Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Most of the other profiteers—at least until later, after Harpers Ferry, when the sale of Father’s personal letters and effects and the odd, cast-off article of clothing or weapon became as lucrative as the sale of portions of the True Cross—were small fellows, merchants, mainly, and tradesmen out to extract from Father’s purse as much as the market would bear for guns and bullets, sabers and saddles and other war supplies. Exploiting a market inflated by the Old Man’s needs for secrecy and speed of delivery, they picked Father’s pocket, which had been filled and re-filled again and again by his now-loyal cadre of Eastern gentlemen of means, men who had finally decided that Father was right, that the war against slavery would have to be carried into Africa, and Osawatomie Brown was the only man to do it. They were Mr. Gerrit Smith, as always, and Dr. Howe and Messrs. Lawrence, Stearns, Sanborn, and Higginson. Good men, all, if not personally courageous. And I do not fault them for denying Father in the weeks and months immediately following the uproar at Harpers Ferry, any more than one can fault Peter for denying Christ. Later, in the aftermath of the Civil War, they did return to his side and glorified his memory with more than appropriate praise.

  Forbes, though, was a cat with a different coat. And I’m reminded by that figure that he wore a green velvet jacket and fringed doeskin boots and affected a cane with a silver knob. He even sported an ostrich feather in his hatband. All of which made him look ridiculous out there in Iowa, especially when he pulled a face and moaned about the fate of his poor wife and babes, who were supposedly living in abject poverty back in Paris, France. He claimed that their sacrifice was made so that he could continue with his noble mission of assisting and guiding Osawatomie Brown in the great attempt to liberate the American slaves. He declared that he was personally re-writing American history.

  He actually said this to me himself. It was out in Tabor, in April of ’59, when we were holed up at the farm of a Quaker supporter of Father’s, a man originally from Indiana who believed that we were preparing, not for war, but for a massive flight of Negro refugees out of the South—which was essentially true, although our intended means to foment that flight were unlikely to have met with any Quaker’s approval. Perhaps, like so many self-proclaimed pacifists gone bone-weary of battling the pro-slavers’ endless stratagems and violence, he had intuited our true plans and welcomed them, but did not wish to be told of them in any detail. Regardless, all that winter and into the spring, he had allowed our shabby troop of sometimes twenty, sometimes fewer than ten, to ensconce itself secretly in his barn by night and train in his fields by day. There Forbes had us marching up and down like toy soldiers, mainly it seemed for the pleasure he got from hearing his own British gentleman’s voice bark orders at American country-boys.

  I remember the April afternoon when, all sweaty and covered with dirt and seeds and thistles from the fields and gullies that we had spent the day conquering for our colonel, I left the other men and, approaching Forbes, asked if I could speak with him privately. He was seated in the shade of a cottonwood tree on a stool he had borrowed from the Quaker’s kitchen and, without looking up from the papers on his lap, said to me, “It’s appropriate, Lieutenant, when requesting permission to speak, to salute your superior officer and address him by rank.”

  He had been with us only a week by then, but already I was sick of him, and the other men downright despised him and were starting to blame Father for his presence among us. John Kagi had declared the night before that he was ready to shoot the fellow dead, and only my loyalty to Father had kept me from running him straight off the place myself. That and my fear that, if he were overtly resisted by us, he would at once turn on us and reveal Father’s plans to the federal authorities—which, as is now well-known, he eventually did. It is true: months before it took place, Forbes came close to ending the raid on Harpers Ferry. Luckily—or, as it turned out, perhaps unluckily—no one in the government or the press believed then that any man, not even the notorious terrorist Osawatomie Brown, would contemplate mounting a privately financed armed raid on a federal weapons manufactory and depot in the fortified heart of the South. Thus, after Forbes turned on us and until the raid itself finally occurred, his words bore no credence with anyone on either side, which is what saved us for another day. By then, of course, he was seen as a fellow conspirator himself and was pursued by the government and fled into England, where he may indeed be living today, an old dandy in doeskin boots, dining out on stories of his early involvement with the famous American anti-slavery guerilla leader and martyr, Osawatomie Brown. I suppose it’s on that possibility that I criticize him now.

  Out there in Iowa, despite his constant admonitions, I neither saluted Forbes nor addressed him by rank. I said straight out that the men and I were faithful to Father and to our common cause, but I could no longer assure him that one or more of the men would not shoot him. I emphasized, so as to make my own position clear, that his murder would be a betrayal of Father’s wishes and detrimental to our common cause. His murder by one of us could undo us altogether. I wanted him to know who and what were keeping him alive.

