Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  It started back in the middle ’30s, after Father had closed down his tannery in New Richmond and returned to Hudson, Ohio, where, like so many other men of small money and big ideas, he got drawn into buying land and farms on easy credit and unsecured loans. Of course, with hindsight one can say that it was inevitable and hardly inexplicable, and having found himself dangerously overextended, he should simply have cut his losses and gotten out. But the Old Man, once he had determined that optimism was realism, could not be shaken from his course. After all, just take a look around, he would say in those early days of the land boom. All over the Western Reserve, men clearly less intelligent and hard-working than he were getting fabulously rich. Why not jump in himself? And why not bring in friends and family, too? Share the coming harvest.

  At first, however, and for a long time, he successfully resisted the temptation to join the general run to speculate on land with borrowed money. That was when optimism was not realism; it was fantasy, or worse. He saw it then as a sickness, the mentality of a stampeding herd. And he justified his resistance, typically, on moral grounds, on principle, fortified by the Bible. As in Deuteronomy 15:6: Thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow. As in Proverbs 22:7: Therichruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

  Later, when he began to borrow, it was on principle then, too. He borrowed everywhere from everyone—from his father and brothers in Akron, from rich men and poor, banks, friends, and strangers. He had a well-deserved reputation for probity and honesty, and so great was his belief in his ability to take the measure of land (a not altogether unfounded belief: though self-taught, he was a skillful surveyor and possessed a sensitive, knowing eye for good farmland) and so attractive a talker was he that, once he set his mind to make a purchase, it was not difficult for him to convince others to become his partners and to loan him the money for his share of the partnership as well. From this side of the fence, however, he took to citing Luke 14: 28-30—the story of the man who tried to build a tower and did not have sufficient material to finish it and was mocked by his neighbors. And 2 Kings 6:4-6—the story of the borrowed iron axe-head that fell into the water and was made to float and was not lost. And also, from 2 Kings 4:1-7—the story of Elisha’s widowed daughter-in-law, whose sons were taken in bond by her creditors, so she borrowed many vessels from her neighbors, and the vessels were made to fill with oil, which were then sold to pay all her debts, even that for the borrowed vessels, freeing her sons and leaving the rest for her and her sons to live luxuriously on afterwards.

  Sadly, Father’s Bible failed to warn him that the newly elected President, Martin Van Buren, would abruptly establish the National Bank and change the lending rules, causing the famous Panic of ’37. Thanks to Van Buren’s National Bank, soon all the small-monied borrowing men like Father were left holding packets of worthless paperpiles of currency issued by the various states and high mountains of mortgaged titles to vast tracts of western land and farms that could be neither sold for one-tenth their costs nor rented for the interest due on the unsecured loans that had purchased them barely a year before. The lucky fellows and the bankers and politicians who understood the system and thus had been able to anticipate the sudden deflation of value that inevitably follows hard upon a speculative boom, those men sold off their properties early and high and walked away counting their profits. Within weeks, they were doing the President’s bidding, calling in their neighbors’ loans and hiring sheriffs to seize land, houses, livestock, and even the personal property of the foolishly stubborn men who persisted in believing that the decline was only a temporary aberration. For those men, men like John Brown, surveyor, tanner, and small-time stockman, the collapse of the land boom was catastrophic.

  Thus, by the summer of ’39, Father—who two years earlier had thought himself practically an Ohio land baron, who in his mind had laid out an entire town on five thousand mortgaged acres overlooking the Cuyahoga River, where he expected soon to see a government-financed canal that would be as enriching to him as the Erie had been to developers in western New York; a penniless man who owned title to two mortgaged farms he did not live on and one, the Haymaker Place, that he loved and hoped to make his family estate one day; a one-time tanner of hides raising thoroughbred horses and blooded Saxony sheep, who rode about like a squire in a carriage behind a matched pair of gray Narragansetts, all this on borrowed money—that man suddenly, inexplicably, found himself hounded by bondsmen, banks, process-servers, and sheriffs.

