Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  “I won’t hurt you,” I whispered.

  “You can’t touch me ‘less’n you pay.”

  I reached into my pocket and drew out the few coins that remained, a gratuity I had received the day before from a Lowell merchant who’d had me haul five hundred weight bales of wool to his cart-copper pennies, enough for a single loaf of bread, no more. “Here, this is all I’ve got.” Looking warily at me, she half turned and opened her tiny hand; I passed her the coins, and they disappeared into her rags at once.

  I peered down at my feet, embarrassed and unsure of what to do next, and when I looked up again, the girl had slid down along the wall and was about to bolt. “Hey, where’re you off to!”

  “No place!” she said, alarmed, and stood stock-still, half hidden in the darkness.

  “But you took my money!”

  “Y’ don’t get much for coppers, y’ know.”

  “But you were running off

  “I was only movin’ out of the walkway some. C’m’ere, an’ be nice, mister. Don’t fret none, I’ll give you some of what y’ want, darlin’. C’m’ere, now,” she said to me in a lulling tone, as if she were trying to calm a large, frightened animal.

  I moved abruptly to her but did not dare touch her this time. I was not afraid of her so much as afraid of myself. If I touched her, I did not know what would follow. Then, suddenly, it was she who had touched me. Her hand stroked me between my thighs, and a second later she was unbuttoning me, using both her hands. Before I could fully register what was happening, it was over: she was standing and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, a distant look on her face, as if she were calculating the few measly items that she might purchase with the pennies I had given her.

  I turned away and quickly buttoned my trousers. “I... I’m sorry!’ I said, without looking around at her.

  “What for?”

  I turned and faced her. She drew her shawl over her scrawny shoulders and seemed about to leave. “Well... that, I guess.”

  “You got what y’ paid for. No more.”

  “Yes, I know. You’re right. I just. .. well, it’s terribly wrong, that’s all. And I’m sorry for that.”

  She shrugged and started off. “G’bye, dearie. Come back when you get your wages.”

  “Wait!” I called. The girl stopped a few paces off, and I ran up to her. “Don’t go yet.”

  She studied my face carefully, uncertain, a little curious, perhaps, but somewhat frightened as well.

  I spoke softly. “I wonder... I was wondering if I might... look at you. I’m sorry... I thought, I wonder if you might let me see you.”

  She cast a look at me aslant, then glanced up and down the walkway, as if seeking an escape route. “No. No looks. Y’ got what y’ paid for, mister.”

  Without touching her, I placed my right hand and left forearm against the wall on either side of her, trapping her in front of me. “I want only to look at you,” I said. “Just for a moment.”

  “Look at me? What do y’ mean? My bubbies y’ want to see?”

  “Yes. And the other.”

  “The other? Naw, you’re daft, mister. You’re makin’ me scared.” She had drawn down and in close to herself and had wrapped her thin arms tightly around her chest, making her seem even more like a child than before. Her large, smudged eyes looked plaintively up at me. “Please... just let me go now, mister.”

  “First let me look at you. Then you can go. I won’t hurt you.”

  “Just my bubbies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not the other?”

  No.

  Slowly, she unwrapped her arms, reached under her shawl and fumbled momentarily with the buttons of her frock, and then she drew the clothing aside and showed me herself—a bony pink chest with tiny breasts. The fragile, innocent body of a child. For a second only, I stared, wishing suddenly that I were as able as she to open my own shirt and bare my breast and have it be the breast of a boy and not my thick, heavy-haired chest. So that, even as I humiliated her, I frankly envied her—when at last I realized what I was doing and was shot through with shame and looked away.

  I waved my hands at her. “I’m sorry! Please forgive me” I said. “Please, cover yourself. I’m so sorry... to have done this to you,” I said. Then suddenly, not knowing what else to do, I got down on my knees before her and in silence hung my head.

