Cloudsplitter (77 page)

The sheriff had gone down. But then he crawled to the wagon, and to our surprise, the Free-Soil prisoners from Lawrence helped him aboard and laid him out and appeared to be tending to him, while the soldiers got off their horses and drew close around the wagon and waited to be fired upon. “Did you kill him?” Father asked in a tense whisper. “Did you kill the man?” He was at my ear and had a hand on each of my shoulders. The others, Fred and Salmon, had come forward and were crouched behind us.

“No.”

“You bloodied him, though,” Salmon said. “They’re ripping off his shirt.”

“But why are they helping him and not escaping?” Father asked. “All they’ve got to do is run, right?”

No one answered.

“I think we should go down there and I should address them,” Father announced.

“No;’ I said. “Better they don’t know who has shot at them or from where. Make them think we’re everywhere. A single, well-aimed shot can be more terrifying than a fusillade.”

The Old Man pondered that for a second, and then he smiled. “Yes. Good. That’s good, Owen. Very good. Come on, boys,”he said, suddenly in charge again, although I detected a new note of apprehension in his voice. Certainly, Father understood the implications of this act as well as I did. “Let’s ride on to Lawrence. And we’ll say nothing of this to anyone. Nothing. All either side needs to know is that there are some abolitionists who are not afraid to shoot, and that such men are everywhere—nowhere and anywhere. They don’t need to know the names of the shooters. Not yet anyhow. You look down there, boys, look,” he ordered, and pointed into the arroyo below at the sight of Free-Soil prisoners and federal troopers scrambling to protect and aid a fallen proslavery sheriff. “See how little we can trust even our own kind. Traitors;’ he pronounced them. “There below, children, there are the Israelites who betrayed Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, gone to worship the golden calves of Jeroboam. Look at them, boys. Let us, from here on out, keep completely to ourselves,” he said. “Completely.”

And so we did. There were, of course, immediate and serious consequences to my shooting the sheriff, but they were not by us particularly unwanted. Although we were widely suspected, by both sides, to have been the hotheads who wounded Sheriff Jones, Father neither admitted nor denied the charge and said only that he himself had not fired on the man but it was a shame he hadn’t been killed. The pro-slavery newspapers went wild, and rumors of imminent war flew across the territory, exciting and frightening everyone on all sides. Missourians and other Southerners gathered together in packs along the border, as if ready to invade. Mobs in Atchison and Leavenworth captured a pair of prominent Free-State men there on business and tarred them and stuck tufts of cotton all over their bodies, tied the men to their horses, and sent them down the Santa Fe Trail, where they were found the next day a few miles north of Lawrence.

It was around this time that, with John and Jason spending so much time up in Lawrence with the Osawatomie Rifles and the Free-State legislature, Father decided that we had better send the women and Tonny over to Uncle Sam Adair’s place in the village of Osawatomie. He also decided to abandon Browns Station and move to a temporary camp in the trackless brushland along the Mosquito Creek, a camp that every few days we could shift to a new location. We were free as the wind off the plains now, able to appear and disappear almost at will. Everything we owned we carried in one wagon, and most of what we owned was weaponry. We were all of us on horseback by now, thanks to stock we had liberated from the hands of the slavers, although we had not saddles for everyone, and Fred and Oliver, when he wasn’t driving the wagon, rode bareback. Roaming the rolling, treeless hillcountry and slipping along the dark river-bottoms where black walnut, oak, and cottonwood trees grew in lush groves, we were more like a roving Indian band than a company of white guerillas. Our chieftain, who was Father, of course, always Father, set policy, but I decided day-to-day on how best to implement that policy.