  Bound as much by principle and Biblical text as when he had stayed out, Father with foolish consistency covered his borrowings with more borrowing and dropped deeper and deeper into debt. In ‘37 and ‘38, with everyone else rushing to sell short and salvage what little property he could, Father, almost alone, refused to get out. “This too shall pass, children, this too shall pass,” he would say. “We must be patient.” But all his promissory notes, which had been piled on top of one another even higher than any of us had imagined, were coming due. One by one, his titles began to be seized, titles that he had used to guarantee second loans, which afterwards he had used for the purchase of still other properties, until finally it began to look as though he would lose all his plots of land, his canal-side properties, also his carriage and Narragansetts and the blooded stock. Even the house we lived in, the Haymaker Place, was under siege, the sweet little farmstead that we older boys and Mary, sister Ruth, and the younger children had been managing well enough to keep the family adequately fed and clothed, while Father raced around the countryside frantically trying to keep his paper empire from being blown utterly away.

  He was in those days more frightened than I had ever seen him before or afterwards. The growing violence of his words alarmed all who heard him, especially Mary and us children. The more frantic and frightened he became, the more reliant on his Bible for guidance and on his moral force for instruction he became, but now his discourse was a tangle of contradictory quotations and maxims that even he could not unravel. “This prolonged tribulation, if it be the will of Providence, must be endured with cheerfulness and true resignation,” he instructed us. “We must try to trust in Him who is very gracious and full of compassion and of almighty power, for those that do not will be made ashamed. We must not be ashamed, children! Remember that Ezra, the prophet, when himself and the capitivity were in a strait, prayed and afflicted himself before God. So must we go and do likewise.”

  Thus, though we had come to dread the announcement of any new scheme or plan to make money and at last turn things around, it was with barely concealed relief that we greeted his decision to round up a herd of miscellaneous cattle from all over the county and drive it east to Connecticut, where there was a ready, cash-paying market operated by the agency of Wadsworth & Wells, a company that Father had dealt with successfully in the past. In short order, he managed to put together a sizeable herd of cows owned mostly by Grandfather and several of Father’s friends, with seventeen head of our own, all but our last two milch cows. He drove his cattle aboard the barge at Ashtabula, and we waved him off and, when he was out of sight, happily embraced one another, glad to see him gone from us for a while, so that we could re-gather our wits and reclaim a shared sense of reality.

  When he went east in ’39, Father’s real plan, which he did not reveal to those who had entrusted him with their cattle, was not merely to raise cash by selling livestock to Wadsworth & Wells, but also while there to negotiate still further loans in New York or, if necessary, up in Boston, to cover his growing losses back in Ohio. It took him only a few days to fail in New York; bankers there had already withdrawn all speculative loans from the Western Reserve and were not about to risk more. Directly, he went on to tap the more deeply rooted money trees in Boston, and when he returned to complete his cattle-dealing in Hartford, although lugging an empty bucket, he was once again brightly optimistic. He never said who, but someone up there had allowed Father to believe that within a few days, a week at the mos
t, of his return to Hartford, he would receive an unsecured loan of five thousand dollars. I suspect his supposed benefactor was a wealthy abolitionist like Mr. Stearns or even Dr. Howe, whose wife, the poet, was rumored to be an heiress, but it might have been a Yankee banker still looking to extract titles to western lands from a bumpkin in need, a rich man only temporarily deluded as to his own best interests by Father’s enthusiasm, naïveté, and evident honesty.