  “Well, you are some crack-brained cull, mister,” the girl said. She stepped around my prostrate form, and I heard her footsteps clack against the stone as she made her escape. When I looked up, she was gone. I was alone in the darkness. I heard the slosh of the river down below and the creak and groan of boats and barges bumping against the piers. On the street above, a pair of drunken men walked past. One laughed, the other sang a bit of a bawdy song.

  He who once a good name gets

  May piss a-bed and say he sweats...

  They both laughed and passed by. Alone in the night once again, I walked for hours after that, aimless, confused, frightened by the appalling knowledge I had obtained—not knowledge of women in general or of the particular poor, nameless Irish girl whom, for a few pennies, I had used as a common whore, but knowledge of myself. I knew myself now to be vile, a beast. On my own like this, away from Father and the rest of the family, cut loose from their moral and intellectual clarity, from the virtue generated, sustained, and perfected among them, I was but a sack of contradictions and unpredictable impulses: I was a boy locked inside a maris body, my childish innocence contaminated now, not merely by longing and self-abuse, but by sexual contact of the most disgusting sort. I had inflicted myself upon a poor, pathetic street urchin, a whore, yes, but a person who, compared to me, was honest, was virtuous—was innocent. Once again, I envied her, and at that moment would have happily exchanged places with her, if for no other reason than properly to punish myself for my transgressions and my hypocrisy and to reward her for her virtue and suffering.

  It should be she, not I, who could freely return to a warm household filled with a loving and upright family; she, not I, who was able to stand alongside her father and mother and brothers and sisters in church and public meetings and to walk freely about the town in the daylight glow of respect and admiration from the citizenry; she, not I, who performed honest labor and received for it shelter, food, clothing; she, not I, whose father, guide, and protector was the good man John Brown. Let me be the harlot, the hired property of drunken, brutal strangers. Let me go hungry and cold through the nighttime alleyways and dark corners of the town, exchanging brief, obscene gratifications for a few pennies. Let me be the victim.

  Burdened with thoughts such as these, I slowly made my sorrowful way home to Franklin Street, arriving there sometime in the middle of the night. The house was not darkened, as I had expected, and when I entered I was greeted by Ruth and John and Wealthy, all in their nightclothes, gathered together in the kitchen comforting our stepmother, Mary, who sat downcast at the table with a bowl of warm milk before her. She had been weeping, I saw at once, and when I asked what had happened, John turned to me and swiftly took me aside and informed me that the baby Ellen had died just minutes before. It was a mercy, he said, for the poor little thing had not drawn a proper breath for hours. Father was still with her upstairs, and he could not be separated from the infant. “It’s as if he cannot believe her dead,” John said. Mother—for he, unlike me, called her that—Mother was all right now. She had accepted the death of the child as an inevitable thing the previous evening, although Father had not, and she had prayed for her to go as quickly and painlessly as possible. But Father had stayed up two whole nights with the babe in his arms, believing that he could somehow save her, even, at the end, trying to breathe into her mouth. But she had died in his arms, and he had refused to lay her down and now was walking up and down in the rooms above, still praying for her recovery.

  I remember John saying, “The Old Man can’t seem to let this one go.” And I remember that he did not ask me where I had been
until this late hour. No one asked. Clearly, and rightly, my private adventures and torment were of no account here.

  Suddenly, there was Father at the bottom of the back stairs, entering the kitchen, his arms hanging down at his sides, his head lowered, with tears streaming down his face. I had never seen Father weep before, and the sight astonished and frightened me. He sat himself down next to his wife with a groping hesitancy, as if he had lost his sight, and he placed his hands against his face and wept openly as a child. No one said a word. This was beyond our understanding. I do not think that Father loved any one of his children more than the others, and he had lost at that time fully half a dozen of his babes, and he had not wept over any of them, although, to be sure, he had grieved deeply over them all, even to despair. His belief in the Life Hereafter had always been sufficiently strong that he could view their early going as a gift from God for the children and a trial from God for him. But somehow this was different. It was as if this time he believed that he, the father of the child, was being punished, not tried, by her death. “The Lord is filled with wrath against me!” he cried. ‘The Lord despiseth me!”

