Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Who are all this glorious hand?

  Alleluia! Hark, they sing,

  Praising loud their heavenly King!

  Towards evening, Oliver came marching proudly into camp with his old Kentucky rifle in one hand and, in the other, four fat prairie chickens, low-flying ground birds somewhat like our partridges, which he delivered over to Wealthy and Ellen, two to each woman. After praising the lad in such a way as to goad the rest of us to go and do likewise every day from here on out—”For I have seen considerable game on our way here,” the Old Man said—he then bade us all to cease our labors now and follow him out to the knoll, where he had earlier laid the mysterious pine box. Even John, with Salmon and Oliver half-carrying him, was obliged to come out to the windy hilltop.

  Now, I thought, now each of us will be given his own Sharps rifle! I had come to despise my old muzzle-loader: it didn’t suit my fantasies or my intentions in the least; it was a boy’s smooth-bore gun, suitable mainly for shooting birds and raccoons; I wanted a weapon that would let me slay men. I wanted one of the famous new-style, breech-loading Sharps rifles that fired with deadly accuracy ten times a minute. Manufactured in the armory at Harpers Ferry, they were the so-called Beecher’s Bibles which that winter had commenced appearing all over Kansas in the hands of the more radical Free-Soilers. First sent out in crates marked Bibles by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s congregation in Brooklyn, New York, they were being purchased and shipped to the Free-Soil settlers now by churches all over the East. I was sure Father would not have come out without at least one case of weapons from the Church of the Holy Rifles—he was not in Kansas, after all, to farm.

  But when we had all gathered there on the knoll, I saw that, sometime during the day and without my having observed him, Father had dug a deep hole in the ground next to the box, and for the first time I began to see that it was perhaps not a crate of Sharps, but something else, for the box resembled nothing so much as a finely carpentered coffin. Father looked down the line of us and reached out and drew Jason and Ellen forward to the center, where he stood, so that the three of them were now standing before the box, and at that I understood finally what was inside the box and why we were gathered out here.

  The sky was darkening down in the east and cream-colored in the west, and the chilled, late afternoon breeze blew into our faces. Without looking at any one of us, staring instead down at the box before him, Father said, “Children, when I rode out from the east I carried with me a whole set of maps. A whole passel of maps, and overlapping they were, and one of’em, Jason, was sent to me by you, as you know. That was the very detailed map that led me to the grave that you dug in slaveholding territory, where you wrapped in a blanket the body of your poor little boy, Austin, and buried him whose soul has now gone on to God in heaven. But whose body lay buried in Missouri soil.

  “Among my other maps, Jason and Ellen, and above all of them, the master map, as it were, is the one that guides them all—the map that is given to me by the Bible. It is God Almighty’s plan of these United States, which I carry with me wherever I go, and on that map this Kansas Territory is still free and will remain free so long as I draw breath. Children, I mean to lay those two maps over one another, Jason’s very detailed drawing of where his child lies buried, and God’s equally detailed plan, and align them.” He then looked straight at Jason and Ellen and said to them, “I know, my children, that you were surrounded by the enemy back there in Missouri and were afraid therefore and were maybe somewhat confused as to what was fitting and proper. I don’t mean to scold or upbraid you, children, but I myself could not abandon that boy’s body in slaveholding territory.

  “I went there to my grandson’s grave, to pray over it, as you asked me to do, but then, when I had completed my prayers for his soul, I realized that I could not tolerate the thought of anyone with my blood and name lying under a little wooden cross in a potter’s field in a slave state. The very thought of it enraged me. So I retrieved Austin Brown’s body from that tainted ground, and Henry and I built it a proper coffin and placed it inside and put it into my wagon, and now we have carried it here to Kansas, where men and women and children are not chattel, here to bury it properly, here to place and mark his gravesite on God’s map of this land and not Satan’s!”

  Then, with the darkness coming slowly on, Father handed ropes to Henry Thompson and me, which we draped beneath the pine box, and holding to them, we lowered the coffin slowly into the earth. Jason and Ellen held each other and wept. Wept with grief, but I am afraid also with shame. For Father had shamed them terribly with what he had done.

