Cloudsplitter

Chapter 5

I don’t know how much time has passed since I began this account — days, weeks, a fortnight — for it is as if I have been elsewhere, a place where time is measured differently and space is not bounded as it is usually. The only thing that grounds me, that stills and locks me into some deliberate measure of time and place, is my intermittent awareness of you, holding these sheets of paper in your hands, reading my words, learning my story and applying it to Father’s larger story, the one that truly matters.

I know that in passing, due to my self-absorption and to the vividness of my recollections, I have mentioned many people and events that you know little of, that you may in fact know nothing of, for they have not come down in the historical record. They are not a part of the received truth. It is important that you hear of them, however, for they, like me, are figures in the context of Father’s story, which, if he is to be known at all, must be known as well. Let me speak, for instance, of Lyman Epps, the Negro man whom I mentioned earlier, and let me say how we came to know Lyman, how I first came to know him, for he will figure in the larger context of known people and events in a significant way. And his story, unlike the story of the men buried beneath Father’s stone in the shade of Mount Tahawus, has not been told before by anyone.

It was in the spring of ’50, almost a half century ago, that I met Lyman Epps, when we all first came to North Elba, a few weeks later in the season than now, and I can bring it back to my mind today as if I were dreaming it — I can see the lilacs blooming and the bloodroot, which I had not seen before, at least not to name.

It might have been earlier than now — the first of May, perhaps. For the lilacs that I am gazing at were located in the trim yards of the houses down in Westport, New York, alongside the broad verandas that faced the glittering waters of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont on the further side; and when Father pointed out the little, low blossom of the bloodroot, we were still down in that prosperous village, gathering the family and our livestock to begin our trek up into the mountains, where it would not be warm enough for the bloodroot and the lilacs to bloom until many weeks later.

Father and I had moved his horse, Dan, and the seven head of Devon cattle away from where we had camped, on a hillside clearing at the edge of town, intending to water the animals at a stream nearby. The boys Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, setting out the sheep to graze, had located the stream earlier. The Old Man halted suddenly, and I peered over the bony red rumps and heads of our thirsty beasts to see what was the matter.

“Owen, come, look here;” he commanded.

I passed by the cattle to where he stood staring intently down the embankment into a glade beside the rock-strewn stream, which was narrow here and tumbled fast downhill towards the lake. I looked where he had indicated and, as was so often the case, saw nothing. Black flies swarmed about my face, and the cattle bunched up impatiently behind us. Father held old Dan, his chestnut gelding, by the halter and peered into the glade.

“Yes, well, if we needed a sign,” he said, with a certain resignation in his voice, “here is one.” In profile, Father’s unsmiling, clean-shaven face was like a fist. He had a tight mouth with thin lips, a square chin and forehead, and a hooked, short nose, a hawk’s beak. You may be unaware that the long beard, with which he was later so often and so famously pictured, he wore only after Kansas, as a disguise, and, indeed, it did disguise him, even to his family, who fondly remembered his daily morning shave, mirrorless by the stove. It was an occasion for us to tease him into almost nicking himself with the razor. “You missed a bit,” one of us, usually Ruth, would calmly observe.

A second child, Oliver or Salmon, would add, “Over here, Father, near your big left ear.” His ears were unusually large, and to our amusement, their size slightly embarrassed him; although he denied it, of course.

“Where?” he would ask, groping over his heavy jaw with his fingertips.

“The other side! On the other side!”

“The right side, just below your enormous right ear!”

“No, it’s the left. His right, Oliver, is your left.”

Father would himself grow amused and join the game by feigning frantic confusion and flashing his long razor recklessly like a saber from one side of his face to the other. “Here? Here? Here?” Until Ruth or I or Mary would seriously fear that he was about to cut himself and would say, “Enough. Let the poor man shave his face in peace,” and the children would disperse, and Father, smiling lightly, would finish and wipe his face dry.

“It’s the May flower” he said to me that morning in Westport. “The bloodroot, we called it, when I was a boy.” Following his extended finger, I looked down by the stream and saw in amongst the ferns and mossy stones a cluster of small white flowers near the ground. “The root is red as fresh blood,” he said, and told me that the Iroquois used it as pigmentation for their war paint. “The petals, though, they come pure white, like those yonder. Innocent above ground, and bloody below,” he mused. He had known it to grow and even blossom under a layer of late snow. It was the first flower of spring, and he was truly glad to see it.

One of the cows smelled the water and started over the embankment, and the rest pulled over behind her, and quickly I stepped around in front of the leader and shoved her back.

“After such tribulation, we may well require a hopeful sign,” Father said, meaning the past winter’s long, lingering death of the infant Ellen, I supposed, and all his financial woes, which had continued to mount so relentlessly in the last few years.

It was strange to feel sorry for Father, and I rarely did and was almost ashamed of the feeling, as if he had forbidden it. Regardless, I placed my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “The Lord will provide, Father.” But the words felt like gravel in my mouth.

“Owen, don’t say words that you don’t believe. Not even in comfort,” he added, and he scowled and turned away and led old Dan and the cattle further up the hill to where the stream ran slowly and there was a shallow pool that the animals could drink from.

Yet, all in all, it was a very pleasant few days, that first stop in Westport, and I almost wished that we could settle there, instead of trekking on to a place that everyone other than Father had described as a howling wilderness. During the last year-and-a-half in Springfield, helping Father and John run Father’s and Mr. Simon Perkins’s wool business, I had grown somewhat used to the easy sociability and abundant distractions of a town. I somewhat envied John for having been left behind, even though he was burdened with looking after Father’s affairs at the warehouse, and I envied Jason, too, and even Fred, who was a full six years younger than I, for having been charged with the care of Mr. Perkins’s flocks back at Mutton Hill in Akron.

But there was no arguing with Father on this matter of our settling amongst the Negroes in North Elba. He was dead set on it. They were freedmen, a few were doubtless fugitives, and the wealthy New York abolitionist Mr. Gerrit Smith, out of simple compassion and generosity, but perhaps with a useful moral point to make as well, had deeded them forty acres per family from his vast holdings in the Adirondacks. But in a few short years the rigors of northcountry farming had for the most part defeated them, and the little colony was coming rapidly undone. Father’s agreement with Mr. Smith was that in exchange for a sizeable piece of land with an abandoned house on it, to be paid for later at one dollar per acre, we would move there and teach the Negroes, many of whom had been Philadelphia barbers and Long Island shoemakers and the such, how to organize and work their land.

Father did not think he could accomplish this without at least one adult son beside him and had carefully explained why I was the one so designated: John was more capable than I when it came to business; Jason and his new wife were settled permanently, it seemed, in Ohio; and Fred, although twenty years old then, was a person who needed close supervision, which Jason was good at providing. As usual, the Old Man was right, and I had to comply.

The first thing we needed to do was survey and validate their claims, he told me: to keep the Negroes from being cheated by the whites, who had been squatting up there for several generations — ever since the terrible, year-long winter of ’06 had driven most of the original settlers out — and had come to think of the whole place as theirs alone. Father’s motives were moral and idealistic, the same as had always prompted his political actions, and he described this move as essentially political — for he had visited North Elba alone the previous fall and had come away newly inspired by a vision of Negro and white farmers working peacefully together. His hope now, he explained to us, was to build a true American city on a hill that would give the lie to every skeptic in the land. There were many such Utopian schemes and projects afoot in those years, a hundred little cities on a hundred little hills, but Timbuctoo may have been the only one that aimed at setting an example of racial harmony. This would be our errand into the wilderness, he said.

But there was more to it than that. The wild Adirondack landscape had moved the Old Man wonderfully. All that winter and spring, despite the worry and grief he bore over the sickness and long dying of the baby Ellen, whenever he spoke of settling down on the broad tableland between the mountains, his face would soften and flush, and he would sail off in reveries and fantasies more likely to have been generated by a short stay at Valhalla than by a quick visit to a tract of hardscrabble highlands with a ninety-day growing season and a grinding, six-months-long winter. “Ah, Owen,” he would exclaim, “just wait until you see the beauty of this place! It makes you think that during the Creation the good Lord Lingered there awhile. There is truly no place I have seen whose aspect has so pleased me as those Adirondack mountains.”

On reflection, I believe, also, that there was for Father yet another deeply pleasing aspect of the North Elba project, one that he hid from us then but which I understood later. Its force was stronger than the moral point that he and Mr. Gerrit Smith wished to make and more substantive than the poetic effect of the landscape on his soul. For many years, the Old Man’s life had been cruelly divided between his anti-slavery actions and his responsibilities as a husband and father, and despite his unrelenting, sometimes wild and chaotic attempts to unite them, it was often as if he was trying to live the lives of two separate men: one an abolitionist firebrand, a public figure whose most satisfying and important acts, out of necessity, were done in secret; the other a good Christian husband and father, a private man whose most satisfying and important acts were manifested in the visible security and comfort of his family. He was a man who had pledged his life to bring about the permanent and complete liberation of the Negro slaves; and he was the head of a large household with no easy sources of income.

Never having married, I did not experience this sort of division in my life, which is perhaps why it took me until I was practically middle-aged before I was led to these particular sympathies for Father. And I certainly had no inkling of his conflicted state back then, when I reluctantly agreed to join him in his removal of the family from Springfield to North Elba, the tenth move in nearly as many years. Now, however, I can see that, for the first time in his life, Father expected to live as what he regarded as a whole man. In the Adirondacks, amongst the Negroes, he had at last imagined a life that was capable of containing all his contraries. Or so he believed then.

Father turned fifty that spring; Mary was thirty-seven. I am sure that, despite all, Father’s errand into the wilderness pleased her, especially after the death of the baby Ellen. It was a fresh start, and Father’s reveries and fantasies about the place had convinced her that our life would finally be calm and organized. Mary was a profound and prayerful person, more meditative and inward than the Old Man and most of the rest of us, and the idea of making a sanctuary in the mountains pleased her, especially if it met the Old Man’s standards for his and our participation in the struggle to free the slaves. And as far as she and we knew then, the removal to North Elba would accomplish that.

I remember him reassuring her that in a year or even less he would tie up his tangled affairs with Mr. Perkins in Springfield and Ohio and have all his debts at last paid off. Then he would be free to build his racially harmonious city on the hill, raise his prize-winning cattle and sheep on the slopes of the Adirondacks, and live out his years in the comfort of his family and neighbors. He would be a preacher, a teacher, and a farmer, he said. It was all he had ever wanted in life. He did not want to be a great man.

He told her that, told it to all of us, and we believed it, and I’m sure that, sometimes, he believed it, too. I soon learned, of course, that months before, when he had gone to North Elba alone, he had had other things in mind — the scattered, dimly formed, but powerful beginnings of ideas and plans that would develop and coalesce up there in the mountains and that would eventually prove irresistible to him. And, I confess it, ideas and plans that would prove irresistible to me and to my brothers as well.

To get to Westport, the boys Watson and Salmon, who were but fourteen and thirteen years old that spring, and I had traveled separately from the others, for we had brought Father’s Devon cattle and his five Spanish merino sheep up along the Connecticut River from Litchfield, Connecticut, where Father had been boarding them, crossed overland to Rutland, Vermont, and passed around the bottom of Lake Champlain to the New York side by the Fort Ticonderoga route. The Old Man, Mary, sister Ruth, and the younger children, Oliver, Annie, and little Sarah, at three years old the second to bear that name, had come north from Springfield in the wagon with all our tools and domestic goods, a pig, some fowl, and our dogs. They had crossed the lake on the ferry from Vermont, arrived in Westport, New York, and set up camp a few days before we got there.

By the time we showed up with the cattle and sheep, Father had already purchased the supplies we would need to see us through to our first harvest, but as soon as I saw the size of the load, I knew that Father’s old horse, an animal for whom he had typically developed an intense affection, would prove too feeble to haul it on the flats, let alone over high mountains. The Old Man and I argued a bit over that one, but he relented, for he knew the difficulties of getting up from Lake Champlain to North Elba even better than I.

With regret, then, he decided to sell his precious old horse, Dan, and use his last remaining cash money to buy a team from the shipping agent in Westport, a Mr. Thurston Clarke. As it turned out, Mr. Clarke offered Father a chance to hold on to his money, or most of it, which would have made a useful difference to him later on, but the Old Man gave it over. The red-coated Devon cattle had aroused considerable admiration among the local people there, and Father was briefly tempted by Mr. Clarke to swap a pair straight across for a team of Narragansetts. At the last minute, Father declined the offer.

The reason was the presence of a black man from North Elba — Lyman Epps. Mister Epps, as Father always addressed him, to the frequent consternation of any white people who were present. The man wandered into our camp south of Westport the evening of the day after the boys and I had arrived from Connecticut with the cattle and the sheep, and he swiftly proved to be an intelligent, charming man, although I confess that I did not warm to him as quickly as did the others. A wiry, coal-black fellow of medium height and quick movements, he was one of Gerrit Smith’s settled freedmen, a well-spoken man in his early thirties, I guessed, who had been a blacksmith in Maryland and knew horses. Many men know horses, but only from the outside; Mr. Epps claimed to understand them from the inside, as if they were people.

He told us that he had come down to Westport from North Elba in search of work: he needed cash to buy seed, because his crops from the previous year had failed, and all his reserves were gone, and he had no more credit at the feed stores or suppliers in the area. But he had been turned away by every blacksmith and harrier in the village, due to his race. In the process, however, he had learned of Father’s presence in town — the abolitionist fool from Ohio bent on teaching Gerrit Smith’s niggers to farm in the mountains. Father, as usual, had made no secret of our intentions, and we, like the Negroes, had quickly become something of a local joke.

On the subject of horses, the man was positively brilliant, or I should say he talked brilliantly on the subject. Such talk pleased the Old Man immensely and probably caused him to disregard the man’s occasional gaps in knowledge and experience, for soon he was inviting Mr. Epps to advise him on the purchase of a new team.

While Father’s own knowledge of horses was not nearly as extensive and deep as with cattle and sheep, where he truly was an expert, he nonetheless, unsurprisingly, held strong and frequently voiced opinions as to the relative merits of the more popular breeds. Also, he rarely exhibited any particular reluctance to lecture folks on how to raise, train, work, and ride horses. He took advice badly but gave it without stint. Back in Ohio, when we were still living on the old Haymaker farm and Father was first slipping deeply into land speculation, he had expanded his livestock operation beyond sheep and cattle and had even raised racehorses for a few years and sold off the colts and yearlings at the nearby Warren racetrack.

I remember his lectures to us, for we older boys were obliged to care for the colts and break them to the saddle and so on, before they could be sold off. “Remember, a colt should never be frightened,” he insisted. “Never. Horses are sensitive beings, very intelligent, easily spooked, so they must be treated with gentleness.” Later on, he explained, when you want to bring them under your control, they will trust your intentions completely and will defer to you in all things.

This was not, of course, his philosophy with regard to raising children. Children, the Old Man believed, were innately sinful, and thus they could be broken to the saddle, as it were, only if regularly disciplined and controlled by the rod, and could be saved only by the mysterious dispensation of the Lord’s grace. For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth, he said. The blueness of a wound deanseth away evil; so do stripes the inward part of the belly. And, Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying. Horses were evidently already saved, or were at least free of sin, and who could argue with that?

I did sometimes wish, however, that he had applied his views on raising animals to his methods of raising children. Foals, Father told us, should learn the use of a halter very early, with nothing but a gentle touch and voice, and you must break them in to reins slowly and much later, after they have grown easy with the halter. His lectures on the use of the bit and the importance of a soft mouth were impressive, and in demonstrating the process of introducing the bit, he handled the animal with such delicacy and affection that you almost wished that you yourself were the foal.

With all livestock, Father was a gentle man who clearly loved to touch and stroke the flesh of the animal, to examine and, if the animal was healthy and well-formed, admire it and express almost motherly concern over any sign of illness or deformity. He would walk a yearling racehorse out of the barn and run his hands over the withers and back, across the barrel of the animal and its gaskins, fetlocks, and pasterns, ending with an examination of the hooves, making sure that we had been listening when he last lectured us on the proper care of a horse’s hoof.

Like most men with a developed affection for animals, Father was an excellent rider, and not surprisingly, he enjoyed instructing us boys and anyone else who would listen on the best methods of bringing your horse to jump over fences or ditches in the fields of the neighborhood and how to bring your horse quickly down a steep slope without risking injury to the animal. And although, at the time, my elder brothers and I were not especially eager to be taught yet again how to do what we thought we already knew well enough, in later years, when we were running for our lives in Kansas, leaping streams and gullies in the dark and crashing through dense copses of cottonwoods, obliging the slavers to stop, back off, muzzle around, and finally give up the chase, I remembered Father’s lectures and theories, his endless repetitions of what then seemed but practice for a steeplechase we never intended to enter, and I was glad for having endured them.

That evening at the camp in Westport, Mr. Epps flicked his nervy attention from one of us to the next with no apparent purpose, as if he were sorting out our family’s internal relations, trying to discern which of us bore influence over the others, so as to learn whose good opinion would permit him to gain the favor of all.

Was it the children? He first tried chatting up baby Sarah and strange little Annie, whose bluntness seemed to delight him. “You’re a very black man, aren’t you? Not all Negroes are as black as you,” she said straight out, and when no one in the family scolded her, for she had merely uttered a simple truth and had done so without racial prejudice, Mr. Epps laughed heartily at her words.

Or was it one of the young boys in the camp, ten-year-old Oliver, or Salmon or Watson, who seemed to be in charge of the livestock, sturdy, young, high-spirited fellows eager to talk with the stranger and show him the virtues of their herd of handsome red cattle and the purebred ram and ewes? He made much of the animals, shoving his hand deep into the fleeces and exclaiming loudly over their weight and density, but the rest of us merely watched and let the boys take his compliments.

Or maybe it was Ruth, the shy, calmly competent young woman who busied herself with the evening meal and kept her back to the man as much as possible, in spite of his pushing his animated face at her, first at one side, then the other, interrupting her work with over-elaborated questions. “Now, tell me, Miss Brown,” he said to her, “who taught you so you come to possess such a knowledge, that you can cook this here panbread and pease porridge and so on, all by yourself out here on a big, open fire for such a large family of people?”

Without looking up, Ruth answered, “My mother,” and resumed her silence, which caused Mr. Epps to pay ornate compliments to Mary — knowing nothing, of course, of our true mother’s death eighteen years earlier, for it was she who had taught Ruth to cook, not Mary. He rattled on just the same, as if our mother were still alive.

Or perhaps the person to ingratiate himself with was me, the redheaded young man whose left arm stayed bent as if permanently fixed that way, the tall fellow who stood slightly off from the others, guarded and watchful, which I am sure is how he viewed me that first time. But he did not seem to know how to address me, perhaps because I was closest to his age and a man and therefore would know more easily than the others when he was playing the cheerful darkie and when he was sincere, although I could not.

There was the young woman whom the elder Mr. Brown had introduced as his wife, Mary, a pleasant, open-faced woman who looked twenty or more years younger than her husband, eager to make the visitor comfortable. He tried her, but saw in a moment that she intended to deflect his every inquiry and observation by referring him straight to her husband, the hatchet-faced man from whom the tall young fellow had evidently got his red hair and gray eyes.

All right, then, he would chat up the Old Man himself, jabber with him awhile about horseflesh, for that was what he was concerned about this evening, and it was a subject on which Mr. Epps considered himself capable of sounding like an expert. And, at least to Father, he did so.

He was not especially religious, I noted, for he, as did I, kept one eye open and on the food while Father prayed over it. He loudly exclaimed “A-men!” when Father finished, and ate like a man who had not sat down to a proper meal in a week, which was probably the case. The difficulties he had faced in these last few days in Westport, importuning white strangers who scorned and spurned him, came to my mind, and I began to feel sorry for the man and somewhat regretted my earlier disapproval. I continued, however, to retain a degree of skepticism as to his character.

By the time he left the camp that first night, Mr. Epps had arranged with Father to work as a teamster for us. “Ain’t no way to get a team pull that wagon over to North Elba without an experienced driver to discuss the subject with them;” he said. “Them mountains scares animals all the way to sick and lazy.”

I’m sure the Old Man believed that I, or he himself, was quite capable of driving a team to North Elba, but he admired Mr. Epps’s pluck and self-confidence and agreed to exchange some seed and other supplies for his services. No doubt he wanted simply to help the man out.

Early the next morning, Father, Mr. Epps, and I, with the horse Dan in tow, showed up at Mr. Clarke’s dockside stone warehouse, a barn-sized storage building with a large stable attached, where he kept six or eight teams of horses and as many wagons, for he hauled freight all up and down the western shore of the lake, from Port Henry to Port Kent and inland to Elizabethtown and even to North Elba.

Father and Mr. Clarke, who was a bespectacled New Englander with a thin face and white chin-whiskers, quickly agreed on a price for old Dan. Then Mr. Clarke tried to sell Father a handsome matched pair of Narragansetts, grays that seemed to be, as he claimed, healthy seven-year-olds. The price was reasonable, but even with what he was being offered for Dan, it was more than Father had in his possession.

I could see the Old Man running down his inventory of possessions, wondering what he could sell to make up the difference. But then Mr. Epps stepped forward and in a clear voice said, “That ‘Gansett yonder spavined in both hocks and be done in less than a year. The other one, Mister Brown, he ain’t got no heart at all. Narrow chest on him. You take them old Morgans in the back,” he advised.

“The bays?” Mr. Clarke said, and he laughed. “Come on, Brown. They’re barely worth shoe-leather. Your nigger’s off his nut,” he said to Father.

The price for the Morgans, because of their age, was less than that for the Narragansetts, but still more than Father had in his pocket. Father said, “I believe I will take my friend’s advice!” and held out the money, all his money in the world, I knew. “But you’ll have to take a few dollars less than what you’re asking, especially if, as you say, they’re not worth shoe-leather.”

Mr. Clarke did not want that. He shook his head and said, “Tell you what, Mister Brown. You keep your money. And you can keep that old broken-down gelding of yours, too. Me, I don’t like to see a white man made a fool of by a nigger. So I’ll swap you even, the team of ’Gansetts for any one pair of those fancy cows you got. You can choose the cattle yourself Father hesitated a moment. Morgans were not so famous then as they are now, especially outside the state of Vermont, and neither Father nor I knew much about the breed. And, whatever his reasons, Mr. Clarke’s eagerness to sell us the others did seem to our advantage. But Father said, “No. I will sell you the gelding, sir, as we agreed, and if you’ll accept it, I will add to it what remaining cash I have for those bays, the Morgans. As my friend here has advised me. And I will keep all my cattle.”

I was not sure he was doing the wise thing, but knew better than to offer my opinion. The Old Man had made up his mind. To my eye, the Narragansetts were definitely the superior team and well worth the weakest pair of cattle from our herd. The transaction Mr. Clarke had proposed would have left us with five cattle, an excellent team of horses, old Dan, and sufficient cash to protect us against a weak harvest.

Father said, “The bays, sir.”

Mr. Clarke gave Father a thin-lipped smile, took his money, and wrote out a bill of sale. Then he made Father sign a receipt for the horses. “Just so you don’t change your mind, or tell folks I cheated you,” he said, and with no more words, he retreated abruptly to his office.

“Well, Mister Brown, you catched the man out,” Mr. Epps said, as we unhitched the small, weary-looking pair of Morgans and led them from the darkness of the stable into the bright light of the yard outside, where their looks did not improve. “Believe me, these bays going to carry you where you want to go, and they still be drawing your plow across your field long after you gone. Make you a good saddle horse, too.”

The Old Maris eyes flashed with pleasure, and he clapped Mr. Epps on the back. “You know, Mister Epps, I love it when one of these racist Yankees hoists himself like that!” he exclaimed, and laughed.

“Yassuhr,” Mr. Epps quietly answered, and we drove the horses back to camp.

Shortly after dawn the next day, we departed Westport for North Elba. The sky, I remember, was cloudless and bright blue — one of those cool, dry northcountry mornings that let you see sharply all the way to the far horizon. Our teamster, Mr. Epps, sat up on the box with Mary, who was feeling poorly. Little Sarah, who was four that spring, settled herself happily between her mother and Mr. Epps. The rest of us walked, with Father and me out at the front of the team, while a short ways behind the wagon, Ruth walked hand-in-hand with seven-year-old Annie, and the boys Watson, Salmon, and Oliver herded the sheep, cattle, and swine along at the rear. The horses, to my surprise, seemed untroubled by the loaded wagon, and they responded quickly and smoothly to Mr. Epps’s commands. Of course, we were still on a relatively flat, dry road and would be for half the day, at least until we got to Elizabethtown, where the steep ascent supposedly began.

Father wanted us to leave Westport with dignity and evident seriousness of purpose — so as not to comfort any of the locals who might think us foolish or pitiable, he explained. Consequently, we moved briskly, heads held high and eyes squarely on the road before us, and kept the separate parts of our caravan distinct from one another, as if we were a military parade passing in review. We wore jackets and waistcoats and hats, as usual, and the little girls and Ruth and Mary wore mob hats and shawls over their shoulders, and their dark outer skirts were appropriately long. Farmers leaned on their hoes, and women and children came to their kitchen doors, to watch us as we passed out of the town and headed northwest towards the first gentle hills of the interior.

A few miles beyond the settlement, we came to a tilted, unpainted shanty that served as a tollbooth and signaled the start of the new Northwest Road to Elizabethtown, more cart track than road. A bar blocked our way. The Northwest Road had been cut through the forest by a private company that had purchased the narrow band of land on which it ran, so as to profit from the traffic. Evidently, Father had not anticipated this, for when he had made his only previous journey to North Elba last fall, he’d come in from the lake at Port Kent by a somewhat more northerly route — through Ausable Forks and Wilmington Notch — with no toll road.

An old, grizzled fellow in floppy trousers and patchwork shirt emerged from the shanty, hobbling on a badly constructed crutch — a veteran, to judge from his U.S. Army braces. He scrutinized our wagon and animals for a few seconds, spat a brown stream of tobacco juice, and said to Father, “Cost you forty cents for the wagon and team. Cost you seventy cents for them there cows. The sheeps and pigs can pass free.”

Father drew himself up and said, “My friend, I have no money. We’re not hauling freight to sell at a profit. We’re a poor family on our way to settle a piece of land in North Elba.”

“Don’t matter to me where you’re headed, mister. Or why. I charges by the axle and the hoof. Far’s I can see, you got two axles and at least nine sets of hoofs. I’m ignoring them sheeps and the pigs. You want to use this road, it’s going to cost you one dollar and ten cents, total.”

“I’ll have to pay you on my return^’ Father said. “Can’t do that.”

“And if I refuse to pay you now?”

This puzzled the old fellow. He gnashed his wad of tobacco and spat again. “Say what?”

Father turned to me. “Remove the bar, Owen.”

I walked over to the barked pole, which was laid into a pair of notched posts, lifted one end, and swung it away, clearing the road. The toll-taker, with Father blocking his approach to the bar, stared in disbelief. Immediately, Mr. Epps chucked to the horses and drove the wagon through, with Ruth and Annie following somberly behind, and then came the cattle, driven by Watson and Salmon, and the sheep, driven by Oliver and the pair of dogs. Oliver wore a mischievous grin on his freckled face and waved at the toll-taker as he passed by.

Father said to the old man, “I apologize for my son’s rudeness. He’s nine years old and should know better. And I give you my word, friend, on my next return to Westport, I’ll pay the toll.” Then he and I replaced the bar and hurried to catch up to the others.

As Father strode past Oliver, he reached out and with the back of his hand struck the boy a hard blow across his unsuspecting smile. “Never mock a man for doing his duty!” he said, and without breaking his stride moved rapidly alongside me to our former position at the front.

After a few moments, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that Oliver’s face was bright red from the blow. He had turned his head to the side in an attempt to hide his tears, while the other boys stared straight on down the road, politely averting their gaze.

Back in Springfield, Father and I had fitted out the box of our wagon with a white canvas canopy stretched over a bent willow frame, for the purpose of protecting the contents and shielding Mary and Ruth and the smaller children when it rained. Also, we intended the wagon to provide a little privacy and serve as sleeping quarters for the females. Until Westport, this had worked out fine, but now, with so many supplies added to our household goods and tools, passengers were obliged to stay out on the open seat at the front with the driver, for there was no room for anyone to sit or lie down under the canopy.

We had brought all of Father’s surveying tools with us, and his old tanning knives, spuds, and chisels, a small bark mill and various other implements and basins retained from his tanning years, for, during his previous journey to the Adirondacks, the Old Man had observed plenty of hickory trees, both shagbarks and butternut, and he planned to set up a small tannery in North Elba and perhaps teach the trade to some of the Negro settlers. We had also packed into the wagon our broadaxes, hatchets, adzes, hammers, wedges, and froes — tools that we would need for clearing the overgrown land that Mr. Smith had deeded to Father. We carried a pair of grass scythes, a bull rake, hay forks, and reaping forks; we had a small hornhead anvil, various types of nails, jack hooks, and a fine oak tumbril sledge that Father himself had built one winter years ago back in Pennsylvania; we had braces and augers and a good pit saw, a bucksaw, and a half-dozen chisels and planes: we carried all the tools, or most of them anyway, that the Old Man, in spite of bankruptcy and lawsuits, had accumulated and held on to in his various homesteading ventures and numerous business operations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts.

We also carried our mattresses, bedding, and clothing, and the furniture that Father and Mary had brought out from the house in Ohio to Springfield the year before — a pair of small chests, Father’s writing table, Great-Grandfather Brown’s mantel clock, Mary’s spinning wheel, and Ruth’s loom; and all the cooking implements and pots, the bowls, plates, mugs, and tableware; and, of course, Father’s big chest of books, which had traveled everywhere with us, from Ohio to Pennsylvania, back to Ohio and on to Springfield, and now to North Elba. To these things, in Westport, we had added kegs of salt, flour, dried beef, corn, crackers, seed, and feed for the animals, buckets for collecting and boiling down maple sap, a washtub, extra harness, and a plow.

As a result of the great weight of these goods, the wagon creaked and groaned on its axles. The spring mud had gone out early that year, fortunately, and the big, iron-sheathed wheels ground down the stone and gravel of the track, as the team of Morgans drew it slowly from the broad, greening valley of Lake Champlain to the upland, leafless forests and the freshly plowed fields and gardens of Elizabethtown.

The bays surprised me with their steadiness and strength, and my opinion of Mr. Epps rose somewhat, as he eased the animals along in a calm and confident way, turning to his side now and then to chat with Sarah or inquiring into Mary’s comfort or periodically informing us as to the names of the streams we passed and occasionally forded and the names of the snow-capped mountains that slowly hove into view in the distance. “We coming along the Boquet River here” Mr. Epps told us. “All the rivers up here flows north to Canada, Mister Brown. Them rivers and streams just like colored folks, you know, following the drinking-gourd star. When folks running from slavery see the rivers start to flow north, they know they almost free,” he said. “And that snowy mountain in the west called Giant of the Valley, and over there you can see the tip of Whiteface. Can’t see none of the truly high ones yet” he cheerfully informed us, although to my flatlander’s eye Giant of the Valley and Whiteface seemed like towering Alps.

