Abruptly, I stood up and left the house. It was nearly dark, the temperature dropping fast as the sun sank behind the mountains, with the smell of mud and melting snow mingling in the cold air. I went behind the barn and walked up to the grove of young birches there and cut off a switch and stripped it of its new, red buds. Back inside the barn, in the darkness, with the animals shifting their weight quietly in their stalls, I barred the door and stood in the middle of the large room. I pulled off my shirt and drew the top of my union suit to my waist, exposing my naked upper body to the chilled dark. Then I began to beat my chest and back with the switch—slowly and lightly at first, then faster and with greater force, and soon I was doing it with genuine fervor. But it was not enough. The switch was too light and broke off in my hand.
For a moment, I stood half-naked and foolish, out of breath, angry at myself, as if I were an iron object that I had stumbled against in the dark. I remembered Father’s strip of cowhide, which he kept out here to discipline and chastize the younger children, although he rarely used it nowadays. I knew exactly where it was, hung on a nail by the door. It was short, not quite a yard long, but heavy and stiff and dry with disuse, with a sharp edge to it. I reached out in the dark and took it down. The strip of old leather felt in my hand like a weapon. I had not actually held it myself since childhood, since that time when Father had bade me beat him with it, when it had felt alive to me, like a serpent. Now the quirt was dead, heavy, an almost wooden extension of my arm, as if my right hand were grasping my crippled left, and I whisked it through the air and struck myself with it many times—perhaps a hundred strokes, perhaps more. The pain was very great. I thrashed myself around in the darkness, slamming myself against the walls and stalls, knocking over tools and sending buckets flying, thrashing like a man caught by a seizure, until at last I was faint from the pain and exhausted and fell to my knees and did not get up.
But the scourging did not work. Nothing would work to purge my thoughts of Susan or alleviate my guilt for having betrayed Lyman. Not prayer, certainly. I prayed so constantly and loudly in the days following that Ruth and the boys teased me and said that I was practicing for Father’s return, and Mary told them to leave me be, I was only doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord; she wished the rest of the family were as devout as I. But in all my prayers I heard no voice except my own, and my own repulsed me, until eventually I could not bear to hear it anymore and gave off prayer altogether and did not join them in the evenings or when they went to church on the Sabbath. I went generally silent on all matters, not just religion, which was how people were used to me anyway.
I thought that I might cleanse myself with work, but that, too, was to no effect, for I was too distracted and anxious to complete any single task without rushing off to begin another, and all I accomplished was to create an even greater disarray and disorder on the place than had existed before. Trees half-cut or, if cut, left to lie and rot on the ground; chimneys pulled apart and not put back together again; fenceposts driven into the ground but left standing without rails to connect them; half-a-dozen rows plowed, but then the horse unhitched, taken off to haul stones from the river, with the plow abandoned in the middle of the field: it rained for most of those days, and I rushed about as if every day there were a bright sun overhead, a madman farmer, and my brothers and sisters and stepmother watched me with fear and bewilderment. My family kept the house running smoothly and the livestock fed and properly cared for, whilst I made a mess of the rest.
There was no way for me to tell them of the source of such turbulence; I was too ashamed. And besides, as the days went on, I myself had grown as fearful and bewildered as they, for I was no longer sure that my strong feelings for Susan were generated by love for her, so much as by a morbid, cruel desire to take away from Lyman his greatest treasure. I did not love her; I hated him. What perversity was this?
I needed Father to arrive home. Only he, I believed, could provide me with the order and structure of thought capable of leading me out of this wilderness of tangled desire and rage. Come home, Father! I began to say to myself, as I raced uphill and down. Come home and control me, Old Man. Bring me back to myself. Come and deliver me over to a thing larger than these strangely disordered longings. Tell me what it is I must do, and I will do it.
