Cloudsplitter (32 page)

The slave-catcher’s eyes went dead, and he inhaled deeply and did as he was told.

“Lie on the ground, face-down” Father said. Behind Father stood a man whom I took to be Captain Keifer, a short, black-haired fellow with a fringe of beard on his chin. There was a note in Father’s voice that frightened me, and it surely must have terrified Billingsly, if he had any sense at all: it was the note of a man whose mind was made up, who would not be stopped from completing the terrible action that he had already decided upon, no matter how the circumstances changed. I knew that he had decided to kill the man. And in spite of being frightened by the tone in Father’s voice, I was excited by it.

Mr. Billingsly got down on his knees and then lay on his stomach, his face pressed against the rocky ground, and when he had done so, Father stepped forward and, straddling the maris body, aimed his gun down at his head.

Lyman said, “You ain’t goin’ to
kill
the man, Mister Brown.”

“I am,” Father said.

Captain Keifer moved forward then and said to Father, “I pray thee, Brown, do not kill him. It is not for thee to execute the man.”

Lyman looked at me with disbelief, and I caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Cannon as they backed away from the scene to the front of the wagon and stood by the horses, as if preparing for flight.

Shoving the stock against his shoulder, Father looked coldly down the barrel at the man’s head. I could see that Billingsly’s teeth were clenched and his eyes were closed tightly, as if he expected nothing less than to hear the irritating explosion of gunfire. It was very strange—he did not look like a man who believed he would die of it. He did not seem to believe that he was inside his own body and that his brain was about to be blown to bits.

“Slave-catcher” Father said, “I am sending thee straight to hell.”

I did not dare to rush Father and try to seize his weapon—the gun might go off and kill the slave-catcher beneath it, or our struggle with one another might give the man the opportunity to escape, and I did not want that, either—so I stood as if rooted to the ground. But when Captain Keifer stepped firmly forward with his hands extended as if to grab Father from behind, I spoke out at last. “Wait, Father!” I cried. “Back off, and put the man in his own manacles! Let him wear the manacles he planned to use on the Negroes. And let Lyman do it!” I said.

Slowly, Father lowered his rifle and backed away from the slave-catcher. “Put your hands behind your back,” he ordered, and the slave-catcher obeyed. “All right, Lyman. Place the chains on him, and lock them tight.”

Lyman reached down and grabbed up one of the two sets of manacles and clamped them onto the white man.

Father rolled Billingsly over onto his back, groped through the man’s waistcoat pockets until he found the keys, and tossed the keys far out into the cove. He grabbed the second pair of manacles and heaved them into the darkness also, and when they fell into the water, there was a loud splash, and then silence.

A moment passed, and Father said, “Put him into the wagon, Owen.” Lyman and I retrieved our guns and together hefted the slave-catcher onto his feet and shoved him into the box of the wagon. While Lyman stood guard over him, I quickly set about removing the hides and pelts, which Captain Keifer would be selling for us, and placed them inside the boathouse. Father escorted our poor, forlorn, very frightened fugitives directly to the boat, and the captain prepared to set sail at once, for the sun would soon rise and there would be many people coming and going along the shore here.

“Cast off!” the captain called to Father, who promptly untied the lines from the pilings and tossed them onto the deck. The captain loosed and unfurled a small triangle of sail at the bow, which caught the breeze at once, and the schooner moved abruptly away from the dock. The captain was standing at the wheel in the bow, and the couple from Virginia were up on the foredeck, standing together and watching, not us, but the dark northern sky, where there was a star, clear and bold, a diamond. Over in the east, the sky had turned a pale blond color, with the tops of the mountains beyond the lake just visible at the horizon. The captain scrambled forward and let out more sail, then returned to the wheel, and in a few moments the boat had crossed the cove and was rounding the point at the far end, heading for open water.

We left Port Kent at once, carrying the slave-catcher out of town to the point on the headlands above the lake where we had rested earlier, and here Father bade me to pull up. He and I climbed down from the wagon and came around to the rear, where Lyman and I got the fellow out.

