Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  My response was usually to groan in pain and queasiness and turn my back to him and stare at the wall next to my bunk, which seemed to calm him somewhat or at least to divert his attention and fix it onto the question of my cure. “Will you try to eat a biscuit, my boy? Just try a bite of biscuit.”

  “I can’t keep it down. I can barely keep down warm water.”

  “Shall I sing to you, son?”

  “If you wish. Quietly, though, please. My head pounds, and my joints ache.”

  “Quietly, then.” And he would begin, in a low and tender voice, one of the sweet Methodist hymns. A verse or two into it, however, and his voice would begin to lift and grow in volume, and soon he was nearly shouting out the words.

  “Father! My head! Too loud, Father.”

  “Of course, son. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, my boy,” he would say, and he would begin the hymn a second time, quietly, almost whispering the words now, and of course it was not long before once again he was bellowing it out, obliging me to wrap my poor head in the pillow, which would cause him finally to cease his singing altogether and, not without a sigh to indicate the degree of his sacrifice, settle for silently reading from his Bible or in one of his accounts of Napoleon’s campaigns, which he was then studying with an eye to making an on-site examination after we had completed our business in Liverpool.

  With or without Father, daytimes I confined myself to our cabin. Prompted by necessity, however, it had become my habit after a few nights at sea to walk awhile abovedecks alone late, and I well remember one night in particular. Long after Father had come in, when finally he lay snoring in the upper bunk—from the first night out, he had made me sleep below, so as to ease my fits of sickness and not to wake him when I had to get down and use the chamber pot—I rose and pulled on trousers and shin; and then, barefoot, my sloshing chamber pot held carefully in two hands and extended well before me, pitched my watery limbs and turbulent barrel of guts down the narrow, dimly lit passageway and made my way up to the main deck. At the stern, I tossed the contents of the pot into the sea and returned to midships, where I set the container down by the cabin passageway and took what had become my nightly stroll, such as it was—a circuit or three, depending on the tolerance of my roiling innards.

  On this night the sea was calm and the breeze light. The squeamishness of my stomach had somewhat abated, and I was able to look out over the glistening black waters without nausea and steady my gaze on the moonlit horizon without dizziness, and for the first time I actually enjoyed the slight roll and buoyancy of the ship below me and the tender flap of the vast sails above, the slosh and creak of the slowly turning sidewheel. I listened with affection to the groan of the masts and spars, the slap of the lines and whir of wooden pulleys, as the wind luffed and loafed overhead. The quiet, steady plash of the low waves as they met the bow seemed almost tropically soft, as if we were in the shallow, warm waters of the Caribbee, and for a long moment I quite forgot that I was cast upon the broad, fierce back of the old, cold North Atlantic.

  Then, as I made my dreamy way around to the leeward side of the ship, I discerned the figure of a fellow passenger, a small, frail-looking woman wearing a heavy, dark woolen shawl over her head. She clung to the railing there and stared down into the inky depths as if lost in thought.

  When I spoke to her, “Good evening, m’am,” she turned abruptly from her reverie as if startled, and to reassure her I quickly introduced myself by name and said I was a fellow passenger, the son of John Brown, whom she had no doubt already met.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. Then, after a long silence, added, “The preacher.” We had not yet been properly introduced, due to my illness and persistent reclusion, but I already knew who she was, of course. I had glimpsed her when we first came aboard in Boston, and later Father had described her at length and had often speculated about her condition and reasons for travel.

  She said her name, Miss Sarah Peabody, of Salem, Massachusetts, and held out her delicate, bare hand, which I grasped in mine for a second. Not knowing what then to say or do, I let go of it quickly, as if her hand were unnaturally hot, instead of alabaster cool. She seemed wraith-like, more apparition than mortal, the image of someone long dead or not yet born, this pale young woman—little more than a girl, I saw, when she opened her small, almond-eyed face to me. Not yet twenty, I thought. And in a dark, sharpened way, she was very pretty.

