Cloudsplitter (80 page)
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.
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.
These things which I alone know—of the death of Lyman Epps and of the brutal massacre down by the Pottawatomie and the turbulent, bloody events that followed, of the climactic raid on Harpers Ferry and the martyrdom of my father and the cold execution of my brothers and our comrades—these things, when I have finished telling them, will not alter history. They will not revise the received truth. That truth is shaped strictly by the needs of those who wish to receive it. No, when I have said them, the things that I alone know will release from purgatory the souls of all those men whom I so dearly loved and who went to their deaths believing that they held their fates in their own hands and that they had chosen in the fight against slavery to slay other men and to die for it.
When
I
kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.
But I am no longer silent. I am saying that those men did not so choose. I chose for them. Their fates were in my hands alone.
There is much, of course, that I am leaving out of my account, much that need not be told here by me. Most of what happened back then occurred in full public view, anyhow, and is known to the world; it needs no corrective from me: I’m not writing a history of those years or a biography of my father. I leave those high tasks to you and the professor. I have neither the mind nor the training for them, nor the inclination. As for the wider events across the nation and in Washington during those years, when the slaveholding South like a gigantic serpent slowly wrapped the rest of the Republic in its suffocating coils: I leave to others the obligation to set straight that record; and for the most part they have already done so, the journalists, the historians and biographers, the memoirists, and so on. The fact that nearly all of us then engaged in the war against slavery believed in the late ’50s that the war was all but lost, that much today, if little noted by the world, is nonetheless collected and recorded there. I needn’t recount these highly visible public events, although I do wish you to know how, over time, they made us believe that our entire government and even our nation’s destiny itself had been stolen from us, as if we had been invaded and all but conquered by a foreign, tyrannical power.
We were enraged by this, to be sure, and howled at it, but when the slavery-loving, Negro-hating mobs gathered legitimacy in Washington and in the Southern press, when the Border Ruffians were portrayed as legitimate settlers and the overseers of human chattel as statesmen, when our leaders, like Senators Douglas and Webster, sold us out for a handful of silver coins and our heroes, like Senator Sumner, were clubbed down in the Capitol building itself, our rage turned suddenly to cold desperation. We who early on had been merely anti-slavery activists and who, slowly over the years in defense of our own rights of protest, had evolved, almost unbeknownst to ourselves, into guerilla fighters and militiamen—we now became terrorists. And having become terrorists, we found ourselves almost overnight made emblematic to those remaining white activists who mostly sat in their parlors or at their desks grieving over the loss of their nation. We inspired them, and they encouraged us. And so we waged their war for them. Unwilling to do more to regain their nation than write a poem or a cheque to help arm, clothe, and feed us, they were often objects of scorn and derision to us, although we were, of course, grateful for their poems and monies and used both to solicit still more monies and, with our purses thus fattened, purchased more Sharps rifles, more horses and supplies, more of the terrorizing broadswords and pikes.
