Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

This is an eventuality that Father has anticipated, a part of his overall plan, and so long as it happens after the bridges and the arms stores have been captured and hostages have been taken, it does not much concern him that sometime in the night a shot or two will be fired, alerting the citizens that a violent action is under way. By daylight, they will know of it, anyhow, and will be told by him then of its purpose, and soon the whole country will begin to apprehend its scale. After all, this raid is meant to be a public act, not a private one, he has reminded us, and if our aims are to be met, we must actually invite a certain hue-and-cry and, so long as we are in control of events and not they us, welcome it. Still, the echoing sound of the first shot shocks the men, and Watson’s and Taylor’s breathless report that their prisoner has escaped into the hotel frightens them. Father, however, is calm as ice.

At this moment, he is mainly concerned with Aaron Stevens’s mission into the countryside. He has sent Stevens with Tidd and Cook and three of the Negro men, Anderson, Leary, and Green, five miles west of Harpers Ferry to Halltown, where resides the wealthy planter Colonel Lewis Washington, a man who is a direct descendant of General George Washington and, for that, something of a local celebrity and politician, an aide to Virginia’s Governor Wise. Further, he is known to have inherited from his incomparable ancestor an elaborately engraved pistol presented to the General after the Revolution by the Marquis de Lafayette and a ceremonial sword given him by King Frederick the Great of Prussia. The Old Man wants Colonel Lewis Washington as a hostage, and he wants to free the Colonel’s half-dozen slaves, but most of all, to help place his own acts into their proper context, he wants General George Washington’s pistol and his sword.

With a rail pulled from the fence by the meadow in front of the house, Stevens and his men batter down the Colonel’s door and roust him and his terrified family from their beds. When the Colonel has dressed and has delivered over to the raiders his ancestor’s famous weapons, Stevens formally places him under arrest and, leaving the man’s wife and young children behind, seats him next to Tidd in a two-horse carriage appropriated from the barn. Behind them, Anderson, Leary, and Green have hitched the Colonel’s four remaining horses to a farm wagon and have placed into it three liberated slaves, two men and a young woman — all they could find in the house and barn, or maybe they’re the only Negroes on the place not too frightened to show themselves, Anderson explains to Stevens, for these poor people can’t know for sure yet that we are who we say we are. Stevens agrees, and they start back along the Charles Town Turnpike towards Harpers Ferry.

A mile west of Bolivar Heights, still following Father’s orders, they draw the wagons up before a large farm owned by John Allstadt, after Colonel Washington the wealthiest planter in the region and, like him, a slaveholder — the owner, in fact, of the young woman who was sold off into the Deep South and her young husband who a week ago hung himself because of it. A second time, Stevens and his men break down a front door and enter a stranger’s home unopposed. They quickly make hostages of the man of the house, Mr. Allstadt, and his eighteen-year-old son, and unceremoniously liberate Allstadt’s four remaining slaves, who are added to the group in the farm wagon. As instructed, Stevens and the other raiders are scrupulously polite to their prisoners and to the women and children, just as they were at Colonel Washington’s, and they try not to frighten them overmuch and take pains to cause no unnecessary damage to the house or personal property, other than that of converting the slaves into free men and women. They state clearly to the whites their sole reason for breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and making prisoners of the husbands and sons — which is strictly to end slavery. If we are not opposed, Stevens says, no blood will be spilt. The husbands and sons, like the wagons and horses, will eventually be returned to them, but their slaves are no longer owned by them, he says. The slaves of Virginia are owned henceforth by themselves and cannot be returned to any man.

In the meantime, back at Harpers Ferry, at 1:25 A.M., precisely as scheduled, the Baltimore-bound B & O passenger train rolls in, and when it has hissed to a noisy stop at the station, the night clerk from the hotel next door skitters low from the door of the railroad station, and before the conductor can step down from the train to the platform, the man has leapt aboard, bearing the startling news that gunmen are out on the Potomac bridge and have shot a watchman, who lies bleeding inside the hotel! Worse, the other three town watchmen are nowhere about and may even have been murdered! And here’s something else: when the clerk slipped unseen into the station by a rear window adjacent to the hotel, he tried to telegraph the stationmaster in Charles Town and discovered that the wires had been cut. There is something very strange, something dangerous, happening, and until now, with no idea of how many gunmen might be out there or where they may be hiding, no one but the night clerk has dared to leave the hotel or been able to raise a general alarm.

The conductor, A. J. Phelps, takes immediate charge and directs the engineer and the baggagemaster, who carries a pistol, to step from the train and investigate the bridge, for it may have been sabotaged. Who knows but what these gunmen are train robbers and have blocked the bridge somehow? If the tracks appear clear, he says, they straightway will pass across the river and, at the station in Monococy in Maryland, will telegraph the news of these startling events over to Charles Town, the county seat, where there is a federal marshal’s office and a regiment of town militia available for help.

Sleepy passengers peer out their windows, wondering why the delay, as the engineer and the baggagemaster, his pistol at the ready, walk slowly along the station platform, step down to the railbed, and crunch over the cinders and gravel towards the dark mouth of the covered bridge. When the pair are about fifteen feet from the entrance, Watson speaks to them from the darkness ahead. Drop your pistol, sir, and both of you walk slowly towards us. Keep your hands in full view. You’re under a hundred guns, gentlemen, and are now our prisoners. You won’t be harmed, if you do as we say.

The baggagemaster lets his pistol fall to the railbed, and the two men, as instructed, extend their hands as if ready to be manacled and walk forward. Meanwhile, behind them, up on the platform, a Negro man named Hayward Shepherd, a freedman employed at the station as the night baggageman, has stepped from the office to the platform to see what is going on, and Phelps, the conductor — too far from the bridge for him or the clerk or anyone on the train to see in the darkness that the engineer and the baggagemaster have been all but taken prisoner — orders him to go and assist them in their investigation. Shepherd jumps to the ground and hurries to join the two, who have disappeared inside the bridge. When he, too, has neared the entrance and is now beyond earshot of the men on the platform, he hears a calm, low voice from the darkness, Watson Brown’s, ordering him to stop and listen. Shepherd, a middle-aged bachelor affectionately called “Uncle Hay” by the white citizens of the town, stops and listens. In a conversational tone, Watson tells him what Father has instructed all of us to say to the Virginia freedmen. We have come from Kansas to free the slaves. You may join us in this enterprise or not. But if you refuse to join us, we will treat with you as with any white man who refuses to join us. We will be forced to consider you our enemy.