Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Mr. Williams said, “Listen, Browns, if I was one of you, Id find me a hole and stay in it till winter. Then maybe I’d light on out of Kansas and go back to the states. All across the territory now there’s going to be hell to pay. You damned Browns,” he declared, “you’re plain crazy. Even you, John. Jason, too. I like you and him well enough, but your name is Brown, and we can’t be under you no more. Not now,” he said, and clicked to his horse and went out from the camp to the crossing. There he took his place at the head of the gathering column of men, and when they were arranged in a military line, he led the troop down the road towards Osawatomie.

  Soon they were gone from sight, and we could no longer hear their hoofbeats. A crow circled overhead and cawed. Seconds later, another crow appeared beside it, and the two carved wide loops against the cloudless sky. Shortly, Jason returned from the river-bottom, looking aghast and pale, as if he had been gazing at the corpses of the five men we had slain barely three hours and five miles away from here. Fred moved back towards the wagon. John had not spoken once yet to Father or stepped from his spot by the dying fire.

  Father put a hand on my arm and said, “What d’ you thinks best now, son?”

  “Attack.”

  “You think so, eh?”

  “Worst thing we could do is what Mister Williams said, hide in a hole. We’re instruments of the Lord, are we not? So let the Lord lead us. To teach when it is unclean and when it is clean: this is the law,’“ I quoted to him.

  He made a small smile. “And if the plague be in the walls of the house!” he came back, “‘then the priest shall command that they take away the stones in which the plague is, and they shall cast them into an unclean place without the city.’“

  “Should we be stones cast out? When we can be the priest’s men, instead?”

  Father nodded, and then he called to Salmon, Oliver, Fred, and Henry, who leaned by the wagon. “Mount up, boys. We’re riding on over by Middle Creek a ways.”

  “What for?” Salmon asked.

  “To find us a camp where we can rest in peace a day.”

  “What then?” Henry wanted to know.

  “Then we’ll see some action. From here on out, we’re going to be on the attack, boys.”

  Jason sat down heavily on a nearby log and, placing his forehead against his knees, wrapped his head with his arms, as if hiding his father and brothers from his sight and hearing. John remained standing by the dwindled fire, all disconsolate and downcast.

  I said to him, “You coming?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “Jason?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You boys maybe ought to think about moving your wives and Tonny permanently into town or down to Uncle’s place!’ I told them. “It’s going to start getting plenty hot around here now,” I said, and climbed up on the wagon seat next to Oliver. Father had mounted Reliance and was out in front of the wagon. “Okay, Father,”I said to him. “Let’s move.”

  He nodded, and we rode off across a broad, high meadow north– west of the crossroad, away from our old settlement at Browns Station, away from the town of Osawatomie, away from poor John and Jason. I remember I turned in the wagon and peered back at them, and my elder brothers were standing with their arms around each other, as if both men were weeping and trying to console one another.

  I did not think then that what later happened to John and Jason would occur, but when it did, I was not surprised. By then, Father, Old Brown, had become the feared and admired Captain John Brown of Kansas, had become Osawatomie Brown, the victor of the Battle of Black Jack, the one nationally known hero of the Kansas War, and he was back in Boston, working his way across the entire Northeast, raising funds and making speeches to thunderous applause. And through it all, from that May day forward, the cold, silent man at his side, the large, red-bearded fellow with the gray eyes who spoke to no one but to Captain Brown himself, was me. My two elder brothers had been all but removed from Father’s life, and I had replaced them there.

  Chapter 20

  I’m trying to recall it: how I came to be knocking at the rough plank door of Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin in the nighttime; and when exactly it occurred, that same night or the next. Things happened so quickly back then that, although I can with ease summon them to my mind in sharp, vivid detail, sometimes their sequence blurs. But I do know that it was right after we had made our first secret campsite over on Middle Creek in amongst a clutch of black oak trees, and had slept awhile and rested our animals and prepared our weapons for battle, that I went to my uncle’s cabin. I have no diary at hand, for none of us kept one, and of course I have no calendar from those days. But I do remember that, towards the end of our first night in camp, while the others were sleeping, on Father’s orders I rode one of Dutch Sherman’s liberated horses out to the Osawatomie Road, intending to slip into town under cover of darkness to be sure that Jason’s wife, Ellen, and John’s Wealthy and little Tonny were safely ensconced with friends there.