  “You’re quite serious, Brown.”

  “Quite, Forbes.”

  He still had not looked up at me. “You know what I’m writing here, Brown?”

  I knew very well: he had held forth on the virtues of his tract numerous times. “A military manual,” I said.

  “Yes. But more than that, Brown. It’s a manual, all right, but one composed specifically for the use of men fighting to end slavery in America. And like all such manuals, it’s a history of the time and place of its own composition. D’ you understand that, Brown?”

  “You mean it’s about us. And about you.”

  “Precisely. And the chapter I’m presently engaged in writing is called ‘The American Garibaldi,’ which is concerned with nothing less than the necessity and means of transforming ordinary citizens into soldiers. Of transforming peasants—ignorant farmers, laborers, woodcutters, and the like—into disciplined soldiers. Now, what do you suppose General Garibaldi would have done if one of his Italian lieutenants had come up and spoken to him as you have just spoken to me?”

  “Well, Forbes, I don’t rightly know.”

  “No. No, you don’t. That’s the point. Y’see, I know things that you don’t. Which is precisely why your father hired me on and commissioned me with the rank of colonel.” Here he digressed awhile to complain of Father’s not having paid him as he had promised, along with some sorrowful reminders of poor Mrs. Forbes and his hungry babes in Paris, France, until at last he returned to the subject at hand—mutiny. “General Garibaldi,” he said, “would have instructed his Lieutenant, as I am you, that it was the lieutenant’s responsibility, not the general’s, to put down any potential mutiny. And if the lieutenant could not do it, then the lieutenant himself would be regarded as mutinous and would be peremptorily shot by firing squad.”

  I looked back at the boys lounging in the field behind me and could scarcely keep a straight lace at the thought of Forbes ordering them to stand in formation for my execution. “Hed have said that, eh? The general.”

  ‘Yes, Brown. And then, just as I myself am about to do, he would have stood and left his lieutenant to ponder that statement, and he would have brooked no further discussion on the subject of mutiny.” Forbes closed his writing book and, as predicted by himself, stood and walked off towards the barn, leaving me, like General Garibaldi’s lieutenant, to ponder his statement.

  Forbes surprised me, though, for that was the last I ever saw of him. I said nothing to the men of my strange conversation with our colonel, and after a while we all wandered back to the barn and washed and, as usual, prepared our frugal evening meal of hoecakes and stew, until finally someone noticed that Forbes was nowhere about. His horse was gone, and all his gear. “Good riddance,” Kagi muttered, and all concurred. Without meaning to, I had scared the fellow off. He took himself so seriously that I had taken him a bit seriously myself, or perhaps I might hav
e humored and endured him longer and spared us much risk afterwards.

  Later, I learned where he had gone—east to New York City, thence to Washington, where he had commenced his vain campaign to betray Father to our enemies. In time, Father learned of Forbes’s failed attempts to convince the Secretary of War and the various newspapers of our plan—thanks to a flurry of frightened letters from friendly abolitionists in the War Department and the journalist Mr. Redpath, who at once told Messrs. Smith and Higginson and Dr. Howe. Typically, they panicked, but to the Old Man, Forbes’s attempted betrayal was a positive development, as it had created amongst our supporters a greater urgency for the battle to begin at once. And, further, the peculiarly deaf ears of the War Secretary and the others to whom Forbes had spoken only confirmed in Father’s mind that God was still his protector, and by winnowing Forbes out, the Lord had merely been correcting Father’s error in having judged the man useful years earlier when they first met.

  In his letter to me, summoning me and the rest of the troop to disperse to our respective homes and await his marching orders, he told me all this. He ended his long letter by writing, I believe that the Lord was merely testing my acumen, as well as my faith, back then, as He always does. And in the unpleasant matter of Mr. Forbes, the Lord hath found me sadly wanting. But now, thanks to the steady increase in my faith and trust in Him, the Almighty hath again protected me from my own folly. Now, come directly home to North Elba, son, he wrote. The Lord is making it so that we must act quickly’.

