Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Cold stove, aprons drooped across chair-backs, muddy boots stacked in the rack by the back entry: I stand in the dead center of the room and cock my head like a hunted animal listening for the hunter; no, more like the hunter poised for the sound of his prey. But I hear nothing, not even a mouse in the wall or a squirrel skittering across the cedar-shake roof. No brother or sister turns in sleep in a narrow cot in the loft overhead; no one sighs and peers from the small, square window up there. There is not a breath, human or otherwise, to ripple the still, funereal air of this house.
Perhaps I have unknowingly arrived home on the Sabbath, the Lord’s one day of rest, when, after six days of tending to our puny needs, He commands us to tend His. Perhaps everyone has departed for the small white church in the settlement below, there to pray for strength now and divine grace at the moment of death and salvation and eternal life thereafter.
Everlasting life—what a horrid thought! Although sometimes I have believed that it would not be a terrible thing to be killed eternally. To be slain again and again, until I no longer feared death. Then life would be the illusion, and dying and being born again to die again the only reality: the world, which has no experience anyhow at being me, would simply go on being itself. I might become good, finally: a perfect man, like a Hindoo saint, with no stern, bearded God lording it over me, enticing me with guilt and shame and principles and duty, and making goodness an irresistible obligation, impossible to meet, and not simply man’s natural condition.
Ah, but I was born and raised a Christian, not a Hindoo! I can only glimpse these things but now and then and cannot sustain such a perverse, foreign view of life and death for longer than it takes to write it down here. Worse, I am a Christian without a God, a fallen man without a Saviour. I am a believer without belief.
I’m unable to say how long I have stood here in the house thinking these strange thoughts, but the shadows have grown long, and the room has nearly fallen into darkness, when finally, for the first time since my arrival home, I hear the sound of another living creature: the slow hoofbeats of a horse, then of several horses approaching the farm at a walk, and the sharp bark of a dog—from the high, thin sound of it, a collie dog—and the laughter and easy talk of human beings! From the window I see, coming through the dusk, my family: there at the front is Father, white-bearded and looking ancient in the face, though still as straight-gaited as ever; and my stepmother, Mary, and my sisters seated up in the wagon; and my younger brothers and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and with them, afoot and on horseback and riding in a trap, half a dozen more, white people and Negroes both, our longtime northcountry neighbors and friends coming gaily along the lane from the settlement as if from a holiday outing.
Suddenly, the empty vessel has been filled, and out of invisibility and silence, I have been made visible to myself, and audible! I call out to them, joyous and grateful for the simple fact of their existence elsewhere than in my mind and memory, and rush pell-mell from the house to the yard and greet them there. These beautiful, utterly familiar faces and bodies are real, are tangible! And here, at last, clasped to the bosom of family and friends, I am one with others again! As when I was a child and my mother had not died yet. As when Father had not begun to block out the sun and replace it with his own cold disk, as when he had not cast me in his permanent shadow. They all touch me, and they even embrace me, and they say how glad they are to have me with them again. Though nothing is forgotten, all is forgiven! Even Susan Epps is here amongst them, and she has beside her, holding tightly to her skirt, a small boy—her son, Lyman’s son, emblem of her love for him and his forgiveness of me, for that is how she presents the little boy to me, saying simply, proudly, “I have a son to make your acquaintance, Owen Brown,” and that is how I receive him, and he me.
Sister Ruth declares that she, too, will soon have a child to make my acquaintance, a nephew or niece, and there will be others coming along before long, for here are Oliver and his pretty young bride, Miss Martha Brewster, who have this very afternoon become husband and wife! A wedding, one I could have attended myself, Ruth tells me, had I arrived in time or had they known of the imminence of my return so as to have held off the wedding for a few hours. But no one knew when Owen would appear, except Father, she says, and nods approvingly at the Old Man, who kept insisting that Owen would get home in time for Oliver’s and Lizzies wedding, and as usual Father was not altogether wrong, she adds, and not altogether right, and everyone laughs at that, for we are delighted when Ruth teases the Old Man, the only one of us who can do it and make him blush with pleasure from it and not scowl.
