Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  A man’s voice inside drawled, “Who’s there? What d’ yer want?”

  I looked to Father, whose leathery face had gone white. His cheek twitched, and his lips were dry and trembling. I was afraid he would not speak to the man; and I could not. Finally, after a few seconds, the Old Man cleared his throat and asked in a thin voice the way to Mr. Wilkinson’s cabin. Friend Wilkinson, he called him. Words were Father’s saving grace. I would not have thought to say that.

  I heard someone push back a chair and walk across to the door and lift the bolt away, and when he had opened the door a crack, I kicked it and swiftly put my shoulder into it, throwing the door open and tossing the man, James Doyle, for that is who it was, back across the tiny room, and we all burst into the cabin, filling it completely, sending the Doyles, a family of six people, back against the further wall, where they cowered in fright. They were a dry little old bald-headed man, his plump wife, and four children, two of them bearded men in their twenties, the others, a girl and a boy, very small, under fifteen.

  They were frightened and astonished by our sudden, huge presence, and when Father shouted to Mr. Doyle that we were the Northern Army and had come to capture him and his sons, Mrs. Doyle at once commenced to weep, and she cried to her husband, “I told you what you were going to get! I told you!”

  “Hush, Mother!” Mr. Doyle said. “Hush, for God’s sake! This here’s Mister Brown, ain’t it? From over to Osawatomie. We can reason with him.”

  She wept profusely and for a moment dominated the scene, mainly by begging Father not to take her son John, who was only fourteen, she said, a mere boy with no notion of these things.

  Father said to her, “The others, your elder sons, are they members of the Law and Order Party?”

  “Never mind that!” bellowed Old Doyle. “What do you want with us? We ain’t but farmers like you, Brown!”

  “Thou art the enemies of the Lord,” Father pronounced, and he ordered the two grown sons, named Drury and William, and Old Doyle, the father, to come out of the house with us, which they did, leaving wife and mother, son and daughter, and sister and brother weeping and wailing behind in the doorway, for they knew what was about to happen.

  Quickly, we marched the three men, coatless and hatless, back up the narrow, curving pathway to the moonlit road. The two younger men were barefoot and walked gingerly over the stony trail. Oliver, Fred, and Henry were in front of the prisoners, Father, Salmon, and I coming along behind, and when we reached the level plain above the creek, a hundred yards or so from the cabin, where the dead dog lay, Father said to stop now.

  One of the Doyles, William, saw the dog and cried, “Oh, Bonny!”

  Father said, “The Law of Moses states that the fathers shall not be killed for the crimes of the sons, nor the sons for the crimes of the fathers. But here father and sons both are guilty.”

  “It’s not necessary that they understand what’s happening to them,” I said. “Let’s just get it done.” I was suddenly afraid that we had come this far and now the Old Man would once again end it too soon with palaver and prayer. I remember raising the blade of my sword over my head with my good right hand, the moonlight glinting off its edge like cold fire, and then I brought it down and buried it in the skull of James Doyle, splashing the son next to him, Drury, with his father’s blood. Fred and then Henry Thompson and Salmon joined in and began hacking away at the brothers, chopping them apart at the arms and slashing them in their chests and bellies, and even Oliver got in some blows with his sword. I heard several of us shriek during the slaughter, but I do not know which of us did that, except that it was not I who shrieked, and I remember that the Doyles themselves never uttered a single sound, not one cry, but fell silently to the ground like beeves being butchered in a stockyard. Sinew, muscle, bone, and blood flew before our eyes; the bodies of our enemies were slashed, cracked, and broken. Human beings were sliced open by our swords, and there the darkness entered in.

  And Father? Where was Father? All the while, he stood away from us, and he alone did not use his sword. He watched. And when we were done with our murderous work, when the three Doyles were stilled at last and lying at our feet in bloody chunks and pieces, making huge puddles of blood on the ground, Father stepped forward and drew out his pistol. He leaned down and placed the barrel against the cloven head of Old Doyle and fired a bullet straight into the man’s brain, as if into a rotted stump.

