I asked him if he had a blanket I could sleep in. Silently, he rummaged through his few possessions and drew out an old gray woolen blanket, and when I saw the thing, I recognized it at once from our childhood — one of the blankets spun and woven in the New Richmond house by our mother long years ago. He tossed it over to me, and I clutched it close to my face and inhaled deeply and grew dizzy with nostalgia. For a long moment, I kept it against my face, traveling back years in time, whole decades, to the long, cold winter nights in the house in the western Pennsylvania settlement, with me and my brothers and sister Ruth, all of us still innocent little children, huddled under our blankets in the big rope-bed in the loft, while below us, Mother tended the fire and cooked tomorrow’s meals, and Father sat on his chair by the whale oil lamp and read from his books, and all the future was still as inviting to me as it was unknown.
Finally, I stirred from my reverie and asked Fred, “How’d you come still to own one of these blankets?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked down at the packed dirt floor. “I’d have thought they were all lost or worn out by now. Did John give it to you?”
In stony silence, he blew out the candle and lay down on his pallet, his back to me, as if gone to sleep.
“Shall we take it with us?” I asked him.
“You can keep it, if you want” he murmured.
I couldn’t accept it from him; it was too precious a gift. But deciding it best now to leave him to his thoughts and, in fact, eager to be immersed in my own, I lay down on the packed dirt floor close to the stove, where I wrapped myself in the sweet-smelling blanket, and swooning with freshened memories of Mother and our childhood home, I was soon asleep.
While I slept, the terrible thing that Fred did to himself took place. Or, rather, he determined then to do it and had actually commenced, so that even though I was awake when it was done, I could not stop him. I thought it was the sound of an owl or a ground dove that had wakened me, a low, cooing noise coming from outside the hut, but when it persisted and brought me wholly out of sleep, I realized that it was something else, some night creature that I could not name. Lifting myself on my elbows, I saw that the door to the hut lay half-open, letting in long planks of moonlight. Fred’s cot was empty.
The cooing sound, Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, I realized, was being made by Fred outside. But I couldn’t imagine what it signified, so I unraveled myself from my mother’s blanket and stood in stockinged feet and peered carefully out the door, as if afraid of what I would see there.
He had his back to me and stood some five or six paces from the hut, and from his head-down posture, legs spread, both hands in front of him, I thought at first that he was making water. His trousers were loosened and pulled down a ways. Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, he sang in a light voice, as if chanting a single pair of notes broken from a tune that he could not get out of his mind. Then I saw the knifeblade flash in the moonlight, a cold, silver glint that he held like an icicle in his right hand, saw it disappear and then re-appear streaked red, as he made a quick swipe across the front of him, as if he were facing the exposed belly of a ram lamb held from behind by a second shepherd, the way we had done so many hundreds of times for Father, who with that same swift, efficient stroke of a knife castrated the poor animal, severing the scrotum and releasing the testicles into his cupped hand.
I shouted Fred’s name, but it was too late. As if to answer me, he made a chilling little bleat, his only cry, and he turned and showed me the terrible breach he had made in himself. Blood spilled from the grisly wound and flowed in a thin skein down his bare legs onto the wet grass.
He hurled his testicles away into the willow thicket with great force, as if violently casting out a demon. On his face he had an expression of wild pride, as if he had come to the end of a long, exhausting day and night of mortal combat and had triumphed over an ancient enemy and had castrated the corpse and now stood over it all bloodied. He seemed dazed, stunned by the totality of his victory. It was as if, for a few seconds at least, the terrible pain of his wound had been erased by its very extremity and by the significance of its meaning.
Then his wild, proud expression disappeared, and he was possessed by a sudden placidity — a great calm. I rushed forward and embraced him and bloodied myself in doing it. I never felt such a sadness as I felt then, for it was in both of us. He relaxed in my embrace, and all the force seemed suddenly to go out of him. The insidious little pocketknife, for that is all it was, fell to the ground, and his knees buckled, and he began to collapse. I lifted him in my arms as if he were a bale of wool and carried him back inside his hut, where I laid him down on his cot and at once set about washing and dressing his wound.
It was a single, neat cut straight across the sac. He had a practiced, shepherd’s hand, which was lucky, for he had severed no big vein, and the bleeding, although bad, did not threaten his life and soon abated somewhat. This allowed me to wash his wound with water that I heated on his little iron stove and to dress it with strips of cloth torn from my shirt, wrapping him loosely about the groin in such a way that he would be protected from infection and accidental injury, and the healing could begin.
It would be several weeks before Fred could walk properly again and we could take our leave, finally, of the Perkins place. I wrote Father at once and told him of the incident — better for him to learn of it first from me than anyone else, I figured — although I feared that it might bring him hurrying out to Ohio, which I did not particularly want, nor, I thought, did Fred. In my letter, minimizing the degree of Fred’s injury, but admitting nonetheless that he had effectively gelded himself, I reassured Father that I could nurse Fred back to health myself, and he evidently believed me, for he remained in Pittsburgh, while I stayed by Fred’s side. During the weeks that followed, I tended him day and night, as Father himself would have done, and never left him alone, except for the few hours a day when I myself was obliged to watch Mr. Perkins’s sheep. Luckily, the collie dog was clever and needed little supervision, so it was not an onerous task to double as shepherd and nurse. Besides, when I informed Mr. Perkins that, as soon as he was able to travel, I planned to take Fred away with me, he promptly found himself a new shepherd boy from a family in town.
Right up to the morning we departed from that place, Fred believed that we were returning to North Elba, and I myself thought so, too. But then came that misty, gray dawn when we slung our rifles and our small bundles of clothing, food, and trail blankets over our shoulders and walked down the long driveway to the road that passed by the Perkins place. I had kept Mother’s blanket and viewed it now as mine from childhood and never spoke of it to Fred. It was my inheritance.
When we reached the road, without a glance or a thought one way or the other, I turned southwest, instead of northeast, and Fred followed.
For a few moments, we walked along in silence. “Where’re we going?” Fred finally asked.
“Well, to Kansas, I guess.”
A quarter of a mile further on, he spoke again. “Father wants us to go to the farm in North Elba. That’s what you told me, Owen.”
“Yes. But we’re needed more in Kansas.”
There was a long silence as he pondered this. Finally, “Why?”
“To fight slavery there.”
More silence. Then, “Doing the Lord’s work?”