A terrible irony that would have been, had my bones joined those others. His splendid voice honors my burial, without his knowing that, by my refusal that long-ago day at Lake Colden to save his father, I was his father’s murderer. Although I told the truth then, when his father died, and I have told the truth now, these many years later, the one was a lie, this other a confession. For the one was told to the living by a man struggling to stay alive, a man still ignorant of his true motivations and weakness; and this other was told to the dead by a ghost wishing solely to join them.
The story of how his father died, when his mother finally conveyed it to him, surely must have cut the boy’s heart, leaving him scarred and wary all the years of his life. It was necessarily the story that I myself told to Father and to the manager of the Tahawus mining camp and that they in turn told to others. Accompanied by a pair of fugitives-two strong young men led by Harriet Tubman herself off a North Carolina plantation and brought out from Albany by Father — they came up towards the pass searching for Lyman and me, after we had not turned up at the camp at the appointed time, for they needed us to convey these fugitives on to Canada. At the lake, they found Lyman’s body where it had fallen, bled gray in the water, and me they found on the rocky heights above, howling like a wounded animal, with no memory of how I got there.
I had cut my crippled arm up and down its rigid length with my knife and had smeared my face with blood and had rolled in dirt and leaves. Father calmed me and, holding me in his arms, managed after a while to extract from me a description of what had occurred, and finally led me back down from the crag to the lakeside, where the others had constructed a litter to transport Lyman’s body home to Timbuctoo.
Father explained that he was obliged to return that day to Albany for one of his court appearances, and Mr. Seybolt Johnson could not be away from the mining camp, so I and the two frightened young fugitives were pressed into carrying Lyman’s body back along the trail we had just cut through the pass to Timbuctoo.
“When you’re back there, let Watson deliver Lyman’s body to his wife, and let him then carry these fellows on to Massena and the crossing to Canada,” Father instructed, speaking to me as if I were a child and taking care also to write his orders on the back of an envelope, which I was to place in Watson’s hand as soon as we arrived at the farm. I was then to leave at once for Ohio, he said, to retrieve Fred, who had been too long alone. It had been several months since John and Jason went off to Kansas with their wives and little sons and put up their homesteads there.
Father placed his hands on my shoulders and in a soft voice said that he thought I was too shaken to stay in North Elba now and needed some time away. He perceived the depths and power and the true nature of my feelings, if not their source, and I believe that for the first time he was afraid for my sanity, afraid that if I stayed in North Elba close to the Negroes and especially to Lyman’s widow, I would try to take my own life. He was right.
The true story of Lyman’s death, however, my confession, Lyman’s son never heard, man or boy, and has not heard now and never will, unless, when he himself dies, he comes over to our old farmhouse and family burying ground and finds me still talking into the darkness — the mad ghost of Owen Brown, he who was the murderer of the elder Lyman Epps, he who was the secret villain of the massacre at Pottawatomie, the meticulous arranger of the martyrdom of John Brown, and the cause of the wasted deaths of all those others whose bodies lie now before me.
The younger Lyman Epps will not end up buried here; his bones will molder next to his father’s and mother’s, three miles yonder in the old Negro burial ground of Timbuctoo. And if he learns the truth of why his father died, he will hear it from his father, the only man who knows it as well as I.
But does my beloved, murdered friend Lyman speak on into the night over there, as I do here? Impossible. Unlike me, Lyman died with a clean conscience. Thus he surely went instantly silent.
IV
Chapter 16
That was the year of the terrible Ohio drought, when the hay burned in the fields, and the soil crumbled into dust and was blown into dunes, and so many farmers, especially the younger ones, were pulling up stakes and heading for the western territories to start over again. From Pennsylvania to Michigan, crops failed before they blossomed, and the fields lay fallow, and the cattle and the swine were killed and butchered early to keep them from starving to death. Men and women looked out at their parched fields and up at the clear, blue sky and shook their heads and said, Enough! We’ll go where there’s rain falling. And my brothers John and Jason and their young wives were among them that year.
It was the year that the copperhead Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the drunken Yankee minion of the slaveholders, became President, putting an essentially Southern, pro-slave government finally in place and setting up passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would turn an old-fashioned land grab into a holy war. It overthrew the Missouri Compromise and transformed the old western frontier, making it for all practical purposes into a foreign land, which in that year began to be fought over by the people of two distinct, bordering nations, the slaveholding South and the free North.
By converting the western territories into an object of conquest, the Kansas-Nebraska Act split the country more effectively than any of the battles and wars that followed. The North and the South competing for Kansas in the 1850s were like France and England at war over Canada a century earlier. Except that in Kansas the stakes were higher. Every American knew that if the pro-slavers captured the territory, they would at once make it a slaveholding state in a democratic union that would be governed from Washington by a slaveholding majority of the states, and as a direct result, three million Americans and their descendants would remain permanently enslaved. The North, hopelessly a minority, would have no choice then but to secede from the Union or commence a war of liberation against the South.
And would white Americans go to war to liberate black Americans? Unthinkable. At that time, before Harpers Ferry, with no real blood yet spilt in the name of the cause, the North would have merely shrugged and turned its back on the slaves and the Southern states altogether, and in a businesslike manner would have looked northward for expansion and marched into Canada.
It was also the year of the birth of Father’s last child, Ellen, named for the baby who had died in Springfield back in ’48. With the birth of this child, the Old Man had fathered on two women a total of twenty children. Of the twenty, only eleven were to live beyond childhood; and of those, three more would die in their youth, cut down in the war against slavery; which left, from the eldest, John, born in 1821, to the youngest, Ellen, born thirty-two years later, only eight who survived into adulthood.
It was the year that Lyman Epps and I finished our elaborate dance, and I went howling into the wilderness, leaving wreckage and smoldering ruin all around behind me.