Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Mr. Wilkinson whimpered and said that he had nothing to do with their being jailed, that it was all the fault of Marshal Saunders.

  “Then what are you here for?”

  “I came for my own business,”he said.

  “You lie, Wilkinson. Jailer,” Father said, “tell me this maris business here. Now!” He cocked the hammer of his gun. Mr. Wilkinson shut his eyes tightly, as if he expected to hear the gun go off that instant.

  Slowly, carefully, the jailer stood. John, Jason, and I all had our guns trained on him. “Wal, he come in to identify the niggers back there and sign some papers to it. Marshal said he was to do that. Hey, listen, Mister Brown,” he said, “I don’t know nothin’ about these here niggers. You can do with them whatever the hell you want.”

  “Has Mister Wilkinson so sworn, that the men you have locked up for the marshal are indeed the fellows he says they are? Because I’m here to tell you they are not,” Father said.

  “Wal, no, not yet he ain’t. They’s just a couple of coloreds, far’s I’m concerned, and I’m holdin’ ’em for the marshal, like he asked, till he comes back from Port Kent.”

  “With no arrest warrant.”

  “Wal... yes, sir. Yes. That’s so.”

  Grabbing Mr. Wilkinson by his shirt collar, Father drew him to the steel door that led to the cells and said to the jailer, “Come along, and bring your keys. Mister Wilkinson here is going to tell you that the men you have locked up are not the men the marshal is seeking.”

  “Wal, sir, y’ know I can’t release them without the marshal’s say-so,” the man said, although he was already unlocking the door to the jail.

  “You will do as I say,”said Father.

  “Yes, sir, I b’lieve I will,” he said, and he swung open the door, and we all walked into the cell block and went straightway back to where Mr. Fleete and Lyman awaited us. They both grinned broadly when they saw us and came to the front of their shared cell and grasped the bars, watching as the jailer unlocked the cell door and swung it wide.

  “Mister Brown, we are mightly relieved to see you,” said Mr. Fleete. “That there fellow, he’s the one told the marshal we run the Cannons off to Canada,” said Lyman, pointing sternly at Mr. Wilkinson. “They come up on us over in Timbuctoo yesterday evening. Said we knew where the Cannons was hiding. Said they killed their master down in Virginia. We don’t know nothing about that, now, do we, Mister Brown?”

  “No, Lyman, we don’t,”said Father.

  “This ain’t legal, you know” the jailer said to Father, as we all marched back out to his office. Father still held Mr. Wilkinson by his shirt collar and had his gun tight against the man’s ear.

  “Just don’t try to stop us,” said Father, “and no harm will come to either of you. We’ll all worry about what’s legal and what isn’t later on. Right now, however, these men have not been charged and therefore are free.” He let go of Mr. Wilkinson and lowered his gun, and we did like wise with ours and, with Mr. Fleete and Lyman in the lead, made to leave the jader’s office. John was the last to depart from the building, and when he turned to draw the door closed behind him, as he told us later, he saw the jailer extract a handgun from his desk, and he shot the man. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that we barely knew of it, except for the loud gunshot and the sulphurous smell of the powder, for we were already outside and crossing the grass towards the horses and wagon.

  “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.

  “Let me have one of my babies,” Father said in a low voice. “Annie or Sarah. Let me have Sarah. Bring me little Sarie, will you, Ruth?” Suddenly, the Old Man looked very tired—bone-weary and aged.

  Ruth went obediently to the sleeping loft to fetch the child. Father said, “Everything seems to have come undone, doesn’t it, children? Our neighbors have abandoned us. Men have been shot. Blood spilt. And a beloved, courageous friend has been shot dead. And now those whom we would assist in their plight have been captured by the enemy and taken off south to be hung, or worse. Oh, I can barely think of it!”

  No one answered. The younger boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, lounged at the door to the further room, waiting eagerly for the bloody details, who shot whom and where, which they knew would come later, when we elder sons went upstairs to bed and were freed by the absence of our parents to brag to one another. Mary silently placed food down on the table, and Lyman, John, Jason, and I all drew up our stools and set to eating. In a moment, Ruth returned carrying the sleepy-eyed Sarah, and deposited the child on Father’s lap. He smiled wanly down into her puffy face, and when she rose to wakefulness, recognized him, and grinned, he brightened somewhat and began to rock her slowly in his arms.

  “John says I must return to Springfield,” he said to us. In a calm, low voice, he explained that he was needed there to settle some painful arguments and tangled disputes between the woolen buyers and the sheep farmers in Ohio and our main support, Mr. Perkins—old claims and counter-claims that John thought would be more easily resolved if Father was there to face down these nettlesome people in person. It had seemed a bad idea to Father at first. “Now... now I don’t know, maybe he’s right. I had hoped to be needed more here, however, than in Springfield,” he said, and he sighed heavily again. “I think our Negro friends across the valley in Timbuctoo, like our white friends here in North Elba, will no longer want to work with us. What think you, Lyman?”

