But on the day of my arrival at the farm, no one is there to greet me; no one reaches out to embrace me and welcome me home. Shadows flash across the ground at my feet, as the broken, silver-edged clouds pass over the house and break and merge and break again — the earth keeps spinning on its spine and rolling around the sun, whilst here on the ground all is still, fixed in time and place like a lacquered insect impaled upon a pin: the lane off the roadway; the barn and outbuildings; the house itself. And there, yonder in the center of the yard, is Father’s rock, head-high and the size of a room. The chunk of dark gray granite sits settled upon the ground as if placed there for no other purpose than to mark the eventual gravesite of Father himself and of my brothers Watson and Oliver, of the Thompson boys, William and Dauphin; and to memorialize the impetuous John Kagi, the noble Aaron Stevens, who will take four shots in the body before he falls, and John Cook, who will be captured in the Pennsylvania woods a few miles north of Harpers Ferry and dragged back to Virginia to be hung alongside Father and the rest; of the quick-tempered boy from Maine Charlie Tidd, and Jeremiah Anderson, avenging himself upon his grandfather, a Virginia slaveholder, and Albert Hazlett, who followed the Old Man to victory in Kansas and will follow him to the scaffold in Virginia; and of the stoical Edwin Coppoc of Ohio and his younger brother, Barclay, and the free Negro John Copeland, as intelligent and articulate as a Brown; and of the Canadian spiritualist Stewart Taylor, and Will Leeman, the youngest of the raiders in our band, a Maine boy who went to work at fourteen in a shoe factory and at seventeen came out to Kansas for no other reason than to fight alongside the great Osawatomie Brown; and of Osborn Anderson, the Negro printer who joined Father in Canada, and Frank Meriam of Massachusetts, and Lewis Leary, the mulatto man who said he was descended from the Lost Colonists of Roanoke Isle, and the tall, handsome Dangerfield Newby, an escaped slave whose abiding hope for the raid was to free his wife and children, but who will die of a six-inch spike shot into his throat by a pro-slaver’s musket; and of Frederick Douglass’s man Shields Green, whom we called Emperor, a man born a slave, who freed his body and gave it over to the cause, but never quite freed his mind. . There sits the huge, rough Adirondack boulder, a chunk of the mountain Tahawus, ready to memorialize the short lives and violent deaths of the men whom I will ride into battle with and then betray. It will be their ghostly watchtower, the place where they will gather together afterwards and wait in silence through the long years, as winter snows blow down from Canada and sweep across the Plains of Abraham and as spring rains wash and thaw the land and soften it for the grasses and flowers of summer and as the autumn leaves catch and collect in low, moldering piles. Great-Grandfather John Brown’s Yankee slate marker leans against the rock, brought north from Connecticut, as Father long intended, to remind all men and women of the unmarked graves of the old Revolutionary War hero and of brother Fred, whose dates have been freshly cut into it and whose body lies beneath Kansas soil, forever lost to us: both those accusatory souls will linger with the others here as well, for it matters not where lie today the bits of bone and the shreds of cloth they once wore: their spirits have all returned to this one spot, this cold, gray altar, here to be stared and wondered at by casual passers-by, to be prayed over by those who would come out and pay homage to John Brown and his brave men, and to haunt and chastize me for all the remaining years of my life, even to today, this long, ongoing day of my inevitable return. It is here, before this stone altar, that I must make my final confession and my sacrifice.
Cold stove, aprons drooped across chair-backs, muddy boots stacked in the rack by the back entry: I stand in the dead center of the room and cock my head like a hunted animal listening for the hunter; no, more like the hunter poised for the sound of his prey. But I hear nothing, not even a mouse in the wall or a squirrel skittering across the cedar-shake roof. No brother or sister turns in sleep in a narrow cot in the loft overhead; no one sighs and peers from the small, square window up there. There is not a breath, human or otherwise, to ripple the still, funereal air of this house.
Perhaps I have unknowingly arrived home on the Sabbath, the Lord’s one day of rest, when, after six days of tending to our puny needs, He commands us to tend His. Perhaps everyone has departed for the small white church in the settlement below, there to pray for strength now and divine grace at the moment of death and salvation and eternal life thereafter.
Everlasting life—what a horrid thought! Although sometimes I have believed that it would not be a terrible thing to be killed eternally. To be slain again and again, until I no longer feared death. Then life would be the illusion, and dying and being born again to die again the only reality: the world, which has no experience anyhow at being me, would simply go on being itself. I might become good, finally: a perfect man, like a Hindoo saint, with no stern, bearded God lording it over me, enticing me with guilt and shame and principles and duty, and making goodness an irresistible obligation, impossible to meet, and not simply man’s natural condition.
Ah, but I was born and raised a Christian, not a Hindoo! I can only glimpse these things but now and then and cannot sustain such a perverse, foreign view of life and death for longer than it takes to write it down here. Worse, I am a Christian without a God, a fallen man without a Saviour. I am a believer without belief.
I’m unable to say how long I have stood here in the house thinking these strange thoughts, but the shadows have grown long, and the room has nearly fallen into darkness, when finally, for the first time since my arrival home, I hear the sound of another living creature: the slow hoofbeats of a horse, then of several horses approaching the farm at a walk, and the sharp bark of a dog — from the high, thin sound of it, a collie dog — and the laughter and easy talk of human beings! From the window I see, coming through the dusk, my family: there at the front is Father, white-bearded and looking ancient in the face, though still as straight-gaited as ever; and my stepmother, Mary, and my sisters seated up in the wagon; and my younger brothers and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and with them, afoot and on horseback and riding in a trap, half a dozen more, white people and Negroes both, our longtime northcountry neighbors and friends coming gaily along the lane from the settlement as if from a holiday outing.
Suddenly, the empty vessel has been filled, and out of invisibility and silence, I have been made visible to myself, and audible! I call out to them, joyous and grateful for the simple fact of their existence elsewhere than in my mind and memory, and rush pell-mell from the house to the yard and greet them there. These beautiful, utterly familiar faces and bodies are real, are tangible! And here, at last, clasped to the bosom of family and friends, I am one with others again! As when I was a child and my mother had not died yet. As when Father had not begun to block out the sun and replace it with his own cold disk, as when he had not cast me in his permanent shadow. They all touch me, and they even embrace me, and they say how glad they are to have me with them again. Though nothing is forgotten, all is forgiven! Even Susan Epps is here amongst them, and she has beside her, holding tightly to her skirt, a small boy — her son, Lyman’s son, emblem of her love for him and his forgiveness of me, for that is how she presents the little boy to me, saying simply, proudly, “I have a son to make your acquaintance, Owen Brown,” and that is how I receive him, and he me.