Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Father trusted Mr. Johnson, mainly because Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman trusted him, but also because, immediately upon his arrival at Tahawus, Mr. Johnson had set about to improve the lot of his Irish workers, who had suffered so terribly under the iron hand of the hypocritical Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Seybolt Johnson was that rarity, a white man of the managerial class who felt towards his workers and Negroes alike that there but for the grace of God went he. “The man is a true Christian,” Father had pronounced after his first visit with him. “We can work with him.”

  Thus Lyman and I, with axes and crowbars, were sent out to bush the old footpath through Indian Pass and make it into a proper trail. Starting at Timbuctoo, we worked from north to south and in three days had gotten nearly to the halfway point, about seven miles in from North Elba, with Mount Colden on our right and, hovering above its shoulder, the huge, rocky chest and head of Mount Mclntyre. Mount Marcy—or Tahawus, as we still called it, Cloudsplitter, the old Indian name for the giant—was on our left, its great shadow permanently cast across the rocky bottom where we labored day after day and camped in a sweet-smelling balsam lean-to at night. Indian Pass was dangerous, rough ground. A man or a horse could easily fall and break a leg or tumble from a ledge into a rocky pit. The long, narrow defile was shaded in the daytime, and down in the gorge between the mountains, the Northern Star was blocked out at night, and moonlight rarely fell, and a man had to be able to trust the feel of the trail under his feet in order to get through. It was all too easy to get lost there, even at midday, to wander inadvertently down a bear path or deer trail and soon become disoriented in the darkness and dense woods. People had been known to disappear into these woods and starve or freeze to death, their picked bones found years later by a lone hunter or trapper.

  The pass itself was colder than the peaks and cliffs that towered above it, and in some places slubs of old, gray snow remained year-round. High, sheer walls of mossy rock rose up beside us and disappeared into the mists overhead, while below on the floor of the gorge we chopped, dug, and shoved, and when necessary laid down narrow log bridges to cross the gills and brooks and the peaty muskegs that abounded there. We would finish one arduous task of clearing and move on to the next bend in the path and instantly come to a new obstacle—a fallen, primeval spruce tree six feet in circumference, a head-high tangle of thick, twisted roots, a mudslide, a wall of enormous boulders—which we were obliged to cut or move aside when we could or, when we couldn’t, carve a pathway through lesser trees or around smaller rocks. Our simple intent, our one thought and standard, was to make it possible for a horse or a string of horses, by day or night in any season, to carry frightened, exhausted fugitives from slavery through to freedom. That thought drove and organized us, and as we worked we talked of little else.

  At night, though, lying back on our mattress of layered balsam boughs, with the fire guttering out, we spoke of other things, naturally. Lyman and I had not been together like this for a long time, a sad time, which I regarded with considerable regret. But out here alone in the wilderness, as of old, we soon found ourselves speaking our innermost thoughts to one another once again, talking of our respective childhoods and early days, our hopes for the future, and our beliefs regarding all first things. Our lives in every way were significantly different, but in a paradoxical way, this let us know all the better how we ourselves might have lived, had Lyman been born white and I black. Despite our differences, Lyman and I regarded ourselves, except for race, as remarkably similar, the way that lovers often do.

  This is a complicated and painful recognition for a black and a white man to make. On both sides, envy and anger get confusedly mingled with love and trust. And so it was with us. Or at least with me. I now knew, for instance, that my thwarted love for Susan was my love for Lyman gone all wrong, fatally corrupted by guilt and envy. I did not want to love her—I did not love her at all—so much as I wanted to neutralize my powerful feelings for Lyman. For they had frightened me: they were unnatural; they were the unavoidable consequence of a manly love finding itself locked inside a white maris racialist guilt, of Abel’s sweet, brotherly trust betrayed by Cain’s murderous envy.

