Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The man was Fred! My brother Fred, barefoot and shirtless, was walking slowly towards the cabin, looking lost in thought or prayer. I was too astonished and pleased by the sight to speak of it. Three days before, Father had ordered him to Lawrence for supplies and mail from home and to ask for reinforcements for the defense of the town of Osawatomie, but Fred had felt indisposed from a recent onslaught of the ague and had begged to stay at Uncle’s for a while, until he recovered, and Father had relented. I had not expected to see him again for a week or more, and now here he was, soundless as death, but very much alive and before my eyes making his slow way along the roadway from the spring to the cabin, as if he were alone and invisible to all eyes but his own.

At that instant, there came three riders over the crest of the hill a ways behind Fred, men whom I recognized at once as Ruffians, men who had been riding with John Reid, the Mexican War veteran from Missouri who had given himself the rank of general and headed up one of those bands that had been in particular hot pursuit of us Browns since Pottawatomie and Black Jack months earlier. Reid had threatened noisily on many occasions to burn down the entire town of Osawatomie, but this was late August, and we had begun not to take these blowhard threats too seriously, for we had most of these men well on the run all across the territory by now, and despite their numbers, all they were capable of were random raids on isolated cabins and farms. It was from some of Reid’s people, in fact, that we had stolen the herd of cattle recently left off with the citizens of Osawatomie — stolen back, I should say — and the three I now saw riding up on Fred I had marked then as villains, and Father and I had even briefly spoken with them: coarse, brutal men whose main object was looting and pillaging the farms and lands of Free-State settlers.

“Fred!” I cried. “Look behind you!”

“He can’t hear you, Owen,” Father said in a low voice. “He may be done for.”

Helplessly, as if bound to a stake, we watched from our spot miles from the scene, while the three riders approached Fred from behind. They had come over the rise from the direction of town, sent out, as I quickly surmised, to reconnoiter for General Reid, in preparation for his oft-threatened raid on the settlement. Their presence probably meant that Reid and his hundred-man force of Ruffians were close by. But Fred did not seem to recognize the men at all or to regard them as enemies. He turned and stopped in the road, and as they neared, he stood and watched, apparently unafraid, as if the men were merely local Free-Staters not known to him.

Father and I were close enough to the scene to see over his shoulder, as it were, and we stared in silence as Fred nodded good morning and the others touched the brims of their hats and made to pass, when one of the men, the large-bellied fellow in the center, gave Fred a hard stare. I would later learn that this was the Reverend Martin White, a notorious and malignant pro-slaver from Arkansas who back in ’54 had come out to settle and preach to his fellow pro-slavers, one of those men who, after the Pottawatomie affair, had become fixated on avenging himself against us Browns.

Although I could not hear him, I saw him speak to Fred and found that I could read his lips somewhat: I know you! he seems to say. And Fred, who still has not recognized the danger, advances open-faced towards the men to greet them, his buckets still in his hands, his bare chest exposed to the riders, who draw out their revolvers and throw down on him. Fred stops in his tracks now and looks wonderingly, innocently, up at them, as once more the man in the middle, Reverend White, silently mouths some words: You’re one of John Browns boys!

By now, Fred’s face has gone all dark and serious, for he has finally seen the dangerous fix he is in, and he shakes his head no, he’s not one of John Brown’s boys.

I know you! White declares.

Fred again shakes his head no. He mouths the words I don’t know John Brown.

Where’s he hiding?

I don’t know him.

Yes, you are his son! says White, and he levels his revolver and fires straight into Fred’s pale, bare chest.

The bullet killed him at once, and he fell like a stone in the middle of the road. For a few seconds, the riders stared down at his crumpled, lifeless body and the spilled water buckets. Then they spurred their horses into a gallop and rode off, heading away from town in the direction they had come, no doubt to bring Reid’s force straight on.

Dark blood poured from the hole in Fred’s chest and puddled over and around his body. A light breeze lifted and flattened the leaves of the nearby cottonwood trees and sifted the tall grasses alongside the road. And now, slowly, the scene began to fade from view, gathering itself back into the dark threads and strings from which it had emerged, until once again Father and I were gazing across the featureless prairie towards the eastern horizon, staring at nothing, and the sun was risen, blasting back at us, radiant and bright yellow and orange, driving the fleecy, gold-tinged clouds from the skies and bathing our faces in its light.

“Murderers!” I cried. Enraged and horrified was I — but I spoke also as if to verify the actuality of what I had just seen, for I could scarcely believe that it had truly happened.

“He denied me,” Father said in a low voice.

“They shot him like a dog!”

“If he had not denied me, they wouldn’t have shot him. They would have taken him prisoner is all, as they did John and Jason. I’m sure of it.”

“No. Even if you’re right, it’s not true,” I declared. Fred was gone, and gone from us forever — my wholly innocent brother, my childhood companion, the boy and man I had loved and envied more than all the others, the one I would have been myself, if I had been strong enough, clear enough, humble enough, if I had been a Christian: my best brother was dead.

Father turned to me and said, “What do you mean, it’s not true?” “Fred has been killed! And that’s the simple fact of it! That’s the truth of the matter. Why he was killed, or how he might have avoided it — those aren’t important now, Father. He’s dead. He’s your son, my brother, and he’s dead!”

I looked into Father’s ice-gray eyes and saw a strange sort of puzzlement there, and for the first time realized that he could neither comprehend nor share my feelings at that moment, and thus he did not in the slightest understand me. He did not know who I was. Or who Fred had been. And consequently, in a crucial way, though he had seen it with his own eyes, he did not know what had just happened.

Suddenly, I felt pity for the Old Man. Despite his intelligence and his gifts of language and his mastery of stratagem, he possessed a rare and dangerous kind of stupidity — a stupidity of the heart. It was possibly the very thing that, combined with his intelligence, gifts, and mastery, had indeed made him into an irresistible leader of men, had made him a resourceful and courageous warrior and even a powerful, rigorous man of religion; but his stupid heart had also made him dangerous, fatally dangerous, to anyone who loved him and to anyone whom he loved back. More than the rest of us, Fred had loved the Old Man; and Father had loved him more than all his other children back. And now Fred was a dead man.

“He has made the blood remission. He is with the Lord,” Father said, and he turned to go. “Come on, we have to rouse the boys. Reid’s prepared to raid Osawatomie, and we have to warn the people and help defend them.” He paused for a second and said, “I believe that the Lord has given us this vision for their sake, not Fred’s.”