Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  We were silent for a moment and looked at one another in puzzlement.

  “That was Fred,” Salmon said. “Why do you suppose he did that?” Father answered that he didn’t know, but look, and sure enough, there came Captain Pate and one of his lieutenants, walking towards us and waving a white flag. What followed is well known: Pate wished to obtain a truce, he said. He declared that he was a deputy United States marshal sent out by the government to capture “certain persons for whom writs of arrest have been issued—”

  Father cut him off and in his coldest voice said, “I’ve been told that before, sir. I know who you are and why you are here. You will surrender unconditionally, Captain Pate, or we will leave every one of you lying dead with your animals over there.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes—” Pate said, but Father again interrupted and drew his revolver on him and commanded him to have his men lay down their arms. We put our weapons out where they could be seen and aimed them straight at Pate and his lieutenant.

  Father said, “You’re surrounded, you realize.”

  “But we’re here under a white flag,” Pate said. “You can’t throw down on us with a white flag showing. That violates the articles of war.”

  “Who drew up those articles?” Father asked. “Not I. Not thee, Captain Pate. No, you are my prisoner. And if you don’t tell your men to lay down their arms, I’ll shoot you dead.”

  You could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes: Father was ready to kill the man and let himself be shot for it at once, as would surely happen, for he and Pate and Pate’s man stood alone up on the lip of the ravine, fully exposed to the guns of the enemy. Luckily, Pate was no fool: he could read Father’s intent and was himself not eager to die. He agreed to surrender and sent his lieutenant trotting back to his lines to instruct his men to lay down their arms and march out with their hands on their heads. Which, a few moments later, they did, surprising us, when they were all lined up before us, with their numbers, for there were twenty-six of them, uninjured and well-armed. Pate’s men were, of course, even more surprised when they saw how few we were, and they were angry at their captain, who lost much face by the surrender and later complained bitterly of what he called Father’s “deceptive, casual disregard for the rules of war.”

  Thus ended the famous Battle of Black Jack, which Father, in a letter to the New York Tribune, rightly named “the first regular battle fought between Free-State and Pro-Slavery forces in Kansas.” We had killed four men and wounded nearly a dozen and captured more prisoners in one sweep than had so far been captured by all the Free–State forces in total. In the North and amongst the Free-Staters, John Brown came away with nearly heroic stature; to the Southerners, he was now the devil incarnate.

  Had it not been for Fred’s miraculous intervention, however, his mad, delusional charge onto the battlefield, the Battle of Black Jack would have ended much differently. His son’s apparent madness was Father’s good fortune: for Fred did, in fact, believe that we had the Ruffians surrounded, and he insisted for days afterwards that he had seen Free-State men on all sides firing on the Ruffians from the bushes and slaughtering them without mercy. He had acted, he said, to end the terrible slaughter of the Missourians.

  We knew, of course, that he had only seen the horses and mules going down, that it was the slaughter of the animals that had maddened him, and I said as much to Father.

  “The boy was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision,” he answered. “That is all that matters.”

  I see that, almost inadvertently, I have been writing you much that concerns my brother Fred, and perhaps I should complete his story here. Towards the end of August, I walked out one morning from camp alone very early to observe the sun rise, an event I had not seen in several weeks, for we had been night-raiding for a long while at a hectic pace over in Linn County and during the daylight hours had mostly hidden out in the marshes and deep gullies, sleeping whenever we could, and thus we had had little opportunity or time for admiring God’s orderly governance of the universe, as it were. Recently, however, we had succeeded in driving a herd of nearly one hundred fifty head of liberated Ruffian cattle into Osawatomie for distribution amongst the people there and, feeling protected by their gratitude, had encamped a few miles from town and, for the first night in a fortnight, been given a normal parcel of sleep. Thus we felt able to lighten our vigilance somewhat, causing Father to release me from my usual task of overseeing the watch, and I had been allowed to enjoy a full night wrapped in my blanket by the guttering fire.

