Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  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, un
til 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.