Raising holy hell, p.19
Raising Holy Hell, page 19
* * *
HARPER’S FERRY, 11 A.M.—A scout has been made by Lt. J. E. B. Stuart and a company of Marines on the Maryland side where a search turned up several crates of weapons and other supplies. The most valuable article, however, was a portmanteau stuffed with documents of a particularly incriminating and alarming nature.
* * *
And now let us turn to the truth of the matter to find out what really happened.
Said the old man
beckoning like a doppelgänger
Let us face into the guns
said the old man
beckoning like a revenant
and rip yourselves immaculate to flinders
Amen
A fanatic does not calculate.
—CELINE
I profess faith in miracles.
I believe miracles can occur.
I believe miracles must occur.
I believe miracles do occur.
I believe, further, that I am Chosen by Him to help them come to pass—
—so that as they stealth the terrain like Apache, their breath shows in white snarls, like crowns-of-thorns on the air above their heads, like hives of concertina wire.
As of this moment they are Invisible no longer. As of this moment they are death on the wing.
This the old man had told them as they had prepared to abandon their rookery and swoop down in the dark from the hills, so that now—
—four miles to the mouth of the bridge
—nine hundred feet across to the Point
—then turn and face into the guns
—then twirl and catch history beckoning
—they repeat it to themselves like children who require reassurance: “Death on the wing, death on the wing, death on the wing.”
It has begun to rain, a frigid, strafing rain. As they slog, stroking with every fourth stride the oiled-slick barrels of the loaded Sharp’s carbines slung handily aslant their shoulders beneath their black woolen serapes, they feel it bouncing off the back of their necks like dimes. The night is shit, but it is shit that redounds to their advantage, screening their advance, muffling their sounds, herding folks indoors.
The old man is seated tailorwise as inevitable as the weather atop a casket of pikes in the bed of his horse-drawn wagon fretting after the telegraph lines which had better have been cut by now or they are all in for one hellacious evening. This, as farther up along the road along the tracks along the bank of the river, Johnny Cook and Charlie Tidd are at this very moment snipping through the lines with the old man’s sheep clips, a task that in this burr-cold braaaaangs their gloveless hands to the bone like fistfuls of hornets.
Death on the wing.
He prays that they may believe it, for what the old man knows as certainly as he has ever known anything is that they are not enough, nor would they be enough twice over, and that unless the slaves flock in force and flock from the outset, they will require the aid of … something more.
This he has held back from them: They believe they are here to seize arms and munitions before lugging themselves off to the mountains. And so they are. But they are here also, and as much, to confirm that he is right, that John Brown knows better, that the slaves will fight for their freedom, that they would rather die with a pike in their hands than live with a strop on their backs.
If only Douglass had not betrayed him, only General Tubman not fallen ill.
The old man visors his eyes with the brim of his hand and peers through the rainslant from the back of the wagon. Impossible to see. Too dark. (The moon has long since capsized.) Shadows. Silhouettes. Breathsmoke. Too rainy. They’re there, though. He can hear them even now. Footfalls like metronomes down the slish-sloshing lane.
It is approaching midnight as they reach the mouth of the bridge where the old man orders them to affix their cartridge boxes outside their ponchos and see to the cocking of their carbines.
Across the river a clutch of lights shines yellowly from the Ferry: a pair of saloons with wee hours. Only with difficulty does the old man delineate through the rainpelt the anacondas of smoke scrolling from their chimneytops like arm bones out of shirtsleeves.
“Those lights,” he thinks. “Like fireflies.” He lets his eyes inventory the dark knowing evenso that it is the middle of October and well past their season.
Aaron Stevens and John Henry Kagi slip as prearranged down the blackened throat of the bridge while all else stand fast awaiting their beacon. The horses nicker uneasily in harness, dipper their necks, spade at the earth with their hooves.
The urge to pray sharks through the old man like stepping on a nail. “Boys,” he says out the back of the wagon, “won’t you gather ’round to join me in a short one?”
