Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  “Indeed,” said one. “From Pumpkinshire!”

  “Extraordinary,” said another.

  “I like your cravat,” said a third, a short, platter-faced fellow with an outsized head and a limp blond moustache. He removed one of his fawn-colored gloves and reached forward and tweaked the piece of soft leather that Father customarily wore at his throat, causing Father to cease his whittling at once and pull himself up straight and glare at the man, until he withdrew his hand and delicately wiped it with a handkerchief and replaced the glove.

  There were several low har-hars from the group. Father resumed his whittling and said, “When you wish to examine my wool, gentlemen, please inform Mister Pickersgill, and I’ll be glad to show it to you.” He briefly stated that he had brought close to one hundred tons of clean, graded wool, all of it raised by expert sheepmen in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and that his number 2 would prove superior to their X and equal to their XX, although he would price it to compete with their number 2.

  There were a few snuffles of disbelief, and one of the Englishmen asked him who had graded his wool. “More to the point,” he said, “who cleaned it?” and the company laughed, for it was unfortunately true that American wool was notorious in those days for not being clean, and a hundredweight of fleece might have as much as twenty pounds of dirt and feces stuck in it. This had been one of Father’s ongoing concerns, making sure that Brown & Perkins wool was clean, even for the domestic market, where the practice of folding trash in with the fleeces was all too common. From the beginning of his and Mr. Perkins’s Springfield enterprise, Father, although only a middleman, had made a great effort when purchasing the wool in the west to teach his shepherds how to wash their sheep thoroughly before shearing and how to pick the wool clean before shipping their clips to him in Springfield. His lectures on the subject at fairs and shows where he demonstrated his methods were famous among the sheepmen from New England to Ohio.

  “Gentlemen, I have purchased every clip of this wool from shepherds I’ve trained personally. It’s been sheared from sheep whose stock I’ve improved with my own purebred merinos and Saxonys. And I myself am the man who has graded this wool. I’ve graded it, and my own sons and I have examined it before shipping for cleanliness.” This was not exactly true, for it was impossible to examine closely two hundred thousand pounds of wool. One graded it by taking a single handful of fleece from each shepherd’s clip, and one sampled clips at random to check for dirt and hoped that the shepherds were as good as their promise to deliver clean wool. Which, for the most part, they were. Besides, Father could generally estimate two hundred fifty pounds of clean wool by casting his eye over its volume.

  “An expert, then,” said one of the Englishmen, a tub-bellied fellow with a yellow waistcoat stretched to its limits. “We have us an expert. He grades his own wool!” he said, turning to his fellows and smiling like a catfish.

  “I am an expert, when it comes to grading wool. I’ve made it my business for nearly forty years, man and boy. Too many cunning shavers out there, gentlemen. Too many trimmers. Not enough honest men, like yourselves. But even so, a sheepman would be a fool not to know how to grade his own wool.”

  “And you’re no fool, eh, Yank?” called one.

  “Gentlemen,” Father said, heating up, “I can grade wool in the dark.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Aye. Blindfolded.”

  “Extraordinary!”

  “I can read a clip blind, from a single tuft,” Father declared, truthfully, for I had seen him do it hundreds of times.

  The short man with the broad face and blond moustache then stepped forward and removed his own necktie, a blousy piece of fawncolored silk that matched his gloves, and held it out to Father. “Perhaps you’d like to demonstrate, Mister... ?”

  “Brown. Be glad to,” he said, and he passed me his knife and stick, removed his hat, and tied the scarf around his head, blocking his sigh t.

  “No help from you now, my fine golumpus,” the man said to me, and he departed from the group and exited quickly from the warehouse, returning after a few seconds bearing a reddish tuft of hair in his gloved hand. “Now, Mister Brown, here’s your sample,” he said, and gave Father the tuft.

  Father rubbed it between his fingers and dropped it at once to the floor. “Gentlemen,” he pronounced, “if you have any machinery that will spin the hairs of a dog, one of those large, wire-haired red dogs, I believe, then I would advise you to put this into it,” and with a flourish, he pulled off the blindfold.

