Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  But, happily, his relationship with Mr. Perkins was at last drawing to a close, he explained, and he no longer felt obliged to keep one or more of his sons tending the man’s flocks. More pointedly, however, the Old Man was alarmed. “Fred’s been showing some wildness,” he said, brought on, he assumed, by John’s and Jason’s leaving to go down into Kansas without him. So I was dispatched out to Ohio in order to “handle” Fred, as Father put it, and bring him home. With one remaining suit to be heard at trial, which would require him to go to Pittsburgh to defend himself and Mr. Perkins into the fall, Father, following the tragedy at Lake Colden, instructed me to depart from North Elba at once.

  He wasn’t inventing this errand out of whole cloth just to get me away from Timbuctoo for a spell, although that was a benefit. Simply, the Old Man couldn’t leave Fred unattended in Ohio much longer, and he did not wish to have him placed as far from his personal supervision as Kansas. In Kansas at that time, the pro-slavery Border Ruffians were already pouring into the Territory from Missouri, with an equal number of Free-Soilers heading down from the North, and both sides were spoiling for a fight. But Father had no intentions of going out there himself, not even for cheap, abundant land and for an honorable fight. He had land in New York, and his warrior’s mind was still on Virginia and the Subterranean Passway. If he was going to fight the slavers anywhere, he insisted, it would be there.

  In July, he had written to John, No, if you two boys and your wives and children must go, fine, do so. I’d go with you, if I could, but I can’t. You’ll just have to leave Fred temporarily alone at the Perkins place, until I can figure a way to get him home here in North Elba. Father thought it too dangerous in Kansas for Fred, who turned twenty-four that year and, according to John and Jason, had grown increasingly morbid and subject to unmanageable bouts of melancholia, which were often followed by inexplicable rages. His melancholy, I remembered from when he was in his teens, was a kind of heavy affectlessness and lassitude, driven, it seemed, by delusory convictions of his own sinfulness, which, after a period, shifted into a state of wild intolerance of the presumed sins of others. He, the most innocent of boys, the most trusting and honest, the most childlike, could not reside inside his body without despising it, and when he could find nothing more in himself capable of sustaining this loathing, he turned it onto the real and imagined sins of others, becoming suspicious, mistrustful, and wary.

  Up to now, in Akron, the dark effects of his seizures had been mostly overlooked by John and Jason and their wives, not without some difficulty, however. But tending the flocks of Brown & Perkins (of Mr. Perkins alone, actually, now that the company had been officially dissolved), with or without John and Jason to watch over him, Fred was nonetheless in familiar territory, surrounded by neighbors and relatives who had known and liked him since childhood and who would not exploit or abuse him or take particular offense from his delusions. That was just Fred, people said. Sometimes he was worse, sometimes he was better; either way, everyone who knew him knew also that he was basically harmless.

  When I first came up on him, he was drawing water from the well, and he heard me and turned and spoke to me in his old, slow way, as if we had never been apart and I had merely gone to the house for a moment and was now returned. “I believe it’s time to wash,” he said. “D’ ye want a drink of water first, Owen? You look like you could use it, brother.” He picked up a wooden ladle from the lip of the well and dipped it into the bucket and extended it to me.

  I thanked him and drank. He was perfectly right, I was dry, and at that moment, although I had not known it, preferred a cool drink of water to just about anything else. Refreshed, I set down the ladle and grinned and laid my hands on his shoulders and said how good it was to see him, as indeed it was. I loved Fred—we had been boys together, and I had loved him and had felt protective and custodial towards him long before I was conscious of there being any basic difference between us. We shared the same mother, he and I, and had marched off to school together, and had played and then worked alongside one another for years. I knew the shape of his eye, his inner face, better than that of any other human being, except perhaps Father’s, and what you have once known so well you must love always.

  Together we lugged water back to his hut, where we washed off the day’s sweat and dust, his from the fields and mine from the road, all the while talking in our old, laconic way. He was in adulthood like my childhood imaginary friend, his namesake, had been. It was only in Fred’s company that I did not feel tongue-tied and conversationally inept and thus could speak in the manner that felt natural to me. Freed of my usual vanity and fears of sounding dull-witted, ill-educated, and rural, I could speak slowly and obliquely, and by indirection say and find true direction out. In speech, Fred and I were both oxen, but unlike me, he was an ox who never tried running with the horses. He drew his load of thought and feeling at the same steady, slow pace and direction, regardless of who accompanied him or whatever rocks, stumps, and gullies got in his path.

  One by one, he asked after Mary and Ruth and the younger children in North Elba, and I reported on each, honestly, if obliquely, for the direct truth about each could not be said without making a narrative the length of a novel. Mary is nursing Ellen, the new baby girl, I said, at her age more worn out by the pregnancy than the birthing and glad that her other female children are now old enough to take her place in the kitchen. I told him that Ruth was living nearby but was pretty much taken up with meeting her new husband’s needs, which I described as complex if inconstant. Watson was in love with a religious girl, a Methodist, had gotten religion himself, and was building a mill, which he hoped would make him rich. Salmon was improving the scruffy local apple trees with cuttings from trees from Connecticut, and Oliver, though barely fourteen years old, had gotten hot with antislavery fever and was running fugitives night and day, and when he was home he was usually asleep.