And so in a voice as unsparing as the weather, he prays, “O Lord, stretch forth Thy hand from on high and deliver us from the clutches of aliens whose mouths speak lies. Use us to execute Thy judgment among the nations and fill them with the corpses of evildoers. Help us to tread them in our anger and trample them in our fury until their blood shall be sprinkled upon our garments, for we have come not to bring peace but a sword. We commend our lives to Thy hands and humbly ask upon them Thy blessing. Amen.”
“Amen,” they signify after him sotto voce, their breath whitening the air of impending engagement.
Deep inside the belly of the bridge a lantern appears beckoning, a bobbing cat’s eye in the distance.
“There it is,” he says. “This is it. Cook, the torches. We’re onto them gentlemen. Let us fly. Death on the wing.”
Detaching Watson and Stu Taylor as rear guard, when the old man gees the wagon forward it lumbers like a caisson, dollying up onto the wooden decking of the carriage path beneath the slanted roof of the bridge where the patter of rain, the clop of horse hooves, the clocketting of the wagon’s wheels fill the bridge with a sound like fistfuls of brass knuckles a-knocking at the door.
He is here and he is coming.
John Brown is across on the bridge.
* * *
“Open it,” growls the old man.
To either side of him stand Aaron Stevens, Jerry Anderson, Dauphin Thompson, Al Hazlett, and Ed Coppoc, and each of them has the barrel of his carbine trained through the wrought iron bars of the armory gate on the rounded basket of nightwatchman Danny Whelan’s belly.
The gate is double-chained and padlocked.
“Will not,” says Whelan, who in trying to sound defiant, succeeds only in sounding ridiculous.
“I’m not asking, son.”
“Anyways, don’t have the key. It’d be a-back yonder in the watchhouse.”
“Not a move then. Not a peep.” The old man turns to Hazlett. “Crowbar. Hammer. In the wagon. Follow?”
It’s Stevens does the honors, the chain snapping beneath a single sharp jacking of the bar and a well-placed blow of the sledge.
Hazlett giddaps the wagon inside the gate where Jere Anderson and Dauphin Thompson catch the embrangled Whelan up by his armpits.
“Not a sound, son,” says the old man, “or as the Lord is my witness, it must be your last.”
“But…”
“We are here from Kanzas,” says the old man. “This is a slave state and we aim to free every Negro in it. As of this moment you are our prisoner and the armory is in our possession. Should the citizens choose to contest the fact, then I must only burn the town and have blood.” He rounds toward Anderson. “The watchhouse. Lock him up.” Then to Hazlett who is slouched on the wagon seat, elbows V’d on his knees, reins laced lax in his hands, “Allie, take Ed Coppoc with you and hie yourselves across the street to the arsenal. You’ll find no locks nor guards on watch. Let none approach too near. Follow?”
Hazlett leans down and sows a yard of chawslush nonchalantly across the ground in advance of hoisting off the wagon with a soup’s-on grin.
“Now skedaddle,” says the old man, “and keep your heads down, the pair of you.”
If all is by the clock, John Henry Kagi and John Copeland will momentarily be securing the rifle works a half mile down the Shenandoah, and Oliver Brown, Will Thompson, and the mulatto Dangerfield Newby will already have taken possession of the Shenandoah River Bridge.
It registers with the old man that the rain has stopped.
A single gunshot whangs the dark.
The old man’s head whipsaws so violently in the direction of the report, which issues from somewhere back by the covered bridge, that Stevens half expects it to detach from his neck and go hurtling off its shoulders.
“No guns!” barks the old man. “No guns! I said no guns!” He will not learn until later of Stu Taylor’s ham-fisted attempt to shoot down bridge relief-watch Paddy Higgins when Higgins bolts his custody. “Aaron, you best take your five and make for the plantation. Now.”
“Right, Cap’n,” says Stevens, setting off to lasso the three Negroes, Ozzie Anderson, Shields Green, and Lewis Leary, plus Cook and Tidd besides, only to be brought back by a hand laid on his shoulder.