  Yes, it was not until the second night that I made it over to the Adair cabin. For, when we had first got to Middle Creek, the boys, Oliver, Salmon, Fred, and Henry Thompson, were exhausted—oddly so, it seemed to me, despite the fact that we had all been awake for nearly forty hours straight, for Father and I were not in the slightest fatigued. Quite the opposite: he and I were exhilarated and filled with new and growing plans and stratagems for raiding and terrorizing the Border Ruffians and pro-slave settlers. The boys, though, were all but useless, at least for a while, until they could begin to put the killings behind them. Fred wept, and he declared again and again that he could not stand to do any more work such as that, and Oliver wrapped himself in his blanket on the ground and would not speak to any one of us, while Salmon and Henry huddled together and read in their Bibles.

  Father sat on the ground beside Fred and said to him, “God will forgive thee, son. I have prayed and listened with all my mind and heart to the Lord, and I know that we have done His will in this business. You can let your conscience rest, son” he said, and stroked poor Fred and comforted him tenderly, while I went to the other boys and made my rough attempt to do the same, although they were not inclined to be comforted by me or Father and in a listless way said for us to just leave them be, they were tired and wished only to sleep.

  So while the others slept or sulked or read, Father and I busied ourselves throughout the afternoon into the evening, constructing a crude lean-to of brush and a corral for the horses; and after dark, when we dared finally to set a small fire, we made a little wicker weir and caught and cooked us some small fish from the creek and ate and talked in low voices until late. Father was worried, I remember, about the women and Tonny, his only grandson, and when I volunteered to go into town to be sure they were safe, he at first said no, it was too dangerous, but I persisted, and finally he relented and gave the order. He said he would write some letters and send them with me and that I should try to get them to Uncle Sam Adair, his brother-in-law, for posting. “I want to have my own say-so on this business,” he said. “To get the truth out, before folks hear erroneous reports of it first. I don’t want the family at home fearing for our lives. Or for our souls, either;’ he added.

  I agreed and said that I would also try to speak with John and Jason, to see if they would now change their minds and come in with us, for we would be much stronger with them than we were without. “True. True enough,” Father said. “But remember, son, it’s we who have made the blood sacrifice. They haven’t. This war’s no longer the same for us as it is for them.”

  I asked if he thought they might betray us, for Jason was at bottom pacifistic and John a political man, but he assured me they would not: he had asked the Lord how he should treat with them, and the Lord had told him to trust all his sons equally. “The Lord saith, ‘Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.’” He often spoke of the Lord
in this familiar way, for it was around this time that Father had begun his practice, later much commented upon, of withdrawing from camp to commune alone with God, more or less in the manner of Jesus, for long hours at a time, returning to us clear-eyed and energetic, full of intention and understanding. I can’t say what that was like for him, whether he was during those hours an actual mystic or was merely deep in solitary prayer, but the practice brought him a piercing clarity and a regularly freshened sense of purpose, which suited my private desires ideally, so I did not question it.

  “You may ask them if they wish to join us here under my command,” he told me. “But don’t press them on it, Owen. I don’t want to force them into choosing against us. A time will come,” he said, “when events and the cruelties of men will bring them over on their own, and when that happens, John and Jason will prove our strongest allies.”

  He drew out his writing kit and for an hour or so was absorbed in writing several letters, one to Mary and the children in North Elba, I later saw, and others to Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, and hurried me out of camp then, instructing me to return quickly, for we would now be obliged to return to action at once, so that the other boys could get the Pottawatomie killings behind them, he explained.

