Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

When Father answered, “The only thing we’re robbing you of tonight is your life,” Mr. Sherman understood the dire situation he was in, and he went wild. He exploded in fury, grabbing the barrel of Father’s revolver with one hand and punching him repeatedly in the face with the other. He was very strong, and when Father could not get the weapon loose of his grip or protect himself from his pummeling fist, I was obliged to bring my sword into play and, with a single stroke, severed the man’s hand at the wrist. Both hand and revolver fell to the ground. He howled in pain and rage and charged at me with his head lowered and butted me in the face, bloodying my nose and knocking me backwards onto the ground. With his remaining hand, he grabbed my dropped sword and swung it like a scimitar in a wide circle, clearing a space to stand in and hold us at bay. His severed hand lay on the ground, and his chopped wrist sprayed blood, draining him white, yet still he staggered in a circle, flailing the sword at us, causing us to leap back from him and look for an opening to take him down without being injured by him. I had scrambled back to my feet, my face covered with blood, and when I saw Father’s revolver lying on the ground next to Mr. Sherman’s hand, I darted over to it, grabbed the weapon, and, from a crouching position, looked up into the maddened face of Dutch Sherman looming over me. His sword, my dropped sword, was about to come down on my head. At the same instant as I shot the man in the chest, Henry caught him from behind across the mid-section with his sword, and Fred sank his sword into the man’s shoulder. He was dead before he hit the ground.

No one said a word for a long time after that. Void of feeling and thought, we stumbled down to the creek and washed our swords and our hands and faces in the cold water and waited there, seated on the rocks, for Oliver to arrive with the wagon. Each of us had withdrawn to a chamber deep inside his head and had locked himself in there alone. When, after about an hour, Oliver still had not come, Father abruptly got up and walked back along the road a ways to Dutch Sherman’s cabin and soon returned, leading a pair of Mr. Sherman’s horses, bridled and saddled. So we would be called horse-thieves, as well as murderers, assassins, cold-blooded executioners. He gave the reins to Salmon and Henry and in a somber, low voice instructed them to ride back along the ridge and see if anything had befallen Oliver.

But just then we heard the familiar sound of the wagon creaking down the road towards the creek, and a moment later it appeared, with Oliver looking terrified and aghast. He had passed all the sites of our killings, had observed the mangled corpses on the ground from his seat up on the wagon, and the bloody spectacle of it had changed him.

Father said to Oliver, “Are you all right, son?”

“I feel dead,” he said in a flat, cold voice.

“I feel like I’m dead.” “Then you are all right. You can’t feel otherwise, son, after a thing like this. There will be no more of it, I promise thee,” he said, and climbed up onto the wagon and took the reins. Fred and I climbed up behind Salmon and Henry on the stolen horses, and the six of us quickly rode out of that ghastly place, heading southeast from the Pottawatomie creek-bottom to where we had left our horses tied, and thence on to our camp on the Marais des Cygnes.

Before us, the darkness had faded from the night sky, and we traveled over the tall-grass plain beneath a pale blue canopy. The moon had set, and the last stars, like silver nails, had pinned the canopy overhead. Behind us in the east, the rising sun would soon crack the black, flat line of the horizon. There long, ragged strips of silver-blue clouds lay banked in tiers, tinged with red, as if the heavens were bleeding.

Let them bleed, I thought. Let the heavens rain down on us in gob— bets and pour rivers of blood over the earth. Let the sky bleed all its color out, and let the earth be covered over with gore — I no longer care.

Let the soil here below stink and turn to a scarlet muck, and let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils fill with it and we drown in it with our hands on each other’s throats — I no longer resist this war. I relish it.

Dear Miss Mayo, I have again, as it were, mislaid you: days, weeks, possibly whole months, have passed without my clocking them, whilst I’ve scribbled away at this, my long-withheld confession, page after page. And when I have finished covering yet another page or chapter of it, I reach for a fresh sheet of paper or an unused tablet, and finding none at hand, I write on the backs of old, filled sheets (which once again I realize that I have somehow neglected to send to you), and I go on setting down my tale in the margins and even between the lines of passages that, for all I know, I must have written to you sometime last spring or winter — passages, pages, entire tablets that, in my urgency to continue writing, I have elbowed to the edge of my little table and have let get lost amongst the pages and tablets previously heaped there and that now slowly tumble to the floor. They clutter there at my feet and pile like autumn leaves and scatter and drift across this dim room in the cold winds sifting through the cracks in the walls of my cabin and blowing beneath its flimsy door.

I have gotten lost inside my confession, as if it were my very self — my only remaining self. I am alive, oh, yes, but my life is long over, and thus I am no more now than these words, sentences, episodes, and chapters of my past. Yet from time to time, at moments such as this, I do rise, like an old, befuddled bear who wakes reluctantly from hibernation and breaks off his unbroken, winter-long dream, and I stumble blinking from the cave of my narration into blinding sunlight, where suddenly, forcibly, I recall the now long-past occasion and need that brought me in the first place a willingness to speak of these things. Which is to say, I remember thee, Miss Mayo, way out East in New York City, poring with steady perseverance over the hundreds of accounts of Father’s life and the numerous interrogatories that you have no doubt taken from the still-living men and women who knew us back before the War and whose tattered memories, though rent and shot through with age, provide them, and now you and Professor Villard, with varying versions of the same events that I dreamed clearly in my cave, as clearly as if they actually occurred there, and that I have been setting down for, lo, these many, unnumbered months.

But I do remember thee, Miss Mayo, and my promise to compose for you my own account and place it safely into your hands, so that you in turn can aid and advise the distinguished Professor Villard in his composition of what you and he surely hope will become the final biography of John Brown. And if I have been too distracted and confused and enfeebled, if I have been too disembodied by the act of telling this tale, to sort and order these pages and arrange to have them placed into your hands somehow, if, in other words, I have been too much a garrulous ghost and too little a proper respondent, then I apologize, Miss Mayo, and ask your forgiveness and understanding, for there is no other way for me to have told what I have already told and to say what I have yet to say. For though a man trapped in purgatory, if he would escape it, may seem betimes to speak to the living, he speaks, in fact, only to the dead, to those who in hurt confusion surround him there, awaiting his confession to set them free.

These things which I alone know — of the death of Lyman Epps and of the brutal massacre down by the Pottawatomie and the turbulent, bloody events that followed, of the climactic raid on Harpers Ferry and the martyrdom of my father and the cold execution of my brothers and our comrades — these things, when I have finished telling them, will not alter history. They will not revise the received truth. That truth is shaped strictly by the needs of those who wish to receive it. No, when I have said them, the things that I alone know will release from purgatory the souls of all those men whom I so dearly loved and who went to their deaths believing that they held their fates in their own hands and that they had chosen in the fight against slavery to slay other men and to die for it.