“Aaron.” Stevens senses the old man’s reluctance to let him go. “The word to what slaves you can, and Colonel Washington brought back unharmed. No blood, son, not if it can be helped. Follow?”
“I do, sir. I will.”
“And Aaron.”
“Sir?”
“Go with God.”
Stevens makes as if to protest, stops himself, salutes instead. As the old man knows well enough, he holds no brief for the God business.
“My Hercules,” thinks the old man, watchful of his back as he strides off. “The best I’ve got. Go with God, son. Go with God all the same.”
* * *
At 1:34 A.M., shortly after a panicked Paddy Higgins flags down the 1:15 Wheeling-to-Baltimore mail train before it can cross to the Maryland side, the old man hears three gunshots whicker on the bridge.
He cannot know it of course, but the last of them is a Sharp’s carbine bullet that after plowing into Hayward Shepherd’s back mows through his left lung punching a hole in his chest the size of a baby’s fist just above the nipple.
For twelve years the soft-spoken, gentle-spirited, aptly named Shepherd has worked as baggagemaster of the railroad depot adjacent to the bridge.
Hayward Shepherd is a Negro, a manumitted slave, and Watson Brown has just backshot him in the dark for failing to “halt” on command.
Shepherd does not know what “halt” means any more than a hog knows from a holiday.
Coughing up weevils of blood and morsels of lung, Shepherd staggers off the trestle and collapses through the front door of the depot where he immediately convulses into unconsciousness.
Fourteen hours later, no more aware that his killer is an abolitionist than is that abolitionist, John Brown’s son, that he has killed a Negro, Hayward Shepherd gives up the ghost.
* * *
The 1:15 caterpillars a quarter mile back down the track, snuffs its lights, and squats on the trestle between the armory and the riverbank exhaling steam and bracking in the dark like the consumptive iron lung of an enormous iron elephant.
* * *
Someone is powerful after the infernal bellpull in the steeple of the Lutheran church. The old man grimaces as for the umpteenth time his gaze toggles up the Bolivar Heights to the rear of town. “Come on, Aaron,” he supplicates beneath his breath, as if by sheer prayerpower he can make Stevens and his men materialize over that godforsaken ridgeline. “Please God, bring it home, boy.”
In fact, the old man is fixed to be strapped with a problem infinitely more vexatious than the whereabouts of the supremely self-reliant Stevens, for Dr. John D. Starry, awakened by the gunshots, the persistent clonking of the churchbell, and the news of Shepherd’s wounding, is just now rousting from bed three of his neighbors. One he will dispatch south to Charlestown, one north to Shepherdstown, and one to spread the word to detain all incoming eastbound trains. With all three he will deposit the identical alarm:
Harper’s Ferry is occupied by armed Negroes. They are killing the citizens. Get up the militia. Come on. Be quick. Bring packs. P.S. Bring Packs.
* * *
It is well past 4:30 A.M. when Aaron Stevens, wearing a grin as gappy as a wedge of watermelon, trolleys through the gate into the walled-off armory yard at the reins of a freshly confiscated four-horse wagon.
In the bed of the wagon are ten Negroes, all liberated slaves, and one white man, their owner.
The former—we have their names—are Sam, Mason, Catesby, Henry, Levi, Ben, Jerry, Phil, George, and Bill.
The latter is a corpulent, middling-aged gentleman with plunging sideburns and a heavily waxed, yet walrusy mustache whose manifest girth is rivaled only by his apparent indignation at the fix in which he finds himself.
“Stevens!” gladtidings the old man, raising his lantern head high as he sidles quickly up beside. “Praise be!”
“And who might you be sir?” challenges the heavyset man lolloping stiffly to his feet in the back of the wagon as he tentstakes the old man with a scrutinizing look. It does not escape the old man that though the fat man’s belly jowls well over at the waistband, his hands are balled defiantly into fists.
“Cap’n, this here is Colonel Lewis by-God Washington,” says Stevens. “Colonel Washington, Captain John Brown, late of Kansas.”
“Osawatomie Brown,” says the old man helpfully.
