Night Birds, The Page 7

  In the morning he climbed the ladder, knowing even before he reached the top that she would be gone.

  That afternoon he ate lunch at Burton’s. The door swung open, admitting the slave catchers he had heard in the dark. One was lean with a pointed chin and arrow-shaped beard, the other short and clean-shaven, even his scalp hairless and gleaming with perspiration. Both wore dirty fringed buckskin and coon caps and their eyes were red-rimmed from exhaustion. Jakob listened closely as they approached the barkeep, Timothy Burton, a genial, aproned host with his hair lying slick against his skull. They ordered pork chops, johnnycake, a bottle of rye whisky to split between them.

  “Jumped right in the river,” the lean one said. His voice had a twang to it. “Never did see the like, thought she was a bird and could fly clean to the other side.” The bald one kept his silence. He breathed through his nostrils, the red-rimmed eyes taking Jakob in and then looking away again.

  “I just hope we get something for the body,” the lean man continued.

  “You found her then?” Jakob asked.

  “Had a time of it though,” said the man. “She was tangled in some branches down the river. Not a mark on her, but her mouth hung open. Her belly was so full of gasses and water that when I lifted her out the damn thing groaned like she was complaining.” He shook his head, grinning, his mouth jagged with yellow teeth. “Scared me so bad I dropped her back in the current and had to fish her out again.” Jakob looked away from the man, left a silver coin on his table, a dime like he had been paid for the ad, and went out back.

  The hounds were tied to a post and lay sleeping in the dust. They didn’t even stir as he passed. Flies swirled around a mule and tormented its watering eyes. He could see the round mound of the tarp draped over the mule’s back, and one hand with broken fingernails swinging below the canvas. Flecks of gray mud were caught beneath the milky nails. In his mind’s eye he saw the muddy current pulling her under, the girl trying to claw her way back toward light and air. He looked at the hand of the slave woman named Ruth for a long time. The mule’s flanks twitched and drops of mud shook loose from her fingers and spattered the ground below her.

  Outside in the rain the voices followed after her, or maybe she would only imagine this, for memory cannot be trusted and her mind would often return to this scene and fill it in with new details. When her father spoke of the tarring, years later, she imagined herself back in that room with him and Kate and Josiah. The eaves dripped spooling waterfalls into barrels on either side of the cabin. She stood there for a minute before a flash of lightning lit up the ground around her and she noticed a rabbit shuddering before her feet. Tricked out of a long winter drowsing by a warming spell, the animal trembled in terror. Caught between the girl and the storm, its long ears flattened against its skull and it hunched down against the smooth surface of the pine porch. Hazel wanted both to run her hands through the soft fur and also to scare it away before her brothers returned. She nudged it gently with her toe, but it remained motionless as stone. Years later, in her moments of greatest terror, the girl would imagine herself like that rabbit. A thing as still as stone while the shadow of the owl passed over. A thing that could not be touched in its silence and stillness. Neither moved, both creatures listening to the spilling sound of water and the undertone of voices rising from the cabin.

  “There’s a way out of this and that’s if your husband takes back his words. You don’t want the entire county calling you abolitionists and nigger-stealers. You don’t want what happened to that reverend.”

  Kate’s voice came back, sharp and high-pitched. “You don’t care about us. You care only for your own reputation.”

  Hazel heard the heavy tread of his boots coming toward the door. The rabbit shook itself out of its daze and vanished into the falling rain. Hazel ducked around the side of the cabin, not wishing to be seen. The door slammed behind him and the silence that followed his fading footsteps was marked only by the door’s creaking hinges and the driving rain.

  Her stepmother’s voice called after her. “Hazel May,” she said. “I still need your help. Come out of the rain, you foolish girl.” Hazel was tempted to ignore her, to run away into the copse of hardwoods over the rise of the hill where her father often took her walking, but the wind blew the rain in horizontal sheets, and the thunder growled. She didn’t want go back inside to see that spot on her father’s throat, or acknowledge that one day he would pass into the valley of the shadow, but she was getting soaked standing there and had no choice but to return.

  Before Hazel went back inside, she cast one last glance toward the grove of aspen trees where her father had told her about the signs. Lightning illuminated the ghostly white trunks and barren branches. The trees tossed in the wind, as if they might lift and move to new country. Then the low clouds closed in around them and the way was lost.

  KINGDOM TOWNSHIP,

  MINNESOTA

  1876

  ROOT OF

  THE MATTER

  THE LONG SUMMER of 1876 spread out before us in a vista of dry bristling buffalo grass and scabbed-over fields. Our fathers were gone in the north, working for more prosperous men. They would return after the harvest and beg relief from a state government that called them “mendicants and beggars” in the press, as though they had brought the locusts on themselves through some weakness of character. And if these men took to drink out of shame and helplessness and lashed out at those nearest, who could blame them? And if these boys came to school wearing long-sleeved chambray in the full heat of summer to hide their tattoos of bruises, it was understood. The boys would in turn share their pain with smaller boys, and so on. I was more fortunate than some, for my father turned his brooding anger on himself. We missed our fathers, and yet we did not look forward to their return. No, in this time I did not wish to draw attention to myself; they had hanged me from that tree once before and I would not allow it again.

