Cloudsplitter (101 page)

By midday, the youngest of the raiders, Will Leeman, was dead; and the oldest, Dangerfield Newby. Inside the firehouse, and inside the hotel across the way, my brother Watson and Aaron Stevens lay wounded, perhaps mortally, and my brother-in-law Will Thompson, brutally beaten, sat in the hotel under armed guard. I was sure that Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had by now fled into the woods, and there may well have been others among the raiders who, to save themselves, had abandoned Father—John Cook, who was clever and knew the streets and alleys of the town better than any of us and had friends and even family amongst the townspeople, he was one; and Charlie Tidd was another. I had seen neither of them all morning; nor Albert Hazlett and Osborn Anderson, who had been stationed alone at the arsenal. The small brick building on Shenandoah Street was close to the town square, and the militiamen, with guards posted at the doors, were now treating it as if they had taken it back.

At one point, I noticed a fellow walking exposed on the railroad loading-trestle that bordered the armory buildings, and when he neared the firehouse, he dropped to one knee and peered around the water tower from an angle that would have given him an easy rifle-shot into the firehouse, except that he did not appear to be armed. Even so, when the door to the firehouse opened, and I saw Edwin Coppoc and my brother Oliver standing there, I feared that the man on the trestle would shoot them, for they were exposed and unsuspecting. But, no, Coppoc spotted the fellow, raised his rifle, and fired, dropping him like a stone, at which point a second man, who had been following a few yards behind the first, shot straight down into the engine house and caught Oliver full-bore in the chest, knocking him backwards inside.

Coppocs having killed an apparently unarmed man seemed to fuel the crowd’s drunken rage. In minutes, they were dragging their prisoner Will Thompson from the hotel, pummeling and screaming wildly at him. They set him out on the edge of the B & O bridge, stepped a few feet away, and shot him many times, after which they tossed his body into the river, where the current carried it against a thicket of driftwood. It caught there, and as they had with Willie Leeman, the townsmen made a target of my brother-in-law and shot into his dead body for a long while.

About mid-afternoon, I noticed a significant number of gun-toting townsmen separate themselves from the mob and in an organized way move up Shenandoah Street in the direction of the rifle works, where it appeared that Kagi, Lewis Leary, and John Copeland were still successfully holding off the militia—thanks to the deep, fast-running, twenty-foot-wide channel that cut between the mainland and the island on which the factory was situated. A footbridge led from the shore to the island, but the walls of the factory came right to the water’s edge, as if to a moat, and up to now the militiamen had been hesitant about rushing it and had contented themselves with keeping the three raiders inside under siege. Now, however, encouraged by the arrival of a crowd of heavily armed townsmen, they put up a protective shield of steady gunfire at the factory windows, whilst a gang of men ran against the timbered gate with a battering-ram and smashed it in. Then the entire combined force of militiamen and townspeople charged into the factory.

A hundred yards downriver, from my treetop aerie high above the further shore, I watched three figures—a white man, whom I knew to be Kagi, and two Negro men, Leary and Copeland—climb out one of the large windows that faced the river. The three men hung from the sill above the churning water for a second and then dropped. In seconds, fifty riflemen were firing down at them from the upper-storey windows, killing John Kagi, who sank beneath the water almost at once, and hitting Lewis Leary numerous times but not killing him outright, for he managed to struggle back to shore downstream a ways, where a contingent of militiamen pulled him limp and bleeding up the embankment into custody. Copeland made it to a large, flat rock in mid-river, where he was immediately spotted by some Jefferson Guards posted on the further shore, who began shooting at him. Caught hopelessly in a cross-fire, he raised his hands in the air, and a few minutes later, a pair of fellows rowed out, made him their prisoner, and saved him from Willie Leeman’s and Will Thompson’s fate for another.

