Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Bewildered at first and frightened by his command, I nonetheless did as I was told and struck him across his naked back with the leather, his own whip of chastizement. It was a feeble blow, but it was all I could muster. “Harder!” he instructed, and I obeyed. “Harder still!” he commanded, and so I did, again and again, growing stronger with each blow, until I had lashed him all sixty times. And then, at the sixtieth and final blow, at last I began weeping copious tears.

  “Now, Owen, now you see how it is between God and man,” Father said to me. “Now you’re weeping. And when the Bible says, ‘Jesus wept,’ you know why He wept. Don’t you?”

  I could not answer.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I understand now.” And I put my shirt back on and left him there alone in the dim light of the barn, praying quietly to God for forgiveness.

  I will tell you another story of our life then and of early deceit and punishment, one that, like the other, will bear significantly on later events. More so than any of our neighbors, wherever we lived, we Browns kept the Sabbath holy. Defined precisely, in the way of Father’s literal ancestors, the old New England Puritans, and of his spiritual forebears, the ancient Hebrews, our Sabbath began on Saturday night at sundown and ended at sundown the following day. Father brooked no variations or exceptions to this rule. Sometimes we children argued with him as to whether the Saturday sun had actually set yet, for there was still light filtering through the trees from the west, and John or Jason might contend that if the trees behind the house had been cut, then there would be at least another half-hour of daylight, so it was not truly sunset. But Father would have none of that, answering, “Yes, John, and I suppose if the western hills were not there, we’d have fully an hour of daylight left. Come in now, boys, and honor the Lord with your silence.”

  And after a few more minutes of broody grousing around outside, we’d give up and come trooping into the house, latching the door behind, to commence our twenty-four hours of confinement, of silence, prayer, and contemplation of the Lord. It was an imprisonment, broken only by the need the next morning early to tend to the animals and later to join in the few hours of worship at church that, when we were young and living in Hudson and New Richmond, Father was still able to insist on. Of course, after he broke with the Hudson Congregationalists over the slavery question back in ’37, an event you have no doubt already uncovered in your researches, after that, we no longer had even the diversion of church services when the Sabbath came around. Instead, we prayed and sang together at home, and Father preached.

  It was difficult for us children, though, especially when we were very young. We moped and drifted somberly about the house, not free even to work or whittle some little tool or toy, no spinning or weaving for the females, no cooking, no household projects, for any of us. Silence, prayer, contemplation, and—except for the Bible—no reading. From our rooms upstairs we peered dreamily out the windows, as ordinary Christians passed down the road on their way to town or cut through the yard into the woods beyond with their muskets on their shoulders, gone deer hunting or out for grouse or partridge, and how we envied them. The girls as much as we boys. We were all fairly high-strung, active children used to constant physical exertion, and to put a twenty-four-hour halt suddenly once a week on our wild spirits, which usually got exercised harmlessly in work and outdoor play and sports, was an extreme imposition, often too extreme for us to place upon ourselves without heavy enforcement from Father.

  Sometimes, usually by early afternoon on Sunday, by which time we had become explosive from the confinement and silence, we older boys would contrive to escape from the house for a few hours and return before sundown without being missed. Father’s habit was to retire to the parlor and sit in his chair by the window with his Bible on his lap and read silently, now and then dozing off. It was usually one of the younger children who saw the Old Man’s chin finally fall to his chest and heard him start to snore, and who, on our orders, would tiptoe up the narrow stairs to the rooms above with this welcome intelligence, and, John in the lead, we older boys, sometimes with Ruth tagging along behind, slid open a window and crept along the ridge of the shed roof to where we swung out onto the branch of a maple tree and quickly scrambled to the ground. Then for a few hours we were free to race through the woods like buckskins, shrieking and hollering to one another, making all the wild noises that for fifteen or twenty long hours we had kept bottled up inside our chests.

