Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  “We don’t know that,” John coolly answered.

  “Well, then, you’re welcome to stay put until you do!” the Old Man snapped, and he leapt to the ground and took the bridle of Reliance from me and signaled for us to depart. At once, Oliver drew the wagon back onto the muddy road, and we headed at a gallop northward across the darkening plain towards Lawrence.

  I remember two more meetings out on the road that night, before we went to Pottawatomie and did the terrible things there. The first was a rider who had been sent down to Osawatomie from Lawrence by the Free-State authorities, Colonel Lane and Mr. Robinson. He was a screw-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, his horse all lathered from the long ride, and he at first mistook us for the advance contingent of the Osawatomie Rifles and thought that Father was John himself, Lieutenant Brown.

  “No, I am Captain Brown;’ Father said to the lad. “His superior officer and his father. What news have you?”

  The Osawatomie Rifles, the boy said, were instructed by Colonel Lane to return to their homes and not to come on to Lawrence.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it’s all over, sir. No need to come in now, Cap’n Brown. And they ain’t got any food, except barely enough for the folks as is already there. President Pierce’s federal troops are running the entire town,” he said. “They come in and parleyed awhile with the Missourians and sent ’em back peaceful.” The Free-State leaders, he explained, had decided not to oppose Colonel Buford and his four hundred Border Ruffians when they first appeared at the edge of town, and the Southerners had then proceeded to ride into the town and sack it. They had broken up all the printing presses and had gotten drunk on as much whiskey as they could find and had burned several stores and even shot the Free-State Hotel full of holes with a cannon. “But they didn’t kill nobody, Cap’n Brown. They just did whatever they wanted, and all the folks stood in the street and watched ’em like it was a circus, and then the Federals come down from Leavenworth and got ‘em to agree to head back to Atchison.”

  The boy smiled, as if he had brought glad tidings, but his news made Father crazy, and when the Old Man drew out his revolver and started waving it around, I thought he might shoot the boy. Instead, he leapt down from his horse and seized the lad by his collar and dragged him off the road a short ways into the high grasses, where he shouted into his face that he would put a bullet in the boy’s head here and now if he was not who he said he was and if what he had told us was a lie. “Because it sounds like a perfect lie!” he declared. “Designed to hold us out of the battle!”

  The boy crumpled to his knees and began to cry, which seemed to soften the Old Man, or at least to convince him that the boy was not lying, for he holstered his gun and lifted the lad to his feet, brushed the mud from his trousers, and brought him back to us. Then he instructed him to ride on to where John and the Rifles were camped and give them his unfortunate news, which he was sure they, at least, would welcome. Glad to be released, the boy mounted his horse and left us at once.

  We ourselves did not know what to do then. Go on to occupied Lawrence, or ride back to our camp on the Marais des Cygnes, southeast of Osawatomie? Neither route took us where we had hoped to go, which was straight into the noise and smoke of battle. Ride back and pitch our tent with John and his Rifles and our pacificist brother, Jason? That seemed somehow shameful, embarrassing, at the least, although none of us said it outright. Our blood was all heated up; we could feel it coursing down our arms to our hands and pounding in our necks and ears. Even Oliver, I realized, as I looked up at him on the wagon box, was caught up in it: his hands were locked in white-knuckled fists, his boyish jaw was clenched tight as a vise; and Henry and my brothers Salmon and Fred, they, too, were poised to ride straight into battle.

  Father stood by the wagon alone and breathed heavily in and out, as if re-gathering his strength, like an ox after a long pull. Finally, I said to him, “I’m for riding into Lawrence and finding Colonel Lane and the others who are responsible for this betrayal. Then we should take them out and execute them for it. Put an end to this constant accommodation.” I meant it and, if Father had agreed, would have done it. But he did not agree.

  “No, no, this is not over yet,” he said. “Keep in mind the story of Joab, who slew Absalom, causing King David such a lamentation and dividing the Israelites against themselves, which greatly weakened them against their enemies. No, boys, we must let the Lord decide this.”

