Hard labor it was, then, made harder by the silent distance that stretched between us, and at night we fell back into our respective nests and dropped quickly into sleep. Days, it rained periodically and then cleared, and raggedy blue skies appeared overhead for a while, and then it rained again. For the most part, Lyman and I worked separately and as far from one another as possible. The nights were cool, and a steady wind blew out of the southwest up along the narrow defile, twitching the high pines and spruce trees into their raspy, long song.
We were now well beyond the crest of the pass, and as we worked our way further along it, the burble of south-flowing rills and brooks soon became the crash and thrum of a large stream—the Opalescent, which emptied into Lake Colden below and then became the headwaters of the mighty Hudson. At night, we heard the gruff cough of a bear, the distant howl of wolves, the dour call of the owl, and at dawn the song of the whip-poor-will and the wood thrush, and the raucous cries of ravens on the heights. But our human voices rarely joined the forest chorus, rarely intruded on our private thoughts or broke our self-imposed solitudes.
On the morning of the third day following our visit to the ice-cave, we came out of the long, forested gorge onto the northern shore of Lake Colden, which stretched before us black and glittering in the sun. From the marshy shore on our right where the Opalescent emptied into the lake, a pair of loons rose like scratches on the sky and crossed overhead, disappearing into the spruce forest. A broad grove of drowned trees spread along the further shore, standing like the gaunt pikes of a medieval army. For a while, we worked our way along the western shore of the oval lake, keeping to the high, dry ground amongst beeches and hickory trees, blazing the trees to mark the trail, and moving at a pretty good clip, for the ground was relatively smooth now and there was not much heavy cover—ferns, briars, and hackberry thatch, mostly, due to its having been scorched a few years back by fire.
By midday, we were nearly past the lake and were about to re-enter the deep forest that for a mile or so of short ridges and gullies led gradually downhill to the mining camp; we expected to finish our job and reach the camp by dark. It had become our habit to stop at noon to rest and eat dried venison and apples and corn bread, gone stale by now, and Lyman, who had been working a few rods ahead of me, leaned his axe and crowbar against a birch tree and headed on a line towards a narrow, flat rock that extended a ways into the lake. I put my tools and pack down and followed, not for companionship anymore, but because his pack held our small stock of food.
Although it was a seasonably cool day, the sun shone down brightly, and the sky was cloudless and stark blue, a taut blanket that stretched from horizon to horizon. In a moment, I had caught up to Lyman, who was pushing his way through a chest-high thicket of willows. We were in a low, wet place and could see but the tip of the rock just beyond the willows, and only now and then. I cut to his right, following what appeared to be an easier path to the rock, and when I came out of the thicket, Lyman was on my left and a few feet behind me. He was still struggling to get through the willows. But when I turned and extended my hand to help him, he had ceased moving altogether. On his sweating face was sheer terror—as if he had seen Satan or God.
I turned slowly around, moving just my head, and saw what terrified him, and it terrified me as well—a long, tawny-gray mountain lion backed up to the edge of the rock, with nothing but the glittering lake behind it and dark water on both sides and we two puny humans in front. The lion had been surprised by our sudden, upwind approach, and now it no doubt believed itself trapped by the water and by us. The animal was no more than ten feet from me, its great tail switching like a snake. Its shoulders were hunched low and its hindquarters lower, coiled to spring. Its small, feline head was nearly all mouth, as if it had been split in half by a hatchet, with black lips and tongue and enormous fangs.
I had never seen a mountain lion alive this close, although with Watson I had tracked and shot two the previous year up on Mclntyre.
I was as fascinated and thrilled by its fierce beauty as frightened of it. I had no weapon, other than the pocketknife I had pathetically proffered to Lyman back in the ice-cave. But I knew that Lyman had his pistol in his rucksack. I stood squarely between him and the lion and had a much better shot at it than he. And I was the better marksman anyhow, and was even to some degree famous for it, while Lyman was equally famous for his inaccuracy.
