Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Then I heard Father’s hard voice call up to me: “Owen! God sees it, Owen! God sees it!” And with that, down the embankment I scrambled and into the river and on to the further bank — saved once again from myself by my father’s call to come along, come and kill men another day.

We arrived late that evening, foot-sore, weary, and sullen, at Uncle’s cabin, which Reid’s marauders, having marked it already with Fred’s cold-blooded murder, had passed over and left intact. Earlier, as we re-gathered on the far bank of the river, we had stood awhile and watched the smoke rise over the village of Osawatomie, where the Ruffians were gaily pillaging and burning. Now and then, the silence was broken by the whoops of the victors and the random sounds of their guns being fired exuberantly into the air. That there was still in effect, despite contradicting claims on both sides, an unwritten law against violating or otherwise injuring women and children was cold comfort to us: houses and barns filled with the long, arduous summer’s harvest were going up in flames, and Free-State livestock was being herded together for travel east to feed hungry mouths in Missouri, and stores and the several public buildings were being looted and burned to the ground. All over the region, the grassy plains and pretty cottonwood dells were scarred by the blackened ruins of farmsteads and crossroads stores, and the trails and roads were increasingly haunted by the wagons of burned-out Free-Staters and pro-slavery families alike returning with their few remaining possessions and animals to their home states — ruined by this war, slump-shouldered, disillusioned, and broken.

Uncle was alone in his cabin when we arrived. Having determined to stay and minister to his tiny flock, he had long since sent his wife, Flora, Father’s half-sister, on back to Ohio for the duration of the hostilities. In spite of his connection to us Browns and of having briefly harbored John and Jason after the Pottawatomie massacre, he had managed, by virtue of his simple decency and even-handedness in all his dealings, to escape persecution by the roving bands of Ruffians. There are all sorts of Christians, and Uncle Sam Adair was, to my mind, a simple Christian, for, although he hated slavery, he regarded all human beings as equally fallen from grace and equally capable of salvation. He was thus essentially pacifistic, like Jason, and did not believe that it was necessary to kill people in order to free others. From the beginning, this had separated Uncle from Father, although Uncle was not severe about it — except, of course, for a spell following the Pottawatomie killings. So while he did not exactly welcome us into his home that night, he nonetheless permitted us to enter and view Fred’s body and make the necessary determinations for his burial.

The main room of the cabin was dimly lit by a single oil lantern and a low fire in the fireplace. We crowded in — Father, Salmon, Oliver, and I — and stood facing the long table where Uncle had laid out the body. He had put Fred’s boots back on him and his shirt, buttoned to the throat, and had washed and shaved his face, so that Fred seemed almost to be sleeping. Fred in repose and in that flickering light had an angelic face, soft and pink and round, more like our mother’s than Father’s. There was something, not female, but decidedly feminine in Fred; in this he was not much like his father or brothers, we who seemed so wholly masculine, unyielding, and crude. Even when a stoical, solitary shepherd in Ohio, where he had resembled no man so much as John the Baptist in the wilderness, Fred had had about him a delicacy and finesse, a physical sweetness, that had set him apart from other men in a way that, after his self-mutilation, became even more pronounced than before: somehow, that most violent and most masculine act of self-reproach, in Fred’s hand, had looked nearly gentle, and it had neither frightened nor embarrassed any of us. We had been saddened by it, of course, but not intimidated, as we would have been if one of our other brothers had done it.

I cannot say what Father thought or felt that night as he looked down on Fred’s body. He did not weep, nor for a long while did he say anything. Always, as regards his children, Father’s thoughts and feelings were strong, but they were also at times somewhat gnarled and stunted, as if our very existence were a chastizement to him. When a decent amount of time had passed in silence, Uncle cleared his throat and coughed nervously and said, “Would you like me to say the prayers for the lad, John?”

At first, Father did not respond; then he slowly shook his head no. I looked at his face and saw again that there was something newly broken in him: a piece of his mind that hitherto had been intact was now cast off from it, and he was no longer merely suppressing his emotions, his rage and grief, saving them for a later, more appropriate hour and place: his mind now was less a finely calibrated engine than a monument: it had become like chiseled stone, cut and carved in a permanent way, and I saw that what Father did not express he did not feel.

He stepped away from Fred’s body and, passing between us, went to the door and said for Uncle to bury Fred here on the property and to mark it properly with his name and dates. “And say upon it the words of the apostle, ‘For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.’” Then, abruptly, he asked Uncle how many horses he had.

“A pair,” Uncle told him. “And I still have a mule.”

“I will need them, along with your wagon. I’ll replace them in a few days. The boys and I have an appointment with some Ruffians, and I don’t want to disappoint them by arriving late.” It was his intention, he said, to nip awhile at the flanks and heels of Reid’s army, until we had ourselves fresh mounts and supplies, and then he would come back around, before heading into Africa.

Uncle looked at him with the same bewildered amazement as I had earlier. “Africa, John? What are you saying?”

“You will know it when I’ve done it;’ Father said. And at that I suddenly remembered his old plan, his Subterranean Passway into the South, and I finally understood his meaning and knew that for him, and lor us, this dismal, murderous war in Kansas was nearly finished.

“Come on, boys,” he said. “Your brother is with the Lord. You’ll see him again soon enough.” Then he stepped from the cabin into the night, and we trooped silently after.

There commenced then a lengthy period which in hindsight could be called the calm before the storm, although we did not know then that the storm was truly coming, even though Father increasingly predicted it. He never said the name of the place, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the town down in the very heart of the Slavocracy where the federal government manufactured its famed Sharps rifles. He called it Africa. But we knew roughly the place he meant and that a new, more dangerous, and more consequential work on a different front was about to begin.

And having come to this point in my account, dear Miss Mayo, where begin the more publically known and recorded events in Father’s life, let me declare that I wish only to tell you here what you cannot more easily and reliably learn elsewhere from the now hundreds of published histories and memoirs of those days half a century gone. My memory for facts, dates, names, and so on is not sharp; it never was: you don’t need me for those anyhow. But my feelings and emotions, my whole sensibility, are today, as I scribble here in my cabin, the same as they were back then. I fear that is all I have now to offer you. It is as if I have throughout these intervening years been insensible to everything that has since then occurred or passed before me, and I am today in my brain and heart the very same man I was a half-century ago, a man suffering incoherently through each new day, whether in North Elba or Kansas or Virginia, with no sure knowledge of what the next day will bring. I am still a man stuck in that same, old killing game, a man who — having contrived to set his father in motion and having shaped matters in such a way as to set the Old Man onto a bloody track straight to perdition, or at least to purgatory — is condemned to follow him there and, if possible, with these words, with the truthfulness of this account, with this confession of my intentions, my desires, and my secret acts, finally to release him. I want Father’s soul to be free of me at last, and mine to be free of him, regardless of where from this purgatory we each afterwards must go.