Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  By the time we resumed our journey, the snow was falling heavily. The mountain ridges on either side had disappeared from view, and as we plodded ahead we could see only a few feet in front of us and to the sides. We were all now shrouded in blankets, except for the Old Man in his greatcoat. The snow was wet and stuck to us, turning us white, even Mr. Epps. Father and I stumbled along in front, searching out the trail a few feet at a time, waving Mr. Epps and the team on as we found it. Hours passed like this, until finally the ground under our feet began to tip and fall away, and we realized that we had reached the beginning of the descent to the valley.

  Mary and Sarah got down from the wagon to walk behind it, and Mr. Epps drove the animals now by walking beside them at their heads, talking to them in a quiet, calm voice. Father instructed Ruth to carry Sarah on her back and told Oliver not to let go of Annie’s hand. Watson and Salmon were to hold the livestock back from the wagon a good ways, but keep them moving, he said, don’t let them huddle up and stall, especially the sheep. Then he and I attached a length of rope to each end of the brake pole. I walked on one side of the wagon, and Father walked at the other, ready for me to shove the pole across to him, under the wagon bed and through the spokes, whenever the wagon threatened to rush the horses.

  It was a slow, nasty business, coming down that long, rocky trail ten and fifteen feet at a time all the way to the valley. At first, the slope was a gentle incline, and Father and I were able to hold the wagon off the horses by tying the driver’s brake back and pushing uphill against the box from the front, our feet skidding and slipping clumsily in the snow. But soon the descent quickened, and the wagon started to break loose. I grabbed the spruce pole out of the wagon box and slung it across to Father, and we each raced to a tree beside the trail and lashed the rope around it, locking the wheels. Then we let the lines out slowly and inched the wagon down the rough trail, skidding it like a sledge, until the ropes had run nearly all the way out, when we each tied the end to the tree and scrambled down to the wagon and chocked the wheels with rocks. Then we stumbled back uphill to the trees, untied the slack ropes, and walked them forward a ways, where we wound them around a nearer pair of trees. We drew them taut again, reached down with our free hand and removed the chocks, and let the wagon slide another few feet. Over and over, endlessly, it seemed, we followed in the blinding snow the same elaborate, painful procedure, and somewhere out there in front Mr. Epps calmed the snow-covered horses and kept them moving together on the nearly invisible trail. My face froze, and the rope burned my hands raw, and the rocks tore at the tender, exposed skin of my palms and fingers, while slowly, bit by bit, we lowered the wagon through the storm to the valley floor—where, as we descended, the clouds seemed to rise, and the snow gradually turned to sleet, then to cold rain.

  By the time we got to level ground, it was almost dark, but we could see again. There were maple trees with fresh buds glistening on wet limbs, a meandering river, cleared, flat meadows covered with new grass, and steep mountains rising swiftly from the plain and disappearing in low, dark gray clouds.

  In spite of our ordeal, we appeared to be in good shape. The team of Morgans that Mr. Epps had advised the Old Man to buy looked positively heroic to me now. Mr. Epps seemed as shrewd to me as he did to himself. I grinned at him, and to my surprise he smiled modestly, almost shyly, back.

  My hands and Father’s were raw and blistered, and our clothes were soaked through. Poor Mary and Ruth and the children came trudging along behind us, looking miserable, wet, and cold, but immensely relieved to be down from the mountain. And further back came the red Devon cattle and Father’s precious long-faced merino sheep and the pigs, with Salmon and Oliver, using the collies, dutifully keeping them together, hollering and chasing after the stragglers, beating them back into line with their sticks. A short ways ahead, I saw a white, two-storey farmhouse with a long porch facing the road and a large, unpainted barn and several ramshackle outbuildings behind it, and when I pointed the place out to the Old Man, he merely nodded, as if he had known it would be there and did not need me to show it to him.

  Finally, when we had all come up and were gathered together beside the wagon, Father removed his hat and prepared again to pray. This time, however, he ordered us to do likewise. “Let us give thanks, children,” he said, and we each uncovered our heads, every one of us, even Mr. Epps.