I showed him my open hand, and with extreme delicacy and without taking his eyes off the beast, he drew the pistol out and extended it to me. Moving slowly and keeping my eyes fixed on the huge cat’s yellow eyes, I took the butt of the gun into my right hand, squared my body, and laid the barrel across my left forearm, which due to the old injury was as steady as a window sill and accounted in no small degree for my good marksmanship. Lifting my forearm, I aimed at the lion’s pale brow, at the top of the inverted V mid-point between its eyes. I thought I could smell the lion. I remember, as I drew back the hammer with my thumb, inhaling deeply—rotten apples—when, without warning, at the last possible second for it to flee, the lion sprang from the rock. It crossed through the air some eight or ten feet to our left and towards the shore, its forepaws reaching the gravelly bank with ease, its hind paws barely touching the water, and was gone into the brush. It crashed away in the distance for a few seconds more, and then silence. Not even birdsong.
Slowly, I exhaled and at once began to tremble. My legs went all watery. I was glad, truly glad, and relieved that it had escaped. Seen this close, the animal was too beautiful to wish dead. I was not altogether sure I could have killed it with the pistol anyhow, for I would have had but one shot, and the lion, a large male, appeared to weigh close to two hundred pounds and, wounded, would have been even more dangerous than when merely startled and inadvertently trapped on its peninsula. Still trembling, I stepped up onto the rock and sat down on the spot of bright sunshine where the lion had been taking its solitary leisure a few moments before and handed the pistol up to Lyman, who had followed me.
“That was the biggest lion I ever seen,” he said in a low, amazed voice, to which I merely nodded. “Don’t know who was more surprised, though, him or us. Never come up on one like that before,” he said. He was holding the pistol at his side, and I looked at it and suddenly realized that I had neglected to let the hammer down—the pistol was still cocked. Hair-triggered. If he mishandled it, the pistol would fire.
I stared up into his narrow, dark, closed face: he was thinking not of the gun in his hand but of the lion, I saw—the beautiful, powerful, ferocious mountain lion, an animal from another world than ours, a beast controlled and driven, from its first breath to its last, by hungers and fears that Lyman and I had been privy to only in the most terrible moments of our lives. We could not forget those moments; the lion could not distinguish them from any other. The beast’s sudden, long leap from the rock across water to land had been extraordinarily beautiful and at once familiar and strange, like the best, last line of a beloved hymn, a graceful arc from bright, certain death to the dark, impenetrable mystery of the forest. Why could I not make that same leap? From my place out there on the back of the rough, gray rock, I peered across the water to the thicket of willows at the shore and the trees beyond, up the beech- and hickory-covered slope to the spruces and the tangled heights and rocky parapets above, where I imagined the lion now, moving in solitude freely and safely all day and night, tracking down its prey and suddenly leaping upon it, pulling it to the ground with its great weight and the brutal fury of its attack, rolling it over in the soft, rust-colored pine needles, and burying its hungry mouth in the body.
I heard the explosion of the gun and was not startled by it. I looked up at Lyman. For a split second, he understood everything. Then his astonished, yet utterly comprehending gaze turned blank and flat as stone, and a huge, red blossom erupted in the center of his chest. His mouth filled with blood and spilled it, and he pitched forward headfirst. His forehead, when it hit the rock, made an evil crack, like the snap of a dry stick.
He rolled over once onto his back, and the upper half of his body slipped off the rock into the water of the lake. A cloud of blood spread from the hole in his chest and grew large in the water and quickly surrounded him, enveloping his chest, shoulders, arms, and head entirely, like the billowing masses of a woman’s silken, scarlet hair.
The human body is a sac filled with blood—puncture its skin, and the shape and color of the body are grotesquely re-arranged and changed. It’s no longer human, its skin is no longer white or black. Half in the lake and bathed in the spreading swirls of his own blood, Lyman could have been a white man or a black—there was no way to tell which. Blood is red.
But I was the man who had never been able to forget that Lyman, while he lived, was black. Thus, until this moment, I had never truly loved him. He was a dead man now—finally, a man of no race. And as surely as if I had pulled the trigger myself, I was the man, the white man, who, because of Lyman’s color and mine, had killed him. It was as if there had been no other way for me to love him.