  “Decide what? Our cause is lost, Father! Lost without even a whimper from those cowards in Lawrence, and now the whole territory, it looks like, is ruled by Franklin Pierce’s soldiers. We’re ruled by Washington turncoats in league with the Atchison pro-slavers and Buford’s mob of Southerners.”

  “We might yet upset this neat arrangement. Something must be done, though. Something dramatic and terrible,” Father said, and when he said that word, “terrible,” I knew what he meant.

  “Who shall we do it to?” I asked. The others—Salmon, Fred, Oliver, and Henry—were silent and wondering; they did not yet know what Father and I were speaking of.

  “I guess it’ll have to be the Shermans and the Doyles and so on, the men down on the Pottawatomie!’ he said.

  “That’s fine. But we better do it quickly, while the hornets are out of the nest. Do you think Dutch Sherman and the Doyle men are at home anyhow? They might have ridden with Buford’s army.”

  Father thought not—they were pro-slave and anti-Negro, all right, and plenty loud about it, but they were family men and had their land claims already settled and had built cabins and weren’t likely to be running with that crowd. “We will go down there tonight” he said. “And we shall treat with the men only, and make quick, bloody work of it, whilst the surrender and the sacking of Lawrence are still in the air, so that everyone in the territory on both sides will know why it was done.”

  My brother-in-law, Henry Thompson, then spoke up. “Mister Brown, do you mean for us to Ml the Shermans and the Doyles?”

  “Yes, Henry, I do,” Father replied. “Boys, Owen has seen it straight. After the debacle in Lawrence, if we don’t do this, our cause here in Kansas is wholly lost, and lost without a fight.”

  “But do we have to kill these men? They don’t own any slaves. They’re just loudmouths.”

  Fred said, “Shut up, Henry! You have to do what Father says. He has spoken with the Lord all these years, and you haven’t. It’s what the Lord has told him to do.”

  “Are these men not our sworn enemies, boys?” Father asked. “Have they not hundreds of times sworn to kill us?”

  They all four nodded agreement—slowly and reluctantly, however. Henry said, “But we have never thought they would ever actually do it. I mean, kill us outright. You know, unless they were provoked or something.”

  “This will provoke them,” I said. “Either you’re with us on this, Henry, or you’re against us.”

  “What about John and Jason?” Salmon asked.

  “The choice hasn’t been put to them,” I said. “So they’re neither for nor against.”

  Father added that, as officers in the Free-State Militia, John and Jason were obliged to follow the orders of their superiors, even if their superiors ordered them to capitulate to the enemy, which, in a sense, they had already done. As irregulars, we were not so bound. Besides, John was a member of the Free-State legislature and had sworn to uphold the laws of the territory. The only laws we had sworn to uphold were the Lord’s.

  “And the Lord wants us to do this thing?” Fred asked.

  “He does,” Father pronounced.

  “Good,” Fred replied, and the others nodded agreement again, this time with firmness.

  This may seem strange to one who was not there on that May night out on the plain—to us it was apposite and just, and not at all strange—but at that moment, when we had reached our decision to go to the cabins on the Pottawatomie and kill the men who lived there, a single rider came out of the darkness from the direction of L
awrence, bringing news which, although it was awful news, seemed nonetheless to have been sent by the Lord Himself, sent with no other purpose than to give us permission to do this thing and do it now.

  Oddly, we did not hear him approach, perhaps because our attention was so taken up with our wrangle. He seemed to emerge from the darkness like a ghost—but it was only a man, a man in a long white duster, riding a pale gray stallion, and although we were startled by his sudden appearance, we were not frightened by it, as he seemed to bear us no enmity. We did not know him, had never seen him before, and he did not introduce himself or ask who we were. He was a tall, well-built man of early middle-age, blond-haired, with a full beard. I recall him exactly. He pulled up beside the wagon and touched the broad brim of his hat with a gloved finger.