  When the box had gone down into the hole, we filled the hole with dirt and moved from the gravesite one by one in a kind of confused browse, as if we were both reluctant and eager to get away from it. Last to leave were Father and Jason and Ellen, and I heard him say to them, “Tomorrow you will make a cross with your boy’s name and dates on it. And you will set it at the head of the grave, there,” he pronounced, and placed his foot firmly on the ground at the place beneath which he knew the boy’s head lay. Directly, then, he departed from the knoll, leaving Jason and Ellen alone at the gravesite. Thus ended the harsh, sullen division between Jason and his Ellen and the rest of us. We were all one family again.

  Chapter 18

  And yet I felt, in a new, peculiar, or maybe just unfamiliar way, alone again. Not an isolato, as I am now, or merely lonely, as I had been before Kansas, but solitary in the way of the devious Iago in the famous play about the Moor by William Shakespeare. Iago is the man who remains, no matter how crowded the stage, incommunicado, unknown, locked inside himself as if inside a dungeon. And while, certainly, in all matters I did as Father wished, I nonetheless became under him in Kansas, like Iago, my own man. Not Father’s. Father was my white-skinned Othello.

  We did not go straight to war against the Border Ruffians. We could not, due to John’s lingering illness and the need to set our tattered, windblown camp straight and make rudimentary householding possible. Also, at that time the Border Ruffians were still holding their fire and were confronting us and our Free-Soil neighbors with little more than loud, drunken talk and empty threats. The Kansas War was something that was happening mostly in the newspapers of the Southern states and back East. And for a spell Father seemed more intent upon finding surveying work for himself than in leading us into battle against the slavers, and consequently he spent a considerable amount of time away from Browns Station, in Topeka and Lawrence and up on the Ottawa Reserve, surveying town sites and claims and marking the borders of the Indian territory.

  It was a good place and time to be a surveyor. There was much confusion and controversy then concerning the settlers’ claims and legal title to lands, thanks to the rapid influx of impoverished squatters and the large-scale purchases of land by outside speculators like the New England Emigrant Aid Society, whose shareholders, despite their stated ambitions to settle Kansas with Free-Soilers and keep the West from becoming part of the Slavocracy, were in it to make a profit and did not mind if they made it off Indian land, government land, or land claimed by some poor grubstaker from Illinois with a single, sorry ox and a wife and five hungry children, a man too illiterate to register his claim properly.

  To the east and south of Browns Station, the Southerners for months had been pouring across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into the territory in ever greater numbers than the Free-Soilers. Not three miles from us there were slaves owned. With the encouragement and connivance of their dough-faced President, Franklin Pierce, the pro-slavers had already elected themselves a bogus legislature and governor situated in Leavenworth and had passed their disgusting “black laws” which made it a crime to read and write or even think and speak as we Browns did every day of our lives, laws which we now took special pleasure in breaking every chance we got, not only to express our contempt for them, but also to goad the Ruffians into trying to enforce their laws, which, so far, they had been reluctant to do. We, of course, had few
dealings with them, anyhow, and did business mostly with folks who were allied with us, especially those who, like us, counted themselves radical abolitionists, at that time a distinct minority even amongst the Free-Soilers. Even so, most of our presumed allies, like most Northerners then, were as anti-Negro as they were anti-slavery: they wanted to keep Kansas soil free, all right, but free and white. To them, slavery was little more than an unfair labor practice imported from the South.

  In his capacity as surveyor, despite his politics and principles and his usual inability to keep them to himself, the Old Man nonetheless passed unimpeded through the lands controlled by the pro-slavers, for they were as eager as the Free-Soilers to ascertain the limits and extensions of their land-claims, certain as they were then of outnumbering us and fearful, therefore, only of our encroaching on their lands illegitimately. Father was just the scrawny old Yankee surveyor with his wagonload of instruments and lines traveling across the plains of eastern Kansas looking for work.

