Night Birds, The Read online

  Cordially,

  Dr. Wendell Frietz

  Chief Medical Officer

  “Why don’t you hand me that letter, Asa?” she asked when I was done reading it. I gave it over without comment. She held it up in the greasy light coming through the window panes, her lips mouthing the words like a child. Then she walked over, opened up the wood stove, and tossed the letter inside. It happened so quickly. Without knowing what I was doing, I overturned the chair and sprang across the room. Tongues of fire licked at the edges of the letter. My mother stood there watching it burn. The oven door was open so I reached inside and plucked the letter out, singeing my fingertips. Black flakes came away. Ashes. But you could still read the heart of the letter. “You put that back in the fire,” mother said. “Do as your mother tells you.”

  The front door opened. Papa was back from his time at the watchtower, the rifle slung over his shoulder.

  I lay on the floor of the loft room that night listening to them argue with my ear pressed to the boards. My mother had not cooked any dinner and I knew that I wouldn’t be getting any. Somehow that didn’t matter.

  “I won’t have that woman in my house,” she said.

  “She’s my blood relation.”

  “I’m your wife.”

  “Blood’s thicker than water. I won’t have that argument used against me in this lifetime. Once was enough.”

  A long silence. I knew she was crying now. “But your momma said she died. Your momma said she didn’t survive childbirth.” Her voice quavered.

  “Ma never did or said a thing that wasn’t in her own best interest. Truth only mattered if it suited her. No, she intended this to happen all along.”

  “It will change things if you bring her here. Our boy,” she said. I pressed my ear closer, straining to catch the next words. What did I have to do with any of this? I was disappointed when she continued. “We barely have enough to feed the boy now. No crop in four years. How will I feed another mouth?”

  “We’ll find a way.”

  “Your mind is set, then?”

  “By God, yes. We’ll take the steamboat to New Ulm and walk from there.”

  “After all these years,” my mother said. “And I thought that letter was from a sweetheart. Now I only wish to God you had a sweetheart.”

  “You’re a curious woman.” I moved again, straining for a better position near a knothole. The boards creaked. Papa, sensing me listening, shushed her. “This house has grown ears,” he said. “We’ve said enough tonight.”

  Long after the wicks were turned down I lay awake thinking on this news. Aunt Hazel, who had shamed the family by getting pregnant while a captive of the Dakota, was alive. She was supposed to have died in Mankato, mourning her Indian lover who got hanged. She and the baby died in the following spring of 1863, and that was all I knew. My head spun with this news. And now she was coming here, released from an asylum.

  When I was seven years old, a severe winter storm had barricaded us in the cabin. Howling winds piled drifts as high as the roof. While waiting for the snow to melt, Papa passed time drawing stories for me on a long ream of butcher paper he had left over because he spared the life of our aging sow the past harvest season. I sat for hours watching. I marveled that such large, gnarled hands could hold a pencil so lightly and summon shapes and shadows to fill the page. He set words down, too, though he was a poor speller. He did not speak and became agitated if I asked questions about the story. After three days the wind down died down and Papa rolled the ream of butcher paper up, tied it with a leather cord, and handed it to me before stepping outside to dig his way to the barn. I have been puzzling over that story he drew for me ever since, for I kenned that he was telling me about the past in a way he couldn’t out loud.

  Papa’s drawings illustrated a tale of two children, a boy and his baby sister, who are lost in the woods. Throughout, there are hints of something terrible that has happened to leave these children orphans. They shelter in an oak tree hollowed out by lightning. Night after night they hide there, conjuring monsters out of ordinary things that pass their tree in the dark. The baby girl begins to starve. Just when the boy is losing hope, a talking crow tells him of a nearby farm. The boy makes a sling of his muslin shirt and carries the baby in it behind him, like a papoose. He journeys through the woods, following the crow as it flits from branch to branch. At a nearby farm they find a goat the boy milks to feed his sister.

  My favorite illustration comes right before this scene, where the children first emerge out of the woods into the clearing of the farm. If you look closely, near a stump of an old tree you will make out the shape of a woman’s horned feet as she lies prone in the grass. I knew with a child’s prescience that the woman in the picture had died in some awful way my papa never bothered to explain. The story ends curiously; the boy finds his way to a town and hands the child he has carried for so long to a woman whose face is shadowed by a bonnet. Then Papa ran out of paper as well as patience. Who were the boy and girl of the story? I understood that Papa knew them and that the true ending had been too painful for him to tell.

  There were other mysteries when you studied on the pictures closely. Now it occurred to me that questions I had wondered about for years might finally be answered. I lay back on my bed thinking these things over and didn’t sleep a wink that night.

  “You don’t look crazy,” were the first words my mother said to Aunt Hazel.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” my aunt responded.

  “What I mean is, you don’t look how I thought you would.” My mother was one of those people known for speaking her mind, which is what they usually say about people with bad manners. But it was true. You don’t expect a woman who you thought was dead all these years— but really was just in an insane asylum undergoing torturous treatments— to look hale and hearty.