Mary, my dear stepmother, I first hold close to my face and then at arms’ length, so that I can peer into her large brown eyes and see my own face reflected back and know that, even though I can never love her as she wishes and Father asks, she nonetheless loves me as powerfully as any mother can love her natural son and feels no loss for herself or imbalance in the exchange, only sorrow for me. My brothers and brothers-in-law and my old friends from Timbuctoo and the village of North Elba, all in the shy way of northcountry farmers, shake my hand and clap me on the shoulder and ask me to say by what route, by what roads and ferries and canals, came I home all the way from I-o-way; and how were the other boys, asks Salmon, when I passed through Ohio; and their families, asks Watson, and our uncles and aunts and cousins in Ohio; and did I visit and pray over Grandfather Brown’s grave in Akron, asks sister Annie, the sweetest and most pious of Father’s daughters and of Grandfather Brown’s granddaughters. And to all I say yes and yes and yes: I have done everything that you would have me do, been everywhere you wanted me to go, said what you wished to have said yourselves, and now here I am standing amongst you, your beloved son, brother, uncle, dear friend, and I want nothing of life now but never again to leave this place and these people. I see the newly married and the recently familied and the several generations rising and all this beautiful, high meadowland and forest that surrounds us, and I permit myself the glimmering thought that someday soon I will ask to marry Susan Epps and raise her son and make for us a farm here on the Plains of Abraham. I will make of this joyful moment a starting point for a long, happy, and fruitful life, instead of making it the mocking, ironic end of a life that was short and bitter and barren.
Would that not be a wonderful way to end this story? With one wedding just finished and another soon to come—the third son of John Brown to marry the Negro widow of his dearest friend, to raise together his friend’s, her late husband’s, namesake into manhood here in the Adirondack wilderness, the three of them, one small family free of all the cruel symbolism of race and the ancient curse of slavery, a white man and a Negro woman and child held dear by a family and community that see them and deal with them solely as family and friends and fellow citizens?
Fantasy, delusion, dream! A guilty white man’s chimera, that’s all. It lasts but a second. It lasts until Father comes forward now and places his heavy hands onto my shoulders, and I am suddenly ashamed of my hope and can no longer look at Susan or her son or at anyone else. Only at Father: at his cold eyes, gray as granite. I feel him press his hands down with great force, as if he has settled a yoke upon my shoulders and wishes me to kneel under its weight. And so I do, I bend and kneel, and in Jesus’ name he prays over me, thanking the Almighty for bringing me safely home, so that I can keep and fulfill my covenant with the Lord and can now go out from this blessed place and commence the great and terrible work that He hath ordained for us.
Amen, he says; and Amen says everyone else; and Amen say I, too.
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We wake in darkness and long for light, and when the light comes, we wait for darkness to return, so that we can descend the rickety ladder from our crowded, windowless attic and warm our hands at the kitchen fire and walk about the yard awhile. We go out of the house either in pairs or alone, so as not to draw the attention of some errant nighttime traveler unexpectedly making his late way past the old Kennedy farm, someone who
The town of Harpers Ferry and the rifle and musket manufactories and the federal arsenal are situated in a deep, narrow gorge three miles south of here, on a spit of terraced, flat-rock land, where the Shenandoah cuts between two high, wooded ridges and empties into the Potomac. At first sight, it seems an unlikely place to make and store an army’s weapons, vulnerable to attack and siege from the high bluffs on both sides of both rivers. But Father has explained that none of our nation’s enemies could attack the town, so far from sea, without first having captured Washington, fifty miles downriver, or Richmond and Baltimore. The last place from which the federal government would expect Harpers Ferry to be attacked is by land, he says, smiling, and only our fellow Americans could manage that. Which is, of course, precisely where and who we are: ensconced northwest of the town up here in the Kennedy farmhouse, fellow Americans coming in under cover of darkness one by one from all over the continent—well-armed young men with anti-slavery principles in their minds and bloody murder in their hearts.
We have said our somber final goodbyes to our families and homes in the North and have joined the Old Man here—fifteen white men and five Negro, when we have all assembled—to wait out the days and weeks and, if necessary, months until he tells us finally that the moment we have been waiting for, some of us for a lifetime, has come. The plan, his meticulously detailed schedule and breakdown of operations, he has rehearsed for us over and over again, night after night, in the chilled, candlelit room above the one big room of the house, our prison, as we have come jokingly to call it. On the basement level, there is a kitchen, where sister Annie and Oliver’s new wife, Martha, have settled in to cook and launder for us—they arrived back in mid-July, after Father, having determined that our disguise as land speculators and provenders of meat required the presence of womenfolk, summoned them down from North Elba. A short ways from the house is a locked shed, where we have stored our weapons, which we periodically clean and maintain to break the monotony of our confinement-some two hundred Sharps rifles and that many more pistols and a thousand sharpened steel-tipped pikes, all paid for by Father’s secret supporters and shipped to Isaac Smith & Sons piecemeal over the summer months from Ohio and Hartford by way of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in wooden cases marked “Hardware and Castings.” John Kagi, who once taught school in the area and knows it well, has functioned as our main advance agent here and has facilitated these delicate operations. Also, John Cook has been here for nearly a year already, sent down from Iowa by Father as a spy, because of his intelligence and Yale education and his much-admired social skills, and he has managed without arousing suspicion to gain employment as a canal-lock tender and last spring even married a local girl, whom he had got with child, which naturally did not particularly please Father, but it helped Cook settle into the daily life of the town, and that has proved useful.