  Once again, as he had for a spell back in North Elba, the Old Man called himself Shubel Morgan. The name of John Brown was pretty famous by now and daily growing more so, especially out here, where he and his sons were known these days to be armed with Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers. He had indeed, as I’d hoped, lugged out from Ohio two unmarked crates that turned out to be packed with weaponry, and he had distributed a Sharps and a Colt revolver and a sharpened broadsword to each of us. All that winter into the spring, whenever we rode into Osawatomie or up to Lawrence for supplies or to send mail and messages east, we brandished our new weapons, like our politics and principles, with unabashed pride, and soon all around the region John Brown and his sons came to be regarded by both sides as potentially troublesome.

  As the surveyor Shubel Morgan, however, and with his rifle and Colt and broadsword tucked out of sight in the wagon box, Father was able to put himself on friendly terms with most everyone he met. Thus did he quickly gain wonderful intelligence of the meandering rivers and sparkling creeks, the densely wooded gullies, washes, ravines, and gorges that criss-crossed the vast, grassy plains like the lines of a flattened hand. Also, he learned the names and locations of the cabins of every pro-slave settler in the region and in short order knew them as well as the names and locations of the Free-Soil settlers. He observed and tallied up the pro-slavers’ weaponry, too, and the number of horses they had, and he discerned something of their general character, which he thought little of. “Cowards” he reported, “and drunkards. Illiterate, ignorant fools with no taste for a real fight, unless it’s over a woman or a jug of corn liquor.”

  There was down on the Pottawatomie River, not far from Browns Station, a particularly nettlesome settlement of Border Ruffians that Father liked to complain of, the Shermans, the Doyles, and the Wilkinsons, our nearest neighbors, in a sense, although to call them neighbors was a gift, for they despised us as much as we them. They were landless farmers who’d drifted up from the Southern hillcountry and built tippy, dirt-floored cabins where they made their babies—angry, poor, ignorant people who took their greatest pleasure in puffing up their sense of their own worth by making drunken threats of violence against Northern abolitionists and against us Browns especially. So far, they had not delivered on any of their threats, and none of us thought they could stay sober long enough to carry it off.

  There were not many Negro slaves in the region, half a hundred perhaps, rarely more than one or two attached to a single owner, as most of these pro-slavers, like our Pottawatomie neighbors, were failed, landless farmers come out from Tennessee and Missouri and parts of the deeper South, many of them without families, even, and with almost no livestock. And Father was right, there was amongst all of them a surprisingly high proportion of reprobates, whiskey-sellers, thieves, prostitutes, tramps, gamblers, scamps, and other parasites who had followed the Southern settlers as if they were a conquering army instead of a migrating mob of ignorant farmers desperate for cheap land.

  In fact, the motives of the pro-slavers for coming out to Kansas were no less mixed than those of us Free-Soilers: like us, they had come for land, for pecuniary advancement, and to wage war over slavery, usually in that order. And, to be truthful, their wild, violent, racialist, and pro-slavery rhetoric was no more incendiary than ours. The difference between the two sides was that, whereas their rhetoric was Satan’s, ours was the Lord’s. They shrieked at us from Satan’s camp, and we trumpeted back from the Lord’s.

  That is how Father saw it. We were not superior to the pro-slavers by virtue of our intrinsic morality or our intelligence or our farming and animal husbandry skills or our weapons or even our courage, he daily preached to us. No, we were made superior solely by virtue of Him whom we had chosen to follow. The stinking darkness of institutionalized slavery had made the Southerners into a foul and corrupt people. It had stolen their souls and had made them followers of Satan. For centuries, they had resided in a permanently darkened pit, and thus, to them, the world was a dimmed, low, pestilential place. We, however, when we gazed onto the world, we stood as if on a peak bathed in the bright light of freedom, which enabled us to see the true nature of man, and therefore, simply by following our own true nature, we were able to follow the Lord God Almighty. And after much scrupulous examination, having confidently discerned the Lord’s will, we naturally had determined to make all men and women free. If, to accomplish that great task, we must put to death those who would oppose us, then so be it: it is the will of the Lord: and in this time and place, He hath no greater work to set before His children than that they stamp upon the neck of Satan and crack the jaw of his followers and liberate all the white and black children of the Lord from the obscene stink and corruption of slavery. Simply, if we would defeat Satan, we must first defeat his most heinous invention, which was American Negro slavery.