  “Well, Father’s not exactly a preacher,” I finally said. “But, yes, I suppose he does tend to preach to folks. He’s a man of religion, you might say.”

  She smiled lightly. “Mister Brown is an ... impressive man,” she said, with a hint of mockery in her tone. Her face was intelligent, and though she was clearly a genteel and refined person, she looked straight at me and, despite her fragility, spoke with mild self-assurance. She was a young woman who seemed sure of her gifts and their value. A new kind of female, to me.

  I could not imagine her pregnant and abandoned, however—I could not imagine her becoming pregnant. Even so, there was something about her gaze and light smile that was not in the slightest virginal, that was bold and provocative, and I found myself defending Father to her, as if wanting her approval of him and, more to the point, of me as well. I told her that my father was a businessman, a wholesaler of wool. And that he was also a famous abolitionist.

  “Really?” She arched her eyebrows and smiled more with pity than condescension. “A famous abolitionist? Strange that I’ve never heard of him. Although perhaps I should have.” She began suddenly to speak with surprising animation. She had thought that she knew everyone of importance who was in the movement. She and her family, she said, the Peabodys, were all deeply involved in the struggle to bring an end to slavery and had been for many years. She and her family were also active in bringing about other reforms, she said, women’s rights, education, and so on. Except for one aunt, she conceded. Not her Aunt Elizabeth, the woman with whom she was traveling to England, but another, her Aunt Sophia, who was married to an author.

  “Poor Aunt Sophia, she follows the Democratic politics and principles of her husband. A fine and famous man,” she said, “who ought to know better.” She told me the author’s name, Nathaniel Hawthorne. “You no doubt have heard of him and perhaps have read some of his tales,” she said.

  At that time, however, his name meant nothing to me. “I’m not much for tales,” I said. When it came to literary matters, I told her, I was an ignorant country boy, a rough shepherd, whose reading was mostly still shaped by his father’s tastes, which is to say, by religion and politics. Amongst the so-called moderns, John Bunyan was our tale-teller and John Milton our poet, and they were hardly moderns, were they? The rest, according to Father, was dross, or worse. Filth.

  “Your father;’ she said. “The famous abolitionist.”

  “Well, yes,”I said. “But perhaps he’s better known amongst the abolitionists in Springfield and out west in Ohio, where we used to live.” I thought for a moment to tell her of his association with Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, but realized that I would be merely bragging, and besides, it would be as indiscreet as it was vain for me to invoke the names of those fine men merely to glamorize Father’s name. Especially in the light of our recent escapades in the northcountry, adventures that neither Mr. Douglass nor Mr. Smith would care to be associated with.

  “Actually, Father works pretty much alone, and with the Negroes themselves. Not so much with white people, excepting, of course, us family members. Which actually enhances his effectiveness, rather than hinders it,” I added, and my voice and phrasing sounded in my ears precisely like Father’s, as if he were speaking through me, as if, even in chatting casually with this attractive young woman, I had no voice or language of my own.

  “Well, I’m sure your father is a hero;’ she said to me, and patted my hand, soothing a troubled child. “He does seem very much to have cast himself in the old-fashioned heroic mold. Like one of Cromwell’s captains, the way he presents himself.
Is he a man of action, as well as a man of religion?”

  I could not determine if she was serious or making fun of me, and though I grew somewhat shy, I tried nonetheless to engage her bright spirit, which drew me irresistibly towards her. “Oh, yes, certainly. Action, action, action! That’s Father’s by-word.”

  “A man of action and a man of God! My goodness, what a rare combination. I don’t believe I’ve ever met such a man, at least not until now. And you, Mister Owen Brown, in matters of war are you his lieutenant, and in matters of religion his acolyte?”

  “You could say that. Regarding the war against slavery, I mean.”

  “Then you, too, are a man of action?”

  “Well, less than he. No, not at all, in fact. I suppose I’m a follower.”

  “A man of God, then?”

  “Less than he there, too. Not at all there, I fear. In religion, I’m not even a follower. Although I’d like to be.”

