Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  And he knew all the ways of men and women extremely well. He was no naif, no bumpkin. My father was not the son of man who stopped up his ears at the sound of foul language or shut his eyes to the lasciviousness and sensuality that passed daily before him. He never warned another man or woman off from speech or act because he was too delicate of sensibility or too pious or virtuous to hear of it or witness the thing. He knew what went on between men and women, between men and men, between men and animals even, in the small, crowded cabins of the settlements and out in the sheds and barns of our neighbors. And he knew what was nightly bought and sold on the streets and alleys and in the taverns of the towns and cities he visited. The man had read every word of his Bible hundreds of times: nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him.

  Father was a countryman, after all, a farmer and stockman much admired by other farmers and stockmen, a workingman who could roll up his sleeves and cut timber, tan hides, or build a stone wall alongside the roughest men in the region. And although he was a failure at it, he was a businessman, too, a man who traveled widely, to Boston and New York and once even to England and the European continent, and stayed in hotels and taverns where prostitutes plied their trade in the lobbies and drinking rooms below and visited the men he traveled with in their rooms next to his, with only a thin partition between. Father knew the ways of most men and women, and he did not loudly condemn them. He merely elected to behave differently, to go his own way, to keep himself pure, and to marry young.

  Our virtues as a family were, of course, guided and enforced from our earliest childhood years well into adult life by Father’s own example and by his steady instruction. Although, when we did become adults, after about the age of sixteen or so, his manner of dealing with our lapses changed, in that he no longer chastized us or enforced his will and the wisdom of his ways with the rod and belt or punished us for our disobedience. Instead, he merely withdrew from the offender the shining light of his trust. And no punishment was so powerful a corrective as that. He did not require that we share with him his deep, unquestioning Christian faith, as long as our every act was a reflection of our belief in the rightness of the Golden Rule and our love of the Truth. “If you cannot be a believing Christian but will nonetheless do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and if you will obey the first commandment of Jesus Christ and only substitute the word ‘Truth’ for God, then I swear that I shall not disavow you.” That was his pledge to us.

  My brothers, John and especially Jason, took him at his word, and by the time they turned twenty, they had already long abandoned the Christian faith and had become rigorous but upright freethinkers in matters of divinity. When I, a few years behind, saw that this did not cause a significant rift between them and Father, I secretly followed suit. Our loss of faith did not please Father, naturally, and he never ceased to speak of it, but he nonetheless knew that there was no way he could command us to maintain our faith, any more than God could command him to maintain his. And so, instead, he grieved over it and constantly upbraided, not us, but himself, for having failed us as a teacher and father.

  There was no way we could disabuse him of this notion. Nor did we especially want to, for it was one of his virtues, after all, and we held all his virtues in the highest esteem. And because our close adherence to his example was what gave to the family as a whole its character, its defining nature and difference from other families, we could not reject the worth of a single one of his virtues without rejecting an essential aspect of the family as well. Which would have been like choosing the life of the outcast. So that if Father grieved over his failure as a teacher and father, then John, Jason, and I were obliged to grieve over our failure as pupils and sons.

  Nevertheless, despite the differences in degree of our faith in Father’s Lord and his Saviour Jesus Christ, we were a pious little clan, we Browns. The daily round of prayers and hymn-singing, Father’s morning Bible lessons, and his insistence on interpreting all events in Biblical terms were of great value. They disciplined and ordered our attention together as individuals and as a group. They woke us from our self-absorbed slumber, connecting us one to the other and all to the larger world outside, and linked that world to the great, overarching sphere of Truth, or God, which we loved before all other truths, or gods.

  I remember Father’s surprisingly lovely singing voice—surprising because his speaking voice was somewhat reedy and thin, a consequence less of his language and attitude than of his physical nature. When he sang, however, his voice was strong and melodic and pitched high, like a young boy’s. He sang sweetly, yet with sufficient force to redden his face, which, when we were children, invariably brought smiles to our faces. He would notice, before we could cover our mouths, and would smile also and sing all the more loudly. In making a joyful noise unto the Lord, smiles and even laughter were permitted, and our favorite hymns were the joyous, loud ones, like “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow.” At prayer, however, or during the daily lesson, we knew to keep our heads lowered, our brows knitted as if in sober thought, our hands clasped together, and no catching one another’s amused eyes when Father, as he occasionally did, due to the fervency of his feelings, lost the train of his thought and fell to stammering or repetition.

  In those days, to anyone who saw us, we were naturally regarded as pious. But not in the strict Methodist or old German Lutheran manner, as we have sometimes been portrayed. No, piety in us Browns was an attitude of respect which we held towards the Truth and our fellow man and which we strove to maintain daily in all our small as well as our large affairs. Our rituals and forms of worship, which were mainly the basic, old, New England Presbyterian forms, functioned, at least for me and my brothers and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Ruth and the other, younger children, merely to remind us of that respectful attitude and, every morning and evening and over every meal, to renew it in our hearts and to place that attitude of respect, of reverence even, in the forefront of our minds.

