled with anger, this boy who had nothing. “Give it back,” he said. “It’s mine.”
Hazel held the leather bag close to her and turned away from him. The bonnet shadowed her face and she was grateful he could not see her tears. He was here , she thought, there can be no doubting it now. He’s dead and it’s my fault for not speaking up for him. My fault he turned himself in. It was forbidden that she should show any sorrow for the Indians, even to this child. The prairies west of here were littered with the countless shallow graves of settlers. Two of her brothers had gone under the scalping knife, their bodies bloating and blackening under the August sun. A few on each side did evil and the rest of them had been left to struggle through the wreckage. All those Dakota hanged. All those in filthy, measles-infested prison camps who had risked their own lives to save whites like Hazel. I will not lay blame. The word for anger and sorrow is similar in Dakota, woiyokisica, and I will cling to that dark energy. I will keep my sorrow, because I was there and I was one of the few who understood what was lost. I know this bag, the smooth stones within a pocket of owl’s down, just as I knew the owner and his longing for a previous age. She looked up once more at the boy in time to see him kneading a rock-sized hunk of snow and ice.
“Witch!” he shouted. “You dirty thieving witch.” His eyes watered with anger and he wiped them with his shirt before cocking his arm. Hazel took a halting step back as he unleashed the ice ball. It caught her square in the forehead, tearing loose the bandage and knocking off her bonnet. She felt needles of ice and grit explode in the wound as her head whipped back. Stumbling, she caught herself at the lip of the shallow grave, dropping the moccasins, but keeping the bag sealed in her fist. Another fit began to flicker like heat lightning inside her. These seizures started with just a faint tremor behind her left eyelid, an innocent twitch that spread to the left side of her face when she clamped her jaw down. Oh no , she tried to say as the shuddering possessed her body, but the words came out as vapor that passed before her and dissipated.
“Lady, what’s wrong with you?” she heard the boy say, his anger turning to concern, before he saw the whites of her eyes rolling back. Dimly, she heard his cry and the footsteps stamping away and that’s the last thing she remembered.
The sign for forget and night is the same: a still left hand, palm downward with the right hand sweeping over it. She would forget the next two months if it were in her power. They found her rolled inside the grave, the leather bag of stones knotted in her fist. The sandy soil that had briefly held her husband’s remains had to be picked out of the reopened wound with tweezers. She woke to that sensation, like wasp stings on her forehead, as Dr. Kolar cleaned the wound. Her eyes followed the rise and fall of his arm to the stained apron he wore, white cloth dappled with yellow blood. A butcher’s apron. She sat up in fear and looked at her swollen belly.
“Easy now,” the doctor said. “You’ve had quite a shock. What did I tell you about leaving here? Any change in surroundings is likely to produce delirium and fits of apoplexia.” Hazel’s hands were trembling. She reached out and touched the soft fabric of her chemise where the smooth hill rose. Deep within her she sensed the child, a silent, waiting hum of energy. Beyond the doctor she saw her gingham dress hanging from the rafters, the material darkened and dripping clots of bloodlike soil to the floor. Ida was cleaning the cloth with a brush, sweeping fragments into a pan. Her slender beaklike nose wrinkled as though she were a bird pecking at unsavory crumbs.
She sensed the girl watching her and set her pan down to join the doctor and pat Hazel’s hair. “You poor, dumb thing,” she said. “The things you must have seen.” Hazel felt a knot forming in her chest, for even this touch was a kindness she craved. “They say the lucky ones are those that died. A woman shouldn’t let herself be captured alive by those red devils.” She held Hazel in the gaze of her fierce brown eyes. “We’ll take care of you now, dearie,” she said. Hazel wondered why the woman did not mention the child inside her. Ida continued to stroke her hair, smoothing out the tangles while Dr. Kolar brought forth a hollow, wooden cylinder tapered at the end.
“To listen to your heart,” he said when he saw the fright in her eyes. He moved the scope from the girl’s chest and then listened for a time at her belly. Hazel watched his expression carefully, but his pale features betrayed nothing. He turned his back to her and it was then that she realized where the blood on his apron came from. He was one of the doctors who had been at the grave on the night of the hangings. In the cool darkness of his basement some warrior had been carved up and would have to carry those mutilations with him into the afterlife as his spirit traveled the path across the Milky Way. Hazel pictured Wanikiya stripped of his beaded breechclout, the sacred paint washed from his face, soft flesh of his neck serrated with rope’s imprint, while the doctor hovered over him with a toothed saw. She pictured the wound in his side, the pretty hollow where his throat joined his chest, a place she would lay her own head and listen to the drumming of his heart.