  With no further greeting, he said to Father straight out, in an even voice, “You may wish to know, sir, that early yesterday it was reported in Saint Louis that Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber. You may also wish to know the name of his assailant, Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina. The senator from Massachusetts, a strong supporter of the abolitionist cause, which I take to be your cause as well, was beaten unmercifully by the Southerner. He was clubbed on the head with a stout cane, and it is very likely that he will not survive the attack.”

  I had never seen Father as wild as he was then. He pulled off his hat and threw it on the ground. His face reddened with rage, and his brow darkened down as if his brain were on fire. He lifted his arms into the air and cried, “How can this be! How can such a thing happen!”

  I said nothing, but the others, too, cried out their shock and anger at this latest outrage by the slavemasters. Then the messenger, if that is, indeed, what he was, said to us, “I bid you good evening, sirs” and, touching his hat a second time, rode slowly off, disappearing into the darkness as silently and swiftly as he had come.

  For a long while after that, Father and the boys acted crazy, as if trying to outdo one another in their ranting and their wild promises to avenge this heinous crime against one of our heroes. I waited until they began to calm somewhat, and when I thought they could hear me clearly, I said, “It’s time now to go down along the Pottawatomie, where we can sharpen our swords and commence to use them.”

  That silenced everyone, even Father, who seemed to break out of a trance. He shook his head violently, as if ridding it of evil spirits or bad dreams, and suddenly he was scrambling up on Reliance and shouting for Oliver to get the wagon moving. He took his own reins in his hands and slapped them against the flanks of the Morgans. The horses leapt forward, and Oliver was obliged to run and grasp onto the rear of the box and clamber aboard whilst it was moving. We watched for a minute longer, saying nothing, and then the others, Salmon, Fred, and Henry, mounted their horses—I had never got down from mine—and we took off at a full gallop, chasing after Father and Oliver, the wagon rumbling in the darkness ahead of us and ahead even of Father, racing along the rough old buffalo-track, the California Road, that led down from the heights of the Ottawa lands to the winding, narrow Cottonwood valley of the Pottawatomie.

  Who can say which event is accidental and which is not? Or even if there exists such a thing as a true accident, a purely causeless event? When you take away belief in God’s will, then every untoward event and every blessing is viewed as merely the result of history; or else its origin is said to be a mystery; or else we lamely and with extreme insecurity reason backwards from effect to cause—from consciousness of guilt, for instance, backwards to the sinful act. Thus, if my feelings of guilt were made a measure of my intention, I have to concede that, even though I was not aware of it at the time, I nonetheless fully intended to kill my beloved friend Lyman Epps and only arranged for it afterwards to resemble an accident, in my own eyes as much as in the eyes of others. And thus it would, indeed, be as I felt it (but did not believe it) afterwards—a crime. A murder. By the same token, by the weight of guilt, I fully intended to go down there along the Pottawatomie Creek that night with my father and brothers and haul five men who claimed to love slavery and hate Negroes out of their cabins and butcher them for the sheer, murderous pleasure of it. For afterwards that is how guilty I felt, as if I had done it for the pleasure of it.

  But if events are driven not by a man’s unconscious desires, and not by pure mystery, and not by some deep, unknown historical force—then what? After all, I was not obliged by circumstances or by any other man to go there with my sword and brandish it the way I did. No, I hold myself responsible for my own bloody acts. And I believe that I am further responsible, and to nearly the same degree, for the bloody acts that night of my father and brothers, too. For without my having instigated the attack and then goaded them when they grew timorous and frightened by the idea, they would not have done it.

  Simply, I showed them at the time and afterwards that if we did not slay those five pro-slave settlers and did not do it in such a brutal fashion, the war in Kansas would have been over. Finished. In a matter of weeks, Kansas would have been admitted to the Union as a slave-state, and there would have been nothing for it then but the quick secession of all the Northern states, starting with New England, and the wholesale abandonment of three million Negro Americans to live and die in slavery, along with their children and grandchildren and however many generations it would take before slavery in the South was finally, if ever, overthrown. There would have been no raid on Harpers Ferry, certainly, and no Civil War, for the South would not have objected in the slightest to the break-up of the Union. Let them go. We will happily keep our slaves.