  I remember, for powerful reasons, one Sabbath in particular, which I will describe, for it has a meaning that extends into the later part of my story. It was late in the fall of ’33, when I was but nine years old, the year after Mother died, and our stepmother, Mary, had been living with us for only a few months. A nearby neighbor and not much more than a girl herself, Mary had first been hired by Father to keep house and care for his younger children during the days, while he ran the tannery, but soon he married her. She was then pregnant with her first child, Sarah, born the following spring. I remember little else of that sad whirl of a year, except what happened to me on one crisp, sunshiny day, when John, Jason, and I, as we had done a hundred or more times, made our escape from our father’s and new stepmother’s dark, silent house to the large, bright world outside.

  I was then a cold, withdrawn child, hopelessly saddened by the death of my mother. The pain of my days and nights was such that I thought of little else and thus was to all appearances a permanently distracted child, one of those children who seem neither to know nor to care where they are or who is with them. I was a boy whose gaze was always inward and fixed there, not on himself, but on some imagined closed door. I have seen dogs whose beloved masters have gone into the house, leaving the animals to wait outside, there to sit on the cold stoop, staring at the door with unbroken gaze. I was like that poor animal, and the door was the death of my mother.

  John went first out the window and crept along the ridge of the steeply pitched roof of the shed, followed by Jason. Then me. At the end of the roofline, there was a two-storey drop to the ground, which had been dug away for the entry to our root cellar below. A sturdy, full-grown maple tree stood at the back of the shed, with several branches close enough to the structure that a medium-sized boy could in a single move slide down from the ridge of the roof to the eave, where he could leap out and catch onto the tree and from there make his way easily to the ground. Without hesitating, John reached the end of the ridge, turned, squatted, and duck-walked quickly down the wood-shingled slope, sprang into the air, grabbed the branch of the tree, and like a squirrel hurried down its length. Jason, grinning, was right behind him.

  Then came I, walking in a kind of haze. I made my way to the end of the roof. But instead of stopping there and lowering myself to a sliding position, like the others, I simply continued straight on, as if the ridge of the roof extended below me. I remember stepping off the roof into open space and falling for a very long time through sunlight and bright green leaves and blue sky in a dreamy downward flight, pulled, not by gravity, but by some force even more powerful than gravity. I was like the boy Icarus, who flew too near the sun on unnatural wings and was hurled back to earth as punishment for his pride and vanity. Down, down I fell, crashing at last against the stone steps to the root cellar.

  I must have reached out at the last second with my left arm, as if to push the ground away, for the arm lay beneath me, crushed by my own weight and the force of my fall. I was fully conscious and at first felt no particular pain, but when John and Jason reached me and rolled me over, I saw that my arm had been snapped almost in two by the cut edge of the stone steps. Jason began to howl at the sight of it, for one of the bones above the wrist had torn through the flesh and sleeve, and the arm was gushing blood.

  I was in terrible pain then. I could not say anything; I could not even cry. Everything was yellow and red, as if the earth had caught fire. Jason was bawling in terror. John whispered hoarsely, “Shut up, Jason! Just shut up! You’ll br
ing the Old Man!” But then he saw my arm and realized that it was all up with us. “Run and get Father!” he said. “But go back up the tree way. Go through the house, tell him Owen fell from the roof and we saw him from inside. He won’t lick Owen now anyhow, and maybe he’ll let us off, too.”

  Jason did as he was told, and a moment later Father appeared, towering over me and John, his huge, dark shape blocking out the yellow sky. John stood and stepped quickly away. “He fell off the roof, Father,” he said. “We saw him from inside.”

  “Yes. So it seems,”Father said. His hands were chunked in fists on his hips, and he surveyed the scene, looking first up at the ridge of the roof, then along our route to the eave, to the maple tree and the ground.

  To John, Father said, “You and Jason came out the window and climbed down the tree to help him, did you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Swiftly, he descended the steps to where I lay all crumpled and broken. Crouching over me and examining my arm, he said to me, “You appear to have been sufficiently punished, Owen. I’ll not add to it. Your brothers, however, will have to wait for theirs.”

