Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Around four o’clock the next morning, we arrived at the copse of black oak trees for which the spring had been named. We were situated on a long slope a half-mile north of the Ruffian encampment and could see in the gray dawn haze their line of covered wagons below, with the tents pitched behind them and, on the wooded slope to the rear, their picketed horses and mules. As there were no fires and no other activity evident in the camp, we assumed they were still sleeping, so we dismounted and, leaving Fred in charge of the horses, made our way stealthily downhill through the brush, where we split into two groups, Father’s nine men and Captain Shore’s fifteen. At this point, about sixty rods from the wagons, we were discovered by a sentinel who had been posted up by the picketed animals, and he fired his musket and shouted the alarm: “We’re under attack!”

Like bees swarming from a hive, the half-dressed Ruffians ran from their tents and commenced firing on us. Instantly, Captain Shore and his men, who were in a somewhat more exposed position than we, laid down a barrage of return fire, while Father led us on the run off to the right a ways, ordering us as he ran not to fire yet. “Hold your fire, boys, and remember, when you do shoot, aim low!” That was always his advice: get to close quarters and aim low. And aim for the body, not the head. “Every one of us would be dead by now” he often said, “if our enemies had aimed low.”

After a few moments, we had made our way to a protected position in a ravine to the right of the wagons. From there, we could get clear, covered shots on the Ruffians, so we laid down our own barrage, which drove them to the backside of their camp into a further ravine, where they kept up a steady fusillade against both Captain Shore’s men in front of them and us on the flank.

As Captain Shore’s men had commenced firing earlier than we and more recklessly, they were soon out of ammunition and could no longer return fire, and because they were the more exposed, they started taking on injuries, and several of his men cried out, “I’m hit! I’m hit! Someone help me, I’m a dead man!” One fellow over there was sobbing like a sorrowful woman. I saw three of Shore’s men — one of them the preacher Moore — break and run back up the long slope towards the grove of black oaks. Then three more fled.

We were trapped, with no alternative to seeing it through to victory or death; and the men knew that now. Father prowled back and forth behind us, scolding us and bucking us up and pointing out targets as they appeared, making of himself a most obvious target in the process, but seeming not to care, as if daring the enemy to shoot him. Several times I shouted, “Father, stay down!” but he only scowled at me, as if I were being cowardly. There was shooting coming from all directions and from both sides: terrified men were firing their weapons randomly at targets made invisible and everywhere by simple human fear: our boys were firing as much at Shore’s men as at Pate’s, and both those bands were shooting in our direction also, and we all may even have fired sometimes at ourselves, so that when Henry Thompson took a bullet in the thigh and rolled away from me, slapping at his wound and hollering, “Damn! Damn! Damn!” as if he’d been stung by a red-hot coal, I didn’t know if he’d been hit by a Ruffian’s bullet or a Free-State militiaman’s. I couldn’t even be positive that I hadn’t accidentally shot him myself. Father rushed to Henry’s side and ripped a strip of cloth from his own shirttail, took out his dirk, and with it and the strip of cloth made a tourniquet for him.

Somewhere in here I remember Captain Shore appearing in our ravine with a small number of his men, those who had not cut and run: he was telling Father that they were out of ammunition and would have to retreat or else go for reinforcements. He had one man dead, five who were wounded, and six who had deserted. The Ruffians had dug in good, he said, and could wait us out, unless we got more men and ammunition quickly. He seemed much discouraged. Father was disgusted and told him to go on back for reinforcements, then, and take the dead man and the wounded with him, including Henry Thompson.

Then, when Shore and his men had left, Father told us to open fire on the Ruffians’ horses and mules, which were picketed in a rope corral a short ways uphill from the tents. “It’ll distract them so Captain Shore can get his men out, and maybe it’ll even draw a few of them out of their hole to where we can pick them off,” he said. He told us this time not to aim low but to shoot at the animals’ heads, because he wanted them to die, not to suffer, and they were easier to hit than men anyhow.

We obeyed and shot into the wild-eyed herd of animals. The horses and mules neighed and brayed loudly when they were hit, and they tripped and trampled upon one another in the dust, as first one poor beast went down and then a second and a third. It was an awful sight, and I had trouble going along with it, but I said nothing and fired away with the others. I shot horses and mules and men that day and had very few thoughts of what I was doing or why, but at one point, in the midst of this carnage, I suddenly saw us all, almost as if I were not a part of it: bands of terrified white American boys and men killing each other and screaming bloody murder into one another’s faces and shooting down poor, dumb animals, slaying one another and our livestock and terrorizing our mothers and wives and children and burning our houses and crops — all to settle the fate of Negro Americans living hundreds and even thousands of miles away from here, a people who were much unlike us and who were utterly unaware of what we were inflicting upon each other here on this hot June morning in amongst the black oak trees of Kansas. It was no longer clear to me: were we doing this for them, the Negroes; or were we simply using them as an excuse to commit vile crimes against one another? Was our true nature that of the man who sacrifices himself and others for his principles; or was it that of the criminal? You could not tell it from our acts.

Firing on the horses and mules evidently surprised and distracted the enemy sufficiently to cover Captain Shore’s retreat from the battle— field, but it drew none of the Ruffians from their cover, and as soon as all the animals were down, they started in again on us. From their ravine behind the tents, they kept us huddled under a blanket of rifle-fire, and as we could get no good angle on them, we were obliged to lie low and prepare for their final charge, which we figured was coming next. Father instructed us to have our broadswords and revolvers at the ready. “Wait till they close on us, boys, and pick your targets carefully. If their leaders go down at the start, the rest might flee, even though they hugely outnumber us.”

But then an astonishing thing happened. I was lying with my back to the ravine, facing uphill towards the grove by the spring, so I saw it all: Fred, alone on horseback, appeared at the edge of the trees and was surveying the scene below with mild surmise, when suddenly he raised his broadsword over his head and came galloping full speed down the long slope straight towards us and the enemy beyond, shouting loudly as he neared us, “We have them surrounded! We have them surrounded!” All firing ceased, as Fred rode across the cleared space that divided us from the Ruffians, still waving his cutlass and bellowing, “We have them surrounded!” Then he disappeared into the bushes off to our left, and we saw him no more.

We were silent for a moment and looked at one another in puzzlement.

“That was Fred,” Salmon said. “Why do you suppose he did that?” Father answered that he didn’t know, but look, and sure enough, there came Captain Pate and one of his lieutenants, walking towards us and waving a white flag. What followed is well known: Pate wished to obtain a truce, he said. He declared that he was a deputy United States marshal sent out by the government to capture “certain persons for whom writs of arrest have been issued—”