by Norman Lock
I pictured the fire that burned atop the Pyramid of the Moon, where the Aztec priests offered the vitals of the sacrificed to the dread god Mictlantecuhtli. Time is woven with the bright and dismal threads of our kind’s darkest raptures into a serape worn in the Dance of the Dead.
“I would not look into his eyes,” I said pensively—an admonition intended as much for me as for the surgeon—the to-and-fro of whose rocking, I noticed irritably, was contrary to my own.
“No, I shan’t do so again,” replied Fenzil without the edge of ridicule with which he usually spoke to me.
He was skeptical of faith and, at the same time, liked to mock me for my manifest lack of it. I was, for him, a curiosity that would have graced the shelves of Thomas Mütter’s “museum” of grotesqueries, which, in Philadelphia, at the start of his career, Fenzil had tended—a collection as repulsive as P. T. Barnum’s. There, at Jefferson Medical College, he had met Edgar Poe. And there, he had assisted Dr. Mütter—yes, the same surgeon whose transfiguring knife you wished for. The circumference of a human life is indeed small.
“Do you have any sympathies for Brown?” I asked Fenzil, arresting him in mid-rock with my hand.
“I’ve been wrung dry of finer feelings,” he replied.
He got up from his rocker and walked across the street to the jailhouse—whether to talk to the guards or Brown, I couldn’t have guessed.
Whenever I could, I’d go off by myself. My mind was turning with outlandish ideas. Once entertained, ideas can’t be recalled, nor can one throw a cordon sanitaire around them. They are as contagious as a plague and will jump from one person to another like a flea from a dog. I spent hours loafing amid wild apple trees, their ripe fruit lately spilled onto the ground, causing, by heady decomposition, the air to smell like sour wine. I would lie there, a drunkard under the influence of the mind’s intoxicants—more potent than alcohol.
In a poem you sent me, the paper sutured with scarlet thread, as though the words were a wound, you wrote:
The Aspen leaves
Turn in the wind
From Dark to Light—
Light to Dark again.
None knows to what end
The Breaking Wheel turns—
Whether to convert—rend—
Or to mill us fine.
Was I born and, having been so, bound to discover in John Brown the reason for my life? Is God less powerful than the affinity by which we are held fast one to another? Are there designs that supersede His own? Does a human phenomenon like love exist beyond the Almighty’s power to repeal or to annul? If He exists, can we ever be free of Him? Will we ever come into our own as men and women—complete, self-sufficient, and, possessing all and wanting naught, content? Could I have said, as Walt Whitman wrote, “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing”?
Toward the end of the six weeks I was in Charles Town, I received a letter from Waldo Emerson, who had heard from your brother of my involvement in the affair.
Bush
Concord, Massachusetts
November 24, 1859
Dear Reverend Winter,
I have had news of you and your whereabouts from our mutual friend Austin Dickinson, who asks to be remembered to you. [Not a word of greeting from you, Emily!] We, the faction advocating the higher purpose for which, we believe, mankind was cast out from a placid, bovine existence before the Fall, are hoping—forlornly, as I can only suppose—that the great man John Brown will be pardoned. His life has been too bound up in what is best for our troubled race, to be sacrificed on the rude altar of vengeance.
He is that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.
I beg you to deliver my best wishes and sincerest regards to Mr. Brown. Tell him his friends in Amherst are praying for his liberty and exoneration. We were lifted up, as though by the hand of the Almighty, when he was last among us, at the Concord town hall, on May 8th last.
I am sending this letter to you, Robert, because I do not know if John is allowed mail.
I remain——
Your respectful correspondent,
R. Waldo Emerson
Thoreau had added a postscript for Brown in his skittish hand:
I think that for once the Sharpe’s rifles and the revolvers were employed for a righteous cause. Take heart, great soul!
Henry D. Thoreau
Also enclosed in the envelope was a poem by Daniel Ricketson that had recently appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican.
Still the warm current flows along his veins,—
His noble heart still beats to freedom true,
And finds a deep response where virtue reigns,—
His soul sublime, and calm as heaven’s own blue.
O thou who hold’st his life-blood in thy hands,
List to the voice of God that speaks within;
His life or death depends on thy commands,—
O, nobly spare him, and escape the sin . . .
However much the “Black Republicans” and Transcendentalists may have petitioned, begged, and clamored for Brown’s release, Democrats—north and south—raised their voices in a truculent chorus, foreseeing the dissolution of the union if he were pardoned. In actuality, his pardon had become beside the point: Most of the proslavery congregation declared that the raid on Harper’s Ferry had made war inevitable.
“The day of compromise is past. . . . There is no peace for the South in the Union!” decried the Charleston Mercury.
“The Harper’s Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of Disunion, more than any other event that has happened since the formation of the Government,” railed Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer.
“If Brown and his confederates were fools and madmen at Harper’s Ferry, may they not have been such in Kansas also? And if so, who shall say how much of the wrong in that unfortunate territory is justly to be charged against those who were the instigators of these fools and madmen, and who placed in their hands the weapons for violence and bloodshed!” thundered the New Hampshire Patriot.
