Night Birds, The Read online

  Only once did one of those country healers touch her: a midwife who lived near the ferryman in Boonville and who was said to stop the flow of blood with only her hands and a verse from Ezekiel. That night she greeted Jakob and the daughter wearing a light-blue dress of linsey-woolsey worn through to transparency and showing the pendulous swing of her breasts beneath the material. She had nut-brown hair, the bangs uneven, as though shorn with a knife. She had a child, but no husband.

  On this still night the air was close and heated in her shanty. The girl smelled the melting tallow of the candles that burned along the edge of the wall, a sick, sweet odor of animal fat burning. The healer kept a hearth and a floor of packed dirt with a single handwoven strip of carpet. She had gray eyes and pale, elegant hands. When the child began to cry she pulled down the left corner of her dress and suckled it in front of them. The healer smiled when Jakob turned away. “Fetch me some of that yarrow that grows in the truck garden,” she told him. “And then I’ll show you what I know.”

  The father left without asking how she knew he would be able to tell yarrow from mustard flowers in the dusk. The walls of her dwelling were tissue-thin. Night air seeped in around them. Something in the woman’s eyes bid the girl to stay and not follow her father outdoors. The baby made loud, sucking noises. Beyond the shanty the girl heard the sound of the wide dark river eating away the shore. Then the healer came toward her and she went stock still. The woman touched her under the chin and forced Hazel to look up into her eyes. Her hand was warm, close to the pulse in the girl’s throat. She saw a pale mirror of herself reflected in the woman’s gray eyes. She saw this and knew the woman would follow after her and haunt her in some way. The healer’s voice was husky when she spoke again. “You walk in the dark,” she said. “I see it. While kith and kin sleep, you walk abroad. Be careful you know the way home again, child.”

  The healer taught her something else before her father shouldered back into the room with yarrow clenched in his fist, something the girl would only dare try years later when a boy lay bleeding to death on a puncheon floor.

  The schoolteacher, a widow named Kate Moriah, took an interest in Jakob’s children. Kate was the daughter of Josiah Kelton, a slave-owner from Virginia who owned the salt mines, sawmill, and four hundred acres of good bottomland where he grew fat hemp forests to make rope and twine. Mainly Kate was concerned that Jakob’s children were being allowed to run free instead of being kept captive in a hot, one-room schoolhouse—captivity being a natural state necessary for both children and “darkies.”

  Kate came into his office one summer afternoon, after the schoolbell had sounded and the limestone cobbles rang with clatter of bootheels and squealing children released for a few precious hours before they had to start evening chores. She frowned at the black-haired girl whose face was smudged with ink as she set type. The man before her was half a foot shorter than Kate, with hairy forearms and thick limbs. Dark locks of his hair fell in his eyes while he worked the press, the iron clacking down with a sound like an angry mouth. He was comely in a certain way, a small black bear.

  Kate coughed politely. She wore a brown-checked gingham dress with leg of mutton sleeves. Her auburn hair was pinned up in an elegant coiffure. Her cheeks looked flushed or sunburned, but really this was just her temper rising, for after several coughs the man still kept his back to her. Finally, the girl went and tugged on his apron and only then did he take notice. In fact, he stepped back and caught his breath and the color rose in his own cheeks. He had only seen this woman from afar before this moment and admired her. “Ma’am?” he said. He bowed in an old-world fashion. His own grandpapa had been a serf in Bohemia. “How may I be of service?”

  “I’ve come about your children,” said Kate, fanning herself with one of the newspapers. She leaned against the hellbox table and the girl noted with satisfaction that one of the woman’s leg of mutton sleeves was smudged by the slag type. “You are aware that county laws stipulate that these children should attend school?” Kate did not mention that the county laws also forbade a once-widowed woman with children of her own from teaching.

  Jakob smiled and wiped his hands on his greased apron. “I did not know this,” he said, exaggerating for her sake the Germanic lilt of his English. It was sometimes useful to play the dumb foreigner, though more often than not Jakob spoke in a precise, deliberate manner. He was known for his stories, in print or otherwise. “You see, these children are vital to my enterprises. They learn both reading and arithmetic through their everyday efforts. I provide all they need.”

  “Don’t be insulted,” said Kate, “but having perused this publication and seen the many grammatical offenses and wild flights of fancy it contains, I doubt their education is sufficient.”

  To Kate and the girl’s surprise, Jakob’s smile only broadened. He stepped closer to the woman and his nostrils flared. Kate’s eyes shone in return. A look passed between the adults that disturbed the girl. In the woman’s fine auburn hair and high cheekbones she was reminded of the brood mare. A handsome thing from afar, if it ever broke free from the traces it would keep running roughshod over everything beneath its hooves and never look back. Hazel had expected her father to put up a better fight than this. “Perhaps we can make some arrangement,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I . . . feel a bit faint just now. It is ever so hot in here. Might you have some refreshment?” The woman looked anything but faint to the girl. Her eyes were blue with flecks of gold in them, and right now they were fastened to her father.