When we entered the village of Elizabethtown — which was the seat of government for Essex County and where, facing the commons, an imposing, white-columned brick courthouse was located — I observed that, off to the northwest, the sky was filling with dark clouds, and although the sun still shone on us, I feared that it would soon rain.

We stopped on the commons for a rest and food and to water the animals at a long wooden trough at the side of the road there. While Mr. Epps and the boys tended to the livestock and Ruth prepared our lunch of corn bread and molasses, Father and I rigged a cover over the driver’s seat of the wagon, so that Mary, who was coughing and appeared to be suffering from the beginnings of ague, would be protected from the weather.

After we had eaten, Father strode off to the courthouse for a brief visit to the office of the registrar of deeds, where, from a cursory examination of the public rolls, he determined, just as he had been told the previous fall by the folks in Timbuctoo, that longtime landholders and squatters in North Elba, white men, were indeed claiming significant portions of the grants that Mr. Gerrit Smith had made to the Negroes. Announcing summarily to the registrar that he intended very soon to survey and to register the deeds for every one of Mr. Smith’s grants of land, the Old Man warned the fellow outright not to list any new lands on the Essex County tax rolls without a surveyor’s map and proper bill of sale and deed attached.

“Judging from all the fancy brick houses I’ve seen hereabouts, I believe that there are in this town more than a few lawyers who would be pleased to defend in a court of law the property rights of a free Negro, if they knew they were defending as well the property rights of Mister Gerrit Smith” he warned the registrar. “Mister Smith, as you of all people must know, is the single largest taxpayer in this county!’ he added.

Delighted, Father reported back to us that the man had received his announcement with an open-mouthed, astonished gape that had made him look extremely foolish, even simple. He imitated the fellow, and we all — except Mr. Epps, I noticed — laughed uproariously, for Father rarely made faces, and he looked quite comical when he did. Even Oliver laughed — although to himself he might have observed that the fellow mocked by Father was no less of a man doing his duty than had been the toll-taker. Inconsistency in small matters was not something that any of us held against the Old Man however. In fact, we almost welcomed it, for in the larger matters, where we, like most everyone else, turned weak and wobbly, he was like purified iron, of a piece and entirely consistent, through and through.

It was close to an hour after noon when we departed from Elizabethtown, heading northwest through a thick forest of pines and balsam trees, and almost at once we moved steeply uphill, with a roaring brook crashing past us over huge rocks from the heights to the village and farms spread out in the valley below. The sky had nearly filled with dark clouds now, and as we ascended, the temperature steadily fell, and soon there was a distinct chill in the air, causing me and the boys to button our waistcoats and jackets around us and Father to haul his greatcoat from the wagon. Ruth and Annie drew their shawls over their heads, and up on the wagon, Mary got out blankets, wrapped one around her and Sarah, passed another to Mr. Epps and a third to Ruth and Annie.

A stiff breeze had come up behind us, and the knowledge that we would soon be wet and cold silenced us. The horses plodded steadily on, slower now but still with a powerful rhythm, despite the unbroken uphill climb and the great weight of the load. Mr. Epps had grown somber. No one spoke as we climbed into the weather. Even the birds had gone silent.

The trail wound slowly ahead between great, tall trees, with the rocky stream still beside us. We had not passed a dwelling place or cleared patch of land for a long while, when suddenly we were over the top, and the trail was passing through a broad intervale between two high distant ridges. We passed alongside a beaver pond spiked with the dark standing trunks of drowned trees, when finally, a little ways further, the Old Man gave a signal, and we stopped.

Here we rested the animals for a while and stood in the shelter of the wagon, our backs to the wind and collars up, hands holding on to the brims of our hats and head coverings. We must have resembled one of the Lost Tribes, wrapped in blankets and old-fashioned woolen garments, clustered around our wagon and livestock on a wilderness trail in the mountains, unsure of whether to push on or go back.

The Old Man studied the glowering sky and said, “Mister Epps, I believe it will soon snow.”

“Probably no more than some rain will fall down in the valleys,” Mr. Epps said. “But you are right, Mister Brown; going to snow up here. Might amount to nothing, might turn out a real blizzard. Never can tell this time of year. You want to wait it out?” he asked Father. “Can hole up in them trees yonder” he said, pointing out a nearby grove of tall pines backed and partially sheltered by a high, rocky outcropping. The dark cliffs were close enough to the trail so that we could reach their protection easily with the wagon and make a safe overnight camp there.

Several large, wet flakes of snow brushed past my face. Father asked Mary how she felt. “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t do anything strictly on my account.” But she did not look well: her face was gray and pinched with discomfort, if not pain, and she was shivering.

“I’m concerned somewhat for the livestock,” Father said to Mr. Epps. “If we’re out here all night in a snowstorm, we’ll do fine, but we might lose a few of the sheep. The animals are pureblood and aren’t yet bred for winter exposure, and they have been kept inside since November.” He asked if there was a farm between this spot and the valley ahead, where the tiny village of Keene was located.

Mr. Epps answered that we would not see a house or barn until we got down off these heights, but we were closer to the Keene valley now than to Elizabethtown, so we should not go back. He remembered that there was a large farm located down in the valley a mile or so this side of the village. We might be able to put up there if this turned into a real storm.

Father removed his hat, and with his hands against his thighs, he lowered his head and prayed silently for a moment, while we stood by and watched. Then he turned to us and said, “Let us keep on, children. Our heavenly Father will protect us.”

“Well, yes, but we better cut us a brake while we got good trees for it,” Mr. Epps said. “A few miles yonder, them big wheels going to need a spoke pole for getting this load downhill.” I quickly pulled the axes from the wagon and took Watson into the trees a ways, and in short order we had cut and trimmed a spruce pole that was long enough to pass through the rear wheels of the wagon.

By the time we resumed our journey, the snow was falling heavily. The mountain ridges on either side had disappeared from view, and as we plodded ahead we could see only a few feet in front of us and to the sides. We were all now shrouded in blankets, except for the Old Man in his greatcoat. The snow was wet and stuck to us, turning us white, even Mr. Epps. Father and I stumbled along in front, searching out the trail a few feet at a time, waving Mr. Epps and the team on as we found it. Hours passed like this, until finally the ground under our feet began to tip and fall away, and we realized that we had reached the beginning of the descent to the valley.

Mary and Sarah got down from the wagon to walk behind it, and Mr. Epps drove the animals now by walking beside them at their heads, talking to them in a quiet, calm voice. Father instructed Ruth to carry Sarah on her back and told Oliver not to let go of Annie’s hand. Watson and Salmon were to hold the livestock back from the wagon a good ways, but keep them moving, he said, don’t let them huddle up and stall, especially the sheep. Then he and I attached a length of rope to each end of the brake pole. I walked on one side of the wagon, and Father walked at the other, ready for me to shove the pole across to him, under the wagon bed and through the spokes, whenever the wagon threatened to rush the horses.

It was a slow, nasty business, coming down that long, rocky trail ten and fifteen feet at a time all the way to the valley. At first, the slope was a gentle incline, and Father and I were able to hold the wagon off the horses by tying the driver’s brake back and pushing uphill against the box from the front, our feet skidding and slipping clumsily in the snow. But soon the descent quickened, and the wagon started to break loose. I grabbed the spruce pole out of the wagon box and slung it across to Father, and we each raced to a tree beside the trail and lashed the rope around it, locking the wheels. Then we let the lines out slowly and inched the wagon down the rough trail, skidding it like a sledge, until the ropes had run nearly all the way out, when we each tied the end to the tree and scrambled down to the wagon and chocked the wheels with rocks. Then we stumbled back uphill to the trees, untied the slack ropes, and walked them forward a ways, where we wound them around a nearer pair of trees. We drew them taut again, reached down with our free hand and removed the chocks, and let the wagon slide another few feet. Over and over, endlessly, it seemed, we followed in the blinding snow the same elaborate, painful procedure, and somewhere out there in front Mr. Epps calmed the snow-covered horses and kept them moving together on the nearly invisible trail. My face froze, and the rope burned my hands raw, and the rocks tore at the tender, exposed skin of my palms and fingers, while slowly, bit by bit, we lowered the wagon through the storm to the valley floor — where, as we descended, the clouds seemed to rise, and the snow gradually turned to sleet, then to cold rain.

By the time we got to level ground, it was almost dark, but we could see again. There were maple trees with fresh buds glistening on wet limbs, a meandering river, cleared, flat meadows covered with new grass, and steep mountains rising swiftly from the plain and disappearing in low, dark gray clouds.

In spite of our ordeal, we appeared to be in good shape. The team of Morgans that Mr. Epps had advised the Old Man to buy looked positively heroic to me now. Mr. Epps seemed as shrewd to me as he did to himself. I grinned at him, and to my surprise he smiled modestly, almost shyly, back.

My hands and Father’s were raw and blistered, and our clothes were soaked through. Poor Mary and Ruth and the children came trudging along behind us, looking miserable, wet, and cold, but immensely relieved to be down from the mountain. And further back came the red Devon cattle and Father’s precious long-faced merino sheep and the pigs, with Salmon and Oliver, using the collies, dutifully keeping them together, hollering and chasing after the stragglers, beating them back into line with their sticks. A short ways ahead, I saw a white, two-storey farmhouse with a long porch facing the road and a large, unpainted barn and several ramshackle outbuildings behind it, and when I pointed the place out to the Old Man, he merely nodded, as if he had known it would be there and did not need me to show it to him.

Finally, when we had all come up and were gathered together beside the wagon, Father removed his hat and prepared again to pray. This time, however, he ordered us to do likewise. “Let us give thanks, children,” he said, and we each uncovered our heads, every one of us, even Mr. Epps.

In his clear, thin voice, Father said, “Heavenly Father, we humbly thank thee for bringing thy children one more time safely through the storm. We thank thee, O Lord, for protecting us and our worldly goods against the travails and terrors of the mountain fastness and the fury of the storm. We who are wholly undeserving of thy boundless care and protection, O Lord, we humbly thank thee. Amen.”

Mr. Epps said his “A-men!” and quickly snapped his hat back on. I followed, and the others did also, except for Father, who remained bareheaded, face screwed up and eyes tightly shut. Uneasily, because of Mr. Epps’s presence, perhaps, we all walked a few steps away and did not look at the Old Man, and a moment later, as if wakened abruptly from sleep, he re-joined us, seeming somewhat distracted, if not downright dazed. This was his usual manner following prayer, however, and we were all quite used to it and never remarked on it, even amongst ourselves. From our viewpoint, simply, the Old Man prayed with greater intensity than the rest of us. From our viewpoint, the Old Man did everything with greater intensity than the rest of us.

By the time we reached the roadside farm, the rain had ceased, and the clouds had drifted back up the snow-whitened slopes to cover only the mountaintops above, revealing a broad, grassy floodplain here below. A mile or so further, Mr. Epps informed us, was the village of Keene, where eight or ten additional families resided. “Mostly, they just scratches out a living. Not much different from us folks up there beyond the notch in Timbuctoo” he said, pointing to a sharp cut in the distant high ridge to the west.

Father said, “That, Mister Epps, will soon change.”

“Yassuh, Mister Brown” he said, and our eyes met for an instant, and I saw that he did not believe that the Old Man would be able to change anything, anywhere.

As we approached the white house and barn, we noticed that the place, clearly a once-prosperous dairy farm, was showing distinct signs of inattention — broken fences and tumbled walls, windblown shingles on the ground, a two- or three-year-old pile of dung collected behind the barn, and none of the abundant cleared land tilled yet.

The place was owned by a man in his mid-twenties, a Mr. Caleb Partridge — whose youth, when he opened the door to Father’s knock, surprised me — and his middle-aged wife, Martha. The couple welcomed us in, evidently pleased by the unexpected prospect of extending food and shelter to such a bedraggled party of travelers. Mr. Partridge, a tall, gaunt man with a thick black beard and heavy teeth, had a brutish handsomeness about him. His wife was pink-faced and plain as oats and seemed almost simple in her shyness, for she giggled nervously whenever one of the adults spoke, even when I was the speaker, and listened with great seriousness to whatever the children, Annie and Sarah, offered by way of conversation, as if only they did not frighten her.

The couple, apparently childless, resided there alone with an aged woman, whom the man introduced as his wife’s mother. She sat in a corner of the large kitchen, mumbling and nodding agreeably to herself, while we warmed our faces and hands and dried our clothing before the huge fireplace and while Mrs. Partridge fussed over Ruth and Mary and the little girls, bringing cloths to help them dry their hair and serving up bowls of hot cider and ample portions of freshly baked corn bread.

Later, when the boys and Mr. Epps and I had fed and bedded down the animals and returned to the house, we all seated ourselves at the Partridges’ long trestle table before a steaming pot of venison stew. Mr. Epps, however, hung back by the corner of the fireplace, where he stood with his dark face held deliberately away from us. Finally, Father noticed him there and said, “Ah, Mister Epps! Come quickly, or your bowl will be snatched by one of these greedy children!”

The Partridges, all three, even the old lady, looked up at Father with expressions of mild surprise on their bland faces. But Mrs. Partridge quickly fetched another plate and spoon, and Mr. Epps crossed to the table and joined us, seating himself with serious mien between me and Watson and directly across from Father, who then took the liberty, as he put it, of blessing the meal — whereupon with great appetite we all did eat.

We stabled our animals in the barn that night and — except for Mary, Ruth, Sarah, and Annie, who were given pallets inside the house by the fire — slept in the loft above. It had once been a fine, tight structure, but now the roof leaked, floorboards were rotting, and the hay was several years old and filled with dust and debris. Two scrawny milch cows were all the Partridges seemed to own for livestock, and they looked like aged, weak milkers ready to quit.

Apparently, most of the Partridges’ cattle had died off in recent years or had been butchered for beef or sold. For income during the long winters, Mr. Partridge had taken to killing large numbers of deer and shipping the venison by sledge south to Albany. He complained that the place was too large for him and his wife to work alone, and there were no men in the area who hired out. The woman had inherited the property from her father, a veteran of the Ticonderoga campaigns in the Revolution, who had taken a land grant here as payment for his military services and thus had been one of the first settlers in the region. Mr. Partridge, the landless third son of a New Hampshire grower of flax, had himself been a farmer for hire, had wandered here from New England, and had come to ownership of the farm nearly six years ago by marrying his employer’s only child and heir a few months before his employer’s death.

I learned all this the next morning, following our departure from the farm, from Father, who had stayed up late talking with Mr. Partridge, after the rest of us had staggered off to the barn to sleep. The Old Man had a way of eliciting personal information from strangers when he got them alone. His questions were disarmingly direct, and his inquiry seemed almost scientific in its detachment, which in a sense it was, for he was not so much interested in a man’s personal life as he was in learning about his character and about human nature generally. Usually, when Father interrogated a person new to him, his immediate aim was to move the inquiry, by way of questions about family and background, to the question of slavery and race, so as to distinguish friend from foe, certainly, but also because, according to Father, it was on this question more than any other that a white man revealed the true nature of his character.

“Our benefactor and new neighbor, Mister Partridge;’ he said to me as we walked along at the head of our little caravan, “is one of those men who says he finds slavery and Negroes equally repugnant. But I believe that he would happily accept both, if it saved his wife’s farm from ruin and left him free to hunt and fish.” He added, “I doubt he’ll be of much use to us.”

We had left just at sunrise, under a cloudless deep blue sky with the morning star and a half-moon floating high beside us in the south like a diamond and a silver bowl. The road was somewhat mudded from yesterday’s rain, but Mr. Epps expected it to be dried out by the time we got up into the mountains again, where, he explained, the road crossed mostly stone anyhow. After passing through the tiny settlement of Keene — a post office, general store, log church, tavern, and a half-dozen log houses huddled together and guarded by mangy, long-haired dogs that all seemed to be related — we crossed the East Branch of the Au Sable River and made our way easefully uphill past freshly plowed fields, switch-backing towards the notch that cut through the range of mountains which lay between us and North Elba.

I had not liked Mr. Partridge, and I told Father that.

“No,” he said, “nor did I.1 suspect he beats the woman and secretly mistreats the old lady. The man bears watching, though. Somewhere along the line,” he said, “I fear we’ll have to cut him down.”

This, of course, I could not then imagine, for no one seemed less likely to oppose us and our work with the Negroes of Timbuctoo in any focused way than the lazy young man in whose house we had just stayed. But when it came to knowing ahead of time who would oppose him, the Old Man could be downright prescient. On a dozen or more occasions, I had seen him accurately predict which man from a congregation or town, to keep us Browns from fulfilling our pledge to rid this nation of slavery, would threaten our very lives, which man would simply turn away and let us continue, and which man would join us in the work. The Lord’s Work, as Father called it.

“Well,” said I, “at least the fellow was hospitable to travelers.”

“I would not call it that.”

“We’re ten people. Nine of us and Mister Epps, and he fed and housed us all, and he let us enjoy his fire and shelter our animals. I’d call that hospitable, Father.” Though I did not like Mr. Partridge, in those days I sometimes found myself feeling sorry for individuals that the Old Man harshly condemned.

“You don’t know him as well as I.”

“Tell me, then. Tell me what you know about Mister Partridge that I don’t. Beyond his marrying a homely woman for her property.”

“Trust me, Owen.”

“Father, I’m trying to!”

We walked in silence for a while, and then Father said, “You remember when he came out to help me hitch the team to the wagon, while the rest of you were tending the beeves and sheep, and Ruth and Mary and the girls were inside the house?”

“I saw him out there, yes.”

“Well, the man came up to me and asked for payment for our food and lodging. He presented me with an itemized bill, written out.” It was an embarrassment to Father. Not because he had no money to give Mr. Partridge, he said, but because he had not expected it. If he had anticipated Mr. Partridge’s charges, he would have negotiated an acceptable arrangement beforehand, and failing that, we would have camped someplace alongside the river. Mr. Partridge had surprised Father, and he found himself painfully embarrassed by it.

We resumed walking uphill in silence, with the wagon and team of Morgans, in Mr. Epps’s capable hands, clambering along behind us, Mary and Ruth and the girls all together now on foot and cheerfully admiring the spectacular vistas opening up on either side of the track, and, at the rear, the boys and our small herd of livestock. The road made its circuitous, slowly ascending way along the back of a buttressing ridge. The morning sun was shining full upon our backs now, and it was as if yesterday’s brief snowstorm had never occurred.

“I must make a confession, Owen,” the Old Man went on. I said nothing, and he continued. “It concerns Mister Partridge. The man’s request for payment confused me. I told him that I could not pay him with money, because I had none. I’m ashamed to say that I gave him instead the clock.”

“The clock? Your grandfather’s clock?”

“Yes.”

I was astonished. Except for his chest of books, Great-Grandfather Brown’s mantel clock was Father’s most valued household possession. Made of cherrywood, it was a treasure that had been entrusted to Father’s care years earlier by his own father; it was perhaps his only family heirloom. It made no sense to me. How could he have handed it over to Mr. Partridge so easily? And in exchange for so little — a single night’s lodging.

“I simply retrieved the clock from the wagon, unwrapped it, and passed it over to him, and he accepted it as payment quite happily and at once carried it into his house. Where I hope Mary and Ruth did not see it.”

I looked back at the women. Ruth held her half-sister Sarah’s hand, and beside her Mary held Annie’s; the two women were themselves holding hands and chatting lightly to one another. “No, I’m sure they didn’t see Mister Partridge carrying off Great-Grandfather’s clock. They seem very happy,” I added uselessly.

“They will know it soon enough. Oh, I am a fool!” he pronounced. “A fool!”

I did not know what to say, so, as usual, said nothing. Most times, when I did not understand something that Father had done or said, it was because he had acted or spoken more wisely than I. At such times, for obvious reasons, my best course was to remain silent and await the arrival of understanding. In this case, however, the Old Man had indeed been foolish, and by comparison I was the wise one.

Still, I remained silent. I loved my father, and respected him, even when he did a foolish or wrong thing.

By mid-morning, we were well out of the valley, and for a while the track turned steeply uphill. Mr. Epps, or Lyman, as I had begun calling him, got down from the box and walked beside the struggling horses, coaxing them on, and Father and I fell back and got behind the wagon and put our shoulders to it. The dense, impenetrable forests up here had never been cut, even those trees that closed like a pale against the road, and the towering pines and spruces had begun to block off the sky from our view, covering us with thick, cooling day-long shadows.

Although we were now far above the greening valley, the air was still sufficiently warm that most of yesterday’s snowfall had melted early and had run off the sides into small rivulets and brooks that dropped away from the ridge, disappearing into the forest, where we could see dark gray remnants of the winter snows, which looked permanent, practically, and glacial. The only birds we saw up here were curious little chickadees and siskins and the occasional screaming blue jay — winter birds. None of the hardwood trees or low bushes had put out their buds yet, and the scattered thatches of grasses we saw lay in yellowed mats, still dead from last year’s frost.

Nothing in the natural world appeared ready for the resurrection of spring. Worse, it was as if we were steadily slipping backwards in time, with May and then April disappearing behind us and darkest winter rising into view just ahead. Soon we were struggling through yesterday’s unmelted, ankle-deep snow. It was cold and nearly dark here below the tall trees, as if earlier this morning, before crossing overhead, the sun, unbeknownst to us, had reversed its path and had descended and set behind us. Except for Father, we had shrouded ourselves with blankets again. A steady, high wind blew through the upper branches of the trees, raising a distant unbroken chorus of grieving voices to accompany our slow pilgrimage.

After a while, almost without my noticing it, the ground leveled off somewhat, and Father and I no longer had to stay close to the wagon to be ready to push it. Our little group had strung itself out practically in single file, as if we each of us wished to be alone with our morbid thoughts, with Father in his greatcoat up at the head of the column, and then the team and wagon driven by Lyman, and me trudging along in its tracks. Behind me came Mary, Ruth, Sarah, and Annie, picking their way through the snow in a ragged line, while stretching back for many rods walked the livestock, singly or sometimes two animals abreast, with Salmon and Oliver positioned among them to keep them moving, and back somewhere out of sight, Watson and the collie dogs brought up the rear.

The road by now had dwindled to a narrow, palisadoed trail barely the width of our wagon. It no longer switch-backed across the side of the mountain, and there were no longer the occasional breaks in the trees with views of the forested slopes and ridges below. Instead, plunging across slabs of rock and over snarls of thick roots, the trail ran straight into the still-darkening forest, as if down a tunnel, and had we met a wagon or coach coming out of the tunnel towards us, we could not have turned aside to let it rush past. It seemed that there was nothing ahead of us but slowly encroaching snow and darkness.

When, suddenly, as if struck by a blow, I realized that we had emerged from the forest. Light poured down from the skies, and the towering trees seemed to bow and back away. Dazzled by the abrupt abundance of light and space, I saw that we were passing along the shore of a long, narrow lake that lay like a steel scimitar below high, rocky escarpments and cliffs, beyond which there loomed still higher mountains, which curved away and disappeared in the distance. The enormous scale of open space, snow-covered mountains, precipices, and black, sheer cliffs diminished our size to that of tiny insects, as we made our slow way along the edge of the glistening lake. Wonderstruck, gaping, we traced the hilt of the sword-shaped body of water and crossed the long slant of its cutting edge to the point, where we exited from the gorge as if through an ancient stone gate.

We had passed through Cascade Notch, and below us lay the beautiful wide valley of North Elba. Off to our left, mighty Tahawus and Mclntyre rose from the plain, splitting the southeastern cloudbank. To our right, in the northwest, we could see Whiteface Mountain, aged and dignified by its wide scars and pale gray in the fading afternoon sun. And between the mountains, spreading out at our feet for miles, lay undulating forests scratched by the dark lines of rivers and the rich, dark tablelands, grassy meadows, and marshes that we would call the Plains of Abraham.

Lyman drew the wagon to a halt, and the family came and gathered around it and admired the wonderful sight together. We removed the damp blankets from our shoulders, folded them and placed them back into the wagon. Then Father took himself off from us a ways and lowered his head and silently prayed, while the rest of us continued simply to admire the generosity and beauty of the land.

For a long time, no one spoke, and then, when Father had rejoined us, Lyman said, “We better keep moving, Browns, if we wants to get home by nightfall.” He slapped the reins, and the wagon jerked forward along the rocky, narrow road, and we all moved back into line behind it, walking easily downhill into the valley, as the sun descended towards the hills and mountains beyond.

Chapter 6

On our arrival at North Elba, after Lyman Epps had departed for his own home, we passed nearly a full week at the long-abandoned farm on the Keene Road, before any of us ventured forth again — time spent unpacking the wagon and cleaning, re-organizing, and repairing the tumble-down cabin and shed, which were too small to be properly called a house and barn. In various ways we were stretching the structures so as to fit our many belongings and our numerous selves. Then, on the morning that I came to breakfast ready to commence plowing the one sizeable, cleared field on the place, Father instructed me not to plow.

This surprised me. With the shortness of the growing season, there was a clear need to get the ground turned over and the seed sown as quickly as possible. It was a clear, dry day, and Watson and Salmon were already waiting for me in the shed. I stood at the door to the cabin on my way outside, while Father perched on a three-legged stool next to the stove, finishing his morning shave.

“You don’t want me to plow today,” I said to him, making it a statement, not a question. Repeating his words was one of my ways of getting the Old Man to explain his purpose without seeming to question his authority.

“No. Saddle the lead horse, Adelphi, for me. I’ve developed a real fondness for the animal. And hitch the off-horse to the wagon and load up my transit and lines,” he said. “It’s time for you and me to call on our African neighbors. Time for us to go to Timbuctoo.”

Although I wasn’t particularly glad of the chance to put off the plowing, I was eager to see Timbuctoo, for I had never visited a Negro farming community before. As far as I knew, this was the only one in the Northeast, although Father said there were a few just across the border, in Canada. I remember wishing that it had a different name, however. I knew from Lyman that, while the acreage that Gerrit Smith had given them to farm was located in the valley in various spots, the Negroes had clustered their cabins together on a narrow, rising section of the tableland southeast of the village of North Elba. They might have called their settlement the Heights, I thought, or South Elba. But, no, they had named it Timbuctoo.

“Same as Timbuctoo in Guinea,” Lyman had explained to me. “You know, like the way white folks call their towns New London and New York and Manchester and such, so as to bring back to their minds the place they came from.” They had even made a flag to fly above the settlement, he told me. “Red, like the blood of the slaves, with one star on it. The freedom star.”

I could see that from their perspective, although they had no more memory of Africa than I had of England, Timbuctoo was an affectionate and respectful name, which I am sure is how Father took it. No doubt their need went beyond that, for while I was connected to my English forefathers by means of the language I spoke, the Negroes’ links to their ancestors had been cut away by slavery, which gave the word “Timbuctoo” a greater resonance in their ears than did words like “Manchester” and “New London” in mine. But I could also hear the whites in the region saying the Negroes’ name for their settlement in a derisive and derogatory way.

“Wouldn’t it be better, this first time, for us just to walk over there?” I asked the Old Man. “In a neighborly way, as equals among equals?” I didn’t want to make our first appearance there with Father up on horseback and me driving a wagon. The picture put me out somewhat, made me feel slightly uncomfortable, for it placed us on a height in our first meetings with these people, who, according to Lyman, owned no horses or oxen, had but a few swine and dunghill fowl, and drew their plows themselves or chopped their soil by hand with hoes and spades. Our elevated position might suggest that we regarded ourselves as Mr. Gerrit Smith’s newly hired overseers riding out to examine the number and condition of the plantation darkies.

Father wiped his razor clean and stood and buttoned his waistcoat. Mary, who was again feeling poorly, lay abed where she and Father had slept on the mattress placed next to the stove. The rest of us had slept in the attic above. With just two rooms downstairs, the cabin, though cozy and clean, was crowded as a small boat. “No” Father said. “I can understand your discomfort, but it’s necessary for us to make a proper show for them. They are a downtrodden people, Owen. And we need them to see that Mister Smith has taken them seriously enough to send out a significant sort of man to deal with them.” When you offer your services to men who consider themselves mighty, he explained, it’s good to go modestly and small. An honest man approaches Herod’s tent with dust on his sandals. But when you come to help people who for generations have been made to regard themselves as lowly and undeserving, you come as grandly as you can and with fanfare. The first gift we offer them, he said, will be a sense of their great value as human beings. They are not simply the despised ex-property of men, they are the blessed children of God, and until they possess that high a view of themselves, they will not be able to utilize our further gifts. “So wear your coat and hat, son,” he said, with a hint of a smile on his thin lips. “And button your shirt to your throat. Today you must look like the son of an important man. A surveyor. You can wear your plowman’s smock tomorrow.”

Father rode ahead of me, seated like a preacher, erect and reflective-seeming, as if he were not admiring or even conscious of the splendid scenery that surrounded us. He was fully as aware of the landscape as I, however. More so, probably. He no longer surprised me when, after a journey during which I had believed him throughout to have been lost in thought, he gave to Mary or the others who had remained at home a vividly detailed report of everything that we had passed, even including the flowers in the glades, the birds in the trees, and the trees and shrubs, all of which he had carefully noted to himself and had named in passing and had remembered.

“When we have named a thing, we have begun to see it,” he often said. “And in so doing we praise and give continual thanks to our heavenly Father. Thus it is to God’s greater glory that we name the most obscure flower in His field.” He had made a game of it when we were children, testing our abilities to identify by name, not the hawkweed or purple vetch or red milium, which everyone knew and admired, but the tiny heal-all, the spotted knapweed, and the lowly squawroot. Salmon was the best of us. Even as a small boy of seven or eight, he knew the names and uses of hundreds of flowers and plants that the rest of us, including Father, barely noticed. He knew that the burnet weed will stanch a wound, that coltsfoot will cure a cough, and that a sick deer will eat pickerelweed, and he knew where in forest and field to find them all.

Father’s and my arrival at the settlement was not quite the grand occasion that I had expected. But it was more the fault of my high expectations than the somewhat dismal reality I encountered, and my expectations, I felt, were more the fault of Lyman than of Father. Earlier, as our journey into the mountains from Westport had progressed, Lyman had spoken to me with increasing friendliness and sincerity. Then, lying side by side in the stale hay of the Partridge barn, he and I had talked long after the others had fallen to sleep. That was when he told me to call him Lyman, since we were close in age, and I agreed, but with reluctance, for somehow my calling him by his given name seemed, in my eyes, at least, to demean him.

“You’ll have to call me Owen, then,” I told him, and after he had done it several times, it no longer seemed so strange for me not to be addressing him in Father’s way, as Mr. Epps.

He was eager to hear about the famous Negro abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who had visited Father several times in Springfield the previous year. Lyman was mightily impressed that Father was sufficiently connected to Mr. Douglass that the great man had actually visited our home and had even stayed overnight with us. I may have been a little over-impressed with it myself and thus doubtless exaggerated somewhat the firmness of the connection, for Father and Mr. Douglass had not yet formed the close association that would mark their later relations. And that in turn might account for Lyman’s exaggerated report of the Negro settlement in North Elba, in terms both of their number and of their achievements as settlers. He may have been trying to impress the son of a close friend of the famous Frederick Douglass.