Then, on the second of May, when we were encamped in the woods just south of the old French trading post on the Marais des Cygnes, a rich Missouri planter named Jefferson Buford, who had rounded up close to four hundred men from all over the South, led his mob straight across the border into the territory. Not ten miles from us, men were flying banners that cried,
The Supremacy of the
White Race! and
Alabama for Kansas.
A day later, we heard from a local Free-State settler that, out on the Peoria Indian lands, fifteen miles from our old camp at Browns Station, a company of some thirty or so Georgians loosely attached to Buford’s force had pitched their tents and were carousing, working up their courage with whiskey and insults. It was country that we knew firsthand and well, so on a cold, overcast day, Father and I rode out there in the wagon to reconnoiter and see what we could learn of the character of Colonel Buford’s force. We pretended to be government surveyors running a line that happened to lie in the middle of their squat. Calling ourselves Ruben Shiloh and his son Owen from Indiana and pretending to have no opinions on the struggle over Kansas, Father and I stopped for a while by the Georgians’ cook wagon, where most of the men had assembled to drink corn whiskey and lounge idly by the fire, two of their favorite activities, it seemed. We secretly counted the number of their horses and weapons, sidearms mostly and old, single-shot hunting rifles, and we talked a little and listened a lot, as they loudly cursed the abolitionists and swore to kill every last one. They loved their leader, Jefferson Buford, and called him Colonel Buford, although, when Father asked, they could not say in which army or militia he had been commissioned.

They were a staggering, loutish bunch of poor, ignorant, landless Southerners, men who bragged that they had come over to Kansas to help themselves first, by seizing abolitionists’ land-claims, and the South second, by killing as many Yankee nigger-lovers as they could find. “Especially those damned Browns,” whom they’d been hearing about from the Shermans and Doyles down on the Pottawatomie. “Them Browns’re goin’ first!” they declared. We tipped our hats and rode on.

Later, in the wagon on the way back to our camp, for a long time Father and I were silent, each of us lost in his own thoughts. Finally, when we were four or five miles from the Georgians’, Father turned to me and said, “You know, Owen, the real problem here isn’t what it seems. It’s not our differences from those fellows. The real problem is that those men truly don’t understand us.”

“How’s that a problem?”

“It just came to me, so I’ll have to say it as I think it. But the pro-slavers, all these Border Ruffians coming over from the South—fact is, they think we’re just like them except that we’re Northerners, that’s all. They think that, like them, we’ve come out here at the behest and in the pay of a gang of rich men and politicians. In their minds, we’re out here following some Yankee version of their Colonel Buford, and, like them, all we want out of this for ourselves is a piece of free land. Strange. But that is the problem.”

“What’s the solution, then?”

“I’m not sure. I think we have to show them somehow that they’re wrong about us. We should figure out how to show these Southerners the true nature and extremity of our principles. We have to show them the difference between them and us. Mainly, they have to see that we are willing to die for this. For they are not. And more to the point, because they are not willing to
die
for their cause, they have to see that we are willing to
kill
for ours. There it is! That’s our secret strength, Owen. All those poor, drunken fools and thieves, they really do believe that we are cowards, no different than they, and that Kansas, since they presently outnumber us, is easy pickings. And if they cry bloody murder and threaten to burn down our houses, it’s only because they think that as soon as the battle starts, we’ll pack up and run north and leave them our land.”

“They’ll see otherwise;’ I said.

“Now is the time, I believe. It’s time, Owen, time to buckle on our swords and wade straight into their midst. It’s time to wreak bloody havoc. We need to slay so many of them with a single, terrifying blow that the rest will start having sobering second thoughts.”

“Fine by me. I’d kill every last one. Give them only enough Kansas soil to lie down dead in.”

“You would, but maybe you won’t have to. I know men like this. I’ve seen them everywhere, even in the North. It’s a basic human type. These fellows are only the degraded, pathetic pawns of other men, who are much more evil than their pawns. Oh, sure, these poor, deluded fellows hate Negroes, all right, and they love slavery. But not because they themselves own Negro slaves or depend upon them to work their puny farms. You don’t see any slave-traders amongst these fellows, do you? And no cotton planters, either. No, these are
poor
men, Owen. And like most people, North and South, but especially South, they’re landless and slaveless and ignorant and illiterate. They’re serfs, practically, but with no lord of the manor to protect them. And it’s because they’ve been taught for centuries to love and envy the rich man who owns slaves that they hate the Negro, and now they have come out here to conquer Kansas for slavery. That’s all. Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin’s as white as the rich man’s, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to
own
slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”

“Very nice” I said. “But how do you propose to show them this?” I asked, out of politeness more than interest. Father’s endless, convoluted theories concerning slavery and Negroes frequently strengthened my brothers’ resolve, and even from time to time charged up the Old Man himself, but they had long since ceased to motivate me. I had my own motivations, which needed no firming. Iron hardeneth iron. For me, the soft, warm days of pusillanimity were long gone.

