Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“They’ll see otherwise;’ I said.

“Now is the time, I believe. It’s time, Owen, time to buckle on our swords and wade straight into their midst. It’s time to wreak bloody havoc. We need to slay so many of them with a single, terrifying blow that the rest will start having sobering second thoughts.”

“Fine by me. I’d kill every last one. Give them only enough Kansas soil to lie down dead in.”

“You would, but maybe you won’t have to. I know men like this. I’ve seen them everywhere, even in the North. It’s a basic human type. These fellows are only the degraded, pathetic pawns of other men, who are much more evil than their pawns. Oh, sure, these poor, deluded fellows hate Negroes, all right, and they love slavery. But not because they themselves own Negro slaves or depend upon them to work their puny farms. You don’t see any slave-traders amongst these fellows, do you? And no cotton planters, either. No, these are poor men, Owen. And like most people, North and South, but especially South, they’re landless and slaveless and ignorant and illiterate. They’re serfs, practically, but with no lord of the manor to protect them. And it’s because they’ve been taught for centuries to love and envy the rich man who owns slaves that they hate the Negro, and now they have come out here to conquer Kansas for slavery. That’s all. Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin’s as white as the rich man’s, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”

“Very nice” I said. “But how do you propose to show them this?” I asked, out of politeness more than interest. Father’s endless, convoluted theories concerning slavery and Negroes frequently strengthened my brothers’ resolve, and even from time to time charged up the Old Man himself, but they had long since ceased to motivate me. I had my own motivations, which needed no firming. Iron hardeneth iron. For me, the soft, warm days of pusillanimity were long gone.

“Well, there’s only one way. We must strike pure terror into their hearts, Owen. Pure terror. Pure! We must become terrible!” he growled. We had to make the Border Ruffians understand that they had to be ready to die miserably for this. If we showed them that their bits of Kansas Territory would not come to them otherwise, they’d go galloping straight back to Alabama and Georgia, where they could lie and boast in the taverns and bawdyhouses all they wanted. All we cared was that Kansas be left a free state, so that we could go back to Father’s old plan of breaking the rich slaveholder’s back by drawing off the Negro labor force with the Subterranean Passway, his plan to turn the Underground Railroad into a north-flowing river of fugitives. Then, to get their sugar and cotton and corn and tobacco grown, the planters would be forced to turn to their fellow whites and would start enslaving them. And when they did that, poor white men would know their true enemies at last. They’d see that their true allies all along had been us abolitionists and the freed blacks living up North and the Southern Negroes who still remained in bondage. With its main supports gone, Satan’s temple of slavery would come tumbling down, and then the Negro would no longer be despised in the land. The poor, landless black man and the poor white would fall into one another’s arms.

“Sounds good, Father,” I said. “Sounds real good.” I cracked the reins and moved the wagon a little more smartly along, as it looked like rain in the west. The huge, milky-white Kansas sky had gone all yellow near the horizon and then had suddenly darkened overhead. Long grasses riffled and swirled in the wind like the soft surface of the sea, changing from pale blue to green to steel gray in the broody, late afternoon light. Our trail was an ancient buffalo road, a grass-covered depression through the high, flat, endless field, which we followed as if in the wake of a westering ship, and I half-expected to see eddies of foam and bubbles out there before us. Ragged sheets of lightning shook down from the southern sky, and a few seconds later, the rumble of thunder rolled across the plain like distant cannonfire.

“What say you to that, son?” Father shouted over the wind. He was holding on to the seat with both hands, as the wagon bucked and dipped across the rough, grassy plain towards the long, purple line of cottonwoods in the river-bottom ahead, where our camp was located.

“To what?”

“To my thoughts!”

“Oh, I like it!” I shouted back.

“Like what?”

“Becoming terrible! I like becoming terrible!”

He loosened one hand from the box and flung his sinewy arm around my shoulders. “Oh, thou hast lately become a true soldier of the Lord, Owen!” He pulled me to him and laughed. Then suddenly the sky opened up, and a cold rain poured down, silencing us for the rest of the way into camp.

Once there, when we had climbed down from the wagon and come into the flapping tent, Salmon, Fred, Oliver, and Henry greeted us with great excitement and gave us news that set us immediately to loading the wagon with our weapons, and with Oliver up on the box driving the team and Father and the rest of us on horseback, we six headed on through the downpour straight on to Lawrence.

In our absence, the boys had learned that the Missourian Colonel Butord and his four hundred Southerners and hundreds more in smaller gangs of Southerners were headed for Lawrence from several directions, and this time they were coming in determined to burn the town to the ground. To justify their attack, the pro-slavers now had a legal pretext, in that, a few days earlier, a grand jury in Atchison had indicted all the Free-State leaders for high treason and the editors of the Herald Freedom, the Free-State newspaper, for sedition. This time, the Border Ruffians meant to stamp out the abolitionists once and for all. They meant to take our citadel and burn it and sow salt where it had stood and wipe all memory of Free-State resistance from Kansas forever.

The possibility of this occurring brought Father to a fever-pitch of excitement. As usual, it was the idea of battle more than the reality that made the Old Maris blood boil and his tongue wag. In some surprising ways and more than he thought, Father resembled the very Southerners he claimed to be at war with. Up to a point, it made him an effective leader of more conventional men than he, which was most men, of course, but that point was where the battle itself actually began.

He was not afraid exactly; Father was a courageous man. Simply, it was as if he could not cease controlling a situation, and whenever he reached that moment when he no longer was able to shape and determine things, he backed off. Which was why, I suppose, he needed me. I made no show of this and do not think that I tricked him into depending on me or moved him in any way contrary to his essential desires, even though he never quite said outright that, once he had properly positioned himself at the edge of battle, he needed me to bring him over it. Rather, it was our unstated agreement, our tacit understanding, that he was the one to lead us to the precipice, and I was the one to carry us across.

Out on the California Road, where it joined the Osawatomie Road down to our old, abandoned camp at Browns Station, we met up with two companies of volunteers, about thirty men, parts of John’s Osawatomie Rifles, as it turned out, who were milling about and apparently going nowhere. The rain had let up, and the men were shaking off their clothes, drying their weapons, and scraping mud from their horses’ shoes. They had built a huge fire, as if they meant to stay awhile or even overnight, for it was nearly dark by then.