He put down his pen and looked at me with irritation. “Owen, the Negroes don’t need you here. They can protect themselves as well without you as with you. No one needs you here now. I don’t. I need you to be with your mother and the rest of the family. We’ve gone over this. The winter is bearing down on them, and they’re suffering because of the absence of a man who can run the place.”
“What about Lyman? He’s there, he’s a man.”
“It’s not the same, Owen. I can’t be there myself, because of these infernal court cases. You know that. The family needs one of us, and it’s you, or it’ll have to be me, to get them safely through the winter and put the place ready for spring. We don’t want next year to go so hard. Think of your poor brothers and sisters, Owen. The babies. Think of your mother.”
“She’s not my mother,” I shot back.
“We’ll not go into that;’ he said curtly. “You’re angry with me, I know, for having to go off like this, for my sending you north. But you should deliver it to me, who deserves it. Don’t ship it to someone who doesn’t deserve it.” He turned abruptly back to his work. Then, after a few moments, he paused and without looking at me seemed to be reversing himself, for he offered to let me stay on in Springfield, if I wished.
I sat up in my cot, not quite believing him. But then he added that I could also go to Ohio with John and Wealthy, or join Fred and Jason at Mr. Perkins’s place. I could go anyplace I chose. Accompany him to Boston to help prepare his lawyer. Follow him to Pittsburgh for more of the same. Even go off to California with all the other young fools and dig for gold, if I wanted. Follow the elephant. “It’s your choice,” he said. “But wherever you choose to go,” he reminded me, still without lifting his eyes from the paper before him, “if you don’t go to North Elba, you’ll be abandoning your duty.”
Besides, he pointed out, I had no money, no house, no land. Or had I some private wealth, and he somehow had not noticed? And I had no trade, other than farming and the keeping of sheep. Or had I been taking instruction by mail in business like John, or horticulture like Jason? If not, would I perhaps like to hire myself out as a day-laborer here in Springfield? And where would I sleep at night, once he closed down the business? Did I have friends who would put me up, people he had not heard about?
He knew the answers to all those questions, of course. He knew what I had to do. And so did I.
At dawn, I rose and packed my few possessions into a gunny sack, slung it over my right shoulder and took up my rifle, and said goodbye to Father. He placed around my neck a purse on a cord with fourteen dollars and some coppers inside to give over to Mary and to pay for supplies he had ordered in Westpott for the farm, which I was to arrange to have transported on to North Elba when I got there. As always, he filled my head with last-minute instructions. Which of the merinos to breed this spring, which to sell, which to butcher for mutton; how much seed to set aside for a second planting if the first got hit by a late frost; which part of the acreage to clear next and which to leave for a woodlot; how much to pay in Westport for salt and flour, and who among the Negroes of Timbuctoo to hire and whether to pay them in goods or cash or crop shares. “Make work for them, if you can afford it, especially when the winter comes on. Even if you and Lyman and the boys are able to clear and cut on your own. They learn from your example, and it brings them a small cash payment as well, which they will surely need.
“Ah, Owen!” he declared. “I envy you, my boy. How I would love to be there now, clearing that mountain forest, working with my back and arms all day and gathering together with my precious family around the table at night,” he said, smiling and inhaling deeply, as if he could smell the crisp, cold Adirondack air. “That’s all the good Lord meant for a man to do. That, and to care for his neighbors. And you can do all of it up there. All of it. I envy you, son.”
I thanked him for it, still sullen and resentful, and we embraced, or, rather, he embraced me, and I strode away from him, crossing through town to the main road north—headed home, for that is what it was now. There was no other place I could name as home than that tidy farmhouse on the edge of the wilderness. So there I went. Home.
I had five days of walking ahead of me. A few times I accepted a farmer’s offer to put up in his barn, but otherwise I slept outdoors in a makeshift camp close to the road, huddled in my blanket before a small fire, like a tramp. I walked steadily from first light to last, up the long Connecticut Valley and across the Green Mountains of Vermont, then north again along the western shore of Lake George, past the ruins of old Ticonderoga to the glittering waters of Lake Champlain. There I stopped in Westport briefly on Father’s business, and then headed upland into the Adirondacks. And the entire time, all five days and nights, I filled my mind with the conscious pretense that I was completely turned around, that my compass had reversed itself and I was walking south instead of north. I was moving down along the Subterranean Passway into Virginia and North Carolina. I was marching towards the slaves and their masters. The fugitive slaves followed their north star; I followed its southern twin.
