Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The sky was darkening down in the east and cream-colored in the west, and the chilled, late afternoon breeze blew into our faces. Without looking at any one of us, staring instead down at the box before him, Father said, “Children, when I rode out from the east I carried with me a whole set of maps. A whole passel of maps, and overlapping they were, and one of’em, Jason, was sent to me by you, as you know. That was the very detailed map that led me to the grave that you dug in slaveholding territory, where you wrapped in a blanket the body of your poor little boy, Austin, and buried him whose soul has now gone on to God in heaven. But whose body lay buried in Missouri soil.

“Among my other maps, Jason and Ellen, and above all of them, the master map, as it were, is the one that guides them all — the map that is given to me by the Bible. It is God Almighty’s plan of these United States, which I carry with me wherever I go, and on that map this Kansas Territory is still free and will remain free so long as I draw breath. Children, I mean to lay those two maps over one another, Jason’s very detailed drawing of where his child lies buried, and God’s equally detailed plan, and align them.” He then looked straight at Jason and Ellen and said to them, “I know, my children, that you were surrounded by the enemy back there in Missouri and were afraid therefore and were maybe somewhat confused as to what was fitting and proper. I don’t mean to scold or upbraid you, children, but I myself could not abandon that boy’s body in slaveholding territory.

“I went there to my grandson’s grave, to pray over it, as you asked me to do, but then, when I had completed my prayers for his soul, I realized that I could not tolerate the thought of anyone with my blood and name lying under a little wooden cross in a potter’s field in a slave state. The very thought of it enraged me. So I retrieved Austin Brown’s body from that tainted ground, and Henry and I built it a proper coffin and placed it inside and put it into my wagon, and now we have carried it here to Kansas, where men and women and children are not chattel, here to bury it properly, here to place and mark his gravesite on God’s map of this land and not Satan’s!”

Then, with the darkness coming slowly on, Father handed ropes to Henry Thompson and me, which we draped beneath the pine box, and holding to them, we lowered the coffin slowly into the earth. Jason and Ellen held each other and wept. Wept with grief, but I am afraid also with shame. For Father had shamed them terribly with what he had done.

When the box had gone down into the hole, we filled the hole with dirt and moved from the gravesite one by one in a kind of confused browse, as if we were both reluctant and eager to get away from it. Last to leave were Father and Jason and Ellen, and I heard him say to them, “Tomorrow you will make a cross with your boy’s name and dates on it. And you will set it at the head of the grave, there,” he pronounced, and placed his foot firmly on the ground at the place beneath which he knew the boy’s head lay. Directly, then, he departed from the knoll, leaving Jason and Ellen alone at the gravesite. Thus ended the harsh, sullen division between Jason and his Ellen and the rest of us. We were all one family again.

And yet I felt, in a new, peculiar, or maybe just unfamiliar way, alone again. Not an isolato, as I am now, or merely lonely, as I had been before Kansas, but solitary in the way of the devious Iago in the famous play about the Moor by William Shakespeare. Iago is the man who remains, no matter how crowded the stage, incommunicado, unknown, locked inside himself as if inside a dungeon. And while, certainly, in all matters I did as Father wished, I nonetheless became under him in Kansas, like Iago, my own man. Not Father’s. Father was my white-skinned Othello.

We did not go straight to war against the Border Ruffians. We could not, due to John’s lingering illness and the need to set our tattered, windblown camp straight and make rudimentary householding possible. Also, at that time the Border Ruffians were still holding their fire and were confronting us and our Free-Soil neighbors with little more than loud, drunken talk and empty threats. The Kansas War was something that was happening mostly in the newspapers of the Southern states and back East. And for a spell Father seemed more intent upon finding surveying work for himself than in leading us into battle against the slavers, and consequently he spent a considerable amount of time away from Browns Station, in Topeka and Lawrence and up on the Ottawa Reserve, surveying town sites and claims and marking the borders of the Indian territory.

It was a good place and time to be a surveyor. There was much confusion and controversy then concerning the settlers’ claims and legal title to lands, thanks to the rapid influx of impoverished squatters and the large-scale purchases of land by outside speculators like the New England Emigrant Aid Society, whose shareholders, despite their stated ambitions to settle Kansas with Free-Soilers and keep the West from becoming part of the Slavocracy, were in it to make a profit and did not mind if they made it off Indian land, government land, or land claimed by some poor grubstaker from Illinois with a single, sorry ox and a wife and five hungry children, a man too illiterate to register his claim properly.

To the east and south of Browns Station, the Southerners for months had been pouring across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into the territory in ever greater numbers than the Free-Soilers. Not three miles from us there were slaves owned. With the encouragement and connivance of their dough-faced President, Franklin Pierce, the pro-slavers had already elected themselves a bogus legislature and governor situated in Leavenworth and had passed their disgusting “black laws” which made it a crime to read and write or even think and speak as we Browns did every day of our lives, laws which we now took special pleasure in breaking every chance we got, not only to express our contempt for them, but also to goad the Ruffians into trying to enforce their laws, which, so far, they had been reluctant to do. We, of course, had few dealings with them, anyhow, and did business mostly with folks who were allied with us, especially those who, like us, counted themselves radical abolitionists, at that time a distinct minority even amongst the Free-Soilers. Even so, most of our presumed allies, like most Northerners then, were as anti-Negro as they were anti-slavery: they wanted to keep Kansas soil free, all right, but free and white. To them, slavery was little more than an unfair labor practice imported from the South.

In his capacity as surveyor, despite his politics and principles and his usual inability to keep them to himself, the Old Man nonetheless passed unimpeded through the lands controlled by the pro-slavers, for they were as eager as the Free-Soilers to ascertain the limits and extensions of their land-claims, certain as they were then of outnumbering us and fearful, therefore, only of our encroaching on their lands illegitimately. Father was just the scrawny old Yankee surveyor with his wagonload of instruments and lines traveling across the plains of eastern Kansas looking for work.

Once again, as he had for a spell back in North Elba, the Old Man called himself Shubel Morgan. The name of John Brown was pretty famous by now and daily growing more so, especially out here, where he and his sons were known these days to be armed with Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers. He had indeed, as I’d hoped, lugged out from Ohio two unmarked crates that turned out to be packed with weaponry, and he had distributed a Sharps and a Colt revolver and a sharpened broadsword to each of us. All that winter into the spring, whenever we rode into Osawatomie or up to Lawrence for supplies or to send mail and messages east, we brandished our new weapons, like our politics and principles, with unabashed pride, and soon all around the region John Brown and his sons came to be regarded by both sides as potentially troublesome.