Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  It was for such complicated and barely understood reasons as these, then, that I found myself strangely and powerfully soothed by Lyman’s presence that night in the barn in Keene. It was the idea of an oppressed people’s flight to sanctuary in the impenetrable mountains that seduced me—that and the brief relief from the burden of race-consciousness that came over me as I lay in the dark beside Lyman Epps, a black man my own age who spoke to me as if I were not white, as if, in fact, I were black or he were white—as if we two were of the same race.

  I lay there in the hay, astonished and full of wonder and delight. My usual high agitation, which I had come to think of as a permanent aspect of my mind, had ceased altogether. And for a few precious moments that night, I did not feel like a stranger to myself. A peculiar restfulness had come over me like a warm breeze—and I thought that all the years of my life so far, since the death of my mother long before, I had been traveling far from home, a child moving through the world disguised as an adult; and now, unexpectedly, on this May night in a barn in the Adirondack mountains, I had been allowed to remove my disguise and settle into my childhood bed, a boy again. I reached out in the dark and took Lyman’s hand in mine, and held it for a long time, with neither of us moving or saying anything, until, still holding his hand, I fell peacefully asleep.

  The next day, on returning to my usual agitated state, I realized with horror that, for all its innocence, my simple, affectionate gesture might well have been regarded by Lyman as brazen or even wanton, and therefore despicable. To my immense relief, Lyman showed no sign of having misunderstood me, and we continued to engage one another for the rest of our journey to North Elba with the same easy familiarity of the evening before. When our little caravan finally arrived at our new home, Father paid him for his services with the sack of seed and supplies that he had promised, and Lyman waved a simple goodbye and walked on down the road. And I did not see him again until Father and I rode into the place called Timbuctoo.

  A few miles south of the village of North Elba, we passed off the old Military Road onto a rutted, rocky lane and into the woods, with Father in the lead on Adelphi and me in the wagon behind him, driving the horse we had named Poke. From the condition of the trail, it was clear that not many wagons had passed this way before, and several times Father had to dismount and clear away fallen branches before I could proceed. Then suddenly we entered a cleared space marred by the charred stumps of trees, and before us were some eight or ten cabins, which were more like shanties than proper log cabins, little huts made of sticks and old cast-off boards and patches of canvas.

  It was a camp, not a village, with no sign of the palisade and neat log houses set around a protected square as I had imagined. There was indeed a flagpole set in the middle of the clearing, just as Lyman had said, but the pole, stuck into a pile of rocks, was tilted at a pathetic angle, and dangling from the top was a tattered banner made from an old piece of red wool, a shirt or piece of a blanket, upon which I could make out a roughly cut five-pointed yellow star.

  Except for a few undersized pigs rooting about in heaps of garbage and a half-dozen scrawny fowl picking at the wet, smelly ground that lay behind the privies, the place looked abandoned. Then I saw several small children with somber brown and black faces peering out from the doorways, and I noticed that here and there an adult’s dark hand had drawn back a rag from a window so that the owner of the hand could observe our approach unseen from the gloom of the cabin.

  After a moment, a bearded Negro man of middle-age appeared at the door of one of the shacks and for a second regarded us with caution, when, apparently recognizing Father from his earlier visit, he smiled broadly and said, “Mis-ter Brown!” and stepped forward to greet us. Then several others, men and women with children trailing behind, emerged from their homes—which I must call hovels, for I do not know what else to call them, they were so poorly constructed and maintained. I could not imagine enduring the bitterly cold winter winds and snow with no more protection than those sad bits of shelter provided. I myself would have fled long since, I thought. Or else I would have built me a proper log cabin and fireplace. The lassitude and disarray of these people amazed and bewildered me. They seemed exhausted and demoralized.