  “The others will hear that,” I said to him. Oliver was weeping, and Henry, who suddenly, in the midst of the killing, had commenced to vomit, was now hiccoughing violently. The two of them staggered in small circles in the darkness, pounding their feet against the hard ground in a slow, furious dance, whilst Salmon and Fred stared down at the bodies of the slain men in silence, as if they had come upon them unexpectedly and did not know how they had died.

  “Let them hear it,” Father said. “It will make no difference. Come, boys,” he said, and led us away from the place where we had slain the Doyles, down the trail towards the Wilkinson cabin, which was located on the claim adjacent to Doyle’s, in a grove of old oak and cottonwood trees closer to the creek.

  Here the Old Man for the first time took charge completely. He banged on the door, and before anyone inside had a chance to answer, he demanded to know the way to Dutch Henry’s cabin, which was widely known as a meeting place for pro-slavery settlers. Someone, presumably Mr. Wilkinson, began to answer, but Father interrupted and told him to come out and show us the way.

  When there was no reply, Father waited a moment and then said, “Are you of the Law and Order Party?” meaning, was he pro-slavery.

  Wilkinson answered forthrightly, “I am, sir!”

  “Then you are our prisoner! I order you to open your door to us at once, or we shall burn the house down around you!”

  “Wait! Wait a minute. Let me get a light,” Wilkinson said.

  Father replied that he would give him thirty seconds and commenced counting, but before he had reached twenty, the door was opened, and we all marched inside the cabin. Here, again, there was a terrified wife and four children, all of the children small, however, little more than babies. Wilkinson was in his mid-thirties, a tall, gaunt Southerner with a great jaw, standing in his underwear and stockinged feet. His wife, also tall and thin, in a flannel nightgown and cap, stood by the fireplace, with the children huddled close around her.

  “Who are you!” the woman screamed at Father. “Are you the devil? You look like the devil!”

  “My wife is sick” Mr. Wilkinson said. “Let me stay here with her till morning. Post a man here, and you can come for me then, when we’ll have someone to tend the babies for her. We got us a woman coming then.”

  Father ignored his drawling pleas. He set Oliver and Fred to search the house for weapons, and they quickly turned up a rabbit gun and a powder flask. “Bring them with us,” the Old Man said. Salmon and Henry he told to pick up the pair of saddles that were lying on the floor next to the door and carry them up to the road. We were short two saddles, and I had spotted them myself when we entered the cabin. To Mr. Wilkinson, Father simply said, “Come along now” and he pointed the tip of his sword at the man, whose face went rigid at the sight of it. He made no answer and walked stiff-legged from the cabin, and Father followed.

  The wife called after him, “Dad, you’ll want your boots!”

  “He won’t be needing them,” I said.

  “What are you going to do to my husband?” Her deep-set eyes, her small, round mouth, her nose, her whole face, were all circles inside circles, a great, concentric, plaintive whorl that threatened to draw me out of myself and towards her, and I stepped backwards as if afraid of her.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We ain’t gonna do nothing to him. Just make him our prisoner.”

  “Why? What’s he done?”

  “For exchange. We’ll exchange him with the Missourians for one of ours,” I said, and stumbled backwards from the cabin and turned and ran to catch up with
the others, who had disappeared into the darkness ahead.

  By the time I reached the place where the path joined the main trail, they had already killed Mr. Wilkinson, and he lay on the rough ground in a splash of moonlight with his throat slashed, a huge, toothless yawn from one side of his massive jaw to the other, and he had a great, raw wound on his skull, as if he had been scalped by Indians, and one arm had been nearly severed from the trunk.

  “All right, now,” Father said. “Let’s get on to the Sherman cabin.” He told us to hide the saddles and the rabbit gun in the brush so we could pick them up later.

  But then Oliver began to cry. “I don’t want to do any more of this!” he wailed. “I can’t!.”

  As if reminding the Old Man of something he had forgotten, Fred leaned in close to Father and said, “He’s not a grown man yet, you know.”

