Sister Ruth declares that she, too, will soon have a child to make my acquaintance, a nephew or niece, and there will be others coming along before long, for here are Oliver and his pretty young bride, Miss Martha Brewster, who have this very afternoon become husband and wife! A wedding, one I could have attended myself, Ruth tells me, had I arrived in time or had they known of the imminence of my return so as to have held off the wedding for a few hours. But no one knew when Owen would appear, except Father, she says, and nods approvingly at the Old Man, who kept insisting that Owen would get home in time for Oliver’s and Lizzies wedding, and as usual Father was not altogether wrong, she adds, and not altogether right, and everyone laughs at that, for we are delighted when Ruth teases the Old Man, the only one of us who can do it and make him blush with pleasure from it and not scowl.
Mary, my dear stepmother, I first hold close to my face and then at arms’ length, so that I can peer into her large brown eyes and see my own face reflected back and know that, even though I can never love her as she wishes and Father asks, she nonetheless loves me as powerfully as any mother can love her natural son and feels no loss for herself or imbalance in the exchange, only sorrow for me. My brothers and brothers-in-law and my old friends from Timbuctoo and the village of North Elba, all in the shy way of northcountry farmers, shake my hand and clap me on the shoulder and ask me to say by what route, by what roads and ferries and canals, came I home all the way from I-o-way; and how were the other boys, asks Salmon, when I passed through Ohio; and their families, asks Watson, and our uncles and aunts and cousins in Ohio; and did I visit and pray over Grandfather Brown’s grave in Akron, asks sister Annie, the sweetest and most pious of Father’s daughters and of Grandfather Brown’s granddaughters. And to all I say yes and yes and yes: I have done everything that you would have me do, been everywhere you wanted me to go, said what you wished to have said yourselves, and now here I am standing amongst you, your beloved son, brother, uncle, dear friend, and I want nothing of life now but never again to leave this place and these people. I see the newly married and the recently familied and the several generations rising and all this beautiful, high meadowland and forest that surrounds us, and I permit myself the glimmering thought that someday soon I will ask to marry Susan Epps and raise her son and make for us a farm here on the Plains of Abraham. I will make of this joyful moment a starting point for a long, happy, and fruitful life, instead of making it the mocking, ironic end of a life that was short and bitter and barren.
Would that not be a wonderful way to end this story? With one wedding just finished and another soon to come — the third son of John Brown to marry the Negro widow of his dearest friend, to raise together his friend’s, her late husband’s, namesake into manhood here in the Adirondack wilderness, the three of them, one small family free of all the cruel symbolism of race and the ancient curse of slavery, a white man and a Negro woman and child held dear by a family and community that see them and deal with them solely as family and friends and fellow citizens?
Fantasy, delusion, dream! A guilty white man’s chimera, that’s all. It lasts but a second. It lasts until Father comes forward now and places his heavy hands onto my shoulders, and I am suddenly ashamed of my hope and can no longer look at Susan or her son or at anyone else. Only at Father: at his cold eyes, gray as granite. I feel him press his hands down with great force, as if he has settled a yoke upon my shoulders and wishes me to kneel under its weight. And so I do, I bend and kneel, and in Jesus’ name he prays over me, thanking the Almighty for bringing me safely home, so that I can keep and fulfill my covenant with the Lord and can now go out from this blessed place and commence the great and terrible work that He hath ordained for us.
Amen, he says; and Amen says everyone else; and Amen say I, too.
2 2
We wake in darkness and long for light, and when the light comes, we wait for darkness to return, so that we can descend the rickety ladder from our crowded, windowless attic and warm our hands at the kitchen fire and walk about the yard awhile. We go out of the house either in pairs or alone, so as not to draw the attention of some errant nighttime traveler unexpectedly making his late way past the old Kennedy farm, someone who from the road would surely note, even in darkness, the presence of a crowd often or more men milling about the stone-and-white-clapboard house and wonder why they were there. The house is surrounded by woods, however, and is fairly remote, with the public road in front leading only and indirectly to the country village of Boonesborough, so that a pair of men or a man alone, if he remain silent, can walk back and forth before the house unseen for a spell, can stretch his cramped limbs and breathe the cool, fresh air of outdoors for the first time in twenty-four hours, and from the road no one not warned of a stranger’s presence would see him. Even if by accident the traveler did catch a glimpse of a stranger or two standing in the yard, he would think nothing amiss, for Dr. Kennedy’s family, now removed to Baltimore, has often rented its old, abandoned family farm to landless seasonal farmers, which was how John Kagi, when he contracted to rent the place for us, represented Father and his several sons — a Mr. Isaac Smith and his boys, from up near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, looking for good Virginia farmland to buy and perhaps at the same time to graze and fatten a few head of livestock to butcher and sell in the fall to the citizens and armory workers of Harpers Ferry. Kagi, who seems almost to believe his lies himself, has a gift for storytelling.
The town of Harpers Ferry and the rifle and musket manufactories and the federal arsenal are situated in a deep, narrow gorge three miles south of here, on a spit of terraced, flat-rock land, where the Shenandoah cuts between two high, wooded ridges and empties into the Potomac. At first sight, it seems an unlikely place to make and store an army’s weapons, vulnerable to attack and siege from the high bluffs on both sides of both rivers. But Father has explained that none of our nation’s enemies could attack the town, so far from sea, without first having captured Washington, fifty miles downriver, or Richmond and Baltimore. The last place from which the federal government would expect Harpers Ferry to be attacked is by land, he says, smiling, and only our fellow Americans could manage that. Which is, of course, precisely where and who we are: ensconced northwest of the town up here in the Kennedy farmhouse, fellow Americans coming in under cover of darkness one by one from all over the continent — well-armed young men with anti-slavery principles in their minds and bloody murder in their hearts.
We have said our somber final goodbyes to our families and homes in the North and have joined the Old Man here — fifteen white men and five Negro, when we have all assembled — to wait out the days and weeks and, if necessary, months until he tells us finally that the moment we have been waiting for, some of us for a lifetime, has come. The plan, his meticulously detailed schedule and breakdown of operations, he has rehearsed for us over and over again, night after night, in the chilled, candlelit room above the one big room of the house, our prison, as we have come jokingly to call it. On the basement level, there is a kitchen, where sister Annie and Oliver’s new wife, Martha, have settled in to cook and launder for us — they arrived back in mid-July, after Father, having determined that our disguise as land speculators and provenders of meat required the presence of womenfolk, summoned them down from North Elba. A short ways from the house is a locked shed, where we have stored our weapons, which we periodically clean and maintain to break the monotony of our confinement-some two hundred Sharps rifles and that many more pistols and a thousand sharpened steel-tipped pikes, all paid for by Father’s secret supporters and shipped to Isaac Smith & Sons piecemeal over the summer months from Ohio and Hartford by way of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in wooden cases marked “Hardware and Castings.” John Kagi, who once taught school in the area and knows it well, has functioned as our main advance agent here and has facilitated these delicate operations. Also, John Cook has been here for nearly a year already, sent down from Iowa by Father as a spy, because of his intelligence and Yale education and his much-admired social skills, and he has managed without arousing suspicion to gain employment as a canal-lock tender and last spring even married a local girl, whom he had got with child, which naturally did not particularly please Father, but it helped Cook settle into the daily life of the town, and that has proved useful.