  We were on that third night out seated before our fire, after having eaten a supper of trout pulled from a pool in the trickling beginnings of the Au Sable and potatoes carried in from home, and we were speculating on the nature of the earth before the arrival of the plants and animals—whether it had been a warm planet, as some scientists were then claiming, or cold and covered with ice, as others thought, or whether the Bible was to be believed in this matter in a literal way, when so many self-professed Christians nowadays, even including Father, regarded its description of God’s creation of the earth as figurative and allegorical.

  “Either way!’ Lyman said, “we know God created everything. The whole kit an’ caboodle. Question is, first time around, was it ice or was it fire? Did things heat up to get to where they are now, or cool down? With all that business about the darkness and the firmaments between the firmaments, it must’ve been ice,” he declared. “I’m holding out for a world of ice that God sets to slowly melting over the years, especially in the years since the birth of Jesus, as the Christian religion gets spread over the world. Starts way down in the Garden of Eden and moves out from there. Which is why the Bible comes from the desert anyhow. Egypt and all that. On account of it being close to Eden and it being already warm there first.”

  Lyman’s accent had slipped to the South, as it usually did when we were at ease alone together and as I imagined it did when he was speaking only with black people. He slurred his vowels, dropped consonants, and let his grammar follow different, less logical rules and conventions than those that guided white people’s grammar. When he talked this way, which was his natural speech, I was often inclined to let my own speech drift over in unconscious mimicry, for it was to me an attractive way to speak—smoother and slower, softer and more intimately expressive than my own habitual pronunciation and grammar permitted. I envied its intimacy especially and longed to escape from the formality of my accent and the impersonal logic of my sentences. But whenever I heard myself trying it, I grew severely embarrassed, as I could not speak Lyman’s English without hearing myself in blackface. I felt like an inept imposter, an unskilled actor mouthing lines not his own.

  Reluctantly, I would return at once to my accustomed manner of speaking, which had been influenced so profoundly by Father’s that, in the context created by Lyman’s fluency and ease, my words seemed to be coming from Father’s mind and my voice from his lips. Consequently, instead of sounding like an untalented minstrel showman making a mockery of Southern Negro speech, I sounded to myself like a tinny, nervous imitation of my old-fashioned Yankee father.

  I have no idea of how I sounded to Lyman’s ears. If he envied the formality of my pronunciation and the rigorous, constricting logic of my grammar, he showed no signs of it. Merely, when amongst white people, he spoke in the manner of a poor, uneducated Southern farmer who was white also, and since he was, after all, a Southerner, it seemed authentic enough, at least to white people. Perhaps he was simply a better actor than I and could move from Negro to white speech without exposing the gap between his true and false selves. I, it seemed, could not, no matter how I spoke. Which is one reason why I so often chose to remain silent. Until now. When there is no one left to hear me but the dead, and you, Miss Mayo.

  Lyman said, “There’s still lots of places around here, even, where the old, original world ain’t got warm yet. So you can still see how it was back in them olden days, if you wants to. Got ‘em close by, even.” He told me then of an ice-cave located not a hundred rods from where we sat. There were a number of ice-caves up here along Indian Pass, he said, which were known to the people of Timbuctoo and carefully avoided by them. “On account of them ol’ African superstitions an’ such. But they don’t bother me none. It’s older folks, mostly, who is scared to go inside. They warns you off ‘em like the devil
live there. Ain’t nobody live there. Too cold, ‘specially for the devil;’ he said with a short laugh. “You wants to see one?”

  I said sure, and we each stuck a pitchy pine-branch into the fire and, torches in hand, marched single-file into the darkness beyond our camp, moving uphill along a rocky rivulet. Soon we approached the sheer, high walls of stone that mark the highest point of the pass, where the trickling waters split and half the trickles run south and grow in time into the mighty Hudson and half run north and become the Au Sable and empty finally into the St. Lawrence. Here Lyman turned off the narrow path to his right and began to scramble uphill over riprapped rocks and tangled roots. I followed close behind.

