Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  But as I listened to the boys’ excuses and explanations, mostly made by Watson, who as the eldest felt obliged to speak for them, I began to see that their failures had more to do with Lyman’s continued and protracted absences from the farm, evidently caused by his work with the Underground Railroad, than by idleness or distraction on their part. They were, after all, only boys. Even Watson. They did not blame Lyman directly, but I saw that they wanted a proper foreman to organize the work every day and to provide instruction, oversight, and encouragement, and they needed a grown maris strong back to lift and heft alongside theirs.

  Lyman’s Railroad work had to be done, too, of course. Who could reproach him for it? Certainly not I, and in fact I intended to join him myself in his nighttime runs as soon as possible. But the farm had been allowed to slide. And unless we quickly pulled it back in line, we’d soon freeze, or our livestock would, and we’d starve, or we’d have to abandon the place altogether—and then no one would be able to work the Railroad.

  I detected some small resentments against Lyman by the boys, evidenced by their clear reluctance to praise him or even to talk much about him, as if the subject held little or no interest for them. Mary and Ruth were voluble enough concerning the man, but I felt that they were not so much praising him as demonstrating to Susan their love and support of her, protecting her from embarrassment, and even at that, it was faint praise they were offering, more often excuses and explanations for his inability to run the place properly than proud descriptions of some specific accomplishment.

  Also, without Father to generate and sustain the contacts with Timbuctoo, the family appeared to have fallen away from the Negro community without having built any compensatory alliances with the whites, except for Ruth’s connection to the Thompsons, by virtue of her relationship with Henry. This was distressing. In this tough place, we all needed each other, white and Negro alike. But after the death of Elden Fleete, and with Father’s and my departure following hard upon, the Negroes had been a little tetchy, Watson said. Understandably so. And there being no one left at the farm who could reassure them of our faithfulness to their cause, they had withdrawn almost all contact, despite Lyman’s and Susan’s continued loyalty to the family.

  The Negroes were in bad shape, Watson said, and Susan confirmed: harried by the local whites, fearful of being carried off by slave-catchers and marshals, and not at all prepared for winter. Also, Watson explained, there was a growing number of whites, led by our old friend Mr. Partridge of Keene, who wished that both the Browns and the citizens of Timbuctoo would go back to wherever they came from. Some of these whites had previously been supporters of Father’s efforts to help the Negroes, but now they, too, coveted the Negroes’ and our land out on the flats—rich, silted land, rare in the Adirondacks, which they could see was not being farmed properly. By their lights, we were misusing it, wasting our good fortune, and this angered them, for they were New England-style farmers, the type that likes to regard waste as a sin. Mr. Partridge, himself no great shakes as a farmer, was exploiting these resentments for his own purposes, which Watson said surely included gaining revenge for our having invaded his home in August, when we shot the slave-catcher and then freed Lyman and Mr. Fleete from the Elizabethtown jail.

  Now, suddenly, where before I had thought of that episode with something approaching shame, I found myself regarding it almost with nostalgia, and I wished that we had done more damage than we did, wished that we had actually slain the slave-catcher and maybe Mr. Partridge, too, and wished that I had been the one to pull the trigger. There were tensions and conflicts everywhere breaking out, and I could not see how they could be quickly resolved, least of all by me. I could not step forward in church like Father and preach the Lord’s work to the whites one week and then preach it to the Negroes the next, or walk into the midst of a crowd of white men at a cattle auction and scold them for their sloth and cowardice as only the Old Man could scold, and then ride over to Timbuctoo and do the same to a crowd of glowering, suspicious ex-slaves.

  Even so, while there was little or nothing I could do to improve relations with the local people, white or black, I could nonetheless pull things together here on the farm. Eager to get an early start, and not a little tired from my journey, I begged off Watson’s and Ruth’s entreaties to tell them still more of the story of Father’s and my travels abroad and climbed up to the loft well before the others. Lying in my cot there in the darkened chamber, I listened to the murmur of the voices of my family below: Mary and Ruth were carding wool and spinning, and the boys were coming and going between the house and barn, bedding down the animals, bringing in firewood, the last household chores of the day, while the little girls and Susan took turns reading from the primer, teaching one another to read and now and again appealing to Ruth or Mary to settle a dispute over a word’s meaning or spelling. With those sweet sounds filling my ears, I drifted into peaceful sleep.