  After that, the Englishmen seemed more respectful of Father and more openly curious about our wool. We might be a couple of rustics from the republic of Pumpkinshire, but we were not fools.

  Nor were they. After some pleasantries—during which the rotund man in the yellow waistcoat took a drink from a silver flask and extended it to Father, who naturally declined, suffering himself to be called, quite good-naturedly, a bloody parson—Father began once again to praise the quality of Brown & Perkins wool.

  In the midst of his discourse, one of the more sober-visaged buyers, a man who up to now had been silent, interrupted him and said, “Mister Brown, I saw your son there setting out these bales. He’s a stout lumper, I must say, especially with his dumb arm and all, my compliments, but really, sir, since it was so easy for him to heft these bales, perhaps you could have him replace them and pull from your stock a few that we ourselves might choose for appraisal. I’m sure you understand, sir.” This man was tall and distinguished-looking, with a narrow gray beard. He was somewhat older than the others, and they seemed to defer to him—even Mr. Pickersgill, I noticed, whose interests were supposed to be the seller’s, not the buyer’s—for they all punctuated his statement with wise nods and pursed lips, as if for his approval.

  Father wasn’t pleased by the implications of the request, but he agreed to it, and I was obliged to haul the bales back, replacing them on the floor with three that the tall Englishman himself selected, all of them, like the first batch, marked number 2, the base-price grade.

  “And now, my good man, if you would be so kind as to show us your fine American wool,” said the Englishman, pointing with his cane at the center bale.

  “My pleasure,” Father said in a hard voice, and he cut the cord so as to expose a top corner of the bale.

  “If you don’t mind,” said the Englishman, passing his cane to the man behind him, and he took the knife from Father’s hand and swiftly cut away the rest of the cord, stripping the bale halfway down of its burlap wrapper. The snowy white fleeces, released to the open air, puffed up at once and grew to nearly twice their size, smelling sweetly of lanolin and freshly scythed grass, evoking a sudden, painful, unexpected memory of home, my first longing to return.

  In silence then and in a strange sort of frenzy, five or six of the group rushed at the open bale and plunged their hands into it. They groped up to their elbows and pulled fleeces apart and grabbed great clumps of wool from the depths of the bale, sniffing it, rubbing tufts across their palms and between their fingers, passing snowy gouts back to their colleagues and reaching in for more. They were like a pack of ravening wolves. We had never seen this sort of behavior from buyers before and were stunned into silence.

  Finally, Father recovered from his shock and called out, “Wait! Gentlemen, wait! You’re ruining the bale! What on earth are you doing?”

  They went on a few moments longer, until at last the tall man stopped and turned to Father and glared at him. “This, sir, is what you Americans call clean wool?” he said in a cold voice, and he reached back into the bale with both hands and drew from its depths a large quantity of wool, nearly a bushel of it, and dropped it at Father’s feet. He retrieved his cane from one of his fellows and spread the wool out. It was filthy. Sticks, twigs, grass, and leaves and clots of dried fecal matter stuck to it.

  Father’s face reddened at once, as he realized what had happened. Bad luck, yes; but worse. Much worse.

  “More di
rty Yankee wool, eh?” one of the fellows in back called. “Same old stuff”

  “Filthy.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “So there’s your Yankee parson, eh?”

  Several men in the group broke away then and moved towards the English sheepmen further down. Mr. Pickersgill hesitated a moment, but quickly followed after them, as if eager not to be associated with us. The tall Englishman did not leave, however, and now he stared hard at Father, whose ears and neck were scarlet with embarrassment and anger. “Mister Brown” he said evenly, “I’m quite disappointed. Frankly, I took you to be an honest man.”

  “I am! I... this is a mistake, sir,” he stammered. “A mistake. It’s but a single bale. I... I myself have been cheated by this bale, sir.”

  “Indeed.”

  “No, really, sir. Why not examine another bale? Here, here, take a poke through this one,” he said, indicating the next bale. “Owen, bring down some others for the gentleman toexamine,”he said.