It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!
Chapter 14
I arrived home in North Elba late in the afternoon just as it was growing dark, greeted by my brother Watson a half-mile east of the farm, out where the road from Keene crests the long rise through the notch. I saw him from a distance and did not at first recognize him. He was tall and lanky, all sticks and rope. He had turned onto the road, emerging from the woods there, leading the Morgan named Adelphi, hitched to a sledgeload of logs taken evidently from the back lot of the property, a forest of blue spruce that sloped towards Pitch-off Mountain.
Watson saw me and waved. Though he was barely sixteen then, he had added considerably to his height since I’d last seen him and walked like a grown man who’d done a hard day’s work. In the months since my departure, Watson had managed to slip away from most of his boyhood, and when I drew near, I saw that his long, narrow face had the beginning haze of a reddish beard. It cheered me to see him so grown up. Nearly my height, he was well on his way to being taller than I, who up to now had been the tallest in the family.
For a few seconds, we grinned at one another with slight self-consciousness, and then I embraced him warmly and tugged his new whiskers. “What’s this, Wat?” I laughed. “Growing yourself a beard, eh?”
He grabbed my beard and gave it an answering yank. “Everybody always says you’re the handsome one. I thought I’d give it a try, see if it’s the beard. It’s just great to see you, Owen!” he exclaimed, and threw his ropey arm over my shoulder. He cocked his head and studied me and said that I looked different to him, that I’d changed somehow.
“Come on, I’ve not been gone that long.”
“No, seriously, Owen. You’re looking different. You didn’t fall in love or something, now, did you?” he said, and shook my shoulder and grinned.
I confessed that it did feel weird to me, coming home this time, as if I had been away for years. My mind filled for an instant with the face of Sarah Peabody, but I swiftly put the image away, replacing her, as if for Watson’s sake, with the sights and sounds of Liverpool, London, Waterloo.
“You’re a famous world traveler now!” he said. “I want to hear about every single thing that you and the Old Man saw over there.”
We walked along beside the horse and sledge, the broad valley opening out in front of us, with white-topped Tahawus and Mclntyre in the distance and the burnished range beyond, and although it was a gray, overcast day threatening to snow, I saw again how lovely this place was. Of course, Father loved it here. How could he not? And how could he not have envied me for being free to return here? I thought, and regretted for a moment that I had been so disgruntled with him.
I was expec
ted, Watson then told me. But expected sooner than this, he said, as they had received a letter from Father some days earlier, telling them I was on my way north. “Me and the boys thought you might’ve got distracted some over in Westport.”
This surprised me. “When was his letter dated?”
He didn’t know. The thirteenth, he thought. Yes, the thirteenth. “I copied it” he said proudly. “Like you used to.”
How could that be? Two days prior to my signing the pledge with the Gileadites, Father had written to the family that I would soon be coming home? I grew angry again and freshly confused. He had already decided and had known, even as he was working up my spirits, that we would not fight alongside the Negroes of Springfield! He knew all along that I would be sent to North Elba. And had said nothing of it until afterwards, when he feebly claimed unexpected legal troubles.
What purpose could he have had—for the meetings, the sermonizing, the pledge? And appointing me secretary and treasurer—why? Was it all for show? And for whom? Not me, certainly. For the Negroes? Had he merely been putting on a play for the blacks of Springfield, working them up, organizing them for battle and steeling them to pledge and risk their lives, when he had no real intention of joining them himself, or even of allowing his son to join them?
I cursed aloud: “Damn him!”
“What’s wrong?” Watson asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “No, the Old Man, actually. It’s just that he knew I was coming back here long before he told me. Even you knew before I did.”
He laughed and punched me on the shoulder. “Ah, well, Owen, that’s the Old Man, isn’t it? You can forget about him now, though. He’s there, and we’re here. You’ve just been spending too much time with him and not enough with us. C’mon, Mother’s going to be happy to see you,” he declared. “And Ruth, too. Everybody!”