  When I first rolled out of my blanket that morning, Father was nowhere in sight—commiserating or consulting with his God in the bushes someplace nearby, I supposed. I was surprised, therefore, when, as I emerged from the tree cover and approached the grassy ridge above our campsite, I spotted him profiled against the sky there, gazing eastward towards the horizon, as if he, too, had come out to see the sun rise. It was a cool, dry morning, not quite dawn, with no breeze. The sky was enormous and loomed above us like a tautly drawn celestial tent, and the land swept darkly away beneath it like a vast, chilled desert. Back in camp in the gully, it was still dark as night, although up here the southeastern sky had faded to a soft, crumbly gray, making Father’s figure a sharp, paper-thin silhouette against it. I silently took my place beside him on the ridge, and together we stared out across the rolling prairie in the direction of the settlement of Osawatomie, some five miles distant, down along the Marais des Cygnes.

  A moment or two passed, when, out on the horizon, there appeared parallel to it a long string of silver light. Soon it had thickened into a metallic strap and broadened, and after a few moments, the lower edge of the silver strap took on a golden hue, while above the strap the fleecy clouds began to go from gray to yellow to red, as if a fire were being lit below them. It was strikingly beautiful and strange in its clarity and exactness. I said to Father, “It looks like it’s a miniature scene and close to us. Like a painting, almost, instead of huge and far away and real.”

  The Old Man merely nodded and said nothing. Perhaps he was used to such visions. I lapsed back into silence and continued watching the eastern horizon slowly shift color and shape. Soon, when I knew that the scarlet disk of the sun was about to break the horizon and shatter the scene with its rays, I saw an extraordinary thing. It’s something that occurs rarely, but nonetheless normally, at sea or on the desert, and also, on the rarest of occasions, happens out on the prairies of the West, where it appears in more nearly perfect detail and on a much grander scale. Commonly called a mirage, it’s disdained for that, despite its beauty and rarity, as if it were merely an illusion. But it is in no way an illusion. It is real and is taking place in present time. What one sees is not a hallucinated or imagined scene: when, as on this morning, the atmospheric and geographic conditions are perfectly aligned, objects and entire scenes and events located far beyond one’s normal range of vision are brought close and are made sharply, silently visible; or else the beholder himself is instantly transported from his former spot across the many miles of prairie, carried as if on a Mohammedan flying carpet and brought face-to-face with a scene that he could otherwise have only imagined or dreamed.

  It is actually unclear which is moved, the scene in the distance or the observer here at hand. Perhaps it’s that the visible aspect of a thing, of any thing, is like its smell, and when atmospheric conditions are right, its visible aspect can be carried away separately, like a spoor, to an observer who is situated many miles distant and who then is enabled to see the thing up close, the way one can sometimes wake to the smell of coffee being brewed over a fire far down the valley from one’s bed and think it’s being made in the next room.

  This is what Father and I saw: at first, there was a misty, grayish scrim that rose from the horizon and became a semi-opaque sheet. Then, evolving out of a series of dark, vertical threads and strings, solid objects began to appear against it, and in a few seconds, a familiar bit of scenery had taken shape—the road
that led past Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin, on the near side of Osawatomie. There were the trees and the creek and the burnt-over stumps of his field and even the smoke curling from his chimney. In the further distance, I saw a man walking from the spring with a bucket in each hand.

  The man was Fred! My brother Fred, barefoot and shirtless, was walking slowly towards the cabin, looking lost in thought or prayer. I was too astonished and pleased by the sight to speak of it. Three days before, Father had ordered him to Lawrence for supplies and mail from home and to ask for reinforcements for the defense of the town of Osawatomie, but Fred had felt indisposed from a recent onslaught of the ague and had begged to stay at Uncle’s for a while, until he recovered, and Father had relented. I had not expected to see him again for a week or more, and now here he was, soundless as death, but very much alive and before my eyes making his slow way along the roadway from the spring to the cabin, as if he were alone and invisible to all eyes but his own.

