Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

When we went down to the Pottawatomie, I believed all that. And in spite of my guilty feelings, I believe it still. No, I swear, I did not go down there for the pleasure of killing my enemies, nor did Father, nor my brothers, despite what the writers, North and South, puzzling over the causes of that event, have said in the intervening years. On that dark May night in ’56,1 truly thought that we were shaping history, that we were affecting the course of future events, making one set of events nearly impossible and another very likely, and I believed that the second set was morally superior to the first, so it was a good and necessary thing, what we were doing. We could slay a few men now, men who were guilty, perhaps, if only by association, and save millions of innocents later. That’s how terror, in the hands of the righteous, works.

And we were right, after all. For it did work. The terror and the rage that we caused with those murders ignited the flames of war all across Kansas, to be sure, and all across the Southern states and in the North as well. We turned Kansas bloody. With a single night’s work, we Browns made the whole territory bleed. The Missourians came flying back across the river determined anew to kill every abolitionist in Kansas, and the Northerners were forced to return blow for blow, until both sides lost sight of the possibilities of a short-term peace and were instead engaged in a fight to the death. Which was exactly as Father and I and, to a lesser degree, the rest of us Browns wanted.

If we had learned anything over the last decade, it was that there was no other way to defeat slavery, except with a willingness to die for it. We had learned what the Negroes long knew. And thus we merely did what the Negroes themselves had done over and over in the past — in Haiti, in the mountains of Jamaica, and in the swamps of Virginia — but could not do out there on the plains of Kansas. We did what we wanted the Negroes to do in Kansas. By slaying those five pro-slavers on the Pottawatomie that night, we placed hundreds, thousands, of other white men in the same position that we alone amongst the whites had held for years: for now every white man in Kansas, anti-slaver and pro-slaver alike, had to be ready to die for his cause.

If Father wanted to believe that it was the Lord’s will we were enacting, fine. I had no argument with him on that, not anymore: out here, living our lives in public, what Father called the will of God I now called history. And if history, like the will of God, ruled us, then whatever moral dimension it possessed came not from itself or from above, but from our very acts, and that it would show us our true fates, for good or for evil.

That is why we killed those men.

I remember we drew the wagon into a narrow cleft in the steep, rutted ridge on the north side of the trail, with the rain-filled creek below us on the left, the land claim and cabin of James Doyle of Tennessee a quarter-mile or so dead ahead, and the others, Sherman’s and Wilkinson’s, a short ways beyond. It was pitch dark, but we lit no torches. I instructed the boys and Father to hitch our horses here and place our rifles in the wagon and leave them, explaining that, as the three cabins we meant to strike were all within a half-mile of one another, we could not risk a gunshot. Then I handed out the heavy, razor-sharp broadswords, one to each. No one else spoke a word, not even Father.

By the time we reached Doyle’s cabin, it was close to midnight, and the clouds had broken open, floating across the satiny sky like soldered rags. There was now a quarter-moon in the southeast quadrant, casting a shifting, eerie light, glazing gray the low trees and scrub alongside the trail. We could see the rough, pale wooden shingles of the roof of the cabin below, when suddenly we heard a low growl, and out of the shadows a pair of huge mastiff dogs came charging towards us, all fangs and ferocious, yellow eyes. With a single swipe of my sword I sliced the first animal across its neck and shoulder, and it fell dead at my feet, nearly decapitated. Fred struck at the other, injuring it in the haunch, sending it howling into the woods behind us, away from the cabin.

Father, who had been next to me in the lead, stopped in his tracks. “Ah, we’re done for! The Doyles’ll be up and armed now.”

“No,” I said. “Just keep moving fast; don’t hesitate. They’ll likely think the dogs are chasing deer. Come on!” and I stepped in front of him and jogged down the scumbly trail to the front door of the cabin. The shutters were bolted, with no light visible inside and no sign of life, except for a thick rope of silver smoke rising from the fireplace chimney. When the others, panting more from excitement and fear than from exertion, had arrived at the stoop with me, I reached forward and banged roughly on the door with the handle of my sword.

A man’s voice inside drawled, “Who’s there? What d’ yer want?”

I looked to Father, whose leathery face had gone white. His cheek twitched, and his lips were dry and trembling. I was afraid he would not speak to the man; and I could not. Finally, after a few seconds, the Old Man cleared his throat and asked in a thin voice the way to Mr. Wilkinson’s cabin. Friend Wilkinson, he called him. Words were Father’s saving grace. I would not have thought to say that.

I heard someone push back a chair and walk across to the door and lift the bolt away, and when he had opened the door a crack, I kicked it and swiftly put my shoulder into it, throwing the door open and tossing the man, James Doyle, for that is who it was, back across the tiny room, and we all burst into the cabin, filling it completely, sending the Doyles, a family of six people, back against the further wall, where they cowered in fright. They were a dry little old bald-headed man, his plump wife, and four children, two of them bearded men in their twenties, the others, a girl and a boy, very small, under fifteen.

They were frightened and astonished by our sudden, huge presence, and when Father shouted to Mr. Doyle that we were the Northern Army and had come to capture him and his sons, Mrs. Doyle at once commenced to weep, and she cried to her husband, “I told you what you were going to get! I told you!”

“Hush, Mother!” Mr. Doyle said. “Hush, for God’s sake! This here’s Mister Brown, ain’t it? From over to Osawatomie. We can reason with him.”

She wept profusely and for a moment dominated the scene, mainly by begging Father not to take her son John, who was only fourteen, she said, a mere boy with no notion of these things.

Father said to her, “The others, your elder sons, are they members of the Law and Order Party?”

“Never mind that!” bellowed Old Doyle. “What do you want with us? We ain’t but farmers like you, Brown!”

“Thou art the enemies of the Lord,” Father pronounced, and he ordered the two grown sons, named Drury and William, and Old Doyle, the father, to come out of the house with us, which they did, leaving wife and mother, son and daughter, and sister and brother weeping and wailing behind in the doorway, for they knew what was about to happen.

Quickly, we marched the three men, coatless and hatless, back up the narrow, curving pathway to the moonlit road. The two younger men were barefoot and walked gingerly over the stony trail. Oliver, Fred, and Henry were in front of the prisoners, Father, Salmon, and I coming along behind, and when we reached the level plain above the creek, a hundred yards or so from the cabin, where the dead dog lay, Father said to stop now.

One of the Doyles, William, saw the dog and cried, “Oh, Bonny!”

Father said, “The Law of Moses states that the fathers shall not be killed for the crimes of the sons, nor the sons for the crimes of the fathers. But here father and sons both are guilty.”