Cloudsplitter Read online

  Cloudsplitter

  A NOVEL

  Russell Banks

  Dedication

  for C.T., the beloved,

  and in memory of William Matthews (1942-1997)

  Epigraph

  ... and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  JOB 1:16

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part IV

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part V

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  More Raves for Cloudsplitter

  Also by Russell Banks

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  Chapter 1

  Upon waking this cold, gray morning from a troubled sleep, I realized for the hundredth time, but this time with deep conviction, that my words and behavior towards you were disrespectful, and rude and selfish as well. Prompting me now, however belatedly, to apologize and beg your forgiveness.

  You were merely doing your duty, as assistant to your Professor Villard, who in turn is engaged in a mighty and important task, which is intended, when it has been completed, not only to benefit all mankind but also to cast a favorable light upon the family of John Brown. And since I myself am both—both a man and a member of the family of John Brown—then I myself stand to benefit twice over from your and Professor Villard’s honest labors.

  Self-defeating, then, as well as cruel and foolish of me, to thwart you. Especially when you are so clearly an open-minded, sincere, and intelligent seeker of the truth, the whole truth—so help me, Miss Mayo, I am sorry.

  I ask you to understand, however: I have remained silent for so many years on all matters touching on Father and our family that by the time you arrived at my cabin door I had long since ceased even to question my silence. I greeted your polite arrival and inquiries with a policy made nearly half a century ago, a policy neither questioned nor revised in all the years between. Policy had frozen into habit, and habit character.

  Also, in the years since the events you are investigating, my life has been that of an isolate, a shepherd on a mountaintop, situated as far from so-called civilization as possible, and it has made me unnaturally brusque and awkward. Nor am I used, especially, to speaking with a young woman.

  I remind you of all this, of my character, I guess you could call it, so that you can place my remarks, memories, and revelations—even the documents that you requested and which I will soon sort out and provide for you—into their proper context. Without continuous consideration of context, no truth told of my father’s life and work can be the whole truth. If I have learned nothing else in the forty years since his execution, I have learned at least that. It is one of the main reasons for my having kept so long so silent. I have sat out here tending my sheep on my mountaintop, and the books and newspaper articles and the many thick volumes of memoirs have come floating down upon my head like autumn leaves year after year, and I have read them all, the scurrilous attacks on Father and me and my brothers in blood and in arms, as well as the foolish, dreamy, sentimental celebrations of our “heroism” and “manly courage” in defense of the Negro—oh, I have read them all! Those who made Father out to be mad, I have read them. Those who called him a common horse thief and murderer hiding beneath the blanket of abolitionism, I read them, too. Those who met Father and me and my brothers but once, on a cloudy, cold December afternoon in Kansas, and later wrote of us as if they had ridden with us for months all across the territory—yes, those, too. And those who, on hearing of Father’s execution, wept with righteousness in their pious Concord parlors, comparing him to the very Christ on His very cross—I read them, too, although it was hard not to smile at the thought of how Father himself would have viewed the comparison. Father believed in the incomparable reality of Christ, after all, not the incorporeal idea. Father’s cross was a neatly carpentered scaffold in Virginia, not a spiked pair of rough timbers in Jerusalem.

  Forgive me, I am wandering. I want to tell you everything—now that I have decided to tell a little. It’s as if I have opened a floodgate, and a vast inland sea of words held back for half a lifetime has commenced to pour through. I knew it would be like this. And that’s yet another reason for my prolonged silence—made worse, made more emphatic and burdensome and, let me say, made confusing, by the irony that the longer I remained silent, the more I had to tell. My truth has been held in silence for so long that it has given the field over entirely to those who have lied and risks having become a lie itself, or at least it risks being heard as such. Perhaps even by you. Thus, although I have begun at last to speak, and to speak the truth, it feels oddly and at the edges as if I am lying.

  I say again that I am sorry that I rebuffed you the other day. You are young and may not know, but solitude, extended for a sufficiently long time, becomes its own reward and nourishment. And an old man’s voice aloud can become repugnant to his own ears, which is perhaps why I have chosen to write to you, and to write at as great a length as will prove necessary, instead of merely speaking with you and politely answering your questions in person as you wished. The anxious bleat of my sheep, the bark of my dog, and the gurgle and crack of my fire—these, for decades, are practically the only voices that I have heard and spoken back to, until they have become my own voice. It is not a voice suitable for a lengthy interview with a young, educated woman like yourself come all the way out here from the city of New York to my hill in Altadena, California.