  In his clear, thin voice, Father said, “Heavenly Father, we humbly thank thee for bringing thy children one more time safely through the storm. We thank thee, O Lord, for protecting us and our worldly goods against the travails and terrors of the mountain fastness and the fury of the storm. We who are wholly undeserving of thy boundless care and protection, O Lord, we humbly thank thee. Amen.”

  Mr. Epps said his “A-men!” and quickly snapped his hat back on. I followed, and the others did also, except for Father, who remained bareheaded, face screwed up and eyes tightly shut. Uneasily, because of Mr. Epps’s presence, perhaps, we all walked a few steps away and did not look at the Old Man, and a moment later, as if wakened abruptly from sleep, he re-joined us, seeming somewhat distracted, if not downright dazed. This was his usual manner following prayer, however, and we were all quite used to it and never remarked on it, even amongst ourselves. From our viewpoint, simply, the Old Man prayed with greater intensity than the rest of us. From our viewpoint, the Old Man did everything with greater intensity than the rest of us.

  By the time we reached the roadside farm, the rain had ceased, and the clouds had drifted back up the snow-whitened slopes to cover only the mountaintops above, revealing a broad, grassy floodplain here below. A mile or so further, Mr. Epps informed us, was the village of Keene, where eight or ten additional families resided. “Mostly, they just scratches out a living. Not much different from us folks up there beyond the notch in Timbuctoo” he said, pointing to a sharp cut in the distant high ridge to the west.

  Father said, “That, Mister Epps, will soon change.”

  “Yassuh, Mister Brown” he said, and our eyes met for an instant, and I saw that he did not believe that the Old Man would be able to change anything, anywhere.

  As we approached the white house and barn, we noticed that the place, clearly a once-prosperous dairy farm, was showing distinct signs of inattention—broken fences and tumbled walls, windblown shingles on the ground, a two- or three-year-old pile of dung collected behind the barn, and none of the abundant cleared land tilled yet.

  The place was owned by a man in his mid-twenties, a Mr. Caleb Partridge—whose youth, when he opened the door to Father’s knock, surprised me—and his middle-aged wife, Martha. The couple welcomed us in, evidently pleased by the unexpected prospect of extending food and shelter to such a bedraggled party of travelers. Mr. Partridge, a tall, gaunt man with a thick black beard and heavy teeth, had a brutish handsomeness about him. His wife was pink-faced and plain as oats and seemed almost simple in her shyness, for she giggled nervously whenever one of the adults spoke, even when I was the speaker, and listened with great seriousness to whatever the children, Annie and Sarah, offered by way of conversation, as if only they did not frighten her.

  The couple, apparently childless, resided there alone with an aged woman, whom the man introduced as his wife’s mother. She sat in a corner of the large kitchen, mumbling and nodding agreeably to herself, while we warmed our faces and hands and dried our clothing before the huge fireplace and while Mrs. Partridge fussed over Ruth and Mary and the little girls, bringing cloths to help them dry their hair and serving up bowls of hot cider and ample portions of freshly baked corn bread.

  Later, when the boys and Mr. Epps and I had fed and bedded down the animals and returned to the house, we all seated ourselves at the Partridges’ long trestle table before a steaming pot of venison stew. Mr. Epps, however, hung back by the corner of the fireplace, where he stood with his dark face held deliberately away from us. Finally, Father noticed him there and said, “Ah, Mister Epps! Come quickly, or your bowl will be snatched b
y one of these greedy children!”

  The Partridges, all three, even the old lady, looked up at Father with expressions of mild surprise on their bland faces. But Mrs. Partridge quickly fetched another plate and spoon, and Mr. Epps crossed to the table and joined us, seating himself with serious mien between me and Watson and directly across from Father, who then took the liberty, as he put it, of blessing the meal—whereupon with great appetite we all did eat.

  We stabled our animals in the barn that night and—except for Mary, Ruth, Sarah, and Annie, who were given pallets inside the house by the fire—slept in the loft above. It had once been a fine, tight structure, but now the roof leaked, floorboards were rotting, and the hay was several years old and filled with dust and debris. Two scrawny milch cows were all the Partridges seemed to own for livestock, and they looked like aged, weak milkers ready to quit.

