There was a lull until about three P.M., when a B & O train pulled in from the west and stopped on a siding at the upper end of the armory, a safe distance from the firehouse. Several dozen civilian riflemen stepped down from the passenger cars and quickly arranged themselves in assault formation and began marching on the firehouse from the rear. They had scaling ladders and got over the fence back there with ease and were halfway across the armory grounds before Father and the boys spotted them and began firing out the windows and the partly opened door of the firehouse. The raid might have ended there and then, but neither of the other two militia companies present in town thought to charge the undefended front gate and storm the firehouse, and consequently, in about ten minutes, despite taking some serious casualties, Father and his remaining men managed to drive the first company back out of the armory grounds and over the fence.
Towards dusk and starting around four P.M., more men rode into town, uniformed soldiers and officers this time — five companies I counted of the Maryland Volunteers, and several additional civilian militias from nearby towns like Hamtramck and Shepherdstown: hundreds of angry, frightened, armed white Southerners coming in on horseback and by train and on foot, until the town square and many of the main streets were filled with federal soldiers, top-hatted riflemen and sharpshooters in buckskins, excitable slope-shouldered boys with pistols, vagrants and drunkards, men, and women, too, carousing and firing their guns into the air and scuffling amongst themselves, and the occasional mounted U.S. Army officer waving his saber and trying vainly to restore order and bivouac his men.
Except for the pall of death that hung over the small, blockaded building at the center, it was a carnival scene down there — chaotic and sensual and violent, with torches and a bonfire, and there was even a fiddler, and drunken dancers lurched up and down the hotel porch. Hawkers were selling food and whiskey, caissons and wagons clogged the streets and gouged deep tracks across front yards, and a riderless, terrified horse galloped down a side street, scattering people in all directions, and down by the river, boys were still potshooting at the bodies of my comrades.
Overhead, the stippled ridges in the white October sky were plated with gold, and in the east, red and cold, zinc-colored streaks had appeared, as the rain clouds rippled and broke, and the autumn sun slipped quickly towards the darkly shadowed, wooded horizon behind me. It had grown suddenly cold, but there was still plenty of bright daylight up on the rocky escarpment, where I remained clinging to the topmost branches of the highest oak tree. Down in the gorge, however, where the two broad, slate-gray rivers converged, the town was falling into darkness. It had grown nearly impossible for me to make out what this morning I had climbed up into the tree to view and could not bring myself, these many hours later, to leave, despite the horror of it — my brothers and my friends making their last stand against slavery; and, of course, my father, Father Abraham, making his terrible, final sacrifice to his God.
In the end, I could see only the lights — lamps starting to flicker from the windows of the houses and public buildings, dancing torches and bonfires casting dark, erratic shadows onto the cobbled streets and against the red-brick sides of the buildings. Occasionally, there was the rattle of gunfire, but it seemed random and almost celebratory, not the sustained noise of combat. An excited waiting had begun down there, a tense, almost hysterical pause, as before the public execution of a famous criminal. I shifted my position in my roost amongst the spindly limbs of the tree, and at that instant from the darkness below heard a rifle shot ring out, and a bullet tore through the leaves close beside my cheek. Then a second gun barked, a muzzle-loader this time. I heard the ball crack against a branch a few feet above me, and a flurry of yellow leaves fluttered across my head and floated past to the ground. I was awash in the last remaining light of day up here, and the soldiers and townspeople below, standing in darkness, had finally seen me. A third shot went wide of the mark, but I heard it tick through the leaves of a nearby tree and saw the leaves fall. A fourth shot slammed into the trunk just below my foot, and I began frantically to climb down, which was difficult, for I had my rifle, useless to me now, and my crippled arm. I must get out of the light, was my one thought. Just a little ways further down, and I, too, will be in darkness and invisible. I let go of my rifle, heard it clatter to the ground, and felt my way to the next-lower branch. A whole crowd of shooters was firing at me now. Bullets zipped through the foliage and crackled against the tree, shattering limbs and tossing splinters, twigs, and leaves into the air: I saw that I was game, a treed bear, pathetically large and cumbersome, all unable to hide, unable toflee, but still alive and struggling to stay alive, still a pleasure to kill. Like the bear, I had fled to the topmost branches of the tallest tree in the forest, not, as I had thought, so that I could better view my enemy, but in terror and delirium and in the crazed hope that I could not be seen there.
With my left arm, I clamped myself to a slender branch close to my head and reached down with my right hand to grasp a sturdier limb below. I let my weight go and groped in the air for a footing, and for a few seconds my body was suspended entirely on my poor arm — that childhood curse: never had it so enraged and humiliated me as now! Suddenly, there was an extended barrage of gunfire from the town, a booming fusillade, and bullets and balls exploded through the tree all around me, snapping off limbs and showering me with torn leaves, and I thought, Surely, now, I am a dead man, they will kill me this instant, when the limb I clung to with my hooked arm let go. Shot through, it floated away from the tree still clamped in the crook of my arm, and I fell, slamming against the branches, tearing foliage away with my free hand — a long, clattering drop into the darkness and safety and silence of the forest.
Here in my cabin, I have fallen. A sympathetic act, no doubt, caused by my account of falling, and I watch myself now from outside myself and above, as astonished and detached as I was that October night on Bolivar Heights, and as I was so many years before in the Negro church in Boston, and long, long ago, when I followed my brothers out along the steeply pitched roof and, in falling against the stone steps of the dry-cellar below, betrayed their Sabbath-day flight and permanently smashed my arm. It is as if a huge, invisible hand above me has pushed me down, or as if since childhood I have been carrying an insupportable weight and have finally been borne down by it.
I write these words with painful slowness now. I know that I am coming to the end of my ability to set down my story, which has proved to be not just my story, after all, but Father’s as well. His is the one that I had hoped to tell you; the other, mine, which lies beneath it, I wished only to tell to Father himself and my brothers and comrades, those ghosts standing in the shadow of the mountain Cloudsplitter, the men whose bodies lie buried beneath the great, gray stone in North Elba.
I tell you this so that if you someday read these pages, you will know that I have finally gone where I always wanted to go, for this morning, after I fell, I managed in the fading dark to crawl across the cluttered floor to the table and locate there my old revolver: it lay cold and heavy as an iron skillet beneath a sheaf of loose papers, where I had placed it — how long ago? Weeks? Months? A year? It doesn’t matter: there is no more time for me, no more chronology. I’m becoming my own ghost at last.