Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Mr. Wilkinson of Tahawus had not hidden his true feelings, not even from me, and I believe that he somewhat resented being cut away from the operation, not out of any love for the Negro or some deep desire to help destroy slavery, but because his work on the Railroad made it significantly easier for him to view himself as a man who acted kindly towards people he regarded as his inferiors. Perhaps he believed that by working for the Underground Railroad and alongside Father, whose motives were pure, he might be able to strike a balance against his hard treatment of the indentured Irish miners and their families. At any rate, soon after he was dropped by the wayside, he joined, unbeknownst to us, with our known enemies, with the slave-catchers and bounty-hunters, with the folks in the region who regarded us as fanatical trouble-makers, and with the marshal from Albany, whose pursuit of the Virginia couple accused of murdering their master had continued throughout the summer.

  The marshal, whose name was Saunders, had gotten himself caught in a squeeze between the Canadian and American authorities and also between the states of Virginia and New York, as the Canadians, after conducting an extensive investigation, had asserted unequivocably that the Cannons had never crossed the border at all. The authorities in Virginia insisted that the couple had been last located over in New-Trenton, New York, where they had been detained briefly by a local deputy whom they had somehow bribed to leave their cell door unlocked—the money for the bribe possibly originating with Mr. Douglass, who had visited the couple during their brief confinement. The New-Trenton deputy was himself now awaiting trial, and in order to save his own skin was telling Marshal Saunders everything he knew or thought he knew about the Cannons and their confederates.

  Meanwhile, we were moving regular shipments of human cargo over Father’s, or Reuben Shiloh’s, new link between Long Lake and North Elba, and due to the rising vigilance of the authorities and the greater presence of slave-catchers west of us in Buffalo and east of us in Troy, our cargo was increasing significantly in volume and degree of risk, so that three or four times a week we were obliged to make a run down along the old Military Road from North Elba through the pine forests and across the swamps and muskegs to the cabin of Mrs. Rankin, where we loaded up and then raced back through the night to Timbuctoo, and the next night moved our cargo on to Port Kemp, where Captain Keifer carried it aboard his boat and sailed it north to Canada.

  It was a wild and exciting time. We were like a gang of outlaws, Lyman and I and Mr. Fleete and Father, armed and reckless, and several times we narrowly escaped capture. Lyman seemed to have found his proper vocation. He grew stern and brave and was no longer so garrulous and puffed up as he had sometimes been earlier. Our days on the farm now seemed merely to be resting periods, interludes that we impatiently waited out, until we again received word from Mrs. Rankin that a new shipment for Reuben Shiloh had arrived in Long Lake, and we would be off, Father and Mr. Fleete on horseback, Lyman and I in the wagon, with our guns close at hand and supplies and tarpaulins and blankets stashed in the bed of the wagon. At Mrs. Rankin’s cabin we’d hole up for the daylight hours in the shed she had out back, beneath which we had early on dug a secret cellar hidingplace where the escaped slaves could await our arrival undetected. And then at sundown we’d load the fugitives into the wagon—men, women, and children in various combinations. We’d cover them with the tarpaulin and race back northeast to Timbuctoo, and if we made good time, we’d keep right on towards Port Kent, arriving there just before sunrise, and Captain Keifer would transfer the cargo from our wagon to his boat. Later that same day, usually in the afternoon, we would pull into the yard in front of the house in North Elba, men and animals alike exhausted and hungry, and we’d eat and fall into bed and sleep like corpses for ten or twelve hours.

  Twice, I remember, we were accosted by law officers—a sheriff in Long Lake and a deputy U.S. marshal in Ausable Forks—but on both occasions our wagon was empty, and after suffering a brief and surly interrogation, we were allowed to continue unimpeded. Nonetheless, we were ready for the worst. Although we weren’t actually pursued at any time and thus weren’t obliged to fire our weapons, there was always the danger of betrayal and discovery. People would look up from their work in the fields and woodlots and stare at us as we passed by or peer out the windows of their bedrooms late in the night when the sound of our horses’ hooves and the loud rattle and clack of the wagon disturbed their sleep. Those people must have known who we were and what we were up to.

  Our operation, however, was narrow, secretive, and private, cut off from any communications with the communities that surrounded us, cut off, even, from the rest of the anti-slavery movement and its committees and churches and the old mainlines of the Underground Railroad. We worked in a kind of darkness and solitude, as if no one else on the planet were engaged in the same or similar activities. As if there were no one who was not utterly opposed to our activities. And, as had happened in the past, back in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where for an extended period we shuttled fugitive slaves successfully out of the South into Canada, we got caught up in the day-to-day rhythms and excitement of the work, and this put us off the larger rhythms of the movement as a whole. It was as if our little four-man operation, our overnight link between Long Lake and Port Kent, New York, were the entire anti-slavery program for America. It wasn’t arrogance or pride that did it, although it did sometimes seem that Father honestly believed that under his leadership our work was more crucial to the movement than any other and that it was more rigorous and disciplined, morally clearer, better planned, and more efficiently executed than the work of everyone else—beliefs dangerously close to arrogance and pride. No, we lost sight of the larger picture because we were obliged to respond constantly and quickly day in and out to the immediate needs of desperate people who had entrusted their lives to us. And just as we forgot about the helpful existence of our distant or indirect allies, we forgot about the conniving actions of our distant and indirect enemies. We operated without reconnoiter and in the absence of intelligence.