Horrified, she tried to sit up again. Ida’s caressing hands turned instead to talons, pinning Hazel back to the bed. Her mind flickered with blue fire, the remnant of her seizure. She was too weak to fight them, too weak to do anything but lift her arms, his name in her throat. Dr. Kolar carried over a long-needled syringe filled with milky fluids. It entered her skin and she stopped thinking for a time.
Two lost mon
ths. She did not run. Ida became kinder, stopping each morning to brush out the tangles from her hair. The seizures stopped as though Hazel had emerged from the grave a new creature, and they did not tie her to the bed each night. The nausea passed, too, and she felt the child moving about within her. How would she keep it safe once it breathed the cold air of this world alone? “A boy,” Ida said. “Only the boys cause this much trouble. A little savage doing a scalp-dance in your tummy right now.” Hazel’s hands and feet swelled with water weight, fingers and toes becoming fat, throbbing sausages as though the child’s liquid environs had leaked into her blood. The baby within her was restless, pressing down on her bladder at night so that Hazel stained the bedsheets. Her belly was not round exactly, more oblong. She should have run, she knew it in her heart, but where could she have gone in a strange town in the middle of a Minnesota winter?
Listen. The old ones spoke of stones raining from the firmament at night and plowing furrows in the earth. This was the spirit who moved in all things, even rocks, and the stones traveled between heaven and earth, and knew the language of the sun and moon and could teach it to a few. These were the stone dreamers who carried round pebbles wrapped in swan’s down and could send out the tiny stones to find missing children, lost treasures, the impending future, for the stones were everywhere and could see all things. Wanikiya’s father was such a medicine man, but died before passing the knowledge on to his son. Wanikiya carried the embroidered bag, a relic of the vanishing past, but the stones were inanimate in the palm of his hands.
Hazel passed her days reading the Bible again, especially Old Testament stories of captivity. She heard Job crying out, “Where is God, my Maker, who gives songs in the night?” She thought, What song will my Maker give to me? She took out the smooth stones from their bed of down and imagined them bringing Wanikiya back. When the child kicked and tumbled inside her, she soothed it by running a hand over her belly, pretending that it was his touch on her skin. The low slanting roof of this room became their shared teepee, the window an aperture above the lodge poles where stars swam, her steaming breath in the cold, smoke from the fire to warm them. A part of her knew these were delusions, but they allowed her to forget what went on in the lower regions of this household, his body, or perhaps another’s, being diced up, his journey no longer possible.
But skin and bone were only a vessel for the eternal. He had been converted by Father Ravoux, the Black Robe who came among them before the hanging. God would know him for his heart. If there was such a life beyond this one, she would be able to find him again. It was Wanikiya who brought her out of silence; for him she began praying again.
For a few words he might have been saved, but the commission in charge of separating the guilty from the innocent, deciding who among the Dakota was guilty of the 485 recorded whites dead on the prairies, would not hear her speak. She was a girl. Henrietta had told them what she had done. If anything she would be tried beside him.
Wanikiya was no innocent and there was blood on his hands. The Stolten boy remembered him, testifying that Wanikiya was there the day his family was massacred, his father run through with a pitchfork. And Wanikiya said nothing in response, even though he knew enough English to answer their charges. So many whites had died, he must have intended to offer up his own death, life for life, a balance, as it was in their ancient conflict with the Ojibwe. There was no record of him saying a single word in Dakota or in English. In that room of killers, white and red, he was called to account with no one to speak for him. She believed he meant himself to be a sacrifice, but she was not there, and perhaps could not have changed things if she had been. She could pretend to send out the stones, but she could not bring him back, could not unmake the lies that broke his neck.
When her child was born she heard it cry before it was carried from the room. She never held him.
Ida had run cool, damp cloths across her forehead, the water dribbling into her mouth. Hazel crumpled the sheets in her fists, gritted her teeth, and pushed. She was sitting all the way up, her face near her kneecaps, when she saw that head crown, a circle of dark hair emerging, and she felt a rush of renewed strength and lay back and pushed. She swore she heard it cry, but later Ida told her the child was born dead, strangled by the umbilical cord. A death like its father’s. Dr. Kolar held it muffled against his chest as he carried it from the room. Hazel’s dark hair was pasted to the healing wound on her forehead and her vision clouded. She felt she was looking down a swirling tunnel narrowing to a pinprick of light. At the end of the tunnel she saw Leah in the doorway; the girl flashed the sign for good, the sign for baby, and then the tunnel closed.