  I said, “Maybe Oliver should go back for the wagon and come down along the trail, pick up these here saddles and so on, and meet up later with us below.”

  “Yes, fine. Do that, Oliver. The rest of you follow me,” Father said, and we went from there down to our final stop, the cabin owned by Dutch Sherman, the Missourian who, of all the pro-slavers settled along the Pottawatomie, was the most outspoken and threatening. It was he whom we had most particularly gone looking for that night, and as it turned out, he was the easiest to kill. Not because we hated him more than the others, but because he physically opposed us, fought us furiously until he was finally dead.

  Evidently, he had heard the gunshot from up above, where Father had fired his revolver into Mr. Doyle’s head, and had come out to investigate, for we met him up on the road a short ways from his cabin. Father, Fred, and I were in front, with Henry and Salmon trailing behind, and we came upon him suddenly before he knew we were there. He was standing by the side of the road, urinating, and had not heard us approach. He was a muscular keg of a man, red-faced, with a bull neck and thick arms, a mustachioed Dutchman of about forty, famous for his temper. We threw down on him with our swords and Father’s revolver, and Father said that we were capturing him for the Northern Army. “You are our prisoner, sir.”

  He buttoned himself up slowly, methodically, and glared at us, all the while muttering in his hard accent, “So it’s you damned Bible-thumping Browns, is it? You are worse than the niggers. You are a bunch of god-damn Yankee trash come down here for stealing our niggers and our horses and then to go off feeling all good for it. You are a pack of god-damn hypocrites, coming around here in the dead of night like this for robbing a man and to terrorize him. Tell me what in the hell do you think you are doing!”

  When Father answered, “The only thing we’re robbing you of tonight is your life,” Mr. Sherman understood the dire situation he was in, and he went wild. He exploded in fury, grabbing the barrel of Father’s revolver with one hand and punching him repeatedly in the face with the other. He was very strong, and when Father could not get the weapon loose of his grip or protect himself from his pummeling fist, I was obliged to bring my sword into play and, with a single stroke, severed the man’s hand at the wrist. Both hand and revolver fell to the ground. He howled in pain and rage and charged at me with his head lowered and butted me in the face, bloodying my nose and knocking me backwards onto the ground. With his remaining hand, he grabbed my dropped sword and swung it like a scimitar in a wide circle, clearing a space to stand in and hold us at bay. His severed hand lay on the ground, and his chopped wrist sprayed blood, draining him white, yet still he staggered in a circle, flailing the sword at us, causing us to leap back from him and look for an opening to take him down without being injured by him. I had scrambled back to my feet, my face covered with blood, and when I saw Father’s revolver lying on the ground next to Mr. Sherman’s hand, I darted over to it, grabbed the weapon, and, from a crouching position, looked up into the maddened face of Dutch Sherman looming over me. His sword, my dropped sword, was about to come down on my head. At the same instant as I shot the man in the chest, Henry caught him from behind across the mid-section with his sword, and Fred sank his sword into the man’s shoulder. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  No one said a word for a long time after that. Void of feeling and thought, we stumbled down to the creek and washed our swords and our hands and faces in the cold water and waited there, seated on the rocks, for Oliver to arrive with the wagon. Each of us had withdrawn to a chamber deep inside his head and had locked himself in there alone. When, after about an hour, Oliver still had not come, Father abruptly got up and walked back along the road a ways to Dutch Sherman’s cabin and soon returned, leading a pair of Mr. Sherman’s horses, bridled and saddled. So we would be called horse-thieves, as well as murderers, assassins, cold-blooded executioners. He gave the reins to Salmon and Henry and in a somber, low voice instructed them to ride back along the ridge and see if anything had befallen Oliver.

  But just then we heard the familiar sound of the wagon creaking down the road towards the creek, and a moment later it appeared, with Oliver looking terrified and aghast. He had passed all the sites of our killings, had observed the mangled corpses on the ground from his seat up on the wagon, and the bloody spectacle of it had changed him.