  She said to me then that she thought she and I were much alike, which surprised me, for at that moment, no one seemed less like me than this woman, and I told her so.

  “But we’re both attached to people of whom we are but diminished forms,” she said, and at that point there began a most extraordinary conversation between us. Slowly, we walked the length of the ship and back again, opening ourselves to one another in a manner altogether new to me. And, as it appeared, new to her as well, for every few moments she would exclaim, “Heavens, I can’t believe I’m talking this way to a perfect stranger!”

  “I guess it’s difficult to be strangers on a sea-voyage,” I said.

  “Yes, and I guess I’m even more lonely than I thought. You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.

  “No, no, of course not. I’m lonely, too.”

  I called her by her given name, Sarah, and she addressed me familiarly, too. She confessed that she had come out onto the deck tonight filled with despondency and hatred for her life. Everything so far had ended up disappointing her, she said. Everything. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she spoke of her illustrious family, the Peabodys of Salem, Massachusetts, with an admiration that approached awe, even including her Aunt Sophia, the woman whose politics she had previously criticized. Now she described her aunt as beautiful and kind and endlessly loyal to her husband, a man who himself was a literary genius, she conceded, in spite of his being a Democrat and anti-abolitionist.

  She contrasted herself with these brilliant and famous relatives: she was ordinary, she said, without their gifts of intellect or speech. And she was in no sense as virtuous as they. Her family members and their friends and associates were, for the most part, rigorous Unitarians and well-known Transcendentalists. But for all their liberalism in religion, in terms of their public and private behavior they were still old-fashioned, upright Puritans. “In other words, they are good people” she said. “Morally upright.” Their generation had abandoned the Calvinist theology in their youth, but had kept the morality. She, on the other hand, having been encouraged by her elders since her nursery days to forsake the old Puritan forms of religion, had retained none of the Puritans’ moral uprightness and rigor. She was a sinner, she said. A sinner without the comfort of prayer and with no possibility of redemption.

  “I wonder, Owen Brown, do you think that this is what it means to be all modern and up-to-date?” She gave a short, metallic laugh, and, once again, I couldn’t tell if she was serious. “Think about it,” she went on. “In spite of the fact that our lies and weaknesses and our sensualities feel to us exactly like sins, we are no longer permitted to believe in sin. It’s absurd!” she exclaimed. She went silent for a moment, when suddenly I realized that she was weeping.

  “What’s wrong? Can you tell me what’s at the bottom of this, Miss Peabody?”

  She didn’t answer at first, and I regretted my question. Then she sighed and said, “The simple truth is that my life has no meaning to me. It’s true, Owen Brown. None. I feel guilt, a great weight of guilt. But no shame!”

  I touched her glistening cheek and said nothing. After a moment, I saw in the moonlight that she was smiling again. Though it was for me a struggle to follow the sudden twists and turns of her emotions and words, I had managed it nonetheless and believed that I understood her, at least momentarily, for I thought that I felt the same way as she—about life, about myself, about everything. Sarah Peabody’s words and her tears and her abrupt and bitter laughter had given sudden, expressive shape to my own inarticulated despair. Although despair, like a miasma, had long influenced my mind and spirit—gray, noxious, slick, and spreading into every corner of my consciousness—until now it had remained wordless, unnamed. But here, thanks to this girl, I could name it. My life, like hers, had no meaning, except as a diminished form of other lives. Father’s, in particular. And I, too, felt guilt and no shame.

  “Then I’m as much a sinner as you, Sarah” I said. “More of a sinner,” I declared, offering cold comfort, I knew. I told her that she wasn’t alone, for I could no more believe in the God of our fathers than she. Despite Father’s tireless wish for me to believe. Thanks to her family’s apostasy, she was blameless for her fall from religion. But my fall, I pointed out, had been my own doing, not my family’s. Then I told her of my “awakening” at the Negro church in Boston and how my lie had thrilled Father. “It wasn’t wholly an act!’ I said to her. “I did feel something. But it certainly was a lie to let Father believe that I had been touched by the wing of an angel.” I told her how my lie had sent the Old Man into a paroxysm of thanksgiving. I was guilty, of course, a sinner, but there was no God to punish me. So here I was, continuing with the charade and feeling guilty every moment, devouring my guilt as if it were delicious, nourishing food, but growing fat and sick with it, as if it were rancid. I told her that I felt like a man with a need for putrid meat.

