Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  The buildings were high and looked ancient, mostly of gray stone, and the crooked alleyways and streets between them seemed narrower and smelled more of old food, beer, and human waste than Boston even. But there was a remarkable increase in human activity here, more noise, more color and variety among human types, than in Boston, which delighted me and seemed to please Father, too, for he had a small smile on his face as we pushed through the throng and made our way from the hurly-burly of the quay to the huge stone warehouse where he had arranged for our wool to be stored pending our arrival and now to be examined and graded and, presumably, sold.

  While I stayed in the dimly lit warehouse and inventoried our nearly two hundred thousand pounds of wool and made sure that none of the bales that Father, John, and I had so carefully graded, labeled, and shipped from Springfield had been damaged or come undone in transit or storage, Father retreated to the office with the purveyors’ agent, a Mr. Pickersgill, to set a time for the buyers to view Brown & Perkins’s wonderful American wool. A pimpled teenaged apprentice watched over me suspiciously, as if he expected me to steal our own wool. All six hundred ninety bales of it, neatly packaged in burlap and tied with heavy cord, had been stacked in a bay near the rear of the huge, cool, cavernous building, and after I had examined and counted every one, I proudly signed the slip the boy had handed me—Received in good order by Owen Brown, agent for Brown Perkins, Springfield, Mass., U.S.A.—and admired for a moment the tidiness of our bales, comparing them to the rough-looking stock that surrounded ours and rose in heaps nearly to the high, dark eaves, theirs, all of it, sloppily and irregularly packaged and tied. Then I picked up my valise and went straight out to the street, there to loll in the sun and admire the passing crowd.

  It looks good for us, I thought. The Old Man was right. These British are no match for us.

  Soon Father emerged from the warehouse, blinking in the bright light like a mole, but looking pleased with himself and eager to move to the next piece of business, which I assumed was finding lodgings. “Turns out we’ve arrived a day late for the weekly viewing and sales,” he said. It would be six days before the buyers from Manchester, Leeds, and the other cloth-manufacturing towns returned to Liverpool to examine the wool that came in during the week and make their bids according to grade and quality. “So, my boy, we have a bit of a holiday in front of us;’ he said, and he rubbed his hands together in a show of pleasure. “What d’ you say we take it?”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Well, let’s just keep moving! Here we are, like Father Abraham sojourning in the land of promise, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob. We are strangers and sojourners here, as were all our fathers. Am I right?”

  “Right! So where do you propose we go?”

  “Why, to London! And to the very continent of Europe! We’ll track Napoleon’s hundred days’ march, all the way from Elba to Waterloo!”

  “We’ve only got six days for marching, Father,”I pointed out. “Not one hundred. And we have to end back here, not Waterloo.”

  “And so we shall.” He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, and we stepped down to the cobbled street and joined the flow of the crowd heading into the heart of the city. He had learned from Mr. Pickersgill, the warehouse clerk, that if we hurried to Garston Street at Speke Hall, we could catch an overnight post-chaise to London. The train had already departed. “Let’s go now!” he said. “It’ll cost us less anyhow to sleep in a moving rattler than a bed in a boarding house that goes nowhere.”

  I had no money of my own, naturally, so wherever Father went, there close behind, of necessity, came I. As if I were in his employ, his apprentice boy. And in a sense, of course, I was. But I did not mind any longer thinking of myself that way, since our goals were now the same. After all, had I money of my own, I would have done just as he—I would have taken a holiday, ducked into a shop on the way for bread and cheese and a sack of shiny red apples, and made for the night coach or a rattler to London and beyond. Who knows, I might even have gone to Waterloo.

  Chapter 12

  This was the first time that I had been out of my native land, and therefore the first time that I’d walked the streets of a country where slavery had been banished, and I felt cheerfully liberated by it. England was then, as now, of course, an antique monarchy, not a modern republic. Nevertheless, it was a freer country than ours, for no man could legally buy and sell another, and for that reason alone, as soon as we stepped ashore, the air we breathed seemed cleaner, fresher, more energizing, than ours at home. I think Father felt the same exhilaration as I. We did not speak of it to one another, however—it was as if we were superstitiously afraid to say the words “Negro” and “chattel” and”slavery,”as if we both knew that merely to utter the words in passing would drop us back into the gloom and rage that we then associated with being citizens of the United States of America. We needed a holiday, a vacation from the obligation to be constantly conscious of our national shame, and when it came, we both took it with unaccustomed alacrity.

  Our high spirits did not diminish, even when we discovered, to our surprise and my slight displeasure, that our fellow passengers in the post-chaise from Liverpool to London were Mr. Hugh Forbes, the English journalist, and Miss Elizabeth Peabody, from the Cumbria. But we did not raise the topic of Negro slavery with them, either; we did not say the hated words. Nor did they, probably because they had already heard enough on the topic from Father during the crossing and did not need or particularly want to hear more. Instead, all of Father’s comments and observations were limited at first to remarking on the passing scenery and then to interrogating Mr. Forbes on the recently ended wars in Italy, on military tactics, and on the ideas and principles of the leader of the failed revolution, the famous Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Mr. Forbes, a man of numerous small pomposities, claimed to have known personally.

