Cloudsplitter (13 page)

Father’s voice cracked and split in the fire of his feelings. “I warned them, I told them this morning at the bank, warned them straight out. I told them that I would shoot down their agents, if they came to take my home and land from me, and I swear, that’s exactly what I will do! I wanted peace, but this . .. this
Ahab”
he spat, “will not let me have it!”

Mary—I think of her now, but I did not think of her then—poor, distressed Mary, with all her small children to tend to, while her husband raged and his elder sons urged him on, must have desired then, as so many times before and later, all the way to the terrifying end days in Virginia, just to be rid of men altogether. She knew better than any of us that there was no way for our family to survive these difficult times except by means of patient, quiet application of our daily labors, and while the Old Man appeared often to agree, when he became frustrated or frightened he could not keep his anger or his fantasies leashed. And we older boys took our lessons from him.

Father loaded his musket and instructed John, Jason, and me to do the same. Then we four marched from the house down to the town road, where there was at the edge of the property an old, low log cabin built by the original Haymaker, which we used now as a storage shed for hickory bark and lumber. “Here we shall make our stand,” he pronounced, and commanded us to spend our time fortifying the structure with whatever boards and timbers there were lying around. He had work at the tannery and at the house yet to finish, he said, and would protect the property from there. He ordered us to stay at the cabin night and day. Ruth or he himself would bring us food and fresh clothing. “And if the rascals show their faces, boys, fire once into the air to signal me, and I’ll come a-running. They’ll see then that we are serious about this!” he declared, and he was off, loping back up the slope to the house, leaving us alone in our outpost.

“Well, if the sheriff does show;’ Jason soberly said, “let’s just be damned sure he knows we’re only firing in the air.”

John agreed. “That’s all the Old Man wants anyhow.” His voice had a quaver to it. “He knows that when they see we’re serious about defending our home, they’ll likely back off

“Yeah, well, I’d like to make it count,” I said. “I’d like to take one of them Ahabs down.” I aimed my musket out the window of the cabin. “Just like that. Boom! Take down the chief. One shot, and the fight’s over. That’s how you do it, y’ know.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” John said. “Come on, give us a hand. We’ve got to turn this cabin into Father’s idea of Ticonderoga.”

“Or Zion” Jason added.

The afternoon of the first day passed quickly, and then Ruth brought us our supper, and darkness fell. We kept watch throughout the night and slept in four-hour shifts. The next day, we busied ourselves building a sort of palisado of old boards and odd-sized timbers around the front of the cabin, a peculiar-looking wall that seemed to have no military or domestic function, for it was incapable of keeping anyone out or in. It was more imagined than real, but the entire episode was more imagined than real.

Which made it perfect for me. I kept my musket close by while I worked, and every now and then dropped my work, grabbed up the gun, and, crouching low to the ground, aimed into the nearby bushes. “Boom! Got ’im! Victory for the Browns! Death to the invaders!”

By the end of the second day, we had grown bored and restless; even I. Father came down from the tannery, where he was hard at work filling orders for hides, and bucked us up, or at least me, with talk of bloody defiance, and then strode back to the house again. We were not altogether unhappy to be freed of our usual tasks at the tannery, but we were growing impatient for action.

Early the following morning, we were up and about the cabin, grumbling over the uselessness of our charge. “This whole affair is just another of the Old Man’s damned fantasies!’ Jason said. He was lumped up in a corner of the cabin, sulking in his blanket. “I’ll be glad when he gives it up. Even if it means we have to go back to scraping hides.”

John, who was then a sometime student of business accounting and commerce in a school over in Akron, sat on the dirt floor by the window with a book in his lap, studying his lessons. “There’s nothing to be done anyhow. The law’s the law”,John said without looking up. “The Old Man just takes a while to realize it. He’ll come around eventually. He always does.”

I stood at the open doorway, where, looking right, I could see along the broad road from Hudson, and, on the left, Father trudging down the lane from the house with our breakfast in a sack, hot corn bread, I hoped, and plum jam and boiled eggs. Father apparently had already been hard at work in the tannery, for, despite the morning coolness, he was not wearing his usual coat and shirt, only his red undershirt, with his trousers held up by wide suspenders.

