Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Then he left me. I lingered a moment longer, watching the sun blot out the eastern horizon with its light, and saw Fred’s open face float against the light, and his slow, thoughtful gestures and ways, and heard faintly in the breeze his gentle, abrupt voice — an illusion this time, no mirage, no vision given by the Lord, and it was already beginning to fade. Then slowly, reluctantly, so as to depart from it before it disappeared altogether, I turned away from this weak, diminishing apparition of my dead brother and followed Father’s cold, dark form down the ridge into the camp.

On that day, the day that his son was killed, Father fought the battle that made him known as Osawatomie Brown. Until his own death and for many years after, even to today, it was his public name. Perhaps — despite my account and because of yours — it will be his name forever. Other men, most of whom had never seen him in the flesh — the journalists and hagiographers of the North, mainly — gave it to him, but he quickly embraced it himself and took to signing, with a vain flourish, his letters and the autograph books of his admirers with it: Osawatomie Brown. Or sometimes, more formally, John Brown of Osawatomie. On the day that he sacrificed his best son upon the stone altar of his belief, Father within hours was transformed from a mortal man — an extraordinary and famous man, to be sure, but, still, only a man — into a hero bathed in swirls of light. It mattered not whether they liked his ways or admired his courage or believed his words; the American people from then on viewed him as more and other than a man.

This transformation, before anyone else even knew that it had occurred, Father already understood and had begun using for his own secret purposes. In the mind of the South, he would be Baal and Anathema. And in the imagination of the North, he would make him-self a Greek or Roman hero, Achilles in his tent or Horatio at the bridge, or one of the old, impetuous, dragon-slaying heroes of Arthurian romance, each of whom in the beginning surely had been, like him, a flesh-and-blood man who, one day, when a sufficient number of stories about him had accumulated in the public mind, stepped across an invisible line and, as if by magic, became other than human: the son lay murdered in the dusty Kansas track, and the father would ride down that track into legend. So that, in the North, Osawatomie Brown soon reached the point of fame where he could lose a battle, and it would nonetheless be regarded as a victory — a triumph, if not for him or for the anti-slavery forces, then for the human spirit. In the South, his victories signaled the coming millennium, the impending war between the races, and his losses entered the accounts as proof, not of his military feebleness or personal failure, but of his enemies’ courage and virtue in defense of slavery. All men now measured their stature and meaning against Osawatomie Brown’s.

In mundane reality, however, the Battle of Osawatomie was neither loss nor victory: I was there. It had no political or military stature and no philosophical or religious meaning. I broke and ran with the others, abandoning the town to the Ruffians’ scourging fire and pillage; I know what it was — merely a failed defense on our part, and a looting raid on theirs.

Neither Father nor I, without having agreed between ourselves, said anything to the others in our party of what we had witnessed from the ridge at dawn that morning, except that we had spotted General Reid’s scouts returning from Osawatomie, riding away from the settlement east to west, towards the Lawrence Road, where, according to rumor, Reid’s force had temporarily bivouacked. And when we rode down from our camp into town, passing Uncle’s cabin, where Fred’s body lay inside on a plank table, we did not stop to pray over it or to speak solemnly with its sad, frightened attendants of Fred’s brief life and useless death; we rode straight on to warn the settlers of the imminent raid from General Reid’s band of irregulars, which we knew numbered in the hundreds.

Reid had been moving across the countryside for weeks, gathering all the loose gangs of marauders into a cohesive force. Rumors, until then mostly discounted by us, had been flying from one Free-State redoubt to another: that he wished to make a final, defining attack on Lawrence and then on Topeka, the capitals of Kansas abolitionism-attacks that we knew would not be tolerated by the federal army, in spite of the unspoken, continued support of the pro-slavers’ interests by the President and his Secretary of War; not wishing to get caught between the Ruffians and the federal troops, we had left the defense of both cities to their own citizens. And until we saw Reid’s scouts returning that morning from Osawatomie, we had not thought that he would bother taking Osawatomie, in spite of its reputation as an abolitionist stronghold and, notwithstanding our long absence from the place, its reputation as the Kansas base of the Browns. By this time, Wealthy and little Tonny and Ellen had returned to Ohio; John and Jason were in Topeka; and our brother-in-law Henry, after suffering his leg wound at Black Jack, had gone home to sister Ruth and their little farm in North Elba. Most of the other inhabitants had fled the town by now as well, so that it was a cluster of barely twenty families — poor, stubborn folks who had refused to abandon their cabins and property to the pro-slave predators of the region but who, unlike the more organized and well-armed citizens of Lawrence and Topeka, posed no real threat to the Ruffians.

However, due to our having distributed amongst them the one hundred fifty head of cattle that we on nighttime raids had been liberating piecemeal from small bands of Ruffians over the previous weeks, we had unintentionally made the town an object of General Reid’s especial attention, and it now appeared that he had stopped on his march towards Lawrence and was coming in unexpectedly from the west, moving south of the Marais des Cygnes River and north of the Pottawatomie, a narrowing wedge of territory that pointed at the heart of the town where the two rivers met.

At the low log blockhouse — actually, more a storehouse than a fort — we combined with Captain Parson’s small homeguard of boys and old men and spread out amongst the trees at the edge of the settlement and dug in there to await the arrival of Reid’s men, with the river, at the one place where it broadened and went shallow and was thus fordable, at our backs. “Never defend an unfordable river,” went one of Father’s maxims, “or the Lord may have to part the waters for you.” At one point, before we had dispersed and taken our positions in the woods behind rocks and logs, Father and I had a moment alone. We were standing on a high, shrubby overlook, with the Marais des Cygnes passing below us. Father was seated on a stump, slowly sharpening his cutlass and every few seconds casting a wary eye up the trail, where we expected soon to see Reid and his men come riding in.

“Why not pack everyone up and safely abandon this place, Father?” I asked him. “Innocent lives will be lost defending it, and Reid’s going to take it anyway.”

“The apostle saith, ‘Rebuke with all long suffering,’“ he answered without looking up from his work. ‘“For the time will come when the people will not endure sound doctrine, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall all be turned into fables.’“

I sighed. “All right, fine. But tell me what you propose to accomplish here.”

“Apotheosis, son. Apotheosis.”

“You expect to die here?”

“Oh, no! Just the opposite. God does not want me to die yet. He has something further for me to do. Something much larger. I know this.”

“You know God’s mind?”