Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  We said nothing to one another for a long while, and then, finally, a few miles west of Keesville, Father sighed heavily and said, “I am grateful to thee, Owen.”

  “You are? For what?”

  “For interfering with me. Back there at the lake.”

  “I feared you would be angry with me.”

  “No, son. I’m in no way angry. I’m grateful to you. I am. In saving Billingsly’s life, you probably saved my soul from hell. Fact is, I’m not ready to kill a man, Owen.”

  “Not in cold blood,” I said.

  “Yes, and that’s the problem. My killing him would have been murder, pure and simple. I have no cold blood, Owen. Not a drop. I must acquire it.”

  I did not know what to say to that; I could not begin to grasp his meaning then; so I said nothing and, for the remainder of our journey, drove mostly in silence. There would come a time, however, and not many years later—in the smoke and blood of Kansas, with the bodies of men and boys yanked from their warm winter beds and hacked to death with machetes and lying now in chunks steaming like fresh meat all around us in the frozen grass—when I would remember this small conversation, and I would understand it then, just as I am sure you do now.

  Chapter 8

  Our involvement with the Underground Railroad aside, our concern for the welfare of the Negroes of Timbuctoo, and our private virtues, along with the ways in which those virtues organized our behavior—all that aside, Miss Mayo, we were to every casual appearance very much like our North Elba neighbors. Country people. A stranger passing through the broad valley that lay between Whiteface and Tahawus would have had little reason to remark upon us (unless, like Mr. Dana and his party of lost hikers, he sat at table with us and stayed the night). He would likely merely have thought that we Browns were nothing unusual for our time and place. Except, perhaps, for our way of speaking, which a stranger would perceive at once and which was, I believe, regarded by some as downright peculiar. And here, in the matter of the manner of our speaking, we get to a thing that was both striking and readily apparent to all who met us, even for a moment, a thing that, to my knowledge, has never been described before, certainly not in print.

  It is perhaps inevitable that the speech mannerisms of a family will be significantly influenced by the single strongest member of that family, and so it was with us. Thus, to a one, even to the littlest child, we sounded very like Father. Elaborately plainspoken, you might say—a manner or style of speech that originated, so far as I know, with Grandfather Owen Brown, who, having had a profound effect on Father’s way of speaking, is indirectly an influence on my way, too, even here and now, and on that of the rest of the family as well. So let me speak first of him.

  Grandfather, who was born and raised in Connecticut back before the Revolution, chose and spoke his words in that old, now-forgotten, New England Puritan manner—deliberately, carefully, with a few thees and thous for leavening, almost as if he were writing his words down on paper, instead of speaking them aloud. He went beyond even the old New Englanders, however, for Grandfather was a stammerer and as a child had trained himself to speak with a formal, dry precision, slowly and in complete sentences, so as not to be controlled or confounded by his affliction. The man cultivated silences and used them as exclamations. He seemed to rehearse his statements in his mind before making any utterance, which gave to him a stately manner overall and provided others with the impression that he was an unusually reflective manas, indeed, he was. By thinking his words first, by silently phrasing and parsing them in his mind, and only afterwards, when he was satisfied with their lightness, speaking them aloud, Grandfather cultivated his thought more thoroughly than ordinary folk, and as a result his words not only seemed, by virtue of the way they were presented, to be wise; they in fact, more often than not, were wise. “You think as you speak, not vice versa” Father often said, and a man forced by an affliction such as stammering to control his speech will in turn soon learn to control his thoughts. So it was with Grandfather.

  Father, with no such handicap as stammering to straiten his way, was obliged to impose one upon himself. When he was a young man, he curbed his reckless speech, and hence his thoughts, by placing into his mouth a stone that was sufficiently large to forbid easy and casual talk, and he carried the stone all day long in silence, except when he deliberately plucked it out and unplugged his mouth, as it were. He used the trick of Demosthenes, but in reverse, and not to overcome a handicap, but to simulate one, so as to obtain its compensatory advantages, which he had observed and admired in his own father.

