Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Father cut him off and in his coldest voice said, “I’ve been told that before, sir. I know who you are and why you are here. You will surrender unconditionally, Captain Pate, or we will leave every one of you lying dead with your animals over there.”

“Give me fifteen minutes—” Pate said, but Father again interrupted and drew his revolver on him and commanded him to have his men lay down their arms. We put our weapons out where they could be seen and aimed them straight at Pate and his lieutenant.

Father said, “You’re surrounded, you realize.”

“But we’re here under a white flag,” Pate said. “You can’t throw down on us with a white flag showing. That violates the articles of war.”

“Who drew up those articles?” Father asked. “Not I. Not thee, Captain Pate. No, you are my prisoner. And if you don’t tell your men to lay down their arms, I’ll shoot you dead.”

You could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes: Father was ready to kill the man and let himself be shot for it at once, as would surely happen, for he and Pate and Pate’s man stood alone up on the lip of the ravine, fully exposed to the guns of the enemy. Luckily, Pate was no fool: he could read Father’s intent and was himself not eager to die. He agreed to surrender and sent his lieutenant trotting back to his lines to instruct his men to lay down their arms and march out with their hands on their heads. Which, a few moments later, they did, surprising us, when they were all lined up before us, with their numbers, for there were twenty-six of them, uninjured and well-armed. Pate’s men were, of course, even more surprised when they saw how few we were, and they were angry at their captain, who lost much face by the surrender and later complained bitterly of what he called Father’s “deceptive, casual disregard for the rules of war.”

Thus ended the famous Battle of Black Jack, which Father, in a letter to the New York Tribune, rightly named “the first regular battle fought between Free-State and Pro-Slavery forces in Kansas.” We had killed four men and wounded nearly a dozen and captured more prisoners in one sweep than had so far been captured by all the Free — State forces in total. In the North and amongst the Free-Staters, John Brown came away with nearly heroic stature; to the Southerners, he was now the devil incarnate.

Had it not been for Fred’s miraculous intervention, however, his mad, delusional charge onto the battlefield, the Battle of Black Jack would have ended much differently. His son’s apparent madness was Father’s good fortune: for Fred did, in fact, believe that we had the Ruffians surrounded, and he insisted for days afterwards that he had seen Free-State men on all sides firing on the Ruffians from the bushes and slaughtering them without mercy. He had acted, he said, to end the terrible slaughter of the Missourians.

We knew, of course, that he had only seen the horses and mules going down, that it was the slaughter of the animals that had maddened him, and I said as much to Father.

“The boy was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision,” he answered. “That is all that matters.”

I see that, almost inadvertently, I have been writing you much that concerns my brother Fred, and perhaps I should complete his story here. Towards the end of August, I walked out one morning from camp alone very early to observe the sun rise, an event I had not seen in several weeks, for we had been night-raiding for a long while at a hectic pace over in Linn County and during the daylight hours had mostly hidden out in the marshes and deep gullies, sleeping whenever we could, and thus we had had little opportunity or time for admiring God’s orderly governance of the universe, as it were. Recently, however, we had succeeded in driving a herd of nearly one hundred fifty head of liberated Ruffian cattle into Osawatomie for distribution amongst the people there and, feeling protected by their gratitude, had encamped a few miles from town and, for the first night in a fortnight, been given a normal parcel of sleep. Thus we felt able to lighten our vigilance somewhat, causing Father to release me from my usual task of overseeing the watch, and I had been allowed to enjoy a full night wrapped in my blanket by the guttering fire.

When I first rolled out of my blanket that morning, Father was nowhere in sight — commiserating or consulting with his God in the bushes someplace nearby, I supposed. I was surprised, therefore, when, as I emerged from the tree cover and approached the grassy ridge above our campsite, I spotted him profiled against the sky there, gazing eastward towards the horizon, as if he, too, had come out to see the sun rise. It was a cool, dry morning, not quite dawn, with no breeze. The sky was enormous and loomed above us like a tautly drawn celestial tent, and the land swept darkly away beneath it like a vast, chilled desert. Back in camp in the gully, it was still dark as night, although up here the southeastern sky had faded to a soft, crumbly gray, making Father’s figure a sharp, paper-thin silhouette against it. I silently took my place beside him on the ridge, and together we stared out across the rolling prairie in the direction of the settlement of Osawatomie, some five miles distant, down along the Marais des Cygnes.

A moment or two passed, when, out on the horizon, there appeared parallel to it a long string of silver light. Soon it had thickened into a metallic strap and broadened, and after a few moments, the lower edge of the silver strap took on a golden hue, while above the strap the fleecy clouds began to go from gray to yellow to red, as if a fire were being lit below them. It was strikingly beautiful and strange in its clarity and exactness. I said to Father, “It looks like it’s a miniature scene and close to us. Like a painting, almost, instead of huge and far away and real.”

The Old Man merely nodded and said nothing. Perhaps he was used to such visions. I lapsed back into silence and continued watching the eastern horizon slowly shift color and shape. Soon, when I knew that the scarlet disk of the sun was about to break the horizon and shatter the scene with its rays, I saw an extraordinary thing. It’s something that occurs rarely, but nonetheless normally, at sea or on the desert, and also, on the rarest of occasions, happens out on the prairies of the West, where it appears in more nearly perfect detail and on a much grander scale. Commonly called a mirage, it’s disdained for that, despite its beauty and rarity, as if it were merely an illusion. But it is in no way an illusion. It is real and is taking place in present time. What one sees is not a hallucinated or imagined scene: when, as on this morning, the atmospheric and geographic conditions are perfectly aligned, objects and entire scenes and events located far beyond one’s normal range of vision are brought close and are made sharply, silently visible; or else the beholder himself is instantly transported from his former spot across the many miles of prairie, carried as if on a Mohammedan flying carpet and brought face-to-face with a scene that he could otherwise have only imagined or dreamed.

It is actually unclear which is moved, the scene in the distance or the observer here at hand. Perhaps it’s that the visible aspect of a thing, of any thing, is like its smell, and when atmospheric conditions are right, its visible aspect can be carried away separately, like a spoor, to an observer who is situated many miles distant and who then is enabled to see the thing up close, the way one can sometimes wake to the smell of coffee being brewed over a fire far down the valley from one’s bed and think it’s being made in the next room.

This is what Father and I saw: at first, there was a misty, grayish scrim that rose from the horizon and became a semi-opaque sheet. Then, evolving out of a series of dark, vertical threads and strings, solid objects began to appear against it, and in a few seconds, a familiar bit of scenery had taken shape — the road that led past Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin, on the near side of Osawatomie. There were the trees and the creek and the burnt-over stumps of his field and even the smoke curling from his chimney. In the further distance, I saw a man walking from the spring with a bucket in each hand.