When we climbed into the wagon again, with Lyman stretched out in the back and Father and I seated up front, and prepared to leave him, the slave-catcher shot us a puzzled expression—it was the look of a man who did not understand why we had not killed him. Not because he thought we were murderers, but because the logic of the situation had demanded it. It seemed to make no sense to him that he was still alive, and he stared after us with an almost plaintive expression, as if he wanted us to come back and properly execute him.

Father said to me, “Drive on quickly, Owen. I cannot stand the sight of the man.” I slapped the reins, and we left him there, standing in the moonlight in the middle of the track, his hands clamped behind him in irons.

We said nothing to one another for a long while, and then, finally, a few miles west of Keesville, Father sighed heavily and said, “I am grateful to thee, Owen.”

“You are? For what?”

“For interfering with me. Back there at the lake.”

“I feared you would be angry with me.”

“No, son. I’m in no way angry. I’m grateful to you. I am. In saving Billingsly’s life, you probably saved my soul from hell. Fact is, I’m not ready to kill a man, Owen.”

“Not in cold blood,” I said.

“Yes, and that’s the problem. My killing him would have been murder, pure and simple. I have no cold blood, Owen. Not a drop. I must acquire it.”

I did not know what to say to that; I could not begin to grasp his meaning then; so I said nothing and, for the remainder of our journey, drove mostly in silence. There would come a time, however, and not many years later—in the smoke and blood of Kansas, with the bodies of men and boys yanked from their warm winter beds and hacked to death with machetes and lying now in chunks steaming like fresh meat all around us in the frozen grass—when I would remember this small conversation, and I would understand it then, just as I am sure you do now.

Chapter 8

Our involvement with the Underground Railroad aside, our concern for the welfare of the Negroes of Timbuctoo, and our private virtues, along with the ways in which those virtues organized our behavior—all that aside, Miss Mayo, we were to every casual appearance very much like our North Elba neighbors. Country people. A stranger passing through the broad valley that lay between Whiteface and Tahawus would have had little reason to remark upon us (unless, like Mr. Dana and his party of lost hikers, he sat at table with us and stayed the night). He would likely merely have thought that we Browns were nothing unusual for our time and place. Except, perhaps, for our way of speaking, which a stranger would perceive at once and which was, I believe, regarded by some as downright peculiar. And here, in the matter of the manner of our speaking, we get to a thing that was both striking and readily apparent to all who met us, even for a moment, a thing that, to my knowledge, has never been described before, certainly not in print.

It is perhaps inevitable that the speech mannerisms of a family will be significantly influenced by the single strongest member of that family, and so it was with us. Thus, to a one, even to the littlest child, we sounded very like Father. Elaborately plainspoken, you might say—a manner or style of speech that originated, so far as I know, with Grandfather Owen Brown, who, having had a profound effect on Father’s way of speaking, is indirectly an influence on my way, too, even here and now, and on that of the rest of the family as well. So let me speak first of him.

Grandfather, who was born and raised in Connecticut back before the Revolution, chose and spoke his words in that old, now-forgotten, New England Puritan manner—deliberately, carefully, with a few thees and thous for leavening, almost as if he were writing his words down on paper, instead of speaking them aloud. He went beyond even the old New Englanders, however, for Grandfather was a stammerer and as a child had trained himself to speak with a formal, dry precision, slowly and in complete sentences, so as not to be controlled or confounded by his affliction. The man cultivated silences and used them as exclamations. He seemed to rehearse his statements in his mind before making any utterance, which gave to him a stately manner overall and provided others with the impression that he was an unusually reflective manas, indeed, he was. By thinking his words first, by silently phrasing and parsing them in his mind, and only afterwards, when he was satisfied with their lightness, speaking them aloud, Grandfather cultivated his thought more thoroughly than ordinary folk, and as a result his words not only seemed, by virtue of the way they were presented, to be wise; they in fact, more often than not, were wise. “You think as you speak, not
vice versa”
Father often said, and a man forced by an affliction such as stammering to control his speech will in turn soon learn to control his thoughts. So it was with Grandfather.