  What sense could you have made, anyhow, of an old, bearded man bleating, barking, and cracking all day and night long? I picture you—had I actually granted the interview that you so kindly requested—becoming embarrassed, confused, finally angry and resigned; and you, closing your notebook and taking polite leave of me, reporting back to your eminent Professor Oswald Garrison Villard at Columbia University that you arrived too late. Poor old Owen Brown, third son of John Brown, the last living witness and party to the Pottawatomie massacre and the victories and tragedies of Bleeding Kansas and the long, terrible series of battles in the War Against Slavery that culminated in the disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry—that pathetic, aged, solitary man, Owen Brown, is now quite mad himself, and so we shall never know the truth of whether his father, too, was mad. We shall never know if John Brown was in his right mind when he butchered those men and boys down on the Pottawatomie that awful night in ’57. Or whether, when he terrorized the pro-slavers in Kansas, he was in fact the old-time, Puritan hero and military genius that so many made him out to be. Or if, when he took Harpers Ferry and refused to flee into the mountains, he had by then lost his mind altogether. The son himself, the hermit-shepherd Owen Brown, is mad, you would say to your professor (and perhaps are saying to him even now), and we shall never know conclusively if the father was mad also. Thus, given what we already know of John Brown, you will say, and in the absence of significant evidence to the contrary, we must concur with our century’s received opinion and, before the next century begins, adjudge him a mad
man.

  I hope, therefore, that your quick receipt of this first of what shall be several, perhaps many, such letters will slow that judgement and eventually reverse it.

  Was my father mad? I realize it is the only question that can matter to you. Since they first heard his name, men and women have been asking it. They asked it continuously during his lifetime, even before he became famous. Strangers, loyal followers, enemies, friends, and family alike. It was then and is now no merely academic question. And how you and the professor answer it will determine to a considerable degree how you and whoever reads your book will come to view the long, savage war between the white race and the black race on this continent. If the book that your good professor is presently composing, though it contain all the known and previously unrecorded facts of my father’s life, cannot show and declare once and for all that Old Brown either was or was not mad, then it will be a useless addition to the head-high pile of useless books already written about him. More than the facts of my father’s hectic life, people do need to know if he was sane or not. For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true. If he was insane, then other, quite different, and perhaps not so terrible things about race and human nature are true.

  And, yes, just as you said, I am probably the only person remaining alive who has the knowledge and information that will enable you and your professor to answer the question. But you must understand. The three-hundred-year-long War Between the Races, from before the Revolution up to and including Harpers Ferry, was being fought mainly as the War Against Slavery. Then, briefly, in ’61, it became the War Between the States. And from then until now, there has been such a grieving, angry clamor that I knew I would not be heard, except as one of the sons of John Brown trying to justify his father’s and his own bloody deeds—a puny, crippled man who fled the carnage he helped create and for the rest of his long life hid alone in the West.

  The truth is, for us, the so-called Civil War was merely an aftermath. Or, rather, it was part of a continuum. Just another protracted battle. Ours was very much a minority view, however. It still is. But from the day it began, to Northerner and Southerner alike, the Civil War was a concussive trauma that erased all memory of what life had been like before it. On both sides, white Americans woke to war and forgot altogether the preceding nightmare, which had wakened them in the first place. Or they made it a pastoral dream. Even the abolitionists forgot. But for those few of us whose lives had been most thrillingly lived in the decade preceding the War, one thing has led obviously and with sad predictability to another, with no break or permanent ending point between the early years of the slave uprisings in Haiti and Virginia and the Underground Railroad in Ohio and New York and the Kansas battles and Harpers Ferry and the firing on Fort Sumter and Shiloh and Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Appomattox Courthouse and the killing of Abraham Lincoln and the savage, dark, murderous days that have followed, even to today, at century’s end. They are like beads on a string to us, bubbles of blood on a barbed steel strand that stretches from the day the first enslaved African was brought ashore in Virginia to today, and we have not reached the end of it yet.

  Thus, when the Civil War ended, I found myself feeling towards the rest of my white countrymen, both Northern and Southern, the way Negroes in America, and Indians, too, must always have felt towards white Americans generally—as if the white man’s history were separate from ours and did not honor or even recognize ours. That is yet another reason why I have remained silent for so long. I did not want my testimony captured and used in the manufacture of an American history that at bottom is alien to me. I did not want to help tell a story that, when it does not ignore mine altogether, effectively contradicts it. That would be treasonous. It would aid and abet our common enemy, who wants nothing more than to declare the war between the races non-existent. Or if not non-existent, then short-lived and well over.

  So now perhaps you understand somewhat why I drove you off, and why I have come in this way to call you back again.

  There is yet a further reason, I suddenly realize, for my having called you back, and I must attempt to confess it, painful as it is to admit, even to myself.

  I am dying. Or I am already dead and have been dead these forty years, with nothing left of me, who once was Owen Brown, except a shadow cast on the near wall by my lamplight and these words tumbling from me like a death rattle, a last, prolonged exhalation. Absurd as it may sound to you who read these words, it is to me the literal truth. I am more the ghost of Owen Brown than I am the man himself.