  The vagueness with which he answered Father’s questions made me suspicious of his claims, but Father seemed eager to believe them, and when in private, during a brief mail-stop outside Manchester, I whispered my suspicions to the Old Man, he just waved me off and explained that Mr. Forbes talked elusively and vaguely because he was British. “They all talk that way, Owen,” he pronounced. “It’s a national trait. They’re a very circumspect people, y’ know. Think of Shakespeare,” he said. I did, and still did not agree, but said nothing more.

  Miss Peabody, whom Father had described earlier as “a voluble woman with many sharp Transcendental edges,” was quite obviously still stunned by the death of her niece and kept to herself, as was natural. I had mumbled my condolences, as soon as I realized who our veiled fellow passenger was, but otherwise we men deferred to her in silence and tried not to intrude upon her privacy and grief. Even Father left her alone, although I knew he would have enjoyed leading her in prayer for the salvation of her niece’s unsaved soul. He believed, as the Bible showed, that God was sufficiently powerful and merciful to break His own rules from time to time and, if sufficiently prevailed upon with prayer, might be willing to admit a fallen suicide into paradise. But, for once, the Old Man politely restrained himself.

  For me, it was exceedingly difficult not to speak to her of Sarah Peabody, to tell the woman of my brief encounter with her niece on the very night of her death, for I was no doubt the last person to have seen her alive and to have spoken with her at length. Not that I could have told the aunt anything consoling. Still, I might have said that her niece had touched my heart with unusual force and had moved my mind in a significant way. I might have said that my brief meeting with her had unexpectedly clarified my thoughts and that I would remember her for the rest of my days, as indeed I have.

  But our spirits, mine and Father’s, were soaring, despite my distrust of Mr. Forbes and our constant awareness of the suffering of Miss Peabody. Not even the shocking sight at dusk of the sooty mills of Manchester and the blackened hovels of the thousands of laborers whose lives were given over to the mills dampened our enthusiasm a
nd curiosity. The crimes evidenced by these monstrous, huge, prisonlike factories were English crimes, not American; and the greed that drove the mighty engines of the mills and the owners’ callous disregard for the lives devoured in their service were English greed and callousness, not American; and as we passed through the city, the raggedy, exhausted, vacant-eyed men and women and pathetic small children whom we saw wending their way along the narrow streets from the mills to their teeming tenements were English, Scottish, and Irish workers—not a one of them American. It was a luxurious detachment that we enjoyed as we crossed this benighted land, and though it was but a respite, I could only hope that we had earned it, Father and I, and that our inability when in America to disassociate ourselves from the sufferings of our Negro brethren, our constant anguish, shame, and rage when at home, had purchased this brief holiday honestly and fairly.

  “This is a fine country, isn’t it, Owen?” Father said, peering out his window at the passing villages and farms. He commented on the scenery as if we, his fellow passengers, could not see it, which was his habit anyhow, although it was somehow not so noticeable to me in America as here. “Their farming and stonemasonry are very good, Owen. But look, their cattle are generally only more than middling good, I would say. And on average their horses, at least those I’ve seen so far, bear no comparison with those of our Northern states, especially. The hogs look healthy and slick, though, wouldn’t you say? And the mutton-sheep are almost as fat as their porkers.”

  Soon it began to rain, and then it grew dark, and our world was reduced to the cramped interior of the coach. While I tried intermittently to doze and Miss Peabody, as it appeared, gloomily meditated on the death of her young charge, Father drew Mr. Forbes forward into a discussion of military tactics, which rambled on into the night. Mr. Forbes did seem to know his subject, however, well enough at least to speak convincingly about the ways and means of training and maintaining a small, disciplined, easily deployed force of insurrectionists so that it could effectively oppose a much larger, slower-moving, national army.

  This was, of course, the very subject the Old Man was most interested in hearing about, and he quickly warmed to it. I knew that he was transposing everything Mr. Forbes said, which mostly concerned the failed wars in Italy, into victory on an Appalachian landscape in the American South, and that, in Father’s mind, Mazzini’s ragtag army of republicans was a rapidly growing force of freed and escaped Negro slaves and a few courageous whites, a citizens’ army broken into small bands operating from thickly forested mountains, fighting mostly with weapons seized from the enemy and living off the land and goods and foods donated by secret sympathizers, darting down from their mountain hideouts under the cover of darkness to make lightning-like raids against the lowland plantations, liberating the slaves there and steadily enlarging their forces with the able-bodied African men and women willing to join the fight, and sending the others north along the great Subterranean Passway, as he called it, all the way up the chain of mountains from the Appalachians to the Alleghenies to the Adirondacks, on to the home base in Timbuctoo and thence to Canada.