  Thus we were not prepared for the re-appearance, one hot August afternoon, of Marshal Saunders at the farm in North Elba. He arrived on horseback in the company of a pair of sober-visaged deputies, bearing testimony from Mr. Wilkinson of the Tahawus mining camp, who the marshal claimed had accused Father and me and two unnamed Negroes presently residing in the vicinity of North Elba of having aided and abetted the escape of the indicted murderers James and Emma Cannon, of Richmond, Virginia.

  The officers came up on us shortly after we had returned from a two-night run to Port Kent with four Maryland Negroes—an elderly man, his daughter, and her two nearly grown sons. Our wagon was empty, and Father and I, fortunately, were alone, as Lyman had accompanied Mr. Fleete back to Timbuctoo, there to rest and afterwards to do some much needed blacksmithing among the Negro farmers.

  We were standing outside the house by the water trough, stripped to our waists, washing ourselves. The boys and the women, including Lyman’s wife, Susan, were cutting the first crop of hay in the front field. Father looked up at the three men, who sat relaxed and open-faced on their horses as if they meant us no harm. Introductions were not necessary, and Marshal Saunders got straight to the point of this his second visit to our farm. When he had told us of Mr. Wilkinson’s betrayal, he said, “Mister Brown, I’ve not come here to charge you and your son with anything. I’m here peaceable. But I do need to know the names of the two colored men who helped you carry the Cannons through here. It wasn’t but a month ago,” he said, with a slow smile. “You no doubt recall their names.”

  Father dried himself deliberately and said nothing. He looked at me, and I saw his boiling rage. Then he passed the drying cloth to me.

  “If we helped anyone named Cannon, and I don’t recall that we did, but if we did, then my son and I did it alone,” Father said. “Wilkinson is a liar.”

  Marshal Saunders said that he was looking for a slim, dark Negro man in his twenties and a heavy-set mulatto man in his fift
ies with a full beard. “I’m going to assume, Mister Brown, that you and your son here didn’t have no notion that the coloreds from Virginia was murderers, all right? And you thought you was only helping a couple of escaped slaves scoot through to Canada, that’s all. Just as was the case with Mister Wilkinson down there at Tahawus. And I don’t consider him a liar, sir. I realize that you all were only doing what you thought was your Christian duty. Your Negro associates, however, probably knew better. They have their little secrets that they keep from us,” he said sourly. He believed that they probably knew where the Cannons were hiding. His aim was to cut a deal with our friends. The same deal, he said, that he was cutting with us. If they could give him some small help in locating the Cannons, then he wouldn’t press charges against anyone up here in North Elba. “They’re free niggers, far as I’m concerned, and that’s how I’ll treat them, so long’s they do the same as you and give me a bit of help in performing my duties as a federal officer of the law. You understand what I’m telling you, Mister Brown?”

  Father stared up at the man in silence. The horses shifted their weight, sweating under the sun. “Certainly I understand,” he finally said. “But I will not help you, sir. My son and I, if indeed we did help some poor Negro slaves escape from the evil clutches of some Southern slavemaster—a man who may well have deserved to die anyhow, since well-treated slaves rarely risk the rigors of flight—then we did so on our own.” The burden of proof lay with the marshal, Father pointed out, and he believed that giving a stranger in a strange land a ride in your wagon was not yet illegal in the state of New York.

  Well, yes, the marshal agreed. It was a gray area of the law, a person might say. Father would benefit everyone concerned, however, himself included, if he saw fit to aid the law. The marshal rolled his head slowly on his shoulders, as if his neck were stiff and this were a casual conversation. The two deputies kept their right hands open and close to the handles of their revolvers.

  Father said, “You don’t know who you’re looking for, except on Mister Wilkinson’s perjured say-so. And I can’t help you, and if I could, I’ll tell you frankly, sir, I wouldn’t. Find your Negroes on your own,” he snapped, and he turned and walked towards the house.

  “It could all unravel on you, Brown!” the marshal called after. “I might bring Wilkinson himself up here, so’s he can identify the two niggers for me, and when it comes to saving their own dusky skins, who knows what them fellows’ll say then?”

  Father wheeled and glared at him. “Do as you wish! Bring Satan up from hell, if you Like, and have him pick a pair of Negroes from the crowd for you. I’ll not help with work like this!”

  The three turned their horses abruptly then and rode out of the yard, and without looking back, they galloped down the road towards the settlement. A moment later, when I went inside the house, I found Father already seated, still shirtless, at his writing table, furiously scratching out a letter.

  “Who are you writing to?” I asked him.

  “John and Jason.”

  “In Springfield? And Ohio?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “They may not be there now!’ I said. “They might’ve already left for here.” Barely a week before, a letter from John had arrived, saying, among other cheering things, that he and Jason intended soon to come up to North Elba for a short visit, to see the place and the family and to settle a few business matters with Father that could best be discussed in person.