  A while later, when the others came up to bed, I woke and listened in the darkness as, one by one, they, too, fell into slumber. But this time, however, I myself could not fall back to sleep. I lay wide-eyed in the silent darkness of the room for hours, my mind a-buzz with half-completed thoughts startling and interrupting one another. I could not figure what was keeping me so agitated—I almost never had any difficulty sleeping. Quite the opposite. Hours slipped by, and then I lost all track of how long I had been awake, and not until the first bleeding away of darkness signaled the near approach of dawn did I suddenly realize that I was waiting for Lyman to come home. And when I knew that, I thought only of it, and him. Until pale daylight began to filter into the room, when I rose and dressed and directly set about putting things right: like Father, the first one up and working.

  I remember thinking on that first frosty morning home, as I walked the grounds and examined the outbuildings and livestock, that it would be a simple matter to make up for Father’s and my lengthy absence and set the place straight. And, in a sense, it was simple, but not the way I expected. I calculated thirty days of steady work for the five of us—three boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, and two grown men, Lyman Epps and me. I had learned early in life from Father how to organize a crew and lay out the day’s work before breakfast, how to see each job through to the end before commencing another, how to make sure that each of us knew exactly what was expected of him for the entire day, and so on.

  Father had never been easy with distributing authority of any kind anyhow, and he had failed to do it here also. Although, as usual, he had included in his letters long lists of things to do and when and how, he had simply left taking care of the farm to his family members and Lyman and Susan in a general way, without explicitly stating who was in charge of what and whom—so, in a way, it was more the Old Man’s fault than anyone else’s that the place had come undone. No family members were lazy or incapable. They had just needed a captain, or in this case, due to the captain’s absence, a first mate. Without one, they had been working at sixes and sevens, each person responding only to his or her immediate needs, laboring more against each other than with each other, with no long view of things, no plan. Every man or boy for himself.

  I will set everything right with ease, said I to myself. I had finished my inspection of the place with a circuit of the barn and a stop at the privy, where I noted the need to remove the season’s night soil, and was about to return to the house and lay the kitchen fire for Mary before any of the others were out of bed. Between Mounts Tahawus and Mclntyre the sun had already broken the horizon, and rosy streaks of new light spilled across the rippled, silvery sky. Over towards the village, the clouds were opening up, and in the dark blue western sky the morning star and a crescent moon were slipping towards the horizon. I stopped and took it in. It was dawn—first light, a marvelous, cold, half-illumined stillness—and made a comforting, reflective pause between night and day, between autumn and winter.

  I could make out the village from the belfry of the church and a few threads of chimne
y-smoke rising from a black line of spruce trees by the river. There was a glaze of frost on the distant, yellowed fields and on the leafless branches and stalks of the chokecherry and alder bushes along the road from town and on the roofs of the house and barn and the unfinished outbuildings—a pale caul or a shroud, I could not say which, but it made everything look fresh and clean. I gazed around me and inhaled the cold mountain air with pleasure, the first pure pleasure I had felt in many days, since the night of the formation of the Gileadites.

  My anger was gone. Soon everyone would admire me and be glad that I had come back.

  As I neared the house to go in, I heard from the direction of the village the rumble of wagon wheels on the frozen road and the clop of a slow-moving horse. Around the curve in the road there came the second Morgan, Poke, the mare, pulling our old wagon at a plodding pace, and up on the box sat Lyman Epps, evidently asleep. Until the horse, smelling the barn, I suppose, accelerated somewhat and jolted him awake.

  From the doorstoop, I watched him for a moment, without his having yet noticed me. He was exhausted, slump-shouldered, and barely able to hold his head up; his skin color was flat gray, like pewter, and his hair stuck out from under his cap in short, knotty clumps, and he seemed older, almost middle-aged: he looked more like an escaped slave himself, a man on the run, than a conductor on the Underground Railroad. How dangerously thin, especially now, I thought, was the line between an escaped slave and a freed slave, between the Negro man who was chattel and the one who was free. And how wide the gulf that lay between a Negro man, slave or free, and me.

  He put up the wagon and unhitched Poke and led her into the barn to water and feed her and brush her down, still without having seen me. I was oddly hesitant about following him and speaking with him; yet we had much to say to one another. I felt shy as a girl with him, anxious and worried, even worried about my appearance’.

  Suddenly angry with myself, I strode across the yard to the barn determined to erase my self-consciousness and went in and greeted Lyman with false heartiness. “Hello, friend!” I loudly exclaimed. “Are you working late, or starting the day early?”

  He smiled wanly and shook my hand. “Good to see you, Owen. When did you arrive?”

  I told him of my return the previous day and jabbered on about my journey from Springfield. While I yacked and he listened, I helped him settle the horse and hang the harness, until finally I realized that he was standing at the barn door, politely waiting for me to finish so he could go into the house.

  “I’m sorry!” I said. “Here I’m keeping you from your wife. And you must be hungry and want to wash, while I’m going on about nothing.”

