Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“It’s not necessary that they understand what’s happening to them,” I said. “Let’s just get it done.” I was suddenly afraid that we had come this far and now the Old Man would once again end it too soon with palaver and prayer. I remember raising the blade of my sword over my head with my good right hand, the moonlight glinting off its edge like cold fire, and then I brought it down and buried it in the skull of James Doyle, splashing the son next to him, Drury, with his father’s blood. Fred and then Henry Thompson and Salmon joined in and began hacking away at the brothers, chopping them apart at the arms and slashing them in their chests and bellies, and even Oliver got in some blows with his sword. I heard several of us shriek during the slaughter, but I do not know which of us did that, except that it was not I who shrieked, and I remember that the Doyles themselves never uttered a single sound, not one cry, but fell silently to the ground like beeves being butchered in a stockyard. Sinew, muscle, bone, and blood flew before our eyes; the bodies of our enemies were slashed, cracked, and broken. Human beings were sliced open by our swords, and there the darkness entered in.

And Father? Where was Father? All the while, he stood away from us, and he alone did not use his sword. He watched. And when we were done with our murderous work, when the three Doyles were stilled at last and lying at our feet in bloody chunks and pieces, making huge puddles of blood on the ground, Father stepped forward and drew out his pistol. He leaned down and placed the barrel against the cloven head of Old Doyle and fired a bullet straight into the man’s brain, as if into a rotted stump.

“The others will hear that,” I said to him. Oliver was weeping, and Henry, who suddenly, in the midst of the killing, had commenced to vomit, was now hiccoughing violently. The two of them staggered in small circles in the darkness, pounding their feet against the hard ground in a slow, furious dance, whilst Salmon and Fred stared down at the bodies of the slain men in silence, as if they had come upon them unexpectedly and did not know how they had died.

“Let them hear it,” Father said. “It will make no difference. Come, boys,” he said, and led us away from the place where we had slain the Doyles, down the trail towards the Wilkinson cabin, which was located on the claim adjacent to Doyle’s, in a grove of old oak and cottonwood trees closer to the creek.

Here the Old Man for the first time took charge completely. He banged on the door, and before anyone inside had a chance to answer, he demanded to know the way to Dutch Henry’s cabin, which was widely known as a meeting place for pro-slavery settlers. Someone, presumably Mr. Wilkinson, began to answer, but Father interrupted and told him to come out and show us the way.

When there was no reply, Father waited a moment and then said, “Are you of the Law and Order Party?” meaning, was he pro-slavery.

Wilkinson answered forthrightly, “I am, sir!”

“Then you are our prisoner! I order you to open your door to us at once, or we shall burn the house down around you!”

“Wait! Wait a minute. Let me get a light,” Wilkinson said.

Father replied that he would give him thirty seconds and commenced counting, but before he had reached twenty, the door was opened, and we all marched inside the cabin. Here, again, there was a terrified wife and four children, all of the children small, however, little more than babies. Wilkinson was in his mid-thirties, a tall, gaunt Southerner with a great jaw, standing in his underwear and stockinged feet. His wife, also tall and thin, in a flannel nightgown and cap, stood by the fireplace, with the children huddled close around her.

“Who are you!” the woman screamed at Father. “Are you the devil? You look like the devil!”

“My wife is sick” Mr. Wilkinson said. “Let me stay here with her till morning. Post a man here, and you can come for me then, when we’ll have someone to tend the babies for her. We got us a woman coming then.”

Father ignored his drawling pleas. He set Oliver and Fred to search the house for weapons, and they quickly turned up a rabbit gun and a powder flask. “Bring them with us,” the Old Man said. Salmon and Henry he told to pick up the pair of saddles that were lying on the floor next to the door and carry them up to the road. We were short two saddles, and I had spotted them myself when we entered the cabin. To Mr. Wilkinson, Father simply said, “Come along now” and he pointed the tip of his sword at the man, whose face went rigid at the sight of it. He made no answer and walked stiff-legged from the cabin, and Father followed.

The wife called after him, “Dad, you’ll want your boots!”

“He won’t be needing them,” I said.

“What are you going to do to my husband?” Her deep-set eyes, her small, round mouth, her nose, her whole face, were all circles inside circles, a great, concentric, plaintive whorl that threatened to draw me out of myself and towards her, and I stepped backwards as if afraid of her.

“Nothing,” I said. “We ain’t gonna do nothing to him. Just make him our prisoner.”

“Why? What’s he done?”

“For exchange. We’ll exchange him with the Missourians for one of ours,” I said, and stumbled backwards from the cabin and turned and ran to catch up with the others, who had disappeared into the darkness ahead.

By the time I reached the place where the path joined the main trail, they had already killed Mr. Wilkinson, and he lay on the rough ground in a splash of moonlight with his throat slashed, a huge, toothless yawn from one side of his massive jaw to the other, and he had a great, raw wound on his skull, as if he had been scalped by Indians, and one arm had been nearly severed from the trunk.

“All right, now,” Father said. “Let’s get on to the Sherman cabin.” He told us to hide the saddles and the rabbit gun in the brush so we could pick them up later.

But then Oliver began to cry. “I don’t want to do any more of this!” he wailed. “I can’t!.”

As if reminding the Old Man of something he had forgotten, Fred leaned in close to Father and said, “He’s not a grown man yet, you know.”

I said, “Maybe Oliver should go back for the wagon and come down along the trail, pick up these here saddles and so on, and meet up later with us below.”

“Yes, fine. Do that, Oliver. The rest of you follow me,” Father said, and we went from there down to our final stop, the cabin owned by Dutch Sherman, the Missourian who, of all the pro-slavers settled along the Pottawatomie, was the most outspoken and threatening. It was he whom we had most particularly gone looking for that night, and as it turned out, he was the easiest to kill. Not because we hated him more than the others, but because he physically opposed us, fought us furiously until he was finally dead.

Evidently, he had heard the gunshot from up above, where Father had fired his revolver into Mr. Doyle’s head, and had come out to investigate, for we met him up on the road a short ways from his cabin. Father, Fred, and I were in front, with Henry and Salmon trailing behind, and we came upon him suddenly before he knew we were there. He was standing by the side of the road, urinating, and had not heard us approach. He was a muscular keg of a man, red-faced, with a bull neck and thick arms, a mustachioed Dutchman of about forty, famous for his temper. We threw down on him with our swords and Father’s revolver, and Father said that we were capturing him for the Northern Army. “You are our prisoner, sir.”

He buttoned himself up slowly, methodically, and glared at us, all the while muttering in his hard accent, “So it’s you damned Bible-thumping Browns, is it? You are worse than the niggers. You are a bunch of god-damn Yankee trash come down here for stealing our niggers and our horses and then to go off feeling all good for it. You are a pack of god-damn hypocrites, coming around here in the dead of night like this for robbing a man and to terrorize him. Tell me what in the hell do you think you are doing!”