  “The inner man and the outer are one, unless ye be a hypocrite and dissembler. Control one of the two, and soon ye will control both,” the Old Man often said, applying his prescription as much to himself as to us children, whom he was instructing. All his instructions, admonitions, and rules were as much for him to follow, honor, and obey as for us. Never did I feel that Father had not himself contended with passions or desires fully as strong as my own, or that he had not, on numerous occasions, felt himself as weak, afraid, lonely, despondent, or frustrated as I and my brothers were, and my sisters, too. Quite the opposite. And from our point of view, all the more virtue accrued to him for his not having given himself over to those feelings. Thus his authority over us resided to a considerable degree in our awareness of his, and not our, struggle with vice, and his, not our, triumph over it.

  Similarly, whatever self-imposed deprivation, whatever forms of abstinence, he requested of us, he demanded of himself also, despite what he confessed were his larger-than-normal desires to indulge in them. We none of us drank tea or coffee. We used no tobacco. We drank no whiskey, brandy, beer, or fermented cider, and kept none in the house. A visitor or houseguest unable to endure a meal without these stimulants and intoxicants would have to provide his own and then would find himself in the uncomfortable position of being observed by all the children and even those of us who were adults with curiosity and slight condescension, as if he were a Chinaman sucking on an opium pipe. If one of us secretly indulged in the use of tobacco, tea, or coffee, or accepted a sip of whiskey from a friend or an acquaintance, as each of us, especially we boys, did from time to time, his physical and mental reactions to it were all out of proportion to his expectations, and he backed off quickly and in fear. The high degree of excitation provided by these stimulants and intoxicants, due perhaps to our lack of experience with their use and to our shame, was almost always sufficient to keep us from returning for a second try. In addition, there was the threat of exile, of feeling cast out from the family, to keep us from disobeying Father’s rules of abstinence. No one of us wanted to be the only one unable to keep his rules. Whether the rest of the family knew of it hardly mattered: we knew of it, and that was enough to guarantee an intolerable loneliness. An occasional taste of that loneliness, like the single sip of whiskey or puff of tobacco smoke, was all any of us needed to renew his commitment to purity, abstinence, self-discipline, and to the orderly comportment of his mind, language, and private acts.

  With regard to sexual matters, we all, except possibly poor Fred, were normal enough boys and then young men. Little as I know of what is normal for girls and women in such matters, I assume the same was true for the females in the family. And in this as in all things, Father’s advice bore the weight of a proscription and sometimes even that of a command: he advised us boys, offered as if in passing, with no room for discussion or further inquiry, to keep ourselves pure and to marry young and to study St. Paul’s letters.

  Forgive me for speaking of the subject—I wish above all to be as frank as I have been truthful—but did Father believe that I, at least, was unable to forbear from self-abuse? It’s a question that has long worried me. I suspect he thought I was, just as I was sure that my brothers, both older and younger, must occasionally have abandoned themselves to this vice, although none of us ever confessed it. All of us—except Fred, whose sensitivity to sin and whose measure of guilt was so much greater than ours—pos
sessed large animal spirits. John and Jason married young; Fred did not marry. Nor did I. Ruth and Annie married young, as did Watson and Oliver, who, along with Fred, died young. But I lived on for many long years, struggling even into old age to maintain my purity as diligently and with the same meager degree of success and heaped-up unhappiness over failure as when I was a boy. In later years, naturally, my animal spirits diminished to a great degree, and my struggle to control them abated at last. But without the struggle, there was no virtue; I take no particular pride, therefore, in the relative purity of my old age.