“Not a clue,” sniffs Washington.
The old man does not ruffle. “Sorry I cannot say the same about you sir, sorry for you, I mean. I know well enough who you be.” In fact, Lewis W. Washington is none other than the great-grandnephew of the sainted George. He is also the wealthiest man and largest slaveowner in the neighborhood, and a part-time staff aide to Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise. “I am here to rid Virginia of slavery,” says the old man matter-of-factly. “You are a man-owner, sir, and you are my prisoner.”
Scarleting about the gills, Washington’s jaw slowly unhinges before he recovers enough of himself to splutter, “Now see here!” The vein running diagonally past his right eyebrow protrudes like pipe-stem.
“There there now,” says the old man. “Do not take it so hard. Rest assured that I shall be most attentive to you, for I may yet get much the worst of it, and then sir, then your own life shall be worth much the same as my own. You have my word. I shall be most particular in my attentions to you.”
“Mr. Anderson?” Turning to Ozzie Anderson, he motions to the black men huddled in the rear of the wagon. “Arm these men with pikes and have them escort the colonel to the watchhouse. Then join Mr. Hazlett at the arsenal. You will find Mr. Coppoc there as well. Have him return here. Follow?”
Trampling on Anderson’s response, the old man turns back to Aaron Stevens. “Have you the article we spoke of?” Without a word Stevens hooks his arm beneath the wagon seat, hefting out a decoratively scabbarded sword looped with gold braid and tasseling. “So this is it then?”
“That it is,” replies Stevens, handing it down like a newborn to the old man. “Bend an eye to its shaft.”
Easing the saber from its scabbard, the old man walks the light of the lantern along the sweep of its blade. The curved surface, scrolly with rosettes, quatrefoils, and fleurs-de-lis, has been buffed to a spit-shine so keen it is blinding. Doing his best to squint-eye past the glint, the old man reads the words inscribed in a single line along its length:
From the World’s Oldest General, Frederick the Great, to Its Greatest, George Washington.
These words he buckles on at the waist.
He would quickdraw history from the hip.
* * *
After ordering the octoroon Lewis Leary and four of the liberated slaves out to the rifle works in support of Kagi and Copeland, the old man detaches Cook, Tidd, Leeman, and yet another four of the slaves over the covered bridge in the confiscated wagon to load the balance of the guns and pikes being readied by Watson Brown, Francis Meriam, and Barclay Coppoc back at the farm. He explains that they are to arm with pikes any slaves they may find rallied there—he anticipates more than one hundred—after which they are to return to the Ferry with both men and weapons “by 9 A.M. at the latest.”
Six of the Invisibles—nearly one-third of his assault force—now lie on the opposite side of the Potomac River.
* * *
The old man permits the detained mail train to cross the covered bridge into Maryland and continue on its way. His parting words to its conductor, Andy Phelps, are: “Because there are women and children aboard, I am letting you pass upon your word that you shall hold your peace along your route about what is going on here.
“If you understood my motives, if you understood my past history, if you knew my heart, you would not blame me for what I am about to do.”
* * *
The sky climbs the horizon on a ladder
each rung a hue,
tusky white to khaki gray.
Daybreak is backlit matte,
stray clouds are scuff marks.
The morning stinks
of recent rains;
it gargles
motile groundwater.
The day awakens with the sniffles.
It is another one of those formaldehyde mornings:
greeting the day
is like
shaking hands with a bone.
* * *
The old man collars and confines to the watchhouse each of the armory employees as they arrive for work at first light. His hostages eventually tally more than forty.
Dr. Starry gallops to Charlestown to spur its militia onward.
Grocer Thomas Boerly, who has staked out the corner of High and Shenandoah Streets directly opposite the arsenal, discharges his shotgun at Will Hazlett who is crouched inside the gateyard no more than twenty-five yards distant. The shot is errant, spraying high and wide, but Hazlett’s return fire is not. The single shot from his Sharp’s carbine shovels roughshod through the burly Irishman’s groin.