  “All the better. But in case they haven’t, this will bring them promptly.” He blotted the letter and passed it over to me to read.

  Come hither at once, boys, and come armed, for we need to snatch a few poor creatures from out of the mouth of Satan before he devours them! A proper show of Christian force and clear intent to rain fire down upon the heads of these local malefactors and hypocrites ought to clarify matters here, leastways enough so that we can continue doing the Lord’s work and help bring about the downfall of slavery by making it too costly to maintain against the combined wills of white Christians and of the desperate, courageous slaves themselves. Come hither to North Elba now, my sons! Come and stand with us as true, courageous, righteous Soldiers of the Lord! Your loving father,

  John Brown

  I pointed out that it might be ten days or two weeks before they received his summons, and the whole affair could well have blown over by then. “And besides,”I said, “they might’ve already left Springfield to come here anyhow. Why bother writing this at all?”

  Father looked up at me with an expression that flowed from puzzlement to slight disgust. “Owen, sometimes I think... ,” he said, then began again. “Owen, I sometimes believe that you must become a hotter man than you are.” And with a little wave of dismissal, he returned to his letter, signed it, and placed it into an envelope and sealed it for mailing.

  I stood by the window for a moment and, peering out at the mountains, saw that it was clouding up in the west to rain. I felt weary, almost dizzy, from two sleepless nights and ached in my bones for rest and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a day and a night. But I knew I could not do that yet. I pulled on a shirt and trudged from the house, across the yard towards the field, to help the family bring in the hay. Scythe in hand, I crossed the road, and as I neared the others, I heard rapid hoofbeats behind me and, turning, saw Father ride out. He was headed towards the village to get his letter into the afternoon post to Westport, whence it would make its slow way south to Massachusetts, and the sight of the man, wrapped in haste and single-mindedness and rage, fatigued me now beyond all imagining. It nearly repelled me.

  A short ways beyond, bent over in the field, was the rest of my family—my stepmother and sisters in starched bonnets like white flower-tops and my brothers under the shade of their straw hats working with their backs to me and against the wind that riffled across the field of yellow hay, flattening and silvering it in the fading afternoon light. They seemed at such peace with the world, so at ease with themselves, that I envied them and, momentarily weak and guilty, my conscience enflamed by Father’s example and his cruel remark, felt cut off from them, as if I were a member of a completely different family.

  There followed then a rapid succession of events, one leading swiftly to the next, and it seemed at the time that there was nothing we or anyone else could do to stop or deflect them. First, that same evening, when Father returned from posting his letter, he came all boiling with unusual rage. The family, me included, was at the table, eating supper, when he galloped into the yard on his poor old tired Morgan horse, strode into the house, and poured out his story in a torrent of words, shocking us with the ferocity of his anger and frightening the younger children. Sputtering and spitting, he bore us the news that when Marshal Saunders had earlier interrogated us, he had lied. It was a lie of omission, but a heinous lie nonetheless, Father declared, for the marshal had not told us that he had brought Mr. Wilkinson along with him and that he had kept the man hidden down the road a ways from the farm. Loud talk of murder and lying federal law officers and hypocrisy, of revenge and bloody rebellion, of laying about with the jawbone of an ass and chopping off the heads of serpents—we were used to that from Father. But here, tonight, in our farmhouse kitchen, our domestic sanctuary seemed to have been invaded for the first time, and the calls to violence were no longer made with regard to some distant or even imaginary place and time. They were more than metaphorical. Father wanted blood, real blood, and he wanted it now.

  The Old Man had learned from the folks in Timbuctoo that after having been rebuked and rebuffed by Father, the marshal and his deputies had gathered up Mr. Wilkinson from his hiding-place, and the four had ridden over to the Negro settlement, where the traitorous villain Wilkinson had identified Lyman Epps and Mr. Fleete as our cohorts. Then, despite Lyman’s and Mr. Fleete’s insistence that they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the couple wanted in Virginia for murder, the marshal had placed both men under arrest and had marched them off to Elizabethtown, where, said
Father, they were probably, even as he himself spoke, being placed under lock and key, as if the two had been returned to the manacles of slavery.

  “This shall not be allowed to stand!” Father bellowed.

  Susan Epps was naturally alarmed as to her husband’s fate, and Ruth and Mary rushed to console her, as did I. Father, however, seemed blinded by his rage, and ignoring the fears of the women and children, he stomped up and down in the room, counting weapons and imagining violent confrontations along the trail between North Elba and the Elizabethtown jail, which both he and I knew the marshal and his party would not reach until morning or even later, if on their way they stopped overnight in Keene at Mr. Partridge’s house, as we ourselves had when first coming over here back in May.

  “We can still catch the culprits, you and I,” he said to me. “Lyman and Mister Fleete are surely afoot, made to walk in chains like captured animals while the white men ride. They must have passed by here this very afternoon while you were all at work in the fields,” he suddenly realized. “Didn’t you see them?” he demanded. “Good Lord, didn’t a one of you children notice them on the road? Four white men astride horses and two black men treated like slaves before your very noses, and not a one of you saw it?”