  And if respect for the truth and our fellow man was the basis of our piety, then there was probably no more consistent and singular expression of our piety than our adherence to the principle of honesty in all our dealings, as much with strangers as with each other, as much with enemies as with friends. It sometimes made us appear odd to folks who were not so insistent on honest dealings, and it made Father, in the end, an incompetent businessman. But for us, that oddity, as I said, was a point of pride. And although we were often obliged to forgo an easy advantage, especially when it came to matters of money, our honest dealings frequently obliged decent people in turn to deal the same way with us, and we were thus sometimes able to prosper by it.

  But it is well-known that from earliest childhood we Browns were taught not to lie. We were chastized severely when caught doing it. It was Father’s first corollary to his first commandment. If ye love the Truth, then ye cannot lie. Less well-known, perhaps, is the fact that I was the worst offender amongst us, as a child, that is; and in the early days, when he was a young man and Mother was alive, Father was more severe in his punishment and in his means of correcting us children than later, and we sometimes did not understand why he beat us so energetically and for so long. (There was the danger, perhaps especially with me, of his bending the branch too far and breaking it off, instead of correcting it to straightness; or of having it snap back defiantly against him and end up bent the other way, permanently misshapen. But I knew nothing of that then.)

  By the time I was five or six years old, well before Mother had died, I had already begun to manifest the habit of lying to an exceeding degree, even for a child. I seemed to take sensual pleasure in it and almost sought out occasions for lying, making up tales, entire adventures, elaborate encounters, and so on, which had never taken place. I went beyond mere exaggeration, and although I oftentimes partially believed in the truth of my accounts, just as I believed in the corporeal reality of my imagined companion, Frederick, there nonetheless was a s
ide of me that was wholly aware of their falsehood and was pleased by it. It gave me momentarily a sense of importance to say that I had seen a bear when I had not, to report on the visit of an Indian when no such person had appeared, to claim that I had been complimented by the schoolmaster, Mr. Twichell, when he had for days ignored me altogether and in fact seemed to think me rather a dull child.

  I remember vividly a significant alteration of this wretched habit, so that in later years, when I lied, it was no longer out of blind compulsion but rather as the product of a conscious, calculated decision. Once, in New Richmond, Grandfather Brown, whose namesake I was, came over from Akron to visit us for a few days. It was during the dark months not long after Mother died, when Father had fallen into one of his periods of silence and withdrawal and passivity, and it had gone on dangerously long, so that family members and neighbors, too, were concerned for the welfare of his five children and for his own physical and mental health. Father was prone to such periods anyhow, especially following a spate of trouble, but this time he seemed unable to end it, unable to pass through his grief and loss and get on with the everyday business of his life.

  Grandfather Brown stayed for a week, I remember, and as the end of it approached, Father was returning to his old, custodial self. When he roused us at dawn, the downstairs fires were now lit, and when the workers arrived at the tannery, Father was there to greet them and lay out the day’s work. In the evenings, he had resumed his reading aloud from the Bible to the younger children, and before we went to bed he totted up the day’s accomplishments and failures of each child and listed tomorrow’s obligations—to wash down the kitchen floor, sweep the yard, bring in the early peas, repair the sheepfold, separate the pullets from the hens, and so on—from each child, according to age and ability, an accounting of his or her allotted task, and to each child the next day’s charge.

  I myself greeted this return to the old routines with mixed feelings, as if I almost missed the gloom and silence and inactivity that had followed Mother’s death. But the others all seemed relieved and for the first time in months happy and playful again, so I tried to join in. But then, on the final morning of Grandfather’s visit, when I passed alone through the parlor on my way out to school, I espied on the mantelpiece, where he had placed it the night before, Grandfather’s large gold watch and chain. It was a particular treasure to him, engraved with his initials, a bit ostentatious, the one vanity that that otherwise simple and utterly unpretentious man indulged in. I picked up the watch and held it for a moment, then slipped the watch, which he in his antique way called a chronometer, into my trouser pocket and dashed away to school with it, while the old man slept peacefully in the next room.

  What were my motives? I did not know then, nor do I today. Except to say that the timepiece drew me like a talisman, a magical amulet. Since Grandfather’s arrival, I had been studying it at every opportunity, aware constantly of its location, whether in Grandfather’s vest pocket or on the sideboard or mantelpiece or in his tough, leathery hand. And once I had it in my possession, I felt wonderfully, magically empowered by it, as if it were the legendary sword, Excalibur, instead of a mere man-made timepiece. As if, with the watch in my pocket, I were a grown man in charge of my own life, not a boy anymore.

  At school, in the clearing by the woodshed, where we children loaded the day’s stovewood to carry inside, I showed the watch to my friends, claiming that my grandfather—a man born before the Revolutionary War, I proudly pointed out—had given it to me, because our names were the same, Owen Brown, which was why the initials engraved on its case were the same as mine. The initials were mine in actual fact, I said. See? O.J.B.