  “They’ll need to stare some of these slavers in the face again and relearn what sort of beast we’re dealing with here.”

  It turned out that, for the moment, at least, all was calm in Osawatomie: Ellen and Wealthy and Tonny had on their own fled our decrepit tents and half-built cabins at Browns Station for the town, evidently on the advice of friends who had heard about the Pottawatomie killings. I spoke briefly there with Wealthy at the door of the little house owned by the Days, distant relatives of hers from Ohio. It was close to dawn, still dark, and I had come in stealthily on foot, with my mount left hidden in a grove of trees by the west ford of the river, and had knocked quietly at the door, waking the dog, which someone inside quickly shushed.

  Then I heard Wealthy’s voice on the other side of the door: “No one’s here but women and children,” she announced.

  “It’s me, Owen. Are you all right?”

  “I can’t let you in. The Days are very afraid.”

  “I understand. Father just wants to know that you’re safe.” Opening the door a crack, she showed me in a slat of candlelight her worried, pale face and said, “We’re safe, so long as we keep from you boys and Father Brown.”

  I asked her then if John and Jason were out with Uncle at his cabin, but she said that she could not tell me. I knew then that they were with Uncle. They were safe, she said, but in hiding. The Ruffians burned Browns Station to the ground this very night, she said, and stole all they could carry. Among the Free-State people, John’s and Jason’s innocence was well-known, she told me, but no one was eager to risk protecting them. “Please stay away from them, Owen, until this thing calms down,” she pleaded.

  I said that I understood her fears and that my report back to Father would comfort him, and, bidding her good night, slipped out of town and reached my horse without being seen. All that day, I hid in the tall grasses atop a rise out by the road to Lawrence, with my horse grazing well out of sight in a nearby ravine, and watched riders in the distance heading back and forth between Osawatomie and Lawrence—hectic armed men of both sides gathering in bands to search for us: one side, the Free-Staters, to capture us and no doubt turn us over at once to the federal authorities as a peace gesture; the others, pro-slave marauders, to shoot us on the spot. And I knew that there would soon be a third side: federal troops from Forts Leavenworth and Scott, sent on orders from the President himself to capture us and march us up to Lecompton for trial or else to turn a blind eye, as they had done so many times before, and hand us over to the Ruffians and let them avenge themselves on us.

  When darkness had fallen, I rode down to the Lawrence Road and turned east towards town and sometime after midnight pulled up before the Adair cabin. I was frightened, certainly, but I was unattached and free, and all manner of men were trying to kill me: I was like a hawk or a lone wolf or a cougar. No one had a claim on me but Father, and though he did not know it, his claim had been given him by me, so that, in a crucial sense, the claim was reversed and was mine, not his at all.

  The cabin, a two-room log structure that had been serving as Uncle’s parsonage until he could get a proper house finished in town next to his church, was dark and appeared abandoned, for there was no smoke rising from the chimney. I knocked on the door, but no one answered, so I knocked again, but still no one answered. There were no horses about and no dog. Maybe the Adairs have fled, too, I thought, and knocked again, loudly, and called, “Uncle! It’s Owen here! I’m alone, Uncle!”

  “Get away!” my uncle shouted back from inside the cabin, startling me. “Get away as quick as you can!”

  “I just want to talk some with John and Jason.”

  “No! You endanger our lives! They won’t speak with you. You and your father have made them into madmen.”

  I told him then to unbar the door and let me see for myself how mad they were, but he said he would not and told me again to leave at once. “You are a vile murderer, Owen, a marked man!” he said.

  “Good,” said I. “Because I intend to be a marked man!” And stepping away from the door, I mounted my horse and headed off down the road again, west and then south to our camp on Middle Creek, where I knew Father and the others were impatiently awaiting my return. Father, at least, would be impatient, for I was sure that he would not commence raiding without me. The others I could not be so sure of. For we had all been changed.