Father, with no such handicap as stammering to straiten his way, was obliged to impose one upon himself. When he was a young man, he curbed his reckless speech, and hence his thoughts, by placing into his mouth a stone that was sufficiently large to forbid easy and casual talk, and he carried the stone all day long in silence, except when he deliberately plucked it out and unplugged his mouth, as it were. He used the trick of Demosthenes, but in reverse, and not to overcome a handicap, but to simulate one, so as to obtain its compensatory advantages, which he had observed and admired in his own father.

“The inner man and the outer are one, unless ye be a hypocrite and dissembler. Control one of the two, and soon ye will control both,” the Old Man often said, applying his prescription as much to himself as to us children, whom he was instructing. All his instructions, admonitions, and rules were as much for him to follow, honor, and obey as for us. Never did I feel that Father had not himself contended with passions or desires fully as strong as my own, or that he had not, on numerous occasions, felt himself as weak, afraid, lonely, despondent, or frustrated as I and my brothers were, and my sisters, too. Quite the opposite. And from our point of view, all the more virtue accrued to him for his not having given himself over to those feelings. Thus his authority over us resided to a considerable degree in our awareness of his, and not our, struggle with vice, and his, not our, triumph over it.

Similarly, whatever self-imposed deprivation, whatever forms of abstinence, he requested of us, he demanded of himself also, despite what he confessed were his larger-than-normal desires to indulge in them. We none of us drank tea or coffee. We used no tobacco. We drank no whiskey, brandy, beer, or fermented cider, and kept none in the house. A visitor or houseguest unable to endure a meal without these stimulants and intoxicants would have to provide his own and then would find himself in the uncomfortable position of being observed by all the children and even those of us who were adults with curiosity and slight condescension, as if he were a Chinaman sucking on an opium pipe. If one of us secretly indulged in the use of tobacco, tea, or coffee, or accepted a sip of whiskey from a friend or an acquaintance, as each of us, especially we boys, did from time to time, his physical and mental reactions to it were all out of proportion to his expectations, and he backed off quickly and in fear. The high degree of excitation provided by these stimulants and intoxicants, due perhaps to our lack of experience with their use and to our shame, was almost always sufficient to keep us from returning for a second try. In addition, there was the threat of exile, of feeling cast out from the family, to keep us from disobeying Father’s rules of abstinence. No one of us wanted to be the only one unable to keep his rules. Whether the rest of the family knew of it hardly mattered:
we
knew of it, and that was enough to guarantee an intolerable loneliness. An occasional taste of that loneliness, like the single sip of whiskey or puff of tobacco smoke, was all any of us needed to renew his commitment to purity, abstinence, self-discipline, and to the orderly comportment of his mind, language, and private acts.

With regard to sexual matters, we all, except possibly poor Fred, were normal enough boys and then young men. Little as I know of what is normal for girls and women in such matters, I assume the same was true for the females in the family. And in this as in all things, Father’s advice bore the weight of a proscription and sometimes even that of a command: he advised us boys, offered as if in passing, with no room for discussion or further inquiry, to keep ourselves pure and to marry young and to study St. Paul’s letters.

Forgive me for speaking of the subject—I wish above all to be as frank as I have been truthful—but did Father believe that I, at least, was unable to forbear from self-abuse? It’s a question that has long worried me. I suspect he thought I was, just as I was sure that my brothers, both older and younger, must occasionally have abandoned themselves to this vice, although none of us ever confessed it. All of us—except Fred, whose sensitivity to sin and whose measure of guilt was so much greater than ours—possessed large animal spirits. John and Jason married young; Fred did not marry. Nor did I. Ruth and Annie married young, as did Watson and Oliver, who, along with Fred, died young. But I lived on for many long years, struggling even into old age to maintain my purity as diligently and with the same meager degree of success and heaped-up unhappiness over failure as when I was a boy. In later years, naturally, my animal spirits diminished to a great degree, and my struggle to control them abated at last. But without the struggle, there was no virtue; I take no particular pride, therefore, in the relative purity of my old age.