Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Go!” John shouted, and we ran. “He pulled a gun!”

I leapt onto the wagon seat and grabbed the reins, and Mr. Fleete and Lyman, their faces filled with fear, jumped into the back. Father, Jason, and John mounted their horses, and we all broke for the road out of town. When the wagon passed the open door of the jail, with the others on horseback racing on ahead, I looked to my side and saw the jailer come to the door. He had been wounded in his left arm, but he held a revolver in his right, and he aimed carefully and fired once, and then we were gone, the horses pounding up the road, heading north out of town — towards the pass to Ausable Forks this time, instead of back the way we had come, through Keene, where we had shot Billingsly.

It was not until we had run nearly a mile that I took it into my head to check my passengers, and when I glanced back I saw with dismay that Mr. Fleete had been shot in the chest. Lyman sat ashen-faced and expressionless beside him, looking out at the passing scenery as if he were alone. Father and the others were still a ways ahead of us, too far to call, and so I drove on. Shortly, when we had gotten several miles out of town, I drew the wagon up under a tall spruce tree beside the road at the crest of a short hill. I turned in the seat and stepped into the back, where Mr. Fleete lay.

As if explaining a living man’s absence, not a dead man’s presence, Lyman said, “Ol’ Elden Fleete, he’s gone back to Africa.”

“Oh, Lord!” I cried. “What have we done? What have we done, Lyman?”

“It ain’t we that killed him, Owen.”

Then Father and John and Jason appeared on horseback beside the wagon, and they looked down and saw what had happened and grew dark with anger and sorrow. Especially Father. “Bring him on back to Timbuctoo, where he can be dressed out for a proper burial. I only wish it were the slave-catcher who was dead,” he said, “not the slave.”

“Mister Fleete was not a slave, Father” I said.

“We know that, Owen. We know it. But those other fellows don’t.” He clucked to his horse, and we all fell into a somber line and made our slow way back down through Wilmington Notch to North Elba.

There was a terrible sadness amongst all the Negroes when we delivered Mr. Fleete’s body over to them, but no indications of surprise. For them, I suppose, the astonishing thing was that one of them had managed to live so long without having run from the world and hid from it in a hole. That was something about Negroes which I found mystifying in those days — that they constantly expected death and yet did not anticipate it. Later, of course, I came to the same viewpoint myself.

But the consequences of our rash acts were not as dire as I, for one, expected, although they were, indeed, catastrophic for the Negro community in general. We had inflicted a serious wound on the slave-catcher (not a mortal one, it seemed), and that was probably a positive good. Although it seemed to me that there had been more than enough blood spilt. On the way back from Elizabeth town, John confided that he hoped Billingsly would come looking for revenge, so we could kill him properly. Two white men wounded for one black man dead: that was the trade-off. Not quite fair, I thought, but closer to even than most of these exchanges allowed. And we had surely scared our Keene neighbor Mr. Partridge straight back to his deer-hunting ways, stifling any rising ambitions he may have held for assisting slave-catchers and sharing in the rewards of that heinous activity. The unfortunate jailer in Elizabethtown, whose name I never learned, was one of those who, in Father’s phrase, were merely doing their duty, and though he had paid dearly for it, he would have a scar to show and a tale to tell for the rest of his days. He would be able to say that he had been one of the first innocent victims of the Browns’ nigger madness. Mr. Wilkinson, our one-time ally, had beat his retreat back to Tahawus, where he would continue to drive his Irish miners, but with no further pretensions to providing aid and succor to Negroes, and that was actually in the interests of Negroes and those of us who might have otherwise allied ourselves with him. It’s always useful to know your enemy and to have him know you, as Father was fond of saying.

Despite their astonishment and sadness on learning of the death of Mr. Fleete, our family was overjoyed, of course, to see us return to the farm that night uninjured, and Susan wept with relief at the sight of her husband freed from jail. However, their anxiety, as we learned on our arrival home, had been greatly increased that afternoon by a piece of intelligence they had received in our absence from Captain Keifer. He had sent his eldest son down to North Elba on horseback to warn us of what we already knew, that Marshal Saunders had come looking for the Cannons in Port Kent, and to inform us of what we had not even guessed — that in truth, as the marshal had claimed, Captain Keifer had not transported the Negro couple to Canada after all. Further, the two had been surprised in the kitchen of the Quaker’s home by the marshal and his deputies, and the man had promptly arrested the couple and was now transporting them south to Albany, whence they would be returned to Richmond, Virginia, there to stand trial for the brutal slaying of their master.

“What! How could that be?” Father demanded. “He deceived us, then! The Quaker lied! Good Lord, is there no one on this earth we can trust?”

Patiently, Mary related to him what the boy had told her. His father’s boat had been forced back a few miles north of Plattsburgh by a sudden, dangerous turn in the weather, and by the time Captain Keifer made a second attempt to take them into Canada, his Underground Railroad operatives on the further side of the border had been notified by Canadian authorities that the couple was wanted in the United States, not for fleeing slavery, for which there were at that time no federal warrants, but for crossing state lines in flight from arrest for murder, and as a result they had refused to accept them. Not knowing what else to do with the couple, Captain Keifer had brought them into his own home in Port Kent and had attempted to hide and protect them there until such time as he could arrange to move them into Canada by some other means. Most of the villagers in Port Kent were soon aware of the presence of the Negro couple and did not object, and consequently Captain Keifer had grown careless as to their easy coming and going about the place. Thus it was not difficult for the marshal and his deputies to take them by surprise.

“Surely”‘ Mary said, “the poor man is desolated by this turn of events. He asked his son to beg you for your understanding and forgiveness, Mister Brown,” she said, addressing him as she always did — although in his absence she, like the rest of us, generally referred to him as Father or the Old Man. “The boy himself was mighty agitated and seemed burdened by guilt. Poor lad, all full of his thees and thous.” She had comforted him as much as she could and sent him back with assurances to Captain Keifer that Father would bear him no ill will and would not judge him for this calamity. After all, Captain Keifer had more to fear now from the law than did any of us, she pointed out. “He has been harboring people who he knew were accused murderers, not just escaped slaves.”

Father sat heavily down at the table and sighed. I sensed that he was giving something up. John and Jason and I glanced at one another nervously. What now? The ride from Father’s peaks to his valleys was often a rough one, and we were still perched on the heights of our day’s adventure, trying to sort out the meanings of our bloody encounters and the death of Mr. Fleete, hoping to be able to use them to energize us and entitle us to further brave acts. We were young men, after all, armed, freshly tested in battle, and puffed up with righteous wrath, and it did not take much in those days to set our hearts to pounding. Even Jason. We did not want Father to abandon us now and, as was his wont at times like this, to slump down into a slough of despond, where we would doubtless have to follow.