Cloudsplitter Read online

  Then, feeling directed to its presence by Father himself, I looked down to my left and saw the hole in the ground. The hole was pure black, like carbon, and neatly cut, about six feet across and six wide. It was freshly dug and deep. From where I stood I could not see the bottom. The soil was dark, wet, having only recently thawed, and was heaped in a neat cone at the further side. I turned away from the huge boulder and moved slowly towards the blackness—for that is what it was, a six-foot square of blackness, a door to another world than this—and felt an almost irresistible tug, a pull beyond yearning, to go forward and enter it, to step off this too solid earth into blackness, as if taking that final step were as simple as walking through the portal of one room into the next.

  I stopped, but could not say what stopped me. Gradually, though, I began to hear noises again, and the crowd and yard and buildings around me drifted back into my ken, and I found that I had left Father’s presence and had rejoined the multitude. Dogs barked, children cried and laughed, men and women chattered with one another. Horses creaked in their harnesses, and wagon wheels crunched across the ground. A crow called out. The breeze blew, and clouds shifted overhead. I smelled tobacco smoke and oiled leather, horse manure, woolen clothing, and winter-soaked old grass and leaves.

  I cannot say if it was cause or effect. But when I found myself once again in the midst of the spectacle and not cast outside it, I was able to back quickly away from the black hole in the ground, to turn and move off from Father’s rock, there to take up an obscure position more or less in the middle of the crowd, to stand and wait with them for the rest of the people to arrive and for the ceremonies to begin. I was waiting now, like the others, for the speeches, the prayers, and the singing of the hymns, for the ornate box of the crumbling remains of eleven murdered men to be lowered into the ground:

  Watson Brown

  Oliver Brown

  Albert Hazlett

  John Henry Kagi

  Lewis Leary

  William Leeman

  Dangerfield Newby

  Aaron Stevens

  Stewart Taylor

  Dauphin Thompson

  William Thompson

  and also the body of this man—Owen Brown—who had lived for so many years longer than the others, brought back at last from Altadena, California, to join the bodies of his martyred brothers and compatriots in the grave beside his father’s grave.

  But, instead, I who am Owen Brown stood aside and watched, as the remains of those eleven men—separately shrouded and then placed together tenderly in a single huge box with their names engraved on a silver plate—disappeared into the black hole that had been cut into the hard ground next to Father.

  There were songs, prayers, and speeches. And then the flag went up, and the soldiers fired their guns into the air in full military salute.

  The Negro man who so resembled Father’s dearest friend, Lyman Epps—or, truly, was it Lyman’s son?—stepped forward and in a trembling, sweet tenor voice sang the Old Man’s hymn, “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow.”

  And, finally, the crowd dispersed.

  And I remained there at our old farm alone—alone to face these somber graves at the foot of the great, granite stone with Father’s name and death date carved upon it. Alone before the cold spring wind blowing across the plain from Tahawus. The Cloudsplitter.

  Alone—all, all alone!

  I hesitate to tell you this, but I must, or you will not understand what I did and why. You will not even understand what I am doing now.

  Though the burial ceremonies had long since ended, and the crowds had gone, I remained, as if forbidden to leave. If I had believed in the God of my fathers, I would have thanked Him for bringing me here at last. But I did not believe in God, then or now. So, instead, I thanked my fellow man, the living men and women whom I imagined digging a hole in the dirt way out west and pulling from it the box with my body in it and bringing it here and setting it down into the ground before me. For though the carcass is riddled, broken, and finally devoured by worms, the spirit survives it, like its very own child. The spirits whose bodies lie buried in mountains of Arctic ice or beneath shifting desert sands or in unmapped potters’ fields paved over by modern city streets—graves where no one pauses, where no one stands and says the name of the dead and goes silent and listens for a moment to hear the dead man or woman speak—those spirits are just as I have been, far away on a mountain in California all these years, speaking only to the sky, the sun, the moon, the cold stars above. And where there are no ears to listen, there is no story to tell. There is only a ghost bawling into the empty night.