  I remember Father tearing the sleeve off my shirt and tying the scrap of cloth tightly around my arm above the elbow to stop the bleeding, talking calmly all the while to the other boys, saying to them that, because they were my elders, he held them responsible for this injury, and they were only making it worse for themselves by lying about it now. He instructed Jason to bring him some kindling sticks for a splint from the woodbox inside and a sheet from one of the beds, and then he grasped my broken arm with both his powerful hands, and when he wrenched the bones back into alignment, the pain was too much for me to bear, and I lost consciousness.

  I am recalling this event now with difficulty and almost as if it happened to another person, for it was so many years ago, and the crippled arm of the man I later became completely displaced the pain endured by the nine-year-old boy I was then. My arm did not heal straight and remained locked in a bent position, as you may have observed when we met, and all my life my left hand has worked more like a clever claw than as a proper match to its twin. It was indeed, just as Father said, my punishment. It was a permanent mark, an emblem, placed upon my body like the mark of Cain, which all could see and I myself would never be able to forget. So that, all my life, every time I reached out with both arms to pick up a lamb or shear a sheep, every time I laid a book on my lap and opened it, every time I sat down to eat or prepared to dress myself or tie my shoes or undertook some simple household task, I would remember not the pain of my fall and the long recovery and healing afterwards, but the fact of my having disobeyed and deceived Father.

  It was the last time any of us sneaked out of the house on the Sabbath, although I suspect that years later, when the event had faded into family lore, some of the younger children, Salmon, Watson, and Oliver, took their Sabbath-day turn at chancing Father’s wrath. We never spoke of it, but no doubt John and Jason were chastized severely with Father’s leather strip. Although nearly as tall as Father, especially John, who turned thirteen that year, they were boys still and slender, and Father had no compunctions then about laying on the rod. I do know that for many weeks, while I carried my arm like a dead thing in a sling, they were made to do my chores, and long years later, whenever we worked alongside one another, they were still somewhat solicitous of me, as if they had retained a measure of guilt for my being crippled. I, of course, as I have done here, blamed only myself.

  That was in New Richmond, but today I am reminded of an episode from those days in Hudson, Ohio, before we went to the Pennsylvania settlement. It was one of the few occasions when we boys managed to get the best of Father. John, Jason, and I stole some early cherries from the orchard of our Uncle Frederick, who lived nearby. It was done at John’s instigation, of course—Jason, even as a boy, was unnaturally scrupulous about such things, and I, who was then about seven (Mother was still alive, I remember that, so I must have been seven), was always the follower of my elder brothers. One of the hired girls who lived and worked at Uncle Frederick’s saw us stealing the cherries and reported it to her older sister, and together they marched straight to their employer and told him of our crime, exaggerating by tenfold the small quantity of cherries we had made off with.

  After Uncle Frederick had taken the girls’ information to Father, we received from Father a quick licking, which was appropriately perfunctory, considering the smallness of our crime, but it left us, especially John, feeling vengeful against the hired girls, whose names were Sally and Annie Mulcahy, poor, orphaned Irish girls brought out west from the city of Pittsburgh. They were near our age, and I suppose we believed that they had betrayed us to the adults out of no more decent impulse than to advantage themselves at our expense.

  Within hours of our licking, John had filched from the barn a small tin of cow-itch. You, a city woman, may never have heard of it, but “cow-itch” is the common name for a salve infused with the hairs of the cowhage plant, which hairs, applied to human skin, burrow into the skin at once, causing great pain for a long time, as if barbed needles had been thrust into the sufferer’s nerves. It is excruciatingly painful against human skin and sears it for hours afterwards and cannot be washed or wiped off. We used it as a vermifuge against certain diseases of the skin of cattle and sheep. Father always kept a supply with him, for even when he traveled, he brought along a medicine kit for animals; if not for his own livestock, then for demonstration purposes, as Father was forever educating the farmers and cattlemen and sheepmen he met along the way.