  Nine days after Pa left to retrieve her from St. Peter, Aunt Hazel came to our house wearing a girlish yellow-print dress, her face freckled from walking in the open sun. She had clear green eyes and dark brown hair. And there was something elfin in her smile.

  “This is the one,” she said to me. She was carrying a carpet bag that held all her worldly belongings. She set it down, saying, “Come closer.”

  I hesitated, thinking on the bits of information I’d managed to wheedle from my mother over the last nine days. That Aunt Hazel “knew things a Christian woman ought not to,” her way of implying the woman was a witch. That Aunt Hazel hadn’t resisted when taken captive, had wanted it even. Now this woman stood before me and she was not the wispy, white-haired vision I had imagined. Not a woman with faraway eyes and long yellow fingernails, but one who looked you straight in the face and saw the fears you hid in your underbelly and smelled the regret on your skin. To tell the truth, she frightened me. But despite certain recent lapses, I was an obedient child and so went to her and let her put her hands on my cheeks until I looked up into her eyes and tried to still the quivering in my stomach. Only a woman does a thing like that: takes you into her hands like she held a sparrow and was divining its lifespan, the good and bad. Men are keen about other things, but not very often about people. Aunt Hazel didn’t say anything about what she saw in my eyes, not at that time.

  We cooked one of the pullets that had quit laying, the hen either sick or obstinate, and had a dinner of baked chicken and potatoes, a rare treat. The adults talked about the trip, and the territory west of St. Peter. “Did it surprise you to see the land?” Mother wanted to know. “It looks like the end of the world outside, the Lord have mercy.”

  “It did make me sad,” Aunt Hazel said. “But I wasn’t surprised. I read about the locusts in the paper. At St. Peter there’s many a farm wife, worn out from her travails. This prairie never was all that fond of settlers.” While she spoke she moved her food around the plate but didn’t eat any.

  “You think God is punishing us?” said Papa. “Reverend Henrickson said so from the pulpit.” A scattering of fine bones lay picked cl
ean on his plate.

  “Maybe,” Aunt Hazel said. “And maybe it’s just the land itself speaking to us and our iron plows, our gelded bulls, and foreign seeds and threshing machines.”

  “You talk a lot,” my mother said. “I remember a time when you didn’t talk so much.”

  Aunt Hazel was quiet for a time and then she told a story in answer. “Listen,” she began. “Once there lived an ancient king who believed all children were born with an innate language and he wished to discover whether it was Greek or Latin. For two months every child that was born in the kingdom was gathered in a single room in the castle. The nurses were forbidden to speak with the children while the king waited to hear what language would arise from them naturally. The babies were well fed and swaddled in warm blankets, but never a word was spoken to them.”

  Hazel paused and then she looked directly at me across the table. “All the children died,” she said. “One by one, not hearing a name or a whisper, and the king came to understand our universal language, silence, and the price it demands in the end.”

  Mother brought her fork down with a clatter. “That’s a terrible story,” she said.

  Father leaned forward in his chair. “Hazel,” he said. “It would be better if you spoke more plainly around here. Save the stories for your book.”

  Still incensed, Mother said, “I don’t know why any of those women would trust the king with their babies. If it was my baby I wouldn’t let another soul handle it.” Then she seemed to realize something and sank back in her chair. Her mouth opened and closed again and she got up and started gathering the dishes. “Well,” she said, “Well.”

  For my own part I liked the story despite the consternation it caused my parents. Hazel’s story cast a spell and not much else was discussed that evening. What I loved most about it is what it said about the silence I had grown up with. Both my parents had thought they were sheltering me with their secrets, protecting me from some awful truths only they knew. I don’t believe in dredging up the past , Papa liked to say. Well, now the past was here with us in the flesh, and she spoke in stories that seemed to say the past mattered, and that silence would only cause more bad things to happen in the world.

  After dinner, Mother threw Aunt Hazel’s uneaten chicken out in the yard. When I came back from carrying water from the springhouse she still seemed angry, clattering the dishes around in the washbasin.

  Aunt Hazel took out a mason jar of white powder from her carpetbag. She set it on the table, unscrewed the lid, and dipped in a tiny spoon. This little bit of powder, no bigger than a hummingbird’s meal, she set on her tongue and swallowed. She shut her eyes, sighed, and when the lid was in place set the jar on the shelf next to my mother’s sarsaparilla root. Aunt Hazel held out a hand to my mother. “I’d like us to be friends, Cassie,” she said.

  Mother, elbow deep in suds, looked at the hand and nodded. “Don’t need to be friends,” she said. “We’re family.”

  Since Hazel was to share the loft room with me, Papa had rigged a single oak crossbar to divide the loft and hung this with quilts. For the novelty of a guest in the household, I was more than willing to give up my bed and my window with the view of ruined, moonlit fields. That first night Aunt Hazel parted the blankets and stood before me in a white gown that hung loosely from her scarecrow limbs. “Asa,” she called to me. “I’d like to make you the same offer.” I’d been sitting up on my pallet and contemplating how to decorate my side of the room. She held out her hand. Unlike my mother, I took it. The hand that held mine had a surprising, bony strength. “Friends,” she said, “but you have to promise me something.”

