Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Hold onto your weapons and never be persuaded to leave them, part with them, or have them far away from you. Stand by one another and by your friends whilst a drop of blood remains in you or a breath of air. And, finally, be hanged on the scaffold or a gallows tree, if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession!

  Remember and say it over and over, union is strength, union is strength’. But regardless, without well-digested arrangements such as these, nothing to any good purpose is likely to be demanded, let the demand be never so great. Witness the hundreds of cases of capture and return to slavery, regardless of the protests raised afterwards, when there was no well-defined plan of operation or suitable preparations made and sworn to beforehand.

  By these proposed means, the desired end may be effectually secured. Namely, the enjoyment of our inalienable rights.

  To hear my written words spoken in his resonating, public-hall voice by Father to a sober-faced audience of people who, because of those words, were made ready to take up arms and slay the enemy was wonderfully thrilling to me, and I felt the blood course up and down my arms and could scarcely repress a smile from my lips. I trembled with joy, as much for the meaning of the words and the pictures they painted in my own mind of making quick and bloody work of my enemies, as for the occasion of hearing Father speak them; and when, in that small, dimly lit sanctuary, Father called out to the crowd of us, “Who will come forward and sign an agreement to adhere to my words of advice?” I was the first to stand and deliver. On either side of me, other men and women were standing and stepping to the front also, until in a moment nearly every person in the room had joined me there.

  Father said, “Now, let me say it again. Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him depart from us. But if ye depart from us, say nothing of what ye have heard here. For ye have also heard what shall be done by us with traitors.” There were at that point a final few who made for the door, unbolted it, and disappeared into the night, leaving behind still more than thirty warriors to bind ourselves together and march behind Gideon against the Midianites.

  “The Lord hath instructed us to reduce ourselves to this number,” Father said, “so that when we have accomplished our task, we will not say, ‘Mine own hand hath saved me.’ We must thank only the Lord,” he pronounced, and many in the group sang out, “Praise the Lord! Praise Him!”

  Whereupon Father said, “This which I shall now read to thee is the Agreement, and when I have finished, come forward one by one and sign on this sheet of paper below it, so that we shall be bound together in this work as brothers and sisters, sworn to the death of every one of us.” He told us then to place our right hands over our hearts, which we did, and in a loud, clear voice, he read the Agreement, which, though I had myself written the words for him in the late hours of the previous night, sounded to me as fresh and new as if I had never heard them before.

  As legitimate citizens of the United States of America, trusting in a just and merciful God, whose spirit and all-powerful aid we humbly implore, we pledge that we will ever be true to the flag of our beloved country, always acting under it. We, whose names are hereunto fixed, do constitute ourselves a branch of the United States League of Gileadites. We pledge that we will provide ourselves at once with suitable implements of war, and will aid those who do not possess the means, if any such are disposed to join us, to acquire and do the same. We further invite every colored person whose heart is engaged in the performance of our work, whether male or female, young or old, to join us in that work, which is the defense of our Negro brethren against the man-stealers and any of those cowards who would aid and abet them. All able-bodied men and women shall be prepared to die in this effort. The duty of the aged, infirm, and young members of the League shall be to give instant notice to all other members in case of an attack upon any of our people. Until some trial of courage and talent of able-bodied members shall enable us to elect officers from those who have rendered the most important services, we agree to have no officers, except a treasurer and secretary pro tern. Nothing but wisdom and undaunted courage, efficiency, and general good conduct shall in any way influence us in electing our officers.

  Father laid the paper on the low table where normally flowers for Sabbath services were placed, flattened it with his left hand, and, saying, “So sworn, John Brown” wrote his name with a visible flourish. I then stepped to the table and took the pen from him, and saying the words “So sworn, Owen Brown,” with trembling hand wrote my name below his. One by one, the rest came forward, following the procedure exactly. So sworn, Alexander Washington. So sworn, Harrison Wheeler. So sworn, Shadrach Benchforth. So sworn, Mary Benchforth. So sworn, Felicity Moone. So sworn, Ebidiah Smith. And on down the line, until all of us had sworn and signed.

  Then, bearing the document in hand, Father walked from behind the table where he had stood throughout and came to stand beside us, facing the nave of the sanctuary, where a small cross was attached high on the white-washed wall, and he led us briefly in prayer, humbly beseeching the Lord to protect us in this mighty task. “Make us hard, Lord, hard, like a stone, so that we shall crush and make bleed the teeth of the slavers when they bite down upon us” he prayed.

  When he had finished, we all said our amens, and the Gileadites somberly filed out to the vestry and into the night. Father and I lingered behind to put out the lamps and candles, and when everyone else was gone and we were alone in the darkness of the vestry, I said to him, “Who’ll be the treasurer and secretary pro tern? And what will his duties be?” I couldn’t see much use for there being a treasurer, as there were no dues or other monies involved with the League, and I was unsure of what a secretary would do, as it was difficult to imagine a secret society engaged in much correspondence or keeping minutes. But the night before, when composing the Agreement, I had been ordered by Father to allow for that one officer, and so, without understanding, I had written it in. Now it seemed important. Naturally, I myself wished to be that person but, because of the honor it implied, dared not hope that the job would fall to me.