“Brown’s acts are but the corollary of black republican ‘shrieks for freedom!’” shrieked Springfield’s Illinois State Register.
“There can no longer be any doubt but what this was a regularly concocted, and premeditated attempt of Abolition Fanatics to overthrow the Government, and emancipate the slaves!” censured the Milledgeville, Georgia, Federal Union.
“It was not a negro insurrection at all . . . there were no slaves at all, except one or two, who were seized and held under terror; not one negro or mulatto, except some intruding free negroes, loafing vagabonds from other States . . . it should be more properly described as an invasion of Virginia by a gang of abolitionists, dupes or emissaries of a treasonable fanaticism, going into a peaceful country to scatter ‘firebrands, arrows and death!’” fulminated the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Most northerners would have agreed with the New York City Independent regarding Brown: “Harper’s Ferry was insane, the controlling motive of his demonstration was sublime.” But Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cranky judgment disturbed me. “Nobody was ever more justly hanged,” he wrote, as if possessed by the ghost of his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, who had helped to send the Salem witches to their deaths.
Still more unsettling was a telegraphed message I received from Abe Lincoln: “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.”
By such contentious opinions was the union divided over Brown’s deed or misdeed. Was it a step toward emancipation or a misstep into war? I was as divided as the nation itself. While I waited for him to be tried and most likely hanged, I did not know what to believe or in whom to place my trust. Bewildered by contrary voices, I felt my faith, which had been weakened as a man’s strength is by bloodletting, dissolve like a wafer on the
tongue. How often in the past had I tasted that bitterness? How often had a childlike belief in goodness returned and drenched my tongue in its honey only to turn again to gall?
On Wednesday, November 2, Brown received his death sentence. You have sometimes complained that words “slip and slide on meaning’s treacherous ice.” But words denoting the body’s extinction are unequivocal. In a month’s time, John Brown would ascend the gallows stairs, and, having played his final role and taking no curtain call, would break his neck at the end of a rope.
Was Brown insane?
I heard him exchange words with a spectator in the courtroom who had come to hear the abolitionist’s doom pronounced:
“To set the slaves free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community.”
“I do not think so,” replied Brown coolly.
“I know it,” insisted the spectator, who, like Herod before him, wanted the head of the Baptist on a plate. “I think you are fanatical.”
“And I think you are fanatical,” retorted Brown. “‘Whom the gods would destroy they first made mad,’ and you are mad.”
I think, Emily, that we are all mad.
–10–
ON THE MORNING BEFORE HIS EXECUTION, Lieutenant Colonel Lee summoned me to his temporary headquarters. When I entered the room, he was staring out the window at the oaks. Caught by a gust of wind, their gold and scarlet leaves were scattered on the courthouse lawn, where an ornamental cannon from the War of 1812 and a pyramid of iron balls stood, as if in waiting for the next raid of militant abolitionists to appear from out of the North. Hearing me enter, he broke the thread of his stare and the train of his thought and turned to regard me.
“Captain Winter,” he said, those sad eyes of his fixed on mine.
“Yes, sir!” I saluted—rather smartly, I thought.
“At ease, Captain.”
I relaxed, although not entirely, because Lee’s ramrod backbone, whether he was sitting his horse or on a chair, shamed me, who was so often slumped. You know how poor my posture is, Emily—hardly befitting an army captain or a minster of God, who might be expected to carry himself with dignity, having borrowed a particle of His uprightness.
“You were in Mexico during the war.”
“Yes, sir, Colonel Lee.” And there I had pondered the savagery of ancient gods.
“And in Utah, during the rebellion.”
“Yes, sir.” And there I’d blasphemed and murdered.
“Then you’ve witnessed acts of bloody violence few of your kind have.”
I supposed that by “your kind” he meant God’s ministers, and I nodded in the affirmative.
“Would you say that your sense of duty is as strong as it was before joining the army?”
I thought it best to lie. “Yes, sir.”
“Good,” he said without the ring of conviction with which he ordinarily spoke. “I’m told the men like you.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” Whether they respected me as their pastor was another matter.
My gaze escaped his and studied a crack in the ceiling, which formed the letter z.
Zealot, I said to myself. Brown . . . Garrison . . . Stephen Douglas . . . Brooks . . . Brigham Young . . . Buchanan . . . One day the world will be incinerated by zealotry.
“I’ve also been told that you have not been careful of John Brown’s soul.”
“Sir?” I was taken aback by Lee’s remark.
“In all these weeks he has been incarcerated, you’ve not been to see him.”
I felt my shoulders round and my spine turn into a swag of chain.
“No, I have not, sir.”
“Why is that?”
“He killed a young friend of mine!” I blurted.
“Private Quinn.”
“Yes, sir.”
I know now that my avoidance of the condemned man had more to do with my uneasy admiration for him than with the death of my young friend by his hand. I had seen too much of death to be altogether affected by any one instance of it, and I was not convinced of the justice of the sentence passed on Brown. Emerson and Thoreau considered him a great man. Who was I to believe otherwise? I was embarrassed by Brown’s imminent death—yes, embarrassed—as if I myself were to be his executioner. I doubt that Lee would have indulged my delicate feelings.
