Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  It was nearly dawn, and the moon had long since set behind us, when we finally exited from the woods south of Indian Pass and approached the mines and furnaces of Tahawus and the settlement that surrounded them. We were making our way down a long, rock-strewn slope that appeared to have been burned clear in recent years.

  Hovering over the marshes and stream below us, a pale haze reflected back the morning light, with the dark, pointed tips of tall pines poking through. The village was an encampment, made up mostly of shanties for the Irish miners which, in their sad disarray and impoverishment, reminded me of the shanties of Timbuctoo, and as we passed by, we could see the miners emerging from their cold, damp hovels—gaunt, grim, gray-faced men and boys rising to begin their long day’s work in the darkness of the earth. Behind them, standing at the door or hauling water or building an outdoor cookfire, were their brittle-looking women, downtrodden creatures in shabby sack frocks who looked too old to have given birth to the babies they carried on their bony hips.

  They barely looked up at us as we passed, so borne down by their labors were they. We fell silent, as if out of respect—two white men and two black men carrying rifles come from the woods, led by the son of the company superintendent. As we passed close to the open door of one of the shacks, Father touched the brim of his palm-leaf hat and nodded to a woman who stood there and seemed to be watching us, her round Irish face impassive, expressionless, all but dead to us. “Good morning, m’am,” Father said in a soft voice. She made no response. Her eyes were pale green and glowed coldly in the dim light of the dawn but seemed to see nothing. She looked like a woman who had been cast off and left like trash by an invading army.

  The haze from the stream below had risen along the slope to the village, slowly enveloping it, erasing from our sight one by one the shanties and the poor, sullen souls who lived there, following us like a pale beast as we made our way along the muddy track that ran through the encampment. When we reached the further edge, we saw ahead of us, situated on a pleasant rise of land, a proper house with a porch and an attached barn, the home of the supervisor of the mines, Mr. Jonas Wilkinson. There I turned and, for an instant, looked back, and the miners’ camp was gone, swallowed by the fog.

  Mr. Wilkinson told us, “They run off to a surprising degree, the Irish. Though they’ve got nothing to run to, except back to the wharfs of Boston or New York. A lot of them are sickly by the time they get here and end up buried in the field yonder. They’re a sad lot.” Mr. Wilkinson was a round, blotch-faced man with thinning black hair and a porous-looking red nose that suggested a long-indulged affection for alcohol. “Ignorant and quarrelsome and addicted to drink,” he said. “The females as much as the men. And you can’t do much to improve them. Although my wife and I have certainly given it a try, she by schooling the little ones and me by preaching every Sunday to them that will listen. But they breed faster than you can teach them, and when it comes to proper religion, Mister Brown, they’re practically pagans. Superstitious papists without a priest is what they are. I’ve about given up on ‘em and just try now to get as much work out of’em with as little expense as possible before they run off, or die.

  “Sorry for sounding so harsh,” he said to Father, who sat on a straight chair and grimly regarded the floor. “But what you’ve got with these Irish is the dead ends of European peasantry. There’s little for them in this country. Little enough for them back there in their own country, I suppose,“he added, pulling on his chin. “Which, of course, is why they come over in the first place. For them, poor souls, I suppose it’s an improvement. They get to start their lives over.”

  Father stood then and said to Mrs. Wilkinson, who was putting a substantial breakfast on the table for us, “M’am, if you don’t mind, I believe we’ll eat with the Negroes in the barn and then rest there until nightfall.”

  “I sense that I’ve offended you, Mister Brown,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “No, sir. No, you haven’t,” the Old Man answered. “I am curious, though, as to your reasons for agreeing to aid us in our efforts to carry Negro slaves off to Canada, when you appear to have so little fellow-feeling for the poor indentured men and women in your charge here.”

  “Ah!” Mr. Wilkinson said brightly—he’d heard this argument before and was prepared, even eager, to answer it. “Slavery is evil! That alone is reason enough for a Christian man to want to aid and abet you. But beyond that, slavery provides the Southerners with an unfair advantage in the labor market. No, sir, for the economic health of our nation, we all must do what we can to bring about the end of slave labor. And this is simply my small part, aiding you and your son and your Negro friends here, and your friend the famous Mister Douglass.”

  He pointed out that every one of his Irish miners had freely contracted to work here, just as he himself had, and when their terms were over and they had met the requirements of their contracts, they were free to go. Indeed, many of them, he said, chose not to leave and continued on here in the mines. This was not slavery, he said, smiling broadly. “Your Negroes know the difference, I’m sure, if you and your son do not. Ask the Negroes which they would prefer. Slavery in the South, or working as a free man here in the iron mines of Tahawus?” He looked to Mr. Fleete and Lyman, as if for an answer, but they remained expressionless.

