Cloudsplitter (3 page)

I was situated at that moment in the turning of the northern year, when the end of winter and the start of spring overlap like shingles on a roof and the natural world seems doubled in thickness and density. A slight shift in the direction of the wind cools the air a single degree, and suddenly a puddle of standing water is covered with a skin of ice that, seconds later, as the same wind parts the clouds and opens the sky, melts in the sunlight. At this moment, all is change. Transformation seems permanent. I was trembling with a type of excitement that I had never felt before, a powerful mixture of anticipation and regret, as if I somehow knew that eternal gain and irretrievable loss were about to be parceled out equally—as if the idea of justice were about to be made a material thing.

I briefly looked back and saw that there were still more people of various ages and stations filing along, some white and some black, and I recognized that we were a procession. There was a horse-drawn carriage just entering the clearing before the Thompson farm, driven by a bearded white man of middle age, with his stout wife seated beside him. Following the carriage came a large, canopied wagon pulled by two matched teams of rugged Vermont Morgans, with a white man in a black ministerial suit at the reins and a young Negro man similarly clothed situated next to him. There seemed to be hundreds of people coming along, and though the impulse to stand aside and watch everyone pass by was stronger than mere curiosity, the impulse to fall in and keep step with the others was stronger still, and I turned away and continued forward along the road.

In a moment, I had passed the turning and entered a section of the road that led through a stretch of tall white pines, where it was dark as night, almost, and more patches of old snow remained, radiating light and cold. A sudden, strong gust of wind blew through the pines and swirled the branches overhead, filling my ears with a sound that made my heart leap with pleasure, for it had been a lifetime and more, it seemed, since I had last walked beneath pine trees that sang and danced furiously in the wind like that. Briefly, I was an innocent, wonderstruck youth again, newly arrived in the Adirondack wilderness. The road was covered with a blanket of soft, rust-colored needles, and I inhaled deeply, losing all my thoughts in the vinegary smell, stumbling backwards in the flow of time.

When I passed out of the pine forest, the road dwindled to a track and entered a broad, overgrown meadow, yellow and sere with the old, winter-killed grass and saturated with run-off from the slopes above. We cleared this meadow ourselves the first summer we came to this place, my younger brothers Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and grazed Father’s Devon cattle on it, leaving the stingier, rock-strewn, upper fields for the Old Man’s blooded merino sheep. But now the whole expanse of cleared land was drifting back to forest, with only a patch of it remaining in grass and that spotted all over with new sumac and masses of tangled brush.

The first time that I walked this path to our farm was back in 49, when I came over from Lake Champlain on the Cascade Road with the family and Lyman Epps and saw the house here on the southern end of the promontory that we were told was called the Tableland but which Father insisted would be called the Plains of Abraham. In his usual way, he had imagined everything for us beforehand—the house was as he had said, and the barn would be exactly where he drove his stakes, facing due southeast across the Plains of Abraham into the mighty Tahawus, as the Iroquois had named it, the Cloudsplitter, so that year-round, from the barn and from our front door, we could watch the sunrise inch north in spring and then south in fall, passing like a clock hand between it and Father’s second-favorite mountain, Mclntyre, marking the slow, seasonal turn of the heavens—for Father had wanted us to mark God’s perfect logic as much by the motion and movement of the planets and sun above as by the symmetries that surrounded us here on earth.

Seven years later, I walked up to this place from the Indian Pass accompanied by a dead man’s body and two fugitive slaves and came to the house and delivered all three over to my family and fled this house and valley for Ohio and then for Kansas. Of this, you know nothing, of course, but you shall know, I promise. Three years after that, the Old Man and I came home for the even more portentous departure for Harpers Ferry. They were hard arrivals and departures. But in between and before and after, there were the thousands of easy, domestic comings and goings that a farming family is obliged to make—daily we walked and sometimes rode this line back through the woods that linked our home to the larger world, beating a footpath into a track and a track into a road which connected eventually to all the other roads that we would travel together and alone.

Considered in all the tossed and turbulent terms of my life, this fading path through the woods—for the trail crossing the meadow had diminished now to little more than that—was like the central nerve of my body, its very spinal cord. Everything of moment branched off that nerve, everything in a sense originated there, and ultimately everything must loop back and end there. And so, apparently, it had, for here I was, walking it again.

