Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Was it true that I had not seen Jason and his wife, Ellen, for weeks? They seemed to have withdrawn permanently to their own tent, on their adjacent claim, not physically ill, as we were, but demoralized, withdrawn, selfish, and still stunned with seemingly endless grief over the death of their little boy, Austin, whose body they had been forced to bury and abandon back in Missouri. They had crossed the river en route from Ohio in late summer, and during the brief trespass upon a corner of the slaveholders’ evil land, as if under a curse, they had lost their only child to cholera. The disease had slain half the passengers of the boat, and with the exception of poor Austin, all the victims were Missouri Border Ruffians and their families coming across to Kansas to claim the territory for slavery. Jason’s and Ellen’s beloved little boy had been snagged by that rough justice and died, a compensatory price too high for them yet to comprehend.

When John and Jason and their matched families decided to come out from Ohio, after their farms had been ruined by the terrible drought of the previous year, it was in search of new, cheap land, so as to start their lives over. But they also came to wage war against the slavers and to capture the Kansas Territory for the North. Thus it was both a rational, opportunistic thing to do — and there were thousands like them from all over the North, doing it for no other reason — and one that glowed with abolitionist righteousness as well. This was the sort of venture that had always appealed to John, but it had the added benefit of allowing him, by emphasizing the moral aspects of the venture, to advertise it effectively to Jason, who had not been as quick to leave the dried remnants of his Ohio orchards as was John to abandon his scorched, hardcake fields. So while Jason and Ellen had gone out willingly, they had not gone eagerly, and perhaps for that reason, the death of their son, Austin, and the need to abandon his body in a shallow grave on a bluff overlooking the river in slaveholding Missouri had made the couple quickly bitter. And there was the painful, ever-present fact that John and Wealthy had their little son, John, whom they called Tonny, still with them. John’s and Wealthy’s good luck, then, might have contributed, too, to the sourish relations that prevailed between the brothers and their wives when Fred and I first arrived at Browns Station, bedraggled, like a couple of tramps, many months later.

In a flurry of letters to Father in North Elba and then to him in Pittsburgh and to me in Ohio while I was watching over Fred, John had written that, to survive the surprisingly violent Kansas weather and the rapid influx of Border Ruffians from Missouri, he needed soldiers, cohorts, reinforcements; he wanted up-to-date weapons and cows and swine, blankets, grain, dried beef and salt fish: he was awaiting the arrival of the makings of an invading army. What he had got instead was a pair of scrawny, exhausted refugees carrying no more than their blanket-rolls and their twenty-year-old muzzle-loaders. We must have been a disappointing sight, Fred and I, that morning when we arrived at the camp, one of us blank-eyed and struck dumb by the enormity of his self-mutilation, still hitching himself along with a rough crutch, and the other, me, a nervy man with a crippled arm glancing back over his shoulder with the wariness and guilt of a criminal, our clothes shabby and dirty from our arduous journey, bringing to our brothers in their place of brave settlement, this desolate place where they had chosen to make their permanent homes and take their self-defining stand against slavery, nothing but our craven needs for comfort and love.

But if we were disappointing to them, they and their settlement were just as much a let-down to us, for we saw, not the neat log cabins and lean-tos amongst the cottonwood groves and broad, fresh streams and high, grassy meadows of Kansas that we expected and that John had described to us in his letters. We saw instead a pair of tattered, flapping tents, a single, broken-wheeled wagon, cold firestoves outside, four bony horses nibbling at the frozen turf. And over all, a pervasive gloom and lassitude — an atmosphere worsened by John’s illness and by Jason’s and Ellen’s withdrawal to the privacy of their own tent, which they had pitched on their land claim several hundred yards down the draw from John’s and Wealthy’s towards the Osawatomie River.

On our arrival, Fred and I had visited and greeted them separately, as if they were John’s jealous and unhappy neighbors, instead of his beloved younger brother and sister-in-law sharing a calamity; afterwards, we had encamped up on the ridge in John’s second tent, and that made Jason and Ellen think that we had chosen John and Wealthy over them. And when, in a few days, I fell sick myself, it was simpler for me to move in with John, where Wealthy could the more easily tend us both, and then Fred followed, perhaps because he knew not what else to do and now hated being alone with his thoughts. He came into the tent and placed his bedroll on the other side of John, so that there were three of us lying there, crowded into a single small, dark space, whilst poor Wealthy tried to keep the fire going outside, despite the wind and the snow and the lack of good, dry firewood, caring for us as if we had been shot and wounded in battle instead of having declined spiritually into a muck of despondency and sloth and after a while had weakened and got physically sick as well.

Wealthy had her poor, confused son, Tonny, beside her at every step, clinging to the folds of her dress and whimpering all day and night about the cold and from constant hunger and showing even then the first signs of slowness that would later grow into retardation and cause her and John so much sadness and worry. But if she had not had him there, I believe that Wealthy would have walked on one of those long winter nights straight into the darkness that surrounded us then and disappeared, only to be found days later, frozen to death in some gully. For she was as angry then as any woman I have ever seen in my life. She was silent, and she fumed. And with every good reason. John, Jason, Fred, and I, we were all of us pitiful, shameful specimens of manhood. We were not worthy of her; nor of Jason’s wife, either. Here we were, the four eldest sons of the great John Brown, four sickly, miserable fools, foundering in gloom, gone all weak and cowardly. I confess it, it was the women who were strong and they who, to all intents and purposes, kept us alive, until the winter morning when the Old Man finally arrived and began to set everything straight.

And it happened just as I imagined it would. Just as I hoped and dreaded it would. The tent flap was drawn suddenly away, and against a milk-white sky loomed the dark, familiar shape of Father in his broad-brimmed black hat and his greatcoat. He entered the tent, glanced quickly around in that expressionless way of his when he has come upon something complicated and unfamiliar, surveying the scene with as little emotion as possible, until he has acquired from it all the information necessary for a proper response, which in this case was to go straight to John, who in his delirium and fever had neither seen nor heard the Old Man enter, whereas both Fred and I, like startled rabbits, had sat up at once.

In silence, the Old Man felt John’s forehead and then bent his head to his eldest son’s chest and listened to his clotted lungs and his heart. Behind him I saw shades flitting beyond the thin canvas, rough profiles of other people moving about outside, and heard the creak and clank of saddles and harness and the low voices of my brothers Salmon and Oliver, which surprised me, for I had thought Father was coming out alone, and I heard a male voice that I did not at first recognize, then the voices of the women, Wealthy and Ellen, and Jason, too, as if a crowd had gathered out there.