There was a lull until about three P.M., when a B & O train pulled in from the west and stopped on a siding at the upper end of the armory, a safe distance from the firehouse. Several dozen civilian riflemen stepped down from the passenger cars and quickly arranged themselves in assault formation and began marching on the firehouse from the rear. They had scaling ladders and got over the fence back there with ease and were halfway across the armory grounds before Father and the boys spotted them and began firing out the windows and the partly opened door of the firehouse. The raid might have ended there and then, but neither of the other two militia companies present in town thought to charge the undefended front gate and storm the firehouse, and consequently, in about ten minutes, despite taking some serious casualties, Father and his remaining men managed to drive the first company back out of the armory grounds and over the fence.

Towards dusk and starting around four P.M., more men rode into town, uniformed soldiers and officers this time—five companies I counted of the Maryland Volunteers, and several additional civilian militias from nearby towns like Hamtramck and Shepherdstown: hundreds of angry, frightened, armed white Southerners coming in on horseback and by train and on foot, until the town square and many of the main streets were filled with federal soldiers, top-hatted riflemen and sharpshooters in buckskins, excitable slope-shouldered boys with pistols, vagrants and drunkards, men, and women, too, carousing and firing their guns into the air and scuffling amongst themselves, and the occasional mounted U.S. Army officer waving his saber and trying vainly to restore order and bivouac his men.

Except for the pall of death that hung over the small, blockaded building at the center, it was a carnival scene down there—chaotic and sensual and violent, with torches and a bonfire, and there was even a fiddler, and drunken dancers lurched up and down the hotel porch. Hawkers were selling food and whiskey, caissons and wagons clogged the streets and gouged deep tracks across front yards, and a riderless, terrified horse galloped down a side street, scattering people in all directions, and down by the river, boys were still potshooting at the bodies of my comrades.

Overhead, the stippled ridges in the white October sky were plated with gold, and in the east, red and cold, zinc-colored streaks had appeared, as the rain clouds rippled and broke, and the autumn sun slipped quickly towards the darkly shadowed, wooded horizon behind me. It had grown suddenly cold, but there was still plenty of bright daylight up on the rocky escarpment, where I remained clinging to the topmost branches of the highest oak tree. Down in the gorge, however, where the two broad, slate-gray rivers converged, the town was falling into darkness. It had grown nearly impossible for me to make out what this morning I had climbed up into the tree to view and could not bring myself, these many hours later, to leave, despite the horror of it—my brothers and my friends making their last stand against slavery; and, of course, my father, Father Abraham, making his terrible, final sacrifice to his God.

In the end, I could see only the lights—lamps starting to flicker from the windows of the houses and public buildings, dancing torches and bonfires casting dark, erratic shadows onto the cobbled streets and against the red-brick sides of the buildings. Occasionally, there was the rattle of gunfire, but it seemed random and almost celebratory, not the sustained noise of combat. An excited waiting had begun down there, a tense, almost hysterical pause, as before the public execution of a famous criminal. I shifted my position in my roost amongst the spindly limbs of the tree, and at that instant from the darkness below heard a rifle shot ring out, and a bullet tore through the leaves close beside my cheek. Then a second gun barked, a muzzle-loader this time. I heard the ball crack against a branch a few feet above me, and a flurry of yellow leaves fluttered across my head and floated past to the ground. I was awash in the last remaining light of day up here, and the soldiers and townspeople below, standing in darkness, had finally seen me. A third shot went wide of the mark, but I heard it tick through the leaves of a nearby tree and saw the leaves fall. A fourth shot slammed into the trunk just below my foot, and I began frantically to climb down, which was difficult, for I had my rifle, useless to me now, and my crippled arm. I must get out of the light, was my one thought. Just a little ways further down, and I, too, will be in darkness and invisible. I let go of my rifle, heard it clatter to the ground, and felt my way to the next-lower branch. A whole crowd of shooters was firing at me now. Bullets zipped through the foliage and crackled against the tree, shattering limbs and tossing splinters, twigs, and leaves into the air: I saw that I was game, a treed bear, pathetically large and cumbersome, all unable to hide, unable toflee, but still alive and struggling to stay alive, still a pleasure to kill. Like the bear, I had fled to the topmost branches of the tallest tree in the forest, not, as I had thought, so that I could better view my enemy, but in terror and delirium and in the crazed hope that I could not be seen there.