  Father simply said, “I see. Well, I am grateful to you for your help and for your kindness to us. But I do think, all the same, that we’ll take ourselves to the barn now, for I wish to speak with our poor passengers out there, who are no doubt feeling anxious about their situation and require from us a bit of reassurance. They are, after all, in the hands of strangers and in a strange land.”

  Eagerly, and evidently pleased that he had made himself understood if not admired, Mr. Wilkinson escorted us from the room, leading us through a narrow woodshed that connected to the barn. He said that he would send his wife along with our breakfast and pointed us towards the hayloft above, where we saw looking nervously down at us the faces of the man and woman who had been hidden there the previous night.

  As soon as Mr. Wilkinson had left us, Mr. Fleete stepped forward in the dark room, smiled up at the young man and woman, and said his own name, then introduced Lyman Epps, Father, and me, in that order. “It’s safe to come down,” Mr. Fleete assured the fugitives. “Help them down,” he said to Lyman, who scrambled up the ladder and assisted first the woman and then the man in descending to the floor of the barn, where we all somberly shook hands. After weeks of running from the hounds of slavery, of trusting white and Negro strangers not to betray them, of hiding out in ditches and under bridges and trestles, of going days and nights without food or sleep, they were almost too tired to be frightened—but, nonetheless, their eyes darted warily from one of us to the other, for who knew, this could be no more than a white man’s clever trap.

  Then suddenly, before anyone had a chance to speak and reassure them, Mrs. Wilkinson entered from the house, carrying a tray of corn bread and eggs and smoked pork and a pitcher of fresh milk. “I’ll be sure that no one disturbs you,” she said cheerfully, and headed back into the house.

  Father looked at me, clear irritation on his face. “Disturb us?” he said in a low voice. “These Wilkinsons have it all wrong. They can’t be trusted.”

  I knew that, as soon as we got back to North Elba, the Old Man would cut their link from the chain. And with no stationmaster to replace them, the line from the Deep South to here to Timbuctoo would be broken. Better, I thought, to let the Wilkinsons continue to have it all wrong and keep the Railroad running than to try to teach them what’s right by putting them off it.

  We fell to devouring the food, all six of us—not, of course, until Father had said an eloquent, if somewhat lengthy, blessing. The fugitives, we quickly learned, were named Emma and James Cannon, and they could not have been older than twenty-one, which was unusual: most of the escaped slaves whom we had aided in the past had been closer to middle-age or else were small children in the company of one or both paren
ts. Occasionally, a young man came through unattached—angry, scarred with old wounds, and still bleeding from new—a man defiant from youth, with a runaway cast of mind and a hundred lashes on his back to show for it. These two, however, were almost genteel in their ways, shy and decorous, the least likely type of slave to risk flight: one could say, if one did not regard the condition of slavery itself as pain beyond all sorrow, that they had not yet suffered enough to justify the hardship and chanciness of flight.

  But the degradation and humiliation and the invasion and theft of a person’s soul made possible by the legal ownership of that person’s body can occur without leaving any visible scars on the body, and that is frequently what happened to the youngest and most delicate of enslaved women and men. As was, no doubt, the case with the man and woman before us, whose owner, they told us, had been powerful in the Virginia state legislature, a wealthy exporter of tobacco, and a partner in several vast Alabama cotton plantations. Emma Cannon had served as maid to her owner’s wife and had resided in their mansion; James Cannon had been a clerk in the tobacco warehouse.

  This was briefly and indirectly the story they told, or, rather, it was what I deciphered of their hushed account, as they answered Mr. Fleete’s and Lyman’s polite questions, while Father and I sat back a ways and listened in silence. They had been married without their owner’s consent or knowledge, and when the slave-master had begun to express carnal desires towards the young woman, she and her new husband had decided to flee, for she would have had no alternative but to accede to her owner’s quickening advances. The reward for their capture was sufficiently large, one thousand five hundred dollars for the woman and one thousand for the man, that they had no choice but to flee straight through to Canada, avoiding wherever possible the more popular and well-known routes.

  I thought, the woes of women always exceed those of the men who love them and are sworn to protect them and fail. I could not take my eyes from the tired, placid face of this gold-colored woman. With her head wrapped in a white bandana, she seemed to me wholly accepting of the chaos and danger that surrounded her here and that had pursued her and would follow her from here, and she seemed strangely beautiful for that. Especially when I compared her face to the darker face of her husband, who appeared more frightened than she, nervous and twitchy, a young man who was probably suffering serious regret for having fled the known world, even a precinct in hell, for these unknown forests of the far north.