  That evening after supper, we sneaked over to Uncle Frederick’s house and smeared the stuff liberally over the seats of the outhouse, which we knew was used strictly by the Mulcahy girls. They lived in an attic above the kitchen wing and had a separate entrance and staircase to their quarters. We had often noticed them coming and going early and late, and we knew that they usually visited the outhouse together, especially after dark. In fact, their practice, strange to us, had become something of a joke to Uncle Frederick and the rest of the family (not to Father, naturally, nor to Mother, both of whom disapproved of coarse humor). But Uncle Frederick liked to say that Sally Mulcahy couldn’t do her business without Sister Annie along, and Annie couldn’t do hers without Sister Sally. So far from home and living on the frontier among strangers, the girls were, of course, merely afraid and naturally shy.

  None of that mattered to us, however. When we had finished our devious work, we hid in the bushes near the outhouse and waited for the results. Shortly before dark, the two girls came tripping down the outside stairs from their attic, crossed the back yard to the outhouse, and went inside. In less than a minute, one of the girls began to shriek. Then the other. “Something’s bit me! Ow-w-w! Something’s bit me!” cried Annie. “I’m afire!” her sister answered. “Me bottom’s afire! Ow-w-w!” We, of course, thought the whole thing hilarious and could barely keep still or silent, while the girls howled in terrible pain. They ran from the outhouse, their skirts up and knickers down and their bright red fannies aflame. Laughing and clapping one another on the back, we three bad boys crept off through the underbrush to home, properly avenged.

  It did not take long, however, for Uncle Frederick and Aunt Martha to conclude that their Irish girls had been victimized by none other than the Brown boys, who, in their view, were allowed by Father to run wild as Indians anyhow. Frederick, who was Father’s younger brother and a deacon in the Congregational Church, was a shopkeeper in the town of Hudson. He was less rural and pious than Father, less withdrawn from the larger community, and despite his sometimes bawdy humor, he was a stern, demanding man. He and his wife, Martha, were childless and perhaps envied Father’s much admired fruitfulness and thus thought him not as properly rigorous a parent as they themselves would have been, had the Lord blessed them in a similar way.

  When Martha and Frederick brought their accusations of our “vicious, bad behavior” to Father, he agreed to punish us severely
, but only if we were proven guilty by objective evidence or confession. To his credit, Father never simply sided with adults against children. And there being no objective evidence, no eye-witnesses, he needed a confession. Thus we were interrogated by him for several long hours that night. But we did not crack. We simply denied that we had been over at Uncle Frederick’s house and claimed that we’d been hunting up a lost lamb at the time of the incident, and no amount of verbal rebuke or recrimination from Father made us back down. Secretly, we believed that we had been in the right and our lie was justifiable. Our earlier punishment for stealing the cherries had not fit the crime. Finally, Father seemed to give up and told us that we’d have to sleep in the haymow in the barn tonight. Not as punishment, he said, but as an opportunity to discuss amongst ourselves the wrongfulness of our act and the nasty work we were doing to our souls by refusing to confess it.

  This was a ruse. The haymow, where we sometimes slept by choice on hot summer nights or for occasional mild punishment on cold nights, had a scuttle that led directly to the cattle stanchions below. We knew from past experience that a person could stand below the scuttle and hear every whispered word above: we had stood there ourselves and overheard conversations above that were presumed to be private, and Father had done it to us as well, repeating our overheard words back to us later as a joke.

  We vowed, therefore, to be silent, and no sooner had we settled ourselves for sleep in the haymow than we heard the barn door below creak open and a few seconds later heard Father’s breathing and now and then heard him shifting his weight at the lower end of the scuttle. For a long time, we listened to him, alert as deer. Suddenly, John got up from the hay where we lay and loudly announced, “I’ll tell you, boys, if someone’s standing down there at the bottom of the scuttle, he’s going to get clubbed with this!” Whereupon, in a fury, he picked up a large chunk of wood, a heavy piece of a joist four or five feet long, and strode to the scuttle and without hesitation simply tossed it down the chute.