  The children all knew who had come to live with us and so I endured the sing-song rhymes which celebrated her supposed treachery: Injun-lover/ you shall suffer/when you see/him on the tree . Nothing inspires a child like a cruel story. If Mr. Simons heard them, he would scold them into silence, but he could not be everywhere at once and so I learned to keep close to the schoolhouse. I was more alone than ever, and yet I did not blame her. It made me feel stronger to think of my grandfather, Jakob, and his convictions and search for signs. I wanted to believe that some of his courage was inside me.

  Aunt Hazel walked to school with me every morning. In the dark we passed over an old Indian trail scarred by generations of ponies and dogs dragging lodgepoles through the tallgrass. Here the earth remembered them. Sometimes Aunt Hazel spoke and told me how it was when they first came here from Missouri. Words spilled out of her as if she’d been storing them up for a decade, hoarding them in her book. She talked of the past until her voice went husky. There was the shepherd’s star before us, and the moon descending. Soon it would be sunrise, but for now the world was formed of gray shadows and the sound of her voice. I listened, half-asleep, a slate board and primer tucked under my arm and I will tell you this: her stories left tracks inside me and I was not the same after. I can’t see her very well when I try to remember her in these moments. Her bare feet didn’t stir the dust. She wore a homespun shawl and a slat bonnet that hid her face. One hand clutched a forked stick she dragged absently behind her, carving ornate patterns on the ground. The other held a bucket she would fill with ginseng dug from the loamy sediment along the Waraju River.

  We crossed this mile of ground, the humpbacked spine of the town looming ever closer, her voice increasing in pace as the story rushed to its end. Her stories became more real to me than this place I knew. Later at school, I would finish my lessons early and set my head down on the desk and drowse in the hot classroom, children chattering all around me, and I would dream of the things she had said.

  We parted at the town’s edge where the road split the graveyard with its leaning cr
osses and names none of us knew anymore. There she might touch my shoulder lightly, a signal for me to continue on alone. The sun was up. If I looked within the shadows of her bonnet I might see her watching me with those dark, sea-green eyes. She never said anything, but I could see how she dreaded this moment of our daily separation and couldn’t understand the reason. Other children passed and hushed when they saw her, some even crossing to the other side of the road. In turn they shrank from me as well in the schoolyard, as if she had carried some contagious madness with her from the asylum and passed it on to me. In a sense, she had. I was infected by her stories and filled with those contrary emotions her stepmother Kate had spoken about in Missouri. I was ashamed of this woman, and yet wanted to protect her.

  At home we ran out of the laudanum Mother liked to layer into her sarsaparilla and terrible headaches began to afflict her. No money had arrived yet from Papa in the northern pineries and we also ran out of kerosene. Those July nights we passed by the light of tallow candles. Hazel said she was not sorry about the kerosene. She said she never liked the smell, or the way it stole all the shadows from the room.

  “Witch,” muttered my mother. “You have me under a spell.”

  Aunt Hazel was unperturbed. “The headaches and visions will pass,” she told her, sighing. “How well I know it.”

  The only thing that soothed Ma’s headaches was a silver comb I ran through her flaxen hair. She closed her eyes and let her head fall forward, still muttering things under her breath. I combed her hair until the gold shone through the dark roots, until my arms went stiff. Eventually, she fell asleep in the chair. All the while, Aunt Hazel drew pictures on my slate board. She drew hypnotic landscapes: pathways through labyrinths of sumac, pickets shaped like writhing serpents, a barn sinking into the earth. These images swirled when you looked at them. Storm-tossed trees crowded the edges and something always seemed on the verge of happening. A hawk’s shadow passed over a rabbit. A crow flew over a wind-whipped sea in search of land. After some nights of this I began to recognize where I had seen the drawings before. “You taught Papa how to draw,” I said. “Those are the same as the drawings in the book he made for me.”

  Aunt Hazel smudged the slate board, her brow furrowing. “Caleb made you a book? He was never one for writing.”

  “One winter we were trapped inside. He worked on it for three days and then gave it to me without a word.”

  “Can I see it?”

  She was quiet for a long time as she studied the drawings. In the passage of six years some the drawings had smeared and the edges of the blue paper were yellow and water-marked. Still, Hazel’s green eyes had turned cloudy with memory. “He didn’t tell you what this was about? I think this is the story of Daniel’s flight.”

  My mother picked her head up and loosed a rumbling groan. “A body can never rest,” she said. She turned her bloodshot eyes on us. Aunt Hazel drew her fingertip along one of the drawings and said nothing. “You and your stories,” my mother said. “There isn’t anybody left alive who wants to hear any of it. Except maybe this boy, and he doesn’t know what’s best for him.” She rubbed the back of her neck, her face scrunching into a grimace. There was a charged silence between the women, the sense of words traveling an invisible wire. I wanted to know what that silence had to do with me. A knot swelled in my throat.

  “He’s enough,” Aunt Hazel said, “if he listens well.”

