A letter from a distinguished woman in the East who had long honored Father’s deeds had arrived at my door, just as you arrived in person last week. It informed me, not of the needs of an illustrious biographer, as you did, but of the coming re-interment of the last of the bodies of those who had fallen with Father at Harpers Ferry. The letter invited me to attend the ceremonies, which were to be held on the upcoming ninth of May, Father’s birthday, at his gravesite, where my brothers’ and companions’ old bones, gathered from shallow graves in Virginia and elsewhere across the country, were at last to join his.
Until that cold morning, for the thirty long years since the end came at Harpers Ferry, I had hoped for no other event, for no additional particularity of circumstance, than that my poor bones, too, my remains, at last be interred there. With or without some slight ceremony, it did not matter a whit to me — so long as they were deposited in my family’s yard in the plot of hard, dark, and stony ground that surrounded the huge, gray boulder in the meadow before the house. For those many years, I had been waiting for nothing but the fit and proper burial of my crumbling, shrouded old corpse in that precious dirt alongside the bodies of my father, John Brown, and my brothers Watson and Oliver, and my companions in arms who had fought beside me in the Kansas wars or were cut to pieces in the raid on Harpers Ferry or were executed on the scaffold afterwards.
All those moldering bodies! All those yellowed, long bones and grimacing skulls carted in boxes unearthed from shallow graves and buried there alongside one another! And now mine also!
But, no, not yet. I wrote back at once, saying only that I would not come, giving no excuse and explaining nothing. I was still very much alive, and silence and solitude had to remain my penance and my solace. I would not, I could not, give them up.
But then, one morning shortly after my curt note had been posted, I woke in my cot and, as I have said, believed that, finally, I, too, had died. Soon, of course, and as afterwards became usual, I saw that sadly I was not dead yet. I was still he who is Owen Brown, he whose dog wakes him and brings him shuffling to the door, he who releases his herd of merinos from the fold into the sloping meadow below, then returns to his cabin and washes his face in cold water and commences living another silent, solitary day.
Was it, in hopes that I was wrong, an attempt to test my reluctantly drawn conclusion that I had not died yet — as perhaps I do here now, writing these words to you ten years later? Was it an attempt to accomplish in life some new arrangement for my death? I cannot say why now and could not then, but that very day I decided to depart from this mountain for a while and return finally to our old family home in the Adirondacks, where my only proper grave lies even today. I arranged for the care of my sheep and my dog with a neighbor in the valley and departed straightway for the East.
I had long believed, or, to be accurate, had long wished, that I would arrive at North Elba from the east somehow, not the west. That I would emerge from the broad shade of Mounts Tahawus and Mclntyre. At my back, long streaks of early morning sunlight would slide through familiar notches in the mighty Adirondack Range and splash down the valleys and spread out at my feet before me like a golden sea washing across the tableland. I had imagined that the spirit of Owen Brown, third son of Osawatomie John Brown, like a spot off the morning sun itself, would come rapidly up along the broad meadows we named the Plains of Abraham, for that is what they first brought to our minds, with the snow-covered peak of Whiteface beyond the house and a crisp Canada wind striking out of the northwest.
I pictured it early in the day, still close to sunrise or shortly after it, when at last the beloved house stood in front of me. The house would be pink and gold in first light and stout and square as the day we first came here from Springfield, the way Father described it at the supper table in our house down there and drew its plan in his notebook to show us. I had imagined the plank door closed tight and latched against the nightfrost — it was to be early spring or fall, a string of silver smoke curling from the kitchen chimney, and no smoke at all from the parlor chimney opposite, where last night’s fire would have long gone out, the log turned to ashes, powdery and cold, bricks chilled like ingots.
These anticipations were left-over memories, however. Rags and tatters fluttering brightly across my darkened thoughts. From my haunt in the San Gabriel Mountains in the far West, I could not know who lived in the old house nowadays. My stepmother, Mary, and my sisters and remaining brothers had all fled the place decades before to Ohio, Iowa, Oregon, and Washington State, scattered across the country by the winds of war and its callous aftermath. Did anyone live there at all? The window glass was to have been iced over, etched with florid designs, I thought.
No, I came instead, not from Tahawus and Mclntyre in the east with dreamily imagined, celestial hoo-rahs and fanfare to announce me, but almost casually, as if out for a stroll along the road that led from the settlement, where the new train from Albany had let me off. I came walking alone out of the northwest, with Lake Placid and scarred old Whiteface Mountain at my back. And I came not as a disembodied spot of first sunlight, for I was no spirit and there was no sun that day — it was a cold, gray mid-morning, with a low sky that threatened snow. I arrived instead as an actual and embodied old man with a long, white beard, dressed in my plain wool suit and cloth cap, picking my way along the dirt road with my hazelwood stick. All the old familiar aches and pains came with me, too — the arthritis in the hips and the cold throb of my crippled left arm, uselessly bent against my waist, my permanent banner to boyhood carelessness and deceit.
My return to Timbuctoo in ’89 was closer to dream, however, than to a lived thing, or even than to memory. At least, that is how I am remembering it now. There was a rhythmical, purposeful continuity of sensation and perception, and no mere disorganized intermingling of fact, emotion, and idea, such as memory provides. A snowflake passed by my face, and then several more, and the breeze abruptly shifted from my back to my front, bringing with it a light, gauzy wash of snow. The large, wet flakes struck my beard and body, and, amazed, I watched them melt away as fast as they fell against my warm clothing and hands. Whatever world I was presently inhabiting, a dreamer’s, a ghost’s, a madman’s, I was surely an integrated part of it, subject to the same physical laws as were all its other parts. No mere invisible witness to nature, as I had hoped, I was in sad fact one of its functioning components. Or else we were both, the entire natural world and I, merely the imaginings of a larger, third Being.
The snow shower blew over, and then, suddenly, I realized that I was not alone on the road. A short ways ahead of me, a group of perhaps a dozen children and a pair of young women walked steadily along in the same direction as I, marching, it seemed, in loose formation, with one woman at the front and the other at the rear. No doubt for the very same reasons as I, they were headed from the village in the direction of the farm.