Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
In mundane reality, however, the Battle of Osawatomie was neither loss nor victory: I was there. It had no political or military stature and no philosophical or religious meaning. I broke and ran with the others, abandoning the town to the Ruffians’ scourging fire and pillage; I know what it was—merely a failed defense on our part, and a looting raid on theirs.
Neither Father nor I, without having agreed between ourselves, said anything to the others in our party of what we had witnessed from the ridge at dawn that morning, except that we had spotted General Reid’s scouts returning from Osawatomie, riding away from the settlement east to west, towards the Lawrence Road, where, according to rumor, Reid’s force had temporarily bivouacked. And when we rode down from our camp into town, passing Uncle’s cabin, where Fred’s body lay inside on a plank table, we did not stop to pray over it or to speak solemnly with its sad, frightened attendants of Fred’s brief life and useless death; we rode straight on to warn the settlers of the imminent raid from General Reid’s band of irregulars, which we knew numbered in the hundreds.
Reid had been moving across the countryside for weeks, gathering all the loose gangs of marauders into a cohesive force. Rumors, until then mostly discounted by us, had been flying from one Free-State redoubt to another: that he wished to make a final, defining attack on Lawrence and then on Topeka, the capitals of Kansas abolitionism-attacks that we knew would not be tolerated by the federal army, in spite of the unspoken, continued support of the pro-slavers’ interests by the President and his Secretary of War; not wishing to get caught between the Ruffians and the federal troops, we had left the defense of both cities to their own citizens. And until we saw Reid’s scouts returning that morning from Osawatomie, we had not thought that he would bother taking Osawatomie, in spite of its reputation as an abolitionist stronghold and, notwithstanding our long absence from the place, its reputation as the Kansas base of the Browns. By this time, Wealthy and little Tonny and Ellen had returned to Ohio; John and Jason were in Topeka; and our brother-in-law Henry, after suffering his leg wound at Black Jack, had gone home to sister Ruth and their little farm in North Elba. Most of the other inhabitants had fled the town by now as well, so that it was a cluster of barely twenty families—poor, stubborn folks who had refused to abandon their cabins and property to the pro-slave predators of the region but who, unlike the more organized and well-armed citizens of Lawrence and Topeka, posed no real threat to the Ruffians.
However, due to our having distributed amongst them the one hundred fifty head of cattle that we on nighttime raids had been liberating piecemeal from small bands of Ruffians over the previous weeks, we had unintentionally made the town an object of General Reid’s especial attention, and it now appeared that he had stopped on his march towards Lawrence and was coming in unexpectedly from the west, moving south of the Marais des Cygnes River and north of the Pottawatomie, a narrowing wedge of territory that pointed at the heart of the town where the two rivers met.
At the low log blockhouse—actually, more a storehouse than a fort—we combined with Captain Parson’s small homeguard of boys and old men and spread out amongst the trees at the edge of the settlement and dug in there to await the arrival of Reid’s men, with the river, at the one place where it broadened and went shallow and was thus fordable, at our backs. “Never defend an unfordable river,” went one of Father’s maxims, “or the Lord may have to part the waters for you.” At one point, before we had dispersed and taken our positions in the woods behind rocks and logs, Father and I had a moment alone. We were standing on a high, shrubby overlook, with the Marais des Cygnes passing below us. Father was seated on a stump, slowly sharpening his cutlass and every few seconds casting a wary eye up the trail, where we expected soon to see Reid and his men come riding in.
“Why not pack everyone up and safely abandon this place, Father?” I asked him. “Innocent lives will be lost defending it, and Reid’s going to take it anyway.”
“The apostle saith, ‘Rebuke with all long suffering,’“ he answered without looking up from his work. ‘“For the time will come when the people will not endure sound doctrine, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall all be turned into fables.’“
I sighed. “All right, fine. But tell me what you propose to accomplish here.”
“Apotheosis, son. Apotheosis.”
“You expect to die here?”
“Oh, no! Just the opposite. God does not want me to die yet. He has something further for me to do. Something much larger. I know this.”
“You know God’s mind?”
“Yes,” he said, calm as a counting house clerk.
“How do you come by this knowledge, Father?”
“The Lord speaks to me. He shows me things. You know this, Owen,” he added with some impatience.
A moment passed in silence, while I pondered his claim—for this was the first time that he had said it so bluntly—that not only did he see what the Lord wished him to see but he had God’s very words in his ear. Finally, I asked, “And what does the Lord say to you? What does He say of me, for instance?”
He turned his face up to me and gently smiled. “The Lord says that I shall never weep for thee, as King David wept for his beloved son, Absalom. And as I must weep for Frederick. And that I shall never wish to have died for thee, as King David wished to die for Absalom. Today, Owen, the Lord hath delivered up the men who hath raised their hand against me, and all who hath raised themselves up against me to do me hurt shall someday be as that young man is. Frederick. My son.” He paused for a few seconds, then went on. “I swear it, and the Lord hath promised it. For if I must, to smite these men I will carry this battle into Africa.”