  Father said to Oliver, “Are you all right, son?”

  “I feel dead,” he said in a flat, cold voice.

  “I feel like I’m dead.” “Then you are all right. You can’t feel otherwise, son, after a thing like this. There will be no more of it, I promise thee,” he said, and climbed up onto the wagon and took the reins. Fred and I climbed up behind Salmon and Henry on the stolen horses, and the six of us quickly rode out of that ghastly place, heading southeast from the Pottawatomie creek-bottom to where we had left our horses tied, and thence on to our camp on the Marais des Cygnes.

  Before us, the darkness had faded from the night sky, and we traveled over the tall-grass plain beneath a pale blue canopy. The moon had set, and the last stars, like silver nails, had pinned the canopy overhead. Behind us in the east, the rising sun would soon crack the black, flat line of the horizon. There long, ragged strips of silver-blue clouds lay banked in tiers, tinged with red, as if the heavens were bleeding.

  Let them bleed, I thought. Let the heavens rain down on us in gob– bets and pour rivers of blood over the earth. Let the sky bleed all its color out, and let the earth be covered over with gore—I no longer care.

  Let the soil here below stink and turn to a scarlet muck, and let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils fill with it and we drown in it with our hands on each other’s throats—I no longer resist this war. I relish it.

  Chapter 19

  Dear Miss Mayo, I have again, as it were, mislaid you: days, weeks, possibly whole months, have passed without my clocking them, whilst I’ve scribbled away at this, my long-withheld confession, page after page. And when I have finished covering yet another page or chapter of it, I reach for a fresh sheet of paper or an unused tablet, and finding none at hand, I write on the backs of old, filled sheets (which once again I realize that I have somehow neglected to send to you), and I go on setting down my tale in the margins and even between the lines of passages that, for all I know, I must have written to you sometime last spring or winter—passages, pages, entire tablets that, in my urgency to continue writing, I have elbowed to the edge of my little table and have let get lost amongst the pages and tablets previously heaped there and that now slowly tumble to the floor. They clutter there at my feet and pile like autumn leaves and scatter and drift across this dim room in the cold winds sifting through the cracks in the walls of my cabin and blowing beneath its flimsy door.

  I have gotten lost inside my confession, as if it were my very self—my only remaining self. I am alive, oh, yes, but my life is long over, and thus I am no more now than these words, sentences, episodes, and chapters of my past. Yet from time to time, at moments such as this, I do rise, like an old, befuddled bear who wakes reluctantly from hibernation and breaks off his unbroken, winter-long dream, and I
stumble blinking from the cave of my narration into blinding sunlight, where suddenly, forcibly, I recall the now long-past occasion and need that brought me in the first place a willingness to speak of these things. Which is to say, I remember thee, Miss Mayo, way out East in New York City, poring with steady perseverance over the hundreds of accounts of Father’s life and the numerous interrogatories that you have no doubt taken from the still-living men and women who knew us back before the War and whose tattered memories, though rent and shot through with age, provide them, and now you and Professor Villard, with varying versions of the same events that I dreamed clearly in my cave, as clearly as if they actually occurred there, and that I have been setting down for, lo, these many, unnumbered months.

  But I do remember thee, Miss Mayo, and my promise to compose for you my own account and place it safely into your hands, so that you in turn can aid and advise the distinguished Professor Villard in his composition of what you and he surely hope will become the final biography of John Brown. And if I have been too distracted and confused and enfeebled, if I have been too disembodied by the act of telling this tale, to sort and order these pages and arrange to have them placed into your hands somehow, if, in other words, I have been too much a garrulous ghost and too little a proper respondent, then I apologize, Miss Mayo, and ask your forgiveness and understanding, for there is no other way for me to have told what I have already told and to say what I have yet to say. For though a man trapped in purgatory, if he would escape it, may seem betimes to speak to the living, he speaks, in fact, only to the dead, to those who in hurt confusion surround him there, awaiting his confession to set them free.