Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  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 a
ctual 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 r
ed-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.