“Africa,” I said.
“You kill a serpent by striking off its head.”
Africa? Was my father, indeed and at last, mad? I was long used to his reliance on elaborate, obscure figures and his habit of displacing the immediate present with the Biblical past, and while usually I could follow his circumlocutious path to his meaning without much difficulty and often found his meaning original, profound, and insightful, this time he had me. Africa! Had the shock of Fred’s murder begun to settle in and madden him? He had so far evidenced no grief or outrage over it, but deep feelings too much denied or suppressed can inexplicably erupt in fissures elsewhere.
“Look, they’re here!” he suddenly said, sounding almost relieved, and he stood and pointed towards the western track, where there came the first of Reid’s force over the horizon, and following close behind came a great troop of men on horseback, riding three abreast and at full gallop. Father slapped his sword into its scabbard and instantly began giving orders. “Hold your fire, men! Aim low, and wait till they’re upon us!” he shouted, as he ran from one man to another, his dozen fighters and Captain Parson’s twenty more, encouraging them and bucking up their courage in the face of this most formidable, terrifying force.
Straight on the riders came, as if expecting no one to oppose them, as if we had indeed done the rational, expected thing and abandoned the town to them. Soon they were only a quarter-mile off, well within range of our Sharps rifles, of which we had perhaps ten, and still Father said to hold fire, wait for his command, and then they were within range of our muskets, but he would not let us shoot yet, so we held back a few seconds longer, until they were fit targets even for our revolvers, when finally Father called, “Fire!” and thirty guns—thirty rifles, muskets, and revolvers—roared as one, and twenty or more of Reid’s men cried out and fell like clods of dirt. Those who were not hit in the fusillade wheeled away from the trail and, firing wildly from horseback, fled into the woods in several directions at once, while we reloaded and went on shooting at the riders and killing those on the ground who had gone down not dead but merely wounded in the first volley.
Reid’s force was like a huge wave rolling in upon a rock. And when the riders had fallen away before us and their ranks had broken on both our flanks, they at first swirled and s
I lay tucked in behind a low, brush-covered hummock, studying through the gaps in the brush the moves of the enemy on the distant rise, when I saw one of Reid’s men dismount and get down on one knee and carefully aim his long rifle in our direction. There was a puff of white smoke, then the sound of a single gunshot, and when I turned to see where the bullet might have hit, Father was standing next to me, still recklessly exposed to the enemy.
He stepped close, turned, showed me his back, and said, “Can you see anything torn or bloody, Owen?”
I replied that I could not.
“Well, I believe I just took a terrible rap on the back from that fellow’s long rifle.”
“What! Then stay down!”
He grinned and said, “Don’t fret yourself, son. The Lord doesn’t intend for me to be shot in the back. He just wants me to keep facing His enemy, that’s all. It’s a little reminder.”
I remember turning towards Reid’s men then and seeing for the first time their cannon. This was no guerilla skirmish; this was warfare. They had rolled the weapon out and were loading it with grapeshot. A moment later, they fired the thing, and it made a terrible roar, snapping off whole trees and tearing down branches overhead. They quickly reloaded and fired a second time, with the same, frightening effect. It made a deep bellow and then a shriek as the grape whistled over our heads and crashed against the trees and hummocks, splintering and smashing everything it hit. While the cannoneers with each new firing brought their weapon closer and closer into deadly range, the rest of Reid’s men, gathering courage from its destructive power, dismounted and formed large companies of shooters and commenced to advance on foot upon our position, stopping every ten or fifteen yards to aim and fire their muskets, driving us slowly back towards the river.
Father kept exhorting us to hold our ground and wait for close quarters and aim low and so on, but first Captain Parson’s men and then Father’s, too, even Salmon and Oliver, were now in full retreat, firing and running, ducking behind a tree or a rock and firing and running again. I stayed at the front beside Father and watched them fly past. Father and I looked at each other and said nothing. Here several of the men were shot and went down—older men: Mr. Partridge, as I recollect, and Mr. Holmes—and this terrified the rest even more and turned their more or less orderly retreat into a pandemonious rout, until finally even Father at this point gave up the fight and, showing the enemy his back, made for the river, with me close behind.
I remember stopping atop the bank, the last of the Osawatomie defenders to flee, and looking down at our men as they waded through the chest-high water, with Father coming after, as if he were not following them but was in hot pursuit—a revolver held high in each hand and his battered old palm-leaf hat set squarely on his head and the tails of his mustard-yellow linen duster floating out behind.
He cut a ludicrous figure. Except for those men—both ours and the enemy’s—who lay dead on the rough ground behind me, they all did. It made no sense to me, none of it. I no longer knew what I was doing here or why. For a second, I thought of turning away from Father and the others and walking straight towards Reid’s cannon and riflemen, offering myself up to them—as a prisoner, if they wanted, or as a sacrifice—just to end it, to finish this mad fight and give sense, if not to my life, then to my death. In a world where every man was trying for no apparent reason to kill the other, the only sensible man should have long since been slain. Like poor, murdered Fred.