  Stepping from one of the huts came a man who, after a few seconds of thinking he was a stranger, I realized was my friend Lyman Epps. He looked oddly unlike himself here, smaller, thinner, flat-faced, as if all the force had gone out of him. Even his skin, which previously had been the color of anthracite, had lost its depth and glow and had turned flint gray. Father had commenced to speak with several of the men, in particular to the middle-aged fellow with the beard who had come forward before the others and appeared to be their spokesman. Ignoring me, or so it seemed, Lyman edged past the wagon and attempted to position himself at the front of the group of men speaking with Father—a nervous little colored man he was, uneasy and, as I had first regarded him down in Westport, not to be trusted.

  He, of course, had not changed in the few days since I had last seen him. Sitting up on my wagon, the son of the great John Brown, a prosperous white man come with his father to assist and uplift these poor, benighted souls, I was the one who had changed. The other men did not defer to or even acknowledge Lyman’s attempts to gain Father’s attention; they shouldered him aside and blocked him out entirely, as Father spoke to the group of his intention to survey and stake their property lines and register them with the county clerk’s office over in Elizabethtown.

  This would entail certain changes in how they did business, he explained, because it meant that they would now be liable for taxes on their land. “But you will own your land, my friends. No man, white or black, can encroach upon it, and you will therefore be free to use it as you please, even to sell it, if you wish, or to pass it on to your children.” But in order to pay taxes, he went on, they would have to raise more than just enough to survive on; they would have to raise a cash crop or produce a product which they could then sell in the nearby towns for cash money.

  I didn’t believe Father was telling these people anything they didn’t already know. They weren’t European peasants or field hands straight off an Alabama cotton plantation. That was the problem, perhaps. Except for the fugitive slaves amongst them, who could not make themselves known and, of course, could not own land in the United States anyhow and probably would soon disappear into Canada, where they could freely settle, the residents of Timbuctoo were men and women with city skills—blacksmiths like Lyman, waiters, barbers, harnessmakers—people who had made pennies at a trade and had saved them and bought their freedom or, thanks to the kindness of their owners or because they were of no particular use as chattel, had been granted it.

  At last, Lyman noticed my presence. Due to my innate shyness, but also because of the complexity and turbulence of my feelings, I hadn’t put myself forward and instead had waited for him to make the first gesture. Which he did, but only after finding himself unable to gain Father’s attention. He held the ears of the horse Poke and touched the animal’s forehead with his own, then looked up at me and smiled and asked, “How’s the Morgan horses holding up, Mister Brown?”

  “Owen” I said, more a rebuke than a correction.

  “They seems rested up,” he said. “Fine pair of animals, ain’t they? Got some age on ‘em, but they gonna give you plenty of service. They be plowing your fields long after you gone from here,” he said, repeating what he had said to Father back in Westport—an empty remark now, where before it had been a fresh recommendation and a promise. A slender young woman, round-faced and with slitted eyes, wearing a tattered yellow shift, a knitted shawl over her shoulders, had approached us and now stood behind Lyman, watching him. I raised my hat to acknowledge her, which caused her to look down at her bare feet. She was a pretty, tea-brown woman, with glistening, wiry hair cut short and worn like a tight black skullcap, and she stood with her hands at her sides, as if waiting for instructions.

  Lyman put one hand on her
shoulder and drew her forward. “Come meet young Mister Brown. This here’s my wife, Susan,” he announced to me.

  “How ... how do,” I stammered, for I was surprised by this information, that Lyman had a wife; in all our conversations, he hadn’t mentioned her, not even in passing. I hadn’t inquired into his marital state, but nevertheless it’s difficult to spend several days and nights with a person, as he had with me, and not mention a wife, if you have one, and consequently I had simply assumed that his silence on the subject, like mine, meant that he was unmarried. Now I found myself angry at him, as if he had deliberately deceived me.

  “You never mentioned you were married,” I said to him.

  Father, having heard me speak, turned and saw Lyman. “Ah, Mister Epps, there you are!” he said, and at once Lyman left me and, with his hand still on his wife’s shoulder, moved towards the Old Man, who swung down from his horse and shook hands with him and made a pleasant fuss over the woman—as I should have done.

