Cloudsplitter: A Novel

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 madman.

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 similarity 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.

All those moldering bodies! All those yellowed, long bones and grimacing skulls carted in boxes unearthed from shallow graves and buried there alongside one another! And now mine also!

But, no, not yet. I wrote back at once, saying only that I would not come, giving no excuse and explaining nothing. I was still very much alive, and silence and solitude had to remain my penance and my solace. I would not, I could not, give them up.

But then, one morning shortly after my curt note had been posted, I woke in my cot and, as I have said, believed that, finally, I, too, had died. Soon, of course, and as afterwards became usual, I saw that sadly I was not dead yet. I was still he who is Owen Brown, he whose dog wakes him and brings him shuffling to the door, he who releases his herd of merinos from the fold into the sloping meadow below, then returns to his cabin and washes his face in cold water and commences living another silent, solitary day.

Was it, in hopes that I was wrong, an attempt to test my reluctantly drawn conclusion that I had not died yet—as perhaps I do here now, writing these words to you ten years later? Was it an attempt to accomplish in life some new arrangement for my death? I cannot say why now and could not then, but that very day I decided to depart from this mountain for a while and return finally to our old family home in the Adirondacks, where my only proper grave lies even today. I arranged for the care of my sheep and my dog with a neighbor in the valley and departed straightway for the East.

I had long believed, or, to be accurate, had long wished, that I would arrive at North Elba from the east somehow, not the west. That I would emerge from the broad shade of Mounts Tahawus and Mclntyre. At my back, long streaks of early morning sunlight would slide through familiar notches in the mighty Adirondack Range and splash down the valleys and spread out at my feet before me like a golden sea washing across the tableland. I had imagined that the spirit of Owen Brown, third son of Osawatomie John Brown, like a spot off the morning sun itself, would come rapidly up along the broad meadows we named the Plains of Abraham, for that is what they first brought to our minds, with the snow-covered peak of Whiteface beyond the house and a crisp Canada wind striking out of the northwest.

I pictured it early in the day, still close to sunrise or shortly after it, when at last the beloved house stood in front of me. The house would be pink and gold in first light and stout and square as the day we first came here from Springfield, the way Father described it at the supper table in our house down there and drew its plan in his notebook to show us. I had imagined the plank door closed tight and latched against the nightfrost—it was to be early spring or fall, a string of silver smoke curling from the kitchen chimney, and no smoke at all from the parlor chimney opposite, where last night’s fire would have long gone out, the log turned to ashes, powdery and cold, bricks chilled like ingots.

These anticipations were left-over memories, however. Rags and tatters fluttering brightly across my darkened thoughts. From my haunt in the San Gabriel Mountains in the far West, I could not know who lived in the old house nowadays. My stepmother, Mary, and my sisters and remaining brothers had all fled the place decades before to Ohio, Iowa, Oregon, and Washington State, scattered across the country by the winds of war and its callous aftermath. Did anyone live there at all? The window glass was to have been iced over, etched with florid designs, I thought.

No, I came instead, not from Tahawus and Mclntyre in the east with dreamily imagined, celestial hoo-rahs and fanfare to announce me, but almost casually, as if out for a stroll along the road that led from the settlement, where the new train from Albany had let me off. I came walking alone out of the northwest, with Lake Placid and scarred old Whiteface Mountain at my back. And I came not as a disembodied spot of first sunlight, for I was no spirit and there was no sun that day—it was a cold, gray mid-morning, with a low sky that threatened snow. I arrived instead as an actual and embodied old man with a long, white beard, dressed in my plain wool suit and cloth cap, picking my way along the dirt road with my hazelwood stick. All the old familiar aches and pains came with me, too—the arthritis in the hips and the cold throb of my crippled left arm, uselessly bent against my waist, my permanent banner to boyhood carelessness and deceit.

My return to Timbuctoo in ’89 was closer to dream, however, than to a lived thing, or even than to memory. At least, that is how I am remembering it now. There was a rhythmical, purposeful continuity of sensation and perception, and no mere disorganized intermingling of fact, emotion, and idea, such as memory provides. A snowflake passed by my face, and then several more, and the breeze abruptly shifted from my back to my front, bringing with it a light, gauzy wash of snow. The large, wet flakes struck my beard and body, and, amazed, I watched them melt away as fast as they fell against my warm clothing and hands. Whatever world I was presently inhabiting, a dreamer’s, a ghost’s, a madman’s, I was surely an integrated part of it, subject to the same physical laws as were all its other parts. No mere invisible witness to nature, as I had hoped, I was in sad fact one of its functioning components. Or else we were both, the entire natural world and I, merely the imaginings of a larger, third Being.

The snow shower blew over, and then, suddenly, I realized that I was not alone on the road. A short ways ahead of me, a group of perhaps a dozen children and a pair of young women walked steadily along in the same direction as I, marching, it seemed, in loose formation, with one woman at the front and the other at the rear. No doubt for the very same reasons as I, they were headed from the village in the direction of the farm.

They were white people. I note that because, when I turned and glanced behind me, I saw an elderly Negro couple—a man in a dark woolen suit not unlike mine and a proper wool fedora and a woman in a long black dress, bonnet, and cape—coming slowly along. They each carried what appeared to be a Bible, as if marching off to church or coming straightway from it. Then, behind them, where the road emerged from an overhanging thatch of tall white pines, came a second group, six or seven Negro people of various ages, at least three generations. And these Negroes, too, were dressed as if for a formal occasion. There was a dark-faced man among them who for a second I thought was Father’s dear friend and mine, a man whom you may well have heard of by now, Mr. Lyman Epps. I was somewhat disoriented, however, due to fear and excitement, and could not be sure. Hadn’t he died long ago? I, of all people, should know that. Was this his son, perhaps?

But, in spite of my confusion, I knew where I was. Not a great deal had changed in the thirty years that I had been away. I instantly recognized the land and the rise and fall of the narrow road, which, owing to the springtime ruts and mud, obliged me to keep to the high center as I walked. On either side, under shade in amongst the trees and in the protected glens and dales, slubs of old, crusted snow still lingered.

There was a light wind soughing in the high branches of the pines, and I heard in the distance the mountain run-off in the West Branch of the Au Sable River, where it gushed under the bridge on the Cascade Road and from there tumbled down these rocky heights northeast all the way to Lake Champlain and on to the St. Lawrence and the great North Atlantic Ocean beyond.

On my right, set up in the sugar maples, was the Thompson farm, gone to ruin now, with the barn half-fallen and the fields on either side shifting back to chokecherry and scrub pine, but still recognizably the same four-square, cleanly constructed dwelling place of the family I loved second only to my own. Beyond the house, sheds, and barn, and beyond the lilacs gone all wild and tangled and still a month from blooming, a grove of paper-white birch trees mingled with aspens on an uphill meadow. Their spindly limbs floated in silhouette inside pale green clouds of new buds, like the delicate, blackened skeletons of birds. On the further slopes, dark maples and oak switches twitched leafless in the breeze.

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.

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 merely 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