  “Certainly,” Jakob said. “Allow me a moment to clean up and I will meet you next door at Burton’s. Frau Volsmann makes the finest ginger soda. It will cure whatever ails you. Then we can discuss these arrangements in more detail.”

  “That will be acceptable,” said Kate and she walked out of the shop, her whalebone hoopskirt and bustle so wide she barely fit through the door.

  Jakob watched the vacant doorway a few moments after she went through it. “My,” he said. “That’s some woman.” Maybe he figured a woman like that wouldn’t get sick like his frail, willowy Emma had and leave him alone with children. For the first time ever Hazel regretted her vow of silence after her mother’s death. Not that it would have mattered, for her father forgot she existed during the next three months as he courted Mrs. Kate Moriah and took her on long “sparking” rides in the phaeton and read her poetry, his own and others.

  Hazel fought this in her own quiet way. As a new pupil in the schoolhouse, she wrote down charms on foolscap paper and sold them to her classmates for a penny a piece. The charms contained a rhyming ditty and instructions for making a potion with the fingernails of their intended. The girls need only get the poor fellow to drink this concoction, made with his own soiled clippings, and he would be theirs forever. When it didn’t work and the boys continued to ignore them in favor of throwing dirt clods at one another and suchlike, the girls demanded their pennies back. Still without speaking, Hazel refused, even after one of the girls’ mothers wrote a vehement letter to Mrs. Moriah.

  When this failed to perturb the teacher, Hazel took to setting aside her McGuffey Reader and writing long, morbid stories about a woman with “russet hair” who seduced men to follow her out into the woods where she stole their soul like a seelenrauber . She wrote another story about a tall woman “built like a roan” who suffered a series of unfortunate accidents before meeting her untimely demise by falling into the churning scupper of a sawmill. She left the stories near her slate board for Mrs. Moriah to find.

  The next day Mrs. Moriah asked her to stay after school. Hazel sat at her desk with her eyes downcast and waited for the woman to commit outrages upon her person which she could run to tell her father about. “I won’t deny that you have a certain imagination and knack for description,” Mrs. Moriah told her, “but these stories won’t do at all. For one thing, I find them to be wholly predictable and ordinary in every circumstance. Like your father’s newspaper, you misunderstan
d the nature of your reader. A good story defies the reader’s expectations, and in doing so, brings them satisfaction. Do you hear how contrary that sounds? There isn’t anything so contrary as the human heart.” She gave Hazel a copy of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and when she finished that she gave her Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales , and then a new book, Hazel’s favorite, by a man named Melville.

  If they didn’t become friends exactly, through literature they reached a truce. Hazel saw what Kate meant about contrariness when the woman’s father returned from overwintering in St. Louis. They journeyed out to his great stone manse through the bowered lane of elm trees and ate dinner that night and Jakob told Josiah Kelton that he wished to marry his daughter.

  Over seventy years old, Josiah had a lean, bladed face and white Quaker-style beard. His skin was chapped and ruddy, the mark of years of fieldwork. One finger lightly traced the gold chain of a new watch tucked in his pocket. These fine clothes fit him well, the same dark suit he had worn to his wife’s funeral this past winter, but he still seemed restless in them as though the wool chafed his skin. His left cheek swelled with a wad of tobacco, which he chewed with the determination of an old bull. His ruddy face reddened further at Jakob’s request. “You really want this?” he asked his daughter and Kate only nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her previous husband had been a carpenter who had drowned along with several other passengers when a ferry overturned in the flooding Missouri River. Without knowing the reason, she married beneath herself each time for the sake of angering her father.

  Then Hazel saw two black children come in, twins around seven years old, with eyes the color of ice just like the old man. They helped a slave woman named Lula serve them a dinner of brisket and collard greens. Hazel saw how Kate pretended not to notice when Josiah’s hand lingered on Lula’s and saw how she pretended not to see the two children with haunting blue eyes. Kate’s whole life was a study in contrariness. She despised her father and yet was beholden to him.

  Jakob and Kate were married that spring and moved into the house that Kate’s first husband had built, a two-room cabin with finely doweled joists and a neat overlay of walnut siding that just happened to be on Josiah Kelton’s land, past his brick slave cabins on the north side of a cow pasture and tucked into the lee of a hill. Some nights, when Kate grew bored with Jakob, she reminded him that her first husband had possessed more practical skills.

  Kate had two living children. Asa, twelve years old, had his mother’s red hair and fine skin. On him the auburn hair looked like leaves on fire and because of his irrepressible cowlick and nasal voice, folks didn’t take to him right away. Her other son Matthew, was six years old and had been blinded by the scarlet fever which also turned him innocent and simple-minded. The land held a graveyard where Kate’s mother was buried along with three of Kate’s other children who had died each summer when the bottomland air turned miasmal and florid with mosquitoes. Sometimes Hazel missed their old life above the printing shop. But here they had a salt spring where deer came, and wolves from the Ioway prairies, and once, a white albino bear with eyes like two drops of blood.

  Two years passed and Jakob took his daughter out in the phaeton less and less, for his new wife didn’t approve of superstition. Perhaps she intuited the reason behind these journeys, knowing Jakob had never fully let go of his first wife.