  All our virtues—of piety, honesty, abstinence, and so on, of cleanliness and orderliness, of devotion to work and industry, of love of learning and of neighborliness—were the products and expressions of struggle. This was not much understood by those who observed us and later wrote about our life and character. Remember, Father, first and perhaps foremost among us, and every other member of the family as well, even including the women, pious Mary, sweet Ruth, and my younger sisters, Annie and Sarah—all of us were normal people. Which is to say, there was not a one of us who was not tempted by impiety. And we were intelligently skeptical about so much—Father, after all, encouraged it in us practically from infancy—that it was difficult not to apply that same skepticism to our entire way of life. Many was the time when we wanted to give ourselves over to another way. What was this crackbrained obsession with slavery and Negroes anyhow? one might well ask, and sometimes we did ask it as, exhausted and exasperated by another of Father’s plans to move us to a new place or to start a school for Negro children or to drop everything and ride off in search of escaped slaves who, without us, would have made their own way to Canada safely just the same, we would look at one another and roll our eyes upward and trudge out to the barn in the dark of night and harness up the horses yet again.

  At bottom, then, we were ordinary people and were tempted, not just by impiety, but by typical American dishonesty as well—and not so much to lie or cheat or steal, but simply to push an advantage on occasion, to charge for a service or good whatever the buyer was willing to pay, for instance, instead of charging only what was fair. That is, instead of asking no more than the cost of that same service or good to us. Which was Father’s monetary policy’s ethical base. We were all obliged to stand upon it firmly, yet here we were, always in deep debt, scrambling for ways to avoid foreclosure, bankruptcy, imprisonment. Honesty in these matters, especially considering our dire circumstances, was thus always the result of struggle, and was all the more virtuous therefore—even as our financial circumstances worsened, and Father tumbled towards out-and-out bankruptcy, and all around us others prospered.

  Likewise, our abstinence was achieved only through struggle against constant temptation, for we did not remove ourselves, as Shakers and Mennonites do, from ordinary, daily contact with people who rationalized the indulgence of every sensual appetite. On the contrary, we befriended and moved freely amongst them all—drunkards, boisterers, brawlers, and sensualists of every stripe and type. They were everywhere in those days, especially out at the edges of civilized society, which is, after all, where we most often resided ourselves, and many of them were our strongest allies in the work. We associated with such folks as much on principle as convenience and as a consequence of our natural sociability. We thought it necessary and right and believed that it helped in the work, for there were many radical abolitionists whose genteel fastidiousness rendered them wholly ineffective, and Father enjoyed pointing them out to us. “Boston ladies,” he called them, although most of them were men.

  No, we Browns maintained our virtue in the face of daily temptation, willfully, elaborately contriving it, as if the virtue were not worth much without it. And though it may have sometimes encouraged in us a feeling of superiority to other “normal” people, that, too, was a temptation to be met, struggled with, and overcome, in public and in private, just as I am doing here, even now. Just as Father himself did throughout his life.

  Always, Father taught by example and instruction: the two were deliberately interwoven; he made of our childhood understandings a fabric that could not be unraveled or torn. For instance, with regard to our well-known love of learning, had we not watched since earliest childhood the Old Man every evening turn to his bookcase and draw out from it a treasured, much-thumbed tome and commence to read from it and comment on what he read there, we would not have believed, due to our lack of formal education, that there was anything of great value to be obtained from books, especially such books as Father, no matter how unsettled or hectic the circumstances, loved and studied all his life. Like most of our neighbors and friends, we would normally have thought that books of philosophy and history and natural science were better left to the learned and were not proper fields of study for such rough country types as we. Father’s sustained example, however, led us to the experience itself. And by imitating his hard-earned love of learning, we were gradually filled with a love of learning ourselves, and thus we came to possess it as if it were a gift to be treasured for life and not a dour, burdensome consequence of blind obedience, cast off as soon as darkness fell.

  We all saw our father, Mary saw her husband, struggle with temptation—he made us see it, he spoke of it constantly: his sensuality, his slothfulness, his vain desire for wealth and fame, his pridefulness—and we saw him daily overcome each and every one of those temptations. How could we not go forward, then, and do likewise? We who were no more and no less sensual, slothful, vain, and proud than he? It was his weakness as much as his strength that guided and instructed us; his pitiful, simple, common humanity that inspired us. Those who later wrote that Father was like an infallible god to us were wrong.