  Five thousand dollars. The figure is important. This was the amount for which Father had recently been sued by the Western Reserve Bank of Warren, Ohio, for having defaulted on several loans. Judgement had been found against him, and unable to pay even a portion of the debt, he was being threatened with outright bankruptcy or jail. At the last minute, an old friend from Akron, Mr. Amos Chamberlain, had kindly taken over the note for him. To guarantee that loan, the Old Man had written Mr. Chamberlain a note against the Haymaker farm. What he did not tell Mr. Chamberlain or the Western Reserve Bank was that the Haymaker title had earlier been used to guarantee any number of additional loans of money for the purchase of other large plots of land along the Cuyahoga River. It had been done pursuant to the digging of the proposed Ohio-to-Pittsburgh canal, which, unfortunately, had ended up going in further west, near Cleveland. It was another of his schemes gone bad, still unpaid, and one of the bottom cards in Father’s shaky house of cards.

  A few days passed, and no money arrived from Boston. A week. Then another. Every few hours, Father walked from the office of Wadsworth & Wells, which he was using as his headquarters, to the post office, only to return empty-handed, puzzled, increasingly angered, and very frightened. At best, he would lose everything: the farm and livestock, the house and all its furnishings—everything! How would he feed his poor babies? How could he face his family and friends? Then sometime during the afternoon of June 14, 1839, Mr. Wadsworth went into the office of his company and discovered that the sum of five thousand dollars had been removed from the cash box. As the box was undamaged and still locked, he knew at once who had taken it. Besides Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells, only Father, their trusted agent, who might now and then need a few dollars in order to help conduct their business, had a key.

  I do not know what my father was thinking while he stood that day in the empty office, counting out the money. He could not possibly have gotten away with it. And the betrayal! He was almost a partner, a trusted confidant of Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells, their reliable procurer of western cattle, one of the most knowledgeable and honest stockmen they had ever worked with. He must have felt like a child who has long protected one lie with another and has woven an entire fabric of lies, laying one strand atop and under the other, and has come eventually to long for the truth to stand revealed, not because he loves the truth, but because exposure will bring an end to the agonizing labor of weaving a world of falsehoods. To get it over with, simply to make sense of his daily life, the child finally tells an utterly outrageous lie, one that cannot be believed. With a single lie, he overthrows the entire false world and reinstates the true. The theft from Wadsworth & Wells was like that, for nothing Father could say to explain it would be believed by them, and for a single moment, as he reached into the cash box and counted out the five thousand dollars, Father must have been that child. He closed the box and placed it back inside the cabinet and locked both.

  At once, he sent the money off to his friend Mr. Chamberlain in Ohio, who would on receipt of it relinquish back to Father the title of the Haymaker Place. All was well again. Until, of course, later that evening, when Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells both presented themselves at the door of Father’s room at his Lawrence Street boarding house. When they knocked, Father, in what he regarded as a remarkable coincidence, as if the Lord were introducing him back to himself, happened to be reading in his Bible, John, Chapter 10: He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

  Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells said that they had come to his chamber, not to accuse Mr. Brown of theft, but simply to ask into his use of the five thousand dollars. They thought that he must have needed it to make a large purchase for them, and they wished to know what it was.

  He did not lie; he could not; he told them straight out: he had taken it for his own use. But it was only a temporary removal, he insisted, for he fully expected to receive the same amount in hours or, at the most, days, from a party up in Boston. This was true enough. And had he not at the same time believed that he was owed that much and more by Wadsworth & Wells, he said, money owed for the eventual sale of the cattle he had delivered to them from the west, he would have felt considerable anguish and remorse for having removed the money prematurely. But while he was truly ashamed of having gotten himself into a situation whereby he needed the money desperately and at once, he felt on the other hand no shame for having actually taken the money, no guilt.

  Now, though he no longer owed five thousand dollars to his old friend Amos Chamberlain, he owed it instead to Wadsworth & Wells, who, with some justification, felt that while they may not have been exactly robbed of it, neither had they willingly loaned it. At that awful moment of his discovery, seated before his stern, skeptical discoverers, the Old Man had no choice but to comply with their demand that he sign over to them, contingent upon his return of their five thousand dollars, the one remaining property in his name, his beloved Haymaker Place, which sheltered his wife and children.

