Books
The Night Birds Excerpt
I grew up in the shadow of the Great Sioux War which started here in Minnesota in 1862. Born four months after thirty-eight Dakota warriors were hanged en masse in Mankato the day after Christmas, I was named for an uncle, Asa, killed during the conflict. Sometimes, lying awake after the wicks were turned down, I listened to the wind outside and wondered what I inherited along with his name. I grew up mindful of the deep scars people carried from the war, but could not know the story behind them. My mother, Cassie, a slender, flaxen-haired woman, became pinch-mouthed if I asked her questions. When my papa still attended church he never stepped forward to take communion and he told me he would beat me within an inch of my life if I pressed him on the matter.
The second summer the locusts returned to our land, Papa stopped going to church entirely. He stood in his barren fields watching my mother and me ride away in the buckboard. Locusts sparked around him like hot specks of grease in a griddle. He stood in his infested fields, watching us ride to church as he crushed the insects in his clenched fists until the greenish-black blood ran down into his shirt sleeves.
I grew up with the past coursing under the surface of my family life like some dark underground river that I could sense but not touch. Against the dozens of pamphlets published far and wide about the conflict-A Thrilling Tale of Captivity, and The Red Man's Revenge-I had the measure of my parents' silence. Just under layers of topsoil I sensed the story waiting there and knew that it had something to do with sorrow, and that it still made them afraid to this very day.