There was nothing for love, now, but all-out war against the slavers. My nature was fully formed; and it was a killer’s. And only by cleaving strictly to Father’s path would I be kept from killing men who did not deserve to die. Father would be my North Star. Lyman Epps would be my memory of slavery.
When Lyman was slain by the accidental firing of his own pistol—reported as such by me and believed at once by all—I did not know that four months later his grieving widow would give birth to his son. I deprived Lyman of that, too. Susan would name the infant after his father, and he would grow up to become famous in later years as a singer of religious songs. At the time of his birth, however, I was long gone—following Father’s instructions to gather up Fred in Ohio. The younger Lyman Epps, the man who, because of me, was born and raised fatherless, I saw and heard sing on the day of the interment ceremonies below Father’s rock. His sweet voice rose into the cold May sky like the pealing of a bell as he sang “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow” over the box that contained the bones of eleven men and should have contained my bones, too.
A terrible irony that would have been, had my bones joined those others. His splendid voice honors my burial, without his knowing that, by my refusal that long-ago day at Lake Colden to save his father, I was his father’s murderer. Although I told the truth then, when his father died, and I have told the truth now, these many years later, the one was a lie, this other a confession. For the one was told to the living by a man struggling to stay alive, a man still ignorant of his true motivations and weakness; and this other was told to the dead by a ghost wishing solely to join them.
The story of how his father died, when his mother finally conveyed it to him, surely must have cut the boy’s heart, leaving him scarred and wary all the years of his life. It was necessarily the story that I myself told to Father and to the manager of the Tahawus mining camp and that they in turn told to others. Accompanied by a pair of fugitives-two strong young men led by Harriet Tubman herself off a North Carolina plantation and brought out from Albany by Father—they came up towards the pass searching for Lyman and me, after we had not turned up at the camp at the appointed time, for they needed us to convey these fugitives on to Canada. At the lake, they found Lyman’s body where it had fallen, bled gray in the water, and me they found on the rocky heights above, howling like a wounded animal, with no memory of how I got there.
I had cut my crippled arm up and down its rigid length with my knife and had smeared my face with blood and had rolled in dirt and leaves. Father calmed me and, holding me in his arms, managed after a while to extract from me a description of what had occurred, and finally led me back down from the crag to the lakeside, where the others had constructed a litter to transport Lyman’s body home to Timbuctoo.
Father explained that he was obliged to return that day to Albany for one of his court appearances, and Mr. Seybolt Johnson could not be away from the mining camp, so I and the two frightened young fugitives were pressed into carrying Lyman’s body back along the trail we had just cut through the pass to Timbuctoo.
“When you’re back there, let Watson deliver Lyman’s body to his wife, and let him then carry these fellows on to Massena and the crossing to Canada,” Father instructed, speaking to me as if I were a child and taking care also to write his orders on the back of an envelope, which I was to place in Watson’s hand as soon as we arrived at the farm. I was then to leave at once for Ohio, he said, to retrieve Fred, who had been too long alone. It had been several months since John and Jason went off to Kansas with their wives and little sons and put up their homesteads there.
Father placed his hands on my shoulders and in a soft voice said that he thought I was too shaken to stay in North Elba now and needed some time away. He perceived the depths and power and the true nature of my feelings, if not their source, and I believe that for the first time he was afraid for my sanity, afraid that if I stayed in North Elba close to the Negroes and especially to Lyman’s widow, I would try to take my own life. He was right.
The true story of Lyman’s death, however, my confession, Lyman’s son never heard, man or boy, and has not heard now and never will, unless, when he himself dies, he comes over to our old farmhouse and family burying ground and finds me still talking into the darkness—the mad ghost of Owen Brown, he who was the murderer of the elder Lyman Epps, he who was the secret villain of the massacre at Pottawatomie, the meticulous arranger of the martyrdom of John Brown, and the cause of the wasted deaths of all those others whose bodies lie now before me.
The younger Lyman Epps will not end up buried here; his bones will molder next to his father’s and mother’s, three miles yonder in the old Negro burial ground of Timbuctoo. And if he learns the truth of why his father died, he will hear it from his father, the only man who knows it as well as I.