  I believed this. All of us at Browns Station believed it, regardless of the differences amongst us regarding religion. In our little army of the Lord, John and Jason were positioned at one extreme, freethinkers, downright agnostical skeptics; and at the other were poor Fred, tormented by his visions of a punishing God who now spoke to him personally on a regular basis, and Father, who appeared to believe that he himself was sometimes allowed to speak for God; the rest of us fell in between the two extremes at various places, which felt temporary, like stops for rest on a long journey. Nevertheless, every one of us, even the women, Wealthy and Ellen, and our brother-in-law Henry Thompson, believed that we were now about to devote our lives to the very best work we could imagine, so that if God indeed existed, it was His work that we would be doing here. And if God did not exist, then it did not matter. For, regardless of our differences, all of us believed in a law higher than any passed by a bogus or even an authentic and legal legislative body of men, and belief in that higher law required us to dedicate our lives to the overthrow of chattel slavery and racialism. And perhaps it was only chance that had placed us here in Kansas, or maybe Father was right and it was in the end God’s will, but either way, here we were, situated precisely where the battle could no longer be avoided, where the enemy had pitched his tent virtually in our very dooryard, and where we would be obliged to rise up at last and slay him.

  My older brothers saw that and trembled with fear or sadly anticipated grief. Although he accepted its inevitability, Jason, especially, did not want war. The man was preternaturally sensitive to the suffering of others and could barely watch the slaughter of a hog, but even he no longer believed that there was a way to end slavery without killing people. He, more than any of the rest of us, had originally come out to Kansas strictly to farm. He had even brought along cuttings from his Ohio vines and eight sapling fruit trees, and while the rest of us sharpened our swords and ran bullets for our revolvers and Sharps repeaters and attached bayonets to long poles, Jason merely watched with a terrible sadness in his eyes, planted his vines and little trees in the newly thawed ground, and kept mostly to himself. His wife, Ellen, and John’s wife, Wealthy, were natu
rally as reluctant for us to go to war as was Jason, but the women, too, knew that it could not be avoided now, unless the Lord Himself intervened, and there was no sign of that. They seemed to accept it as their fate, although Ellen was starting to talk about returning to Ohio in the autumn, with or without Jason, if fighting broke out.

  Brother John had always been an anti-slavery firebrand, certainly, but he was also an ambitious, somewhat worldly man and still seemed to hold out hopes for a political victory, as we would soon have in the territory a sufficient number of Free-Soilers to establish a legitimate Free-Soil legislature and governor of our own and pass an anti-slavery territorial constitution that would get Kansas admitted to the Union as a free state. Well-spoken and more educated than the rest of us, John had it in his mind to get elected to the Free-Soil legislature in Topeka. There was a significant number of radical abolitionist settlers in and around Osawatomie and Lawrence who were eager to support him, and every day hundreds of Eastern radicals who honored the name of John Brown were coming down into the territory by way of the new Iowa-Nebraska trail, settlers who back home had regularly read The Liberator and The Atlantic Monthly and would be proud to vote out here for the son and namesake of Old John Brown, the famous abolitionist from New York State, friend and associate of the even more famous abolitionists Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Dr. Samuel Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  Salmon and Oliver both were hot-blooded boys eager to test their mettle in a good fight, and they had long ago grown used to following, if not Father himself, then me. They were wholly reliable, therefore.

  That left to constitute our little army only Henry Thompson and brother Fred. Henry was newly married to Ruth, his wife back in North Elba residing during his absence with the Thompson clan, but despite that—because he believed in Father’s wisdom and moral clarity even more than Father’s natural sons did—if the Old Man let him, Henry would follow him straight into the jaws of hell. And then there was Fred, poor, wild Fred, whose dreams and visions seemed to have become so thoroughly intermingled with his daily reality that he thought we had already gone to war against Satan: with Fred, the main difficulty for us lay in holding him in check until such time as we needed him to start firing his Colt and laying about with one of the terrible, ancient, double-edged broadswords that Father had brought out with him from the East and which Fred wore strapped to his waist day and night.