  “Never mind that. I think we’ve seen enough” said the Englishman. “Mister Brown, you’d have to open every bale and sort out all two hundred thousand pounds of your wool and separate the clean wool from the dirty and somehow wash and dry the rest, if you wished to sell it at the going rate now. You’d have to clean it the way it should’ve been cleaned in the beginning, and then repack it. All one hundred tons, Mister Brown. I rather doubt that you and your son have the time and money to manage that. And even then, Mister Brown, why should we trust you? Even then, no matter what you yourself claimed, we’d be buying the wool on faith, and there’s a price for that, you know. It’s not the going price, I’m afraid.”

  Father responded with silence and stared at the savaged bale with loathing.

  “I’m sorry, Mister Brown. You seem like a decent fellow. I advise you to simply sell your wool here in Liverpool as it is. Get what you can for it, and return home happy to have sold it at all. There’s enough of a shortage here this fall that you’ll move it. It won’t go untaken.”

  Father looked at him coldly. “You’ve got me in a vise, haven’t you? You’ll pay what you want for my wool, glut the market, and drive down the price of your homegrown stuff. Then you’ll turn around and probably sell our wool back to the American clothmen, who’ll pay dearly for it, due to shortages there.” He was spluttering now, enraged, as his situation gradually became clear to him. The English buyers were about to make themselves a pretty profit twice over and in the bargain cheat the sheepmen on both sides of the Atlantic. They were probably arranging this very minute to provide short-term, high-interest loans to their New England colleagues for the purchase of Brown & Perkins wool in Liverpool at a lower price than it would go for at home.

  “No one, except possibly you, is trying to cheat anyone, Mister Brown.”

  “I? I? I’ve been cheated more than anyone here!” Father shouted. “I can accept my personal share in this disgrace, sir, but I didn’t know of it. I have been hurt here! Hurt worse than you can ever know. My partner, Mister Simon Perkins, has been damaged financially by this fiasco, as have I. But my honor has been damaged in this! My honor!”

  “Yes. Well, I’m sorry for that, Mister Brown. Good day, sir,” said the Englishman, and he walked away, leaving Father and me staring down at the wrecked bale of wool, its contents scattered over the floor at our feet. It was an ugly mess; it was also an indictment, and a trap. Father knew that he had been disgraced. And that it could only lead to further disgrace.

  “Oh, Owen. What will I do? What will I do now?” His hard gray eyes suddenly softened and went wet, and his face fell and appeared to collapse into itself. I thought for a moment that he might sit down upon the floor and weep, and I reached forward and put my arm around his shoulders.

  “Be the good shepherd, Father.”

  “Please, son. Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “I mean it, be the good shepherd. Cease being the man who is the hireling and not the shepherd. Leave off being the man who doesn’t own the sheep, and when he sees the wolf coming, abandons the sheep, so the sheep are scattered and slain.”

  “Yes. It’s in the Book of John. Yes, I know.”

  “Be the good shepherd,” I said again, for I wished him to understand that all these men were hirelings and wolves, and in this wool business we were but hirelings ourselves. And now, at the coming of the wolves, we appeared to have abandoned the sheep, who were our enslaved Negro brethren at home. “Be the good shepherd, the Bible says, and know thy sheep and be known of thine.”

  “Do I understand you, Owen?”

  “I hope so. Yes.”

  “You’re calling me back to myself. Aren’t you, son?”

  I told him that I was, and that we did not need to dwell so much either on victory or on defeat here amongst the hirelings and the wolves, so long as the outcome of our business with them was to depart from them at once and bring us back to our true selves. We should do here whatever we could and do it with equanimity and calm straightforwardness, I said, but then we should return at once to our true work, where our worth wasn’t measured by our ability to obtain a few cents per pound of wool one way or the other. If we were doing our true work, our worth would be measured in links of broken chain, in manacles cast off, and in whips plucked from the hands of slavemasters and thrown upon the ground.