  Thus, at Timbuctoo, standing in the doorway of my family’s house, believing that my body lay crumbling in a box alongside the bodies of my father and brothers and all those who were with us at Harpers Ferry, I felt assured at last of a listening ear. There I could imagine a curious and affectionate man or woman or child, a white person or a black, an ordinary American citizen come to this place to tender his respects and to wonder about the life of my father, Old John Brown, Captain Brown, Osawatomie Brown, and his sons and followers who were martyred far away in Virginia for their violent opposition to the enslavement of three million of their fellow Americans. And because I could imagine such a person being at that place—I had seen such a person, seen hundreds of them, that very morning!—then I could imagine myself, for the first time since the end came, coming forward coherently into speech. And so I spoke, and much of what I am telling you now I said then, too.

  Take that as an analogy, Miss Mayo. And if my words sometimes seem scattered to you or if I appear confused by the events in my life or by the actions and natures of others, if I wander and ruminate distractedly at times, then, please, forbear, for at such times I have for a moment or two merely lost my ability to imagine you reading these words, and my story therefore has briefly come undone or has regressed to a moan or a childish, half-forgotten, incantatory chant invoked to ward off my loneliness. It will pass, it will leave off—as soon as I picture you wandering down the lane that leads to our old farmhouse, where you stop and stand thoughtfully for a while before the graves by yonder huge, gray boulder. Do not worry, for, even though you cannot see me, I will look out and see you and will come quickly forward to speak to you.

  I stand at the door in the evening light and gaze out upon the greening valley beyond Father’s somber rock and the graves that surround it, and my thoughts spread into the past like fingers groping in the dark, touching and then seizing familiar objects that lie situated in oddly unfamiliar relations to one another. In such a way am I obliged to reconstruct my past, rather than to recall it. Or perhaps simply to construct it for the first time, for it was never so clear and coherent back when I was living my life as it seems now.

  These words are my thoughts given shapely proportions and relations to one another. My story is my only remaining possibility for an ongoing life, which is how it must be for everyone, living or dead.

  In the distant, dusky light of a fading day in May, I peered across the fresh, wet meadow grass to the sooty Adirondack mountains. It was the eighty-ninth anniversary of my father’s birth; I was alone; it was late in the day; and a garrulous apparition is what I had become, lingering at his own, at his father’s, his brothers’, and his fallen comrades’ gravesites, speaking into the fast-approaching night and then talking still, talking even, when it came, in darkness.

  Let it darken down. It mattered not a whit to me. Let the earth turn and the moon wax and wane and the tides rise and fall. Light or dark, warm or cold, early or late—I require no lamp, no fire, no sleep. Let the rain fall, the cold winds blow; let the snow come tumbling from the skies and the clouds scatter and the skies turn bright with sunlight on the morrow and the hills glisten in the dew.

  I no longer know physical discomfort, nor even fatigue. I have been freed of all that. The world, simply by virtue of its continuing presence, directly pleasures me, as would any dream of life delight a man dropped permanently into
sleep. This may be purgatory, but I take it as a long-desired and wholly unexpected gift. The dream of a dream come true. And it’s as if at the end of the dream there waits, not an awakening, but... what? A further, deeper dream? Silence, perhaps.

  Yes, the silence of the-truth-be-told.

  My thoughts and memories and even my feelings spin and spiral upwards like silk ribbons, where they float vividly amongst old, nearly forgotten memories of Kansas and the wars we fought then and afterwards. But the ribbons keep losing their momentum and tumble back down again, as if, due to the cold of a particular altitude or by having entered some atmospheric level where the elements differ from those here below, they are converted from silk to iron and are drawn back to this hard Adirondack earth by the punishing force of gravity.

