My elder brothers and I did not greatly resemble each other in physical ways, either, although it was clear to most people that we were blood kin. Even at that young age, in his late twenties, John was a large and thick-bodied fellow, strong and muscular and athletic-looking, but in the manner of a budding banker, perhaps, or a politician. He had a high and noble forehead, symmetrical features, long, soft, dark brown hair that he combed straight back over his collar, giving him the look of a scholar, which, in a manner of speaking, he was, for he had learned accounting and was at that time deeply engaged in the study of several of the newer sciences, such as phrenology and hypnotism. His voice was deep and authoritative, and he had a great, loose laugh, which I had imitated when I was a boy but now merely admired.
Jason was a shorter man than John, about the same height as Father, and more slender than I with my woodsman’s build, but although he gave the appearance of delicacy, he was in fact extremely hardy and tough, a gristly man who moved in a slow, measured way that suggested deep thought, for his brow was characteristically as furrowed as a field in May, and his lips he kept pursed, like a man auditioning his words in silence before speaking them. In another age, or if he had been born to high estate and privilege, Jason might have been a philosopher or poet, a man like Mr. Emerson of Concord, perhaps, whose life, whose every act, was determined by the shape and substance of his thought. Jason was a man of sweet reasoning, his gentleness driven not by sentiment so much as by the innocence of logic. Unlike John, he was a man whom no one would follow into battle; but then, unlike John, he had no desire to lead. By the same token, he was equally disinclined to follow any man, even Father. A poor soldier was Jason, he who would be neither private nor general.
Yet, fully as much as John and all our younger brothers, and as much as I at my best, Jason was loyal to Father and to the rest of the family. He was not in the slightest selfish; he was merely one who thought freely for himself. Contrary to how he has sometimes been portrayed in the various accounts of our family, Jason was a man of great courage, too, and until the end, he stood alongside us; and when, before we went into Virginia, he left our side, he did so out of deep conviction, not cowardice or self-interest. I always admired, rather than criticized, Jason for his willingness to resist Father’s imperative.
Father had a power over us that seemed almost to emanate from his very body, as if he were more of a purely male person than we. While I have in my lifetime met a few other such men, who, like Father, seemed to be more masculine than the general run of men, as a rule they were brutal and stupid, which he surely was not. Like him, their beards were coarser, the hair on their hands, arms, and chests denser, their musculature and their bones tougher, heavier, more massy, than those of other men. They smelled more male-like than the rest of us. Even bathed and suited up for church, they, like Father, gave off the aroma of well-oiled saddle leather. None of those men, however, was as morally sensitive and intelligent as the Old Man, traits that made his masculinity so much more formidable than theirs. In ancient times, figures like Father, characterized in their appearance and manner by an excess of masculinity, were probably singled out in youth and made chieftain, clan leader, warlord. It was difficult not to bow before such a man.
Sometimes I thought this was how most women felt in the presence of men generally — like a small, hairless child, soft and vulnerable, before the large, hairy, tough, and impervious adult. It’s what we mean, perhaps, by “womanish.” Men like Father seem to evoke in all of us, male as well as female, long-abandoned, childlike responses which make us malleable to their wishes and will. Thus, when Father said, “Jump!” even though I was twenty-four, then thirty, then thirty-four years old, I jumped. I always jumped.
I am not ashamed of that, however. For, truth to tell, it was his gentleness, not his huge, male ferocity, that gathered us in and kept us there. We came to him willingly, not out of fear. His pervasive gentleness was like a sweet liquor to us, an intoxicant that left us narcotized, inducing in us a morbid susceptibility to his will. My most vivid memories of this most manly of men are of his face streaming with tears after he had struggled vainly for long days and nights to save his dying child. I think of his holding a freezing lamb against his naked chest under his shirt and coat, warming the creature with his own body, until the tiny lamb came slowly back to life and the Old Man could place it down beside its mother and step away and fairly laugh aloud with the pleasure of seeing it begin to nurse again. I remember Father tending to his wife and to each of his children when we were sick, hovering over us like a perfect physician, when he himself was ill and barely able to stand, tucking blankets around our shivering bodies, tending the fire, heating milk, manufacturing and administering remedies and medicinal specifics, long past exhaustion, until one or the other of us would begin at last to recover and was finally well enough to spell him, and then and only then would he allow himself to be treated. And though we often laughed and behind his back mocked Father for his long-windedness and certain other peculiarities of speech when he was trying to teach us a new skill — for he was one of those who teach as much by verbal instruction and repetition as example — withal, he was the most patient and tender teacher any of us ever had, who suffered our ignorance and ineptitude gladly, and never seemed to forget how mysterious and peculiar the world looked to a child and how even the simplest household or barnyard tasks seemed at first forbidding and complex.
No, it was the remarkable, perhaps unique, combination of his extreme masculinity and his unabashedly feminine tenderness that brought us willingly under his control and kept us there, so that, even when one or two or three of us seemed to wander off from his teachings and desires — as in the matter of religion, or, later, when he determined to go down into Virginia — none of us ever departed from him altogether. We merely on those occasions took a few cautious steps to his right or left side and tried to aid him in his work from that position, instead of from a position directly behind him. Even when John married Wealthy Hotchkiss and Jason married Ellen Sherbondy, and they moved out of the family household and set up on their own, they did it in ways that merely established new orbits that allowed them to function as satellites circling Father, like moons around a planet, and thus they were held as powerfully as before by his larger orbit, while he himself circled the sun. At an age when most men our age were running off to see the elephant, as we called it then — heading out to search for gold in California, staking out land in the further reaches of the Western Reserve, or following the crowds of bright, ambitious men and boys to New York and Washington — I and my brothers kept ourselves bound to our father’s destiny.
With the sudden arrival at the farm of John and Jason, a day that turned out to be tumultuous and, ultimately, tragic began as a celebration of familial warmth and union. Over breakfast, Father apprised his elder sons of the ongoing situation with regard to the Underground Railroad, Marshal Saunders’s pursuit of the Cannons, Mr. Wilkinson’s betrayal of Lyman Epps and Mr. Fleete, and their recent arrest and removal to the Elizabeth town jail. And when he informed them of his intention to ride over to Elizabethtown with me for the purpose of arranging the release of the Negro men—“Even if it must be done at gunpoint,” he said — John and Jason naturally chose to accompany and support us.