“Lyman, too?”
“Sure. Lyman, too,” he said. “It’s great you’re home, though. Tell me everything. I want to hear everything. Especially about old John Bull. I want to hear all about England. And Flanders! What’s that like?”
As we walked, I related some of the details of my journey, pleasing and exciting him to a surprising degree, as if I had been to the South Seas on a whaling ship. Down the long hill we went, and soon, although it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, we were walking in wintry darkness, as if dead of night had fallen. Then, in the distance, I saw the glimmer of lamplight from the kitchen, and I made out the shape of the house. In this wide, dark, cold valley with the blackened mountains beyond, the house looked like a small ship bobbing at anchor in a safe harbor.
“You go in,” Watson said. “I’ll take care of Adelphi. We can unload these trees tomorrow in a twink.”
I said fine and headed for the door, anxious suddenly and a little afraid, as if I were about to hear unwanted news.
But, no, everything was joy and thanksgiving, kisses and embraces and bright, shining faces. They all gathered around me, as if I were one of Ulysses’ returning warriors, gone for long years instead of months, and put their faces next to mine and kept touching me with their hands even after we had hugged one another. My face nearly hurt from the smiling. They pulled my coat off me and bade me sit at the table, while the babies, Annie and Sarah, who, at seven and four years old, were no longer babies, unlaced and playfully drew off my boots.
Mary, sweetly calm in the center of the sun-shower, blessed me and thanked the Lord for my safe return. She looked healthier than when I had left, her round face reddened from the heat of the kitchen stove and the excitement, and I glimpsed her prettiness, saw her for a second as she must have looked to Father when he first met her some eighteen years earlier, a warm, soft, utterly benevolent presence in his unyielding, masculine world.
I held her hands in mine and said, “I’m truly glad to see you, Mary. Are you as well as you look?”
“Oh, my, yes!” she said, and laughed, and Ruth and the boys, Oliver and Salmon, laughed, too.
“What’s the joke?”
“Oh, we’ll tell you later,” Ruth said, and ruffled my hair with her cool hand. “We’ve lots to tell. You and Father may not know it, Owen, but believe it or not, life goes on without you.”
“Apparently!’ I said, and looked around the crowded room. There were Oliver and Salmon, lithe, tanned boys grinning like monkeys, and the little girls, Sarah and Annie, already back at work, the one churning and the other putting out plates. And then for the first time I saw Susan Epps, standing beside the stove in the further corner of the kitchen. Her hands were folded in her apron, and she was smiling gently at me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge her before she could greet me. At once I got up and crossed down the room to her and gave her a friendly embrace, realizing as I did so that she was pregnant, and well along with it, too.
“Yes, indeed,” I said to her. “Life does go on!” and she gave a winning, shy laugh. I congratulated her and turned to look for Lyman. “Where’s your excellent husband?”
There was a silence, and then Watson, who had come in from the barn and was shucking his coat by the door, said, “He’ll be back soon.”
“Soon?”
“Tonight. Or tomorrow night. He’s moving a few folks north.”
“Well, good!’ I said. “I was kind of afraid that the whole operation’d come to a halt. You know, after the business with Mister Fleete and our jailbreak.”
In a low voice, Mary said, “It did stop things, Owen. At least amongst the whites.”
“I’d expect some to cut and run.”
“No, just about all have abandoned us.”
“The Thompsons?” I asked.
“Yes!’ Mary said. “Pretty much.”
“The cowards!” I said, and slapped the table with my hand.
“Not Henry, though,” Ruth piped. “He’s not abandoned us.” I looked over and remembered the exchange that I had seen between her and young Henry Thompson at church.
“Yeah, but Owen’s right,” Watson said. “The rest are cowards. It’s mostly just Lyman alone making all the runs now. I’d be there beside him, if the Old Man’d let me. It’s this Fugitive Law; it’s made cowards of our neighbors. People go over and harass the folks at Timbuctoo all the time, making like they’re looking for escaped slaves. Even some folks we once counted as abolitionists.”
I asked Susan, “Is this true?”