  “The treasurer and secretary will safeguard these documents,” he answered, and he placed the Words of Advice and the Agreement with the signatures into my hand. “He will not deliver them to the enemy, Owen, even under pain of death. And when the time comes, as it surely will, that we receive monetary support for our work from our white friends, he will record such funds as we receive and will control their expenditure.”

  I said nothing, and when Father had closed the church doors behind us and we had stepped down to the dark, deserted street, I carefully rolled the documents so as not to crease them, and we began walking side by side towards the warehouse. Finally, I could stand it no longer, and I said to him, “So are you making me the sole officer for the Gileadites?”

  “For now, yes. I’ll speak of it first to the others, but I’m sure they’ll agree to it. There’s no one better qualified for the task. Do you mind?” he asked.

  “No. No, I don’t mind,” I answered off-handedly.

  But I remember thinking, At last! It has begun! At last, the killing has begun!

  The wind outside my cabin has let up, and I hear mice skittering in the darkness across the warped, dried-out floors. Their bodies against the boards—though each weighs less than an ounce of fur and twigged bone, a mere thimbleful of flesh—seem nonetheless immeasurably realer than mine, weightier, as if the bit of stale, dusty air displaced by their tiny bodies and disrupted by their rapid movements alongside the crumbling walls exceeds in volume anything my body is capable of filling or disturbing. Yet I know that my presence, despite its frail ethereality, alarms them. The animals see and hear me the way they see and hear an ominous shift in the weather long before it occurs. I am like a ghost and in the course of this relation have traveled far and wide and back and forth in time, a dark spirit growing steadily darker, transported by memory and articulation and the compulsive direction of my thought. I can no longer say, Miss Mayo, whether I am in my cabin
now in Altadena or our old house in ’89 in North Elba. Darkness merges time and place.

  Above me, in the bare attic room where Ruth and I and the younger children and Lyman Epps and his wife, Ellen, slept on our pallets, divided one from the other, males from females, like Shakers by a curtain on a string, I hear the dry rustle of squirrels, or perhaps it is a pair of raccoons—it’s the shuffling gait of animals that have wintered inside, and now that spring has at last come to these northern Adirondack hills, they have mated, and the female has dropped a litter of cubs in her nest of sticks and leaves in the leeward corner, where since November she slumbered protected against the arctic snows and freezing winds. My sudden, unexpected presence here after years away has frightened the poor creatures. I hear the female trying to move her cubs to some place up there in the attic where she feels they will be safe, carrying them in her mouth one by one to the corner furthest from where she senses me. She senses the presence of an alien creature, possibly human, a killer, in one of the two rooms below.

  Although I am still and it is dark and she can see and hear no one, can smell no sour human body, no tobacco smoke, no lamp, no guttering candle, nonetheless she knows that something like a human being, something like a killer, has entered this long-abandoned building and stands in silence now in the middle of the room below. She knows that there must be one of the killers, a human being, down here. The disturbance in the musty air can be nothing else, where for years there has been no human—no men with their dogs, no children even, with their small deadly weapons—except occasionally during the daylight hours, when a crowd of humans, male and female, smelling foully of death and making loud grinding and barking noises with their feet and mouths, come inside and stomp around for a while, as if contemplating taking up residence here, and then leave again.

  Don’t fret, little mother, I’ll not hurt or hinder you. I may remain down here for a long while, perhaps for as many years as this otherwise abandoned old structure stands; perhaps longer, or maybe I’ll stay only for this one night, I can’t know; but don’t you worry, you tiny, frightened mice and agitated raccoons and squirrels, and even you porcupines under the house gnawing on the rafters beneath my feet—all my killing is done now. The killing is finished. You needn’t fear me, even you black bears whom I hear cough and growl outside in the yard, prowling the now-deserted site for refuse, quarreling over a few chicken bones and chunks of old bread tossed aside by the humans when they left this afternoon at the end of their ceremonies. Even the wolves slinking back down the valley from the ridge behind the house and the lion alone on the mountain need not fear my presence here. Every living creature is safe from me now.

  But if they understood these words, no matter; they would take no comfort from them. They know us too well, our terrible propensity for killing. Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of Him. Both. Our only virtue sometimes seems to be that we are as cruel and violent to one another as we are to the other species, whom we slay and devour, or slay for the pure pleasure of it and toss aside, or simply slay because it’s expedient and heap up their corpses. I wish to warn them and to comfort them.

  A pathetic wish; it serves no purpose. Sharp as their ears may be, they cannot hear these words, let alone understand them. I can warn and comfort no one, not even the dumb animals.

  It’s just as well not to try, for all I am now is a story being told for all practical purposes by a man whose only possibility for positioning himself to speak it rests with his imagining this old house, the overgrown yard that surrounds it, the huge, gray stone yonder, and the yellowing bones that lie in boxes buried in the hard ground beside it. I’m but one of the thousand stories of the mystery of being human, and all the other animals know that story already and know the nine hundred ninety-nine more; it’s why they fear us: they know our nature, and don’t require a ghost to tell it.