  “Listen to this,” my mother said to me, affixing me with her eyes. Spots of color flared in her cheeks. “When the Indians came to our cabin, we knew something was wrong. They was only asking for water, but there was fires in the distance and we could hear shooting at the other farms. My mother told us to bring them the water and then she took our money jar, all our family money, and she fled for the woods. I was pregnant at the time. She just left us there like some kind of sacrifice, little Sallie and I. There were three Indians, maybe not more than boys. Skinny as devils with that smoke smell thick on them. The biggest one grabbed Sallie up by the ankles and me screaming the whole time, Please! No! He swung her around until her head smashed into the porch post, just like that. They held me down, the three of them, did the most vile things. I would have been dead if it wasn’t for Caleb, if he hadn’t come on them then. Such rage. He had the double-bladed ax from the woodshed and they didn’t even see him coming and there was the roar of him; good Christ the sound of him, and their blood and my blood and the way he kept swinging long after they were dead.” To Hazel she said, “Do you think I have forgotten? Do you think I want you here with your stories?” She went on, “Oh. It was a long flight into those same woods where my mother had run, but she was nowhere to be found; God curse her, we didn’t see her again. Twelve miles to the fort and him carrying me half the time. . . . A lesser man wouldn’t have had me afterwards.” She drew in a deep breath, tried to steady herself even as the tears rushed down her ruddy cheeks. “There boy, that’s your story.” Her jaw was clenched tight. “Have you been listening well?” she finished before her voice broke.

  Afterward nobody had anything to say for a long while. Aunt Hazel fetched some old rags which my mother used to blow her nose on. I sat down on the puncheon bench, exhausted by her story and the vision it had painted. When her sobbing had slowed, Aunt Hazel said, “Your mother went into the woods? And you didn’t see her again?”

  My mother ground her teeth. “Yes,” she said and she grabbed hold of the sleeve of Hazel’s dress and clutched it tightly. “And me pregnant.”

  Aunt Hazel stepped back. “When the war was done I used to walk in those same woods. I was looking for Daniel’s hiding place. No one wanted me around then, either. I was beginning to show. Too painful. It reminded them too much of these things, stories like you have spoken. And so I walked, holding onto my belly, and the leaves coming down in a rain of red and gold, such beauty as you feel in your throat. I wondered how it was possible after all that had happened. I prayed so fiercely that whatever I carried, girl or boy, that it would know only beauty and not the hatred I had seen.”

  “Yes,” said my mother, blowing her nose once more. “That’s how it was.”

  An odd kind of magic was at work here, though it was made of only word and gesture. As Hazel spoke she stroked my mother’s hair and I felt the hair on my arms begin to prickle. There was no more talk of spells or witchery. The two women had reached some kind of agreement. “There is one other thing, though, about those woods,” Aunt Hazel said.

  “What do you mean?” said Mother. “We no longer own the land. The Schillings, those bastards, they bought up entire parcels after the war. Those few that survived came back to find they owned nothing. It was all legal. A piece of paper. How Caleb talked his way back into this property is beyond me.”

  Aunt Hazel was lost in her own reverie. “It was beautiful in those woods, but there was a stump I stayed clear from. A terrible smell came from that place. The crows flocked there.”

  “What are you saying?” Mother said.

  “I don’t think your mother ever made it out of those woods alive,” Hazel said.

  We set out the next morning under a red sky that threatened rain. I had not known the place we walked to had once belonged to my mother’s family. The Thompsons had tenanted the land for a time, dug out a sod-die from the side of a hill and lived in it like moles for a winter before the wife got homesick and they went back to Virginia. It was strange to have my mother with us, but she said she would chew away her fingers waiting for us to return to the cabin. I carried the ax like a woodsman and walked between the two women. My mother spoke in a cheery voice, her terror of the night before forgotten. She showed us the place, a dark square in the gold grass, where her father had kept his still, brewing moonshine to sell to the Indians.

  We didn’t have to walk far before we came to the hill that sloped down to join the Waraju River, the banks steep here, a place that drew all those Old Germans who were lonely for the hills and dark forests of their childhood. Men like my gran
dfather Jakob. My mother quit speaking. Below us we could see the gleam of the winding river, sandbars glittering in the sluggish current. A few shrill-voiced crows harangued a horned owl on the other side of the river. There were immense cottonwood trees down along the bank, hoary-barked specimens that bore the wounds of the spring melt when the surging, snow-choked river battered them with ice. The locusts had left this place alone.

  We moved single file behind Hazel, our guide. The air turned vivid with cottonwood fluff carried on the wind and my aunt caught a downy seed in the palm of her hand. “Waraju,” she said, holding it out for us. “The cottonwood.” She blew on it and the wind hurried it away once more. “The Dakota believed these trees were sacred.” She looked off in the distance, a woman in a white apron. She had replaced the yellow dress with a sturdier one made of brown-checked gingham. Her nails were splintered and edged with black dirt from grubbing for ginseng. Her dark hair whipped in the wind, the bonnet slung behind her, held to her throat by a lute string. Aunt Hazel found a cottonwood branch, and kneeling, cracked it open for us. She passed it to me, asking what I saw.