“Right.”
“Good. That’s real good.”
“Yep.”
A little further down the road, he said, “But what about Father? He won’t like this, Owen.”
“Maybe not, at least at first. But don’t worry, he’ll come along soon to Kansas himself. He won’t let you and me and the boys do the Lord’s work, while he stays out east doing Mister Perkins’s. Anyhow, John says there’s going to be shooting in Kansas before long. That’ll bring the Old Man on. He hates it when he can’t give us the order to fine,”I said, and laughed, and he laughed with me.
So on we went, walking and sometimes hitching rides on wagons, barges, canal boats, moving slowly west and south into the territory of Kansas — a one-armed man and a gelded man, two wounded, penniless, motherless brothers marching off to do the Lord’s work in the war against slavery. In this wide world there was nothing better for us to do. There was nothing useful that anyone wanted us to do, except to stay home and take care of the place and the women, which neither of us wanted to do and neither could do properly, either. We had to be good for something, though: we were sons of John Brown, and we had learned early in our lives that we did not deserve to live otherwise. So we were going off to Kansas to be good at killing. Our specialty would be killing men who wished to own other men.
Chapter 17
At first in Kansas was the waiting — waiting for the Old Man to bring us the new-style, breech-loading Sharps rifles and horses and winter gear for waging war against the Border Ruffians, waiting for Father to raise abundant funds and supplies in Syracuse and Akron and decide to come out to Kansas after all — the same as when, after Kansas, we waited out the winter in Iowa; and then, still later, as when we huddled together in the cold, unlit upstairs room of the Kennedy farmhouse outside Harpers Ferry and waited for Father to return empty-handed from his final, fateful meeting with Frederick Douglass, so that the assault on the Ferry could begin at last. We were always waiting for Father in those days; and it was every time in the same, humiliating way — quarrelsome, disgruntled, in confusion and disarray, incompetent, undisciplined, often physically ill, and all our best intentions and his careful instructions gone somehow weirdly awry, as if we secretly meant to sabotage him, we the loyal, dependent sons and followers of John Brown lying in our cots, cold and damp, scowling up at the ceiling or into the walls, filled with dread at the thought of the Old Man’s arrival, and yet at the same time nearly giddy with impatience for him to come and darken the portal with his familiar shape and lower his head and walk into the tent, there to kneel down by one of us, the sickest, always the sickest, whom Father could identify at a glance, and which was John at that time when the Old Man first arrived out there in Kansas at the pathetic encampment we called Browns Station. My waiting, of course, was more colored by dread and impatience even than that of my brothers, for, in coming out here with Fred, I had disobeyed the Old Man and needed to know how he viewed me now.
John had gone down with the ague, but it had gotten worse, and soon he was taking short, shallow breaths, as if his lungs had gotten enflamed. Feverish and shivering, subject to visions and spurts of wild, incoherent speech, he had been sick for a month by the time Fred and I got there from Akron. We had taken the old river-route down the Ohio and up to St. Louis by the Missouri, and when we got to Browns Station, we found John unable to eat and barely able to sip water, despite the tireless, silent care of his wife, Wealthy. And it was not long before Fred and I, too, lay wrapped in all our clothes and blankets in the cots on either side of John, whom we followed close behind in the degree of our sickness, I, like him, with the ague, and Fred, weakened from our travels and still healing from his terrible wound, unable to act without being led by one of his brothers. Neither of us could provide leadership for him. Or perhaps, in our chilled despondency, neither of us wished to. So he had simply imitated me, as if I were imitating John. And perhaps I was.
It was not yet the dead of winter, it was, in fact and by the calendar, still autumn, and the snow was not so bad as it would have been by now in North Elba. Yet I had never felt so cold up there in the eastern mountains as out here on the western plain. It was as if in Kansas the sun had gone out permanently. The icy, relentless wind off the flat expanse of land blew day and night and froze our clothes and hair and the beards of the men and stiffened our faces and rubbed our hands raw and made our bones feel like iron and never ceased blowing against the tents, snapping them like sails in a hurricane, threatening all night and day to tear the canvas from the poles and rip the guy-lines and stakes from the hardened ground and expose our poor, blanketed bodies to the low, gray western sky, as if they had been put out there by the Indians for the coyotes and vultures to devour and for the old Indian gods to receive into paradise.
Was it true that I had not seen Jason and his wife, Ellen, for weeks? They seemed to have withdrawn permanently to their own tent, on their adjacent claim, not physically ill, as we were, but demoralized, withdrawn, selfish, and still stunned with seemingly endless grief over the death of their little boy, Austin, whose body they had been forced to bury and abandon back in Missouri. They had crossed the river en route from Ohio in late summer, and during the brief trespass upon a corner of the slaveholders’ evil land, as if under a curse, they had lost their only child to cholera. The disease had slain half the passengers of the boat, and with the exception of poor Austin, all the victims were Missouri Border Ruffians and their families coming across to Kansas to claim the territory for slavery. Jason’s and Ellen’s beloved little boy had been snagged by that rough justice and died, a compensatory price too high for them yet to comprehend.
When John and Jason and their matched families decided to come out from Ohio, after their farms had been ruined by the terrible drought of the previous year, it was in search of new, cheap land, so as to start their lives over. But they also came to wage war against the slavers and to capture the Kansas Territory for the North. Thus it was both a rational, opportunistic thing to do — and there were thousands like them from all over the North, doing it for no other reason — and one that glowed with abolitionist righteousness as well. This was the sort of venture that had always appealed to John, but it had the added benefit of allowing him, by emphasizing the moral aspects of the venture, to advertise it effectively to Jason, who had not been as quick to leave the dried remnants of his Ohio orchards as was John to abandon his scorched, hardcake fields. So while Jason and Ellen had gone out willingly, they had not gone eagerly, and perhaps for that reason, the death of their son, Austin, and the need to abandon his body in a shallow grave on a bluff overlooking the river in slaveholding Missouri had made the couple quickly bitter. And there was the painful, ever-present fact that John and Wealthy had their little son, John, whom they called Tonny, still with them. John’s and Wealthy’s good luck, then, might have contributed, too, to the sourish relations that prevailed between the brothers and their wives when Fred and I first arrived at Browns Station, bedraggled, like a couple of tramps, many months later.
In a flurry of letters to Father in North Elba and then to him in Pittsburgh and to me in Ohio while I was watching over Fred, John had written that, to survive the surprisingly violent Kansas weather and the rapid influx of Border Ruffians from Missouri, he needed soldiers, cohorts, reinforcements; he wanted up-to-date weapons and cows and swine, blankets, grain, dried beef and salt fish: he was awaiting the arrival of the makings of an invading army. What he had got instead was a pair of scrawny, exhausted refugees carrying no more than their blanket-rolls and their twenty-year-old muzzle-loaders. We must have been a disappointing sight, Fred and I, that morning when we arrived at the camp, one of us blank-eyed and struck dumb by the enormity of his self-mutilation, still hitching himself along with a rough crutch, and the other, me, a nervy man with a crippled arm glancing back over his shoulder with the wariness and guilt of a criminal, our clothes shabby and dirty from our arduous journey, bringing to our brothers in their place of brave settlement, this desolate place where they had chosen to make their permanent homes and take their self-defining stand against slavery, nothing but our craven needs for comfort and love.