Then, suddenly one morning, there was the Old Man, appearing in our midst like the missing main character in a play, taking over the stage and putting everyone else at once into a supporting role. Which was how we wanted it, of course. Without Father, we had no hero for our play, and whenever he was absent, we undertook our parts without purpose or understanding. We forgot our lines, positioned ourselves wrongly on the stage, confused friend with foe, and lost all sight of our desired end and its opposition. Without the Old Man, tragedy quickly became farce.
Father seemed to know this and almost to welcome it, for when he returned home after a long while away, he always came with a fury, bearing down on us like a storm, crackling with noise and electrical energy, full of clear, irresistible purpose and making thunderous statement of it. He appraised the situation in a second, and before he was even off his horse, the man was barking out orders, schedules, and plans, was making announcements, establishing sequences, goals, standards, setting everyone at once diligently to work for the common good.
Accompanied this time by Mr. Clarke, the Yankee shipper from Westport, he brought supplies, seed, flour, salt, and nails. For the younger children, little gifts—a new Bible for Sarah, a box of paints for Annie, a penknife for Oliver—and for Mary, a silk handkerchief: all presented first thing, unceremoniously, off-handedly, as a greeting. For Salmon, Watson, and me, he had firm handshakes and quick commands to help unload the supplies from the wagon, so Mr. Clarke could move on and make his other deliveries in the settlement before nightfall. He would be returning here in the morning to pick up our furs and as many fleeces as we were able to release to him: that would be Oliver’s job, counting and tying for shipment and sale the spring fleeces and the winter’s catch of pelts—beaver, lynx, marten, and fisher. That’s what Mr. Clarke especially wanted. Father said to get going now, son, that’s a big job, and something was telling him that some of those pelts still needed scraping before they were ready for market, and the other boys were going to be too busy to help him. Mr. Clarke drove a hard bargain and would not accept a bloody hide, Father warned.
Up on his wagon, Mr. Clarke laughed and recalled for Father how he had lost to him his best pair of Morgans, thanks to Father’s nigger, which brought to Father’s attention the absence of Lyman and Susan. He scanned our little group out there in the yard before the house—Mary hugely pregnant and beaming with pleasure at the sight of her husband; Ruth tall and slender and fairly bursting with the secret of Henry Thompson’s promise to ask for her hand in marriage; Salmon, Watson, and I already lugging barrels from Mr. Clarke’s wagon to the barn; the little girls, Sarah and Annie, as if honored by the task, together holding the bridle of Father’s horse, a fine sorrel mare which I recognized as having once belonged to Mr. Gerrit Smith, and, indeed, it did later turn out to be a gift from him.
Father asked where were our friends, referring to them as Mr. and Mrs. Epps, a tacit correction to Mr. Clarke.
I paused at the rear of the wagon, a keg of nails on my shoulder, and Father caught my eye. “Owen?” he said, as if I were the sole reason for their absence.
Mary said, “I would have written about it to you, Mister Brown, but I thought you were coming sooner than this.”
My silence probably told him as much as any words could have then. He nodded and said that we would discuss this later, meaning after Mr. Clarke had left us. I quickly went back to my work, and Father resumed issuing orders, even as he dismounted and embraced Mary and walked arm in arm with her towards the house. Over his shoulder, he instructed Salmon to kindly water the horse when he had finished unloading, and brush her down and set her out to pasture without feeding her grain, as shed been fed this morning in
Keene. Not at Mr. Partridge’s, you can be sure of that, he added. Her name was Reliance, he said, and she was reliable. And then to Watson he said that he could see fencing half up, half lying on the ground, and hed better set to work on that at once, boy, or we’ll be chasing cattle day and night. And me he instructed to check Mr. Clarke’s bill of lading against our goods received and sign it for him, then put myself to work on getting the south meadow turned under by nightfall, so we can harrow and plant tomorrow. He had observed coming down from the notch that the frost was well out of the ground there. “Come to the house at noon for dinner,” he said to me, “and we’ll lay out the rest of the planting then. We have lots of hard work to do, boys, so put yourselves to it! I’ll examine the place and view the livestock in a while this morning and will travel over to Timbuctoo this afternoon. By this evening,” he declared, “we will all know who we are and what we’re doing here!”