  Suddenly, I felt a breath of cold air in my face, as if a huge, dead thing had exhaled. Lyman disappeared from my sight, and I thought the freezing breath of the dying monster had blown his torch out, for all I saw before me was a clutch of low balsams and behind them the perpendicular face of the rock wall. “Lyman! Where are you?” I cried.

  His voice came back all hollowed out: he was inside the cave. “Cup your torch, and come forward,” he said.

  I did as instructed, and the balsams easily parted, and in a second I found myself gone from the familiar world of trees and mountain streams and purple-blue night sky. I was standing beside Lyman inside a high, rock-walled chamber—standing in the very mouth of the monster. Looking down its half-illuminated length in the flickering light and leaping shadows, I could see the throat and belly. It was as if we had been swallowed whole by Jonah’s whale. The chamber was freezing cold and the air damp and still, and our warm breath blew pale clouds that lingered before our faces. There were long, white icicles hanging from the crackled sides and sharply angled top of the cave, and thick, yellowish tongues of ancient ice along the floor, dirtied and stained by the animals that over the years had wintered here—the old beasts: bears, catamounts, fisher cats. No human could have stayed here long; it was too cold, too dark, too cruel a habitation to visit, except briefly and only to escape blizzard, flood, or fire.

  Then the ice-cave was suddenly like a tomb to me, a stone sepulchre, and we were locked inside it, as if a rockslide had sealed off the entry from the world outside. I imagined this but also for a moment believed it—that we two were actually trapped inside this cold, rock-walled chamber together, and no one knew. No one would come and dig us out. No one would ever find our bones or know what had happened here. We had been at last cut loose from everything in the world outside that had long separated us one from the other—the color of our skin, our war against slavery, Susan, Father. Even God! It was a vision that promised the end of solitude. I glimpsed in this moment the possibility of escape at last from my terrible isolation. The loneliness that had cursed me since childhood and that had surrounded me like a caul seemed for the first time to stretch and extend itself like a pregnant woman’s belly to include another human being inside, who was a man like me, who was my twin, myself doubled and beloved, and who was at this instant looking back at me with love.

  I reached down and shoved the unlit end of my torch into a notch between two rocks beside me so that it continued to burn. Then I drew out my knife and opened it and placed it into Lyman’s right hand and laid my right hand on his shoulder.

  He looked at the knife and at me. “Why you givin’ me this?”

  “I have a confession to make.”

  “No,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. And I’m ready to die for it. But only at your hand.”

  He snorted, derisively almost. “I don’t want no confession from you, Owen Brown. Whatever you done, you already done it anyhow.”

  “No. Not yet. My confession will be the act.”

  “Yes, you has. Ain’t nothin’ you confess to me I don’t already know. Susan told me how you spoke to her. An’ I seen you sneakin’ ‘round our cabin nights. And now you wants me to forgive you for it? Or else to kill you?” He laughed. “No. I ain’t gonna give you that, not neither one. You wants to kill yourself, now, that’s different. Why not anyhow? Sneakin’ ’round after a colored woman, a married black woman. Like she’s not as good as a white woman and deserving the same respect? Or like I’m not as good as a white man? When here you is, the son of John Brown.” He curled his lip and stared me in the face. “You ain’t half the man your father is,” he said.

  He handed the open knife back to me, turned, and left the cave for the world outside, while I dropped precipitously down a well of darkness, his words echoing in my ears as I tumbled and pitched and turned—descending into myself once again: no-man.

  In time, my torch flickered and finally went out and fell over, hissing like a snake against the ice it had fallen on. I stood alone in the darkness and cold of the cave like that for a very long while, before I stirred and groped along the granite wall and found my way back out. By the time I stumbled back into our camp below, Lyman had wrapped himself in his blanket and was asleep at the further end of our lean-to, or appeared to be. I drew my blanket around me and curled up opposite him. But I did not sleep. Like a dead man, I lay with my eyes wide open, unblinking, staring at the night sky, with no words and no human voice in my ears but the words and voice of Lyman’s terrible truth.