There were, he said, close to a hundred Negroes living in North Elba, most of them freedmen, with a small number of fugitives secreted among them, individuals who could not be named. “Could be, Owen, that I myself am running from a slavemaster” he said, “and the next man be the freedman. You can’t know which is which, can’t tell one from the other, freedman or slave, unless I name him for you — and even then, how you going to be sure? So long as you know that one of us is free, then the next man is safe. Leastways up there in the mountains he’s safe, because the slave-catchers, they don’t dare show their faces in Timbuctoo.”

The Negroes were armed, he said, and would kill any man who came sneaking around looking to haul a single one of them, man, woman, or child, back to slavery. I lay there in the darkness next to him, rapt with pleasure, as he described a remnant people settled in the wilderness and living off the land, an industrious people, secure and vigilant, setting lookouts on the peaks, with elaborate signaling systems, rams’ horns and drums, to give the warning whenever a stranger entered their wild domain. I pictured valiant Negroes ambushing their enemies at the mountain passes.

For years, Father had told us stories about the Maroons of Jamaica, whom he so admired — those escaped slaves who had fled into the mountainous interior of their island and who for half a century fought off the mighty British army, until finally the King of England gave up the fight and let them stay in their highland villages, where they raised their families and ruled their territory unimpeded. I saw the Negroes of Timbuctoo as a modern American version of those old Jamaicans, and of the rebellious slaves who had followed Toussaint L’Ouverture into the mountain fastness of Hispaniola, waiting for the moment when they would have the numbers and the occasion to sweep down upon the sugarcane plantations along the coastal plain and strike a death blow against their French owners, freeing themselves from servitude forever. I imagined the Negroes of Timbuctoo to be warriors of that high order.

Lyman told me that they had built their cabins close together all in one place to make them easy to defend, and when they worked their fields, which were often located far from their cabins, they went armed with swords and guns. Even the women and children, he said. I asked who was their general or leader. Was there one among them who functioned as a chieftain, and how had they elected him? I remember peering through a broken window in Mr. Partridge’s loft to the shrubby field behind the barn, where fireflies lit up the spring night like the silent firing of the guns of a hundred scattered, hidden warriors — here, here, here; gone, gone, gone — harassing their huge, clumsy enemy, maddening him with the accumulated pain of many small blows struck by an army of black-skinned warriors made invisible by the darkness.

“No one chief rules us,” Lyman said. “What we do, Owen, is reason together. We sit and talk things out, mostly amongst the men who knows a thing or two. Men such as myself. And then we comes to an agreement together about how we going to do this and that. Course, there’s some folks who gets listened to more closely than the others, there’s some who don’t get no never mind at all, and there’s some who’re in between. Me, I’m one of the in-between fellows. On account of my still being a young man and all. But with me working for Mister Brown now, that could change some. Folks up there thinks highly of Mister Brown,” he said, wistfully, as if he had forgotten that I was the son of Mr. Brown, almost as if he had forgotten for a moment that I was white, which pleased me. More than that, it comforted me.

It never happened that when in the presence of a Negro I did not feel perceived as white and then at once begin to think of myself in those terms also. No matter how used to the presence of Negroes I became — and since my early childhood, Father, whenever possible, had brought all types of Negroes into our household, providing us with daily, respectful proximity to them — a black person made me constantly conscious of my whiteness. I could not forget it. It angered me in a way that left me secretly ashamed. And on those occasions, in a childish way, I sometimes actually wished that Negroes did not exist as if their very presence in our country were pestilential and the disease of race-consciousness were their fault and not ours.

I didn’t know how to inoculate myself against this disease, except to associate strictly with whites, which I could never do and call myself a man. Because of our history together, I didn’t know how to see around or through a black person’s race, and thus I could not see around or through my own. And whenever I became aware of my whiteness, I was ashamed. Not just because of the horrors of slavery, although that surely provided plenty of reason for any white American to feel ashamed of his race, but because, in the eyes of the God of my father and, most importantly, in the eyes of my father himself, race-consciousness was wrong. Just as wrong as not being able to forget, whenever I found myself in the presence of a woman, that I was a man and not just a fellow human being. It was as if race-consciousness, like sex-consciousness, were some kind of uncontrollable lust that left a white man with no regard for the deep, personal relations of friendship and family.

Pride, lust, envy — these are the certain consequences of race-consciousness, whether you are black or white, just as they are the consequences of thinking constantly of your maleness or femaleness when in the presence of the other sex. It affects you in such a way that you either feel proud of your race or sex, mere accidents of birth, or envy the other’s; proud, you think of the other person as available for your base and sensual use, or else, ashamed, you wish to have the other person make use of you. You do not view yourself or the other person simply as a person. Perhaps only the old New England Puritans or certain of their latter-day descendants, like Father, were properly equipped, morally and intellectually, to recognize and defeat such serpentine failings. I, however, despite Father’s best intentions and teaching, was not so equipped, and as a result, I frequently added a fourth sin to the list-wrath. For on those occasions when I had become enraged by my inability to overcome my weakness, I directed my anger, not at myself, as I should have, but against the person whose race had made me conscious of my own race or the person whose sex had enflamed me. The latter I might defeat by living like an anchorite and withholding myself from the company of women other than those related to me by blood, which, of course, is precisely what I have done. The former, however, I could defeat only by abandoning my pledge to dedicate my life to the destruction of slavery and arranging my life so as to associate only with white people. But waging war against slavery was my sworn duty, as marriage was not, and by the time I had reached my young manhood, thanks to the imprint made upon my mind and spirit by Father, abdication of it was no longer imagineable.

It was for such complicated and barely understood reasons as these, then, that I found myself strangely and powerfully soothed by Lyman’s presence that night in the barn in Keene. It was the idea of an oppressed people’s flight to sanctuary in the impenetrable mountains that seduced me — that and the brief relief from the burden of race-consciousness that came over me as I lay in the dark beside Lyman Epps, a black man my own age who spoke to me as if I were not white, as if, in fact, I were black or he were white — as if we two were of the same race.

I lay there in the hay, astonished and full of wonder and delight. My usual high agitation, which I had come to think of as a permanent aspect of my mind, had ceased altogether. And for a few precious moments that night, I did not feel like a stranger to myself. A peculiar restfulness had come over me like a warm breeze — and I thought that all the years of my life so far, since the death of my mother long before, I had been traveling far from home, a child moving through the world disguised as an adult; and now, unexpectedly, on this May night in a barn in the Adirondack mountains, I had been allowed to remove my disguise and settle into my childhood bed, a boy again. I reached out in the dark and took Lyman’s hand in mine, and held it for a long time, with neither of us moving or saying anything, until, still holding his hand, I fell peacefully asleep.

The next day, on returning to my usual agitated state, I realized with horror that, for all its innocence, my simple, affectionate gesture might well have been regarded by Lyman as brazen or even wanton, and therefore despicable. To my immense relief, Lyman showed no sign of having misunderstood me, and we continued to engage one another for the rest of our journey to North Elba with the same easy familiarity of the evening before. When our little caravan finally arrived at our new home, Father paid him for his services with the sack of seed and supplies that he had promised, and Lyman waved a simple goodbye and walked on down the road. And I did not see him again until Father and I rode into the place called Timbuctoo.

A few miles south of the village of North Elba, we passed off the old Military Road onto a rutted, rocky lane and into the woods, with Father in the lead on Adelphi and me in the wagon behind him, driving the horse we had named Poke. From the condition of the trail, it was clear that not many wagons had passed this way before, and several times Father had to dismount and clear away fallen branches before I could proceed. Then suddenly we entered a cleared space marred by the charred stumps of trees, and before us were some eight or ten cabins, which were more like shanties than proper log cabins, little huts made of sticks and old cast-off boards and patches of canvas.

It was a camp, not a village, with no sign of the palisade and neat log houses set around a protected square as I had imagined. There was indeed a flagpole set in the middle of the clearing, just as Lyman had said, but the pole, stuck into a pile of rocks, was tilted at a pathetic angle, and dangling from the top was a tattered banner made from an old piece of red wool, a shirt or piece of a blanket, upon which I could make out a roughly cut five-pointed yellow star.

Except for a few undersized pigs rooting about in heaps of garbage and a half-dozen scrawny fowl picking at the wet, smelly ground that lay behind the privies, the place looked abandoned. Then I saw several small children with somber brown and black faces peering out from the doorways, and I noticed that here and there an adult’s dark hand had drawn back a rag from a window so that the owner of the hand could observe our approach unseen from the gloom of the cabin.

After a moment, a bearded Negro man of middle-age appeared at the door of one of the shacks and for a second regarded us with caution, when, apparently recognizing Father from his earlier visit, he smiled broadly and said, “Mis-ter Brown!” and stepped forward to greet us. Then several others, men and women with children trailing behind, emerged from their homes — which I must call hovels, for I do not know what else to call them, they were so poorly constructed and maintained. I could not imagine enduring the bitterly cold winter winds and snow with no more protection than those sad bits of shelter provided. I myself would have fled long since, I thought. Or else I would have built me a proper log cabin and fireplace. The lassitude and disarray of these people amazed and bewildered me. They seemed exhausted and demoralized.

Stepping from one of the huts came a man who, after a few seconds of thinking he was a stranger, I realized was my friend Lyman Epps. He looked oddly unlike himself here, smaller, thinner, flat-faced, as if all the force had gone out of him. Even his skin, which previously had been the color of anthracite, had lost its depth and glow and had turned flint gray. Father had commenced to speak with several of the men, in particular to the middle-aged fellow with the beard who had come forward before the others and appeared to be their spokesman. Ignoring me, or so it seemed, Lyman edged past the wagon and attempted to position himself at the front of the group of men speaking with Father — a nervous little colored man he was, uneasy and, as I had first regarded him down in Westport, not to be trusted.

He, of course, had not changed in the few days since I had last seen him. Sitting up on my wagon, the son of the great John Brown, a prosperous white man come with his father to assist and uplift these poor, benighted souls, I was the one who had changed. The other men did not defer to or even acknowledge Lyman’s attempts to gain Father’s attention; they shouldered him aside and blocked him out entirely, as Father spoke to the group of his intention to survey and stake their property lines and register them with the county clerk’s office over in Elizabethtown.

This would entail certain changes in how they did business, he explained, because it meant that they would now be liable for taxes on their land. “But you will own your land, my friends. No man, white or black, can encroach upon it, and you will therefore be free to use it as you please, even to sell it, if you wish, or to pass it on to your children.” But in order to pay taxes, he went on, they would have to raise more than just enough to survive on; they would have to raise a cash crop or produce a product which they could then sell in the nearby towns for cash money.

I didn’t believe Father was telling these people anything they didn’t already know. They weren’t European peasants or field hands straight off an Alabama cotton plantation. That was the problem, perhaps. Except for the fugitive slaves amongst them, who could not make themselves known and, of course, could not own land in the United States anyhow and probably would soon disappear into Canada, where they could freely settle, the residents of Timbuctoo were men and women with city skills — blacksmiths like Lyman, waiters, barbers, harnessmakers — people who had made pennies at a trade and had saved them and bought their freedom or, thanks to the kindness of their owners or because they were of no particular use as chattel, had been granted it.

At last, Lyman noticed my presence. Due to my innate shyness, but also because of the complexity and turbulence of my feelings, I hadn’t put myself forward and instead had waited for him to make the first gesture. Which he did, but only after finding himself unable to gain Father’s attention. He held the ears of the horse Poke and touched the animal’s forehead with his own, then looked up at me and smiled and asked, “How’s the Morgan horses holding up, Mister Brown?”

“Owen” I said, more a rebuke than a correction.

“They seems rested up,” he said. “Fine pair of animals, ain’t they? Got some age on ‘em, but they gonna give you plenty of service. They be plowing your fields long after you gone from here,” he said, repeating what he had said to Father back in Westport — an empty remark now, where before it had been a fresh recommendation and a promise. A slender young woman, round-faced and with slitted eyes, wearing a tattered yellow shift, a knitted shawl over her shoulders, had approached us and now stood behind Lyman, watching him. I raised my hat to acknowledge her, which caused her to look down at her bare feet. She was a pretty, tea-brown woman, with glistening, wiry hair cut short and worn like a tight black skullcap, and she stood with her hands at her sides, as if waiting for instructions.

Lyman put one hand on her shoulder and drew her forward. “Come meet young Mister Brown. This here’s my wife, Susan,” he announced to me.

“How… how do,” I stammered, for I was surprised by this information, that Lyman had a wife; in all our conversations, he hadn’t mentioned her, not even in passing. I hadn’t inquired into his marital state, but nevertheless it’s difficult to spend several days and nights with a person, as he had with me, and not mention a wife, if you have one, and consequently I had simply assumed that his silence on the subject, like mine, meant that he was unmarried. Now I found myself angry at him, as if he had deliberately deceived me.

“You never mentioned you were married,” I said to him.

Father, having heard me speak, turned and saw Lyman. “Ah, Mister Epps, there you are!” he said, and at once Lyman left me and, with his hand still on his wife’s shoulder, moved towards the Old Man, who swung down from his horse and shook hands with him and made a pleasant fuss over the woman — as I should have done.

I did follow the Old Man’s example of getting down from the wagon, though, and joined him as he spoke with Lyman and his wife. Father was gracious with her, as he always was with women; regardless of their race or station, he pointedly treated them as equal to himself. I myself was too shy to speak with any woman directly — except, of course, for my sisters and my stepmother, Mary. It was Mary whom Father was speaking of when I drew up to him. He was explaining that she was ill and needed more help with the household chores than could be provided by Ruth and the younger children.

“Since the birth of our infant who died this April past, my wife has been poorly!’ he said. “But not so poorly that she could not stand and work, until now. I believe, however, that if she is allowed to keep to her bed for a spell, she will recover.”

This was news to me, but Mary naturally did not confide in me, and I confess that I did not make a habit of observing her condition. I bore great good will towards the woman but could not help feeling somewhat distant from her, through no fault of her own, certainly. Unlike Ruth, Fred, Jason, and John, I had remained unable to shift my affections for our true mother over to my father’s wife.

“Would you be willing to work for me in the fields?” Father asked Lyman. “Susan I would also like to hire, to keep house and care for the smaller children. You could both put up at our place until the fall, eat at our table, and take a quarter-share in the harvest, so that you could then get your own farm off to a proper start next year.”

I touched Father’s sleeve with my hand. “We have barely enough room for ourselves, Father;’ I said in a low voice. “The boys and I can handle the planting and haying and the livestock ourselves. Ruth is capable of the rest, with the little ones to help her.”

Father gave me a hard look. “Owen,” was all he said. He resumed talking to Lyman and Susan, and I stalked off. I knew that Lyman and his wife would agree at once to come over and live with us. However crowded it was at our place, there would be more room for the couple there than in their shack here in Timbuctoo, and a quarter-share of our crop would probably be twice what the man could raise alone on his own land. At our table they would eat a full meal every day, which they surely never did at their own. Also, Lyman’s standing in the Negro community, which seemed to me on the low side, would rise considerably from his and his wife’s association with our family.

But I also knew what the Old Man was up to: if he was going to be of any use to these people, he needed to bring at least one of them into close affiliation with our family, a trusted and trusting person who would help him penetrate the community, to speak for him to the others and to inform him as to their thoughts and needs. It was how he always worked. Beyond surveying their land grants, beyond teaching the Negroes how to farm in this climate and on this stingy soil, Father wanted to set up an Underground Railroad station in North Elba, where there was none, at least no station with any known connections to the lines that ran to Canada along the New York side of the Champlain Valley. He intended to carry escaped slaves out of the South by way of the Adirondack mountain passes, a route that until now had been used only in isolated cases, when some poor soul somehow got off the main route by accident and slipped through the iron-mining camps on the south side of Tahawus and followed rumor north through Indian Pass to Timbuctoo and then, traveling alone and at great risk, worked his lonely way north and east to connect finally with the Lake Champlain line by means of the Quaker stationmasters in Port Kent and Plattsburgh.

In Father’s mind, the passes and ridges of the Adirondacks were the northernmost extension of the entire Appalachian Range, which ran all the way back through New York State to the Pennsylvania Alleghenies down into Virginia and on into the very center of the slaveholding region. His map of the Railroad was unlike anyone else’s — unlike Harriet Tubman’s, unlike Frederick Douglass’s, unlike the Quakers’. On Father’s map, the southernmost lines fed like taproots from the cotton plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia up into the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the main trunk line flowed north and east. It did not split one way towards Niagara and the other towards the Hudson Valley and Lake Champlain, as the other maps had it, but ran in a single line between the two into the rocky heart of the Adirondacks, straight to North Elba, where a long night’s ride could get you over the border into Canada.

Father spoke often and elaborately of this map, and to implement it, he needed Lyman Epps and his wife, Susan — because the Old Man worked his Railroad alone. He had always done it that way. Whether in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Springfield, Massachusetts, John Brown ran his own Underground Railroad line, and that obliged him to forge his own connections to the Negroes. Except for the members of his immediate family, Father did not trust white people, not even the lifelong radical abolitionists like himself, as much as he trusted black people. “In this work, it’s their lives that are at stake,” he often said. “Not ours. When it comes to a showdown, white people can always go home and pretend to read their Bibles, if they want. A black man will have to fire his gun. Who would you rather have at your side, a well-meaning white fellow who can cut and run if he wants, or a Negro man whose freedom is on the line?”

Later in the day, after Father had assured the community that they were the legal landholders in Timbuctoo and that he would return and commence his survey on the following day, we took our leave of the gloomy place. In order to prepare his next day’s work, he carried with him all such bills of sale and contracts and deeds as the landholders had in their possession — so greatly did the Negroes trust the Old Man that they willingly delivered up to him their only evidence of their rights to their land. Not that Father would ever betray them; they were right to trust him. But the effect Father had on Negroes was difficult to understand. Mostly I attributed it to the rage against slavery that he never ceased to express; although sometimes, when I was down on Father myself, I attributed it to the gullibility of the Negroes. The fact is, more than any other white man, Father consistently managed to make Negro people believe that their struggle against the evils of slavery and the daily pain and suffering imposed on them by racial prejudice were his as well, despite the fact that he was so often a white man in a preacher’s suit sitting up on a very tall horse.

Lyman and Susan, with a single sack of belongings and some shabby bedding and a corn mattress tied in a roll, accompanied us as passengers in the wagon. They sat in the box behind me, and I drove, silent and somber, and as before, the Old Man rode ahead on Adelphi. Every now and then he called back to Lyman and asked the name of a mountain or inquired as to the ownership of a particular stretch of roadside land, and Lyman always had a ready answer — whether it was the correct answer, I could not then say, but I did suspect that he was making them up to please and impress the Old Man. Later, to my ongoing chagrin, I learned, of course, that he had been accurate in every case. He knew the names of all the peaks in our sight, and he knew whose land was whose and the history and use of every landmark. I was behaving like a spurned lover, I knew, but could not help myself.

When we arrived back at the farm, Father presented Lyman and his wife to Mary, who still lay abed next to the stove, looking very ill, I finally realized. Her appearance frightened me — her skin was slack and chalky, her small, plain face was almost expressionless, and she moved and spoke slowly and with precision, as if she were in pain. Expressing pleasure to have Susan as a helpmate to Ruth, she welcomed the couple to the house. “There is not much room here, as you see, but the place is bright and airy,” she said to them in a weak voice.

“We will have to get along like Shakers,” Father declared. “Which means that Mister Epps will make his bed on the male side of the attic, and Missus Epps will sleep opposite with Ruth and the girls. I trust that won’t prove a difficult arrangement,” he said to Lyman, who glanced overhead towards the attic and smiled and said that it would be just fine. I do not know what his wife thought. They had given over their privacy, perhaps, but in exchange had received superior shelter. It was, as Father’s joke implied, more than a little like the exchange many people made in those days, when they gave up their houses and neighbors and moved in with the Shakers, whose roofs, like ours, did not leak and whose tables provided plenty of simple fare.

I touched Ruth’s arm and drew her with a signal to follow me outside. We passed around the corner of the house and made our way up the brushy slope in back, where we both sat on a broad, rough rock embedded in the hillside and looked out over the shake roof of the house to the forested plain and mountains beyond. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was sliding off to our right a ways, casting over us and the house and small barn long shadows from the pine trees that grew on the hillside behind us. In the meadow, in dappled sunlight, the Devon cattle were grazing, and the sheep were scattered up on the scrub-covered hillside beyond. In front of the house, where the boys were stacking firewood, Father’s horse and the other horse stood waiting to be watered and set loose to graze alongside the cattle.

It was a lovely scene, actually — a peaceful, orderly domicile and farm set down in the midst of splendid scenery, a kind of ideal farmstead. Yet, for all that, I saw it as a thrashing and violently upset scene, with its warring elements held in place almost against their nature, constrained and barely kept in check by a trembling willfulness. Father’s, I suppose, but, to a lesser degree, mine also.

Ruth seemed to sense the high degree of my agitation, and she stroked the back of my hand, as if to calm me. “What’s the trouble, Owen?” she asked. “Did something untoward happen today?”

“No, no, nothing. Although the place, Timbuctoo, was a disappointment to me,” I said and briefly described the sad state of the encampment.

She tried to comfort me by saying what I knew myself, that it could not be otherwise, for the poor folks who lived there owned few tools and no livestock to speak of, and, as Father had told us many times, they knew nothing of how to farm in this climate. I had always admired Ruth’s character and in some ways envied her, for she seemed to have no difficulty in making herself behave exactly as she should — the good daughter to Father, the loyal and loving stepdaughter to Mary, and, to me and all the others in our family, the perfect sister.

I, however, since earliest childhood, had struggled constantly with a rebellious spirit, my mind in a continuous state of disarray and brooding resentment, and so it seemed that I was forever being placed under the lash of self-chastizement and correction. Alone among my brothers and sisters, Ruth understood this about me and did not condemn me for it. I could never have confessed to John or Jason or even to poor Fred what I then confessed to her. “Oh, Ruth,” I blurted, “I want very much just to leave this place!”

“That’s a terrible wish,” she said in a hushed voice, as if I had blasphemed.

“It shouldn’t be.”

“But Father needs you, and Mother needs you.”

“She’s not our mother.”

“Yes, Owen, she is.”

“Not to me.”

“We have no other mother. And she’s ill and weak, and there’s so much to do here before we can call it a proper farm. And Father can’t do what he came here to do, unless he has your help.”

“I know all that. But I want to leave this place. I want to get away, that’s all. From everything. This farm, the Negroes, these mountains!” I said, waving my hand at the peaks in the distance, as if they were ugly to me. They weren’t ugly to me, but I was angry and confused — wrathful was what I was, for, uncertain as to the object of my anger, I was smearing it over everything in sight. “How can you do it, Ruth? Don’t you wish our life were different? Don’t you wish we could live normally someplace, like other people, in a town or even on a farm close to other farms? I want to live like the white people in Springfield, or even down there in Westport. This place is awilderness,”I said. “And there’s no one here for us to be with, except the Negroes. You should see their place, over in Timbuctoo!” I said, fairly spitting the name. “We’re not like them. And we’re not like the dumb, ignorant white farmers around here, either. We’re different than that fellow Mister Partridge back in Keene, or the squatters living around here trying to steal the land off the Negroes. We’re different. And alone.”

Ruth put her arm around me, and we were both silent, and after a moment, I managed to clear my mind somewhat and said to her, “I’m sorry, Ruth. I shouldn’t be like this with you.” She patted my hand sweetly, and we were silent for a moment more. “Tell me what’s wrong with Mary,”I said. “Is it something serious? She won’t die, will she?”

Ruth did not answer for a long time. Then she said, “No, I don’t think it’s serious. She has female problems, Owen. That’s all. From her lying-in last fall with the birth of Ellen, which hasn’t healed. She will heal, though, and be well again, but only if she keeps to her bed and rests. Father knows how she is and what’s wrong. He understands what she needs. By bringing in the colored woman, he’s protecting Mother against her own good nature and her need to be always at work. And with the woman to help, I’ll be able to do the rest. And with Mister Epps helping the boys run the farm, you’ll be free to work alongside Father and the Negroes. It’s only for a few months, Owen, and then our life will settle down again, I’m sure of it.”

“It’ll never settle down again!” I declared. “It’s never been settled! Not since our mother died have we been at peace in this family!”

“That’s not true, Owen.”

“Don’t you remember how it was before our mother died?”

“No,” she declared, and then abruptly she stood and said, “Come, I must get back to the house. I’ve got churning—”

“Wait a moment. Just let me tell you how it was then. Because it changed, Ruth, after she died. Believe me, it changed” I said.

“Owen, I know the story. You must settle your mind. You should pray, Owen, that’s what. You should pray for forgiveness, and to obtain peace of mind. You’re too much alone, the way you’ve fallen from belief. I can’t talk to you,” she said firmly, and moved off from the rock where I sat. “Only the Lord can give you what you need. I have to get back to the house,” she said, and she turned and left me.

I sat in the shade alone awhile then, remembering how it was when I entered the room and learned that my mother had died. I remembered the darkness that swirled like black smoke about my mother’s head as she disappeared into it and was gone. I recalled myself staring at the darkness. It had hardened into a flat black circle that was located in the exact center of my vision, as if a hole had been burned into the lenses of my eyes, and no matter where I looked, it was there, a wafer of darkness, with people and objects disappearing behind it as I turned my head from side to side. I carried that circle before me for many years, and when the hole in my lenses finally healed, there remained scars, opaque and whitened, which every now and then swam into my field of vision and again blocked out the world before me.

As on this late spring afternoon in North Elba, when I stumbled half-blind down from the meadow and entered the cabin, where Father and Lyman Epps and his wife, Susan, stood talking quietly with Mary, who lay abed on a pallet near the stove, while Ruth sat on a stool nearby, calmly churning butter.

I could not see Father at all, although I stared directly at his location and spoke directly to the spot where he stood. Father was in a circle of light, actually, situated somewhere behind it, as if occluded by a sun floating in the space between me and him, so that he was eclipsed by it. On the peripheries I saw Lyman, looking alarmed, and his wife, Susan, frightened also, by my wild visage, no doubt, and the words that splashed from my mouth.

“Father, I have to tell you something!” I began, and then I glimpsed Ruth looking up at me, dismayed, and Mary seeming bewildered and pained by the force of my entry, by the loud interruption of my ill-coordinated and off-balance body lurching through the portal as I broke into the placidity of the room, my voice loud and cracking as I spoke the words. “Father, you must let me leave! Father, I’m sorry… “ I began, and then I stopped myself. Struggling to make my desire to flee these mountains known to him in a coherent way, wanting merely his simple permission to go and live as I wished, I felt more like a child overwhelmed by a tantrum than a twenty-five-year-old man expressing his regret that he must disappoint his father in order to satisfy himself.

“You want to leave us?” Father said, pronouncing the words slowly, as if he barely understood them. “You want to fall away from your family and abandon the work we have come here to do? Just as you have fallen away from the Lord and His work?” He paused and drew his breath in through his teeth. “I love thee, Owen, and for just this reason I have prayed for thee ever since I first saw that you had moved so far from the Lord and His word and will. I knew that it would lead here, and that there would come a time when your duty would seem meaningless to you. So where do you wish to go, Owen?” His face, reddened and tight with anger, belied his calm words. His gray eyes had gone cold on me, and I felt an actual chill in my bones, as if a damp breeze had suddenly blown through the room.

“Am I not a man, Father? Am I not free to go where I wish and live as I wish?”

“I wouldn’t have you beside me or in my house, if you did not yourself choose to be there. Where do you wish to go, Owen?”

“Well, I want only to leave here. I… I’m not sure where I want to go to. Back to Springfield, I guess. To join John there, maybe. To help him, or find work on my own. I don’t know.”

“So it’s not that you’ve learned of someplace else, then, where you can do your duty to God and your fellow man more effectively than you can here. It’s merely that you’re loath to do it here. I say that you are behaving in a cowardly manner, Owen. Think like a slave, and you are one. A free man doesn’t flee his duty, unless he’s able to do it better someplace else. You disappoint me greatly, Owen,” he pronounced. “Springfield! What can you do in Springfield with regard to your duty, whether it’s your duty to your family or to your fellow man, that you can’t better do here? We have all pledged, every one of us, to bend our lives to overcoming the scourge of slavery. Some of us do it in order to do God’s work, and some others simply because they are human beings who are themselves diminished by the existence of slavery. But for all of us, it is our duty! We’ve all taken a pledge that, not kept, will betray, not only God and our fellow man and not only our family members, but ourselves! I can’t let you do that, Owen. Not without opposing you.

“I cannot—”

“Oh, stop! Father, stop, please!” I shouted, silencing him, sending him back behind the light of the sun. At the edges, I saw Lyman and Susan step away, as if about to flee. Mary had brought her hand to her mouth, and Ruth was rising from her stool, both of them looking at me as if my face were covered with blood. Which is indeed how I felt at that moment, as if my face were sheeted with a spill of blood. “I can’t go, Father! And I can’t stay! I can’t give myself over to the slaves, and I can’t leave them! I can’t pray, and yet I can’t cease trying to pray. I cannot believe in God, Father. But I can’t abandon my belief, either. What am I to do? Please, tell me. What am I to do?”

He reached out of the light then and placed both hands sweetly onto my shoulders and drew me to him in an embrace. “My poor boy,” he said in a voice almost a whisper. “My poor boy.”

My thoughts and feelings were a tangled mass of contradictions, but his embrace settled them at once and straightened them and laid them down side by side in my mind, like logs of different sizes and kinds placed parallel to one another. An unexpected, powerful wave of gratitude washed over me, when, suddenly, I became aware of a clattering noise, the sound of boots against the floor, the noise of several large people entering the dim room. I heard voices, Oliver’s and Salmon’s, and the voices of several men — strangers.

Quickly, I stepped back from Father and turned to see three men, accompanied eagerly by Oliver, Salmon, and Watson behind, all six of them making their way into the small room, the men with pack-baskets, their clothes mudded and swatched with briars and leaves, their dirty faces red and swollen from numerous insect bites. They looked embarrassed to have come in upon us so abruptly and made awkward moves to get back outside, bumping one another and the boys behind, so there was for a moment a burly congestion at the door.

Finally, one of the men, a tall, blond, bearded fellow, turned back to Father and smiled sheepishly and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but the lads said for us to come straight inside. Forgive our rudeness for not first announcing ourselves.”

Father moved straight to the man, and I found myself standing next to Lyman, who gently touched my arm with his fingertips in a gesture of affection. In a formal and dry tone, Father said to the blond man, “I am John Brown. This is my farm. How can I help you?”

