Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

While I clear the house and my men stack the arms into our wagon, Father and his men will be nearing the covered bridge that crosses the Potomac from Maryland into the state of Virginia and the town of Harpers Ferry. This is how it will go. Around nine o’clock, the drizzle shifts over to a straight rain. At ten-thirty, they reach the Maryland Heights, a steep, wooded thousand-foot-high cliff above the cut of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge. Although from up here it is too dark to make out the shapes of the brick-front buildings and cobbled streets below, the men can see through the rain a few dim, last lights from the slumbering town. Passing by the abandoned log schoolhouse, where I am to store our weapons and later arm the escaping slaves, Father and his men descend on the narrow, winding lane to the grassy riverbank and march for a while alongside the wide, swift-flowing, steel-colored river to the covered bridge, which crosses to Harpers Ferry a short ways upstream from the place where the east-running Potomac River is joined from the south by the Shendandoah. Well in sight of the bridge now, its wide, black entrance beckoning like the mouth of a gigantic serpent, they leave the road and cross the C & O Canal at lock 23 and make their way in the cold rain along the tow path to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks running in from the east. Here the tracks turn, cross the canal, and pass through the covered bridge alongside the narrow roadway, passing over the wide, gray river in pitch darkness to the station and loading platforms in the town center, where they turn again and lead out of town on the further side of the Potomac into western Virginia and on to Ohio.

Father and his men are well down in the gorge now, as if they have entered the den of the monstrous snake. Behind them and before them on their left, like thick, black curtains hanging from the blacker sky, loom high walls, where clusters of scrub oak and thickets of thorn bushes cling to wet, rocky escarpments all the way to the tops, and tall, windblown chestnut and walnut trees rise from the bluffs above. There can be no return now: Father and his men have reached the bridge over the Potomac and must enter it and go on, straight into the town at the further end. Father halts the wagon at the entrance for a moment and stations Watson and Stewart Taylor as a rear guard on the Maryland side. Then, at the Old Man’s command, Kagi and Stevens march straight into the mouth of the bridge. Fifty yards back, Father follows in the rumbling wagon, and the rest of the men, rifles at the ready and cartridge boxes clipped to the outside of their clothing for quick access, march wordlessly along behind, walking stiffly on the loose planks, as if on ice, and taking shallow, tight breaths, as if afraid to fill their chests with the blackness that surrounds them.

A few moments later, Kagi and Stevens emerge from the long throat of the bridge. They are the first of the raiders to enter the town, and as soon as they have set their boots onto the rain-slicked cobbles of Potomac Street, a watchman hears their step and calls, Who goes there! Kagi answers, Hallo, Billy Williams! It’s a friend! The watchman draws close to the two and lifts his lantern and says, Oh, it’s Mister Kagi who’s out so late, and they instantly throw down on him and take him prisoner and douse his lamp.

The raid has begun. Osawatomie Brown and his men are inside Harpers Ferry and have taken their first hostage. The raiders are able to breathe and walk normally now, and they move rapidly and efficiently from one place and situation to the next, exactly as planned and rehearsed. Turning right on Potomac Street at the B & O train depot, they pass the deserted porch and darkened windows of the Wager Hotel, where the last guests have finally gone upstairs to their rooms, and head straight towards the armory, a long double row of brick buildings situated between the railroad siding and the canal. On the left, adjacent to the gate of the armory grounds, there is a square brick building, a single-storey, two-room structure that serves as a fire-engine house for the town and a guardhouse for the armory. When Father has drawn the wagon close to the iron gate, the armory watchman, whose name is Daniel Whelan, cracks open the timbered door of the firehouse, pauses, squints into the darkness, and then reluctantly steps outside into the rain. In a sleepy voice, he says, That you, Williams?

Open the gate, Mister Whelan, Father says.

You’re not Williams, says the watchman, more confused than frightened. At once, Oliver and Newby step forward with their rifles leveled and take him prisoner. Aaron Stevens grabs the crowbar from the wagon bed and twists it into the chain holding the gate. When the lock snaps, he and Kagi swing open the gate, and Father drives the wagon straight into the yard. The other men, including the two captured watchmen, follow at gunpoint, and Kagi swings the gate closed again.

Now Father climbs down from the wagon and, turning to his dumbfounded prisoners, declares that he has come here from Kansas, for this is a slave state, and he has come to free all its Negro slaves.

Williams and Whelan look wide-eyed in disbelief at the old man. The rain drips from the tattered brim of his hat and from his white beard. Barely hearing his words, they stare at him, this bony, sharp-eyed old fellow in the frock coat, who, except for his rifle and the two pistols at his waist, resembles more a poor, hardscrabble farmer from the hills than a Yankee liberator of slaves, and they look around at the small, shabbily dressed, heavily armed group of white and Negro young men who stand near him, and finally at each other, and say nothing. What is happening here? For Williams and Whelan, this is a strange, waking dream, a shared hallucination.

I have taken possession of the United States armory, the old man calmly continues. And if the citizens of the town interfere with me and my men, we must burn the town and have blood.

Father now proceeds to dispatch his men so as to take control of the remaining arms supplies and defenses of the town. Under guard by Dauphin Thompson and Lewis Leary, the two hostages are shut into the firehouse, while Oliver and Will Thompson are sent three blocks south on Shenandoah Street to take command of the bridge that crosses the Shenandoah River into town. The tollbooth proves to be empty and the bridge unguarded. Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc take over the arsenal, also unguarded, just off the main square and in sight of the hotel, where they will wait for further orders and a wagon to empty it. Stevens, Kagi, and Copeland are ordered to the rifle factory, which is located a short ways further down Shenandoah Street at Lower Hall’s Island, a long, narrow rise of land in the Shendandoah River that is separated from the shore by a canal. Once more, a single watchman is surprised by the raiders and, when captured, is marched by Stevens back to the firehouse, leaving Kagi and Copeland behind to hold the rifle works. On his return to the firehouse, Stevens comes upon three half-drunk, unarmed young men, carousers straggling home late from the Wager Hotel, and he swiftly puts them under his gun and brings them in with the watchman.

It is not yet midnight, and both bridges into town, the armory, the arsenal, and the rifle factory have been brought under the control of the raiders. Six men have been taken hostage and locked into the firehouse. Unknown to the rest of its citizens, unknown to the world, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, belongs to Osawatomie Brown. Around this time, the rain lets up, and the clouds slowly pull away and open the starry sky to view. Soon the dog-tooth moon breaks the dark horizon above the Maryland Heights north of town, where, just before one A.M., as Father expected, a fourth watchman, Patrick Higgins, comes down the moonlit footpath from his home in Sandy Hook to relieve Williams at the Maryland side of the Potomac bridge. As he enters the covered bridge, Watson and Stewart Taylor, Father’s rear guard, step from the shadows and capture the man. In silence, dutifully following the plan, they direct their prisoner to the bridge and commence marching him over to the firehouse, when suddenly Higgins turns and swats Watson on the forehead and races ahead of them into the darkness. Before Watson can stay his hand, Taylor raises his rifle and fires, his bullet slightly grazing the forehead of the escaping man, who is able nonetheless to get safely to the end of the bridge and into the Wager Hotel, where he is the first to raise the alarm, although he cannot say who has shot at him or why.