And it was the year that I followed Father’s orders and went out to Ohio to put my brother Fred under my control and bring him back to the farm in North Elba, although in the end I did not bring him back. Instead, I disobeyed Father and took him with me to Kansas, following my brothers John and Jason into the battle there, and eventually by my actions forcing Father to do the same. It did not seem that way at the time, of course, but it does now.
It was autumn when I arrived in Ohio, and the drought had ended some months earlier, but the effects of its devastation were still all around, many empty, abandoned farms and storefronts and fields gone back to brush and weed — as if the landscape had recently been visited by a Biblical chastizement. It was like that for me, too. That warm October evening at Mr. Perkins’s large, prosperous farm a few miles outside Akron, with all the turmoil and madness of North Elba only a few weeks behind me, I was still trembling and distracted by considerations of my own recent proximity to murder and perversion. Otherwise, I might have been more astute in my dealings with Fred, whose nervous condition was, in fact, far worse than mine. I would have put my mission to him in a gentler way.
Unlike me, however, he seemed on the surface to be at relative peace with himself — sitting out with Mr. Perkins’s flocks of merino sheep all day long like an ancient shepherd with his crook and pipe, rounding them up at day’s end with his little black collie dog, and returning them at nightfall to the fold. Evenings, he retired to a small hut that he had built of cast-off lumber, where he prepared his modest meals over a tin stove and read by candlelight from his Bible and slept on a reed mat on the floor. In my agitated state, I envied him for the monkish simplicity of his life and thus did not see the turbulence it hid and anticipated nothing of what was coming.
Though not a large man, Fred was sinewy and tough and very strong, like Father. His face also resembled Father’s, with a hawk-beak nose and deep-set gray eyes under a heavy brow. His hair was stiff and straight, more brown than red, and he had grown a scruffy, wild beard. The last time I saw him, he’d been a boy — not a normal boy, to be sure, but more child than man. All that had changed considerably in the years between. I was not so much shocked or worried by the changes, because Father and my older brothers had prepared me, as I was intrigued by them. With his dark, leathered skin, he looked like a man of the desert, a bedouin or an ancient anchorite living on locusts and honey, an effect emphasized by his clothing — loose deerskin trousers held up by a length of rope, and a shearling vest with no blouse beneath it, and rough, Indian-style moccasins which he had evidently made himself. Artlessly, but all the more artful for that, Fred cut an impressive figure.
When I got to the Perkins place, it was nearly evening. A stable-hand pointed me to Fred’s hut, adjacent to the sheepfolds out behind the large white farmhouse, and I went straight there, intending to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Perkins the next day and inform them of my intention to take my younger brother away with me. I wasn’t especially eager to see them. Father was supposed to have written them of my mission, so I anticipated no trouble, but I did not particularly like Mr. Perkins and his wife. Despite his many years of generosity to Father, I somehow blamed Mr. Perkins for Father’s financial troubles. I saw him, at little cost or risk to himself, as having offered the Old Man the opportunity to develop his wild financial notions unimpeded until he had been overthrown by them. In the normal course of events, Father never would have gotten his warehousing scheme off the ground. But Mr. Perkins was a very rich man, a banker who had made a fortune in the canal business and speculation in the early ’40’s land-boom, which had bankrupted Father, and for him, the sheep business was only a distraction of his old age, a game played with idle money that allowed him to feel like a country squire and attend to something other than his many physical ailments. And I think Father’s skills as a breeder of merino sheep and his energy, earnestness, and honesty fascinated Mr. Perkins, who was in all these ways the opposite. Also, he knew that, however much of his money Father lost in the wool business, Old Brown would pay Mr. Perkins back, no matter how long it took. Meanwhile, he had the continuing benefit of having at least one of Brown’s sons to tend his flocks, which gave him an indentured, highly skilled worker with no fixed term, a hostage, almost a slave. Insensitive to these distinctions and similarities, the man was also definitely not an abolitionist, and Mrs. Perkins even less so, and we had long ago been instructed by Father, of all people, not to discuss or preach abolitionism around them. From the Book of Proverbs, he counseled us, “Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices with strife.”
But, happily, his relationship with Mr. Perkins was at last drawing to a close, he explained, and he no longer felt obliged to keep one or more of his sons tending the man’s flocks. More pointedly, however, the Old Man was alarmed. “Fred’s been showing some wildness,” he said, brought on, he assumed, by John’s and Jason’s leaving to go down into Kansas without him. So I was dispatched out to Ohio in order to “handle” Fred, as Father put it, and bring him home. With one remaining suit to be heard at trial, which would require him to go to Pittsburgh to defend himself and Mr. Perkins into the fall, Father, following the tragedy at Lake Colden, instructed me to depart from North Elba at once.
He wasn’t inventing this errand out of whole cloth just to get me away from Timbuctoo for a spell, although that was a benefit. Simply, the Old Man couldn’t leave Fred unattended in Ohio much longer, and he did not wish to have him placed as far from his personal supervision as Kansas. In Kansas at that time, the pro-slavery Border Ruffians were already pouring into the Territory from Missouri, with an equal number of Free-Soilers heading down from the North, and both sides were spoiling for a fight. But Father had no intentions of going out there himself, not even for cheap, abundant land and for an honorable fight. He had land in New York, and his warrior’s mind was still on Virginia and the Subterranean Passway. If he was going to fight the slavers anywhere, he insisted, it would be there.
In July, he had written to John, No, if you two boys and your wives and children must go, fine, do so. I’d go with you, if I could, but I can’t. You’ll just have to leave Fred temporarily alone at the Perkins place, until I can figure a way to get him home here in North Elba. Father thought it too dangerous in Kansas for Fred, who turned twenty-four that year and, according to John and Jason, had grown increasingly morbid and subject to unmanageable bouts of melancholia, which were often followed by inexplicable rages. His melancholy, I remembered from when he was in his teens, was a kind of heavy affectlessness and lassitude, driven, it seemed, by delusory convictions of his own sinfulness, which, after a period, shifted into a state of wild intolerance of the presumed sins of others. He, the most innocent of boys, the most trusting and honest, the most childlike, could not reside inside his body without despising it, and when he could find nothing more in himself capable of sustaining this loathing, he turned it onto the real and imagined sins of others, becoming suspicious, mistrustful, and wary.
Up to now, in Akron, the dark effects of his seizures had been mostly overlooked by John and Jason and their wives, not without some difficulty, however. But tending the flocks of Brown & Perkins (of Mr. Perkins alone, actually, now that the company had been officially dissolved), with or without John and Jason to watch over him, Fred was nonetheless in familiar territory, surrounded by neighbors and relatives who had known and liked him since childhood and who would not exploit or abuse him or take particular offense from his delusions. That was just Fred, people said. Sometimes he was worse, sometimes he was better; either way, everyone who knew him knew also that he was basically harmless.