The boys had removed themselves from the cabin, and the two other strangers had followed and now stood in the yard, while the one who had spoken faced Father from the portal. He was of middle-age, tall and athletic-looking, but clearly not a hunter or woodsman or farmer: his clothing, although filthy and matted with leaves and forest debris, was of too fine a cut, and his pack was a sportsman’s, not a hunter’s. I saw then that, despite his bright and polite manner, the man was sick with insect bites — his face, neck, and hands were puffed up like an adder. He and his companions appeared to have been stung a thousand times by mosquitoes and by the wretched clouds of black flies that populate the forests here. They swarm like a pestilence and are so numerous as to madden and blind a deer and drive it into the water and cause it to drown. If you don’t cover your skin with grease or carry a smutch, they can cloud out the light of day, fill your nostrils and ears, and swell up the flesh of your face until your eyes are forced shut.

The man then introduced himself as Mr. Richard Henry Dana, Esquire, of Boston. His companions, who had slouched to the ground next to the house in apparent exhaustion, were a Mr. Metcalf and a Mr. Aikens, also of Boston, and all three, he said, were lawyers out on a wilderness holiday. They had come up from Westport, had passed several days visiting the mining village of Tahawus, on the further side of Indian Pass, had ascended Mount Tahawus with a guide from the village, and then had struck out for North Elba on their own, anticipating a hike of some six or eight hours. But they had lost the blazes of the trail, he explained, and had wandered through the thick, tangled forests for two days with nothing for nourishment but a single trout caught with a bent pin and piece of red flannel by Mr. Aikens. “He thinks of himself as something of a woodsman,” Mr. Dana said with a winning smile. Their one fire had been doused by rain, and the black flies had plagued them throughout their ordeal.

“We ask you to spare us a little food, if you can,” Mr. Dana said to Father. “And allow us to sleep overnight here on the ground. And perhaps you’ll direct us on to North Elba and Osgood’s Tavern in the morning, where we’ve been expected for two days now.”

Calmly, Father directed Ruth to bring the men water and a pitcher of milk and some corn bread and to feed them slowly, so they wouldn’t vomit it up. “We’ll give you a proper meal later, when we all sit down for supper, but that should ease you somewhat now,” he said, and he escorted the men outside, led the three of them around to the shaded side of the house, and bade them lie down there, while Ruth brought them nourishment and a salve for their insect bites. He told Watson to bring the men a smutch against the flies and instructed the rest of us to attend to our labors — it was time to bring in the cattle and sheep. There was work to be done, putting up the livestock and milking the cows and building the cookfire in the stove, hauling water from the spring, bringing up a string of trout from the river below, brushing down the horses for the night — the daily round of work that we all fell to without a thought, as natural a part of our lives as breathing in and out.

The storm in my breast and mind had passed. But I knew that it would return. I knew also that it had weakened me so greatly that when it did return, I would be even more dangerously tossed about than I had been today. I did not know what would bring it on — a cross word from Lyman, a disappointment concerning the work with the Negroes, a further decline in Mary’s health, or an incomprehensible command from Father — but any one of these alone might be sufficient to set me off again. I was, during those first few weeks at North Elba, precariously balanced between opposing commitments which were set to create the shape of the rest of my life, and I knew that not to choose between them would lead me inescapably to a resolution that expressed, not my will, but Father’s.

Mr. Dana was, of course, the world-famous author, who, many years later, after Father’s execution had made him world-famous as well, published a detailed account of his fortunate meeting with us that day at the edge of the wilderness. He described Ruth very nicely as “a bonny, buxom young woman of some twenty summers, with fair skin and red hair,” and he praised her “good humor, hearty kindness, good sense, and helpfulness.” He was complimentary also to Mary. And even to me, whom he remembered as “a full-sized red-haired son, who seemed to be foreman of the farm.” Father he got right, and he even mentioned Lyman and his wife, Susan, exclaiming over the fact that they sat with us at table that night and were introduced by Father to Mr. Dana and his companions properly and formally, with the prefixes Mr. and Mrs. Naturally, at the time of his visit we did not know who he was. Nor did he know who we were. To us, he and his companions were merely a set of pathetic city folks lost three days in the woods. To him, we were a farm family settled in the wilderness, wholly admirable, exemplary even — an ideal American family of Christian yeomen. In his innocent eyes, we were bred to duty and principle, and held to them, he wrote, by a power recognized by all as coming directly from above.

Chapter 7

Here, Miss Mayo, let me tell you a story, a true story, one of the very few ever told of the Underground Railroad, for, as you must know by now, as soon as the Civil War began, the Underground Railroad was seen strictly as a preamble, and a secret one at that. Its history, its true story, got lost, forgotten, dismissed, even by those whose lives were shaped by it, saved by it, sacrificed for it.

But that’s not what I’m intent on setting down here today, a lament or complaint. I merely want to tell you a small story, but one that will flower and grow large with meaning later on, when you see it in the context of the larger story, Father’s, not mine. Anyhow, let me commence. In the weeks that followed upon the events which I recently described to you, we Browns did indeed settle into a life at the farm that corresponded to the author Mr. Dana’s somewhat fantastical view of us as exemplary American yeomen.

Father and I divided the large attic into two chambers with sawn boards, and with rocks taken from the brooks below the house, we constructed a second fireplace, so that in short order we had a proper farmhouse with a kitchen and eating room, where Father and Mary slept, and a proper parlor downstairs, and two sleeping chambers upstairs for the rest of us. We rebuilt the old privy and repaired and enlarged the crumbling barn and sheds so that we could adequately shelter our animals and store the hay and corn when they came in and firewood for the winter. The boys spent most of their time clearing trees and extending our fields on both sides of the narrow road that passed by the house, cutting and burning the stumps and then planting vegetables in the burned-over ground, like Indians fertilizing the corn, potatoes, turnips, and other root crops with fish that they pulled in great numbers from the streams that churned in those early days with thick schools of silvery trout. Lyman, who was not especially skilled as a woodcutter or farmer, but who had clever hands nonetheless, took to manufacturing and repairing tools and harness for the farm: he constructed a fine chestnut harrow to follow the plow and an iron-railed sledge for hauling logs out of the deep woods, and he and the Old Man set up a small tannery in one of the sheds and commenced to tan the hides of the deer we shot and salted, and soon the women, Mary, Ruth, and Susan, were at work manufacturing shoes and leather aprons and other items of clothing to protect us against the elements.

Every morning, before beginning our day’s labor, we gathered together in the parlor for prayers and Father’s brief sermon, and even though I had grown long used to these solemn services, they nevertheless uplifted me, as I believe they did the others, and made the day’s work easier, for despite my unbelief, the services connected our labor to something larger than ourselves and our petty daily needs. Father’s intention, I am sure, was precisely that — to lead us to understand our woodcutting and plowing and constant care of animals, the day-long manufacture of our meals and the permanent ongoing repair of our tools and equipment, and our endless preparation for the long winter, such that we would believe that we were participating in a great cycle of life, as if we were tiny arcs of an enormous curve, a universal template that began with birth and ended with death and which, if participated in fully and without shirking, would lead us to a second and still larger cycle of rebirth and regeneration, to an infinite spiral, as it were. Thus, as the fields were prepared and sown, so too were our inner lives being prepared and sown, and as our land and our livestock grew fruitful and multiplied, so did our spirits blossom and bear fruit, and as we dried and salted and stored our food and supplies in sawdust and hay for winter, so would our spirits and minds be prepared to endure the inescapable suffering and deaths of our loved ones, which would come to us as inevitably as the freezing winds and the deep, drifting snows of winter.

But in those warm days of spring and early summer, as we settled into our farm, the tumult that habitually inhabited my own mind was eased somewhat, and my earlier turbulence and confusion seemed almost to have occurred in the mind of another man than myself, some fellow younger than I, whose wrathfulness and turmoil had kept him from appreciating the singular beauty of the place and the pleasures of hard work well done and the company of a large, skilled, and cheerfully employed family. Towards Lyman I felt a renewed sense of comradeships as if he were a brother, kin. and despite his having a wife, a woman whom I grew quickly fond of, for her sober wit and decorum. My squallish feelings of before appeared to wane and then to blow away like clouds off the mountains that daily stood before us in their forested summer majesty — great, green pillars holding up the sky — cloudsplitters, indeed.

As he had promised, the Old Man right away took himself off from the farm and began his survey of the lands granted by Mr. Gerrit Smith to the Negroes, assisted sometimes by me or Lyman, but increasingly accompanied by the sturdy, bearded fellow we had met on our first visit to Timbuctoo, a man who, as it turned out, was their unofficial chieftain and an altogether admirable gentleman. Elden Fleete was a freedman from Brooklyn, New York, a self-educated, somewhat bookish man whose mouth, like Father’s, was full of quotations from the Bible, but also from the plays of Shakespeare and authors of antiquity. He had been a printer and for many years had edited and published an abolitionist newspaper called The Gileadite, which circulated mainly among Negroes in Brooklyn and New York City and was little known elsewhere. Although to my mind it compared favorably to the better-known newspapers, such as The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison — who, as I am well aware, is your Professor Oswald Garrison Villard’s distinguished, and no doubt much admired, late grandfather. In my praise of Mr. Fleete’s little paper, I mean no criticism of your colleague’s ancestor.

Mr. Fleete, despite his bookishness, was a humorous, energetic man of high ideals who had come to Timbuctoo not so much to own land and farm it as to help in the creation of an autonomous African community in the mountains of North America. He had come here strictly in order to establish a precedent and model for what he hoped would someday be a separate nation of Negro freedmen on the North American continent. In those early days before the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, before it had become inescapably clear to everyone that the slavers had taken over every branch of the government of the United States, abolitionists black and white were much divided over how to deal with the fact that there were more than three million people of African descent living in the United States. Regardless of how, or even whether, slavery was banished from the land, so long as most whites regarded them as inferior, these millions would remain here a despised, abject race incapable of rising to the level of white people. Certain Negroes, like Frederick Douglass, for example, and a few whites, like Father, persisted in believing that white people could eventually learn to regard Negroes as their equals; others thought that the only solution to the problem was to force all three million American Negroes to return to Africa; and there were numerous positions between these two extremes. Mr. Fleete was among a small minority of black abolitionists who hoped that the United States government would establish in the western territories a separate state for Negro freedmen, and he had been calling for this in the pages of The Gileadite. The state would be named Gilead and would be ruled by a legislature and a governor elected by its citizenry. Its people would be no more answerable to the government of the United States than were the citizens of France or England. He had even written a constitution for his nation of Gileadites, which was modeled closely on the Constitution of the United States, except, of course, for the provisions therein designed to advance and support chattel slavery.

Father thought the notion of Gilead the height of absurdity and said so, frequently and loud, but he had high regard for Mr. Fleete’s general intelligence and character, and as he was a man much admired by the other Negroes of Timbuctoo, the Old Man befriended him and worked easily with him in the several areas where they found agreement. They both recognized the need to make a proper survey of the freedmen’s lands, they both felt the urgency of teaching the residents of Timbuctoo how best to survive as independent farmers and stockmen in this climate, and they agreed on the usefulness of establishing Timbuctoo as an actively operating station on the Underground Railroad.

They knew that the routes in the east along the Hudson and Champlain Valleys and in the west into Ontario by way of Niagara and Detroit were becoming increasingly dangerous in those years and subject to betrayal and savage attack by pro-slavery people residing along the lines and by kidnappers hired by Southern slaveholders. “The fact is, we’ve got to head up into the hills and move across the ridges and peaks where we cannot be pursued,” the Old Man had decided way back in Springfield. Also, he had long wished anyhow to establish an escape route for the slaves which would be protected, not by well-meaning whites, but by heavily armed black men: he believed that only when the Negroes themselves were able to threaten the slavers with deadly force would the cost of the “peculiar institution” become so great as to crumble of its own weight. It was from these residents of Timbuctoo that he believed he would draw his initial cadre of armed black men.

Thus, with Mr. Fleete at his side, as soon as his surveys were finished and the deeds registered at the county courthouse in Elizabethtown, Father at the first opportunity hiked the long way south to Indian Pass, crossing through the tangled forests where Mr. Dana, the author, and his Boston companions had gotten lost, on to the tiny village of Tahawus, which had been settled some years earlier for the purposes of mining iron ore from the red cliffs there. In that isolated place, living amongst a population of mostly Irish miners and their Yankee supervisors, was a family named Wilkinson, people known to Father and Mr. Fleete as dedicated and trustworthy abolitionists, who in the recent past had hidden an occasional escaped slave in their storage cellar or barn until such time as he or, as was sometimes the case, she could be passed along or directed northward through the forests to North Elba and thence on to Canada.

The head of the household, Mr. Jonas Wilkinson, in his capacity of engineer and geologist, had previously worked for Gerrit Smith on certain of his enterprises in the western section of the state of New York, having to do with the construction of canals, and it was through Mr. Smith that Father had first come to know of him. Mr. Fleete, of course, knew him strictly through his benevolence towards the occasional escaped slave who passed through Tahawus and on to Timbuctoo.

The two, Mr. Fleete and Father, arranged to have Mr. Wilkinson notify them whenever “cargo” sent from the South for trans-shipment north arrived at his home. He was to send one of his sons through the forest to our place, and then Father and I, Mr. Fleete and Lyman Epps, carrying rifles as if on a hunt, would go back with the boy, retrieve the cargo, and under cover of darkness transport it back to North Elba, where, as soon as possible, we would move it north by wagon to the next trans-shipping point, which at that time was Port Kent on Lake Champlain, a mere forty miles south of the Canadian border.

By means of carefully worded letters to Mr. Smith at his home in Walpole, New York, and to Frederick Douglass over in Rochester, the Old Man alerted many of the agents, conductors, and stationmasters in downstate New York and Pennsylvania and even as far south as Maryland that there was now an effectively manned link in the Underground Railroad that ran right up the center of New York State straight into the mountainous wilderness of the north, If we utilize this route, he wrote to Messrs. Smith and Douglass in a pair of letters which he asked me one evening to transcribe for him, there is unlikely to be any interference with our shipments from those parties who remain hostile to our interests. It is my fond hope that in time this route can be extended southward through the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains and that we will have reliable trans-shipping agents and conductors posted all the way to New Orleans. In a postscript, Father had me add, I myself must first interview all who wish to join this enterprise, for, as you know, the strength of any chain is determined by its weakest link.

Cautiously, I pointed out to him that it might prove impossible to interview the agents and conductors, except for Mr. Wilkinson in Tahawus and the fellow in Port Kent, known to us only by name and reputation: Mr. Solomon Keifer was a Quaker shipwright originally from Rhode Island, who for several years had been moving fugitive slaves north by boat. Father’s insistence on controlling every aspect of the operation, I feared, would doom it, as it had doomed similar ventures before.

But he would hear none of it. “If a thing can’t be done right, then it’s not worth doing,” he said. “It’s the Lord whose work this is, Owen, not Mister Douglass’s or Mister Smith’s. I trust only in the Lord. And in myself, who serves Him.”

If this venture failed, it would not be because Father hadn’t done his utmost to get the job done right. No, he declared, he would interview and appoint every man who wished to act as an agent or conductor for us. No exceptions. And if that meant we could not extend our line and station now to those already in existence among the slaves in the Southern states, well, then, so be it. We would find another way to siphon off the human chattel from the plantations, another way to bring about the collapse of that satanic institution. “We will triumph in the end,” he insisted. “But the end may be much further off than we realize, and when it comes, it may appear in terms that we cannot now imagine. In the meantime, Owen, we must trust our principles large and small, for the end is always and forever the Lord’s, and thus will take care of itself, with or without us.”

Who could argue with him? Certainly not I — who at that age had too little experience of the world, of the Lord’s will, and of slavery to know that he was wrong, and too little command of language and the forms of reasoning to name and rebut his fallacies. I was not altogether a passive or unquestioningly obedient son, but I was aware of my own limitations and so allowed him to rule me, in spite of our frequent disagreements and disputes.

Late one bright afternoon in early June, Mr. Wilkinson’s young son, Daniel, a boy about the age of Watson, fourteen or fifteen, appeared at our farm bearing the information that cargo had arrived in Tahawus, trans-shipped from the town of New Trenton in Oneida County. Mary, who was beginning by then to recover from her malady, although she was not yet able to take on any of the heavy household duties, welcomed the boy in and gave him something to eat. Meanwhile, Oliver chased down Father, who was off in Timbuctoo helping to raise a barn, and Salmon came for me, who that afternoon had gone with Watson to build an Indian-style fishing weir on the tableland below, where the west branch of the Au Sable passed through a rocky gorge on a corner of our land. Lyman remained waiting at the farm, where he had been constructing a small forge for smithing next to the tannery that he and Father had built.

It was nearly dusk before we all — Father, me, Lyman, and Mr. Fleete — forgathered at the house and then with considerable excitement struck out with the Wilkinson lad for Tahawus, a good eight hours’ hike away. The boy was intelligent and articulate and proud to have been given such a heavy responsibility, and as we walked rapidly along, he conveyed his father’s message to us in bits, barely restraining his pleasure. He told us that a Negro man and his wife, both in a somewhat debilitated condition, had arrived the previous night. They had been forwarded by Mr. Frederick Douglass himself and had come mostly under cover of night alone from Utica, along cart tracks and footpaths through the woods all the way to the Wilkinsons’ house. They were from Richmond, Virginia, and had run off a fancy James River estate, had nearly been caught twice and were terrified of being returned to their owner, who they believed would separate them by selling the man off as a field hand to Alabama, where their owner had interests in a cotton plantation. They were a well-spoken couple, he said, and claimed they could read and write. And there was a considerable reward for their return, he added as a warning, for he knew that this fact increased the danger of transporting them.

I believe that this was the first time that young Daniel had been personally involved with helping slaves to escape, and the thing was for him a considerable adventure. For Father and me, of course, it was a welcome resumption of the activity that had given us so much extreme satisfaction back in Ohio and Pennsylvania, when we used to take off into the hills of Virginia and Maryland or drive down along the Ohio River with John and Jason and be gone from home for days transporting whole wagonloads of escaped slaves north to Canada, traveling at night and hiding out in the barns of Quakers and other sympathizers or camping in the deep woods during the daylight hours. We had not been able to participate in this activity since Father’s removal east to Springfield, partially because there was in Springfield an already functioning network of abolitionist transporters who were white and with whom Father would not cooperate, and also because, with all the demands of the woolen business there, he simply could not take off and turn day into night carrying Negroes under tarpaulins in the back of a wagon racing down country roads. Also, in Springfield, there had been other venues available to his activism.

For Mr. Fleete, this was a great opportunity; without the material support and protection of the Old Man, he had up to now been limited to only the most passive of roles in aiding the escapes of his enslaved brethren. Lyman Epps, like almost every freedman in those days, wished to work on the Underground Railroad, but he also had a young man’s natural desire to test himself under fire. As it was highly unlikely that we would meet up with a bounty-hunting slave-catcher and be obliged to defend our cargo against seizure or that we would be seriously opposed by any local people up here in the mountains, this was a perfect opportunity for Lyman to do both without risking much. In those years, most of the settlers in the Adirondacks were New Englanders, people who, even if not wholly sympathetic with the work being done by the radical abolitionists, were nonetheless unwilling to obstruct it, so long as they themselves were not put in physical or legal danger. They did not like Negroes, but they did not especially want to help those who enslaved them. If others wished to move them through to Canada, fine, they would not interfere. Even so, we had to be prepared for any emergency, and thus we marched on to Tahawus under cover of darkness, and armed.

In the weeks since we first arrived and took up residence there, we had grown increasingly familiar with the forest pathways that linked the various Adirondack settlements, so that now, even at night, we were in no great danger of getting lost, especially since there was a bright, nearly full moon floating overhead. Most of the footpaths we used had been deer tracks laid down in ancient times in the narrow valleys and defiles and along the connecting ridges, followed later by the Algonquin and Iroquois Indians, who never settled here but for hundreds of years had fought each other for control of the region as a hunting preserve. Once you had in your mind a map of the land and understood the logic of its topography, you could pretty well predict where the path from one place to another would be found. In our first weeks in North Elba, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I had explored all the woods for several miles around the farm and Timbuctoo and felt as much at home there now as we had back in the neat villages and cultivated fields of Ohio. Wed even taken to racing one another after work up several of the nearby mountains and back to the house before supper, vying amongst us to find the quickest route up and down Pitch-off or Sentinel. Mr. Fleete and Lyman, of course, knew the woods intimately, for they had resided there for nearly three years by then, and Father’s recent tramping over thousands of acres of field and forest with his surveying instruments had given him a refined intelligence concerning the neighborhood. When a place enters your daily life, you quickly lose your fear of it, and I almost had to laugh at my first awestruck, fearful impressions of these forested mountains and valleys barely a month earlier, when we came up from Elizabethtown and Keene.

It was nearly dawn, and the moon had long since set behind us, when we finally exited from the woods south of Indian Pass and approached the mines and furnaces of Tahawus and the settlement that surrounded them. We were making our way down a long, rock-strewn slope that appeared to have been burned clear in recent years.

Hovering over the marshes and stream below us, a pale haze reflected back the morning light, with the dark, pointed tips of tall pines poking through. The village was an encampment, made up mostly of shanties for the Irish miners which, in their sad disarray and impoverishment, reminded me of the shanties of Timbuctoo, and as we passed by, we could see the miners emerging from their cold, damp hovels — gaunt, grim, gray-faced men and boys rising to begin their long day’s work in the darkness of the earth. Behind them, standing at the door or hauling water or building an outdoor cookfire, were their brittle-looking women, downtrodden creatures in shabby sack frocks who looked too old to have given birth to the babies they carried on their bony hips.

They barely looked up at us as we passed, so borne down by their labors were they. We fell silent, as if out of respect — two white men and two black men carrying rifles come from the woods, led by the son of the company superintendent. As we passed close to the open door of one of the shacks, Father touched the brim of his palm-leaf hat and nodded to a woman who stood there and seemed to be watching us, her round Irish face impassive, expressionless, all but dead to us. “Good morning, m’am,” Father said in a soft voice. She made no response. Her eyes were pale green and glowed coldly in the dim light of the dawn but seemed to see nothing. She looked like a woman who had been cast off and left like trash by an invading army.

The haze from the stream below had risen along the slope to the village, slowly enveloping it, erasing from our sight one by one the shanties and the poor, sullen souls who lived there, following us like a pale beast as we made our way along the muddy track that ran through the encampment. When we reached the further edge, we saw ahead of us, situated on a pleasant rise of land, a proper house with a porch and an attached barn, the home of the supervisor of the mines, Mr. Jonas Wilkinson. There I turned and, for an instant, looked back, and the miners’ camp was gone, swallowed by the fog.

Mr. Wilkinson told us, “They run off to a surprising degree, the Irish. Though they’ve got nothing to run to, except back to the wharfs of Boston or New York. A lot of them are sickly by the time they get here and end up buried in the field yonder. They’re a sad lot.” Mr. Wilkinson was a round, blotch-faced man with thinning black hair and a porous-looking red nose that suggested a long-indulged affection for alcohol. “Ignorant and quarrelsome and addicted to drink,” he said. “The females as much as the men. And you can’t do much to improve them. Although my wife and I have certainly given it a try, she by schooling the little ones and me by preaching every Sunday to them that will listen. But they breed faster than you can teach them, and when it comes to proper religion, Mister Brown, they’re practically pagans. Superstitious papists without a priest is what they are. I’ve about given up on ‘em and just try now to get as much work out of’em with as little expense as possible before they run off, or die.

“Sorry for sounding so harsh,” he said to Father, who sat on a straight chair and grimly regarded the floor. “But what you’ve got with these Irish is the dead ends of European peasantry. There’s little for them in this country. Little enough for them back there in their own country, I suppose,“he added, pulling on his chin. “Which, of course, is why they come over in the first place. For them, poor souls, I suppose it’s an improvement. They get to start their lives over.”

Father stood then and said to Mrs. Wilkinson, who was putting a substantial breakfast on the table for us, “M’am, if you don’t mind, I believe we’ll eat with the Negroes in the barn and then rest there until nightfall.”

“I sense that I’ve offended you, Mister Brown,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “No, sir. No, you haven’t,” the Old Man answered. “I am curious, though, as to your reasons for agreeing to aid us in our efforts to carry Negro slaves off to Canada, when you appear to have so little fellow-feeling for the poor indentured men and women in your charge here.”

“Ah!” Mr. Wilkinson said brightly — he’d heard this argument before and was prepared, even eager, to answer it. “Slavery is evil! That alone is reason enough for a Christian man to want to aid and abet you. But beyond that, slavery provides the Southerners with an unfair advantage in the labor market. No, sir, for the economic health of our nation, we all must do what we can to bring about the end of slave labor. And this is simply my small part, aiding you and your son and your Negro friends here, and your friend the famous Mister Douglass.”

He pointed out that every one of his Irish miners had freely contracted to work here, just as he himself had, and when their terms were over and they had met the requirements of their contracts, they were free to go. Indeed, many of them, he said, chose not to leave and continued on here in the mines. This was not slavery, he said, smiling broadly. “Your Negroes know the difference, I’m sure, if you and your son do not. Ask the Negroes which they would prefer. Slavery in the South, or working as a free man here in the iron mines of Tahawus?” He looked to Mr. Fleete and Lyman, as if for an answer, but they remained expressionless.

Father simply said, “I see. Well, I am grateful to you for your help and for your kindness to us. But I do think, all the same, that we’ll take ourselves to the barn now, for I wish to speak with our poor passengers out there, who are no doubt feeling anxious about their situation and require from us a bit of reassurance. They are, after all, in the hands of strangers and in a strange land.”

Eagerly, and evidently pleased that he had made himself understood if not admired, Mr. Wilkinson escorted us from the room, leading us through a narrow woodshed that connected to the barn. He said that he would send his wife along with our breakfast and pointed us towards the hayloft above, where we saw looking nervously down at us the faces of the man and woman who had been hidden there the previous night.

As soon as Mr. Wilkinson had left us, Mr. Fleete stepped forward in the dark room, smiled up at the young man and woman, and said his own name, then introduced Lyman Epps, Father, and me, in that order. “It’s safe to come down,” Mr. Fleete assured the fugitives. “Help them down,” he said to Lyman, who scrambled up the ladder and assisted first the woman and then the man in descending to the floor of the barn, where we all somberly shook hands. After weeks of running from the hounds of slavery, of trusting white and Negro strangers not to betray them, of hiding out in ditches and under bridges and trestles, of going days and nights without food or sleep, they were almost too tired to be frightened — but, nonetheless, their eyes darted warily from one of us to the other, for who knew, this could be no more than a white man’s clever trap.

Then suddenly, before anyone had a chance to speak and reassure them, Mrs. Wilkinson entered from the house, carrying a tray of corn bread and eggs and smoked pork and a pitcher of fresh milk. “I’ll be sure that no one disturbs you,” she said cheerfully, and headed back into the house.

Father looked at me, clear irritation on his face. “Disturb us?” he said in a low voice. “These Wilkinsons have it all wrong. They can’t be trusted.”

I knew that, as soon as we got back to North Elba, the Old Man would cut their link from the chain. And with no stationmaster to replace them, the line from the Deep South to here to Timbuctoo would be broken. Better, I thought, to let the Wilkinsons continue to have it all wrong and keep the Railroad running than to try to teach them what’s right by putting them off it.

We fell to devouring the food, all six of us — not, of course, until Father had said an eloquent, if somewhat lengthy, blessing. The fugitives, we quickly learned, were named Emma and James Cannon, and they could not have been older than twenty-one, which was unusual: most of the escaped slaves whom we had aided in the past had been closer to middle-age or else were small children in the company of one or both parents. Occasionally, a young man came through unattached — angry, scarred with old wounds, and still bleeding from new — a man defiant from youth, with a runaway cast of mind and a hundred lashes on his back to show for it. These two, however, were almost genteel in their ways, shy and decorous, the least likely type of slave to risk flight: one could say, if one did not regard the condition of slavery itself as pain beyond all sorrow, that they had not yet suffered enough to justify the hardship and chanciness of flight.

But the degradation and humiliation and the invasion and theft of a person’s soul made possible by the legal ownership of that person’s body can occur without leaving any visible scars on the body, and that is frequently what happened to the youngest and most delicate of enslaved women and men. As was, no doubt, the case with the man and woman before us, whose owner, they told us, had been powerful in the Virginia state legislature, a wealthy exporter of tobacco, and a partner in several vast Alabama cotton plantations. Emma Cannon had served as maid to her owner’s wife and had resided in their mansion; James Cannon had been a clerk in the tobacco warehouse.

This was briefly and indirectly the story they told, or, rather, it was what I deciphered of their hushed account, as they answered Mr. Fleete’s and Lyman’s polite questions, while Father and I sat back a ways and listened in silence. They had been married without their owner’s consent or knowledge, and when the slave-master had begun to express carnal desires towards the young woman, she and her new husband had decided to flee, for she would have had no alternative but to accede to her owner’s quickening advances. The reward for their capture was sufficiently large, one thousand five hundred dollars for the woman and one thousand for the man, that they had no choice but to flee straight through to Canada, avoiding wherever possible the more popular and well-known routes.

I thought, the woes of women always exceed those of the men who love them and are sworn to protect them and fail. I could not take my eyes from the tired, placid face of this gold-colored woman. With her head wrapped in a white bandana, she seemed to me wholly accepting of the chaos and danger that surrounded her here and that had pursued her and would follow her from here, and she seemed strangely beautiful for that. Especially when I compared her face to the darker face of her husband, who appeared more frightened than she, nervous and twitchy, a young man who was probably suffering serious regret for having fled the known world, even a precinct in hell, for these unknown forests of the far north.

Later, when Father entered the conversation and began interrogating the young man and woman with regard to the character and abilities of the numerous stationmasters and conductors who had brought them this far, I found myself a comfortable corner of the barn, spread some straw, and lay down. Soon I found myself falling into a sort of reverie. The images of women — white women and black, sick and dying or aged beyond their years — began to haunt me like ghosts, or more like furies, all of them enraged at me for having abandoned them to their terrible fates. It was not exactly dream, not exactly fantasy, either, and I might have dispelled it by simply standing up and crossing the large, dark room to where Father and the others sat. But instead I fairly well invited the figures straight into my mind: the sullen, pale face of the Irish woman with the morning mist rising around her — abandoned by me, who had barely looked behind when we passed; and the scared, bewildered face of the girl humiliated by me in the Springfield alley; and the vulnerable, exhausted, yet profoundly willful face of the woman here in the barn across from me — a man who could not save her, any more than her poor husband could, from the memories of enslavement and the brutal lust of the man who had owned her; and the face of my stepmother, Mary, who had married at the age of nineteen, inherited five of another woman’s children, then borne eleven more and seen six of those eleven die, four going in that terrible winter of ’43, the last dying in infancy only two months ago — and neither I nor their father could save a one of them. Then the faces of the women swirled and merged and became the face of my own mother, whom I would never see again, not on this earth and not in heaven, either, who was gone, simply that — gone from me and located nowhere else in this perversely cruel universe, which first gives us life amongst others and then takes the others off, one by one, until we are left alone, all of us, alone.