We ourselves have arrived in a trickle, a few at a time. First, on July 3, Father and I and our old Kansas cohort Jeremiah Anderson came in by wagon from North Elba, and then soon after came Oliver and Watson and the Thompson boys, William, who earlier wished to be in Kansas with us and his brother Henry but never made it off the Thompson farm, and his younger brother Dauphin, only twenty years old, by nature a sweet and gentle boy, but who over the years has come practically to worship Father. From Maine comes Charlie Tidd and with him Aaron Stevens, both hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign, and shortly after them, Albert Hazlett rides a wagon in, followed by the Canadian Stewart Taylor, the spiritualist, who is convinced that he alone will die at Harpers Ferry and seems almost to welcome it, as if his death is a small price to pay for the survival of the rest of us. A week later, the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barclay, will arrive at the farmhouse, lapsed Quakers who trained with us in Iowa. Then, late in the summer, Willie Leeman will walk all the way in from Maine, and shortly after him come the first of the Negroes, Osborn Anderson and Dangerfield Newby, which pleases Father immensely, for he has begun to grow fearful that his army will be made up only of white men. In the end, there will be four more men to join us at the Kennedy farm: the Bostonian Francis Meriam, unstable and inspired to join us by his recent visit with the journalist Redpath to the black republic of Haiti; and John Copeland, Lewis Leary, and Shields Green, the last three of them Ohio Negroes, which, not counting our commander-in-chief, rounds out our number at twenty.
But do not fear, this number will be sufficient unto our present needs, Father has declared. We have pared away from our side all those men who would defeat us through their cowardice and faithlessness. We now have only the enemy to fight. July has turned into August and is moving rapidly towards autumn, and as each new recruit joins us, Father begins his narrative anew, an old jeremiad against slavery that lapses into fresh prophecy of its demise, as weekly he adjusts his plan for the taking of Harpers Ferry, so that it reflects the skills and personalities of the new arrivals, his increased belief in his recruits’ commitment to the raid, and his growing awareness that in the end there will be far fewer of us than he anticipated. The arrival of Mr. Douglass will, of course, alter things considerably, even if he comes alone, but it’s mainly afterwards that his presence will revise our circumstances and operations, Father points out, after we have seized the town and the cry has gone out across the Virginia countryside that Osawatomie Brown and Frederick Douglass have begun their long-awaited war to liberate the slaves. That’s when our sharpened pikes, with their six-foot ash handles and eight-inch knife blades bolted to the top, will go into action. Father believes that most of the slaves who join up with us will not be much experienced in the use of firearms, but until they can be trained and properly armed, these weapons will do them fine. Besides, the very sight of razor-sharp spears in the hands of vengeful liberated Negroes will help terrorize the slaveholders. Terror is one of our weapons, he says. Perhaps our strongest weapon. Until then, however, and for now, this is the plan.
From our blanket rolls scattered over the rough plank floor, we prop our heads in our hands and listen to our commander-in-chief, and each of us sees himself playing his role flawlessly, not missing a cue or a line, as if he were an actor in a perfectly executed play. Father sits on a stool in the center of the attic, and as usual, he first hectors and inspires us with his rhetoric and then runs through his plan yet again. He is the author of the play and its stage-manager and master of costumes and scenery and all our properties, and he is the lead actor as well—along with Mr. Douglass, of course, we mustn’t forget him, for without Frederick Douglass, no matter how successful the first act is played, the second and third will surely fail. There may not even be a second or third. Everyone knows that. Father will reveal more about those acts later, he says, but for now we need be mindful only that it is overall a work, a performance, whose s
The rest of us are important players, too, we know, but compared to the Old Man and Mr. Douglass, minor. Father insists that no, each one of us is as crucial to the success of this operation as every other: from top to bottom, we are a chain, and if one link breaks, the entire chain comes undone. But still, we know better. And so does he. Each of us twenty is replaceable, and until Mr. Douglass arrives, this will be the Old Man’s show, and then it will belong to the two of them. It will never belong to us. Meanwhile, however, we listen to the Old Man’s directions and memorize our lines and positions, so that when at last Osawatomie Brown steps onto the stage and begins the action, we will be able to follow his lead and efficiently prepare the way for the entry of the famous Frederick Douglass and his thousands of Negro actors, all of whom are as yet unrehearsed and have been cast as players only in our imaginations.