  “No, no, Father,” we all said, and each in his own way tried to console him. We reached out to him and placed our hands on him, and several of us wept with him. Although I did not. I could not. I backed off a ways and watched in shame, for I knew the true cause of Father’s suffering, over and above his grief for the lost child. I was the cause. I knew that Father was blaming himself for my sins, condemning himself for not having interceded with me in my frequent lustful wanderings, which surely he had observed and marked. And now he believed that he was being punished by an angry God for his inattention. I did not need to hear Father say any of this; I knew it in my bones.

  Slowly, I came forward, and the others, as if they knew what I intended, parted for me and made room for me to go down on my knees beside Father’s chair. “I’m sorry, Father, for what I’ve done. I have sinned, and I am sorry. Please, Father, please forgive me.”

  At that, he ceased weeping and looked straight into my face. His great gray eyes penetrated my face to my very soul, and he did not flinch at what he saw there, and I did not squirm away from his gaze, much as I wanted to. “Owen, my son. You are a good boy, Owen. I forgive thee,” he said in a low voice, and he placed his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him. “The Lord hath taken one child from me and returned to me another, who was lost,” he said. “I welcome thee, Owen,” he said, and it was as if his words had cleansed me, for at once I felt uplifted and strong again. Whatever Father wished me now to do, I would do without argument, without hesitancy, without fear. I remember, on the night that the baby Ellen died, thinking that.

  II

  Chapter 5

  I don’t know how much time has passed since I began this account—days, weeks, a fortnight—for it is as if I have been elsewhere, a place where time is measured differently and space is not bounded as it is usually. The only thing that grounds me, that stills and locks me into some deliberate measure of time and place, is my intermittent awareness of you, holding these sheets of paper in your hands, reading my words, learning my story and applying it to Father’s larger story, the one that truly matters.

  I know that in passing, due to my self-absorption and to the vividness of my recollections, I have mentioned many people and events that you know little of, that you may in fact know nothing of, for they have not come down in the historical record. They are not a part of the received truth. It is important that you hear of them, however, for they, like me, are figures in the context of Father’s story, which, if he is to be known at all, must be known as well. Let me speak, for instance, of Lyman Epps, the Negro man whom I mentioned earlier, and let me say how we came to know Lyman, how I first came to know him, for he will figure in the larger context of known people and events in a significant way. And his story, unlike the story of the men buried beneath Father’s stone in the shade of Mount Tahawus, has not been told before by anyone.

  It was in the spring of ’50, almost a half century ago, that I met Lyman Epps, when we all first came to North Elba, a few weeks later in the season than now, and I can bring it back to my mind today as if I were dreaming it—I can see the lilacs blooming and the bloodroot, which I had not seen before, at least not to name.

  It might have been earlier than now—the first of May, perhaps. For the lilacs that I am gazing at were located in the trim yards of the houses down in Westport, New York, alongside the broad verandas that faced the glittering waters of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont on the further side; and when Father pointed out the little, low blossom of the bloodroot, we were still down in that prosperous village, gathering the family and our livestock to begin our trek up into the mountains, where it would not be warm enough for the bloodroot and the lilacs to bloom until many weeks later.

  Father and I had moved his horse, Dan, and the seven head of Devon cattle away from where we had camped, on a hillside clearing at the edge of town, intending to water the animals at a stream nearby. The boys Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, setting out the sheep to graze, had located the stream earlier. The Old Man halted suddenly, and I peered over the bony red rumps and heads of our thirsty beasts to see what was the matter.

  “Owen, come, look here;” he commanded.

  I passed by the cattle to where he stood staring intently down the embankment into a glade beside the rock-strewn stream, which was narrow here and tumbled fast downhill towards the lake. I looked where he had indicated and, as was so often the case, saw nothing. Black flies swarmed about my face, and the cattle bunched up impatiently behind us. Father held old Dan, his chestnut gelding, by the halter and peered into the glade.