  And so, once again, this time for the last time, I came through the Cascade Notch from the wilderness village of Keene into North Elba and, out there on the freshly greening Plains of Abraham, set up on the rise just beyond the bulky shadow of Father’s beloved Mount Tahawus, sighted our family farm. So sweetly self-contained and four-square it seemed in the pale June light that I dared not recall to my mind my gloomy reasons for having returned here—for it was merely to say goodbye, perhaps forever, to my beloved brothers, those who would not accompany Father and me south, and to my dear sisters and stepmother, who had already endured so much for us and would soon endure unimaginably more, and to the place itself, where, to all intents and purposes, I had grown in my cumbersome way into manhood.

  I think back to those olden days now as I thought back to them then and approach the doorway of the house as I approached it then, with fear and literal trembling, for so much has changed in the intervening years, the years since the death of Lyman Epps and my flight into the West and my return today, so much has changed in the world at large, and yet I myself have not been altered—I am still that same, half-cracked man, Owen Brown, lurching forward into history on the heels of his father, resolving all his private, warring emotions and conflicted passions in the larger, public war against slavery, making the miserable, inescapable violence of his temperament appear useful and principled by aiming it, not at himself, where perhaps it properly belonged, but at his father’s demonized opponents. For otherwise, how would I have turned out but as a suicide?

  And having admitted that, I suddenly understand what must follow upon the completion of my confession! For then I will, at last, have no longer a reason to live. I will be ready to become a ghost myself, so as to replace in purgatory the long-suffering ghosts this confession has been designed expressly to release.

  Dear Miss Mayo, since I wrote the lines above, I have been briefly away from my table, searching through the rubble of my cabin for my old revolver, my sidearm in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry and the long, furtive years of flight afterwards. I located it at last in a cache of Father’s letters from ’55 and ’56 (which I had previously overlooked and promise now to send to you when I finally gather and send on all the scattered pages of this sorry, disheveled account), and when I came upon it there in a corner beneath my cot—along with some two dozen rounds of ammunition—I confess that I felt a strange, new kind of glee. I know not what else to call it than glee: it is a peculiar, altogether unfamiliar emotion to me.

  I have placed the revolver, my old Colt .45, now cleaned and loaded, upon the writing table, and every time I come to the end of a sentence, I look up from the page and see the weapon there, waiting patiently as an old friend set to take me on a journey, and I feel again that exotic, anticipatory glee.

  It is late summer—here and everywhere that my mind goes—and the mowing has evidently been interrupted by this morning’s rain, and the deserted fields glisten silvery in the sun as I pass along between them, on horseback then, in my mind and memory now, making my slow way through the notch and over the Plains towards the farm. The storm clouds have broken and blown away to the east, leaving great, spreading shreds and swaths of deep blue sky. Off to my left and behind me looms the craggy granite peak whose very name I cannot let enter my mind without Father’s dark face also entering there, for I have come over the years so to associate the two, as if each, mountain and man, were a portrait of the other and the two, reduced to their simplest outlines, were a single, runic inscription which I must, before I die, decipher, or I will not know the meaning of my own existence or its worth.

  There is no one in the fields and no other person on the narrow dirt track coming my way towards the farm or from it towards me, and no cattle or kine or horses grazing in the pastures and pens. No dogs and none of the fine, blooded, merino sheep whose dams and sires Father brought up from Springfield in the spring of ’50, when we first settled here. No smoke rises from the chimneys of the house or from the tanning shed or from Lyman’s old forge, and except for the thin rattle of the frigid waters of the Au Sable over rock in the wooded valley below and the shudder of the breeze amongst the topmost branches of the ancient pines towering on the slopes above me, there is no sound—no one is cutting wood or hammering nails anywhere in earshot, no one digs a well or a pit or ditch, no one opens or closes a door or a window. Even the birds—silent as ghosts!

