Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Lyman laid his rifle in the box of the wagon and stepped behind the boathouse a ways to relieve himself, and I began to explain to our fugitives that we were located on the shore of a lake barely forty miles south of Canada. This was the last stop on the Underground Railroad, I was saying, when I heard a man’s voice from the darkness behind me.

“Just stand where you are, Brown, and put your hands on your head,” he said calmly, and when I turned, I saw him with his revolver on Lyman. It was Mr. Billingsly, the slave-catcher. I slowly lifted my hands and placed them on my head as instructed and as Lyman had already done.

“You niggers, you move over here by me,” the slave-catcher said to Mr. and Mrs. Cannon. “And you,” he said to Lyman, “you stand by the wagon there with Brown.” I saw then that the man was carrying in his other hand a pair of manacles. Extending them to me, he said, “Clamp these onto my prisoners, Brown.”

“No,” I said. “I will not do that.”

He stared at me hard. “You people are crazy, is what.”

He turned to Lyman. “Here. You do it, then. Put these irons on them.” He held the instruments out to him.

Lyman regarded the manacles coldly. He said, “You the slave-catcher, not me.”

At that instant, I saw Father step out of the darkness behind Billingsly. He held his musket at waist level with both hands and had it aimed straight at the small of the man’s back. “Put down your gun, Mister Billingsly,” he said in a cold, almost expressionless voice.

The slave-catcher’s eyes went dead, and he inhaled deeply and did as he was told.

“Lie on the ground, face-down” Father said. Behind Father stood a man whom I took to be Captain Keifer, a short, black-haired fellow with a fringe of beard on his chin. There was a note in Father’s voice that frightened me, and it surely must have terrified Billingsly, if he had any sense at all: it was the note of a man whose mind was made up, who would not be stopped from completing the terrible action that he had already decided upon, no matter how the circumstances changed. I knew that he had decided to kill the man. And in spite of being frightened by the tone in Father’s voice, I was excited by it.

Mr. Billingsly got down on his knees and then lay on his stomach, his face pressed against the rocky ground, and when he had done so, Father stepped forward and, straddling the maris body, aimed his gun down at his head.

Lyman said, “You ain’t goin’ to kill the man, Mister Brown.”

“I am,” Father said.

Captain Keifer moved forward then and said to Father, “I pray thee, Brown, do not kill him. It is not for thee to execute the man.”

Lyman looked at me with disbelief, and I caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Cannon as they backed away from the scene to the front of the wagon and stood by the horses, as if preparing for flight.

Shoving the stock against his shoulder, Father looked coldly down the barrel at the man’s head. I could see that Billingsly’s teeth were clenched and his eyes were closed tightly, as if he expected nothing less than to hear the irritating explosion of gunfire. It was very strange — he did not look like a man who believed he would die of it. He did not seem to believe that he was inside his own body and that his brain was about to be blown to bits.

“Slave-catcher” Father said, “I am sending thee straight to hell.”

I did not dare to rush Father and try to seize his weapon — the gun might go off and kill the slave-catcher beneath it, or our struggle with one another might give the man the opportunity to escape, and I did not want that, either — so I stood as if rooted to the ground. But when Captain Keifer stepped firmly forward with his hands extended as if to grab Father from behind, I spoke out at last. “Wait, Father!” I cried. “Back off, and put the man in his own manacles! Let him wear the manacles he planned to use on the Negroes. And let Lyman do it!” I said.

Slowly, Father lowered his rifle and backed away from the slave-catcher. “Put your hands behind your back,” he ordered, and the slave-catcher obeyed. “All right, Lyman. Place the chains on him, and lock them tight.”

Lyman reached down and grabbed up one of the two sets of manacles and clamped them onto the white man.

Father rolled Billingsly over onto his back, groped through the man’s waistcoat pockets until he found the keys, and tossed the keys far out into the cove. He grabbed the second pair of manacles and heaved them into the darkness also, and when they fell into the water, there was a loud splash, and then silence.

A moment passed, and Father said, “Put him into the wagon, Owen.” Lyman and I retrieved our guns and together hefted the slave-catcher onto his feet and shoved him into the box of the wagon. While Lyman stood guard over him, I quickly set about removing the hides and pelts, which Captain Keifer would be selling for us, and placed them inside the boathouse. Father escorted our poor, forlorn, very frightened fugitives directly to the boat, and the captain prepared to set sail at once, for the sun would soon rise and there would be many people coming and going along the shore here.

“Cast off!” the captain called to Father, who promptly untied the lines from the pilings and tossed them onto the deck. The captain loosed and unfurled a small triangle of sail at the bow, which caught the breeze at once, and the schooner moved abruptly away from the dock. The captain was standing at the wheel in the bow, and the couple from Virginia were up on the foredeck, standing together and watching, not us, but the dark northern sky, where there was a star, clear and bold, a diamond. Over in the east, the sky had turned a pale blond color, with the tops of the mountains beyond the lake just visible at the horizon. The captain scrambled forward and let out more sail, then returned to the wheel, and in a few moments the boat had crossed the cove and was rounding the point at the far end, heading for open water.

We left Port Kent at once, carrying the slave-catcher out of town to the point on the headlands above the lake where we had rested earlier, and here Father bade me to pull up. He and I climbed down from the wagon and came around to the rear, where Lyman and I got the fellow out.

When we climbed into the wagon again, with Lyman stretched out in the back and Father and I seated up front, and prepared to leave him, the slave-catcher shot us a puzzled expression — it was the look of a man who did not understand why we had not killed him. Not because he thought we were murderers, but because the logic of the situation had demanded it. It seemed to make no sense to him that he was still alive, and he stared after us with an almost plaintive expression, as if he wanted us to come back and properly execute him.

Father said to me, “Drive on quickly, Owen. I cannot stand the sight of the man.” I slapped the reins, and we left him there, standing in the moonlight in the middle of the track, his hands clamped behind him in irons.

We said nothing to one another for a long while, and then, finally, a few miles west of Keesville, Father sighed heavily and said, “I am grateful to thee, Owen.”

“You are? For what?”

“For interfering with me. Back there at the lake.”

“I feared you would be angry with me.”

“No, son. I’m in no way angry. I’m grateful to you. I am. In saving Billingsly’s life, you probably saved my soul from hell. Fact is, I’m not ready to kill a man, Owen.”

“Not in cold blood,” I said.

“Yes, and that’s the problem. My killing him would have been murder, pure and simple. I have no cold blood, Owen. Not a drop. I must acquire it.”

I did not know what to say to that; I could not begin to grasp his meaning then; so I said nothing and, for the remainder of our journey, drove mostly in silence. There would come a time, however, and not many years later — in the smoke and blood of Kansas, with the bodies of men and boys yanked from their warm winter beds and hacked to death with machetes and lying now in chunks steaming like fresh meat all around us in the frozen grass — when I would remember this small conversation, and I would understand it then, just as I am sure you do now.