  I did follow the Old Man’s example of getting down from the wagon, though, and joined him as he spoke with Lyman and his wife. Father was gracious with her, as he always was with women; regardless of their race or station, he pointedly treated them as equal to himself. I myself was too shy to speak with any woman directly—except, of course, for my sisters and my stepmother, Mary. It was Mary whom Father was speaking of when I drew up to him. He was explaining that she was ill and needed more help with the household chores than could be provided by Ruth and the younger children.

  “Since the birth of our infant who died this April past, my wife has been poorly!’ he said. “But not so poorly that she could not stand and work, until now. I believe, however, that if she is allowed to keep to her bed for a spell, she will recover.”

  This was news to me, but Mary naturally did not confide in me, and I confess that I did not make a habit of observing her condition. I bore great good will towards the woman but could not help feeling somewhat distant from her, through no fault of her own, certainly. Unlike Ruth, Fred, Jason, and John, I had remained unable to shift my affections for our true mother over to my father’s wife.

  “Would you be willing to work for me in the fields?” Father asked Lyman. “Susan I would also like to hire, to keep house and care for the smaller children. You could both put up at our place until the fall, eat at our table, and take a quarter-share in the harvest, so that you could then get your own farm off to a proper start next year.”

  I touched Father’s sleeve with my hand. “We have barely enough room for ourselves, Father;’ I said in a low voice. “The boys and I can handle the planting and haying and the livestock ourselves. Ruth is capable of the rest, with the little ones to help her.”

  Father gave me a hard look. “Owen,” was all he said. He resumed talking to Lyman and Susan, and I stalked off. I knew that Lyman and his wife would agree at once to come over and live with us. However crowded it was at our place, there would be more room for the couple there than in their shack here in Timbuctoo, and a quarter-share of our crop would probably be twice what the man could raise alone on his own land. At our table they would eat a full meal every day, which they surely never did at their own. Also, Lyman’s standing in the Negro community, which seemed to me on the low side, would rise considerably from his and his wife’s association with our family.

  But I also knew what the Old Man was up to: if he was going to be of any use to these people, he needed to bring at least one of them into close affiliation with our family, a trusted and trusting person who would help him penetrate the community, to speak for him to the others and to inform him as to their thoughts and needs. It was how he always worked. Beyond surveying their land grants, beyond teaching the Negroes how to farm in this climate and on this stingy soil, Father wanted to set up an Underground Railroad station in North Elba, where there was none, at least no station with any known connections to the lines that ran to Canada along the New York side of the Champlain Valley. He intended to carry escaped slaves out of the South by way of the Adirondack mountain passes, a route that until now had been used only in isolated cases, when some poor soul somehow got off the main route by accident and slipped through the iron-mining camps on the south side of Tahawus and followed rumor north through Indian Pass to Timbuctoo and then, traveling alone and at great risk, worked his lonely way north and east to connect finally with the Lake Champlain line by means of the Quaker stationmasters in Port Kent and Plattsburgh.

  In Father’s mind, the passes and ridges of the Adirondacks were the northernmost extension of the entire Appalachian Range, which ran all the way back through New York State to the Pennsylvania Alleghenies down into Virginia and on into the very center of the slaveholding region. His map of the Railroad was unlike anyone else’s—unlike Harriet Tubman’s, unlike Frederick Douglass’s, unlike the Quakers’. On Father’s map, the southernmost lines fed like taproots from the cotton plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia up into the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the main trunk line flowed north and east. It did not split one way towards Niagara and the other towards the Hudson Valley and Lake Champlain, as the other maps had it, but ran in a single line between the two into the rocky heart of the Adirondacks, straight to North Elba, where a long night’s ride could get you over the border into Canada.