  For the two days that followed, we worked in near silence, speaking to one another politely but only when necessary, as we chopped trees and roots and pried, rolled, and lugged stones off the path that led through the mountains to the Tahawus mining camp. What was there now to say? It had already all been said—and Lyman’s final words to me in the ice-cave had permanently closed off any further conversational intimacies between us. I had not told him what by me still wanted telling, but he had made it clear that whatever I might say, it needed no hearing from him, and I could only accept that judgement.

  Hard labor it was, then, made harder by the silent distance that stretched between us, and at night we fell back into our respective nests and dropped quickly into sleep. Days, it rained periodically and then cleared, and raggedy blue skies appeared overhead for a while, and then it rained again. For the most part, Lyman and I worked separately and as far from one another as possible. The nights were cool, and a steady wind blew out of the southwest up along the narrow defile, twitching the high pines and spruce trees into their raspy, long song.

  We were now well beyond the crest of the pass, and as we worked our way further along it, the burble of south-flowing rills and brooks soon became the crash and thrum of a large stream—the Opalescent, which emptied into Lake Colden below and then became the headwaters of the mighty Hudson. At night, we heard the gruff cough of a bear, the distant howl of wolves, the dour call of the owl, and at dawn the song of the whip-poor-will and the wood thrush, and the raucous cries of ravens on the heights. But our human voices rarely joined the forest chorus, rarely intruded on our private thoughts or broke our self-imposed solitudes.

  On the morning of the third day following our visit to the ice-cave, we came out of the long, forested gorge onto the northern shore of Lake Colden, which stretched before us black and glittering in the sun. From the marshy shore on our right where the Opalescent emptied into the lake, a pair of loons rose like scratches on the sky and crossed overhead, disappearing into the spruce forest. A broad grove of drowned trees spread along the further shore, standing like the gaunt pikes of a medieval army. For a while, we worked our way along the western shore of the oval lake, keeping to the high, dry ground amongst beeches and hickory trees, blazing the trees to mark the trail, and moving at a pretty good clip, for the ground was relatively smooth now and there was not much heavy cover—ferns, briars, and hackberry thatch, mostly, due to its having been scorched a few years back by fire.

  By midday, we were nearly past the lake and were about to re-enter the deep forest that for a mile or so of short ridges and gullies led gradually downhill to the mining camp; we expected to finish our job and reach the camp by dark. It had become our habit to stop at noon to rest and eat dried venison and
apples and corn bread, gone stale by now, and Lyman, who had been working a few rods ahead of me, leaned his axe and crowbar against a birch tree and headed on a line towards a narrow, flat rock that extended a ways into the lake. I put my tools and pack down and followed, not for companionship anymore, but because his pack held our small stock of food.

  Although it was a seasonably cool day, the sun shone down brightly, and the sky was cloudless and stark blue, a taut blanket that stretched from horizon to horizon. In a moment, I had caught up to Lyman, who was pushing his way through a chest-high thicket of willows. We were in a low, wet place and could see but the tip of the rock just beyond the willows, and only now and then. I cut to his right, following what appeared to be an easier path to the rock, and when I came out of the thicket, Lyman was on my left and a few feet behind me. He was still struggling to get through the willows. But when I turned and extended my hand to help him, he had ceased moving altogether. On his sweating face was sheer terror—as if he had seen Satan or God.

  I turned slowly around, moving just my head, and saw what terrified him, and it terrified me as well—a long, tawny-gray mountain lion backed up to the edge of the rock, with nothing but the glittering lake behind it and dark water on both sides and we two puny humans in front. The lion had been surprised by our sudden, upwind approach, and now it no doubt believed itself trapped by the water and by us. The animal was no more than ten feet from me, its great tail switching like a snake. Its shoulders were hunched low and its hindquarters lower, coiled to spring. Its small, feline head was nearly all mouth, as if it had been split in half by a hatchet, with black lips and tongue and enormous fangs.