Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

It was a single, neat cut straight across the sac. He had a practiced, shepherd’s hand, which was lucky, for he had severed no big vein, and the bleeding, although bad, did not threaten his life and soon abated somewhat. This allowed me to wash his wound with water that I heated on his little iron stove and to dress it with strips of cloth torn from my shirt, wrapping him loosely about the groin in such a way that he would be protected from infection and accidental injury, and the healing could begin.

It would be several weeks before Fred could walk properly again and we could take our leave, finally, of the Perkins place. I wrote Father at once and told him of the incident — better for him to learn of it first from me than anyone else, I figured — although I feared that it might bring him hurrying out to Ohio, which I did not particularly want, nor, I thought, did Fred. In my letter, minimizing the degree of Fred’s injury, but admitting nonetheless that he had effectively gelded himself, I reassured Father that I could nurse Fred back to health myself, and he evidently believed me, for he remained in Pittsburgh, while I stayed by Fred’s side. During the weeks that followed, I tended him day and night, as Father himself would have done, and never left him alone, except for the few hours a day when I myself was obliged to watch Mr. Perkins’s sheep. Luckily, the collie dog was clever and needed little supervision, so it was not an onerous task to double as shepherd and nurse. Besides, when I informed Mr. Perkins that, as soon as he was able to travel, I planned to take Fred away with me, he promptly found himself a new shepherd boy from a family in town.

Right up to the morning we departed from that place, Fred believed that we were returning to North Elba, and I myself thought so, too. But then came that misty, gray dawn when we slung our rifles and our small bundles of clothing, food, and trail blankets over our shoulders and walked down the long driveway to the road that passed by the Perkins place. I had kept Mother’s blanket and viewed it now as mine from childhood and never spoke of it to Fred. It was my inheritance.

When we reached the road, without a glance or a thought one way or the other, I turned southwest, instead of northeast, and Fred followed.

For a few moments, we walked along in silence. “Where’re we going?” Fred finally asked.

“Well, to Kansas, I guess.”

A quarter of a mile further on, he spoke again. “Father wants us to go to the farm in North Elba. That’s what you told me, Owen.”

“Yes. But we’re needed more in Kansas.”

There was a long silence as he pondered this. Finally, “Why?”

“To fight slavery there.”

More silence. Then, “Doing the Lord’s work?”

“Right.”

“Good. That’s real good.”

“Yep.”

A little further down the road, he said, “But what about Father? He won’t like this, Owen.”

“Maybe not, at least at first. But don’t worry, he’ll come along soon to Kansas himself. He won’t let you and me and the boys do the Lord’s work, while he stays out east doing Mister Perkins’s. Anyhow, John says there’s going to be shooting in Kansas before long. That’ll bring the Old Man on. He hates it when he can’t give us the order to fine,”I said, and laughed, and he laughed with me.

So on we went, walking and sometimes hitching rides on wagons, barges, canal boats, moving slowly west and south into the territory of Kansas — a one-armed man and a gelded man, two wounded, penniless, motherless brothers marching off to do the Lord’s work in the war against slavery. In this wide world there was nothing better for us to do. There was nothing useful that anyone wanted us to do, except to stay home and take care of the place and the women, which neither of us wanted to do and neither could do properly, either. We had to be good for something, though: we were sons of John Brown, and we had learned early in our lives that we did not deserve to live otherwise. So we were going off to Kansas to be good at killing. Our specialty would be killing men who wished to own other men.

At first in Kansas was the waiting — waiting for the Old Man to bring us the new-style, breech-loading Sharps rifles and horses and winter gear for waging war against the Border Ruffians, waiting for Father to raise abundant funds and supplies in Syracuse and Akron and decide to come out to Kansas after all — the same as when, after Kansas, we waited out the winter in Iowa; and then, still later, as when we huddled together in the cold, unlit upstairs room of the Kennedy farmhouse outside Harpers Ferry and waited for Father to return empty-handed from his final, fateful meeting with Frederick Douglass, so that the assault on the Ferry could begin at last. We were always waiting for Father in those days; and it was every time in the same, humiliating way — quarrelsome, disgruntled, in confusion and disarray, incompetent, undisciplined, often physically ill, and all our best intentions and his careful instructions gone somehow weirdly awry, as if we secretly meant to sabotage him, we the loyal, dependent sons and followers of John Brown lying in our cots, cold and damp, scowling up at the ceiling or into the walls, filled with dread at the thought of the Old Man’s arrival, and yet at the same time nearly giddy with impatience for him to come and darken the portal with his familiar shape and lower his head and walk into the tent, there to kneel down by one of us, the sickest, always the sickest, whom Father could identify at a glance, and which was John at that time when the Old Man first arrived out there in Kansas at the pathetic encampment we called Browns Station. My waiting, of course, was more colored by dread and impatience even than that of my brothers, for, in coming out here with Fred, I had disobeyed the Old Man and needed to know how he viewed me now.

John had gone down with the ague, but it had gotten worse, and soon he was taking short, shallow breaths, as if his lungs had gotten enflamed. Feverish and shivering, subject to visions and spurts of wild, incoherent speech, he had been sick for a month by the time Fred and I got there from Akron. We had taken the old river-route down the Ohio and up to St. Louis by the Missouri, and when we got to Browns Station, we found John unable to eat and barely able to sip water, despite the tireless, silent care of his wife, Wealthy. And it was not long before Fred and I, too, lay wrapped in all our clothes and blankets in the cots on either side of John, whom we followed close behind in the degree of our sickness, I, like him, with the ague, and Fred, weakened from our travels and still healing from his terrible wound, unable to act without being led by one of his brothers. Neither of us could provide leadership for him. Or perhaps, in our chilled despondency, neither of us wished to. So he had simply imitated me, as if I were imitating John. And perhaps I was.

It was not yet the dead of winter, it was, in fact and by the calendar, still autumn, and the snow was not so bad as it would have been by now in North Elba. Yet I had never felt so cold up there in the eastern mountains as out here on the western plain. It was as if in Kansas the sun had gone out permanently. The icy, relentless wind off the flat expanse of land blew day and night and froze our clothes and hair and the beards of the men and stiffened our faces and rubbed our hands raw and made our bones feel like iron and never ceased blowing against the tents, snapping them like sails in a hurricane, threatening all night and day to tear the canvas from the poles and rip the guy-lines and stakes from the hardened ground and expose our poor, blanketed bodies to the low, gray western sky, as if they had been put out there by the Indians for the coyotes and vultures to devour and for the old Indian gods to receive into paradise.