A fever burned in her afterward and she dreamed that dark circle of hair was a raven she had birthed, a bird out of legend. It perched there on her knee, waiting for her die, a night bird slick with her own fluids.
Leah stopped coming, either forbidden or because there was no more child to listen for. Hazel could no longer hear George below her and wondered where he had gone. She passed in and out of the fever, once imagined her stepmother Kate in the room looming over her. “It’s better this way,” Kate was saying. “The child would only have reminded you every living day what you had been through.” Hazel blinked and she was gone, a feverish phantasm.
During a warming spell in April, Ida and Dr. Kolar took her to her child’s grave. A drenching rain lashed the cobbled streets and rinsed wet snow in gritty funnels down the hill. Hazel was still too weak to walk without the support of their arms on either side, Dr. Kolar on her left holding a small umbrella that only partially shielded them from the rain. Ida pointed out a cairn of stones beneath three oak trees, told her that Leah had made the cross of woven willows. They heard her sob, a choked sound as though a corset was binding her too tightly. When they relaxed their grip, Hazel lunged forward and began to throw the stones aside.
She slipped in the mud, her fingers clawing at slick rocks, exposing packed solid ground beneath. Ida was shouting; Dr. Kolar had hooked his arms around her waist and was pulling her away. Hazel strained with all her might, arms outstretched, a high-pitched wail escaping her throat. She fought them all the way back down the street, her blows landing without any force, until Dr. Kolar carried her back up the narrow stairwell to the attic room where she was kept.
Locked in the room, she continued to wail. Her voice was the voice of those mothers in Matthew, chapter two. At first it was wordless, but then that passage swam into her head, the memory of what happened after Christmas, and she was furious with God. She raged in the low-ceilinged attic room, her blood throbbing in her temples, the dress plastered to her shivering skin. All her remaining strength was channeled into her scream. Her hands curled into such tight fists that her fingernails pierced her palm. In the midst of her outcry, as she was pacing, her boots clacking the floorboards, chewing her lip so hard that she tasted blood inside her mouth, she was upright one moment, and then brought to her knees. The answer came to her like the prairie fires that sweep through the tallgrass in high summer, sucking the air from the lungs of any creature caught in its path. It put her on her knees, her palms against the floorboards. Rising up in her chest she felt her guilt over Wanikiya’s death, her sorrow over the lost child. These dark feelings were rooted in her belly one moment and then torn out of her, as though a hand had literally reached down her throat to yank them out, held each thing up to the fire, one by one, each ugly as chaff, until they were charred away and she was emptied out. A purgative flame. She was emptied out and yet there was still this presence inside her, speaking, undeniable.
Hazel wept. When she was done weeping she saw the ragged edges of her fingernails against the floorboard, saw the black dirt beneath them. And had her answer. He is alive. My child lives. She began to pray again.
The Great Sioux War. The Sioux Uprising. Little Crow’s Revenge. The Indian Massacre. These are the names history assigned to what she endured. That evening Ida entered the room after Hazel had quit making such terrible noi
ses. She brought tincture of laudanum, a hairbrush. Ida let the door creak open, warily, as if afraid that Hazel would assail like her some demon. But the girl was lying quietly on top of the sheets, dressed only in her chemise, humming something under her breath that sounded like a hymn. The girl let Ida put the tincture in her mouth and she swallowed as she bid. There was something different about her. Her dark green eyes flickered with pale fire. Ida wiped away blood at the corner of the girl’s mouth.
Had the girl gone mad? She was changed, though Ida couldn’t put her finger on it. Hazel’s forehead blazed. She looked like a picture Ida had once seen of Joan of Arc, a stylized portrait, a peasant woman in a rude shift in the midst of the fire. Then she realized what she was seeing. The girl lay with her arms rigid at her sides. She would endure these things, her eyes told Ida. She would outlive Ida, all of them. Even when laudanum mellowed her facial features, unlocked her jaw, she looked no less fierce. I hold something , her eyes said, you will never touch, never have yourself.
When I dreamed I dreamed in Dakota. Eventually, the Kolars decided they could do no more for me and I was released in late May. Ida gave me a few dollars to buy passage back upriver and find my family. Instead I went looking for the Dakota, but their winter camp south of Mankato had been abandoned, the Indian prisoners transferred down the Mississippi to Davenport, Iowa. I wanted to find Blue Sky Woman, to have her braid my hair, sing to me, heal me.
Night Birds, The Page 36