  Mr. Forbes was a slender, talkative man in his middle thirties, with a high, balding head and dark, wavy hair, which he kept long and combed across the top in a vain attempt to hide his baldness, although it shone through nonetheless. He had the chalky complexion of a man not used to outdoor work, dark, deep-set eyes, a long, aquiline nose, and he wore a drooping moustache. His teeth were not good, but, withal, he was a handsome man and intelligent-looking, if in a delicate, slightly effeminate way, as when now and again he winced at the rising volume of Father’s voice and looked somehow pained, as if embarrassed, when the coach crunched over a stone or dropped into a narrow ditch and tossed him in his seat.

  “I suppose some things seem obscure, Mister Brown, but really, they’re quite obvious, aren’t they?” said Mr. Forbes. “Once they’ve been pointed out, of course. Either by genius before the fact or, as is more often the case, after the fact by disaster. Don’t you think so?” He had a habit of pausing in his statements and briefly admiring his fingernails, then going on. “For instance, Mister Brown, here’s some after-the-fact wisdom, if you like. Taken from the Italian campaign. Taught by disaster.” The smaller force, he said, had of necessity always to be made of men who, though they believed many things, must believe but two. Number one, each soldier must believe that he is engaged in a struggle in which he and his comrades are morally right and their opposition morally wrong. No middle way. No room to negotiate a compromise. It couldn’t be a simple dispute over land. Basic principles, not mere borders, must be at stake. And number two, he must believe that he is fighting for his own life and for the lives of his loved ones. So that the only imaginable alternative to his participating in this dreadful war is death for him and his loved ones. No going home for a season to harvest the olives and the grapes. “Give me liberty or give me death,” Mr. Forbes said, smiling. “That sort of thing. A bit like your American revolution, wouldn’t you say? It helped, of course, that you were lucky. And had brilliant leadership, I must say. Brilliant. At a time when ours was inept. Lovely. For you, I mean.”

  Mr. Forbes did not seem particularly to like the brave Italian soldiers he was describing or even to admire the great Giuseppe Mazzini. Like many of the journalists whom I came to know later, during the Kansas War and afterwards, he seemed to feel himself superior to his subjects and affected a cynical and amused detachment towards them. This didn’t bother Father, apparently, or else he simply didn’t notice it, which worried me, as Father continued to interrogate the man and appeared at times to confide in him certain plans and intentions which I thought were better left secret. I would turn out much later to have been correct in my estimation of the character of Mr. Hugh Forbes, for, as is well known, he joined us as an ally late in the Kansas campaign and then at a crucial moment afterwards became one of our chief betrayers and nearly brought us down. For now, though, and even right up to the point of his betrayal, he was to Father a man possessing much valuable knowledge, and the Old Man meant to use him. I sat and watched and listened. And whenever I thought the Old Man was going too far, or coming too close, I interrupted him and led them to a different aspect of the topic, for I could not get him off the topic altogether.

  The rain poured down, and the coach sloshed roughly forward towards London. The leather curtains flapped and slapped against the sides, and now and then a fine spray of water entered the dark interior, wetting us. Father asked Mr. Forbes, “I’m wondering, how, sir, would you be able to discipline and train such an insurrectionary force? You can’t go out and conscript soldiers and drill them in public and instruct them and so on. You have to operate in secret and in small numbers. Especially in the beginning.” No matter how much your soldiers shared those two essential beliefs—that in the face of outrageous wrong they were morally right, and that they were fighting for their and their loved ones’ lives—they still were not professional soldiers, after all. Most of them would be unskilled laborers, he pointed out to Mr. Forbes. Our recruits, he explained, would be people who were likely to be illiterate, unused to military machinery and weapons, untrained in distinguishing between occasions that require independent action and those that require submission to authority. And they would be people who had been taught for generations to hold themselves beneath the very men they were now opposing.

  “Is this theoretical, Mister Brown?” drawled Mr. Forbes. “Or are you planning a revolt?”

  “Father,” I said into the darkness, cutting him off. “Isn’t it like Gideon and the Gileadites? In the war against the Midianites. Remember?”

  “Ah! So it is! So it is! There’s your answer, Mister Forbes. My son knows what you do not, sir. That the greatest military manual ever composed is the Holy Bible! Properly construed. And he’s quite right, the answer to my question is in front of my eyes. For the Lord said unto Gideon, ‘Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him depart early from Mount Gilead.’ And twenty-tw
o thousand men departed from the mountain, leaving behind ten thousand who were not cowards. And the Lord said, ‘There are yet too many.’ Too many! Imagine! Not too few. And the Lord conceived of a test for Gideon to put to the remaining people, such that all those who went down on their knees to drink were separated out, and there were then but three hundred remaining, only those who had put their hand to their mouth when drinking, the men too proud to go down on their knees even to drink from the river Jordan. And the Lord said unto Gideon, ‘By these three hundred men will I save you and deliver the Midianites into thine hand.’

  “And here, Mister Forbes, the Bible is very instructive in a most particular and interesting way!’ Father went on. “Gideon, who this time was instructed by his dream, divided his three hundred men into three companies of one hundred each, and according to the dream, he himself would lead one company only, and they would go to the camp of the Midianites at the beginning of the middle watch. Very useful instructions, when you think about it. The beginning of the middle watch. Smart, eh?”