  Father wrote that he would meet me at the farm, that we would all meet in North Elba—we in the family who will go down into Africa together: my brother Watson, only twenty-four years old, who returned here to the farm after his turn in Kansas and Iowa ahead of me and who will die miserably in Father’s arms of gunshot wounds in less than four months’ time; and our youngest brother, Oliver, a boy of twenty-one and already battle-hardened from the Kansas campaign, but bookish withal and about to marry a daughter of the Brewster family nearby, a girl who will be a widow before turning twenty; and two of my brothers-in-law from the Thompson clan, William and Dauphin, whose elder brother Henry sacrificed all he dared in Kansas and returned to North Elba over a year ago to recover from his wound at Black Jack and live again as a farmer and husband to our sister Ruth and thus will not die in Virginia with his brothers. The others, sixteen of them—although Father thought there would be thirty or forty or even more—will join us when we ride south, or they have already been sent there by the Old Man to reconnoiter and await our arrival: John Kagi, who even now is in Virginia, ascertaining the number and quality of the forces that will oppose us; and John Cook, disguised as an itinerant schoolteacher, obtaining and fitting out for our rendez-vous the soon-to-be-famous Kennedy farmhouse on the heights north of Harpers Ferry, the place where we will make our headquarters during the weeks leading up to our assault on the armory and town below. Brothers John and Jason, with their families in Ohio, will not join us in battle, Jason on principle and John, against his principles, out of fear. Brother Salmon, at Father’s orders and despite his loud protestations, has been stationed here at the farm to care for Mary and our sisters and to manage the affairs of the family, which the Old Man knows will become exceedingly complex after the raid, regardless of its outcome.

  But on the day of my arrival at the farm, no one is there to greet me; no one reaches out to embrace me and welcome me home. Shadows flash across the ground at my feet, as the broken, silver-edged clouds pass over the house and break and merge and break again—the earth keeps spinning on its spine and rolling around the sun, whils
t here on the ground all is still, fixed in time and place like a lacquered insect impaled upon a pin: the lane off the roadway; the barn and outbuildings; the house itself. And there, yonder in the center of the yard, is Father’s rock, head-high and the size of a room. The chunk of dark gray granite sits settled upon the ground as if placed there for no other purpose than to mark the eventual gravesite of Father himself and of my brothers Watson and Oliver, of the Thompson boys, William and Dauphin; and to memorialize the impetuous John Kagi, the noble Aaron Stevens, who will take four shots in the body before he falls, and John Cook, who will be captured in the Pennsylvania woods a few miles north of Harpers Ferry and dragged back to Virginia to be hung alongside Father and the rest; of the quick-tempered boy from Maine Charlie Tidd, and Jeremiah Anderson, avenging himself upon his grandfather, a Virginia slaveholder, and Albert Hazlett, who followed the Old Man to victory in Kansas and will follow him to the scaffold in Virginia; and of the stoical Edwin Coppoc of Ohio and his younger brother, Barclay, and the free Negro John Copeland, as intelligent and articulate as a Brown; and of the Canadian spiritualist Stewart Taylor, and Will Leeman, the youngest of the raiders in our band, a Maine boy who went to work at fourteen in a shoe factory and at seventeen came out to Kansas for no other reason than to fight alongside the great Osawatomie Brown; and of Osborn Anderson, the Negro printer who joined Father in Canada, and Frank Meriam of Massachusetts, and Lewis Leary, the mulatto man who said he was descended from the Lost Colonists of Roanoke Isle, and the tall, handsome Dangerfield Newby, an escaped slave whose abiding hope for the raid was to free his wife and children, but who will die of a six-inch spike shot into his throat by a pro-slaver’s musket; and of Frederick Douglass’s man Shields Green, whom we called Emperor, a man born a slave, who freed his body and gave it over to the cause, but never quite freed his mind. . . . There sits the huge, rough Adirondack boulder, a chunk of the mountain Tahawus, ready to memorialize the short lives and violent deaths of the men whom I will ride into battle with and then betray. It will be their ghostly watchtower, the place where they will gather together afterwards and wait in silence through the long years, as winter snows blow down from Canada and sweep across the Plains of Abraham and as spring rains wash and thaw the land and soften it for the grasses and flowers of summer and as the autumn leaves catch and collect in low, moldering piles. Great-Grandfather John Brown’s Yankee slate marker leans against the rock, brought north from Connecticut, as Father long intended, to remind all men and women of the unmarked graves of the old Revolutionary War hero and of brother Fred, whose dates have been freshly cut into it and whose body lies beneath Kansas soil, forever lost to us: both those accusatory souls will linger with the others here as well, for it matters not where lie today the bits of bone and the shreds of cloth they once wore: their spirits have all returned to this one spot, this cold, gray altar, here to be stared and wondered at by casual passers-by, to be prayed over by those who would come out and pay homage to John Brown and his brave men, and to haunt and chastize me for all the remaining years of my life, even to today, this long, ongoing day of my inevitable return. It is here, before this stone altar, that I must make my final confession and my sacrifice.