  And so on down the line I went, until I had made small portraits of everyone, except, of course, for Lyman and Susan, whom I did not mention and of whom he did not ask. He knew about their presence in our life, naturally, but he had never met them. To Fred, they were like so many of the Negroes who had briefly resided with us at one time or another over the years, invited in by Father for asylum or merely to rest during their long, dangerous journey out of slavery. They were more the continuing context than the content of our lives, and since Fred could safely assume that our context was unchanged, he did not need to ask after it or be told.

  He made the two of us a simple supper of cabbage soup and rivels, which was very good with biscuits, and while we ate, he reported to me about the sheep, which he referred to as his sheep. Afterwards, we were silent for a longtime, until finally Fred pursed his lips thoughtfully and furrowed his brow and said, “Why’d you come all the way out from North Elba, Owen?”

  “Well, the truth is, the Old Man’s finished up his association with Mister Perkins,” I said.

  “Oh. That right?”

  “Yes. And he wants me to bring you back up there.”

  “He wants me to leave my sheep and go with you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh,” he said, as if it mattered not in the slightest to him where he went or why. He lit a tallow candle and stretched out on his pallet and opened his Bible and began to read in it.

  I sat by the stove on a three-legged stool, wondering how long it would take us to arrange properly for our departure from this place... if we would have to hang around until Mr. Perkins hired himself another shepherd ... if it would be adviseable for me to go on down to Hudson for a few days to visit with Grandfather and our other relatives... if John and Jason had left any of their possessions with Fred, or did they take everything to Kansas with them, and how did one do that, transport so much so far ... just letting my mind drift idly, when suddenly Fred shut his Bible and in a loud voice announced, “Owen, it’d be best if I didn’t go with you.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “W
ell, the fact is, I carry within me a great many lusts. And so long as that is true, I do not care to place myself amongst other people,” he explained in his slow, careful way. “Especially amongst girls and women. Here in my cabin and out there in the fields alone, I ain’t so tempted as when I’m with other people. Particularly those of the feminine persuasion.” He opened his Bible again and read aloud: Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin. And sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. He leafed ahead to another passage, obviously much-read, and recited, Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. “You see, it’s because of my lust, Owen, that my seed doth not remaineth in me. I can’t keep it inside me. I am not yet born of God;’ he pronounced.

  I did not know what to say then. We both remained silent awhile, until finally I asked him, “Do you pray, Fred? Doesn’t that help some? You know, with keeping the seed inside and all.”

  “Yes, I pray a heap. But it don’t do any good. It’s been better since the others left, though. John and Jason and their families. Since then I’ve been able to move out here and be by myself and have mostly holy thoughts. No, I ought to stay right here where I am, Owen. It’s for the best. I know that.”

  “Father won’t permit it” I said firmly. “C’m’on, Fred, you know if I go back without you, the Old Man’ll come hopping all the way out here to fetch you himself. And he’ll be mad at us both then. Up there in the mountains, you’ll be fine. The Adirondacks is still a wilderness. You can build yourself a hut there as well as here,” I told him, and gave him to understand that he’d be even more alone in North Elba than he was here in Akron.

  “No, Owen, that ain’t true. All the whole family’d be around me. It’s the way we are. Remember, ‘Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’“

  “Come on, Fred, you’re sounding like the Old Man;’ I said. “Thumping yourself on the head with the Bible. Ease up on yourself, brother. You’re the best of all of us.” Then I repeated Father’s charge to me and declared forcefully that we’d speak to Mr. Perkins in the morning and make our arrangements to leave here as quickly as possible. “They need us back at the farm,” I said, lying a little. “Not out here tending Mister Perkins’s flocks and arguing theology and sin all night.”

  I asked him if he had a blanket I could sleep in. Silently, he rummaged through his few possessions and drew out an old gray woolen blanket, and when I saw the thing, I recognized it at once from our childhood—one of the blankets spun and woven in the New Richmond house by our mother long years ago. He tossed it over to me, and I clutched it close to my face and inhaled deeply and grew dizzy with nostalgia. For a long moment, I kept it against my face, traveling back years in time, whole decades, to the long, cold winter nights in the house in the western Pennsylvania settlement, with me and my brothers and sister Ruth, all of us still innocent little children, huddled under our blankets in the big rope-bed in the loft, while below us, Mother tended the fire and cooked tomorrow’s meals, and Father sat on his chair by the whale oil lamp and read from his books, and all the future was still as inviting to me as it was unknown.

  Finally, I stirred from my reverie and asked Fred, “How’d you come still to own one of these blankets?”

  He didn’t answer. He just looked down at the packed dirt floor. “I’d have thought they were all lost or worn out by now. Did John give it to you?”

  In stony silence, he blew out the candle and lay down on his pallet, his back to me, as if gone to sleep.

  “Shall we take it with us?” I asked him.

  “You can keep it, if you want” he murmured.