  Apparently, most of the Partridges’ cattle had died off in recent years or had been butchered for beef or sold. For income during the long winters, Mr. Partridge had taken to killing large numbers of deer and shipping the venison by sledge south to Albany. He complained that the place was too large for him and his wife to work alone, and there were no men in the area who hired out. The woman had inherited the property from her father, a veteran of the Ticonderoga campaigns in the Revolution, who had taken a land grant here as payment for his military services and thus had been one of the first settlers in the region. Mr. Partridge, the landless third son of a New Hampshire grower of flax, had himself been a farmer for hire, had wandered here from New England, and had come to ownership of the farm nearly six years ago by marrying his employer’s only child and heir a few months before his employer’s death.

  I learned all this the next morning, following our departure from the farm, from Father, who had stayed up late talking with Mr. Partridge, after the rest of us had staggered off to the barn to sleep. The Old Man had a way of eliciting personal information from strangers when he got them alone. His questions were disarmingly direct, and his inquiry seemed almost scientific in its detachment, which in a sense it was, for he was not so much interested in a man’s personal life as he was in learning about his character and about human nature generally. Usually, when Father interrogated a person new to him, his immediate aim was to move the inquiry, by way of questions about family and background, to the question of slavery and race, so as to distinguish friend from foe, certainly, but also because, according to Father, it was on this question more than any other that a white man revealed the true nature of his character.

  “Our benefactor and new neighbor, Mister Partridge;’ he said to me as we walked along at the head of our little caravan, “is one of those men who says he finds slavery and Negroes equally repugnant. But I believe that he would happily accept both, if it saved his wife’s farm from ruin and left him free to hunt and fish.” He added, “I doubt he’ll be of much use to us.”

  We had left just at sunrise, under a cloudless deep blue sky with the morning star and a half-moon floating high beside us in the south like a diamond and a silver bowl. The road was somewhat mudded from yesterday’s rain, but Mr. Epps expected it to be dried out by the time we got up into the mountains again, where, he explained, the road crossed mostly stone anyhow. After passing through the tiny settlement of Keene—a post office, general store, log church, tavern, and a half-dozen log houses huddled together and guarded by mangy, long-haired dogs that all seemed to be related—we crossed the East Branch of the Au Sable River and made our way easefully uphill past freshly plowed fields, switch-backing towards the notch that cut through the range of mountains which lay between us and North Elba.

  I had not liked Mr. Partridge, and I told Father that.

  “No,” he said, “nor did I.1 suspect he beats the woman and secretly mistreats the old lady. The man bears watching, though. Somewhere along the line,” he said, “I fear we’ll have to cut him down.”

  This, of course, I could not then imagine, for no one seemed less likely to oppose us and our work with the Negroes of Timbuctoo in any focused way than the lazy young man in whose house we had just stayed. But when it came to knowing ahead of time who would oppose him, the Old Man could be downright prescient. On a dozen or more occasions, I had seen him accurately predict which man from a congregation or town, to keep us Browns from fulfilling our pledge to rid this nation of slavery, would threaten our very lives, which man would simply turn away and let us continue, and which man would join us in the work. The Lord’s Work, as Father called it.

  “Well,” said I, “at least the fellow was hospitable to travelers.”

  “I would not call it that.”

  “We’re ten people. Nine of us and Mister Epps, and he fed and housed us all, and he let us enjoy his fire and shelter our animals. I’d call that hospitable, Father.” Though I did not like Mr. Partridge, in those days I sometimes found myself feeling sorry for individuals that the Old Man harshly condemned.

  “You don’t know him as well as I.”

  “Tell me, then. Tell me what you know about Mister Partridge that I don’t. Beyond his marrying a homely woman for her property.”

  “Trust me, Owen.”

  “Father, I’m trying to!”

  We walked in silence for a while, and then Father said, “You remember when he came out to help me hitch the team to the wagon, while the rest of you were tending the beeves and sheep, and Ruth and Mary and the girls were inside the house?”

  “I saw him out there, yes.”