  Meanwhile, the expected money from the mystery loaner in Boston did not materialize. I suspect that it had never been more than a mild promise merely to consider his request, but the Old Man, when he wanted, could make a polite rejection seem its opposite. They waited a week more, and finally Mr. Wadsworth declared that he and Mr. Wells would hold whatever monies they got for selling the herd of cattle against his eventual repayment of the money he owed them or until the sale of the Haymaker property. They had no way of knowing the true value of the farm, of course, or whether it had any prior liens on it, so they simply used the cattle as collateral. And they told him that, regretfully, they would no longer be able to rely on him as their western agent.

  At that point, Father had no choice but to leave Hartford and make his somber way homeward. Thus he returned to us a humiliated man and poorer by far than when he had left to put his affairs at last in good order. Poorer, more desperate, and deeper in debt than ever, this time to men who, unlike Mr. Chamberlain, unlike Grandfather and our other relatives, friends, and neighbors back in Ohio, had no particular interest in protecting John Brown and his family. There was nothing for it then but a steady worsening of his affairs. Like Napoleon in Russia, he had advanced too far beyond his meager resources, so that he could no longer retreat back to a safe base, there to wait out the winter storms. Instead, he would have to slog and thrash his way forward, a blind man in a blizzard. And so he did for the rest of his life, dragging us along behind.

  Back in Hudson, like a man switching a single pea beneath three shells, the Old Man managed to forestall disaster and hold on to the Haymaker Place a while longer, until the following year, the summer of ’40. After much legal wrangling and suits and counter-suits leading all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, a final judgement had been found. Bankruptcy was unavoidable. This time, all Father’s debts were being called in, and his beloved old Haymaker Place had at last to be abandoned.

  To his further horror, the original lien against the place had been called in by the bank and sold at auction, with Mr. Amos Chamberlain the eventual buyer, and the proceeds from the sale, once Father’s loans from the bank were covered, were to be paid against the sum owed Wadsworth & Wells. Mr. Chamberlain, in what Father saw as an unforgiveable betrayal, had managed to find the cash to offer the bank eight thousand five hundred dollars for the place. “If the man had that sort of money’ Father fumed, “he might’ve loaned it to me and let me keep the farm, so that I might feed my family!”

  Blinded by his anger, Father was unable to accept the reality
of the situation. He refused to turn the farm over to Mr. Chamberlain, and as a consequence, one warm day the county sheriff and his deputies came out to the farm to put us off it. The Old Man viewed the Haymaker Place as his last stand. “I need this farm! I must hold it and work here, if I’m ever going to provide my creditors with their just due,” he insisted. In recent months, he had abandoned all vain fantasies of spinning gold from straw and had wisely resumed tanning hides on the property, his most reliable means of support over the years, where his labor and skills and those of his sons were sufficient to turn a small profit. Thus he had come to imagine for the first time in years a realistic way of slowly working himself out of debt, one hard-earned dollar at a time. But he needed the house and its outbuildings and the stands of shagbark hickory that surrounded the farm in order to accomplish it.

  The prospect of losing the place put him into a mindless frenzy. “Boys, we will fight them to the death! A man must defend his property!” he declared to us that June morning. “It’s an old story. If it can be made merely to appear that Naboth the Jezreelite has blasphemed God and the King, then it will be perfectly right and good for Ahab to possess his vineyard! So reasoned wicked men against Naboth thousands of years ago, boys, and so they reason against me today!”

  We were all at midday dinner in the house, Oliver but a baby then, the kitchen full of babies, it seemed—Charles, who would die in the terrible winter of ’43, and Salmon and Watson, and little Sarah, who was six and who would also die in that winter of ’43. Fred, then a sweetly meditative child with none of his later turbulence, was nine; Ruth was but eleven and already performing the labors of a grown woman; and there was I, at sixteen, like a large, housebound dog, simple-mindedly excited by the loud, rough noise of Father’s voice; and Jason, two years older, silently observing, placid, skeptical but loyal; and John, the eldest, eager to display his superior understanding of the situation and his willingness to stand fast with the Old Man.