  At that instant, there came three riders over the crest of the hill a ways behind Fred, men whom I recognized at once as Ruffians, men who had been riding with John Reid, the Mexican War veteran from Missouri who had given himself the rank of general and headed up one of those bands that had been in particular hot pursuit of us Browns since Pottawatomie and Black Jack months earlier. Reid had threatened noisily on many occasions to burn down the entire town of Osawatomie, but this was late August, and we had begun not to take these blowhard threats too seriously, for we had most of these men well on the run all across the territory by now, and despite their numbers, all they were capable of were random raids on isolated cabins and farms. It was from some of Reid’s people, in fact, that we had stolen the herd of cattle recently left off with the citizens of Osawatomie—stolen back, I should say—and the three I now saw riding up on Fred I had marked then as villains, and Father and I had even briefly spoken with them: coarse, brutal men whose main object was looting and pillaging the farms and lands of Free-State settlers.

  “Fred!” I cried. “Look behind you!”

  “He can’t hear you, Owen,” Father said in a low voice. “He may be done for.”

  Helplessly, as if bound to a stake, we watched from our spot miles from the scene, while the three riders approached Fred from behind. They had come over the rise from the direction of town, sent out, as I quickly surmised, to reconnoiter for General Reid, in preparation for his oft-threatened raid on the settlement. Their presence probably meant that Reid and his hundred-man force of Ruffians were close by. But Fred did not seem to recognize the men at all or to regard them as enemies. He turned and stopped in the road, and as they neared, he stood and watched, apparently unafraid, as if the men were merely local Free-Staters not known to him.

  Father and I were close enough to the scene to see over his shoulder, as it were, and we stared in silence as Fred nodded good morning and the others touched the brims of their hats and made to pass, when one of the men, the large-bellied fellow in the center, gave Fred a hard stare. I would later learn that this was the Reverend Martin White, a notorious and malignant pro-slaver from Arkansas who back in ’54 had come out to settle and preach to his fellow pro-slavers, one of those men who, after the Pottawatomie affair, had become fixated on avenging himself against us Browns.

  Although I could not hear him, I saw him speak to Fred and found that I could read his lips somewhat: I know you! he seems to say. And Fred, who still has not recognized the danger, advances open-faced towards the men to greet them, his buckets still in his hands, his bare chest exposed to the riders, who draw out their revolvers and throw down on him. Fred stops in his tracks now and looks wonderingly, innocently, up at them, as once more the man in the middle, Reverend White, silently mouths some words: You’re one of John Browns boys!

  By now, Fred’s face has gone all dark and serious, for he has finally seen the dangerous fix he is in, and he shakes his head no, he’s not one of John Brown’s boys.

  I know you! White declares.

  Fred again shakes his head no. He mouths the words I don’t know John Brown.

  Where’s he hiding?

  I don’t know him.

  Yes, you are his son! says White, and he levels his revolver and fires straight into Fred’s pale, bare chest.

  The bullet killed him at once, and he fell like a stone in the middle of the road. For a few seconds, the riders stared down at his crumpled, lifeless body and the spilled water buckets. Then they spurred their horses into a gallop and rode off, heading away from town in the direction they had come, no doubt to bring Reid’s force straight on.

  Dark blood poured from the hole in Fred’s chest and puddled over and around his body. A light breeze lifted and flattened the leaves of the nearby cottonwood trees and sifted the tall grasses alongside the road. And now, slowly, the scene began to fade from view, gathering itself back into the dark threads and strings from which it had emerged, until once again Father and I were gazing across the featureless prairie towards the eastern horizon, staring at nothing, and the sun was risen, blasting back at us, radiant and bright yellow and orange, driving the fleecy, gold-tinged clouds from the skies and bathing our faces in its light.

  “Murderers!” I cried. Enraged and horrified was I—but I spoke also as if to verify the actuality of what I had just seen, for I could scarcely believe that it had truly happened.

  “He denied me,” Father said in a low voice.

  “They shot him like a dog!”

  “If he had not denied me, they wouldn’t have shot him. They would have taken him prisoner is all, as they did John and Jason. I’m sure of it.”