  Again and again, I move through the abandoned, darkened house and attempt to leave this place and find that I cannot. The door lies open before me; I came in through it as easily as a summer breeze. Yet, still, I cannot go back outside, cross the deserted yard before the large rock and the graves, and pass back along the road I came by and head out across the valley towards Mount Tahawus, retracing my morning steps and disappearing into the mists that hover tonight over its broad flanks.

  What seemed at first a blessing—my finding myself located here amongst the crowd of mourners and celebrants at the ceremonial burial of the bones of my brothers and the other raiders from the Virginia attack—seems now almost a curse. I left this farm to all intents and purposes permanently way back in the autumn of ’54, when I went out to fetch poor brother Fred from Ohio and instead disobeyed Father and went down into Kansas with Fred and joined up with our older brothers, John and Jason, and thus an account of the events that took place during the years that I spent in North Elba is a story of no great significance in history. But those few years seem now like the large wheel in a clockwork, the wheel that drives all the other wheels, which are smaller than it and advance more rapidly on their axes and at differing speeds. They measure out the individual seconds, minutes, and hours of my entire life, of Father’s entire life and the life of my family. Driven by that great, slowly turning wheel, the smaller wheels tell littler stories, which are like tales or essays measured against a long romance. They are the stories of Bleeding Kansas, of the abolitionist movement, of the Underground Railroad, of Harpers Ferry, and so on. None of them, however, is my story, the one I am compelled to set down here, as if it were a confession of a great crime that, amidst all the fury and in the noise and smoke and carnage of great events, somehow went unnoticed when it occurred, unpunished afterwards, and unrecorded by you historians and biographers. Mine is the one account that explains all the others, so it is no great vanity for me to tell it.

  Even so, after a lifetime of keeping silent and allowing you historians and biographers to establish and make permanent your received truth regarding John Brown and his men, to correct your record is not really why I tell it now. I tell it now because I cannot cease speaking until I have finally told the truth and can lie down in the grave alongside the others, dead, properly dead and buried and silent, and forgiven by them at last. I have begun to see that they are the ones to whom I speak. Those who died. No one else. Not you, Miss Mayo, and not your professor. And I do not haunt them; they haunt me. And their haunting will not end until I have revealed, not to you, but to them, my terrible secret.

  A man can keep a betrayal like mine shut inside himself and unacknowledged all the way down the years of his life to his grave. But the dead whom he betrayed will not let him rest until he has finally revealed it to himself and confessed it to them. The world need not know it; only those whose deaths he caused must hear him. The world at large can go on making up, revising, and believing its received truth. (It will do so anyway—history little notices last-minute or even deathbed confessions.) The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.

  The burden of carrying a terrible and incriminating secret for a lifetime, of dying with it untold, is not great. It’s done all the time. For long periods of one’s life—especially if one goes off, as I did, and lives alone on a mountaintop—one doesn’t even have to think about it. As the years go by, it grows encrusted with rationalizations and elaborate, self-serving explanations and gets distorted by the pliability of living memory, one’s own and others’. And so long as one remains silent, other people will inevitably construct a believable narrative that makes the inexplicable plausible.

  What really happened at the Pottawatomie massacre? Why did Old Brown go down into Harpers Ferry and stay there long after he could have come out alive? Why did he take his sons and his sons-in-law and all those other fine young men to certain death with him? How did his third son, Owen Brown, come to be the one son who escaped? All these inexplicable events have been explained hundreds of times, hundreds of ways, some of them ingenious, some foolish, all of them plausible. But all without the backing of truth.

  No matter. So long as I remained silent, so long as I myself did not try to explain the inexplicable, my secret went unnoticed and proved thus to be no great burden for me to keep untold, to keep unrevealed, even to myself.