  I couldn’t accept it from him; it was too precious a gift. But deciding it best now to leave him to his thoughts and, in fact, eager to be immersed in my own, I lay down on the packed dirt floor close to the stove, where I wrapped myself in the sweet-smelling blanket, and swooning with freshened memories of Mother and our childhood home, I was soon asleep.

  While I slept, the terrible thing that Fred did to himself took place. Or, rather, he determined then to do it and had actually commenced, so that even though I was awake when it was done, I could not stop him. I thought it was the sound of an owl or a ground dove that had wakened me, a low, cooing noise coming from outside the hut, but when it persisted and brought me wholly out of sleep, I realized that it was something else, some night creature that I could not name. Lifting myself on my elbows, I saw that the door to the hut lay half-open, letting in long planks of moonlight. Fred’s cot was empty.

  The cooing sound, Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, I realized, was being made by Fred outside. But I couldn’t imagine what it signified, so I unraveled myself from my mother’s blanket and stood in stockinged feet and peered carefully out the door, as if afraid of what I would see there.

  He had his back to me and stood some five or six paces from the hut, and from his head-down posture, legs spread, both hands in front of him, I thought at first that he was making water. His trousers were loosened and pulled down a ways. Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, he sang in a light voice, as if chanting a single pair of notes broken from a tune that he could not get out of his mind. Then I saw the knifeblade flash in the moonlight, a cold, silver glint that he held like an icicle in his right hand, saw it disappear and then re-appear streaked red, as he made a quick swipe across the front of him, as if he were facing the exposed belly of a ram lamb held from behind by a second shepherd, the way we had done so many hundreds of times for Father, who with that same swift, efficient stroke of a knife castrated the poor animal, severing the scrotum and releasing the testicles into his cupped hand.

  I shouted Fred’s name, but it was too late. As if to answer me, he made a chilling little bleat, his only cry, and he turned and showed me the terrible breach he had made in himself. Blood spilled from the grisly wound and flowed in a thin skein down his bare legs onto the wet grass.

  He hurled his testicles away into the willow thicket with great force, as if violently casting out a demon. On his face he had an expression of wild pride, as if he had come to the end of a long, exhausting day and night of mortal combat and had triumphed over an ancient enemy and had castrated the corpse and now stood over it all bloodied. He seemed dazed, stunned by the totality of his victory. It was as if, for a few seconds at least, the terrible pain of his wound had been erased by its very extremity and by the significance of its meaning.

  Then his wild, proud expression disappeared, and he was possessed by a sudden placidity—a great calm. I rushed forward and embraced him and bloodied myself in doing it. I never felt such a sadness as I felt then, for it was in both of us. He relaxed in my embrace, and all the force seemed suddenly to go out of him. The insidious little pocketknife, for that is all it was, fell to the ground, and his knees buckled, and he began to collapse. I lifted him in my arms as if he were a bale of wool and carried him back inside his hut, where I laid him down on his cot and at once set about washing and dressing his wound.

  It was a single, neat cut straight across the sac. He had a practiced, shepherd’s hand, which was lucky, for he had severed no big vein, and the bleeding, although bad, did not threaten his life and soon abated somewhat. This allowed me to wash his wound with water that I heated on his little iron stove and to dress it with strips of cloth torn from my shirt, wrapping him loosely about the groin in such a way that he would be protected from infection and accidental injury, and the healing could begin.

  It would be several weeks before Fred could walk properly again and we could take our leave, finally, of the Perkins place. I wrote Father at once and told him of the incident—better for him to learn of it first from me than anyone else, I figured—although I feared that it might bring him hurrying out to Ohio, which I did not particularly want, nor, I thought, did Fred. In my le
tter, minimizing the degree of Fred’s injury, but admitting nonetheless that he had effectively gelded himself, I reassured Father that I could nurse Fred back to health myself, and he evidently believed me, for he remained in Pittsburgh, while I stayed by Fred’s side. During the weeks that followed, I tended him day and night, as Father himself would have done, and never left him alone, except for the few hours a day when I myself was obliged to watch Mr. Perkins’s sheep. Luckily, the collie dog was clever and needed little supervision, so it was not an onerous task to double as shepherd and nurse. Besides, when I informed Mr. Perkins that, as soon as he was able to travel, I planned to take Fred away with me, he promptly found himself a new shepherd boy from a family in town.

  Right up to the morning we departed from that place, Fred believed that we were returning to North Elba, and I myself thought so, too. But then came that misty, gray dawn when we slung our rifles and our small bundles of clothing, food, and trail blankets over our shoulders and walked down the long driveway to the road that passed by the Perkins place. I had kept Mother’s blanket and viewed it now as mine from childhood and never spoke of it to Fred. It was my inheritance.

  When we reached the road, without a glance or a thought one way or the other, I turned southwest, instead of northeast, and Fred followed.

  For a few moments, we walked along in silence. “Where’re we going?” Fred finally asked.

  “Well, to Kansas, I guess.”

  A quarter of a mile further on, he spoke again. “Father wants us to go to the farm in North Elba. That’s what you told me, Owen.”

  “Yes. But we’re needed more in Kansas.”