And then he was gone into the house.
Silence. Watson, Salmon, and I looked somberly, gingerly, at one another. Then Watson shook his head and grinned. “Well, I guess the Old Man’s back,” he finally said. “Hoo-rah, hoo-rah.”
“Yep,” said Salmon. “Cap’n Brown’s home for three minutes, and we already got our marching orders. He ain’t gonna be very happy when he finds out about Lyman, though.”
“I don’t know,” Watson said. “The Old Man’ll set it right. He has a way with Negroes.”
Mr. Clarke laughed. “Your old man has a way with white folks, too,” he said, his spectacles glinting like mica in the morning sun. “Talked me into giving him more credit than I ever give a poor man nowadays.”
“You’ll get your money,’ I said. “Don’t fret yourself”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see, Red. We’ll see how them pelts and fleeces add up,” he said, and handed me a stub of a pencil and the bill of lading, which I signed with a surly flourish, John Brown, by his son Owen Brown, and as I wrote the date, I realized that tomorrow was Father’s birthday.
I was twenty-seven that spring. When Father was my age, he had been married for nearly a decade and had fathered four children. His wife, my mother, had not yet died. When he was my age, he had already made himself a professional surveyor, had established a successful tannery that employed two grown men and four or five boys, had built a house, raised a herd of blooded sheep, cleared twenty acres of hardwood forest and carved a farm out of the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. He had founded a settlement school, and when he was my age, at a time when most respectable white people preferred that folks show slavery their blind eye, he had publically pledged his life to its overthrow. At twenty-seven, he knew what he stood for, what he could and could not do. At my age, Father had become in all visible ways a man.
And here was I, still a boy. How was that possible? In what crucial ways was my nature so different from his that our lives and works would diverge by this much?
John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story—we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God. That was the difference between us and our father. We had him for a father, and he had someone else.
His father, like ours, had taught his son John to be independent of all men, but Grandfather had included himself, the teacher, amongst them. He, too, like Father, had told the story of Abraham and Isaac to his eldest son, but he had told it in such a way that it was not about the nature of obedience or sacrifice; it was about the nature of God. Grandfather Brown was a gentle, rational man whose greatest difficulty was in accommodating his character to a cruel and inexplicable universe, and unlike his son, he was not bound by a lifelong struggle to overcome his own willfulness and vanity. It’s their own secret struggles that shape the stories people tell their children. And had I been blessed with a son of my own, the story would have been told yet a third way. The central figure in it would have been neither Abraham nor God. It would have been Isaac, and the questions my story asked and answered would have been Isaac’s alone.
I would have told my son that Isaac’s father, Abraham, rose up early in the morning and led Isaac up into the mountain of Moriah, claiming that he had been directed to do this by God, in order there to make a sacrifice unto Him. And Isaac believed his father, for he loved him and had never known him to lie. And when they had reached the mountaintop and Isaac’s father had clave the wood for the burnt offering and Isaac saw no lamb there, the boy spoke unto Abraham, his father, saying, “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” And his father said unto Isaac, “God will provide a lamb.” But when Isaac saw his father come forward with a rope and a knife in his hands to bind and slay him upon the altar they had built together, he understood that he himself was to be the lamb. He was afraid and asked himself, Did he love his father so greatly that he could not flee from Moriah back into Canaan, where lay his aged mother, Sarah, or that he could not follow his father’s bondswoman Hagar and her son, Ishmael, who was his brother, into the wilderness of Beersheba? He said to his father, “I heard not this command from God. It comes to me only from thee, and thou art not the Lord, nor canst thou speak for Him. For thou hast taught me that, and I have believed it, and therefore now I must flee from this place, or else abandon all that thou hast taught me.” Whereupon his father fell down upon the ground and said that an angel of the Lord was calling to him out of heaven, saying, “Abraham, Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son from me.” And Isaac showed his father where behind him a ram had been caught in a thicket by his horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of Isaac, and father and son prayed together, giving thanks unto the Lord, and descended together from the mountain feeling wise and greatly blessed by the Lord. That is the story I would tell.