I lay on my side with my coat drawn over my head and squeezed my eyes shut. It has been this way for women and men and their children, I thought, for thousands of years, from tribal times till this modern age, and it will be this way forever. Was this, then, that great cycle of birth, life, and death which my father spoke of with such admiration and belief? The cycle of women, strange creatures, so like us men and yet so different from us, giving birth and watching helplessly as their children die, or dying themselves on the birthing bed, or, if not, then growing old too soon, while the sons who survive grow up to become the husbands, fathers, and brothers who exhaust themselves failing in the attempt to save them, and who then, having failed, spin the wheel again and impregnate them in the dark of night or on the back stairs or in the low attics of the servant quarters — was this Father’s great cycle of life?

The fugitives’ story had set my mind to working in this morbid way, despite my best attempts to think of other things, to think even of the mild adventure that we men of North Elba were set on. I knew the likely story, the tale of rape that the young woman across from me was not telling us, that she was perhaps not even telling her poor husband. I had heard that tale in many of its lurid forms over the years, and there was no reason to think that she, uniquely, had not been used by her owner to satisfy his sexual desires and that, risking death, she had not fled her owner more to save her husband than her own violated self. Her owner! After all these years of hearing it spoken, the word still had the power to shock and repel me. A human being actually owned another, he could use her in any way he wished, and he could sell her if he wished, as if she were an unwanted article of clothing. And he owned her husband as well — a fact that made of their pledge of themselves in marriage, one to the other, a dark joke, a sickening, cruel fancy.

I slept and woke and slept again, and when I woke a second time, seated on the floor next to me was Mr. Fleete, leaning against a post and smoking his pipe in a meditative way. I asked him, “Do you have a wife or children, Mister Fleete?”

“No. My wife is dead, Mister Brown. She died young. At about the age of that woman yonder. Died without children.”

“And you never thought to marry again?”

He sighed and studied the pipe in his brown hand. A silver strand of smoke curled upwards in the dim light towards the one small window high overhead. “Well, y’ know, I thought of it now and again, yes. Especially as regards children.”

“Do you think you will marry, then?”

“No, Mister Brown. The world does not need more children. And no woman needs me for a husband. The one who did,”he said, “is dead. But I’ll be seeing her again in the sweet bye an’ bye. Won’t I?” he added, and smiled lightly, as if he did not quite believe his own words.

“Yes,” I said, and turned away to sleep again, to dream the childhood faces of my sisters, Ruth and Annie and Sarah, each one exchanging her place with the others in my dream, as if the three were one and as if present were mingled with past. In the dream, I was their father, not their brother, yet I was myself and not Father. They were all, first one, then two, then three female children wailing in sorrow, and I was pacing hectically around them, like the blindfolded horse tied to the bark-crusher, marching in a fixed circle, while the three little girls stood crying in the center, lashed to the pole like witches condemned to be burned. I could not tell if I myself had tied them there or instead was marching in a circle around them to protect them from those who would place sticks at their feet and set them afire.

When I woke again, it was closer to midday, and a pillar of light fell straight down from the high window onto the board floor of the barn. I stood and walked across to where Lyman lay on his back atop a saddle blanket, staring at the distant ceiling, lost in thought. The others appeared to be asleep — except for Father, who sat on guard by the door, with his rifle across his knees. His eyes followed me, but his head did not move as I came and sat next to my friend.

“Lyman,” I said in a voice almost a whisper.

“Hello, Owen,” he said without looking at me.

“I want to ask you about your wife, Susan. Did you come out of slavery with her?”

“Susan?”

“I’m sorry. I know that I haven’t inquired much about her,” I said awkwardly. “She’s somewhat… shy.”

“So she is. But mainly amongst white folks.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Not your fault, Owen.”

“Well, did you?”

“What?”

“Come out of slavery together.”

“No. She come north alone. Come out from Charleston, stowed away on a timber boat and sneaked ashore in New Jersey. Down in Carolina, Susan was owned by a crazy man, and she’d a killed him if she hadn’t run off first.”

“You don’t have any children,” I said.

“No. No, we don’t. Susan has children, though. Three of them. They got sold off south, sent to Georgia someplace, she don’t know where.”

We were silent for a moment. Finally, I asked, “What about their father?”

“What about him?”

“Well, who was he?”

Lyman turned and looked at me, said nothing, and returned his gaze to the ceiling.

I stood then and went back to my corner, where I lay down on the floor and wrapped my coat around my head again as if to shut out the world and drifted back into a lurid sleep.

Later, to Father, I said, “Tell me about my grandmother. Your mother. Grandfather’s first wife. I know little more than her name, Ruth. And that she died young, when you were a boy.”

“Yes,” he said, and looked away from me. “And I loved my mother beyond measure. Her kindness and piety were great… greater than that of any person, man or woman, I have since known.”

“When she died, were you as bereft as I when my mother died?” “Yes, Owen. I surely was. Which is why I took such pity on you then, and why I feel that in many ways I understand you now somewhat better than I understand your older brothers, who suffered less. I was like you, I was barely eight years old, when my mother died. And when Father remarried, I found it difficult to make a place in my heart for my stepmother.”

“I’ve long since come to love Mary as my own mother,” I said to him.

He turned to me. “No, Owen,” he said. “You have not. Although I know you do love her. But it is your own true mother whom you still hold yourself for, as if awaiting her return. She won’t return, Owen. You’ll have to go to her. And if you believe you’re bound to be with her again in heaven, then you’ll be free to leave off this painful waiting and longing that keeps you from opening your heart to your stepmother, and to all other women as well.” He knew this, he said, because it had been a danger to him also, and if it had not been for his Christian faith, he would feel today as he had over forty years before, when his own mother died. “I cannot help you, son. Only the Lord can help you.”

I stood and walked away from him without saying anything more and returned to my place in the room.

Of the young man, James Cannon, I asked, “Do you have family in Canada who will help you settle there?”

He did not look at me when he spoke, but kept his large, wet eyes fixed before him, as if contemplating something that he could not share with me, a memory, a childhood fear or sorrow. “Family? No, not exactly, Mister Brown. But I ’spect folks will be there to help settle us. Leastways, so I hear. Mister Douglass done made the arrangements.”

“Everything will be different now, won’t it? Escaping from slavery is like a resurrection, isn’t it? A new life.”

Slowly, he turned his head and gazed wide-eyed at me, as if puzzled by my words. “More like birth, I’d say, Mister Brown. Resurrection is where you gets to be born again.”

“What is the name of the man who was your master?”

“His name? Name Samuel;’ he said. “Mister Samuel Cannon.”

“The same as yours.”

“Yes, Mister Brown, same as mine. Same as his father, too. Same as my mother.”

“So you were born a slave to Mister Samuel Cannon, and your mother was born his father’s slave?”

“Yes, Mister Brown. She surely wasn’t Mas’ Cannon’s wife.”

“Who was your father, then? What happened to him?”

He looked away from me again. “Don’t know. Long gone.”

Lyman watched me from a few feet away, listening. Mr. Fleete was asleep; across the room, still seated by the door with his rifle across his knees, Father lightly dozed. The woman, Emma Cannon, lay on her side next to her husband, with her back to us, and I could not see if she was asleep.

“Forgive me forasking,”I said in a low voice. “But your wife, Emma. Was her name also Cannon? I mean, before you married her?”

He was a young man, several years younger than I, but at that moment, when he turned his large, dark face towards me and for a few seconds studied my face, he appeared decades, epochs, whole long eons, older than I, and weary, endlessly weary, of my innocence. And when I saw his expression, it was as if in a single stroke I’d finally lost that punishing innocence, and I felt ashamed of my inquiry. I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked into your personal affairs. Forgive me, please.”

He must have despised me that afternoon, despised all us whites, the Wilkinsons and even Father and every one of the other, more or less well-intentioned, white conductors and stationmasters whose extended hands he and his wife had been obliged to grasp — hating us not in spite of our helping them to escape from slavery but because of it. In ways that were not true for Mr. Fleete and Lyman, we were unworthy of helping him and his young wife. And the terrible irony which trapped us all was that our very unworthiness was precisely the thing that obliged us to help them in the first place.

At nightfall, Mrs. Wilkinson brought food to us a second time, potatoes and a substantial leg of mutton, and when we had eaten, Mr. Wilkinson came and cheerfully bade us farewell and let us out of the barn by a back door, into the dark, adjacent woods. Making our way down towards the valley below the house, we kept to the birch trees, as Mr. Wilkinson had urged, so as not to be seen by the men returning to their hovels from the mines. For both good and bad reasons, although he did not detail them to us, Mr. Wilkinson did not want his Irish workers to know of his involvement with the Underground Railroad.

Hidden by the darkness, as we passed among the thick white trunks of the birch trees, we saw the miners. They were illuminated by the flickering light of the whale oil lanterns they carried — shadowy, slumped figures moving silently uphill. It was like a march of dead souls that we observed, and the image troubled me, and I found myself lingering behind the others, hanging back, fighting a strange impulse to leave the darkness and join them, to fall into line with the returning miners and merge my life with theirs.

Father grabbed at my sleeve. “Come, Owen,” he said. “I know what you feel, son. Come away. We cannot help them,” he said, and I turned reluctantly from them and followed my father and the four Negroes into the forest.

Shortly before dawn, we emerged from the deep pine woods on the road just below our farm, where Mr. Fleete parted from us to return to his cabin in Timbuctoo. He would not be joining us for the next stage of our journey, from North Elba to Port Kent, nor would Lyman, for our route would carry us through several villages and a generally more settled region than the wilderness of the pass between North Elba and Tahawus, and we did not want to attract undue attention to our wagon, as would surely occur if we were in the company of even one of “Gerrit Smith’s North Elba niggers,’ as the settlers of Timbuctoo were called by the local whites. While there were indeed a number of white abolitionists residing in the region, the Thompson family foremost among them, also the Nashes, the Edmondses, and some others, anti-Negro feeling was starting to run high here, amongst the small farmers in particular, who believed that, thanks to Mr. Smith’s land grants and now Father’s survey, the Negroes had obtained unfair access to the better part of the tablelands. This resentment fed on the usual racial prejudices of poor and ignorant white farmers and was fattened by the oily words of land speculators and politicians working to please the money-lenders. Father’s association with the Negroes was, of course, well known, and the several Sunday sermons that he had given at the invitation of Mr. Everett Thompson, who was a much-respected deacon in the North Elba Presbyterian Church, had enflamed many of the local people against us, and consequently we had begun appearing in public with Negroes whenever possible. “We must not act in the presence of our neighbors as men who are ashamed of doing the Lord’s work,” the Old Man had insisted, when I counseled caution. “We must force them to confront us, and from that they will in time confront their own consciences, so that when the spirit of the Lord enters them, they will know what is right and will act accordingly.”

But Father was no fool, and he knew that it would be dangerous all around to invite any such confrontation while transporting escaped slaves in our wagon, and thus he was obliged to dissuade both Mr. Fleete and Lyman from traveling on with us. Mr. Fleete seemed almost grateful to be let off from it, but Lyman was not. “You might wish I was along, Mister Brown, if some slave-catcher come upon you,” he said, as we walked along the road to our farm. The sun was rising full in our face, cracking the horizon just south of the notch. Father and Lyman marched in front, and Mr. and Mrs. Cannon and I came wearily along behind. The long hike through Indian Pass from Tahawus had taken several hours longer than the walk over the night before, as the fugitives were not shod as well as we and, despite the rigors of their flight, were not used to tramping at such length through rough terrain.

“You may be sure that Owen and I can ably defend our cargo, if need be,” Father said to Lyman. I myself was not so sure. At that time I had not yet fired my gun at another human being, and to my knowledge the Old Man hadn’t, either.

As we rounded the bend before our house, Father suddenly halted and drew back and hurried us all into the chokecherry bushes by the side of the road. He bade us get down out of sight and silenced us with the flat of his hand. “We have visitors,’ he whispered. “Two horses at the front of the house.”

There was a narrow gully that ran back from the road into a dense thicket of silver birch, and Father instructed the fugitives to hide there. “Do not move until one of us comes for you,” he instructed them, and at once the man and woman slipped away from us into the gully and out of sight. Then he, Lyman, and I approached the house.

There were two men lounging at the door, one of them known to us — Caleb Partridge from Keene. The other was a long, leathery fellow with a patchwork gray and black beard on his face and the squint and facial color of a man who spent most of his time outdoors, although the clothes he wore belied that — a brown suit and waistcoat and a tall black felt hat. He wore strapped to his waist, in stark contrast to his clothing, a holstered Colt Paterson, a five-shot revolver, the sort of sidearm one usually associated with a police officer or Pinkerton agent. He was a manhunter. The other fellow, Partridge, although unarmed, looked to be his assistant today, or perhaps his guide.

As we approached them, Partridge smiled. Watson and Salmon were just setting out the cattle and sheep to graze in the near meadow, and I saw Oliver in the distance behind the barn, carrying water and grain to the pigs and feed to the fowl. Annie and Sarah were at play with their husk dolls on a stump in the yard beside the house. Ruth and Mary and Lyman’s wife, Susan, were nowhere to be seen, probably inside preparing breakfast.

Father stopped a few feet before the visitors, who had gotten slowly to their feet. He cradled his old Pennsylvania rifle, the one with the maplewood stock, loosely in his arm and said, “Mister Partridge.”

“Good morning, Mister Brown. How d’ ye do? You’ve been off in Tahawus, your wife tells us.”

“Yes, we have. You will introduce your companion to me.”

“Been hunting, Mister Brown?” the man said. His teeth were rotted and stained with tobacco. “Looks like you come up empty.”

“I do not know you, sir,” Father said. At the sound of his voice, Ruth and Mary had come to the window and peered out at us. The boys had stopped their work and were watching us from a distance. Only the little girls went on as before, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary happening.

“Billingsly,” the man said. “Abraham Billingsly. Of Albany.”

“I take you to be a bounty-hunter, Mister Billingsly. A slave-catcher.”

“I am an agent. I am an agent hired to return lost or stolen property to its legal and rightful owner. I have a contract,” he added, patting his breast pocket.

“I do not permit slave-catchers to stand on my land, sir. Nor do I permit those who associate with slave-catchers to stand on my land,” Father said to Partridge. “You will both have to vacate these premises. Immediately.”

The tall stranger took a step forward and smiled and stopped, as Lyman and I moved to either side of Father and let our muskets be seen. In a sleepy drawl, the slave-catcher said, “I merely wanted to make some inquiries of you, Mister Brown. That’s all. Your niggers is safe enough. I already seen the wench inside. Her and this one with you, neither of them is lost or stolen, leastways not so far as I know. Matter of fact, your good neighbor here, Mister Partridge, he vouched for them himself. I don’t give no trouble to what you call ‘free’ niggers.”

“I’m running you off my property, sir!” Father declared. “Leave now, or we will shoot you dead!”

“No need to get upset!” Partridge said. “This here fellow come by my house yesterday and requested me to take him over here to North Elba. That’s all! He’s after some nigger couple from Virginia that’s killed a man down there and took off for Canada, pretending they was escaped slaves. They got a arrest warrant out for them.”

“He has a contract, not a warrant,” Father said.

The slave-catcher said, “I heard there was escaped slaves passing through here, Mister Brown, and that you might have something to do with handing them along. You and your family are well-known, Mister Brown. And I heard there was a nigger couple staying in your house. Seemed unusual, so I thought I’d just have me a look at them. I see now that they ain’t but field-niggers, though. The ones I’m looking for is a little yellow gal and dark-skinned boy about twenty years old. House niggers, Brown. Not flatfoot darkies like yours.”

Father then moved in close to both men, who were considerably taller than he and younger but who backed off from him, for he bore forward with singular purpose and barely contained fury. “I do not want to kill you in front of my wife and children,” Father said. “But by God, I will! Leave here at once!”

Partridge stepped quickly away and made for his horse. The slave-catcher followed behind with as much leisure as he dared show, and the two mounted their horses and backed them off towards the road.

“Aim your muskets, boys,” the Old Man said, and we raised our guns. I looked down the barrel at the head of the slave-catcher. It felt wonderfully clarifying.

“We’re leaving, Brown!” Partridge cried, and he put his horse on the road and kicked it into a gallop and disappeared around the bend.

For a few seconds, the other man remained and stared hard at Father, as if memorizing his face. “Brown,” he said, “if you try to move the two niggers I’m looking for, I’ll have to take them from you.” Then he turned his horse’s head and rode it slowly from the yard and down the road towards North Elba, passing within twenty feet of the man and woman he wished to capture and return to slavery.

We lowered our guns, and the family, including Susan, came and surrounded us, fearful, but relieved, and also proud of us. My ears were buzzing, and my heart pounded heavily, and I barely knew where I was or who was with me. Mary was telling Father that the men had arrived the previous evening and had interrogated Susan and had poked through all the outbuildings and rooms of the house. Mary had expected them to leave then, which was her reason for allowing them to examine the place so thoroughly. She said, “I’d have turned them away at once, but they insisted on waiting for your return and asked to sleep in the barn. We felt like prisoners, but I couldn’t very well refuse them. I’d have sent one of the boys to warn you if we’d known where you were likeliest to come out of the forest to the road. I’m sure they believed you’d come walking in all unawares with the very couple they were seeking,” she said.

“And we would have,” said Father. “But for their horses, which I spotted in time.”

“That was my doing!” Watson piped. “They had their horses in the barn, so’s to hide them from you. But when we went out at sunup to put out the stock, we first brought their horses out, as if doing them a kindness, which they couldn’t very well object to.”

Father complimented Watson for his cleverness, and then he declared that we must give thanks to the Lord. Following his example, we all lowered our heads there in the bright, sun-filled yard before the open door of our house, and Father commenced to pray with more than his usual fervor. I felt a noticeable relief and, momentarily, a genuine uplifting of my spirit from the experience — not so much from Father’s address to the Lord, however, as from standing in the sunlight in a closed circle with my beloved family and our friends Lyman and Susan. There were yellow butterflies all around, a cloud of them in the sunlight, swirling in a spiral, like a beneficent whirlwind.

A few moments later, Watson and I walked back down the road, past the gully where we had hidden Mr. and Mrs. Cannon, to examine the tracks of Partridge and the slave-catcher Billingsly, so as to be certain they had indeed gone. Then we returned and went into the thicket and retrieved the frightened young couple from their hiding place and brought them to the house, where they were fed and hidden for the day in our attic, and as soon as the morning chores were finished, Father, Lyman, and I planned on joining them there, to sleep until dark.

Thanks to our encounter with Mr. Billingsly and his threats, Father had changed his mind and had decided to allow Lyman to accompany us to Port Kent. “I was glad to have him standing with us this morning,” he said to me, as we moved through the flock of sheep, separating the first of our pregnant ewes from the others. “At times, I admit, the man seems light-headed, but when it counts, he’s firm. I believe he has the courage to shoot a man.”

I asked Father, “What do you think about what Mister Partridge said? About the Virginia couple. That they killed a man. He meant their owner, I suppose.”

“Perhaps they did kill the man. Their owner. I certainly hope so,” he said, his mouth like a crack in a rock. Gently holding one of the pregnant ewes, he examined it for disease, poking through the fleece, comforting the animal while he expertly parted the fleece with his fingertips. “Billingsly is a bounty-hunter, not a marshal. And as soon as Partridge shows him the way to Timbuctoo, he’ll be cut loose, so as not to get any share in the reward. And I don’t think Billingsly will dare go up against us alone,” he said. Then he added, “Even so, just in case, we’ll be better armed with Lyman along than we would without him.”

When I awoke, it was not yet dark, but then, peering out the small attic window, I saw that Father and Lyman were outside, hitching the team to the wagon. Even in his fifties, the Old Man had physical energy exceeding mine and that of most young men; he required little more than four or five hours’ sleep for a long day’s or night’s work, and when he worked, day or night, he seldom stopped to rest. To my surprise, Lyman, from his first arrival at our house, seemed naturally to keep pace with the Old Man, which I admired and somewhat envied, for it made me feel lazy by contrast and ashamed, although neither of them was thoughtless enough to comment on my need for a normal portion of sleep or to upbraid me for slothfulness, except as a light, affectionate tease.

I hurried down the ladder to the kitchen, where our cargo, Mr. and Mrs. Cannon, freshly washed and for the first time looking unfrightened, were seated at the table with Mary, Ruth, Susan, and several of the children, cheerfully at play with a string game apparently taught them by Mrs. Cannon. I cut myself a large slice of bread and ate and silently watched, until Father came inside and gave us the order to depart. We escorted Mr. and Mrs. Cannon outside and placed them and their bundles and a basket of food for our journey into the back of the wagon, where the couple arranged themselves atop the several fleeces and tanned deerhides and pelts that Father had packed there. These he planned to sell in Port Kent, our ostensible reason for traveling to the town. Then, rifle in hand, Lyman climbed into the box, and Father covered the box and all its contents with a canvas sheet, which he drew tight and tied with the children’s cord. I climbed up and took the reins. Father, holding both our rifles, joined me there, and with a somber wave goodbye to the family gathered by the doorway, we departed.

We saw no one along the road to North Elba until we reached the Thompson farm, where Mr. Thompson and several of his sons were crossing the road with their cows, bringing them into the barn for milking, and we were forced to stop. Mr. Thompson hailed us and walked over, while his boys moved the cattle. Of all the white people in the region, he was probably our closest friend and associate. A fervent anti-slavery man, father of a brood of sons more numerous than our own, and a skilled farmer and carpenter, he was the only local man towards whom Father’s admiration went without serious provisos attached. He was tall and bulky, built like a cider barrel, and, although red-faced and high-spirited, was deeply religious and, like Father, a temperance man. I liked him for his humorous ways and the ease with which he commanded his phalanx of sons, whose ages corresponded fairly closely to ours. Although the eldest, Henry, was nearly my age, there were still babies being born annually in the Thompson house, one male child after another, numbering now sixteen. Mr. Thompson’s wife, the woman who had produced this brood, was large and cheerful, not unlike her husband, and it was perhaps only in hopes of at last bearing a daughter that she continued to allow herself to become pregnant, for she was nearing middle-age and the natural end of her child-bearing years.

Father raised his hand in greeting and touched the rim of his right ear, the common signal for conductors. Mr. Thompson gave the countersign and touched his ear also. “I saw that fellow Partridge from Keene this morning,” he said to us.

“Yes,” Father answered. “He and his friend, a man named Billingsly, they paid us a visit as well.”

Mr. Thompson took a long look at the wagon box. “Do you need help?”

“No.”

“Partridge and the bounty-hunter went on to the Negro settlement. You know, John, there’s plenty of folks hereabouts, folks like Partridge, who’d happily give aid and comfort to a slave-catcher for the beauty of a dollar or two.”

“Where might he light?” Father asked.

“Anybody local would tell the man to wait out to Wilmington Notch. So if I was you, I’d keep moving and moving fast when I got to the notch. It’ll be dark by then.”

“Thank you kindly,” Father said.

Mr. Thompson nodded and stepped aside. His cows had crossed the road and were making their slow way towards his barn. The sun had nearly set over the wooded hills west of Whiteface, and wide plum-colored streaks were spreading across the pale yellow sky. I snapped the reins, and we moved on towards the road that led out of North Elba and passed along the West Branch of the Au Sable, across the flat, marshy grasslands to where the river turned northeast.

Soon it was dark, with the nearly full moon flashing intermittently on our right behind the black silhouettes of the trees. Whiteface towered on our left, its long, pale scars brightly illuminated by the moonlight, and below us the glittering river, making a great noise, narrowed and passed over rocks and cascades as the mountains on either side converged at the notch. For several miles here the road was barely wide enough for a single wagon. On one side the land fell off precipitously to the river, while on the other a sheer rock face where not even shrubs grew rose towards high ledges and outcroppings that nearly blocked the sky.

We had just entered the notch, when Father ordered me to halt the wagon, and after I had done it, he got down and loosened the tarpaulin at the back and folded it over so that Lyman could see out. In a low voice, he said to Lyman, “If someone gives chase, Mister Epps, just fire away.” Then he climbed back up beside me, and we continued as before.

The darkened road turned and twisted, and I was obliged to hold the team to a walking pace. The track was narrow and sometimes sloped abruptly down to the edge of the water, then ascended a ways to cross above an overhanging cliff, until, forced by a wall of huge boulders from an ancient landslide, it switch-backed towards the river and descended to the rushing waters again. Day or night, this was a mighty dangerous place. Highwayman, slave-catcher, bounty-hunter — one man alone could stop a wagon from passing here and could keep it from turning back as well, simply by felling a tree or rolling a boulder down from the embankment above. At every turning I was sure we would suddenly be brought up short by an obstacle in the road and would be fired upon from the darkness. Father kept his rifle at the ready and said nothing. The sounds of the horses’ hooves were muffled by the roar of the water below, and I felt as if we were passing through a long, dark cave, when gradually I saw that we had emerged from the notch, for the road had straightened somewhat and the hills seemed to have parted and backed away. The light of the moon splashed across the tan backs of the horses; the noise of the river had diminished, and I could hear the comforting clop of the horses’ hooves again. It was then that I heard the rapid pounding of my heart, for I had grown considerably more alarmed by our passage through the notch, now that we were safely beyond, than when we were actually doing it. For a long time no one spoke, but after a while, when we were well clear of the notch and passing through the relatively flat valley of the Au Sable where it’s joined by the East Branch coming north from Keene, Father said, “I didn’t think Billingsly would want to go up against us alone. But the truth is, he could have done us some damage back there.”

We were safe now, on the high, more or less straight, northeasterly road to the village of Keesville and on to Port Kent. This was the other of the two roads into the Adirondack wilderness from Lake Champlain. The first was the toll road that we’d taken on our arrival from Westport, through Elizabethtown and Keene and the pass at Edmonds Lakes near our farm. This more northerly route, the old Military Road dating back to the days of the French and Indian wars, once you got through the Wilmington Notch, was wide enough in places for two wagons to pass and took you across the rolling hills and fertile farmlands alongside the now meandering Au Sable and Boquet Rivers directly to the shore of the vast lake. Our journey from here on was uneventful and sped by, as we passed darkened farms and settlements, sighting an occasional herd of deer grazing at the edge of a meadow or a fox darting into the brush beside the road, while the moon slowly ascended from behind us to its high point overhead and then began its descent towards the lake.

After crossing the swaying bridge over the falls at Keesville, we began to get glimpses of the lake now and then through the trees, until finally we came to the high, grassy head of land that forms the protective cove where Port Kent is located, and it was as if we had come to the edge of the sea. Father bade me to stop the wagon, and he got down and helped Lyman and our fugitives climb out of the wagon and stretch their limbs and enjoy the cool, fresh air off the lake. For a few moments, we stood about and rested and ate a portion of the food that Mary had packed for us. We did not speak much one to the other, but instead simply gazed at the beauty of the land and sky and water that lay before us.

The moon had streaked the dark waters with skeins of molten silver. Way in the east at the horizon, the velvety night sky was lit by the pale light of a false dawn, and from our place on the height of land overlooking the broad expanse of the lake, morning seemed imminent. The lake, one hundred four miles long from north to south, was at its widest here, more than twenty miles across to the state of Vermont. A cool breeze blew sharply over the choppy waters to land, and on the far side of the lake a starry sky hovered above the Vermont horizon like a deep blue curtain lit from below.

When it was time to move on, Lyman Epps and Mr. and Mrs. Cannon of Richmond, Virginia, climbed back into the wagon, and Father once again tied down the tarpaulin and came and joined me up front. We followed the road down from the headland to the shore and soon entered the village of Port Kent. We were headed for the boatyard owned and operated by the Quaker Solomon Keifer, whom we expected to show up at dawn to commence his day’s work there. The village was still mostly asleep, although here and there we saw a window lit by candles or an oil lamp inside. We passed the main dock and several stone warehouses, after which came a row of small boathouses, until we arrived at the last in the row, where we saw a small sign, Capt. S. I. Keifer, above the closed door facing the lane. Here I drew the wagon to a halt and jumped down and tied the horses to a hitching post. A narrow pier ran out a ways into the lake, where a wide-bottomed schooner was tied up — the last leg of our fugitives’ journey, their final means of transport to freedom.

A narrow wooden stairway led up from the shore to a crest of land above, where there were a number of houses and a church and meeting house, and Father immediately went that way, in search of Captain Keifer, while Lyman and I stayed with the wagon and our cargo. Feeling we were finally safe, I put my rifle down and untied the tarpaulin, and when I had done so, Lyman came and stood with me in the darkness, stretching his legs and rubbing his aching joints, which signs of discomfort caused me to beckon to Mr. and Mrs. Cannon to come out of the wagon. Slowly, first the man and then the woman emerged from the box and brought their bundles with them and regarded the unlikely scene with curiosity and some natural trepidation, for it must have looked to them that they were about to set off on an ocean-going voyage.

Lyman laid his rifle in the box of the wagon and stepped behind the boathouse a ways to relieve himself, and I began to explain to our fugitives that we were located on the shore of a lake barely forty miles south of Canada. This was the last stop on the Underground Railroad, I was saying, when I heard a man’s voice from the darkness behind me.

“Just stand where you are, Brown, and put your hands on your head,” he said calmly, and when I turned, I saw him with his revolver on Lyman. It was Mr. Billingsly, the slave-catcher. I slowly lifted my hands and placed them on my head as instructed and as Lyman had already done.

“You niggers, you move over here by me,” the slave-catcher said to Mr. and Mrs. Cannon. “And you,” he said to Lyman, “you stand by the wagon there with Brown.” I saw then that the man was carrying in his other hand a pair of manacles. Extending them to me, he said, “Clamp these onto my prisoners, Brown.”

“No,” I said. “I will not do that.”

He stared at me hard. “You people are crazy, is what.”

He turned to Lyman. “Here. You do it, then. Put these irons on them.” He held the instruments out to him.

Lyman regarded the manacles coldly. He said, “You the slave-catcher, not me.”

At that instant, I saw Father step out of the darkness behind Billingsly. He held his musket at waist level with both hands and had it aimed straight at the small of the man’s back. “Put down your gun, Mister Billingsly,” he said in a cold, almost expressionless voice.

The slave-catcher’s eyes went dead, and he inhaled deeply and did as he was told.

“Lie on the ground, face-down” Father said. Behind Father stood a man whom I took to be Captain Keifer, a short, black-haired fellow with a fringe of beard on his chin. There was a note in Father’s voice that frightened me, and it surely must have terrified Billingsly, if he had any sense at all: it was the note of a man whose mind was made up, who would not be stopped from completing the terrible action that he had already decided upon, no matter how the circumstances changed. I knew that he had decided to kill the man. And in spite of being frightened by the tone in Father’s voice, I was excited by it.

Mr. Billingsly got down on his knees and then lay on his stomach, his face pressed against the rocky ground, and when he had done so, Father stepped forward and, straddling the maris body, aimed his gun down at his head.

Lyman said, “You ain’t goin’ to kill the man, Mister Brown.”

“I am,” Father said.

Captain Keifer moved forward then and said to Father, “I pray thee, Brown, do not kill him. It is not for thee to execute the man.”

Lyman looked at me with disbelief, and I caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Cannon as they backed away from the scene to the front of the wagon and stood by the horses, as if preparing for flight.