“Yes, mostly. But Lyman, him and a few others from there, are still taking people north. It worries me. But people get this close to freedom, you got to help them.”
We talked then for a while of the increased difficulties and dangers of harboring escaped slaves and transporting them from Timbuctoo to Canada. Lyman had evidently grown fierce in the work, enraged by the death of Elden Fleete and his own brief imprisonment and made reckless rather than timid by it, joined only by a few of the more adventurous Negroes and by Henry Thompson, with no help coming from any of the whites in the northcountry, not even the Quakers in Port Kent. There were marshals and slave-catchers all over now, stopping off at the farm every few days and like plantation overseers checking the shacks and huts of Timbuctoo, intimidating the whites generally and the Negroes pointedly and employing Partridge and others like him to spy for them.
Shortly, we were enjoying a fine, ample supper of Brunswick stew made with squirrels shot that morning by Salmon and Oliver, and pickled beets and cucumbers, and a pile of Mary’s famous Indian hoecakes—my welcome-home supper, Ruth called it. There was abundant good news, beyond Susan’s pregnancy. Yes, it was true, Ruth and Henry Thompson had been courting, and as soon as he could arrange an interview with Father, Henry intended to ask for her hand in marriage. And the big, grinning secret concerning Mary was that she, too, was pregnant.
Startled, I put down my spoon and asked, “Well! That’s something, isn’t it? Does Father know yet?”
“Why, Owen, of course he does! I wrote to him right away. As soon as I knew myself, I told him. He was pleased as pie. Didn’t he tell you?�
��
I said no, he didn’t. “That is wonderful news, though,” said I, weakly, thinking more of the difficulties promised by another child than the blessings. But now I understood why the Old Man had felt suddenly required to concentrate solely on work which would help support the family, and why he had put the Gileadites so abruptly aside, and why he had sent me back here. With his wife pregnant again, his sense of responsibility to his family would have been unexpectedly sharpened. He had not told me, no doubt, because it was still very early in her pregnancy, and after so many lost babies, Father had learned to protect himself by holding his excitement in abeyance: it had become characteristic of him to wait practically until the pregnancy was over before beginning to speak of it. Also, although he was a man who had helped a thousand sheep and hundreds of cows and horses to foal and had even helped deliver several of his own children, he was nonetheless peculiarly shy about talking of such matters when it came to humans.
I felt kindly towards Father again, and guilty for having been so quick to judge him. I upbraided myself and began to wonder whether I held some kind of permanent, unknown grudge against the man that kept me looking constantly for reasons to indict him, even while I went on believing that I loved and admired him beyond all other human beings. It was a strange, new question, and gave me pause.
The evening wore on, and as we talked and joked around the table and in the parlor afterwards, re-establishing our old, familiar roles and routines with one another, I was more or less forcibly integrated into the family, and gradually I began to understand some of the more subtle changes that had recently taken place at the farm, and mostly they disturbed me. The winter snows were about to blow down on us. But coming in, I’d noticed that a great deal of the autumn work on the place had not been done. The livestock had looked well-cared-for, but that, from long habit, was routine and to be expected. The boys had done a lot of hunting and fishing, I saw, with plenty of hides and pelts being dried in the barn—bear, wolf, the usual deer and beaver, a wildcat, even a pair of mountain lions—and an abundance of salted venison and trout and corned beef had been put up, but by the women, I assumed. Not half the wood in, and Lyman and the boys had cleared and burned less than five hundred square rods of the flatland that wed need for spring planting and next year’s hay. Blacksmith shop and butchering shed not closed in. Cold cellar not dug, and the soil already freezing hard. Barely half the fencing for the winter sheepfolds built. The barn had been closed in properly, but there were chicken coops and an extension for a winter pigsty that hadn’t been started. They’d bred the dams for early lambing, Watson assured me, and had tanned the hides of eight deer, but hadn’t gotten around yet to tanning the fleeces and pelts that Father had asked them to prepare for winter clothing. Fortunately, the women seemed to have done their autumn work—the smoking and salting of meats, putting up cheeses and lard, filling the root cellar with potatoes, squashes, and turnips—so we would at least have enough to eat.
Cloudsplitter Page 46