  “Yes, well, if we needed a sign,” he said, with a certain resignation in his voice, “here is one.” In profile, Father’s unsmiling, clean-shaven face was like a fist. He had a tight mouth with thin lips, a square chin and forehead, and a hooked, short nose, a hawk’s beak. You may be unaware that the long beard, with which he was later so often and so famously pictured, he wore only after Kansas, as a disguise, and, indeed, it did disguise him, even to his family, who fondly remembered his daily morning shave, mirrorless by the stove. It was an occasion for us to tease him into almost nicking himself with the razor. “You missed a bit,” one of us, usually Ruth, would calmly observe.

  A second child, Oliver or Salmon, would add, “Over here, Father, near your big left ear.” His ears were unusually large, and to our amusement, their size slightly embarrassed him; although he denied it, of course.

  “Where?” he would ask, groping over his heavy jaw with his fingertips.

  “The other side! On the other side!”

  “The right side, just below your enormous right ear!”

  “No, it’s the left. His right, Oliver, is your left.”

  Father would himself grow amused and join the game by feigning frantic confusion and flashing his long razor recklessly like a saber from one side of his face to the other. “Here? Here? Here?” Until Ruth or I or Mary would seriously fear that he was about to cut himself and would say, “Enough. Let the poor man shave his face in peace,” and the children would disperse, and Father, smiling lightly, would finish and wipe his face dry.

  “It’s the May flower” he said to me that morning in Westport. “The bloodroot, we called it, when I was a boy.” Following his extended finger, I looked down by the stream and saw in amongst the ferns and mossy stones a cluster of small white flowers near the ground. “The root is red as fresh blood,” he said, and told me that the Iroquois used it as pigmentation for their war paint. “The petals, though, they come pure white, like those yonder. Innocent above ground, and bloody below,” he mused. He had known it to grow and even blossom under a layer of late snow. It was the first flower of spring, and he was truly glad to see it.

  One of the cows smelled the water and started over the embankment, and the rest pulled over behind her, and quickly I stepped around in front of th
e leader and shoved her back.

  “After such tribulation, we may well require a hopeful sign,” Father said, meaning the past winter’s long, lingering death of the infant Ellen, I supposed, and all his financial woes, which had continued to mount so relentlessly in the last few years.

  It was strange to feel sorry for Father, and I rarely did and was almost ashamed of the feeling, as if he had forbidden it. Regardless, I placed my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “The Lord will provide, Father.” But the words felt like gravel in my mouth.

  “Owen, don’t say words that you don’t believe. Not even in comfort,” he added, and he scowled and turned away and led old Dan and the cattle further up the hill to where the stream ran slowly and there was a shallow pool that the animals could drink from.

  Yet, all in all, it was a very pleasant few days, that first stop in Westport, and I almost wished that we could settle there, instead of trekking on to a place that everyone other than Father had described as a howling wilderness. During the last year-and-a-half in Springfield, helping Father and John run Father’s and Mr. Simon Perkins’s wool business, I had grown somewhat used to the easy sociability and abundant distractions of a town. I somewhat envied John for having been left behind, even though he was burdened with looking after Father’s affairs at the warehouse, and I envied Jason, too, and even Fred, who was a full six years younger than I, for having been charged with the care of Mr. Perkins’s flocks back at Mutton Hill in Akron.

  But there was no arguing with Father on this matter of our settling amongst the Negroes in North Elba. He was dead set on it. They were freedmen, a few were doubtless fugitives, and the wealthy New York abolitionist Mr. Gerrit Smith, out of simple compassion and generosity, but perhaps with a useful moral point to make as well, had deeded them forty acres per family from his vast holdings in the Adirondacks. But in a few short years the rigors of northcountry farming had for the most part defeated them, and the little colony was coming rapidly undone. Father’s agreement with Mr. Smith was that in exchange for a sizeable piece of land with an abandoned house on it, to be paid for later at one dollar per acre, we would move there and teach the Negroes, many of whom had been Philadelphia barbers and Long Island shoemakers and the such, how to organize and work their land.