  John, as I later learned, went insensible and nearly mad and remained so for many months, even while a prisoner of the United States Army, his condition having been exacerbated greatly by the terrible cruelties inflicted upon him by the soldiers after they captured him, hiding nearly naked and babbling, in the gorse bushes several miles behind Uncle’s cabin, where, following my brief visit, his delusions had chased him. Jason declined into a passive, self-accusing grief, which, though it later passed and he did indeed, finally, although only for a while, come over to our side in the war, drove him actually to seek out and surrender himself to the United States troops. His release was quickly arranged, unlike John’s, which took until the following spring. I think Jason’s personal safety and the safety of his wife, Ellen, were his main concerns and motives in all that he did from then on, for as soon as he was able, he sent Ellen back to Ohio, along with Wealthy and Tonny, and well before the end of the Kansas War followed them there himself.

  Oliver and Salmon shortly came round to their normal senses, as did Henry Thompson, but they, too, were different people than before: they were warriors now, men who no longer questioned first principles or premises or Father, and consequently they fought like young lions, as if every new war-like act were an erasure, a justification, of the Pottawatomie killings. Thus it was for them no longer so much a matter of making Kansas a free state as it was of killing and terrorizing the pro-slavers, purely and simply. Strategy, long-range goals, overall plans—these were not their concern. For them, the war was merely a day-to-day killing business, work organized and laid out by Father and me, as if we were laying out farmwork in North Elba.

  As for Fred, poor Fred: he was now even more wildly religious than before, and if Father was not an actual mystic and speaking privately with his God (which, as I said, he may well have been), Fred surely was. Happily, however, Fred’s God merely confirmed what Father’s was saying and released him to follow Father’s orders with murderous enthusiasm.

  Father was changed, too. It soon became clear, and surprised even me—perhaps especially me—that Pottawatomie had been a great gift to him: for it returned him to his purest and in many ways most admirable self, the old, fervent, anti-slavery ideologist, and added to it a new self, one that up to now had existed only in his imagination: the brilliant tactician and leader of men at war. All his years of studying the science of war sud
denly came into play and of necessity were being put to good use out here on the rolling plains of southeastern Kansas. And with each new military success, from the Pottawatomie killings on, with Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie and all the lesser raids and ambushes and breathless escapes from our pursuers, his confidence swelled and his enthusiasm for the work increased, so that before long it was no longer required of me to goad or brace him in the least, and in fact I found myself barely able to keep pace with him. This was a most welcome development, for it restored to us our relationship of old. We were once again in proper balance. He was once again Abraham and I was Isaac.

  Yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, I myself was not changed by the Pottawatomie killings. No, I remained the same man who had migrated out to Browns Station from Ohio with his self-mutilated brother, the man who had watched in silence and did not stop his beloved friend from killing himself that day in Indian Pass, and who loved his friend’s wife in order not to love his friend. I was still very much he who had carved the farm in North Elba out of the wilderness while running escaped slaves north to Canada, the fellow who had sailed off to England and in the crossing found his heart and spirit uplifted and enlarged by a woman bearing a sorrow and a wound he did not wish to comprehend. I was still the man whose spirit one moment rose to the ceiling like a hymn in a Negro church and the next insinuated its way towards a perverse brawl in a nighttime park, the man who when still a boy humiliated himself and demeaned a poor Irish girl of the streets in the back alleys of Springfield: all the way back to the boy, the very boy, who stole his grandfather’s watch and lied about it and for his lies was made to chastize his father’s bare back with a switch: I remained him, too.

  Yet was it not due solely to this strict, stubborn persistence of my character that, in point of fact, I, too, was now a different man than I had been before? For I now inhabited a world in which I was no longer seen as the outcast, the grunting, inarticulate, crippled Owen Brown whom everyone easily loved but no one feared: a man not half the man his father was. If instead I now found myself twice the man my father was, as indeed betimes I did, it was not because I had changed but because, after the Pottawatomie killings, whether they were with us that night or not, my father and everyone else had changed.