  Father spoke often and elaborately of this map, and to implement it, he needed Lyman Epps and his wife, Susan—because the Old Man worked his Railroad alone. He had always done it that way. Whether in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Springfield, Massachusetts, John Brown ran his own Underground Railroad line, and that obliged him to forge his own connections to the Negroes. Except for the members of his immediate family, Father did not trust white people, not even the lifelong radical abolitionists like himself, as much as he trusted black people. “In this work, it’s their lives that are at stake,” he often said. “Not ours. When it comes to a showdown, white people can always go home and pretend to read their Bibles, if they want. A black man will have to fire his gun. Who would you rather have at your side, a well-meaning white fellow who can cut and run if he wants, or a Negro man whose freedom is on the line?”

  Later in the day, after Father had assured the community that they were the legal landholders in Timbuctoo and that he would return and commence his survey on the following day, we took our leave of the gloomy place. In order to prepare his next day’s work, he carried with him all such bills of sale and contracts and deeds as the landholders had in their possession—so greatly did the Negroes trust the Old Man that they willingly delivered up to him their only evidence of their rights to their land. Not that Father would ever betray them; they were right to trust him. But the effect Father had on Negroes was difficult to understand. Mostly I attributed it to the rage against slavery that he never ceased to express; although sometimes, when I was down on Father myself, I attributed it to the gullibility of the Negroes. The fact is, more than any other white man, Father consistently managed to make Negro people believe that their struggle against the evils of slavery and the daily pain and suffering imposed on them by racial prejudice were his as well, despite the fact that he was so often a white man in a preacher’s suit sitting up on a very tall horse.

  Lyman and Susan, with a single sack of belongings and some shabby bedding and a corn mattress tied in a roll, accompanied us as passengers in the wagon. They sat in the box behind me, and I drove, silent and somber, and as before, the Old Man rode ahead on Adelphi. Every now and then he called back to Lyman and asked the name of a mountain or inquired as to the ownership of a particular stretch of roadside land, and Lyman always had a ready answer—whether it was the correct answer, I could not then say, but I did suspect that he was making them up to please and impress the Old Man. Later, to my ongoing chagrin, I learned, of course, that he had been accurate in every case. He knew the names of all the peaks in our sight, and he knew whose land was whose and the history and use of every landmark. I was behaving like a spurned l
over, I knew, but could not help myself.

  When we arrived back at the farm, Father presented Lyman and his wife to Mary, who still lay abed next to the stove, looking very ill, I finally realized. Her appearance frightened me—her skin was slack and chalky, her small, plain face was almost expressionless, and she moved and spoke slowly and with precision, as if she were in pain. Expressing pleasure to have Susan as a helpmate to Ruth, she welcomed the couple to the house. “There is not much room here, as you see, but the place is bright and airy,” she said to them in a weak voice.

  “We will have to get along like Shakers,” Father declared. “Which means that Mister Epps will make his bed on the male side of the attic, and Missus Epps will sleep opposite with Ruth and the girls. I trust that won’t prove a difficult arrangement,” he said to Lyman, who glanced overhead towards the attic and smiled and said that it would be just fine. I do not know what his wife thought. They had given over their privacy, perhaps, but in exchange had received superior shelter. It was, as Father’s joke implied, more than a little like the exchange many people made in those days, when they gave up their houses and neighbors and moved in with the Shakers, whose roofs, like ours, did not leak and whose tables provided plenty of simple fare.

  I touched Ruth’s arm and drew her with a signal to follow me outside. We passed around the corner of the house and made our way up the brushy slope in back, where we both sat on a broad, rough rock embedded in the hillside and looked out over the shake roof of the house to the forested plain and mountains beyond. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was sliding off to our right a ways, casting over us and the house and small barn long shadows from the pine trees that grew on the hillside behind us. In the meadow, in dappled sunlight, the Devon cattle were grazing, and the sheep were scattered up on the scrub-covered hillside beyond. In front of the house, where the boys were stacking firewood, Father’s horse and the other horse stood waiting to be watered and set loose to graze alongside the cattle.