  I had believed, when I first agreed to write to you, that it was my task to tell Father’s untold story, to fill out the historical record with my eyewitness account so as to revise once and for all the received truth about John Brown and his sons and followers. All my life I had resisted doing that, and it seemed wonderful to me that, as it then appeared, I had been given a final chance to set it down. But now it seems that I am not so much revising history as making a confession of a crime, a terrible, secret crime which—if I had been able to keep to my original intentions and long-nurtured desires and had not been obliged to pass beyond them, there to discover strange, unexpected new intentions and desires—would have remained safely hidden. A crime still known by me alone.

  This, then, is not simply a report to you or Professor Villard. A dead man confesses to other dead men so that he may join them. And to dead women, too, all of them gone before me now—stepmother Mary, sister Ruth, my younger sisters, Annie, Sarah, and even the lastborn, Ellen—the women who lost and for the rest of their lives grieved over father, brother, husband; the women who, though their bodies were not buried here alongside Father’s and the others’, nevertheless are out there with them, waiting to hear me. I confess to mere acquaintances and strangers, too. I confess to all the men and women, Negro and white, who believed in Father and his mission, who gave him their life’s trust and treasure and even gave him their sons and brothers.

  I peer from the window and now and again step forward into the doorframe and look away into the darkness. There they are. All of them are out there; a vast multitude silently awaits me, as if I were on a brightly illumined stage and the broad, grassy valley were a darkened amphitheater. In dim, reflected moonlight I see their sober faces uplifted, expectant, as free of judgement of me as I am of them, for they cannot know their own true stories until they have heard mine.

  They knew me, and they hear me now neither with particular sympathy nor without it, for, while no one of them may have committed any such crime as I, they all surely were tempted and at times were as confused as I and as enfeebled, conflicted, and angry. Certainly my brothers were, and my sisters and stepmother and the young men who sacrificed their lives in the long war against slavery. I knew them, too, and in those terrible, fierce years leading up to Harpers Ferry there was not a one of them who was at all times clearer of motive and understanding than I. They will not judge me. They will merely hear me out. My account is a gift. Permanent rest, for them as much as for me, is impossible without it.

  Chapter 2

  You may not know this, but I have been remembering what follows here below and don’t know what else to do with the memory than to convey it by this means to you. Somehow, my words seem more a proper indictment written down like this; they cannot be so easily ignored or forgotten or denied by me as when I mer
ely mouth them.

  In the spring of ’31, when he was four months old, my brother Fred’s birth-name got replaced by the name of an earlier Frederick, a boy who was born between me and Ruth, a five-year-old boy who had died in March that year of the ague. I cannot recall even the face of that first Frederick. And, to my regret, I long ago forgot the birth-name of the second, the infant who eventually became the true Frederick, our Fred, and there is no one else left who would remember it.

  Then, a year and a half after the re-naming, in the autumn of ’32, when my sister Ruth was three years old and little more than a baby herself, we lost our mother. We were living in the wilds of New Richmond in western Pennsylvania, having recently removed there from Hudson, in Ohio. The new Frederick was by then nearly two. There was another baby, unnamed, who was born and died a few days before my mother herself died. John and Jason were eleven and ten and were out of school and regularly employed in the tannery with Father. I was eight and thus still a schoolboy.

  But until Mother died, we Browns had been to all appearances a normal family of our time and place, if a bit overly strict in matters of religion. After that, we became like some ancient Hebrew tribe of wanderers and sufferers, burdened by the death of women and children and by our endless obligations to our father’s restless, yet implacable, God. Isolated from our neighbors and tangled in tribulation and increasingly dire financial circumstances, we were weighed down further by complicated vows and covenants that made sense only after Father had explained them to us. And even though his explanations made our life briefly comprehensible, since there was always a reason for everything that we did, over the long run they made things worse, for he likened our life, not to the lives of the modern American people who surrounded us, but to those of his Biblical heroes. It was as if, after Mother died, we moved outside of conventional time and wandered with our herds and puny belongings through some distant land and epoch, so that we were not living in Ohio, but in Canaan, not in Pennsylvania, but among the Philistines, not in Massachusetts, but in Pharaoh’s Egypt.