The great, broad plain and our farm just beyond the crest of the meadow were still hidden from my view. Up ahead, the children and their female teachers had nearly reached the crest, and beyond that line were the snow-covered mountain peaks—pale wedges rising from the near horizon like the sails of approaching galleons. Then, one by one, the children followed their teachers over the top and disappeared, as if jumping off a precipice. Dutifully, I trudged up the slope behind them and in my turn came to the top. And when I gazed down, I saw that I had arrived finally at my home.

A vast crowd of people had assembled below in the front yard of the house and all about the front and sides of the barn. There were many wagons, four-in-hands, buggies, and fancy carriages with men and women seated on them, and quite a few men up on horseback, and large standing groups of people of all ages. A significant number of these appeared by their dress and bearing to be personages of no slight importance in the world, reverends and top-hatted bankers and the such. I saw a lot of Negro people there, too, poorer folks than the whites, most of them elderly. They kept mainly to the side and to themselves, although here and there a richly dressed black man mingled informally with the whites, and there were even a few white individuals standing amongst the blacks. At the further edges of the crowd, back by the barn and along the far side of the house, boys and dogs chased one another in the usual way, while in amongst the adults, numerous small children sat perched upon their fathers’ shoulders.

The huge throng was assembled in a vast semi-circle, as if in an ancient amphitheater, between the old house and barn and the great, gray stone in the center. It was a grand scene! With affection and a kind of gratitude, with feelings beyond speech, I gazed down on the poor, bare buildings that we had lived and worked in all those years, that had sheltered and shielded not just us Browns but also the hundreds of fugitives who had come to our door seeking succor and protection from the wilderness and the snows and cold winds and all the terrors of the flight from slavery.

At the center of the arc of the crowd was the huge, gray rock-intimidating, mysterious. Like a chamber it was, a room filled with solid granite. Next to it stood the old, Puritan-style slate gravestone that memorialized the death of Great-Grandfather John Brown, Father’s namesake, which Father had lugged up from Connecticut so as to memorialize on its other side the death of brother Fred in Kansas as well. The worn slab marked Father’s own grave now. A short ways beyond the rock was a mast-high flagpole with no flag a-flying, and at its base three lines of soldiers in dress uniform had assembled formally in drill order, standing at parade rest.

Then came the abrupt further edge of the clearing, where the wide swale of forest began, copses of fresh-budding hardwoods and great stretches of evergreens, as the land gradually rose towards the snow-covered peaks of the mountains, and above the mountains, glowering, dark gray sheets of sky stretched overhead front to back and covered us all like a canopy. It was to me a wonderful sight!

I glanced back, and sure enough, here came hundreds more people along behind—the same elderly couple and the family of Negroes and the loaded wagon and carriage I had seen back by the Thompson place, and many more behind them, afoot and on horseback and in wagons and coaches. What a marvelous celebration! I thought, and hurried on, nearly tumbling in my eagerness to descend from the high overlook to the plain below.

When I reached the crowd there, I passed around the back of it and made my way towards the near side of the house and there slipped along the edge of the crowd, around and between carriages and tethered horses. They were all strangers to me, and I to them. Thirty years had passed since I had been in a public gathering of any sort, and I was a young man then, standing in Father’s shadow. Who would recognize me now? Whom would I recognize? No one living.

Most of the people stood idly by, talking lightly and taking their ease, as if awaiting the arrival of a master of ceremonies. Their attention seemed to be directed with intermittent watchfulness towards Father’s rock at the front, and I moved in that same direction myself. Barely the top of it was visible to me as I passed through the multitude, but I was drawn straight and swiftly to it, as if the rock had been magnetized and I were a pin on a leaf afloat in water.

And suddenly there I was, clear of the crowd and standing alone before the rock, with Great-Grandfather Brown’s old slate marker posted beside me on the right, and Father’s bones buried deep beneath it. In front of me, looming like some high altar from pagan times, was the great, gray stone. It seemed to shine in the milky morning light, and its surface was coldly clarified and dry, like the skin of a statue of a mythological beast. As I neared the rock, everything else blurred—the crowd of people, the house and barn, the mountains around—and faded altogether from my view. All was silent.

Before me, incised into the skin of the granite, were words, letters, numerals as familiar to me as the lineaments of my own face, yet a rune. A stonecarver, sometime in the years since I had seen it last, had cut into the rock the letters and numerals that spelled out Father’s name and the year of his execution. I looked upon them now, and I fairly heard, instead of read, the name and year spoken aloud in Father’s own unmistakeable voice and pronunciation, John
Brown
1859, as if he himself had been miraculously transformed into that rock and I into the quaking, white-bearded old man standing here before him, and the rock had spoken his riddle.

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.