In the evening, after supper, Father bade me give him my views regarding Lyman’s decision to live away from us. I knew that he had already spoken with Lyman himself that same afternoon in Timbuctoo and had heard his version, and that he had obtained Mary’s view of the matter as well. The former I knew nothing about, for I had not spoken with Lyman myself since the day he departed from us; the latter I knew to be one of placid, unquestioning acceptance: as far as Mary was concerned, Lyman had decided that he and Susan could live more naturally on their own land among their own people, that was all. “And perfectly understandable, too,” Mary said, when Father raised the subject. “Especially after the disappointment of the baby.” We were all gathered in the parlor, where Father was preparing to lead us in prayer.
“Yes. The baby” he said, closing his eyes and looking down as if to pray for its soul. We stood in silence for a moment, and the soul of the infant born dead did seem to flit through the room and then swiftly disappear. That was how it was whenever Father was present—the entire spirit world was strangely enlivened. Then Father said, “I urged them today to come here and retrieve its body and re-bury it properly in the Negro burying ground over there. I assume they’ll do it tomorrow. But before they do, I want to know how it goes between you, Owen, and Mister Epps in particular. And with all the Negroes, too, not just him. I perceive a point of strain, a serious weakness in our relations with them, son. And I believe that you are the fault,” he said. “Give me simply your views on why they’ve separated from us and, a thing which distresses me much more, why the Underground Railroad no longer runs through this valley. The two are obviously
connected.”
Everyone in the family looked at me, except for Father, who had opened his Bible and appeared to be studying tonight’s reading from the Scriptures. “Yes, probably they are connected,” I said. “No other whites in the settlement are willing to carry fugitives north. They are as cowardly as ever. More so, of course, since the Fugitive Act. And the Negroes themselves dare not try it, either. Except for Lyman. But Lyman chooses not to enlist our aid anymore, and he has no wagon, not even a single horse or mule. So there it is. No one goes north anymore, unless on foot, and that apparently has discouraged the conductors below from sending fugitives on to North Elba. Instead, they take the greater risk of sending folks by way of the Lake Champlain route and the Rochester-to-Niagara route.”
“Well, that’s been taken care of Father said. “I’ve today written to Mister Douglass and a person in Utica whom I cannot name. Service will resume shortly. But you still haven’t told me your view of Mister Epps’s departure from us.”
“What did he tell you himself?”
“He would say nothing on the subject.”
“Nothing?”
“No, nothing, Owen.”
“Then I can say nothing, either.”
He looked up and studied my face for a long moment. I remember the sound of Grandfather’s clock ticking. Then he said, “Very well, Owen. It shall remain between you and Mister Epps. Let us pray, children.” And in his usual manner, he began to pray.
It was only a matter of days before the Old Man had the farm up and running again—which pleased me, of course, but alloyed my pleasure at the same time with a measure of guilt. A few days more, and he had resumed service on the Underground Railroad between Timbuctoo and Canada, an activity which of necessity I joined. But sullenly at first, I confess, for its resumption was based on Father’s having re-established his old close and trusting relations with Lyman and the other Negroes of the settlement. Within a few short weeks, it was as if the Old Man had never left. He returned to preaching every second or third Sabbath at the Congregational Church in North Elba, a church he nonetheless would not formally join, and he undertook once again to conduct his weekly class on the Bible, which was attended by sometimes as many as a dozen men and women of the village, white and black. He happily approved of young Henry Thompson’s wish to marry Ruth and used it as an opportunity to bridge the distance that had marred relations between our two families, bringing the Thompsons into the abohtionist fold once again, and where the Thompsons went, many other local families went as well.
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