  Later, when Father entered the conversation and began interrogating the young man and woman with regard to the character and abilities of the numerous stationmasters and conductors who had brought them this far, I found myself a comfortable corner of the barn, spread some straw, and lay down. Soon I found myself falling into a sort of reverie. The images of women—white women and black, sick and dying or aged beyond their years—began to haunt me like ghosts, or more like furies, all of them enraged at me for having abandoned them to their terrible fates. It was not exactly dream, not exactly fantasy, either, and I might have dispelled it by simply standing up and crossing the large, dark room to where Father and the others sat. But instead I fairly well invited the figures straight into my mind: the sullen, pale face of the Irish woman with the morning mist rising around her—abandoned by me, who had barely looked behind when we passed; and the scared, bewildered face of the girl humiliated by me in the Springfield alley; and the vulnerable, exhausted, yet profoundly willful face of the woman here in the barn across from me—a man who could not save her, any more than her poor husband could, from the memories of enslavement and the brutal lust of the man who had owned her; and the face of my stepmother, Mary, who had married at the age of nineteen, inherited five of another woman’s children, then borne eleven more and seen six of those eleven die, four going in that terrible winter of ’43, the last dying in infancy only two months ago—and neither I nor their father could save a one of them. Then the faces of the women swirled and merged and became the face of my own mother, whom I would never see again, not on this earth and not in heaven, either, who was gone, simply that—gone from me and located nowhere else in this perversely cruel universe, which first gives us life amongst others and then takes the others off, one by one, until we are left alone, all of us, alone.

  I lay on my side with my coat drawn over my head and squeezed my eyes shut. It has been this way for women and men and their children, I thought, for thousands of years, from tribal times till this modern age, and it will be this way forever. Was this, then, that great cycle of birth, life, and death which my father spoke of with such admiration and belief? The cycle of women, strange creatures, so like us men and yet so different from us, giving birth and watching helplessly as their children die, or dying themselves on the birthing bed, or, if not, then growing old too soon, while the sons who survive grow up to become the husbands, fathers, and brothers who exhaust themselves failing in the attempt to save them, and who then, having failed, spin the wheel again and impregnate them in the dark of night or on the back stairs or in the low attics of the servant quarters—was this Father’s great cycle of life?

  The fugitives’ story had set my mind to working in this morbid way, despite my best attempts to think of other things, to think even of the mild adventure that we men of North Elba were set on. I knew the likely story, the tale of rape that the young woman across from me was not telling us, that she was perhaps not even telling her poor husband. I had heard that tale in many of its lurid forms over the years, and there was no reason to think that she, uniquely, had not been used by her owner to satisfy his sexual desires and that, risking death, she had not fled her owner more to save her husband than her own violated self. Her owner! After all these years of hearing it spoken, the word still had the power to shock and repel me. A human being actually owned another, he could use her in any way he wished, and he could sell her if he wished, as if she were an unwanted article of clothing. And he owned her husband as well—a fact that made of their pledge of themselves in marriage, one to the other, a dark joke, a sickening, cruel fancy.

  I slept and woke and slept again, and when I woke a second time, seated on the floor next to me was Mr. Fleete, leaning against a post and smoking his pipe in a meditative way. I asked him, “Do you have a wife or children, Mister Fleete?”

  “No. My wife is dead, Mister Brown. She died young. At about the age of that woman yonder. Died without children.”

  “And you never thought to marry again?”

  He sighed and studied the pipe in his brown hand. A silver strand of smoke curled upwards in the dim light towards the one small window high overhead. “Well, y’ know, I thought of it now and again, yes. Especially as regards children.”

  “Do you think you will marry, then?”

  “No, Mister Brown. The world does not need more children. And no woman needs me for a husband. The one who did,”he said, “is dead. But I’ll be seeing her again in the sweet bye an’ bye. Won’t I?” he added, and smiled lightly, as if he did not quite believe his own words.

  “Yes,” I said, and turned away to sleep again, to dream the childhood faces of my sisters, Ruth and Annie and Sarah, each one exchanging her place with the others in my dream, as if the three were one and as if present were mingled with past. In the dream, I was their father, not their brother, yet I was myself and not Father. They were all, first one, then two, then three female children wailing in sorrow, and I was pacing hectically around them, like the blindfolded horse tied to the bark-crusher, marching in a fixed circle, while the three little girls stood crying in the center, lashed to the pole like witches condemned to be burned. I could not tell if I myself had tied them there or instead was marching in a circle around them to protect them from those who would place sticks at their feet and set them afire.

  When I woke again, it was closer to midday, and a pillar of light fell straight down from the high window onto the board floor of the barn. I stood and walked across to where Lyman lay on his back atop a saddle blanket, staring at th
e distant ceiling, lost in thought. The others appeared to be asleep—except for Father, who sat on guard by the door, with his rifle across his knees. His eyes followed me, but his head did not move as I came and sat next to my friend.

  “Lyman,” I said in a voice almost a whisper.

  “Hello, Owen,” he said without looking at me.

  “I want to ask you about your wife, Susan. Did you come out of slavery with her?”

  “Susan?”

  “I’m sorry. I know that I haven’t inquired much about her,” I said awkwardly. “She’s somewhat... shy.”

  “So she is. But mainly amongst white folks.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “Not your fault, Owen.”

  “Well, did you?”