Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

For a second, Shepherd hesitates, as if not quite getting Watson’s meaning, and then abruptly he turns and runs. Watson — or perhaps it is Stewart Taylor, or maybe some other raider, standing in the shadows of the storefronts nearby; any one of us could have done it — fires his rifle, and Shepherd falls, mortally wounded by a single bullet in the spine, running through to the chest. With everyone watching him and no one daring to move to help — not Watson or Stewart inside the covered bridge, not their two prisoners, not the several raiders hiding in the shadows along the street or Father standing unseen at the gate of the armory, not the men up on the platform by the station or the passengers staring in horror from the windows of the train: no one who sees it can make himself come forward to help the fallen man — as Shepherd lifts his bloody chest from the cinders and with his arms slowly drags his numbed, dying body away from the bridge towards the station. After what seems like a long while, he succeeds in getting to a protected place below the platform that is close enough for Phelps and the hotel clerk safely to reach down and draw him up to it, where they quickly pull his body inside the station as if he were already a dead man.

Prepare yourselves for sad ironies, Father forewarned us, often enough for us to have expected it. But it has come nonetheless as a dismaying shock. Men, the cruel perversity of slavery will snap back betimes and will try to bite us in our face, he told us. We have to be hard, hard. This surely is what he meant: that in the liberation of the slaves, the first to die may well be neither a white man nor a slave, but a free Negro.

This sad event has the immediate good effect, however, of closing down the train and trapping its passengers inside it, with Conductor Phelps and the hotel clerk retreating to the station, and the guests, those few wakened by this, the second gunshot of the night, holing up inside the hotel. For the time being, the town is still ours. A little after four A.M., Aaron Stevens’s party comes clattering down Potomac Street, the trap driven by Tidd, with Colonel Washington and Mr. Allstadt and his son in it, and the farm wagon driven by Cook, with the seven liberated slaves huddled in back. Stevens, who carries General Washington’s pistol and sword wrapped in a blanket, and the other raiders, Anderson, Leary, and Green, are on horseback, their mounts taken from Allstadt’s farm.

As soon as they have arrived at the armory yard, Father tells the newly freed slaves who he is, Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, which, as he expected, evokes in them a certain fearfulness, until he reveals that his principal ally is the famous Negro Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave himself, and this seems to impress and calm them somewhat, for these are Virginia ex-slaves and rebellious types, surely, or they would not have come in with Stevens and his men, and being from a border town, they no doubt have had secret access to abolitionist information and literature. He places pikes into their hands and stations them inside the firehouse to guard the growing number of hostages. For now, these white men are your prisoners, he says. Treat them honestly, for they are hostages, whom we will deploy if we need to bargain for our continued safety, and as we will be freeing them later, we want them to tell other white people the truth about us, that we want not revenge but liberty.

The seven Negroes, a woman and six men, several of them barefoot in the cold night, take up their pikes and hesitantly, as if they have no choice in the matter, follow their former masters into the firehouse, while Father straps on George Washington’s scabbard and sword and adds to his pair of old service revolvers the General’s engraved pistol and tooled leather holster. In all his armament, he is a formidable sight, a warrior chieftain, and with his Old Testament beard and fierce gray eyes and his battered straw hat and Yankee farmer’s woolen frock coat and his — to the Negroes, to all people, in fact — peculiar way of speaking, he is a paradoxical one as well: a man out of time, without a shred of vanity or the slightest regard for convention, and though an old man, he is as overflowing as a boy with single-minded purpose and high principles, armed and clothed for no other task in life than this night’s bloody work. The rest of the men, if they put their rifles down, and the ex-slaves, if they put away their pikes, could easily fold back into the general populace and disappear from sight, here or anywhere in America; but not Father: he is Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, and no American, white or black, Northern or Southern, would mistake him for anybody else.

Although they are far fewer than he expected by now and seem somewhat confused and fearful, the arrival of these, the first of the freed slaves, has excited Father, and he orders Cook to drive one of the wagons over to the Maryland side, to the schoolhouse where I and my two men, Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam, will have cached the remainder of our arms, one hundred fifty rifles and another hundred pistols and most of the thousand sharpened pikes. Cook is to bring one-third of the pikes back into town, for, surely, by morning there will be mutinous slaves thronging to the armory yard. The remainder of the weapons are for me and my men to distribute first amongst the insurrectionary slaves who come in from Maryland, and then we are to carry the remainder up into the mountains for eventual dispersal there. By daylight, on both sides of the river, we will have hundreds of escaped slaves to arm, Father says, and must be ready for them in both places, or they will not believe that we are serious.

For now, until further orders, the raiders who are inside the town are merely to hold their positions — Kagi and his men, Copeland and now Leary, over at the rifle factory on Hall’s Island, Oliver and Will Thompson posted at the Shenandoah bridge, Watson and Taylor still holding the bridge across the Potomac, and Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc guarding the arsenal; the rest of the men stand at the ready here at the center of town, in and around the armory grounds and the firehouse.

It is close to six A.M. The rain has ceased, and the heavy storm clouds have moved off, and as dawn approaches, the sky turns slowly to a fluttery, gray, silken sheet, with the high, wooded ridges in the east and north silhouetted against it. The brick storefronts and houses and offices of the town and the narrow, cobbled streets glisten wetly from the night’s rain, and when the first light of the rising sun spreads across the eastern horizon, the faces of the buildings here below turn pink and seem almost to bloom, as if in the darkness of the night they existed only in a nascent form, not quite real.

Before long, the first of the armory workers, all unsuspecting, come drifting into the center of town in twos and threes from their small wood-frame houses above the cliffs on Clay Street, and as they walk through the iron gate into the yard, Father and the others grab them and make them hostages in the firehouse, until he has close to forty men crowded into the two large rooms and has to station several of his raiders inside with the freed slaves to help guard them. Then, by daylight, just as Father said it would, word of the raid gets out. Dr. John Starry, a local physician, is the first to raise the alarm. Summoned to the hotel hours earlier to care for the wounded watchman and the dying Hayward Shepherd by a courageous Negro barman who, at risk of his life, slipped out a side door of the hotel and down dark alleyways to the physician’s house, Dr. Starry bandages the watchman’s forehead and is at Shepherd’s side when the poor man dies, after which, accompanied by the barman who brought him there, he succeeds in returning to his home undetected, where at once he rouses his family and neighbors. Then he rides to the home of the Superintendent of the Armory, A. M. Kitzmiller, bringing the scarcely-to-be-believed news. The armory, arsenal, and rifle works and a large group of hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, are all in the hands of an army of abolitionist murderers that is led by none other than Osawatomie Brown and aided by a wild gang of escaped, spear-carrying slaves! There is a full-scale insurrection under way! Brown has trained cannon on the square, the doctor reports, and is moving all the arms from the town into the interior!