Then I heard Father’s hard voice call up to me: “Owen! God sees it, Owen! God sees it!” And with that, down the embankment I scrambled and into the river and on to the further bank—saved once again from myself by my father’s call to come along, come and kill men another day.
We arrived late that evening, foot-sore, weary, and sullen, at Uncle’s cabin, which Reid’s marauders, having marked it already with Fred’s cold-blooded murder, had passed over and left intact. Earlier, as we re-gathered on the far bank of the river, we had stood awhile and watched the smoke rise over the village of Osawatomie, where the Ruffians were gaily pillaging and burning. Now and then, the silence was broken by the whoops of the victors and the random sounds of their guns being fired exuberantly into the air. That there was still in effect, despite contradicting claims on both sides, an unwritten law against violating or otherwise injuring women and children was cold comfort to us: houses and barns filled with the long, arduous summer’s harvest were going up in flames, and Free-State livestock was being herded together for travel east to feed hungry mouths in Missouri, and stores and the several public buildings were being looted and burned to the ground. All over the region, the grassy plains and pretty cottonwood dells were scarred by the blackened ruins of farmsteads and crossroads stores, and the trails and roads were increasingly haunted by the wagons of burned-out Free-Staters and pro-slavery families alike returning with their few remaining possessions and animals to their home states—ruined by this war, slump-shouldered, disillusioned, and broken.
Uncle was alone in his cabin when we arrived. Having determined to stay and minister to his tiny flock, he had long since sent his wife, Flora, Father’s half-sister, on back to Ohio for the duration of the hostilities. In spite of his connection to us Browns and of having briefly harbored John and Jason after the Pottawatomie massacre, he had managed, by virtue of his simple decency and even-handedness in all his dealings, to escape persecution by the roving bands of Ruffians. There are all sorts of Christians, and Uncle Sam Adair was, to my mind, a simple Christian, for, although he hated slavery, he regarded all human beings as equally fallen from grace and equally capable of salvation. He was thus essentially pacifistic, like Jason, and did not believe that it was necessary to kill people in order to free others. From the beginning, this had separated Uncle from Father, although Uncle was not severe about it—except, of course, for a spell following the Pottawatomie killings. So while he did not exactly welcome us into his home that night, he nonetheless permitted us to enter and view Fred’s body and make the necessary determinations for his burial.
The main room of the cabin was dimly lit by a single oil lantern and a low fire in the fireplace. We crowded in—Father, Salmon, Oliver, and I—and stood facing the long table where Uncle had laid out the body. He had put Fred’s boots back on him and his shirt, buttoned to the throat, and had washed and shaved his face, so that Fred seemed almost to be sleeping. Fred in repose and in that flickering light had an angelic face, soft and pink and round, more like our mother’s than Father’s. There was something, not female, but decidedly feminine in Fred; in this he was not much like his father or brothers, we who seemed so wholly masculine, unyielding, and crude. Even when a stoical, solitary shepherd in Ohio, where he had resembled no man so much as John the Baptist in the wilderness, Fred had had about him a delicacy and finesse, a physical sweetness, that had set him apart from other men in a way that, after his self-mutilation, became even more pronounced than before: somehow, that most violent and most masculine act of self-reproach, in Fred’s hand, had looked nearly gentle, and it had neither frightened nor embarrassed any of us. We had been saddened by it, of course, but not intimidated, as we would have been if one of our other brothers had done it.
I cannot say what Father thought or felt that night as he looked down on Fred’s body. He did not weep, nor for a long while did he say anything. Always, as regards his children, Father’s thoughts and feelings were strong, but they were also at times somewhat gnarled and stunted, as if our very existence were a chastizement to him. When a
At first, Father did not respond; then he slowly shook his head no. I looked at his face and saw again that there was something newly broken in him: a piece of his mind that hitherto had been intact was now cast off from it, and he was no longer merely suppressing his emotions, his rage and grief, saving them for a later, more appropriate hour and place: his mind now was less a finely calibrated engine than a monument: it had become like chiseled stone, cut and carved in a permanent way, and I saw that what Father did not express he did not feel.
He stepped away from Fred’s body and, passing between us, went to the door and said for Uncle to bury Fred here on the property and to mark it properly with his name and dates. “And say upon it the words of the apostle, ‘For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.’” Then, abruptly, he asked Uncle how many horses he had.
“A pair,” Uncle told him. “And I still have a mule.”
“I will need them, along with your wagon. I’ll replace them in a few days. The boys and I have an appointment with some Ruffians, and I don’t want to disappoint them by arriving late.” It was his intention, he said, to nip awhile at the flanks and heels of Reid’s army, until we had ourselves fresh mounts and supplies, and then he would come back around, before heading into Africa.