  Seasons came and went until March of 1859, when on a warm day walking home from school Hazel held out her hand and caught a red petal curling past her in the wind and held it in the palm of her hand. It is a false spring , she thought, not knowing where the words came from. The snows will return and what germinates in this season will perish. There will be little fruit for the harvest. It is false, false. Then she realized she held a petal of the Judas flower within her palm. Chilled, she dropped it and listened for a time in the evening quiet. Nothing happened. No vision from the devil entered her brain. The breeze hushed over the hay meadow and stirred the dress at her ankles. A warm southern wind carried the smell of the spring thaw. She was looking north and wondering how far the wind had traveled. She imagined it lifting her from the grass and carrying her there. Maybe in this distant northern land there was an Indian boy with a feather in his hair, his pony’s mane ruffling in this same breeze while the rider looked south and wondered what this wind was bringing toward him.

  Hazel had arrived home from school ahead of her mother and brothers. On the way she passed the shop where Jakob published The Saline Springs Luminary and saw shattered window glass and a vacant dark spot where the press had once stood. Who would do such a thing? Of her Pa there was no sign. As she set about her evening chores, her mind filled with worry. First those red petals had unsettled her, now this. When she entered the barn to fill buckets with the milk she would churn into butter for tonight’s supper, she was surprised to find her father there with the hand press, stabled like some living creature of iron and wood. Her father wore a greased apron. Weak wintry light spilled over him through cracks in the slats. In the stalls the horses nickered, spooked by the strange smell of ink and oil. Her father took hold of the calfskin handle. The machine came down with a ringing clank while the horses perked up their ears and tensed their flanks. He was talking to himself while he worked. He released the lever and shook out a smeared sheet of paper and held it up in a shaft of light. A deep frown of concentration was etched between his eyes.

  In Hazel’s mind she was cast back to the winter when her first mother died and her father spent time alone in a stall talking to himself. From her place in the doorway, unnoticed as of yet, the girl made out the title at the top of the page: Liberator . She didn’t know this was an anti-slavery pamphlet. She didn’t know that he was publishing his paper from a barn because every window in his shop had been shattered the night before by the Blue Lodge Society and the spines of every book he owned lay broken and torn in puddles of ink. All she saw was their oldest draft horse, a gentle Morgan named Isaac, as he leaned over the stall and sniffed the new paper, nostrils wide and flaring. She thought the horse might snatch the paper right out of her father’s hands and chomp it like an apple in his great yellow teeth, but then he snorted and turned his rump toward the publication.

  Long after the candles were put out and the ashes banked in the stove the girl lay awake listening to her parents arguing over her father’s newest publication. From her room below the loft where she shared a goosedown mattress and rope bed with her blind brother Matthew, the words were indistinguishable.

  When she dreamed that night, she felt a familiar floating sensation. Night after night, she dreamed that she stepped out of her own body. She became a shadow girl made of air and darkness. As she drifted from her cage of skin and bone she looked down on her own sleeping form, fists tight, clutching the quilt.

  Like vapor she drifted past her parents as they exchanged bitter words before the stove. Cold air seeped under the door and she traveled through that space and out into the night. Among the secret beds of the deer she came like a shadow and the does lifted their heads in the darkness, sniffing. Only the birds saw her. They trailed after her dream-form. She had the sense that if they caught her she would not wake again. Her parents would find her body, blue and cold, in the morning and know her soul had been carried off in the night. Crows cawed in the distance. The wind picked up and hurled her along like a leaf.

  She closed her eyes while the air rushed past. When she opened them she no longer recognized where she was. She stood before a strange, mound-shaped house of earth and sod. The roof was green with grass and twisting vines of morning glory. The door made a squeaking sound as it swung open and shut on its iron hinges. Broken window glass lay upon the grass. A silent crow watched from atop a chimney of mud and wattles. The wind came across on quiet cat’s feet and whispered If only men knew what I know . She felt a thrill run up her spine at these words. Something watched from inside the house.

  She went past the broken door. Chairs were spilled and scattered on the floo
r. A pot squatted over the slackening flames in the hearth. The floor beneath her was packed dirt, not so different from that of the healer’s cabin. A figure in a light-blue dress lay on a pallet. Only when Hazel came closer did she see the head was gone.

  In the next moment she noticed the missing head upright in the center of the table. The hair was matted with blood, but she recognized the healer from the river. In dream fashion the facial features shifted and became her mother’s. The girl was terrified now. Blood dripped through the table, ticking, as steady as a mantle clock. Hazel came closer, saying “Mama?” Her voice sounded strange in her ears. When she was right next to the table the eyes opened, white and empty. Her mother’s jaws parted with a crackling sound and the carmine petals of the redbud tree spilled out and flooded the room. At last when the stream of petals stopped, the head spoke. “Hide,” it said. “You must hide.” There were footsteps outside the cabin. The thing that had done this was coming closer. Hide. She was up to her ankles in red petals, her feet fixed to the floor.