He was fifty or sixty yards from the cabin, when I heard horses coming along the road and turned and saw a group of men approaching, three or four on horseback and several more in a light trap drawn by a pair of roans. One of the riders I recognized as the county sheriff, another as Mr. Chamberlain, the newly despised new owner of our farm. I also recognized several of the riders as Mr. Chamberlain’s sons. The men in the trap I assumed were deputies. It was an impressive force, and they appeared well-armed.

Still some distance uphill from us, Father saw them, too. “Shoot them if they come off the road and step a single foot onto our land, boys!” he hollered, and I ducked into the cabin, where John was already scrambling for his musket.

Jason peered out the window that faced the road and said, “Oh, no. They’ve come.” John and I swiftly stood side by side at the door and made our guns visible to the riders, who were now pulling up before the cabin and our rickety wall, although they were not yet on our land, so we were not obliged to shoot. Father, in his undershirt and galluses, was a ways off but coming on with purposeful stride and a steadily reddening face. He had no gun in hand, only our poor breakfast.

“Shoot that traitor Amos Chamberlain, shoot him first, boys!” he shouted. “He’s the villainous one! Spare the others—they’re just doing their legal duty!”

I took dead aim at the forehead of the bearded, bulky Mr. Chamberlain atop his chestnut stallion. Then I heard a rustling behind me and turned and saw Jason clambering out the rear window of the cabin. He had left his musket leaning against the wall. In a second, he was gone, disappeared into the heavy brush. “Jason’s fled!” I whispered to John.

“He’s not stupid,” John said in a low voice, and I saw that my brother had lowered his musket and was standing forward in the portal. Then, with his gun pointed peacefully at the ground, he stepped outside the cabin and walked slowly towards the intruders.

Unsure of what to do now, I kept my gun trained on Mr. Chamberlain and looked to my left towards Father, as if for instructions. Up the sloping lane behind him, I could see my stepmother with the infant Peter in her arms and the seven younger children beside her on the wide porch of the white, two-storey house. Salmon and Watson were holding on to the dogs, and Ruth had in her hands a large wooden bowl. The unpainted barn and tannery shed and the sheep pens were off to the right of the house, with the vegetable garden on the left and then the apple orchard and Father’s mulberry trees and the corn field further on. Rising slowly behind the house were wide rolling green meadows bordered by leafy oak and chestnut trees and our two remaining milch cows and the mares grazing in the shade by the stone wall at the near edge of the hickory forest. It truly was a lovely farm, the prettiest place we had ever lived in, Father’s last remaining tie to an orderly life.

Slowly, I lowered my gun and stepped forward beside John, as Father came up, still holding the sack with our breakfast. I remember smelling the corn bread, stronger even than the smell of the sweating horses and men grouped before us.

“H’lo, Brown,” the sheriff said, and he cleared his throat and spat a stream of tobacco. He was a tall, mustachioed man with a paunch the size of a wicker basket. “I guess you know why we’re here. We don’t need to have no trouble. This can all go peacefully.”

“There’ll be no peace in this place, so long as that man insists on taking my house and land!” Father said, pointing fiercely at Mr. Chamberlain, who puffed his considerable size up and chewed his thick lips in fury.

The sheriff went on calmly, as if Father had said nothing. “You got to give it over, Brown. Otherwise, I’m going to have to place you under arrest. The law is clear here, Brown. Any further quarrels about deeds or title you got with Mister Chamberlain here you can settle in court on your own later. Right now, though, the place and its contents is legally his. You and your family, you got to clear out.”

“We will not leave our land!”

“It’s not your land anymore, Brown!” Mr. Chamberlain shouted down.

“You won’t pack up your family and personal household articles and go peacefully?” the sheriff said.

“He can’t take no household articles!” Mr. Chamberlain cried. “They’re all going to be auctioned off, soon’s he clears out. He knows all this! He’s just stalling till he can sneak off with property that isn’t legally his no more.”

“Be quiet, Amos,” the sheriff said. “One more time, Brown. Make it easy on yourself and your family.”

“In order to take my land,” Father declared, lapsing, as he often did when his feelings were high, into Quaker speech, “thou must first squash me and mine beneath thy foot! I will not help thee in this heinous act!”