  She gently laid her small hand over mine. We were standing again by the rail where I had first seen her. “Oh, Owen Brown, be easy on yourself. Really. You don’t know, maybe that is how it feels to be touched by the wing of an angel.” Even so, she explained, I had only a little lie to live with, and besides, it was a lie that made someone I loved very happy. My father now believed that his son was a Christian. And that, therefore, he had himself a proper acolyte. “It’s a good lie, Owen. There are such things, you know. Good lies. Even for us lapsed Calvinists. Don’t abandon it. Keep it,” she said. “For me, I’m afraid, it’s different. Significantly different. My lie can’t be kept, and there’s no way for me to abandon it, or it me. And, worse, my lie makes no one happy.”

  Then, to my amazement, she told me the truth about her condition. “I’m unmarried, Owen, and I’m with child. I’m pregnant. As you may have already guessed,” she said, but I denied it.

  Another lie.

  “What do you think of that?” she asked, looking into my face for the answer. “Really. Tell me the truth.”

  I could not speak at first. Finally, I managed to stammer, “Well... well, yes. That’s ... that isn’t right. I mean ... I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry ... ’ stammering not because of any shock or disapproval but because I had not the ready answer that shock and disapproval would have provided: the politely smiling lie. She saw that and seemed pleased.

  For a moment, we stood there side by side at the rail, looking down at the black water in silence. Then I said, “Where I’m from, Sarah ... actually, everywhere, a man is accountable to a woman and her family. But that... that seems not to be the case here.”

  “No, it certainly isn’t. Seduced and abandoned. Is that how you describe it? I’m a young woman seduced by a cad and abandoned, Owen Brown. A fact soon to be visible to all.” She gave one of her small, bitter laughs. “But nothing’s that simple, of course. It never is. After all, I loved the man,” she said. Then she confessed that she still loved him. She confessed that she had been willingly seduced. He was in no way a cad, and he didn’t exactly abandon her. And in his own way, he was as trapped as she. Not by his body, of course, as
she was, but by his circumstances. He couldn’t marry her. Not even if he wanted to. He was married to someone else. Married to a fine, loving woman, in fact, whom she very much admired, and he had three beautiful children by her. And he had been as foolish and reckless and cruel to that woman and their children as she.

  “But you’re the one who has to pay the price.”

  “Yes, I must pay the price. At least publicly. There’s your ‘shame,’ Owen. My shame. Although it must also be my child’s. But he pays another way. In secret. He knows everything that I know, naturally, but he can never say it, can never stand forth in public and accept responsibility for his sins. He can never be publically accountable, not without shaming his dear, innocent wife and children, which would only compound his sin. No, he will have to live with his guilt instead,” Sarah said. And because it was a secret guilt, it would be compounded for the rest of his life. His sin was like the pearl of great price purchased with borrowed money, which he would never be able to pay back. Sarah’s shame and her child’s reflected shame might actually fade in time—her sin was public, or soon would be, but sometimes people forget and eventually forgive. “Especially if we aren’t around to remind them with our physical presence,” she said. “But his guilt will grow and grow. No one can ever forgive him, not even he himself, and he can never forget me. For as long as he lives, whether I live or die, I’ll remain the emblem of his sin. I know him well, Owen Brown. He’s a brilliantly sensitive man, and he makes all the finest moral distinctions. He’s practically famous for it.” She suddenly laughed.

  “Is he a pastor?” I asked. I could not imagine any ordinary man capable of seducing this woman. He would have to have been a man of powerful intellect, a man possessed of a great gift of language, and certainly someone highly respected in her society.