  Although I was but thirty-five years old in ’59 and escaped from Harpers Ferry like a rabbit through the corn and ended up safe here on my western mountaintop, my life since that day has been an after-life. In recent years, as I have grown into an old man, there have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mornings when I have wakened in my cold cabin with my lungs flooded and, before the sun has dried the dew off the window pane, have concluded that sometime during the night I finally died. But then hunger or some other bodily need or the animals—my dog scratching at the door, the sheep bleating, the cry of a hawk—bring me back to the sad awareness that, no, I have not died, not yet, and thus am obliged once more to grope through the gray veils that wrap me and come to full wakefulness and begin again the daily rounds of a man alive.

  Until the night that followed your arrival at my door, however, when I must indeed have gone deeper into the embrace of death than ever before. So that when in the morning I finally woke, if waking it truly was, I knew beyond all doubt that I am now he who was Owen Brown. Not he who is Owen Brown. Not that crotchety old man you met growling at you like a bear in its cave, but his past, his childhood and youth and his young manhood, that’s who I am. It was as if your visit had sounded a final knell that drove me into a purgatory which I had been longing for all these years but had neither the courage nor the wisdom to seek on my own. As if, now that I am here, there is no going forward or back, no possible ascent to heaven or descent to hell, until I have told my story.

  Thus these words, these letters, and the packets of materials which in time I will turn over to you. All my worldly effects, as it were, I bequeath to thee. Make of them, you and your professor, whatever you will. In the long, ongoing War Between the Races, this, I suppose, must be my final act, and I pray only that, before I am in error judged good, if cowardly, and my father mad, if courageous, I be given the time to complete it.

  It is all very strange. Now that I have opened communications with you, I find myself unable to keep my inner voice silent. I have given off all work—my sheep and the spring lambs wander the grassy hills unaccompanied in search of water and pasturage, protected only by my faithful little dog, Flossie who returns from the herd every few hours to the cabin door and scratches and whines outside, as if angered by my protracted absence and intent on rousing me from an inexplicable sleep.

  But I am not asleep. I do now and then drift towards a dozing state, but I am driven back from it each time by the rising sound of my voice, as if it, too, has a will of its own and, like Flossie, does not want me to sleep. Whether I am seated at my table, as now, writing the words down, or in my chair in the darkness by the window with the silvery moonlight falling across my lap, or lying in my cot by the back wall staring at the low ceiling all night long and into the next day, my ears are filled always with my own voice. The words are like water in a brook that bubbles from an underground spring and spills downhill across rocks and fallen trees to where it gathers in eddies and builds a dark, still pool, moving me finally to rise from my cot and sit down at my table and begin again to write them down, my purpose being merely to break the little dam or jam and release the pressure against it and let the flow of words resume.

  It is more than passing strange. And joyous, somehow. I see where I am, and yet it is as if I who was Owen Brown have flown from my mountaintop. I have today been recalling an earlier, my first, departure from this place and its s
imilarity to this day’s dying—although that was literal and this, of course, is merely figurative. Then, just as now, what a strange joy I felt! It was a full decade ago, in the spring of ’89, and I had been lingering alone on this high, treeless hill for close to thirty years, waiting for the moment of my death to finish its last flash through my weary body, biding my time, helpless and silent as smoke and with all the patience of the long-dead. I was waiting, silently waiting, not so much for my actual death, which meant little to me, one way or the other, as for the pine box that contained my bones to be carried three thousand miles from the hills of California back along the railroad lines to my family’s house and farm in the Adirondack mountain village of North Elba, New York. To the place that, because of the Negroes living there, we called Timbuctoo.

  A letter from a distinguished woman in the East who had long honored Father’s deeds had arrived at my door, just as you arrived in person last week. It informed me, not of the needs of an illustrious biographer, as you did, but of the coming re-interment of the last of the bodies of those who had fallen with Father at Harpers Ferry. The letter invited me to attend the ceremonies, which were to be held on the upcoming ninth of May, Father’s birthday, at his gravesite, where my brothers’ and companions’ old bones, gathered from shallow graves in Virginia and elsewhere across the country, were at last to join his.

  Until that cold morning, for the thirty long years since the end came at Harpers Ferry, I had hoped for no other event, for no additional particularity of circumstance, than that my poor bones, too, my remains, at last be interred there. With or without some slight ceremony, it did not matter a whit to me—so long as they were deposited in my family’s yard in the plot of hard, dark, and stony ground that surrounded the huge, gray boulder in the meadow before the house. For those many years, I had been waiting for nothing but the fit and proper burial of my crumbling, shrouded old corpse in that precious dirt alongside the bodies of my father, John Brown, and my brothers Watson and Oliver, and my companions in arms who had fought beside me in the Kansas wars or were cut to pieces in the raid on Harpers Ferry or were executed on the scaffold afterwards.