  When we went down to the Pottawatomie, I believed all that. And in spite of my guilty feelings, I believe it still. No, I swear, I did not go down there for the pleasure of killing my enemies, nor did Father, nor my brothers, despite what the writers, North and South, puzzling over the causes of that event, have said in the intervening years. On that dark May night in ’56,1 truly thought that we were shaping history, that we were affecting the course of future events, making one set of events nearly impossible and another very likely, and I believed that the second set was morally superior to the first, so it was a good and necessary thing, what we were doing. We could slay a few men now, men who were guilty, perhaps, if only by association, and save millions of innocents later. That’s how terror, in the hands of the righteous, works.

  And we were right, after all. For it did work. The terror and the rage that we caused with those murders ignited the flames of war all across Kansas, to be sure, and all across the Southern states and in the North as well. We turned Kansas bloody. With a single night’s work, we Browns made the whole territory bleed. The Missourians came flying back across the river determined anew to kill every abolitionist in Kansas, and the Northerners were forced to return blow for blow, until both sides lost sight of the possibilities of a short-term peace and were instead engaged in a fight to the death. Which was exactly as Father and I and, to a lesser degree, the rest of us Browns wanted.

  If we had learned anything over the last decade, it was that there was no other way to defeat slavery, except with a willingness to die for it. We had learned what the Negroes long knew. And thus we merely did what the Negroes themselves had done over and over in the past—in Haiti, in the mountains of Jamaica, and in the swamps of Virginia—but could not do out there on the plains of Kansas. We did what we wanted the Negroes to do in Kansas. By slaying those five pro-slavers on the Pottawatomie that night, we placed hundreds, thousands, of other white men in the same position that we alone amongst the whites had held for years: for now every white man in Kansas, anti-slaver and pro-slaver alike, had to be ready to die for his cause.

  If Father wanted to believe that it was the Lord’s will we were enacting, fine. I had no argument with him on that, not anymore: out here, living our lives in public, what Father called the will of God I now called history. And if history, like the will of God, ruled us, then whatever moral dimension it possessed ca
me not from itself or from above, but from our very acts, and that it would show us our true fates, for good or for evil.

  That is why we killed those men.

  I remember we drew the wagon into a narrow cleft in the steep, rutted ridge on the north side of the trail, with the rain-filled creek below us on the left, the land claim and cabin of James Doyle of Tennessee a quarter-mile or so dead ahead, and the others, Sherman’s and Wilkinson’s, a short ways beyond. It was pitch dark, but we lit no torches. I instructed the boys and Father to hitch our horses here and place our rifles in the wagon and leave them, explaining that, as the three cabins we meant to strike were all within a half-mile of one another, we could not risk a gunshot. Then I handed out the heavy, razor-sharp broadswords, one to each. No one else spoke a word, not even Father.

  By the time we reached Doyle’s cabin, it was close to midnight, and the clouds had broken open, floating across the satiny sky like soldered rags. There was now a quarter-moon in the southeast quadrant, casting a shifting, eerie light, glazing gray the low trees and scrub alongside the trail. We could see the rough, pale wooden shingles of the roof of the cabin below, when suddenly we heard a low growl, and out of the shadows a pair of huge mastiff dogs came charging towards us, all fangs and ferocious, yellow eyes. With a single swipe of my sword I sliced the first animal across its neck and shoulder, and it fell dead at my feet, nearly decapitated. Fred struck at the other, injuring it in the haunch, sending it howling into the woods behind us, away from the cabin.

  Father, who had been next to me in the lead, stopped in his tracks. “Ah, we’re done for! The Doyles’ll be up and armed now.”

  “No,” I said. “Just keep moving fast; don’t hesitate. They’ll likely think the dogs are chasing deer. Come on!” and I stepped in front of him and jogged down the scumbly trail to the front door of the cabin. The shutters were bolted, with no light visible inside and no sign of life, except for a thick rope of silver smoke rising from the fireplace chimney. When the others, panting more from excitement and fear than from exertion, had arrived at the stoop with me, I reached forward and banged roughly on the door with the handle of my sword.