Shoving the stock against his shoulder, Father looked coldly down the barrel at the man’s head. I could see that Billingsly’s teeth were clenched and his eyes were closed tightly, as if he expected nothing less than to hear the irritating explosion of gunfire. It was very strange — he did not look like a man who believed he would die of it. He did not seem to believe that he was inside his own body and that his brain was about to be blown to bits.

“Slave-catcher” Father said, “I am sending thee straight to hell.”

I did not dare to rush Father and try to seize his weapon — the gun might go off and kill the slave-catcher beneath it, or our struggle with one another might give the man the opportunity to escape, and I did not want that, either — so I stood as if rooted to the ground. But when Captain Keifer stepped firmly forward with his hands extended as if to grab Father from behind, I spoke out at last. “Wait, Father!” I cried. “Back off, and put the man in his own manacles! Let him wear the manacles he planned to use on the Negroes. And let Lyman do it!” I said.

Slowly, Father lowered his rifle and backed away from the slave-catcher. “Put your hands behind your back,” he ordered, and the slave-catcher obeyed. “All right, Lyman. Place the chains on him, and lock them tight.”

Lyman reached down and grabbed up one of the two sets of manacles and clamped them onto the white man.

Father rolled Billingsly over onto his back, groped through the man’s waistcoat pockets until he found the keys, and tossed the keys far out into the cove. He grabbed the second pair of manacles and heaved them into the darkness also, and when they fell into the water, there was a loud splash, and then silence.

A moment passed, and Father said, “Put him into the wagon, Owen.” Lyman and I retrieved our guns and together hefted the slave-catcher onto his feet and shoved him into the box of the wagon. While Lyman stood guard over him, I quickly set about removing the hides and pelts, which Captain Keifer would be selling for us, and placed them inside the boathouse. Father escorted our poor, forlorn, very frightened fugitives directly to the boat, and the captain prepared to set sail at once, for the sun would soon rise and there would be many people coming and going along the shore here.

“Cast off!” the captain called to Father, who promptly untied the lines from the pilings and tossed them onto the deck. The captain loosed and unfurled a small triangle of sail at the bow, which caught the breeze at once, and the schooner moved abruptly away from the dock. The captain was standing at the wheel in the bow, and the couple from Virginia were up on the foredeck, standing together and watching, not us, but the dark northern sky, where there was a star, clear and bold, a diamond. Over in the east, the sky had turned a pale blond color, with the tops of the mountains beyond the lake just visible at the horizon. The captain scrambled forward and let out more sail, then returned to the wheel, and in a few moments the boat had crossed the cove and was rounding the point at the far end, heading for open water.

We left Port Kent at once, carrying the slave-catcher out of town to the point on the headlands above the lake where we had rested earlier, and here Father bade me to pull up. He and I climbed down from the wagon and came around to the rear, where Lyman and I got the fellow out.

When we climbed into the wagon again, with Lyman stretched out in the back and Father and I seated up front, and prepared to leave him, the slave-catcher shot us a puzzled expression — it was the look of a man who did not understand why we had not killed him. Not because he thought we were murderers, but because the logic of the situation had demanded it. It seemed to make no sense to him that he was still alive, and he stared after us with an almost plaintive expression, as if he wanted us to come back and properly execute him.

Father said to me, “Drive on quickly, Owen. I cannot stand the sight of the man.” I slapped the reins, and we left him there, standing in the moonlight in the middle of the track, his hands clamped behind him in irons.

We said nothing to one another for a long while, and then, finally, a few miles west of Keesville, Father sighed heavily and said, “I am grateful to thee, Owen.”

“You are? For what?”

“For interfering with me. Back there at the lake.”

“I feared you would be angry with me.”

“No, son. I’m in no way angry. I’m grateful to you. I am. In saving Billingsly’s life, you probably saved my soul from hell. Fact is, I’m not ready to kill a man, Owen.”

“Not in cold blood,” I said.

“Yes, and that’s the problem. My killing him would have been murder, pure and simple. I have no cold blood, Owen. Not a drop. I must acquire it.”

I did not know what to say to that; I could not begin to grasp his meaning then; so I said nothing and, for the remainder of our journey, drove mostly in silence. There would come a time, however, and not many years later — in the smoke and blood of Kansas, with the bodies of men and boys yanked from their warm winter beds and hacked to death with machetes and lying now in chunks steaming like fresh meat all around us in the frozen grass — when I would remember this small conversation, and I would understand it then, just as I am sure you do now.

Chapter 8

Our involvement with the Underground Railroad aside, our concern for the welfare of the Negroes of Timbuctoo, and our private virtues, along with the ways in which those virtues organized our behavior — all that aside, Miss Mayo, we were to every casual appearance very much like our North Elba neighbors. Country people. A stranger passing through the broad valley that lay between Whiteface and Tahawus would have had little reason to remark upon us (unless, like Mr. Dana and his party of lost hikers, he sat at table with us and stayed the night). He would likely merely have thought that we Browns were nothing unusual for our time and place. Except, perhaps, for our way of speaking, which a stranger would perceive at once and which was, I believe, regarded by some as downright peculiar. And here, in the matter of the manner of our speaking, we get to a thing that was both striking and readily apparent to all who met us, even for a moment, a thing that, to my knowledge, has never been described before, certainly not in print.

It is perhaps inevitable that the speech mannerisms of a family will be significantly influenced by the single strongest member of that family, and so it was with us. Thus, to a one, even to the littlest child, we sounded very like Father. Elaborately plainspoken, you might say — a manner or style of speech that originated, so far as I know, with Grandfather Owen Brown, who, having had a profound effect on Father’s way of speaking, is indirectly an influence on my way, too, even here and now, and on that of the rest of the family as well. So let me speak first of him.

Grandfather, who was born and raised in Connecticut back before the Revolution, chose and spoke his words in that old, now-forgotten, New England Puritan manner — deliberately, carefully, with a few thees and thous for leavening, almost as if he were writing his words down on paper, instead of speaking them aloud. He went beyond even the old New Englanders, however, for Grandfather was a stammerer and as a child had trained himself to speak with a formal, dry precision, slowly and in complete sentences, so as not to be controlled or confounded by his affliction. The man cultivated silences and used them as exclamations. He seemed to rehearse his statements in his mind before making any utterance, which gave to him a stately manner overall and provided others with the impression that he was an unusually reflective manas, indeed, he was. By thinking his words first, by silently phrasing and parsing them in his mind, and only afterwards, when he was satisfied with their lightness, speaking them aloud, Grandfather cultivated his thought more thoroughly than ordinary folk, and as a result his words not only seemed, by virtue of the way they were presented, to be wise; they in fact, more often than not, were wise. “You think as you speak, not vice versa” Father often said, and a man forced by an affliction such as stammering to control his speech will in turn soon learn to control his thoughts. So it was with Grandfather.

Father, with no such handicap as stammering to straiten his way, was obliged to impose one upon himself. When he was a young man, he curbed his reckless speech, and hence his thoughts, by placing into his mouth a stone that was sufficiently large to forbid easy and casual talk, and he carried the stone all day long in silence, except when he deliberately plucked it out and unplugged his mouth, as it were. He used the trick of Demosthenes, but in reverse, and not to overcome a handicap, but to simulate one, so as to obtain its compensatory advantages, which he had observed and admired in his own father.

“The inner man and the outer are one, unless ye be a hypocrite and dissembler. Control one of the two, and soon ye will control both,” the Old Man often said, applying his prescription as much to himself as to us children, whom he was instructing. All his instructions, admonitions, and rules were as much for him to follow, honor, and obey as for us. Never did I feel that Father had not himself contended with passions or desires fully as strong as my own, or that he had not, on numerous occasions, felt himself as weak, afraid, lonely, despondent, or frustrated as I and my brothers were, and my sisters, too. Quite the opposite. And from our point of view, all the more virtue accrued to him for his not having given himself over to those feelings. Thus his authority over us resided to a considerable degree in our awareness of his, and not our, struggle with vice, and his, not our, triumph over it.

Similarly, whatever self-imposed deprivation, whatever forms of abstinence, he requested of us, he demanded of himself also, despite what he confessed were his larger-than-normal desires to indulge in them. We none of us drank tea or coffee. We used no tobacco. We drank no whiskey, brandy, beer, or fermented cider, and kept none in the house. A visitor or houseguest unable to endure a meal without these stimulants and intoxicants would have to provide his own and then would find himself in the uncomfortable position of being observed by all the children and even those of us who were adults with curiosity and slight condescension, as if he were a Chinaman sucking on an opium pipe. If one of us secretly indulged in the use of tobacco, tea, or coffee, or accepted a sip of whiskey from a friend or an acquaintance, as each of us, especially we boys, did from time to time, his physical and mental reactions to it were all out of proportion to his expectations, and he backed off quickly and in fear. The high degree of excitation provided by these stimulants and intoxicants, due perhaps to our lack of experience with their use and to our shame, was almost always sufficient to keep us from returning for a second try. In addition, there was the threat of exile, of feeling cast out from the family, to keep us from disobeying Father’s rules of abstinence. No one of us wanted to be the only one unable to keep his rules. Whether the rest of the family knew of it hardly mattered: we knew of it, and that was enough to guarantee an intolerable loneliness. An occasional taste of that loneliness, like the single sip of whiskey or puff of tobacco smoke, was all any of us needed to renew his commitment to purity, abstinence, self-discipline, and to the orderly comportment of his mind, language, and private acts.

With regard to sexual matters, we all, except possibly poor Fred, were normal enough boys and then young men. Little as I know of what is normal for girls and women in such matters, I assume the same was true for the females in the family. And in this as in all things, Father’s advice bore the weight of a proscription and sometimes even that of a command: he advised us boys, offered as if in passing, with no room for discussion or further inquiry, to keep ourselves pure and to marry young and to study St. Paul’s letters.

Forgive me for speaking of the subject — I wish above all to be as frank as I have been truthful — but did Father believe that I, at least, was unable to forbear from self-abuse? It’s a question that has long worried me. I suspect he thought I was, just as I was sure that my brothers, both older and younger, must occasionally have abandoned themselves to this vice, although none of us ever confessed it. All of us — except Fred, whose sensitivity to sin and whose measure of guilt was so much greater than ours — possessed large animal spirits. John and Jason married young; Fred did not marry. Nor did I. Ruth and Annie married young, as did Watson and Oliver, who, along with Fred, died young. But I lived on for many long years, struggling even into old age to maintain my purity as diligently and with the same meager degree of success and heaped-up unhappiness over failure as when I was a boy. In later years, naturally, my animal spirits diminished to a great degree, and my struggle to control them abated at last. But without the struggle, there was no virtue; I take no particular pride, therefore, in the relative purity of my old age.

All our virtues — of piety, honesty, abstinence, and so on, of cleanliness and orderliness, of devotion to work and industry, of love of learning and of neighborliness — were the products and expressions of struggle. This was not much understood by those who observed us and later wrote about our life and character. Remember, Father, first and perhaps foremost among us, and every other member of the family as well, even including the women, pious Mary, sweet Ruth, and my younger sisters, Annie and Sarah — all of us were normal people. Which is to say, there was not a one of us who was not tempted by impiety. And we were intelligently skeptical about so much — Father, after all, encouraged it in us practically from infancy — that it was difficult not to apply that same skepticism to our entire way of life. Many was the time when we wanted to give ourselves over to another way. What was this crackbrained obsession with slavery and Negroes anyhow? one might well ask, and sometimes we did ask it as, exhausted and exasperated by another of Father’s plans to move us to a new place or to start a school for Negro children or to drop everything and ride off in search of escaped slaves who, without us, would have made their own way to Canada safely just the same, we would look at one another and roll our eyes upward and trudge out to the barn in the dark of night and harness up the horses yet again.

At bottom, then, we were ordinary people and were tempted, not just by impiety, but by typical American dishonesty as well — and not so much to lie or cheat or steal, but simply to push an advantage on occasion, to charge for a service or good whatever the buyer was willing to pay, for instance, instead of charging only what was fair. That is, instead of asking no more than the cost of that same service or good to us. Which was Father’s monetary policy’s ethical base. We were all obliged to stand upon it firmly, yet here we were, always in deep debt, scrambling for ways to avoid foreclosure, bankruptcy, imprisonment. Honesty in these matters, especially considering our dire circumstances, was thus always the result of struggle, and was all the more virtuous therefore — even as our financial circumstances worsened, and Father tumbled towards out-and-out bankruptcy, and all around us others prospered.

Likewise, our abstinence was achieved only through struggle against constant temptation, for we did not remove ourselves, as Shakers and Mennonites do, from ordinary, daily contact with people who rationalized the indulgence of every sensual appetite. On the contrary, we befriended and moved freely amongst them all — drunkards, boisterers, brawlers, and sensualists of every stripe and type. They were everywhere in those days, especially out at the edges of civilized society, which is, after all, where we most often resided ourselves, and many of them were our strongest allies in the work. We associated with such folks as much on principle as convenience and as a consequence of our natural sociability. We thought it necessary and right and believed that it helped in the work, for there were many radical abolitionists whose genteel fastidiousness rendered them wholly ineffective, and Father enjoyed pointing them out to us. “Boston ladies,” he called them, although most of them were men.

No, we Browns maintained our virtue in the face of daily temptation, willfully, elaborately contriving it, as if the virtue were not worth much without it. And though it may have sometimes encouraged in us a feeling of superiority to other “normal” people, that, too, was a temptation to be met, struggled with, and overcome, in public and in private, just as I am doing here, even now. Just as Father himself did throughout his life.

Always, Father taught by example and instruction: the two were deliberately interwoven; he made of our childhood understandings a fabric that could not be unraveled or torn. For instance, with regard to our well-known love of learning, had we not watched since earliest childhood the Old Man every evening turn to his bookcase and draw out from it a treasured, much-thumbed tome and commence to read from it and comment on what he read there, we would not have believed, due to our lack of formal education, that there was anything of great value to be obtained from books, especially such books as Father, no matter how unsettled or hectic the circumstances, loved and studied all his life. Like most of our neighbors and friends, we would normally have thought that books of philosophy and history and natural science were better left to the learned and were not proper fields of study for such rough country types as we. Father’s sustained example, however, led us to the experience itself. And by imitating his hard-earned love of learning, we were gradually filled with a love of learning ourselves, and thus we came to possess it as if it were a gift to be treasured for life and not a dour, burdensome consequence of blind obedience, cast off as soon as darkness fell.

We all saw our father, Mary saw her husband, struggle with temptation — he made us see it, he spoke of it constantly: his sensuality, his slothfulness, his vain desire for wealth and fame, his pridefulness — and we saw him daily overcome each and every one of those temptations. How could we not go forward, then, and do likewise? We who were no more and no less sensual, slothful, vain, and proud than he? It was his weakness as much as his strength that guided and instructed us; his pitiful, simple, common humanity that inspired us. Those who later wrote that Father was like an infallible god to us were wrong.

We were much misunderstood always. That, I suppose, is yet another of the many ways in which we Browns paid for our virtues. Poverty is one, too. We were hard-working, a large and highly skilled family of workers, and yet, because of our devotion to our Negro neighbors and their cause, all our enterprises failed. Father was regarded by some, rightly, as a genius when it came to livestock. And he was a self-taught surveyor of great skill and understood all the ways in which a piece of land was valuable or poor. He was a tanner capable at the age of twenty of organizing and operating a large tannery on his own. He was a businessman who understood the subtle connections between the producer of wool, the wholesale purveyor of wool, the manipulation by the purveyor of the market price for wool, and the consequent exploitation of the producer, and he was able to conceive and put into place a complex scheme to block that exploitation. And yet we ourselves remained poor, in permanent debt, living on the kindness and philanthropy of men like Mr. Gerrit Smith and Mr. Simon Perkins. For while in many ways we may well have been self-sufficient, growing all our own food and manufacturing all our clothing and tools, we were obliged to do it on land that, in the end, belonged to others.

Even in North Elba, where Mr. Smith had deeded Father two hundred forty acres of first-rate tableland at one dollar per acre. Father died owing for most of it. The Old Man raised money, many thousands of dollars, for the Negroes from white strangers all over the United States, but when he died, his widow had not a dollar to her name. I remember hunger; I remember cold; I remember public humiliation — these were the hard prices we paid for our much-admired devotion to principle. And I did not think it would ever end, despite Father’s schemes and his permanent willingness to launch every year a new enterprise for raising money: gathering wool all over Ohio and Pennsylvania and warehousing it for Mr. Perkins in Springfield until the prices rose; buying and selling purebred cattle; speculating on land where canals were rumored to be going in any day now; and on and on, his face bright with the vision of all his debts at last being paid off, of finally owning his own farm outright, of being able to provide for his large, ever-growing family against the rigors that he believed would characterize the long years ahead. For he was sure that Mary would survive him — she was so much younger than he — and believed that she would be left with young children to care for. He did not want to die without having provided for his widow and children.

To all appearances, though, and compared with our neighbors, especially our Negro neighbors in North Elba, we did prosper. Our farm was a thriving operation. This was mainly due to hard work and Father’s great organizational skills. Although I was, in a sense, the foreman, Father was the executive and every day laid out the tasks that we each would attend to. Much of farm life, of course, is a round, and the work is organized merely by the turning of the year and by the slow, regular rhythms of animal life, and it needs no executive, but we were a large family with diverse skills and abilities, children at different stages of growth, from the youngest, who was then Sarah, to the eldest in residence, me, a full-grown adult. And there were the other adults as well-Mary, our mother and stepmother, and sister Ruth, and Lyman and Susan Epps, who had come to seem like permanent members of the household, like in-laws.

We were close, interlocked, like the gears and wheels, cogs and belts, of an elaborate machine. Whatever one of us thought, said, or did had an immediate, felt effect on everyone else. It may be that our family in its closeness was sometimes thought by us to be suffocating and too much controlling of our daily lives, and it must have seemed that way often to outsiders; but we were never lonely, never without a sense of being useful and even necessary to the rest, and never without support and encouragement, even in our moments of greatest despair. For we each took strength, not from Father alone, but from the family as a whole. Father, of course, was the family’s mainstay; he provided us with example, instruction, understanding, and strength. As a result, when he himself weakened or fell into despair, it was very difficult for the rest of us not to do likewise. And whenever Father’s belief in the rightness and necessity of his path wavered, as from time to time it did, or when his faith in his God was threatened, as happened at least twice that I know of, his forward motion would instantly stop. And when he stopped, the rest of us would slow and wobble on our respective pivots and would soon find ourselves stopped and lying on our sides as well.

In the terrible winter of ’43,1 remember, when the four children died — the first Sarah, Charles, Peter, and the baby, Austin — Father fell into such a prolonged numbness that, before he recovered his feelings, we ourselves had descended into deepest despond, and he was obliged to nurse us, every one, back to health again. It was as if the sickness that took the children one after the other that bleak winter first invaded his spirit and from him spread like a pestilence to Mary and thence to John and Jason and me and on to Ruth and the younger children, even to poor Salmon, who was only a small boy at the time, seven years old, the youngest child not to be taken from us. It was an unsupportable burden. The fires dwindled and flickered out, and the ashes grew cold, and we walked about the house with our arms wrapped around ourselves and silently cursed the day of our birth. No one of us could rouse the other from his despair.

Father took to his Bible, and for the first time he did not read aloud or instruct us from it. He sat on a stool in the corner, muttering the words to himself, as if seeking, but not finding there, some explanation of why God had done this to us. Poverty he could endure with good spirits, and every setback and disappointment he regarded as temporary. And he had lost a child before, the first Frederick, who had died at the age of five and for whom he had grieved, and after a normal period of mourning he had resumed his life — he even named his next male child Frederick, as I have already described. But this disaster, this terrible loss, was beyond all his worst expectations, beyond all his understanding. His faith was sorely tested by it — that fact alone humiliated him and beat him down. To have four of his beloved children taken from him, each of them in its pitiful turn dying in his arms, this defeated him utterly. There was no one amongst us who could console or uplift him, for all of us, even Mary, had grown so accustomed to relying on him for consolation and uplift that if he was emptied of force, then we were, too.

This was the other, the darker side of our family’s strength. When the Old Man went down, we all went down. Happily, almost nothing ever discouraged or defeated Father, except the death of children, which, by the time of his own death, he had endured so many times that his heart must have been nearly covered over with a skein of thick gray scars.

Knowing his terrible, long suffering, one can forgive him anything, I suppose. It rarely happened, he was so strong and so right, but there were times, certainly, when I felt called to forgive Father. Not by him — he seldom asked for my forgiveness, and when he did ask, it was for some trivial transgression, some slight oversight — but called upon by myself alone. In order to save me from him.

Forgive the Old Man, I would say to myself. Come on, now, grow large, Owen, and be generous with understanding and compassion. Yes, understanding, especially that — for when one understands a human being, no matter how oppressive he has been, compassion inevitably follows. Yet there was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him — my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded: by the absolute tightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever; and by the sheer power of Father’s personality, the relentlessness of it, how it wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own, even to each other. Certainly we spoke like him, but we could not hear it ourselves. We had to be told of it first by strangers.

The Old Man seemed to burn us out: whenever he rode off on one of his journeys to raise money for the work or on business of his own, he left us behind him, glad to have him gone. Yes, thrilled to have him gone — but dry and cold and light, like pieces of char or bits of cinder, like ash. When the Old Man left, we did not speak much, not to one another, not to strangers.

I meant here to write about how we spoke and why our speech was so strangely mannered. I see that I have done something else. I close now, as ash, again… or still: I do not know which.

Chapter 9

It’s as if I’m actually living there, in North Elba, and in those olden times when I was young. As if, weeks ago, when I first began speaking of it, I went tumbling down some twisting, narrow shaft that emerged there. And now, still clambering along a descending maze of tunnels and caves, I am unable to find my way back again to the surface of the earth, to my cabin in Altadena and daylight. The only light down inside these cold, rock-walled chambers is the light of memory flaring up, illuminating rough pictures and writings overhead, like those the Indians drew in ages past to invoke and placate their pagan gods. I stand below, gazing in wonder at the pictures, and the figures begin to move and speak, and my wonder, as you have seen so many times in these pages, turns first to warmth of recognition, then to gladness, and then, as the story told by the figures grows violent or somber, turns fearful and sad, I stumble backwards away from the pictures and into the darkness of the cave again. Soon I am falling, scrambling, clawing my way along yet another shaft in this warren, until the floor beneath my feet finally levels out, and once more I stop and stand, and when the light of memory spreads from my face, I see in its glow that I have arrived in a new chamber… and there, up on the walls — a mingling of shadow and light — it moves and dances… and another, different event in my long-ago, half-forgotten life commences to unfold before me!

Today as I write I find myself still situated in the chamber of that first summer in North Elba, the summer of ’50, when I was twenty-six, and I am recalling that it was for me an especially instructive time, perhaps because of the absence at the farm of my recently married elder brothers, John and Jason, who were ranked above me at that time in Father’s little army and who, therefore, normally would have superseded me in the work. Father’s work. The Lord’s work, as he constantly reminded us, of freeing the slaves. For until the slaves were free — as he told us over and over again — none of us were free.

To Father, white and black Americans alike were bound by slavery: the physical condition of the enslaved, he insisted, was the moral condition of the free. This was not some vague, safely abstract principle, such as propounded by the New England philosophers. No, for Father, quite literally, we Americans, white as much as black, Northern as much as Southern, anti-slave as much as pro-, we were, all of us, presently living under the rule of Satan. It was an inarguable truth to Father that man’s essential task while on this earth was to bring both his personal and his civic life into total accord with the will and overarching law of God. And since a republic is a type of state that by definition is governed by laws created and enforced by its citizens, whenever in a republic those laws do not conform to the laws of God, because those laws can be changed by men, they must be changed by men. And not to change them placed the mortal soul of every one of its citizens in terrible jeopardy. Not to struggle constantly to overthrow the system of slavery was to abandon our Republic, was to surrender our civic freedoms and responsibilities, was to give our mortal souls over to the rule of Satan. We were obliged to oppose slavery, then, not merely to preserve and perfect the Republic, although that alone was a worthy enough task, but to defeat Satan. It was our holy, our peculiarly American, obligation.

Simple. Or so it seemed. For even though I understood Father’s logic well enough, I didn’t always understand his applications of that logic to the specific circumstances, contingencies, and conditions that arose daily in our lives. Which meant that, on a day-to-day basis, I sometimes did not know right from wrong.

For instance, there was the time — after we had passed the young Negro couple, Emma and James Cannon, on to safety, as we assumed — when we discovered that, in fact, there was considerable evidence that they had murdered their master and that there was indeed a warrant from the Commonwealth of Virginia for their arrest and return. When this came out, many of the whites in North Elba grew fearful and angry. These were the same, good people who, before this episode, as I have shown, had been quietly aiding Father and me and various of the Negroes of Timbuctoo in our attempts to spirit escaped slaves northward. Now, however, they wished us to cease this activity. And I found myself in partial agreement with them.

One day several weeks after our misadventure with Billingsly, the bounty-hunter, there appeared up at our farm a United States marshal from Albany — accompanied by the ever-helpful Mr. Partridge of Keene. Bearing a warrant for the immediate arrest and return of Emma and James Cannon for the murder of their owner, one Mr. Samuel Cannon of Richmond, Virginia, the marshal put to Father, as he had to numerous others in the village, a set of pointed questions regarding the whereabouts of the couple. Though his interrogation of Father was clearly based on detailed information that had been provided by his guide, Mr. Partridge, the marshal appeared to know nothing of our burly encounter in Port Kent with Mr. Billingsly. Which was natural: it was not, after all, in the bounty-hunter’s interest to aid and abet the capture of his prey by a salaried officer of the law, and thus it was unlikely that he would have reported, even to his helper, Mr. Partridge, our having briefly kidnapped him, an incident he probably regarded with a certain degree of embarrassment anyhow.

When Father simply answered that he knew nothing of the Negro couple, there was little the marshal could do but pass north to the next known stop on the Railroad, there to interrogate the Quaker Captain Keifer. Up there, most officers of the law in those days had a pretty good idea of who was working on the Underground Railroad and who was not and, unless prodded by warrants and writs, did little to obstruct them.

It was our white neighbors, the Brewsters, the Nashes, and even Mr. Thompson, who, when they learned of the warrant for the arrest of the Cannons, grew frightened and came to Father and spoke angrily against our having escorted murderers north. Father sat on his stool and, while the men stood around him, heard them out. They were a delegation of three, apparently chosen to represent to Father the views and desires of the entire community. As known abolitionists themselves and friends of John Brown, they were no doubt thought to be more likely to get a hearing from him than if others, less sympathetic to the cause, had come.

Mr. Thompson was their spokesman. “Helping slaves to escape from slavery is a good thing to do,” he said. “A good thing. Upright. But, really, John, helping to spirit known murderers out of the country — that’s a different matter altogether.” He told Father that, as we Browns could not assure the community that the people we were escorting to freedom were decent Christians and not criminals or moral reprobates, it was our neighbors’ wish that we cease our activities at once. It was partly a consequence, he said, of our insistence on working outside and separate from the churches and other white institutions and individuals who could provide our cargo with bona fides to certify that the fugitives were not criminals. But it was also a consequence, he pointed out, of Father’s determination to work with the Negroes of Timbuctoo, especially with men like Elden Fleete and Lyman Epps, men who, Mr. Thompson and the others believed, had no particular interest in farming here. All the whites but Father, Mr. Thompson pointed out, had come here to North Elba solely to farm and raise their families in peace and security. Even many of the Negroes had come here for that purpose. Now, however, everyone, white and black alike, was being interrogated by a United States marshal, and bounty-hunters like Billingsly and lazy rascals like Partridge had taken to skulking around the place. “Let the abolitionist Negroes themselves, Fleete and Epps, conduct escaping slaves, or people who claim to be escaping slaves, on to Canada on their own, if that’s what they want to do with their time,” Mr. Thompson told Father. “But we whites, John, we should stay clear of it. Completely.”

He took a long while to make his case, and when he had finished, Father stood and drew himself up to his full height, which was not exceptional, but because of his large face, he often appeared quite tall. He said, “Gentlemen, you are all my friends. And I would like to put you at your ease, but I cannot just now. I will make my complete answer to your charges and concerns, but I prefer to make it to the entire community, and not just you three. I’ll do it come Sunday morning in the church, where I have grown accustomed to speaking now and then. I would be pleased if you gave this out to the others, so that all who have an interest in the matter may hear me.”

Then, with no further ceremony or words, he let them out of the house and, by abruptly turning his back and shutting fast the door, dismissed them.

That Sunday morning, a cold, rainy day, I remember, we all, including Lyman and Susan Epps, rode in the wagon into the village of North Elba and marched into the little white Presbyterian church there and took our accustomed seats in our usual pew towards the front. We sat in a single row, with Father on the aisle. There was an unusually large turnout, for this matter had generated considerable heat and feeling in the town. The small chapel was packed with red-faced farmers and their families and smelled of their boots and wet wool clothing. The entire Thompson clan was present, taking up two pews to our one, and I noted Ruth and young Henry Thompson exchange a significantly friendly glance, and I remember saying to myself, A-ha! What have we here?

The preacher, the Reverend Spofford Hall from Vermont, a scrawny, somewhat insipid fellow whom Father abhorred for his lax liberalism in religion, gave out with his usual, mechanical invocation, after which the small choir stood and sang the opening hymn. Sang it with unaccustomed force, I thought, due perhaps to four of the eight being Negroes from the settlement, who must have known that there was scheduled in today’s ceremonies a thing of particular significance to them. They sounded like a choir three times their size, and Father’s knees joggled up and down in close time to the music, and his eyes glistened happily as they sang.

At last, the Reverend Hall stepped to the lectern set before the spare, New England-style altar and announced in his high, watery voice, “Today our neighbor Mister Brown will address us.” Then he stood down and turned the meeting over to Father.

It was a sermon that I had heard by then numerous times and listened to often enough afterwards, and I can hear the Old Man’s voice today, these many years later, as clearly as I did that cold, gray morning in North Elba. I see him standing there, straight as a tree, screw-faced and tense, his wet, fox-red hair sticking up, and I listen to him begin his first sentence, and as I write, my mouth seems to open, as if I am to speak his entire sermon for him, word for word.

“Good morning, neighbors” the Old Man said.

“Though outside these walls the rain falls, and the mountains be all hid in clouds, and though the chilled wind today blows out of the northwest, we here inside our small sanctuary are dry and warm together, are we not?

“We are comfortable, friends and neighbors, and we are safe, and we sing praises to the Lord, our heavenly Father, and we offer Him our prayers of thanksgiving, so as to signify our pleasure and our heartfelt gratitude to Him who, at His pleasure, hath granted that comfort and that safety to us. Do we not?

“Comfort and safety which has been granted to us — we who clear the forests, we who till the fields, we who raise our livestock. Little people of the valley between the mountains, that is what we are, friends. Men, women, and children struggling merely to survive and if possible to prosper in a hard place in a hard time. Are we not?