  My friends, the boys especially, were impressed and crowded round me to see it the better, imagining the watch and heavy chain, as I did, worn in a Colonial soldier’s waistcoat pocket by me, or someone sharply resembling me, as he marched heroically into the smoke and fury of Revolutionary battle.

  At once, however, I realized that I had gone too far and now would have to swear the other children to secrecy. “Don’t say nothing to Mister Twichell about it,” I said. “My father was supposed to be the one who got Grandfather’s watch, and he don’t know yet that it’s gone to me, instead. Grandfather said he’d tell him today, while I’m off the place.”

  I was betrayed, of course. Not by one of the children, though. By Mr. Twichell himself, who had stood at the doorway and had observed my little performance from across the schoolyard. When I passed by the schoolmaster and entered the building with my armload of firewood, he tapped me lightly on the shoulder, smiled down, and said, “Owen, when you have put the wood in the box, come and show me what you were showing the children.”

  I did as instructed, and he took the timepiece and turned it over, examining the initials and the fine face with the Roman numerals. “How did you come by this?” he gently asked.

  I looked around and saw that all the children were watching, waiting for me to reveal my lie, for at bottom they had known the truth, or at least had known that I was lying, and now I was about to be exposed in public, not just as a liar, but as a thief as well. I hesitated a second, and Mr. Twichell said again, “How did you come by such a marvelous instrument, Owen?”

  I sucked in my breath and quickly repeated the lie that I had told the children outside.

  He gazed at the watch for a few seconds, admiring it, and when he handed it back to me, asked if I could read the time from the markings on its face. I nodded yes, and he asked me how I knew which was which, for they weren’t numbers, were they? They were X’s and V’s and Vs.

  “They’re in the same place as the regular numbers,” I said.

  He said that was so, and then told us to take out our slates and begin the day’s lesson, which turned out to be—fortuitously, he said, winking broadly at me—upon the difference between Roman and Arabic numerals. In a surprisingly short time, every child in the room could write in Roman any date the teacher called out to us and any hour, the number of the states in 1776 and the number today in 1833, the white population of the United States, the Negro population of the United States, the total of the two, and the difference between.

  At day’s end, when I passed out of the schoolhouse, Mr. Twichell stopped me at the doorway and handed me a small, folded sheet of paper. “I’m sorry, Owen,”he said, in a voice so soft that only I could hear it. ‘This is for your father. Please, don’t fail to deliver it to him.” I took the note with trembling hand, for I knew what it said, and slipped it into my trouser pocket, next to Grandfather’s watch. “You may read it if you wish;’ Mr. Twichell added. He seemed sad and guilty, almost, and I knew why. But he had done the right thing. I was the sinner, not he.

  I did not read the note; I could not. I did not deserve to. Dutifully, when I arrived home, I went straight to Father, who was at work inside the tannery, and passed the note to him. He slowly unfolded the paper and read it. Finally, without a word, he held out his hand before me, and I drew the watch from my pocket and laid it flat in his huge, callused, outstretched hand. He thanked me, turned to Grandfather, who had been seated on a stool next to the fire, watching, and gave it over to him. Carefully, Grandfather examined the watch, as if checking it for damage, and placed it into his vest pocket. Then he took up his walking stick, rose creakily, and walked from the room to the yard, where my brothers were at work.

  Father said, “Is there anything you can say in your defense, Owen?” His face was very sad and downcast, like Mr. Twichell’s.

  “No.”

  He sighed. “I thought not. Come with me,” he said.

  We went to the barn, where it was dark. Motes of hay drifted slowly from the lofts through beams of light shining through the cracks and openings above. He told me to remove my shirt, which I did, while behind me and out of sight he took from its nail on the main post of the barn the hated piece of cowhide which, years ago, long before my birth, he had tanned and cut into a long strip strictly for the purpose of chastizing hi
s children. I bowed my head and waited, shivering, for the first blow against the cold skin of my bare back.

  And when the blow came, the force of it sent my breath from my body, and before I could inhale, the second blow came, harder than the first. Twelve times he lashed my back, one for each hour on the face of the watch, he told me, as he swung the leather strap again and again, each stroke shoving me nearly off my feet. Twelve strokes, he said, so that I would forever associate this particular punishment with my lie. “Twelve strokes for telling people that you owned what was owned by another. For lying.” Each stroke drove me a step forward—twelve steps in a circle in the dirt floor of the barn.

  Finally, he stopped. I had not wept and was surprised by that and wondered if somehow, due to my sinful nature, I had lost the capacity for it. Father said, “There are also sixty minutes on the face of a watch, Owen. And not only did you lie, you stole. You coveted your grandfather’s property and stole it from him.” To my amazement, then, Father turned me around to face him and handed me the leather strap and stripped off his own shirt. “As much as you’ve failed me as a son, I’ve failed you as a father,” he said, and he got down on his knees before me. “We’re connected, our sins are connected, in the same way as the sixty minutes and the twelve hours on the face of Grandfather’s watch are connected. Therefore, you must place sixty lashes on my back. Then you’ll never forget how we, you and I, and Grandfather, too, all of us, are connected in all our thoughts and deeds.”