“Well, there’s only one way. We must strike pure terror into their hearts, Owen. Pure terror. Pure! We must become terrible!” he growled. We had to make the Border Ruffians understand that they had to be ready to die miserably for this. If we showed them that their bits of Kansas Territory would not come to them otherwise, they’d go galloping straight back to Alabama and Georgia, where they could lie and boast in the taverns and bawdyhouses all they wanted. All we cared was that Kansas be left a free state, so that we could go back to Father’s old plan of breaking the rich slaveholder’s back by drawing off the Negro labor force with the Subterranean Passway, his plan to turn the Underground Railroad into a north-flowing river of fugitives. Then, to get their sugar and cotton and corn and tobacco grown, the planters would be forced to turn to their fellow whites and would start enslaving
them.
And when they did that, poor white men would know their true enemies at last. They’d see that their true allies all along had been us abolitionists and the freed blacks living up North and the Southern Negroes who still remained in bondage. With its main supports gone, Satan’s temple of slavery would come tumbling down, and then the Negro would no longer be despised in the land. The poor, landless black man and the poor white would fall into one another’s arms.

“Sounds good, Father,” I said. “Sounds real good.” I cracked the reins and moved the wagon a little more smartly along, as it looked like rain in the west. The huge, milky-white Kansas sky had gone all yellow near the horizon and then had suddenly darkened overhead. Long grasses riffled and swirled in the wind like the soft surface of the sea, changing from pale blue to green to steel gray in the broody, late afternoon light. Our trail was an ancient buffalo road, a grass-covered depression through the high, flat, endless field, which we followed as if in the wake of a westering ship, and I half-expected to see eddies of foam and bubbles out there before us. Ragged sheets of lightning shook down from the southern sky, and a few seconds later, the rumble of thunder rolled across the plain like distant cannonfire.

“What say you to that, son?” Father shouted over the wind. He was holding on to the seat with both hands, as the wagon bucked and dipped across the rough, grassy plain towards the long, purple line of cottonwoods in the river-bottom ahead, where our camp was located.

“To what?”

“To my thoughts!”

“Oh, I like it!” I shouted back.

“Like what?”

“Becoming terrible! I like becoming terrible!”

He loosened one hand from the box and flung his sinewy arm around my shoulders. “Oh, thou hast lately become a true soldier of the Lord, Owen!” He pulled me to him and laughed. Then suddenly the sky opened up, and a cold rain poured down, silencing us for the rest of the way into camp.

Once there, when we had climbed down from the wagon and come into the flapping tent, Salmon, Fred, Oliver, and Henry greeted us with great excitement and gave us news that set us immediately to loading the wagon with our weapons, and with Oliver up on the box driving the team and Father and the rest of us on horseback, we six headed on through the downpour straight on to Lawrence.

In our absence, the boys had learned that the Missourian Colonel Butord and his four hundred Southerners and hundreds more in smaller gangs of Southerners were headed for Lawrence from several directions, and this time they were coming in determined to burn the town to the ground. To justify their attack, the pro-slavers now had a legal pretext, in that, a few days earlier, a grand jury in Atchison had indicted all the Free-State leaders for high treason and the editors of the
Herald Freedom,
the Free-State newspaper, for sedition. This time, the Border Ruffians meant to stamp out the abolitionists once and for all. They meant to take our citadel and burn it and sow salt where it had stood and wipe all memory of Free-State resistance from Kansas forever.