“Comfort and safety granted to us — who deserve nothing. Who deserve neither comfort nor safety, certainly, but who deserve neither discomfort nor danger, either. Understand me — granted to us, who deserve nothing! Not even to exist. Is this not the case, friends?

“I speak of everyone in the community, all of us — the blackest and the poorest among us, and the whitest and the richest. The most innocent, and the most foully corrupted. The most pious, and the least pious. The young, and the old. For we do not, not a one of us, deserve to live. It is not something the Lord owes us! Can you argue with that, friends?

“So that, if there is a debt, neighbors, if there is something that is owed someone, then it runs the other way, does it not?

“For who among us asked to be born? Who among us made such a request? No, white or black, rich or poor, not a one of us had such a right or even the means to make that request. And now, having been born, having been granted air to breathe and a place to stand upon, having been shown a firmament set between the firmaments, having been wakened from the dreamless sleep of nothingness, now, who among us can say, This was owed me, this was long owed me? Or even, This, Lord, did I request of Thee?

“The Lord giveth, neighbors, and the Lord taketh away. And does He not do so at His pleasure, friends? Not ours! No, it is only at the Lord’s own pleasure that we exist, is it not?

“We cannot cajole Him, we cannot argue our case, as if He were an Elizabethtown judge and we a plaintiff’s attorney. We cannot even beg. No, all we poor people can do, having come to an awareness of our lives, is give thanks. Give thanks, and then live out our lives according to that high, holy purpose, the purpose of continuing to give thanks, over and over again, amen.

“Contemplate the alternative, neighbors. Briefly, just briefly, is all — for to contemplate that alternative is truly painful. Nothingness is the alternative! A blasted absence! Contemplate nothingness for a few short seconds, neighbors, and you will turn away in horror, and then you will give thanks unto the Lord. Then you will sing His praises. And you will leap and dance with joy! Not for the pleasure of being alive, for life is all too often no pleasure whatsoever, but you will leap and dance with joy and thanksgiving for having had the opportunity to exist at all!

“I am thinking, this rainy, cold morning, neighbors, of old Job. A farmer and stockman, like many of us here. I am thinking of a pious man with a large, loving family who, like us, lived in a broad valley surrounded by mountains, where there were wolves and lions and bears, where the cold winds blew in winter, and where, beyond the mountains, there were enemies lurking who coveted his fields and crops and envied the peacefulness and the fruitfulness of his life. Can you imagine Job as a man very like us? Can you?

“Against these enemies, and against the wolves and lions and bears, against the cold winds of winter and the drought of summer, against sickness and plague, old Job and his loving family and neighbors nonetheless prospered and thrived, and they and their livestock multiplied in their numbers, until they had become a community in that ancient wilderness, a community much like ours here in our modern, American wilderness.

“And these good folks, old Job and his family and friends, they did everything right. They did it just so. In this they were perhaps superior even to us here in North Elba. For we are sometimes slack and slothful, are we not? And some of us keep not the usual observances in religion, and from time to time we mistreat one another in our families, or we fall to quarreling with each other, do we not? But Job and his family and friends, they were, one and all, a consistently upright people. Especially Job, the Bible tells us. Especially Job. He was a man who, even in that fine a community, was outstanding and much admired. Admired for his piety, his judgement, and his decorum, admired for his kindness and generosity, for his integrity, and for his willingness to keep all God’s commandments. Do you remember the story?

“If we ourselves here today could be like any man in the Holy Bible, neighbors, we would be like Job. Am I right? Not for his wealth, naturally — although he had plenty of that, and we wouldn’t turn it away. And not simply for the respect and admiration that he obtained from his family and neighbors, although none of us would scorn those. And not for his wisdom and clarity of mind, either.

“No, we would want to be like Job because of his simple goodness, his straightforward decency, and his charitableness. Recall the story. Job was a man who rested easy with himself, the Bible says. We have all known one or two men like that, and we might have envied them, but for the fact that in envying them we would have become less like them than before, for one of their main virtues was that they envied no man. And so we have tried strictly to love such men and to emulate them, have we not?

“Well, old Job was an easy man to love. Even God, who loves all men equally, regarded Job as especially admirable, and thus, when Satan sat down on a rock to criticize these poor, forked creatures that were so beloved of God, the Lord singled out Job for special praise. In this story, friends, the key to Satan’s motives is that he did not comprehend God’s love of mankind, not even of Job, the best of mankind, the champion human being of us all back in those ancient Biblical days. And so Satan spoke to God of mankind as if we were not worthy of God’s love, and he said that, therefore, God should withdraw His love. ‘Take it off from them,’ Satan said.

“You remember the story, neighbors. Satan argued with the Lord that the only reason we humans were in the slightest obedient to the Lord’s commandments was because we expected and often received large rewards for it. For it was true, and it remaineth so, that we are far more likely to prosper when we keep His commandments than when we do not keep them.

“But Satan insinuated that we were a shrewdly calculating lot. That we were hypocrites. And thus we were not worthy of God’s love. And if we were not worthy of God’s love, Satan reasoned, then we were not worthy of the existence that He had granted us even without our asking.

“A gift unimagined is the gift of God’s love. Our very existence is that unimagined gift. That, neighbors and friends, that is why there is something and, for us, not merely nothing! God’s love is the universe’s first and only cause, neighbors.

“Well, no one ever called Satan a fool, did they? Throughout the Bible he is called many things, but never foolish. No, sir. He took a long look at this man called Job, this fine man living out there in the land of Uz with his seven sons and three daughters, his seven thousand sheep and his three thousand camels and his five hundred yoke of oxen — quite a plantation was Job’s place out there in Uz. And Satan said to the Lord, ‘You know that fellow Job, the one you’re always bragging about, the man you’re so high on? Well, he’s a hypocrite, too. Even he!’

“The Lord saith, Ah, yes, my servant Job! But you’re wrong. Job is a perfect man. He’s the most upright of them all, and he fears me, and he eschews evil.’ Thus saith the Lord, neighbors.

“Satan said, ‘Sure, of course, he fears you and eschews evil and makes all the proper observances and so on. But it’s not for nothing. Look at the hedge you’ve built around the man. Look how he’s rewarded for it. But just put forth thine hand against him, Lord, and the man will curse thee to thine face,’ said Satan. ‘Believe me, that fellow Job, he’s a hypocrite! declared Satan. The same as the rest. He may be the best amongst men, but even he is a hypocrite.’

“And so the Lord gave Satan permission to do with Job as he wished, so long as he did not slay him. All that old Job hath is in thy power,’ saith the Lord to Satan. ‘Go ahead, take away everything, and you’ll see what sort of man we have here.’

“You remember the story, neighbors. First came the Sabeans, who slew Job’s oxen and his asses and even put the servants attending them to the sword. And just as Job was absorbing the news of this loss, another messenger came in and told him that fire had fallen from the sky and burned up all his sheep. And then three bands of Chaldeans fell upon Job’s camels, slew the servants attending them, and stole the camels away to Chaldea. And then came the worst thing, friends. Remember? While Job’s sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine together in the house of the eldest son, a great wind howled out of the wilderness and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon them and killed them all!

“And what did poor Job do in the face of these terrible events? Did he charge the Lord foolishly? Did he rail against God, as you or I might have done? No, Job rent his mantle and shaved his head, and he made a public showing of his sorrow by returning himself as if to his infancy, bald and naked as a babe. And then he fell down upon the ground, and, friends, he worshipped the Lord! ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb; he said, ‘and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!’

“This, neighbors, was no hypocrite!

“But Satan wasn’t satisfied yet. ‘He hath his life still! Satan pointed out to the Lord. ‘But just put forth thy hand now, and touch his bone, and touch his flesh, and Job will curse thee to thy face.’

“The Lord said, ‘Go on, try him.’ So Satan went forth, and he smote old Job with sore boils from his foot to his crown. He smote him so badly that the poor man could only sit in agony among ashes, scraping his enflamed flesh with a potsherd. Such a figure of pathos and ruination was he that even his wife came out and said to him, ‘So, Job, dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die,’ she said to him. ‘Husband, curse God and die.’ Harsh words, neighbors, are they not?

“But wise old Job, he said to his wife, ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God and not evil also? Foolish woman! he said to her, but she understood him not and left him alone there in the ashes.

“You remember the story, neighbors. Then from the town came Job’s three friends to comfort and grieve with him. Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar were their names, and for seven days and seven nights they listened to Job recount his sorrows and curse, not God, never God, but his birth, his very birth.

“Old Eliphaz the Temanite — a sensible man, we would say, if he came among us today in North Elba — Eliphaz argued that Job must have somehow offended God. ‘For who ever perished! he said to Job, ‘who was also innocent? Tell me, where were the righteous cut off? Happy is the man,’ reasoned the Temanite, ‘whom God correcteth. Cheer up,’ he told Job. ‘You are being chastized by the Father for your failings’

“Have you not also been consoled like this, friends, in times of great suffering?

“‘Oh, if only that were the case!’ was Job’s answer. ‘Oh, that my grief and my calamity were so evenly weighed in the balance together!’

“And so Bildad the Shuhite spoke unto Job. ‘Surely, friend Job, surely God would not cast away a perfect man,’he said. And neither will he keep an evil-doer. You cannot beone,’said Bildad to Job, ‘so you must perforce be the other.’

“But Job cried, ‘No, no, no, a thousand times no! If I justify myself to the Lord, mine own mouth shall condemn me. If I say I am perfect, He shall prove me perverse. The Lord destroyeth the perfect and the wicked alike! Even if I were righteous,’ Job said to his friend and neighbor Bildad, ‘I would not answer with that. Instead, I would make supplication only to my Judge. For look ye, He breaketh me without cause! And you, Bildad, you do not understand any of this.’

“But we understand, do we not, neighbors?

“Then Job’s friend Zophar the Naamathite gave it a try. ‘You must be lying,’ he said as kindly as he could. ‘You say to us that thy doctrine is clean, and thou art clean in the Lord’s eyes. Well, Job, old friend, that cannot be, else you would not be in such a catastrophic condition. So confess, my brother. Prepare thine heart, and stretch out thy hands before thee towards Him. And then the Lord will reward thee!’

“And Job said to Zophar, ‘No, no, no, no! Look around you, fool! Everywhere the tabernacles are full of robbers, and they prosper. Everywhere those who provoke God are secure. Therefore, you, my friends and neighbors,’saith Job to Zophar, Bildad, and Eliphaz, ‘you are all physicians of no value.’

“Hear me, friends and neighbors of this village of North Elba. Hear me. Job said, ‘You speak wickedly for God and talk deceitfully for Him. You speak in your own interests only. Does not His excellency make you afraid? Does it not make you tremble?

“As for me,’ Job said to his friends and neighbors — and here I come to the point of my preachment to you — Job said, As for me, though the Lord slay me, yet will I trust in Him and will maintain mine own ways before Him. Miserable comforters are ye all!’ Job said to them. ‘Ye believe that one might plead with God as a man pleadeth with his neighbor. I cannot find one wise man among you.’

“Have ye not known such miserable comforters as these, friends? They are all around us, are they not? Why, we might even be them ourselves, might we not?

“Where, then, neighbors, shall wisdom be found? And where lieth the place of understanding?

“Behold. I, John Brown, I say to you that it is just as the Bible shows us. The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom. And to depart from evil, that is understanding.

“And you will remember, neighbors, from the old story, there came a whirlwind, and out of the whirlwind the Lord answered Job’s cry. ‘Of Job’s friends and neighbors,’ the Lord saith, ‘who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? And where was’t thou,’the Lord saith to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, ‘where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Where wast thou when I placed the firmament between the firmaments?’

“To them the Lord saith, ‘My wrath is kindled against thee! For you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.’ And the Lord took from them seven bullocks and seven rams each and gave them unto Job. And He blessed the latter end of Job’s life even more than at the beginning with sheep and camels and oxen and asses, and He gave him seven sons more and three daughters.

“Well, neighbors, there you have it. My answer to your charges against me! Now, shall I tell thee the meaning of the story of Job? Shall I again compare us here in this sanctuary today to old Job out there in Uz, a man of principle?

“Or shall I instead compare us to his friends and neighbors, to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, whose hypocrisy kindled the wrath of the Lord against them? Which of these ancients resembles us more?

“For, look, ye have counseled me exactly as Job’s wife counseled him. Ye have told me to forsake my integrity and curse God.

“Ye hath brayed at me like Eliphaz. Ye hath spoken out against me as if wisdom were thine and thy feet were set in the place of understanding.

“Remember, neighbors, in the fear of the Lord, that is where wisdom lies. And to depart from evil, that is understanding. And that is all ye need to know.

“I say to you, miserable comforters! physicians of no value! I tell thee here and now that I and my family shall continue as before — to fear the Lord and to depart from evil. We seek wisdom and understanding. Those are our principles. We shall live by our principles. You, my good neighbors, you may do as you wish.”

Here the Old Man completed his remarks and stepped down and rejoined the congregation. When he had taken his seat, he lowered his head in prayer, and first Mary, next to him, and then the rest of us alongside in the pew did likewise, and as I myself, the last in our group to do so, lowered my head, I noticed that there were a good many other people amongst the congregation who were also following Father’s example, as if in this argument with Job they wished pointedly to separate themselves from the side of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.

A moment later, the Reverend Hall walked up to the lectern, and although the service resumed in its usual manner, I was not aware of it, for my thoughts were turning around the meaning of Father’s talk. I felt myself surrounded by a buzzing light, as if by a swarm of golden bees, and I had to struggle to hear my thoughts. A terrible understanding had come over me in the midst of Father’s talk, and I did not want to lose it, in spite of its being fearsome and threatening to me.

In Father’s words, the figure of Job was, of course, like no one so much as Father himself. As Job stood to God, Father did also. My terrible understanding was that I, too, was like no one so much as Job. Not, however, in my relation to God; but in my relation to Father.

Who was Satan to me, then? Who would test my faithfulness to Father by afflicting me as Satan had afflicted Job? Would I, too, come to curse the day I was born? Would I beg for my own death, as Job had cried out for his and, as I knew, Father, in his periods of greatest despondency, had also? Would I, like Job, like Father, be able to resist the blandishments and sophistries of the hypocrites?

In the Bible, Job is rewarded at the end for his faithfulness to the Lord, he receives from Him new cattle and new children, and Satan is sent packing, along with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. But, as Father showed, Job’s reward is given as evidence of God’s power, not His justice. This is what the hypocrites found beyond their understanding. The moral of the story would be the same even if God had not rewarded Job at the end, for it was done merely to punish the hypocrites and confound Satan, not to comfort Job.

Who, then, in Father’s story of my life, plays the role of Satan? Who wishes to prove me a hypocrite?

The terrible answer, the only possible answer, was that anyone who opposes Father as Satan opposes God, could, if I merely questioned Father, prove me a hypocrite. That answer turned me into a trapped animal, a fox with a paw clamped in an iron-toothed jaw. To escape it, I would be obliged to gnaw at my own flesh and separate my body from itself. Freed, I would be a crippled little beast unable to care for himself, unable even to flee. I would have obtained freedom, yes, but freedom for what? To huddle alone in the bushes nearby, there to die slowly of my self-inflicted wounds. No, I thought. Better the intimacy of iron against my wrist. Better the familiarity of my own teeth closed inside my mouth. Better boils, a potsherd, ashes. Better to curse ever having been born.

Predictably, with a few changes made — none of them, however, designed to placate the wishes of our white neighbors — Father went straight back to work on the Underground Railroad. In his mind, all our white neighbors were now cowards and hypocrites, every one of them, and periodically he denounced them to any of us in the family who would listen. He denounced even his good friend Mr. Thompson, for, although the Old Man at first thought that he had successfully shamed our neighbors with his sermon, his message evidently hadn’t taken hold: no one in the village was willing anymore to aid him in his efforts to spirit fugitive slaves out of the country — except, of course, for the Negroes themselves. And except for the rest of us Browns. Meaning me, I suppose, although there was considerable sacrifice required as well of the others in the family, who had to accommodate themselves to Father’s and my and Lyman’s frequent and protracted absences from the farm.

The most significant change in our modus operandi, however, was in cutting Mr. Wilkinson of the Tahawus mining camp out of the operation. In a flurry of letters to Mr. Frederick Douglass in Rochester, Father made it clear that he would not work with the man. Thenceforth, cargo from the South would have to be shipped to Father in North Elba via an agent named Reuben Shiloh, in care of a Mrs. Ebenezer Rankin, resident of the town of Long Lake, New York, a small, rough lumbering community in the southern Adirondack wilderness about forty miles from North Elba. Reuben Shiloh was in fact Father himself, a pseudonym. Mrs. Rankin, his point of contact in Long Lake, was the elderly widow of a veteran of the War of the Revolution. She lived alone in a cabin on the land her husband had homesteaded after the war, was regarded in the village as mildly eccentric and harmless, and, due to her deep religious feeling and independence of spirit, was sympathetic to the cause. Father first met her after a sermon he had made on the subject of abolitionism at the Congregational church there in Long Lake and, as was his wont, had trusted her instantly. Generally, the Old Man made decisions as to a person’s trustworthiness at once and without consulting others. When it had to do with business matters, of course, he was usually wrong, well off the mark, absurdly so; but when it concerned the question of slavery, he was almost always right.

“It’s a thing you can tell in an instant. You know it from a person’s speech or the cast of his eyes, as soon as you begin to speak with him on the subject of race,” he said, trying to explain his procedure. “Early on, Owen, I conceived the idea of placing myself, when speaking of such matters with white people, in the position of a Negro.” Which is to say that he listened to whites and watched them as if his self-respect, his well-being, his very life, were always at stake, and consequently, as he claimed, he quickly saw things that most whites ignore or blind themselves to. For example, if he spoke of the horrors of slavery to a stranger and the man’s face went all slack and sad over it, as if he wished to be admired for the tenderness of his feelings, then Father knew not to trust him. But if the man reacted, not with sadness and regret, but with righteous wrathfulness, then he would brighten and feel secure in confiding in that person. Father said he loved seeing that old-time righteous anger fill up a white man’s face. It happened rarely, however. “No, Owen” he said, “when it comes to race and slavery, white people, try as they may, cannot hide their true feelings. Not to their fellow Americans who happen to be born black, that is. And not to me, either. Only to themselves.”

Mr. Wilkinson of Tahawus had not hidden his true feelings, not even from me, and I believe that he somewhat resented being cut away from the operation, not out of any love for the Negro or some deep desire to help destroy slavery, but because his work on the Railroad made it significantly easier for him to view himself as a man who acted kindly towards people he regarded as his inferiors. Perhaps he believed that by working for the Underground Railroad and alongside Father, whose motives were pure, he might be able to strike a balance against his hard treatment of the indentured Irish miners and their families. At any rate, soon after he was dropped by the wayside, he joined, unbeknownst to us, with our known enemies, with the slave-catchers and bounty-hunters, with the folks in the region who regarded us as fanatical trouble-makers, and with the marshal from Albany, whose pursuit of the Virginia couple accused of murdering their master had continued throughout the summer.

The marshal, whose name was Saunders, had gotten himself caught in a squeeze between the Canadian and American authorities and also between the states of Virginia and New York, as the Canadians, after conducting an extensive investigation, had asserted unequivocably that the Cannons had never crossed the border at all. The authorities in Virginia insisted that the couple had been last located over in New-Trenton, New York, where they had been detained briefly by a local deputy whom they had somehow bribed to leave their cell door unlocked — the money for the bribe possibly originating with Mr. Douglass, who had visited the couple during their brief confinement. The New-Trenton deputy was himself now awaiting trial, and in order to save his own skin was telling Marshal Saunders everything he knew or thought he knew about the Cannons and their confederates.

Meanwhile, we were moving regular shipments of human cargo over Father’s, or Reuben Shiloh’s, new link between Long Lake and North Elba, and due to the rising vigilance of the authorities and the greater presence of slave-catchers west of us in Buffalo and east of us in Troy, our cargo was increasing significantly in volume and degree of risk, so that three or four times a week we were obliged to make a run down along the old Military Road from North Elba through the pine forests and across the swamps and muskegs to the cabin of Mrs. Rankin, where we loaded up and then raced back through the night to Timbuctoo, and the next night moved our cargo on to Port Kemp, where Captain Keifer carried it aboard his boat and sailed it north to Canada.

It was a wild and exciting time. We were like a gang of outlaws, Lyman and I and Mr. Fleete and Father, armed and reckless, and several times we narrowly escaped capture. Lyman seemed to have found his proper vocation. He grew stern and brave and was no longer so garrulous and puffed up as he had sometimes been earlier. Our days on the farm now seemed merely to be resting periods, interludes that we impatiently waited out, until we again received word from Mrs. Rankin that a new shipment for Reuben Shiloh had arrived in Long Lake, and we would be off, Father and Mr. Fleete on horseback, Lyman and I in the wagon, with our guns close at hand and supplies and tarpaulins and blankets stashed in the bed of the wagon. At Mrs. Rankin’s cabin we’d hole up for the daylight hours in the shed she had out back, beneath which we had early on dug a secret cellar hidingplace where the escaped slaves could await our arrival undetected. And then at sundown we’d load the fugitives into the wagon — men, women, and children in various combinations. We’d cover them with the tarpaulin and race back northeast to Timbuctoo, and if we made good time, we’d keep right on towards Port Kent, arriving there just before sunrise, and Captain Keifer would transfer the cargo from our wagon to his boat. Later that same day, usually in the afternoon, we would pull into the yard in front of the house in North Elba, men and animals alike exhausted and hungry, and we’d eat and fall into bed and sleep like corpses for ten or twelve hours.

Twice, I remember, we were accosted by law officers — a sheriff in Long Lake and a deputy U.S. marshal in Ausable Forks — but on both occasions our wagon was empty, and after suffering a brief and surly interrogation, we were allowed to continue unimpeded. Nonetheless, we were ready for the worst. Although we weren’t actually pursued at any time and thus weren’t obliged to fire our weapons, there was always the danger of betrayal and discovery. People would look up from their work in the fields and woodlots and stare at us as we passed by or peer out the windows of their bedrooms late in the night when the sound of our horses’ hooves and the loud rattle and clack of the wagon disturbed their sleep. Those people must have known who we were and what we were up to.

Our operation, however, was narrow, secretive, and private, cut off from any communications with the communities that surrounded us, cut off, even, from the rest of the anti-slavery movement and its committees and churches and the old mainlines of the Underground Railroad. We worked in a kind of darkness and solitude, as if no one else on the planet were engaged in the same or similar activities. As if there were no one who was not utterly opposed to our activities. And, as had happened in the past, back in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where for an extended period we shuttled fugitive slaves successfully out of the South into Canada, we got caught up in the day-to-day rhythms and excitement of the work, and this put us off the larger rhythms of the movement as a whole. It was as if our little four-man operation, our overnight link between Long Lake and Port Kent, New York, were the entire anti-slavery program for America. It wasn’t arrogance or pride that did it, although it did sometimes seem that Father honestly believed that under his leadership our work was more crucial to the movement than any other and that it was more rigorous and disciplined, morally clearer, better planned, and more efficiently executed than the work of everyone else — beliefs dangerously close to arrogance and pride. No, we lost sight of the larger picture because we were obliged to respond constantly and quickly day in and out to the immediate needs of desperate people who had entrusted their lives to us. And just as we forgot about the helpful existence of our distant or indirect allies, we forgot about the conniving actions of our distant and indirect enemies. We operated without reconnoiter and in the absence of intelligence.

Thus we were not prepared for the re-appearance, one hot August afternoon, of Marshal Saunders at the farm in North Elba. He arrived on horseback in the company of a pair of sober-visaged deputies, bearing testimony from Mr. Wilkinson of the Tahawus mining camp, who the marshal claimed had accused Father and me and two unnamed Negroes presently residing in the vicinity of North Elba of having aided and abetted the escape of the indicted murderers James and Emma Cannon, of Richmond, Virginia.

The officers came up on us shortly after we had returned from a two-night run to Port Kent with four Maryland Negroes — an elderly man, his daughter, and her two nearly grown sons. Our wagon was empty, and Father and I, fortunately, were alone, as Lyman had accompanied Mr. Fleete back to Timbuctoo, there to rest and afterwards to do some much needed blacksmithing among the Negro farmers.

We were standing outside the house by the water trough, stripped to our waists, washing ourselves. The boys and the women, including Lyman’s wife, Susan, were cutting the first crop of hay in the front field. Father looked up at the three men, who sat relaxed and open-faced on their horses as if they meant us no harm. Introductions were not necessary, and Marshal Saunders got straight to the point of this his second visit to our farm. When he had told us of Mr. Wilkinson’s betrayal, he said, “Mister Brown, I’ve not come here to charge you and your son with anything. I’m here peaceable. But I do need to know the names of the two colored men who helped you carry the Cannons through here. It wasn’t but a month ago,” he said, with a slow smile. “You no doubt recall their names.”

Father dried himself deliberately and said nothing. He looked at me, and I saw his boiling rage. Then he passed the drying cloth to me.

“If we helped anyone named Cannon, and I don’t recall that we did, but if we did, then my son and I did it alone,” Father said. “Wilkinson is a liar.”

Marshal Saunders said that he was looking for a slim, dark Negro man in his twenties and a heavy-set mulatto man in his fifties with a full beard. “I’m going to assume, Mister Brown, that you and your son here didn’t have no notion that the coloreds from Virginia was murderers, all right? And you thought you was only helping a couple of escaped slaves scoot through to Canada, that’s all. Just as was the case with Mister Wilkinson down there at Tahawus. And I don’t consider him a liar, sir. I realize that you all were only doing what you thought was your Christian duty. Your Negro associates, however, probably knew better. They have their little secrets that they keep from us,” he said sourly. He believed that they probably knew where the Cannons were hiding. His aim was to cut a deal with our friends. The same deal, he said, that he was cutting with us. If they could give him some small help in locating the Cannons, then he wouldn’t press charges against anyone up here in North Elba. “They’re free niggers, far as I’m concerned, and that’s how I’ll treat them, so long’s they do the same as you and give me a bit of help in performing my duties as a federal officer of the law. You understand what I’m telling you, Mister Brown?”

Father stared up at the man in silence. The horses shifted their weight, sweating under the sun. “Certainly I understand,” he finally said. “But I will not help you, sir. My son and I, if indeed we did help some poor Negro slaves escape from the evil clutches of some Southern slavemaster — a man who may well have deserved to die anyhow, since well-treated slaves rarely risk the rigors of flight — then we did so on our own.” The burden of proof lay with the marshal, Father pointed out, and he believed that giving a stranger in a strange land a ride in your wagon was not yet illegal in the state of New York.

Well, yes, the marshal agreed. It was a gray area of the law, a person might say. Father would benefit everyone concerned, however, himself included, if he saw fit to aid the law. The marshal rolled his head slowly on his shoulders, as if his neck were stiff and this were a casual conversation. The two deputies kept their right hands open and close to the handles of their revolvers.

Father said, “You don’t know who you’re looking for, except on Mister Wilkinson’s perjured say-so. And I can’t help you, and if I could, I’ll tell you frankly, sir, I wouldn’t. Find your Negroes on your own,” he snapped, and he turned and walked towards the house.

“It could all unravel on you, Brown!” the marshal called after. “I might bring Wilkinson himself up here, so’s he can identify the two niggers for me, and when it comes to saving their own dusky skins, who knows what them fellows’ll say then?”

Father wheeled and glared at him. “Do as you wish! Bring Satan up from hell, if you Like, and have him pick a pair of Negroes from the crowd for you. I’ll not help with work like this!”

The three turned their horses abruptly then and rode out of the yard, and without looking back, they galloped down the road towards the settlement. A moment later, when I went inside the house, I found Father already seated, still shirtless, at his writing table, furiously scratching out a letter.

“Who are you writing to?” I asked him.

“John and Jason.”

“In Springfield? And Ohio?”

“Yes, of course!”

“They may not be there now!’ I said. “They might’ve already left for here.” Barely a week before, a letter from John had arrived, saying, among other cheering things, that he and Jason intended soon to come up to North Elba for a short visit, to see the place and the family and to settle a few business matters with Father that could best be discussed in person.

“All the better. But in case they haven’t, this will bring them promptly.” He blotted the letter and passed it over to me to read.

Come hither at once, boys, and come armed, for we need to snatch a few poor creatures from out of the mouth of Satan before he devours them! A proper show of Christian force and clear intent to rain fire down upon the heads of these local malefactors and hypocrites ought to clarify matters here, leastways enough so that we can continue doing the Lord’s work and help bring about the downfall of slavery by making it too costly to maintain against the combined wills of white Christians and of the desperate, courageous slaves themselves. Come hither to North Elba now, my sons! Come and stand with us as true, courageous, righteous Soldiers of the Lord! Your loving father,

John Brown

I pointed out that it might be ten days or two weeks before they received his summons, and the whole affair could well have blown over by then. “And besides,”I said, “they might’ve already left Springfield to come here anyhow. Why bother writing this at all?”

Father looked up at me with an expression that flowed from puzzlement to slight disgust. “Owen, sometimes I think…,” he said, then began again. “Owen, I sometimes believe that you must become a hotter man than you are.” And with a little wave of dismissal, he returned to his letter, signed it, and placed it into an envelope and sealed it for mailing.

I stood by the window for a moment and, peering out at the mountains, saw that it was clouding up in the west to rain. I felt weary, almost dizzy, from two sleepless nights and ached in my bones for rest and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a day and a night. But I knew I could not do that yet. I pulled on a shirt and trudged from the house, across the yard towards the field, to help the family bring in the hay. Scythe in hand, I crossed the road, and as I neared the others, I heard rapid hoofbeats behind me and, turning, saw Father ride out. He was headed towards the village to get his letter into the afternoon post to Westport, whence it would make its slow way south to Massachusetts, and the sight of the man, wrapped in haste and single-mindedness and rage, fatigued me now beyond all imagining. It nearly repelled me.

A short ways beyond, bent over in the field, was the rest of my family — my stepmother and sisters in starched bonnets like white flower-tops and my brothers under the shade of their straw hats working with their backs to me and against the wind that riffled across the field of yellow hay, flattening and silvering it in the fading afternoon light. They seemed at such peace with the world, so at ease with themselves, that I envied them and, momentarily weak and guilty, my conscience enflamed by Father’s example and his cruel remark, felt cut off from them, as if I were a member of a completely different family.

There followed then a rapid succession of events, one leading swiftly to the next, and it seemed at the time that there was nothing we or anyone else could do to stop or deflect them. First, that same evening, when Father returned from posting his letter, he came all boiling with unusual rage. The family, me included, was at the table, eating supper, when he galloped into the yard on his poor old tired Morgan horse, strode into the house, and poured out his story in a torrent of words, shocking us with the ferocity of his anger and frightening the younger children. Sputtering and spitting, he bore us the news that when Marshal Saunders had earlier interrogated us, he had lied. It was a lie of omission, but a heinous lie nonetheless, Father declared, for the marshal had not told us that he had brought Mr. Wilkinson along with him and that he had kept the man hidden down the road a ways from the farm. Loud talk of murder and lying federal law officers and hypocrisy, of revenge and bloody rebellion, of laying about with the jawbone of an ass and chopping off the heads of serpents — we were used to that from Father. But here, tonight, in our farmhouse kitchen, our domestic sanctuary seemed to have been invaded for the first time, and the calls to violence were no longer made with regard to some distant or even imaginary place and time. They were more than metaphorical. Father wanted blood, real blood, and he wanted it now.