With my left arm, I clamped myself to a slender branch close to my head and reached down with my right hand to grasp a sturdier limb below. I let my weight go and groped in the air for a footing, and for a few seconds my body was suspended entirely on my poor arm—that childhood curse: never had it so enraged and humiliated me as now! Suddenly, there was an extended barrage of gunfire from the town, a booming fusillade, and bullets and balls exploded through the tree all around me, snapping off limbs and showering me with torn leaves, and I thought, Surely, now, I am a dead man, they will kill me this instant, when the limb I clung to with my hooked arm let go. Shot through, it floated away from the tree still clamped in the crook of my arm, and I fell, slamming against the branches, tearing foliage away with my free hand—a long, clattering drop into the darkness and safety and silence of the forest.

Here in my cabin, I have fallen. A sympathetic act, no doubt, caused by my account of falling, and I watch myself now from outside myself and above, as astonished and detached as I was that October night on Bolivar Heights, and as I was so many years before in the Negro church in Boston, and long, long ago, when I followed my brothers out along the steeply pitched roof and, in falling against the stone steps of the dry-cellar below, betrayed their Sabbath-day flight and permanently smashed my arm. It is as if a huge, invisible hand above me has pushed me down, or as if since childhood I have been carrying an insupportable weight and have finally been borne down by it.

I write these words with painful slowness now. I know that I am coming to the end of my ability to set down my story, which has proved to be not just my story, after all, but Father’s as well. His is the one that I had hoped to tell you; the other, mine, which lies beneath it, I wished only to tell to Father himself and my brothers and comrades, those ghosts standing in the shadow of the mountain Cloudsplitter, the men whose bodies lie buried beneath the great, gray stone in North Elba.

I tell you this so that if you someday read these pages, you will know that I have finally gone where I always wanted to go, for this morning, after I fell, I managed in the fading dark to crawl across the cluttered floor to the table and locate there my old revolver: it lay cold and heavy as an iron skillet beneath a sheaf of loose papers, where I had placed it—how long ago? Weeks? Months? A year? It doesn’t matter: there is no more time for me, no more chronology. I’m becoming my own ghost at last.

Father believed that the universe was a gigantic clockworks, brilliantly lit. But it’s not. It’s an endless sea of darkness moving beneath a dark sky, between which, isolate bits of light, we constantly rise and fall. We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out: abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water. For most of my life, surely since that day in October when I fled the field at Harpers Ferry, I have been a steadily diminishing light—until the day when I began to set down this long account, and my light flared up as it never had before. It has continued to burn brightly against the night ever since.

But now there is little left to tell, almost nothing, and soon I will learn if this has been all for naught, if this passage between the firmaments has been no more than the dying fall of a cinder into the dark waters of the swirling deep. When I have told the little that is left to tell, if I have not died by then and still have the bodily strength, I will simply put down my pencil and pick up my revolver, and I will use it to place me at my father’s side, where I have always properly belonged. If I cannot lie there next to him and my ghost cannot reside alongside his, then it will mean only that my light went out forever on that night those many long years ago at Harpers Ferry, and this account has been but a meaningless, phosphorescent flare, the memory of light, instead of the thing itself, and it will not matter.

Here, Miss Mayo, is all that I have left to tell.

I took the horse and wagon and returned from the schoolhouse to the Kennedy farm. Once there, I pulled the wagon in behind the house, well out of sight from the road, and went straight to the storage shed, where in the darkness I groped over the half-dozen wooden crates that Father and the boys had emptied before setting out, when they loaded their wagon with weapons for the slaves. They had broken most of the crates apart in the process, and it took several minutes before I found one that was intact and had its topside boards. It was a crate that had contained the long pikes, those poles with knives attached that Father had imagined would terrorize the slaveholders. The box was stoutly constructed of pine and plenty large enough for my purposes, so I carried it to the kitchen and set it by the stove. Then I commenced filling it from the huge heap of papers and books that lay untouched on the floor where I had placed them the night before.