  “Well, the man came up to me and asked for payment for our food and lodging. He presented me with an itemized bill, written out.” It was an embarrassment to Father. Not because he had no money to give Mr. Partridge, he said, but because he had not expected it. If he had anticipated Mr. Partridge’s charges, he would have negotiated an acceptable arrangement beforehand, and failing that, we would have camped someplace alongside the river. Mr. Partridge had surprised Father, and he found himself painfully embarrassed by it.

  We resumed walking uphill in silence, with the wagon and team of Morgans, in Mr. Epps’s capable hands, clambering along behind us, Mary and Ruth and the girls all together now on foot and cheerfully admiring the spectacular vistas opening up on either side of the track, and, at the rear, the boys and our small herd of livestock. The road made its circuitous, slowly ascending way along the back of a buttressing ridge. The morning sun was shining full upon our backs now, and it was as if yesterday’s brief snowstorm had never occurred.

  “I must make a confession, Owen,” the Old Man went on. I said nothing, and he continued. “It concerns Mister Partridge. The man’s request for payment confused me. I told him that I could not pay him with money, because I had none. I’m ashamed to say that I gave him instead the clock.”

  “The clock? Your grandfather’s clock?”

  “Yes.”

  I was astonished. Except for his chest of books, Great-Grandfather Brown’s mantel clock was Father’s most valued household possession. Made of cherrywood, it was a treasure that had been entrusted to Father’s care years earlier by his own father; it was perhaps his only family heirloom. It made no sense to me. How could he have handed it over to Mr. Partridge so easily? And in exchange for so little—a single night’s lodging.

  “I simply retrieved the clock from the wagon, unwrapped it, and passed it over to him, and he accepted it as payment quite happily and at once carried it into his house. Where I hope Mary and Ruth did not see it.”

  I looked back at the women. Ruth held her half-sister Sarah’s hand, and beside her Mary held Annie’s; the two women were themselves holding hands and chatting lightly to one another. “No, I’m sure they didn’t see Mister Partridge carrying off Great-Grandfather’s clock. They seem very happy,” I added uselessly.

  “They will know it soon enough. Oh, I am a fool!” he pronounced. “A fool!”

  I did not know what to say, so, as usual, said nothing. Most times, when I did not understand something that Father had done or said, it
was because he had acted or spoken more wisely than I. At such times, for obvious reasons, my best course was to remain silent and await the arrival of understanding. In this case, however, the Old Man had indeed been foolish, and by comparison I was the wise one.

  Still, I remained silent. I loved my father, and respected him, even when he did a foolish or wrong thing.

  By mid-morning, we were well out of the valley, and for a while the track turned steeply uphill. Mr. Epps, or Lyman, as I had begun calling him, got down from the box and walked beside the struggling horses, coaxing them on, and Father and I fell back and got behind the wagon and put our shoulders to it. The dense, impenetrable forests up here had never been cut, even those trees that closed like a pale against the road, and the towering pines and spruces had begun to block off the sky from our view, covering us with thick, cooling day-long shadows.

  Although we were now far above the greening valley, the air was still sufficiently warm that most of yesterday’s snowfall had melted early and had run off the sides into small rivulets and brooks that dropped away from the ridge, disappearing into the forest, where we could see dark gray remnants of the winter snows, which looked permanent, practically, and glacial. The only birds we saw up here were curious little chickadees and siskins and the occasional screaming blue jay—winter birds. None of the hardwood trees or low bushes had put out their buds yet, and the scattered thatches of grasses we saw lay in yellowed mats, still dead from last year’s frost.

  Nothing in the natural world appeared ready for the resurrection of spring. Worse, it was as if we were steadily slipping backwards in time, with May and then April disappearing behind us and darkest winter rising into view just ahead. Soon we were struggling through yesterday’s unmelted, ankle-deep snow. It was cold and nearly dark here below the tall trees, as if earlier this morning, before crossing overhead, the sun, unbeknownst to us, had reversed its path and had descended and set behind us. Except for Father, we had shrouded ourselves with blankets again. A steady, high wind blew through the upper branches of the trees, raising a distant unbroken chorus of grieving voices to accompany our slow pilgrimage.