The Old Man had learned from the folks in Timbuctoo that after having been rebuked and rebuffed by Father, the marshal and his deputies had gathered up Mr. Wilkinson from his hiding-place, and the four had ridden over to the Negro settlement, where the traitorous villain Wilkinson had identified Lyman Epps and Mr. Fleete as our cohorts. Then, despite Lyman’s and Mr. Fleete’s insistence that they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the couple wanted in Virginia for murder, the marshal had placed both men under arrest and had marched them off to Elizabethtown, where, said Father, they were probably, even as he himself spoke, being placed under lock and key, as if the two had been returned to the manacles of slavery.

“This shall not be allowed to stand!” Father bellowed.

Susan Epps was naturally alarmed as to her husband’s fate, and Ruth and Mary rushed to console her, as did I. Father, however, seemed blinded by his rage, and ignoring the fears of the women and children, he stomped up and down in the room, counting weapons and imagining violent confrontations along the trail between North Elba and the Elizabethtown jail, which both he and I knew the marshal and his party would not reach until morning or even later, if on their way they stopped overnight in Keene at Mr. Partridge’s house, as we ourselves had when first coming over here back in May.

“We can still catch the culprits, you and I,” he said to me. “Lyman and Mister Fleete are surely afoot, made to walk in chains like captured animals while the white men ride. They must have passed by here this very afternoon while you were all at work in the fields,” he suddenly realized. “Didn’t you see them?” he demanded. “Good Lord, didn’t a one of you children notice them on the road? Four white men astride horses and two black men treated like slaves before your very noses, and not a one of you saw it?”

I explained that we had all been hard at work bringing in the hay, that it was hot and we were way down at the lower end of the field by then, trying to beat the rain. It had not rained after all, but had merely threatened to do so all afternoon long and into the evening. Now we heard distant thunder rumbling in the west, and flashes of heat lightning crackled across the darkening sky.

“Bah!” he exclaimed, grabbing down our muskets and checking the powder and bullets. “What we need are swords” he muttered to himself. “Broadswords! So we can sweep down upon them like avenging angels!”

But as the evening wore on, the Old Man calmed somewhat and seemed to settle upon a slightly more rational strategy for obtaining the release of our friends, which relieved me. I had not liked much the idea of the two of us riding out alone in the dark and recklessly falling upon the marshal, his deputies, and Mr. Wilkinson, and probably Partridge, too, with nothing but two small-bore muskets and a pair of hand-axes between us. On reflection, Father now believed that he might obtain the legal and financial help of Mr. Gerrit Smith, whose influence in these parts was great, and to this end the Old Man commenced to write a set of letters and pleas. He also proposed to ride over to Elizabethtown tomorrow morning himself, armed, in case of emergency, and accompanied by me — there to speak with the local authorities and try to get our friends released on their own recognizance pending a trial, which he firmly believed would never take place anyhow.

“This whole thing is a dumbshow,” he now insisted. “A charade. It’s merely an attempt to intimidate the poor fellows,” he growled. He believed that Marshal Saunders was only interested in putting a feather in his cap for capturing the Cannons and thus was trying to frighten our friends into betraying the poor couple and had no intention of trying them in court. Father was sure that Lyman and Mr. Fleete had no more knowledge of the Cannons’ present whereabouts than we and were as ignorant as we of the Cannons’ true reasons for fleeing their master and the state of Virginia — if indeed it was true that they slew the man in the first place. And if they did, so be it. How could we blame them? Father almost wished they had slain their master. “Only in an evil and inhuman land, Owen, is it a crime to slay the man who enslaves you. Remember that,” he said.

When morning came and Father and I were preparing to leave for Elizabethtown, who should arrive at our doorstep but dear John and sweet Jason — my beloved brothers. It was a great reunion for us all. They arrived on horseback with the sun rising behind them, spotted first by Salmon, who gave the cry that brought us all streaming from the house to greet them.

They were gentle men, both alike in that way, and loving towards everyone in the family, especially towards our stepmother, Mary, and sister Ruth. With regard to Ruth they were probably no more devoted than I myself, but towards our stepmother they seemed as a pair to exhibit a greater affection and protectiveness than I could ever muster. This had always confused me somewhat, for their loss, when our mother died, had surely been as great as mine. Yet, apparently, it was not so, or at least for them the loss was not of a nature that restricted their ability to transfer deep affection and tenderness for our natural mother across to our stepmother. It sometimes seemed that the loss of our mother had actually enlarged my elder brothers’ capacity to love her replacement, for they were more careful of Mary’s feelings than were her natural sons even, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver. How strange it is, that brothers and sisters can share every important childhood experience and yet end up responding to those experiences in such dramatically different ways. What liberates and gives power to one child must often humiliate and weaken another, until it appears that our differences more than our sameness have come to bind us.

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.

Once again, it fell to me to drive the wagon, while Father and my elder brothers rode on horseback. “We’ll need the wagon to carry our friends back home,” Father said, and, of course, I agreed, although Father or one of the others could have driven it as well as I. Mary and Ruth and Susan Epps packed two days’ food for us, and the entire family stood by the door and waved cheerfully, as if we were setting out on a deer hunt, and we rode uphill back along the Cascade Road, east towards Keene and Elizabethtown.

We had not planned to stop in Keene, which we reached by noon, but as we passed by the rundown farm owned by Mr. Partridge, Father suddenly determined to pull up. “I believe I have some business with that man,” he grimly announced, and pulled into the yard and dismounted. We followed, but did not get down from our horses, as he crossed the yard, strode across the porch, and rapped loudly on the door. There was a single, saddled horse at the porch rail, a bay that I thought I recognized but could not be sure until the door swung open and I saw Mr. Partridge’s long, dark, gloomy face and behind him glimpsed the grizzled face of the slave-catcher Mr. Billingsly.

Billingsly darted out of our line of sight into the darkness of the room, but he surely knew that I and probably Father had spotted him when the door opened. This was a dangerous situation, and I jumped down from the wagon and signaled to John and Jason, who dismounted and joined me at the porch steps.

“What do you want here, Brown?” Mr. Partridge said, his voice a bit shaky with fear, as the three of us came to stand behind Father, each with a musket in hand. Father, too, had his gun with him, slung under his right arm.

“I’ve come to redeem my clock,” Father announced. He reached down into his left pocket and drew out some coins, which he held in front of him, until Mr. Partridge unthinkingly extended his own palm. Father let the coins trickle into the other man’s hand and said, “That, sir, is the cost of our food and lodging for one night, which you established back in May. You may count it, and then you will hand over my clock.”

“You’re crazy, Brown,” he said, and he shoved the coins back at Father, groping at the Old Man’s snuff-colored frock coat until he found a loosely open pocket and dropped them in, whereupon he moved to shut the door in Father’s face. Father kicked the door back hard and shoved Mr. Partridge aside, and there stood revealed the slave-catcher Billingsly, who had drawn both his pistols.

Everything that followed happened in less than two seconds. I saw Mr. Partridge’s dough-faced wife a ways behind Billingsly, her hands over her mouth, and beyond her was the old woman, her mother, calmly seated by the rear window, knitting, as if she were alone in the house. Mr. Partridge, his bearded face taut and drained white with fear, turned and grabbed Great-Grandfather’s clock from the fireplace mantel and extended it towards Father, a last-chance peace offering. At that instant, Billingsly fired one of his pistols, missing Father, who stood directly before him, missing everyone, although we did not know it yet, and simultaneously several of us fired our rifles, a reckless, wild thing to do at such close range with so many innocent people close by, but we were lucky, for no one was struck — except for the one man who deserved it, Billingsly the slave-catcher. He howled in pain and went down, rolling on the floor and clutching at his thigh, where blood spurted crimson onto the rug.

I had fired my gun, I know that, and I later learned that John had fired his, but I do not know which of us shot Billingsly. Whichever, John or me, it was the first time one of us Browns had shot a man. I myself had meant not to hit anyone, intending merely to fire into the ceiling over everyone’s head, hoping, I suppose, to control the situation by striking terror into Billingsly, not a bullet. John later said that he had definitely meant to shoot the man dead but had not a clear shot, so merely had tried not to hit anyone else, especially the women.

Who knew, then, which of us had shot him, and did it matter? One of John Brown’s sons had done the bloody deed, and the day would continue that way, with John Brown and his sons wreaking havoc and spilling blood in the Adirondack mountain villages of New York. Whatever one of us did, we all did.

The man Billingsly was down, and his pistols were scattered across the floor. There was a loud battery of shouts, bellows, commands, and, from at least one of the women, high-pitched screams, and I do not know if I or my brothers or Mr. Partridge or even Billingsly was amongst the hounds who gave cry, although one of us Browns shouted, “He’s down! He’s down!” And another yelled at Partridge, “Don’t make a move, mister, or I swear it, I’ll kill you at once!” Several of us were calling to the rest, “Are you hit? Are you hit?” And, “No! Missed me! The coward missed me!” And, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire now!”

Only Father remained calm. He waited for silence, and when it came, the Old Man, as cool and unruffled as a frozen lake, took the clock out of Mr. Partridge’s hands. Then he looked down at the bleeding slave-catcher, who squirmed and writhed on the floor in pain, and said in a clear, steady voice, “Mister Billingsly, this is the second time that you are lucky that we Browns have not killed you. I advise you, sir, to consider another line of business than hunting down escaped slaves.”

He turned, closed the door behind him, and placed the clock into the front of the wagon, below the driver’s bench. Then the Old Man and John and Jason mounted their horses. I jumped up into the wagon, and we rode quickly off, away from the valley, into the mountains and over the ridge to Elizabethtown, where, at around four o’clock in the afternoon, we drew up before the stately brick courthouse.

The jail was behind and belowstairs, and we walked directly there. I did not know Father’s plan, or if he actually had one, beyond somehow convincing the Elizabethtown jailer to release Mr. Fleete and Lyman into our custody, which did not to me seem likely. But Father was adept at improvisation, so it was perhaps fortuitous, when we four Browns marched into the jail, armed and passably dangerous-looking, our faces flushed and hearts still beating rapidly from the shooting back in Keene, that we ran face-first into Mr. Wilkinson of Tahawus. He looked surprised and frightened to see us, naturally. He appeared to have just come in from a hard ride himself.

“Mister Wilkinson” Father said, “tell me your business here.”

The man backed off and turned to the jailer, a small, mustachioed man seated behind a cluttered desk, putting papers away. “This here’s John Brown!” Wilkinson exclaimed to the jailer, who did not appear to care. “He’s come to break the niggers out of jail!”

At once, Father placed the mouth of the barrel of his musket next to the ear of Mr. Wilkinson. “You’re right about that;’ he said. “Jailer, you can march back to the cells with my sons here and uncage the two colored men and bring them forward, if you will be so kind. Otherwise, I will blow this man’s brains out.”

Mr. Wilkinson whimpered and said that he had nothing to do with their being jailed, that it was all the fault of Marshal Saunders.

“Then what are you here for?”

“I came for my own business,”he said.

“You lie, Wilkinson. Jailer,” Father said, “tell me this maris business here. Now!” He cocked the hammer of his gun. Mr. Wilkinson shut his eyes tightly, as if he expected to hear the gun go off that instant.

Slowly, carefully, the jailer stood. John, Jason, and I all had our guns trained on him. “Wal, he come in to identify the niggers back there and sign some papers to it. Marshal said he was to do that. Hey, listen, Mister Brown,” he said, “I don’t know nothin’ about these here niggers. You can do with them whatever the hell you want.”

“Has Mister Wilkinson so sworn, that the men you have locked up for the marshal are indeed the fellows he says they are? Because I’m here to tell you they are not,” Father said.

“Wal, no, not yet he ain’t. They’s just a couple of coloreds, far’s I’m concerned, and I’m holdin’ ’em for the marshal, like he asked, till he comes back from Port Kent.”

“With no arrest warrant.”

“Wal… yes, sir. Yes. That’s so.”

Grabbing Mr. Wilkinson by his shirt collar, Father drew him to the steel door that led to the cells and said to the jailer, “Come along, and bring your keys. Mister Wilkinson here is going to tell you that the men you have locked up are not the men the marshal is seeking.”

“Wal, sir, y’ know I can’t release them without the marshal’s say-so,” the man said, although he was already unlocking the door to the jail.

“You will do as I say,”said Father.

“Yes, sir, I b’lieve I will,” he said, and he swung open the door, and we all walked into the cell block and went straightway back to where Mr. Fleete and Lyman awaited us. They both grinned broadly when they saw us and came to the front of their shared cell and grasped the bars, watching as the jailer unlocked the cell door and swung it wide.

“Mister Brown, we are mightly relieved to see you,” said Mr. Fleete. “That there fellow, he’s the one told the marshal we run the Cannons off to Canada,” said Lyman, pointing sternly at Mr. Wilkinson. “They come up on us over in Timbuctoo yesterday evening. Said we knew where the Cannons was hiding. Said they killed their master down in Virginia. We don’t know nothing about that, now, do we, Mister Brown?”

“No, Lyman, we don’t,”said Father.

“This ain’t legal, you know” the jailer said to Father, as we all marched back out to his office. Father still held Mr. Wilkinson by his shirt collar and had his gun tight against the man’s ear.

“Just don’t try to stop us,” said Father, “and no harm will come to either of you. We’ll all worry about what’s legal and what isn’t later on. Right now, however, these men have not been charged and therefore are free.” He let go of Mr. Wilkinson and lowered his gun, and we did like wise with ours and, with Mr. Fleete and Lyman in the lead, made to leave the jader’s office. John was the last to depart from the building, and when he turned to draw the door closed behind him, as he told us later, he saw the jailer extract a handgun from his desk, and he shot the man. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that we barely knew of it, except for the loud gunshot and the sulphurous smell of the powder, for we were already outside and crossing the grass towards the horses and wagon.

“Go!” John shouted, and we ran. “He pulled a gun!”

I leapt onto the wagon seat and grabbed the reins, and Mr. Fleete and Lyman, their faces filled with fear, jumped into the back. Father, Jason, and John mounted their horses, and we all broke for the road out of town. When the wagon passed the open door of the jail, with the others on horseback racing on ahead, I looked to my side and saw the jailer come to the door. He had been wounded in his left arm, but he held a revolver in his right, and he aimed carefully and fired once, and then we were gone, the horses pounding up the road, heading north out of town — towards the pass to Ausable Forks this time, instead of back the way we had come, through Keene, where we had shot Billingsly.

It was not until we had run nearly a mile that I took it into my head to check my passengers, and when I glanced back I saw with dismay that Mr. Fleete had been shot in the chest. Lyman sat ashen-faced and expressionless beside him, looking out at the passing scenery as if he were alone. Father and the others were still a ways ahead of us, too far to call, and so I drove on. Shortly, when we had gotten several miles out of town, I drew the wagon up under a tall spruce tree beside the road at the crest of a short hill. I turned in the seat and stepped into the back, where Mr. Fleete lay.

As if explaining a living man’s absence, not a dead man’s presence, Lyman said, “Ol’ Elden Fleete, he’s gone back to Africa.”

“Oh, Lord!” I cried. “What have we done? What have we done, Lyman?”

“It ain’t we that killed him, Owen.”

Then Father and John and Jason appeared on horseback beside the wagon, and they looked down and saw what had happened and grew dark with anger and sorrow. Especially Father. “Bring him on back to Timbuctoo, where he can be dressed out for a proper burial. I only wish it were the slave-catcher who was dead,” he said, “not the slave.”

“Mister Fleete was not a slave, Father” I said.

“We know that, Owen. We know it. But those other fellows don’t.” He clucked to his horse, and we all fell into a somber line and made our slow way back down through Wilmington Notch to North Elba.

There was a terrible sadness amongst all the Negroes when we delivered Mr. Fleete’s body over to them, but no indications of surprise. For them, I suppose, the astonishing thing was that one of them had managed to live so long without having run from the world and hid from it in a hole. That was something about Negroes which I found mystifying in those days — that they constantly expected death and yet did not anticipate it. Later, of course, I came to the same viewpoint myself.

But the consequences of our rash acts were not as dire as I, for one, expected, although they were, indeed, catastrophic for the Negro community in general. We had inflicted a serious wound on the slave-catcher (not a mortal one, it seemed), and that was probably a positive good. Although it seemed to me that there had been more than enough blood spilt. On the way back from Elizabeth town, John confided that he hoped Billingsly would come looking for revenge, so we could kill him properly. Two white men wounded for one black man dead: that was the trade-off. Not quite fair, I thought, but closer to even than most of these exchanges allowed. And we had surely scared our Keene neighbor Mr. Partridge straight back to his deer-hunting ways, stifling any rising ambitions he may have held for assisting slave-catchers and sharing in the rewards of that heinous activity. The unfortunate jailer in Elizabethtown, whose name I never learned, was one of those who, in Father’s phrase, were merely doing their duty, and though he had paid dearly for it, he would have a scar to show and a tale to tell for the rest of his days. He would be able to say that he had been one of the first innocent victims of the Browns’ nigger madness. Mr. Wilkinson, our one-time ally, had beat his retreat back to Tahawus, where he would continue to drive his Irish miners, but with no further pretensions to providing aid and succor to Negroes, and that was actually in the interests of Negroes and those of us who might have otherwise allied ourselves with him. It’s always useful to know your enemy and to have him know you, as Father was fond of saying.

Despite their astonishment and sadness on learning of the death of Mr. Fleete, our family was overjoyed, of course, to see us return to the farm that night uninjured, and Susan wept with relief at the sight of her husband freed from jail. However, their anxiety, as we learned on our arrival home, had been greatly increased that afternoon by a piece of intelligence they had received in our absence from Captain Keifer. He had sent his eldest son down to North Elba on horseback to warn us of what we already knew, that Marshal Saunders had come looking for the Cannons in Port Kent, and to inform us of what we had not even guessed — that in truth, as the marshal had claimed, Captain Keifer had not transported the Negro couple to Canada after all. Further, the two had been surprised in the kitchen of the Quaker’s home by the marshal and his deputies, and the man had promptly arrested the couple and was now transporting them south to Albany, whence they would be returned to Richmond, Virginia, there to stand trial for the brutal slaying of their master.

“What! How could that be?” Father demanded. “He deceived us, then! The Quaker lied! Good Lord, is there no one on this earth we can trust?”

Patiently, Mary related to him what the boy had told her. His father’s boat had been forced back a few miles north of Plattsburgh by a sudden, dangerous turn in the weather, and by the time Captain Keifer made a second attempt to take them into Canada, his Underground Railroad operatives on the further side of the border had been notified by Canadian authorities that the couple was wanted in the United States, not for fleeing slavery, for which there were at that time no federal warrants, but for crossing state lines in flight from arrest for murder, and as a result they had refused to accept them. Not knowing what else to do with the couple, Captain Keifer had brought them into his own home in Port Kent and had attempted to hide and protect them there until such time as he could arrange to move them into Canada by some other means. Most of the villagers in Port Kent were soon aware of the presence of the Negro couple and did not object, and consequently Captain Keifer had grown careless as to their easy coming and going about the place. Thus it was not difficult for the marshal and his deputies to take them by surprise.

“Surely”‘ Mary said, “the poor man is desolated by this turn of events. He asked his son to beg you for your understanding and forgiveness, Mister Brown,” she said, addressing him as she always did — although in his absence she, like the rest of us, generally referred to him as Father or the Old Man. “The boy himself was mighty agitated and seemed burdened by guilt. Poor lad, all full of his thees and thous.” She had comforted him as much as she could and sent him back with assurances to Captain Keifer that Father would bear him no ill will and would not judge him for this calamity. After all, Captain Keifer had more to fear now from the law than did any of us, she pointed out. “He has been harboring people who he knew were accused murderers, not just escaped slaves.”

Father sat heavily down at the table and sighed. I sensed that he was giving something up. John and Jason and I glanced at one another nervously. What now? The ride from Father’s peaks to his valleys was often a rough one, and we were still perched on the heights of our day’s adventure, trying to sort out the meanings of our bloody encounters and the death of Mr. Fleete, hoping to be able to use them to energize us and entitle us to further brave acts. We were young men, after all, armed, freshly tested in battle, and puffed up with righteous wrath, and it did not take much in those days to set our hearts to pounding. Even Jason. We did not want Father to abandon us now and, as was his wont at times like this, to slump down into a slough of despond, where we would doubtless have to follow.

“Let me have one of my babies,” Father said in a low voice. “Annie or Sarah. Let me have Sarah. Bring me little Sarie, will you, Ruth?” Suddenly, the Old Man looked very tired — bone-weary and aged.

Ruth went obediently to the sleeping loft to fetch the child. Father said, “Everything seems to have come undone, doesn’t it, children? Our neighbors have abandoned us. Men have been shot. Blood spilt. And a beloved, courageous friend has been shot dead. And now those whom we would assist in their plight have been captured by the enemy and taken off south to be hung, or worse. Oh, I can barely think of it!”

No one answered. The younger boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, lounged at the door to the further room, waiting eagerly for the bloody details, who shot whom and where, which they knew would come later, when we elder sons went upstairs to bed and were freed by the absence of our parents to brag to one another. Mary silently placed food down on the table, and Lyman, John, Jason, and I all drew up our stools and set to eating. In a moment, Ruth returned carrying the sleepy-eyed Sarah, and deposited the child on Father’s lap. He smiled wanly down into her puffy face, and when she rose to wakefulness, recognized him, and grinned, he brightened somewhat and began to rock her slowly in his arms.

“John says I must return to Springfield,” he said to us. In a calm, low voice, he explained that he was needed there to settle some painful arguments and tangled disputes between the woolen buyers and the sheep farmers in Ohio and our main support, Mr. Perkins — old claims and counter-claims that John thought would be more easily resolved if Father was there to face down these nettlesome people in person. It had seemed a bad idea to Father at first. “Now… now I don’t know, maybe he’s right. I had hoped to be needed more here, however, than in Springfield,” he said, and he sighed heavily again. “I think our Negro friends across the valley in Timbuctoo, like our white friends here in North Elba, will no longer want to work with us. What think you, Lyman?”

Lyman looked up from his plate of ham and corn bread and baked beans, chewed silently for a moment, and finally said, “Mister Brown, I can’t speak for them other folks. Just for me and my wife here. And we’re going to do whatever you decide you need us for. You and your boys, you got me out of that jail today. And if it was me instead of poor ol’ Elden that got killed, and he was the one sitting here tonight eating supper, I know he’d be telling you the same thing. But them other folks over at Timbuctoo, they’re probably going to want to lay low for a spell. Sort of playing possum, you know. They got to, Mister Brown. You can understand that.”

“Playing possum, eh? But not you and Susan?”

“No, no, we’re colored folks, too, Mister Brown. For sure. But we’re living here now in this house. We’re not settled with them across the valley in Timbuctoo no more. That’s why we’ve got to take more consideration of what you people do than they do over there. It’s like we got this here debt that we owe to you and the family, Mister Brown. And we want to be paying it off” He looked across the room at his wife as if for confirmation, and she nodded, and he went back to eating.

“All right, then,” Father said. “It’s settled.”

“What is?” said I, warm corn bread and butter like soft, crumbled gold in my mouth.

“We’ll go down to Springfield with John and Jason.”

“We?”

Father shot me a hard look. “You and I. Isn’t that what, not so long ago, you were begging for, Owen? I need you there, for a month at least, while Jason returns to Ohio and sets things right for us out west and sees to his wife and poor Fred, who have been making do on their own these months. Taking care of Fred is no simple matter, as you know. The good woman probably did not bargain for that when she agreed to marry Jason.”

“Ellen loves Fred, Father,” Jason said. “Believe me, he’s no burden to her. She has no fear of him, even when he goes off on one of his spells.”

“Yes, well, even so, she needs you, son. And I need you there, too, to make what payments we can for the unsold fleeces and to explain our delay to the rest.”

As fast as it could be said, then, it had been decided. Father, John, and I would return to Springfield, Jason would head back to Ohio, and Lyman and Susan Epps would stay on at the farm with the remainder of the family, tending to the harvest and setting the farm up properly for winter. Lyman had replaced me, as I had replaced Jason. And there was more. Father wished to travel to England, he said, where, according to John, the price for wool was now up to seventy dollars per hundredweight, nearly twice what Brown & Perkins was getting for it in Springfield. He would go there and attempt to convince the British to buy American wool for the first time. By setting the British buyers off against the American, he might thereby break the monopoly that was crippling the producers and driving Father and Mr. Perkins deeper and deeper into debt as they purchased the wool and held it in the Springfield warehouse, waiting for the prices to rise.

But England? To travel across the sea and attempt to penetrate a market and deal with men we knew nothing about? That seemed foolish to me.

Not to Father. He would empty the warehouse and sail over with it. The tariffs were down. American fleeces could compete with the best in the world now, he insisted. John Bull had only to see it before his eyes and have a knowing man like Father explain to him the fine conditions under which those fleeces had been grown and make the necessary guarantees for future delivery, and the fellow would snap it up. Everyone knew that our free Ohio and Pennsylvania sheepmen could out-produce the poor, beaten-down Scots and Irish, once the market was opened to them. The only reason no one had done it before this was that the individual sheepman was incapable of delivering the required quantity of wool, and the devious American buyers had colluded and done everything they could to discourage and sabotage cooperatives like ours. “This is the solution!” he exclaimed, happy now, excited again, sailing before a fresh breeze, well out of his doldrums of a few minutes earlier.

It was almost too much to keep up with, these switches and turns, descents and ascents of feeling and intention. Jason was happy enough, and looked it, pursing his lips in an anticipatory smile of returning to the arms of his bride and the comfort of their home in Ohio. And John was well-pleased, for he had come to feel like a proper businessman down there in Springfield and had moved into more or less permanent quarters with his wife, Wealthy. And Lyman could not have been in the slightest discouraged by the prospect of becoming foreman of the farm, with his wife, Susan, with Mary and Ruth and a hard-working brood of boys and girls to help him.

I wondered how Mary regarded the Old Man’s decision: relief, I supposed, for his decision to call off the war against slavery for a spell but dread and anxiety as well, for his forthcoming absence from her side as autumn and winter came on.

But the one, perhaps the only one, who felt deflated by these new plans, surely, was I, Owen Brown, he who barely three months before had wanted nothing so much as to return from the wilderness of these mountains to the bustling river town of Springfield. Something had altered my feelings in those intervening months. The work with Father and the others on the Underground Railroad, to be sure, those excitements and risks and the sense of being engaged wholly in a moral enterprise — they had changed me. But something more lasting than that had eliminated my earlier longing to leave this place, a thing that had grown out of our life as a family settled on a farm in these mountains.

For as long as I could remember, we had as a family been unified and empowered by the single great Idea. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, we had been fragmented and split off from one another — with Father charging about the countryside and traveling back and forth on his various missions; with strangers black and white coming into our household and departing as quickly as we became familiar with them; with half a household here and another half there; with plans and fantasies simultaneously multiplying and disintegrating, as circumstances shifted subtly or got dramatically altered by forces invisible and beyond our control; with the very shape and number of our family constantly changing from one season to the next, as a new child was born every year, year after year, 1834, ’35, ’36, ’37, all the way to ’48, and the terrible, sad deaths of children coming between those births, until we barely knew the names, birth dates, and death dates of our brothers and sisters. For every new child that arrived, there seemed to be one recently departed, due to the ague, to dysentery, to consumption, to calamitous accidental scalding, from the first Fred, back when I was but six years old, to the first Sarah, and Charles, Peter, and Austin, who all went in that horrific winter of ’43, to little Amelia in ’46, and most recently, in Springfield, the baby Ellen. Now, after all that, there had come a small but significant measure of stability here among these Negro and white farmers in these mountains, and for the first time in my life I felt I stood at the center of things.

I had not expected that. I had not in fact known that such a feeling was even possible or that, once experienced, it would seem, not merely desireable, but necessary. But it was here in North Elba and nowhere else that the whirl of the one great Idea seemed for me to slow and even to cease hurtling me from one place and set of feelings and loyalties to another. It was here that I felt like a normal son and brother in a normal family, farming our rough acres of northern land, tending our livestock, and aiding our neighbors. I had even begun to imagine, on seeing my sister Ruth grow attracted to Henry Thompson, my own possibilities for finding a wife here, building a house, raising my own herd of sheep, fathering my own children. And, alongside my Negro and white neighbors alike, continuing to do my bit of the Lord’s and Father’s work.

For the Old Man, of course, this was not enough. It was not nearly enough; it was in fact a sin, to be making a home and in addition doing merely our bit of the Lord’s work. We had to be doing all of it; and all our work had to be the Lord’s. Making a home had to be incidental. Or else we were doing Satan’s work.

Thus we Browns were once again shifting our mode of contention against those who would oppose us, and shifting our base of operations as well. We would head south to Springfield and thence to London, England, from where, Father said, we might well briefly cross over to the Continent and there make an on-site study of Napoleon’s military campaigns in the Lowlands. Upon the sale of our wool, we would return freed at last of debt, so as to devote ourselves completely, once and for all, to the proper business of waging war against slavery.

“Then shall all the world see the fruits of our discipline, of our principled savagery, and of our strategic intelligence,” Father declared to us that last night in North Elba. Then might the war properly commence. This valley would be our base camp, our headquarters, as we moved down the Appalachians. Modeling our tactics and our principles on the tactics and principles that brought about the great achievements of Toussaint, Spartacus, and Nat Turner, we would liberate the South — plantation by plantation, town by town, county by county, state by state — until we had at last broken the back of the beast.

So, yes, he had his plan, even then. And little by little he had made it known to us. He had maps and texts to support his theories, and he would draw them out in the evenings to illustrate them to us and demonstrate their feasibility. Also, he was no doubt practicing for the time when he would have to place his plan before the gaze of more skeptical audiences than his wife and children and the Negro members of his household, audiences made up of people like Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, men whose support he personally would depend upon and whose support his plan was in fact premised on.

To bed, then: the child Sarah, asleep on Father’s lap, carried to her bed by sister Ruth; the lads Watson, Salmon, and Oliver grumpily climbing to the loft, to await the arrival of their elder brothers. And we did follow along shortly after, with Lyman Epps, who surely would have preferred to be sleeping in a private chamber in his own bed with his wife, but who must live like a Shaker now, celibate and communal. And Ruth and Susan Epps to the chamber where the females slept, where the little girls, Annie and Sarah, were slumbering already.

Leaving Father and Mary alone downstairs in their bed near the parlor fireplace, where the Old Man, I knew, in his enthusiasm for this new turn of events, and conscious of the oncoming prolonged absence from his wife and home, would be reaching towards her in the darkness, doing the Lord’s work, being fruitful, multiplying. While Great-Grandfather Brown’s clock ticked loudly from the fireplace mantel.