  Nobody had asked me anything important before this. I swallowed, nodded. She said, “Promise me you won’t ever go into my belongings. They’re all I have.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise.”

  We shook on it and then she went back to her side of the room, turned down the wick, and lay on top of her sheets. A cooling breeze blew into the room and ruffled the blankets and the gown she wore. “Aunt Hazel?”

  “Yes?”

  “If we’re friends it means I can ask you questions.”

  “Sure,” she said. “But friends don’t tell each other everything. If they did they wouldn’t be friends very long. What is it you wish to know?”

  “Were you afraid in the asylum?”

  She didn’t answer right away, thinking on the matter. Her voice seemed to come from far away when she did. “It isn’t like you think,” she said. “The St. Peter Hospital is like a city unto itself. There are farm fields and animals and even cabins where the patients on good behavior get to live. I wasn’t really afraid inside there because everyday was the same. All the meals are set according to a weekly plan. Every part of the day is settled.”

  “But weren’t there scary people?”

  “Some,” she said. “But most of them they locked away in their own section. You could hear them on quiet nights. A relentless kind of moaning came from their section, and maniacal sounds. But most of the crazy ones I knew were harmless. There was a man who thought he had a horse trapped inside his chest. He would go about the room, whinnying and pounding his breast.” Aunt Hazel made the sound for me. We both laughed.

  “Didn’t you ever think to write any of us?”

  “Ask me something else.”

  “What is it that makes you afraid?”

  “You’re kind of stuck on the same subject,” she said. “Well, all right. I am afraid of forgetting things. I am afraid that sometimes it’s too late for me to start my life over again.” Then her voice hushed further. “I’m afraid I’ll have to go back.”

  “I don’t want that either,” I told her. “Aunt Hazel, there’s something you should know. I never really had a friend before. I might not be any good at it.”

  “It isn’t all that difficult.”

  Then all at once I confessed to her about the Indian and what I had done. The words spilled out in a breathless rush. It might seem strange to you, for me to confess in this manner, but for whatever reason I’d made a decision right then and there to trust this woman. I was crying by the time I got to the end. I said, “That’s why I don’t know if I’ll be a good friend. Look what I did to my own folks.”

  “Nonsense. I know somebody who would understand you.”

  “Who?”

  “Your grandpa.”

  “Grandpa Jakob? Papa doesn’t talk about him much.”

  I couldn’t wait to hear more but from downstairs I heard the rumble of the loft’s trapdoor. My mother knocked on the door three times. “You all go to sleep,” she said. “We can hear every darn word downstairs. Your father needs his rest.”

  A quiet settled between my Aunt Hazel and me and it wasn’t like all the other silences I had known in my lifetime. It was the kind of quiet that makes you feel content inside. I didn’t worry that night about having any bad dreams.

  We woke early the next morning to a crescendo of shattering glass. Still in her nightgown, Aunt Hazel rushed to the trapdoor, threw it open, and climbed down the ladder from the loft. I followed after, my mind still groggy with dream.

  Downstairs, I woke up pretty quick. The mason jar of bromide lay in a million pieces on the floor and the powder sifted through the floorboards down into the root cellar below. Aunt Hazel knelt in the glass shards and tried to salvage what powder remained before it was all lost. Her face looked pale, stricken. Mother stood over her saying, “I didn’t mean to. I was just reaching for my jar of sarsaparilla and I plum forgot what else was up there.” Papa sat at the table with his head in his hands.

  Aunt Hazel said nothing, but a shiver of grief traveled down her spine and she shuddered. Her hands trembled, spilling more powder. I knelt beside to help her.

  “Don’t cut yourself in the glass,” Mother told me. Then she turned to Hazel. “We’ll get you some more,” she said. “We’ll write that doctor friend of yours and he can send some more.”

  Like water the powder spilled dow
n through her hands, speckled with spots of her blood. She stood with her remaining medicine in a bowl of bone china. Her hair jutted out in wiry curls. White-faced now, she was the very woman I had been expecting to show up at our door. Her lower jaw quivered. “There won’t be any more,” she said. “This is all they would allow me to take. You can’t just order it in the mail, or get some from the apothecary. The only way to get more is for me to go back inside.”

  “I’ll get a letter written to that doctor myself,” Mother promised. “I can be very persuasive.”

  Aunt Hazel held the bowl close against her chest while she climbed the ladder into the loft where she would remain the rest of that day. She set the bowl in a corner where it was sheltered behind her carpet bag and then, still in her gown, lay down on the bed with her arms folded over her chest. An absolute stillness possessed her. Looking at her, I realized this was how she had survived all those years locked away. I watched her and tried to think up nice things to say, but nothing came to me.