  Since the day I left this house for Kansas and beyond, I have wanted to be back here again—but not for this. I never in my lifetime wanted it to be true that the mystery surrounding my father’s life and death, the questions concerning his character and motives, even the question of his sanity, lay here in this house on this hallowed plot of ground. Though I better than anyone alive knew the answer to all those questions, which tormented so many good men and women, tormented everyone who loved him for himself and for what he did, I still during my lifetime did not say aloud what was the truth, not to myself and not to anyone else. I loved him, too, and loved what he did. So I kept silent and hoped that the questions would end, or that they needed no answers. I hoped that a mystery was sufficient.

  After Harpers Ferry, I went away; I ran as far as the continent ran, to where there was nothing further than the endless, blue Pacific; and climbed a mountain there and built a cabin; and said nothing: nothing to the journalists, who found out from my brothers and sisters where I had hidden myself and came clambering up my mountain in Altadena to interview me, nothing to the historians, who mailed me long detailed lists of questions, which I tossed into the fire in my iron stove; nothing to Father’s old abolitionist friends and supporters, who came to my cabin seeking answers and left feeling pity for what the war against slavery and the deaths of my beloved father and brothers had done to me. I did not even speak of those matters with my brothers and sisters themselves, those who survived into old age with me, when in later years they arranged to gather together now and again in one of the houses they had scattered to, on a Fourth of July, sometimes on a Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday, and I would trundle down from my hermit’s shack and travel the many hundreds of miles to their homes, where late in the evening they would share their memories of Kansas, of the work before Kansas, and of Harpers Ferry. At those gatherings they all thought me shy, inarticulate, perhaps not as intelligent as they, as they always had anyhow, and they were not wrong. But that did not mean that I did not know the truth about Father and why he did the great, good things and the bad, and why so much of what he did was, at bottom, horrendous, shocking, was wholly evil.

  Within a few days of the swearing of the Gileadites in Springfield, our little army was dissolved. Or, more to the point, Father abruptly withdrew from its command and took me with him, leaving the Negro Gileadites to their own devices and stratagems, which, happily for them, turned out to be sufficient unto the day. But to be cast down from such a height of excitement and anticipation, as I was cast down by Father, was truly agonizing for me. In those days, my particular closeness to Father and the intensity and whole-heartedness with which I embraced his plans and dreams of carrying the battle straight to the slaveholders separated me from my brothers, and I could not pass it off the way John did when, within a few days of Father’s and my somberly and ceremoniously pledging ourselves to defend with our life’s blood the fugitive slaves, the Old Man, as was his wont, turned his attention suddenly elsewhere—to the sorry business of Brown & Perkins, as it happened. John simply shrugged his shoulders and set off on his own business, as he and Jason had so often done in the past. I, however, was crushed with disappointment and bitter frustration. And I was vexed with Father, more so than I had ever been before.

  Looking back now, these many years later, I can see with some sympathy how Father was sorely conflicted then between what he saw as his obligations to his family and his creditors and to Mr. Perkins, who had stood by him for so long, and what he saw as his duty to oppose slavery. I was, of course, not so divided, but there was no place else I could go to wage war than with Father, no army in which to enlist but his, no one to follow into battle but him. When he decided once again to let the fight go, all I could do was gnash my teeth in rage and sharpen my long knife and clean my gun and dream of spilling blood.

  I might have stayed on in Springfield, defying Father’s order to return to North Elba and run the farm there, marching instead and on my own with the Gileadites—who, as it turned out, because of the fear they aroused simpl
y by virtue of rumor and the sight of armed Negro men at the Springfield railroad station and on the streets, never did have the opportunity for an actual, bloody confrontation with the slave-catchers. Wisely, the man-stealers and their cohorts sought their prey elsewhere. But without Father at my side, I knew that I was not especially wanted by the Negroes anyhow. To them, I was merely one of the sons of Captain Brown, as they sometimes called him. I was the big, shy, red-headed fellow who ran errands for his illustrious sire. Any light on my face was reflected light.

  Nights, as I lay in my cot and fumed over what I regarded as Father’s dereliction, his defection even, I dreamed up bloody scenes to give vent to my wrath and my longing for battle. I aimed down the barrel of my gun and fired into the chest of the slave-catcher standing over the prostrate form of a fugitive. I sneaked up behind an auctioneer on his way to market with a bound gang of human chattel, and in full view of his victims reached around his neck and slashed his throat with my knife, retrieved his keys, and with my bloodied hands set the men and women loose from their fetters and led them into the woods and up into the hills. Visions of carnage and revenge filled my mind and strangely pleased me, easing me, calming my turbulent thoughts—so that I could eventually accede to Father’s wishes and return to North Elba.

  “I very much oppose having to go back there,” I told him the night before I departed from Springfield. “I want to stay here and fight alongside the Gileadites.” We were in the office of Brown & Perkins, and I had taken to my cot, prepared for sleep, while he worked on at the desk by lamplight, dashing off more letters that begged for time, for patience and understanding, for merciful delays of prosecution, that promised eventual, full payment, complete clarification and accounting, justice and restitution. This sort of letter he wrote himself, and he pointedly did not want me as his scribe.