“You will visit him tonight in his cell,” he ordered. “Even a villain like ‘Old Brown’ is entitled to his last meal and his Last Rites on his last night on earth before the Last Judgment.”
“Yes, sir.” Extreme Unction was not mine to give, but I held my tongue.
He stood and said, with the utmost severity, “Captain Winter, you will give Mr. Brown the comforts of your Savior!”
“Sir!” I replied with a tremor in my voice, wondering whether Lee had a different Savior or even none at all. Perhaps he had no need of one.
I saluted and went outside, feeling like a boy returned once more to the playground after a caning from his teacher. I stood and watched two negroes raking leaves from the courthouse lawn. They neither shuffled nor sang, nor were they sullen. I didn’t know if they were slaves or freemen. I only knew that they were men, and the thought staggered me, as if I had never before entertained it in the presence of negroes.
All that afternoon, I worried about my visit, wondering what I should say to Brown. I wondered—and feared—what he would say to me. There are certain words that, having been said, will stay with us, as if we were shut up for eternity with a pesky fly, which had also been granted everlasting life: buzz, buzz, buzz—an unrelenting noise provided by the Grand Inquisitor.
Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall devour before Him. And it shall be very tempestuous round about Him.
At eight o’clock, on the night of December 1, which would be Brown’s last among the living, his guard admitted me to the cell. Sounds were amplified unnaturally: The warder’s keys jangled as if the music of the spheres had turned sour; the iron door groaned as though God were pulling a monstrous tooth from earth’s granite jaw; a cricket in a dusky corner chirped as would a catapult being ratcheted into place; an insomniac bird outside the barred window raised a hue and cry as it will at the approach of doomsday. My eyes magnified each effect of light and dark: The glow of the lamp trembled in the darkness, while the blackness under the cot could have been an entrance to ancient Night. John Brown, wearing a frock coat and collarless shirt, appeared to exceed the dimensions of his jail.
He must have sensed my fear, because he invited me kindly to sit in the cell’s only chair and to drink a glass of the cider he had requested. I did as he asked. The cider, which was not hard, nonetheless scorched my insides like the most ardent spirits.
“Your plain cider has a powerful effect,” I said, setting the glass on the desk where he had been writing. “It’s like the miraculous jug at Cana, in which Christ turned water into wine.”
“Thus does the word of God, like purest water on the tongue, burn the soul of any man who heeds it,” replied Brown, his eyes glittering in the light from the smoky oil lamp.
“Do you still maintain that you did right at Harper’s Ferry and Pottawatomie?” I asked abruptly.
I hadn’t intended to interrogate him. I had been ordained by the church, commissioned by the army, and charged by Lee to urge him to repent and, in exchange for his contrition, offer him deliverance, if not exoneration and freedom. At that instant, I realized that my life had been tending toward this fatal conjunction, in a narrow cell in Charles Town—not two hundred miles from Appomattox Courthouse, where Robert E. Lee would, in less than six years’ time, surrender his sword to Ulysses S. Grant, commanding general of a victorious Union army.
“Mr. Winter.” In his eyes, I supposed I was unworthy of my clerical title or military rank. “Are you asking as a pastor or as an army captain?”
“I’m asking as a man who has lost himself!” I replied with more heat than was necessary and a good deal more candor. I’d surprised myself by disc
losing an intimate matter to a man whose motives I could hardly fathom. He didn’t appear surprised, however; he was the sort of man who inspired unreasoning devotion.
“We are all lost,” he said, sparing pity neither for us nor himself.
His face was seamed, as a man’s can sometimes be, which has looked too long on the iniquity of others (never mind his own).
“But you have only to follow Colonel Lee’s orders to ease your conscience.”
“Mr. Brown, I am not Lee’s spy!” I cried indignantly. “I am a man of God.”
“And I tell you, Mr. Winter, that we are all God’s spies, waiting to reveal the secrets we keep even from ourselves. I will do so tomorrow afternoon before Him who sits in judgment of us all.”
“You can be of no help to me!” I said bitterly, like a child whose father has failed to comfort him.
“I am not the shepherd here,” he reminded me, and I was ashamed.
‘“We lie down in our shame, and our confusion covereth us,”’ he said, as if he had looked into my mind and seen its turmoil. “But we must behave as if we were not confused. We must believe that He has whispered in our ears the plan of His intricate design and our purpose within it. That is the meaning of faith, is it not?”
“I no longer have faith,” I moaned like Goodman Brown after having seen his wife, Faith, dance naked with the witches in the forest of Salem.
“Don’t look to God to restore it!” In Brown’s voice, I heard His wrath. “It is for you to find what you yourself have lost.”
Suddenly, I wanted to fall to my knees and beg God’s mercy from Brown. I wanted him to deliver me from the maze into which I had wandered. I wanted my heart to be made pure and my conscience washed clean. I wanted to confess to this man, who I had hoped would confess to me. I wanted to call him “Father.”
“I killed a man,” I said softly.