  We were much misunderstood always. That, I suppose, is yet another of the many ways in which we Browns paid for our virtues. Poverty is one, too. We were hard-working, a large and highly skilled family of workers, and yet, because of our devotion to our Negro neighbors and their cause, all our enterprises failed. Father was regarded by some, rightly, as a genius when it came to livestock. And he was a self-taught surveyor of great skill and understood all the ways in which a piece of land was valuable or poor. He was a tanner capable at the age of twenty of organizing and operating a large tannery on his own. He was a businessman who understood the subtle connections between the producer of wool, the wholesale purveyor of wool, the manipulation by the purveyor of the market price for wool, and the consequent exploitation of the producer, and he was able to conceive and put into place a complex scheme to block that exploitation. And yet we ourselves remained poor, in permanent debt, living on the kindness and philanthropy of men like Mr. Gerrit Smith and Mr. Simon Perkins. For while in many ways we may well have been self-sufficient, growing all our own food and manufacturing all our clothing and tools, we were obliged to do it on land that, in the end, belonged to others.

  Even in North Elba, where Mr. Smith had deeded Father two hundred forty acres of first-rate tableland at one dollar per acre. Father died owing for most of it. The Old Man raised money, many thousands of dollars, for the Negroes from white strangers all over the United States, but when he died, his widow had not a dollar to her name. I remember hunger; I remember cold; I remember public humiliation—these were the hard prices we paid for our much-admired devotion to principle. And I did not think it would ever end, despite Father’s schemes and his permanent willingness to launch every year a new enterprise for raising money: gathering wool all over Ohio and Pennsylvania and warehousing it for Mr. Perkins in Springfield until the prices rose; buying and selling purebred cattle; speculating on land where canals were rumored to be going in any day now; and on and on, his face bright with the vision of all his debts at last being paid off, of finally owning his own farm outright, of being able to provide for his large, ever-growing family against the rigors that he believed would characterize the long years ahead. For he was sure that Mary would survive him—she was so much younger than he—and believed that she would be left with youn
g children to care for. He did not want to die without having provided for his widow and children.

  To all appearances, though, and compared with our neighbors, especially our Negro neighbors in North Elba, we did prosper. Our farm was a thriving operation. This was mainly due to hard work and Father’s great organizational skills. Although I was, in a sense, the foreman, Father was the executive and every day laid out the tasks that we each would attend to. Much of farm life, of course, is a round, and the work is organized merely by the turning of the year and by the slow, regular rhythms of animal life, and it needs no executive, but we were a large family with diverse skills and abilities, children at different stages of growth, from the youngest, who was then Sarah, to the eldest in residence, me, a full-grown adult. And there were the other adults as well-Mary, our mother and stepmother, and sister Ruth, and Lyman and Susan Epps, who had come to seem like permanent members of the household, like in-laws.

  We were close, interlocked, like the gears and wheels, cogs and belts, of an elaborate machine. Whatever one of us thought, said, or did had an immediate, felt effect on everyone else. It may be that our family in its closeness was sometimes thought by us to be suffocating and too much controlling of our daily lives, and it must have seemed that way often to outsiders; but we were never lonely, never without a sense of being useful and even necessary to the rest, and never without support and encouragement, even in our moments of greatest despair. For we each took strength, not from Father alone, but from the family as a whole. Father, of course, was the family’s mainstay; he provided us with example, instruction, understanding, and strength. As a result, when he himself weakened or fell into despair, it was very difficult for the rest of us not to do likewise. And whenever Father’s belief in the rightness and necessity of his path wavered, as from time to time it did, or when his faith in his God was threatened, as happened at least twice that I know of, his forward motion would instantly stop. And when he stopped, the rest of us would slow and wobble on our respective pivots and would soon find ourselves stopped and lying on our sides as well.