  I was ashamed, I told him, to be as distracted as I had been lately by this business of selling wool, this business of being a hireling. I wanted to return to the real battle, to the only thing that mattered. I wanted to resume our war against the slavers and to wage war against them until they were dead, every single one of them, or until every Negro man and woman in America was as free as I was myself and our nation had become a holy sanctuary and was no longer a prison and a charnel house.

  He smiled sweetly up into my face and embraced me. In a low, tremulous voice, he said, “You are fast becoming my greatest blessing, son. The Lord’s greatest gift to me.”

  His old force quickly returned to him then, and he bade me pack up the strewn wool from around the floor and tie the bale back as before, while he went to Mr. Pickersgill and re-stated his desire to have our wool auctioned this afternoon as previously scheduled. “But I’ll tell him not to accept less than twenty-seven cents per pound for number 2, thirty-five for number I, and so on up the line.” That would undercut the English prices enough to get it sold, he said, but not by so much that we’d be left with nothing to show for our troubles. It was less than what we would have got in Springfield last month, but it was the best we could do today here in England. “We’ll just do what we can, and we’ll move straight on from there. Right, son?”

  “Right. Action, Father! Action, action, action!”

  “Ah, that’s the boy!” he said, his eyes gleaming with pleasure. “Owen, the Lord hath given thee an understanding heart. He hath given thee wisdom! Thou art my Solomon. I should have named thee Solomon!” he declared. “Should I do that, call thee Solomon?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “Not unless you call yourself David.”

  His eyes widened comically, although he didn’t intend to be funny, and he shook his head, as if to rid himself of the notion of being named David. Then off he hurried, to speak with Mr. Pickersgill, while I bent to the task of repairing the broken bale of dirty wool.

  Chapter 13

  Our return from England to Springfield that autumn, hapless and empty-handed, the failed Yankee woolen entrepreneurs, was unremarkable—except for Father’s renewed ferocity regarding the war against the slaveholders. We had, of course, heard the news, just before departing Liverpool, of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act: it was in all the English newspapers. There were reports of disruptions and public demonstrations in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia and widespread outrage, even among Northern whites who previously had been acquiescent, and calls for armed resistance for the first time from the Garrisonians (although Father did not count that for much). As a result of this cowardly piece of legislatio
n, there was now no safe haven for escaped slaves anywhere in America. A Negro human being was like a wandering cow, identified by color and all too often by the owner’s brand, returnable when and wherever found. And free Negroes, too, were terrified for their lives, for the new law turned every white citizen of every Northern state into an unpaid agent of Southern slaveowners and gave no legal protection to free Negro men, women, or children, any one of whom could be instantly transformed into an escaped slave merely by a bounty-hunter’s say-so and hauled off to the South and sold as chattel.

  Mostly, it was this Fugitive Slave Act that provided the Old Man with a new focus for his rage, which, since the debacle in Timbuctoo, had been somewhat deflected by the now-failed mission to England for Brown & Perkins and by our Flemish holiday, as I thought of it. Also, quietly, I had begun to encourage his rage, for I was now eager to test my own mettle in the fires of battle. This was a new role for me, heating up Father’s blood, and it was strangely exhilarating to me. Who would have thought it: Owen Brown, the quiet son, encouraging the Old Man to march steadily against the enemy?

  Despite our love and respect for him, I don’t think we took his plan all that seriously, even when he rolled out his maps and described his strategies to people outside the family fold, as he had done with our friend Lyman Epps and poor Mr. Fleete, shot in the escape from Elizabethtown. Father had revealed his secret plan to a few white people, too, such as Mr. Thompson, our friend and neighbor in North Elba, before they broke over the matter of transporting the Negro couple from Richmond, and Mr. Gerrit Smith, back when he first made the arrangement to settle us in Timbuctoo. Whenever he did reveal his plan, the Old Man always swore his listener to absolute secrecy, naturally, but who would not eagerly guarantee silence? The plan seemed so crack-brained then that no one would have believed you if you told him what Old Brown was up to. We in the family certainly told no one, if for no other reason than that we were somewhat embarrassed by it. We wished to protect Father’s reputation for probity, after all, and also our own. And who wants to be laughed at, especially on someone else’s account?