  “No. Even if you’re right, it’s not true,” I declared. Fred was gone, and gone from us forever—my wholly innocent brother, my childhood companion, the boy and man I had loved and envied more than all the others, the one I would have been myself, if I had been strong enough, clear enough, humble enough, if I had been a Christian: my best brother was dead.

  Father turned to me and said, “What do you mean, it’s not true?” “Fred has been killed! And that’s the simple fact of it! That’s the truth of the matter. Why he was killed, or how he might have avoided it—those aren’t important now, Father. He’s dead. He’s your son, my brother, and he’s dead!”

  I looked into Father’s ice-gray eyes and saw a strange sort of puzzlement there, and for the first time realized that he could neither comprehend nor share my feelings at that moment, and thus he did not in the slightest understand me. He did not know who I was. Or who Fred had been. And consequently, in a crucial way, though he had seen it with his own eyes, he did not know what had just happened.

  Suddenly, I felt pity for the Old Man. Despite his intelligence and his gifts of language and his mastery of stratagem, he possessed a rare and dangerous kind of stupidity—a stupidity of the heart. It was possibly the very thing that, combined with his intelligence, gifts, and mastery, had indeed made him into an irresistible leader of men, had made him a resourceful and courageous warrior and even a powerful, rigorous man of religion; but his stupid heart had also made him dangerous, fatally dangerous, to anyone who loved him and to anyone whom he loved back. More than the rest of us, Fred had loved the Old Man; and Father had loved him more than all his other children back. And now Fred was a dead man.

  “He has made the blood remission. He is with the Lord,” Father said, and he turned to go. “Come on, we have to rouse the boys. Reid’s prepared to raid Osawatomie, and we have to warn the people and help defend them.” He paused for a second and said, “I believe that the Lord has given us this vision for their sake, not Fred’s.”

  Then he left me. I lingered a moment longer, watching the sun blot out the eastern horizon with its light, and saw Fred’s open face float against the light, and his slow, thoughtful gestures and ways, and heard faintly in the breeze his gentle, abrupt voice—an illusion this time, no mirage, no vision given by the Lord, and it was already beginning to fade. Then slowly, reluctantly, so as to depart from it before i
t disappeared altogether, I turned away from this weak, diminishing apparition of my dead brother and followed Father’s cold, dark form down the ridge into the camp.

  On that day, the day that his son was killed, Father fought the battle that made him known as Osawatomie Brown. Until his own death and for many years after, even to today, it was his public name. Perhaps—despite my account and because of yours—it will be his name forever. Other men, most of whom had never seen him in the flesh—the journalists and hagiographers of the North, mainly—gave it to him, but he quickly embraced it himself and took to signing, with a vain flourish, his letters and the autograph books of his admirers with it: Osawatomie Brown. Or sometimes, more formally, John Brown of Osawatomie. On the day that he sacrificed his best son upon the stone altar of his belief, Father within hours was transformed from a mortal man—an extraordinary and famous man, to be sure, but, still, only a man—into a hero bathed in swirls of light. It mattered not whether they liked his ways or admired his courage or believed his words; the American people from then on viewed him as more and other than a man.

  This transformation, before anyone else even knew that it had occurred, Father already understood and had begun using for his own secret purposes. In the mind of the South, he would be Baal and Anathema. And in the imagination of the North, he would make him-self a Greek or Roman hero, Achilles in his tent or Horatio at the bridge, or one of the old, impetuous, dragon-slaying heroes of Arthurian romance, each of whom in the beginning surely had been, like him, a flesh-and-blood man who, one day, when a sufficient number of stories about him had accumulated in the public mind, stepped across an invisible line and, as if by magic, became other than human: the son lay murdered in the dusty Kansas track, and the father would ride down that track into legend. So that, in the North, Osawatomie Brown soon reached the point of fame where he could lose a battle, and it would nonetheless be regarded as a victory—a triumph, if not for him or for the anti-slavery forces, then for the human spirit. In the South, his victories signaled the coming millennium, the impending war between the races, and his losses entered the accounts as proof, not of his military feebleness or personal failure, but of his enemies’ courage and virtue in defense of slavery. All men now measured their stature and meaning against Osawatomie Brown’s.