Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“You realize that now we’re all going to suffer!” Jason said to Father. “Do you realize that?”

“No, you’re wrong” said Father. “Those men were the enemies of the Lord, and they deserved to die, no matter who did it. For without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. I will tell you this much, son: I myself killed no one. But if the slavers think I killed their kith and kin, that’s fine by me. All the better. Now they will know our extremity. Now they will know what they’re up against,” he said.

But Jason was no longer listening. He had stepped unsteadily away a few paces, and he turned and, nearly staggering, walked off from us and the men of the militia.

The sight of him, shocked and clearly appalled, pointedly separating himself from Father and me and Fred and making his way along a zig-zag path over the rise and down the ravine towards the river, told the others that the boy’s dawn account had been true, and it seemed to release the men. At once, they busied themselves with breaking camp and bridling and saddling their horses. A few seconds later, John was left standing alone by the fire — a captain overthrown and abandoned.

He looked first at us and then at his men, then back at us again, as if torn and dismayed by the choice that had been forced upon him. Finally, he called out to his men, who were mostly already on horseback by now and were clearly prepared to depart: “Wait up! Hold up a minute! This business isn’t settled yet. You fellows are still under my command.”

Henry Williams, a storekeeper in Osawatomie, a big-shouldered man with a dark, rubbishy beard, said, “No, we’re electing us a new captain, John. We ain’t riding under no Brown.” The others nodded and murmured agreement, and Mr. Williams turned in his saddle and said to them, “Who d’ you boys want for a captain? Any nominations?”

One of them said, “You’d do fine, Henry.”

Another man, a tall, raw-boned man in a canvas duster, said, “My vote’s for Williams. He’s got sense. And he’s got family and his store to protect. He ain’t going to do anything so stupid as killing off folks at random,” and he glared first at Father and me and then directly at John.

John said, “I’ve got family.”

“Yes;” the man said, “so you do,” and he turned his horse and rode out from the camp, onto the crossing.

Mr. Williams said, “Listen, Browns, if I was one of you, Id find me a hole and stay in it till winter. Then maybe I’d light on out of Kansas and go back to the states. All across the territory now there’s going to be hell to pay. You damned Browns,” he declared, “you’re plain crazy. Even you, John. Jason, too. I like you and him well enough, but your name is Brown, and we can’t be under you no more. Not now,” he said, and clicked to his horse and went out from the camp to the crossing. There he took his place at the head of the gathering column of men, and when they were arranged in a military line, he led the troop down the road towards Osawatomie.

Soon they were gone from sight, and we could no longer hear their hoofbeats. A crow circled overhead and cawed. Seconds later, another crow appeared beside it, and the two carved wide loops against the cloudless sky. Shortly, Jason returned from the river-bottom, looking aghast and pale, as if he had been gazing at the corpses of the five men we had slain barely three hours and five miles away from here. Fred moved back towards the wagon. John had not spoken once yet to Father or stepped from his spot by the dying fire.

Father put a hand on my arm and said, “What d’ you thinks best now, son?”

“Attack.”

“You think so, eh?”

“Worst thing we could do is what Mister Williams said, hide in a hole. We’re instruments of the Lord, are we not? So let the Lord lead us. To teach when it is unclean and when it is clean: this is the law,’“ I quoted to him.

He made a small smile. “And if the plague be in the walls of the house!” he came back, “‘then the priest shall command that they take away the stones in which the plague is, and they shall cast them into an unclean place without the city.’“

“Should we be stones cast out? When we can be the priest’s men, instead?”

Father nodded, and then he called to Salmon, Oliver, Fred, and Henry, who leaned by the wagon. “Mount up, boys. We’re riding on over by Middle Creek a ways.”

“What for?” Salmon asked.

“To find us a camp where we can rest in peace a day.”

“What then?” Henry wanted to know.

“Then we’ll see some action. From here on out, we’re going to be on the attack, boys.”

Jason sat down heavily on a nearby log and, placing his forehead against his knees, wrapped his head with his arms, as if hiding his father and brothers from his sight and hearing. John remained standing by the dwindled fire, all disconsolate and downcast.

I said to him, “You coming?”

He shook his head no.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Jason?”

He didn’t answer.

“You boys maybe ought to think about moving your wives and Tonny permanently into town or down to Uncle’s place!’ I told them. “It’s going to start getting plenty hot around here now,” I said, and climbed up on the wagon seat next to Oliver. Father had mounted Reliance and was out in front of the wagon. “Okay, Father,”I said to him. “Let’s move.”

He nodded, and we rode off across a broad, high meadow north— west of the crossroad, away from our old settlement at Browns Station, away from the town of Osawatomie, away from poor John and Jason. I remember I turned in the wagon and peered back at them, and my elder brothers were standing with their arms around each other, as if both men were weeping and trying to console one another.

I did not think then that what later happened to John and Jason would occur, but when it did, I was not surprised. By then, Father, Old Brown, had become the feared and admired Captain John Brown of Kansas, had become Osawatomie Brown, the victor of the Battle of Black Jack, the one nationally known hero of the Kansas War, and he was back in Boston, working his way across the entire Northeast, raising funds and making speeches to thunderous applause. And through it all, from that May day forward, the cold, silent man at his side, the large, red-bearded fellow with the gray eyes who spoke to no one but to Captain Brown himself, was me. My two elder brothers had been all but removed from Father’s life, and I had replaced them there.

I’m trying to recall it: how I came to be knocking at the rough plank door of Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin in the nighttime; and when exactly it occurred, that same night or the next. Things happened so quickly back then that, although I can with ease summon them to my mind in sharp, vivid detail, sometimes their sequence blurs. But I do know that it was right after we had made our first secret campsite over on Middle Creek in amongst a clutch of black oak trees, and had slept awhile and rested our animals and prepared our weapons for battle, that I went to my uncle’s cabin. I have no diary at hand, for none of us kept one, and of course I have no calendar from those days. But I do remember that, towards the end of our first night in camp, while the others were sleeping, on Father’s orders I rode one of Dutch Sherman’s liberated horses out to the Osawatomie Road, intending to slip into town under cover of darkness to be sure that Jason’s wife, Ellen, and John’s Wealthy and little Tonny were safely ensconced with friends there.

Yes, it was not until the second night that I made it over to the Adair cabin. For, when we had first got to Middle Creek, the boys, Oliver, Salmon, Fred, and Henry Thompson, were exhausted — oddly so, it seemed to me, despite the fact that we had all been awake for nearly forty hours straight, for Father and I were not in the slightest fatigued. Quite the opposite: he and I were exhilarated and filled with new and growing plans and stratagems for raiding and terrorizing the Border Ruffians and pro-slave settlers. The boys, though, were all but useless, at least for a while, until they could begin to put the killings behind them. Fred wept, and he declared again and again that he could not stand to do any more work such as that, and Oliver wrapped himself in his blanket on the ground and would not speak to any one of us, while Salmon and Henry huddled together and read in their Bibles.