  Lyman looked up from his plate of ham and corn bread and baked beans, chewed silently for a moment, and finally said, “Mister Brown, I can’t speak for them other folks. Just for me and my wife here. And we’re going to do whatever you decide you need us for. You and your boys, you got me out of that jail today. And if it was me instead of poor ol’ Elden that got killed, and he was the one sitting here tonight eating supper, I know he’d be telling you the same thing. But them other folks over at Timbuctoo, they’re probably going to want to lay low for a spell. Sort of playing possum, you know. They got to, Mister Brown. You can understand that.”

  “Playing possum, eh? But not you and Susan?”

  “No, no, we’re colored folks, too, Mister Brown. For sure. But we’re living here now in this house. We’re not settled with them across the valley in Timbuctoo no more. That’s why we’ve got to take more consideration of what you people do than they do over there. It’s like we got this here debt that we owe to you and the family, Mister Brown. And we want to be paying it off” He looked across the room at his wife as if for confirmation, and she nodded, and he went back to eating.

  “All right, then,” Father said. “It’s settled.”

  “What is?” said I, warm corn bread and butter like soft, crumbled gold in my mouth.

  “We’ll go down to Springfield with John and Jason.”

  “We?”

  Father shot me a hard look. “You and I. Isn’t that what, not so long ago, you were begging for, Owen? I need you there, for a month at least, while Jason returns to Ohio and sets things right for us out west and sees to his wife and poor Fred, who have been making do on their own these months. Taking care of Fred is no simple matter, as you know. The good woman probably did not bargain for that when she agreed to marry Jason.”

  “Ellen loves Fred, Father,” Jason said. “Believe me, he’s no burden to her. She has no fear of him, even when he goes off on one of his spells.”

  “Yes, well, even so, she needs you, son. And I need you there, too, to make what payments we can for the unsold fleeces and to explain our delay to the rest.”

  As fast as it could be said, then, it had been decided. Father, John, and I would return to Springfield, Jason would head back to Ohio, and Lyman and Susan Epps would stay on at the farm with the remainder of the family, tending to the harvest and setting the farm up properly for winter. Lyman had replaced me, as I had replaced Jason. And there was more. Father wished to travel to England, he said, where, according to John, the price for wool was now up to seventy dollars per hundredweight, nearly twice what Brown & Perkins was getting for it in Springfield. He would go there and attempt to convince the British to buy American wool for the first time. By setting the British buyers off against the American, he might thereby break the monopoly that was crippling the producers and driving Father and Mr. Perkins deeper and deeper into debt as they purchased the wool and held it in the Springfield warehouse, waiting for the prices to rise.

  But England? To travel a
cross the sea and attempt to penetrate a market and deal with men we knew nothing about? That seemed foolish to me.

  Not to Father. He would empty the warehouse and sail over with it. The tariffs were down. American fleeces could compete with the best in the world now, he insisted. John Bull had only to see it before his eyes and have a knowing man like Father explain to him the fine conditions under which those fleeces had been grown and make the necessary guarantees for future delivery, and the fellow would snap it up. Everyone knew that our free Ohio and Pennsylvania sheepmen could out-produce the poor, beaten-down Scots and Irish, once the market was opened to them. The only reason no one had done it before this was that the individual sheepman was incapable of delivering the required quantity of wool, and the devious American buyers had colluded and done everything they could to discourage and sabotage cooperatives like ours. “This is the solution!” he exclaimed, happy now, excited again, sailing before a fresh breeze, well out of his doldrums of a few minutes earlier.

  It was almost too much to keep up with, these switches and turns, descents and ascents of feeling and intention. Jason was happy enough, and looked it, pursing his lips in an anticipatory smile of returning to the arms of his bride and the comfort of their home in Ohio. And John was well-pleased, for he had come to feel like a proper businessman down there in Springfield and had moved into more or less permanent quarters with his wife, Wealthy. And Lyman could not have been in the slightest discouraged by the prospect of becoming foreman of the farm, with his wife, Susan, with Mary and Ruth and a hard-working brood of boys and girls to help him.

  I wondered how Mary regarded the Old Man’s decision: relief, I supposed, for his decision to call off the war against slavery for a spell but dread and anxiety as well, for his forthcoming absence from her side as autumn and winter came on.

  But the one, perhaps the only one, who felt deflated by these new plans, surely, was I, Owen Brown, he who barely three months before had wanted nothing so much as to return from the wilderness of these mountains to the bustling river town of Springfield. Something had altered my feelings in those intervening months. The work with Father and the others on the Underground Railroad, to be sure, those excitements and risks and the sense of being engaged wholly in a moral enterprise—they had changed me. But something more lasting than that had eliminated my earlier longing to leave this place, a thing that had grown out of our life as a family settled on a farm in these mountains.