“Oh, dammit, then. You’re under arrest, Mister Brown,” the sheriff said, and he ordered Father to step up peacefully into the trap. “Don’t make me put irons on you, Brown. This is a tough enough business as it is, putting folks off their land, without you making it any tougher.”

Then, to my shock and sharp disappointment, Father’s shoulders sagged. He meekly asked if he could first retrieve his shirt and coat and his Bible from the house.

“You let him back inside that house’ Mr. Chamberlain warned, “he might decide to make a stand. There’s no telling what he’ll do to it. You’ve got him now, so take him in.”

Father looked plaintive and hurt. “But I must have my coat and shirt. I am not properly dressed, sir. And my Bible. I need it.”

The sheriff hesitated a few seconds, but then said, “No, c’mon, Brown. One of your boys here can bring your coat and so on, they can bring it to you later. I got to lock you up.”

“A-hab.” Father said the word slowly and gave it the shading of a curse. But all the force seemed to have gone out of him. He handed me the sack with our breakfast and slowly stepped up into the trap and took a seat behind the driver.

We stood there by our ramshackle wall, John and I, and watched the men ride off with their sad, slumped prisoner. He sat in the wagon in his red undershirt, miserable, humiliated, gazing back at us. I waved goodbye to him, but he made no sign.

Finally, when they had gone from sight, Jason stepped cautiously around the side of the cabin and came and joined us.

“Jason, you’re a bloody coward!” I shouted at him.

“Sure. You bet I am.”

John said, “Let it go, Owen. Jason did right. The Old Man had to lose this one. And he knew it. He was just blustering. He lost it way back. No sense making a fight over it now. They’ll let him out by tomorrow morning, if not before.”

“What’s in the bag? Breakfast, I hope. I’m hungry as a hogl’ Jason said, and reached for the sack in my hand.

I jerked it away and then swung it at him, smacking him on the forehead.

“Hey, hey, hey!” John said. He took the bag from me, and the two of them walked slowly away, up the lane towards the house, dividing the johnnycake and boiled eggs between them, while I hung back, standing alone by the side of the road, fighting off a boy’s angry tears.

But by the same afternoon, Father was back. He walked down the road and up the lane to the house, where, with as much dignity as he could muster in his undershirt, he somberly greeted us all around. Then he marched straight to the tannery, where he had hung his shirt and coat on a peg, and when he had decorously dressed himself in his accustomed clothing, as if preparing to go to church, he told us, in a somber, measured way, what had happened. The sheriff had delivered Father to the Akron jail, had even locked him inside a cell, but then had released him at once on his own recognizance, pledged to appear at trial later in the month. Mr. Chamberlain had agreed not to prosecute, so there would be no trial, as long as by that time we had departed from the farm with no more personal property than we were permitted under the bankruptcy proceedings. “We must obey the law, children. Hard as it is,” he said.

“But we were supposed to take a stand!” I declared. “You said we’d stand and fight. I was willing to shoot the man down, Father. I was! I was all ready and had the man in my sights. Jason, he took off like a coward, but John and I—”

“Enough!” Father said. “I am a fool. That’s all. It’s
my
fault that we’ve come to this terrible a pass. If you want to shoot someone, Owen, shoot me.” He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, then removed it and walked ahead of us to the house, to sort and separate and inventory all our farm and household goods for the auction.

Even today, so many years later, more than a whole lifetime later, I can recall every one of the items exempted from public auction. They were the articles that we carefully separated from the house and barn and put out onto the porch and yard and then packed into our wagon one by one, and later unpacked and packed again, over and over, hauling them through the next nine years by cart, canal boat, and on our own backs, from one temporary domicile to another, all the way to Springfield, Massachusetts, and eventually to the cold, hard hills of North Elba, where, at last, we set them down and they stayed put.

There at the Haymaker farm, I followed Father like a scribe from one end of the crowded porch to the other and across the front yard, writing in a tablet, while he strictly enumerated each of the articles and goods that the law permitted us to own and carry off. I made two copies of the list, one to be delivered to Mr. Chamberlain, signed by John Brown and notarized, and one for ourselves, which, for a long time, wherever we lived, Father kept posted on the kitchen wall, as if it were a reminder of his wealth, instead of his poverty.