  “No, no, that’s all right. I just needs to sleep some,” he said, and yawned. “Pulled me a long ride last night, all the way back from Massena on them corduroy roads, you know. My backbone’s sore.”

  “How many’d you take up?”

  “A pair of ‘em. Two men. From near Norfolk originally, off a Chesapeake Bay plantation. One a preacher. Preached my ear off the whole way up.”

  “You get them over all right? No trouble?”

  “No trouble. No help, neither, but no trouble.”

  “Well, you’ll have some help now,”I said, adding that as soon as we had the farm readied for winter, I’d be working the Railroad with him. “That ought to shame a few other white folks back into action,” I declared.

  “I don’t know, folks is pretty scared now!’ he said. “But good. I could use some help moving those as comes along from time to time. There ain’t as many as before, you know. Not since the Fugitive Law.”

  “The Fugitive Law!” I said, and spat, like an actor in a melodramatic show.

  “But I expect with winter coming,” he went on, “we’ll see a last batch making a run for it. So’s they don’t get stuck hiding out in people’s attics down here till spring.”

  “Right, right, of course. But first we’ve got to—”

  “In fact,” he said, interrupting me, “Tom Grey over to Timbuctoo, you recall him? He told me of a family of five, maybe six, be coming through from Utica tonight or tomorrow. If they ain’t already arrived. You didn’t hear nothing ’bout that, did you? Tom said he’d send word over here soon’s they arrived.”

  “No. No one told me anything. But first we’ve got to get this place in shape, Lyman.”

  “Yes. Yes, I know,” he said, and turned to leave.

  I reached out and grabbed him by the arm, more forcefully than I intended, causing him to stop and remove my hand as if insulted by it.

  “I’m sorry;’ I said. “It’s just I need to talk to you about the work, Lyman. Fact is, you and the boys have let things slide a little far, I think.”

  He turned to me, with his face cast to the side. I began nonetheless to list the various jobs and projects that lay before us and to put them in the order that we would follow, when I shortly realized that he wasn’t hearing me, was merely waiting for me to finish so he could go inside the house. I grew impatient with him. In a sense, this was his farm, too, nearly as much as it was mine, and he had certain responsibilities towards it, which he clearly was not interested in accepting. “Lyman, you’re not listening, are you?”

  “Owen” he said, still without looking at me, “what I am is tired. My back feels broke from three days and nights up on that wagon out there. Maybe we can talk about these matters later, when I’ve got me some rest.”

  I don’t know what came over me then, but my ears began to buzz, and a gauzy, blood-red screen dropped before my eyes. With no conscious intention or desire to do it, I grabbed Lyman by the shoulder with my right hand, clamped my left onto his belt, and lifted and flung him bodily across the room, banging him hard against the stall, causing the horses to roll their eyes in fear and stamp their feet. He slid to the floor, shaken and astonished, and looked up at me with fear in his eyes for the first time ever, which I took in happily almost, accepting his gaze with a strange relief. As if I had long wanted him to fear me.

  He said in a steady, low voice, “There’s something gone wrong in you.”

  My breathing came hard, although I had not exerted myself—I was very strong, and Lyman, not a large man, had not resisted me. “Maybe... maybe there is. No, nothing is wrong in me. But my priorities... I have to hold to my priorities. This farm, it’s all so shaky. The winter’s coming. You wouldn’t listen.”

  Slowly, he got to his feet and brushed bits of hay off his coat and trousers and put his cap back on, restoring his dignity. “I’m listening now,” was all he said.

  “Well, we’ve got these priorities. The farm and all. And responsibilities, to the family. To your family, too. You and I, we’ve got to take care of them in the proper way. Then we can attend to the others, to the Railroad and all that. But it’s not like we have Father here for that. Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand. Priorities. Responsibilities. I understand those things just fine.”

  He moved warily towards the open barn door, facing me all the while, as if he expected me to attack him again. And I was gladdened by his wariness. I knew that in an hour, perhaps in a moment or two, I would surely collapse inside myself with shame and would beg Lyman’s forgiveness; but right then I was determined to keep myself open to these feelings of unexpected joy and to let them flow through me like a cold wind. By attacking Lyman physically, I had released in myself something dark and wonderfully satisfying. It was as if an ice-dam had let go, and huge chunks of ice, a flotilla of logs and fallen trees and frozen debris, were cascading over boulders and cliffs, making a great roar, and I was at this instant thrilled by the sheer power and noise of the flow.

  I had done the forbidden thing. I had struck a black man.

  I took a step towards him, and he jumped back, nearly out the door of the barn into the yard.

  I reached for him, and he jumped again. “Why didn’t you fight me, Lyman?”

  He squinted up at me as if he had not heard right.

  “I w
ant to know. Why didn’t you fight me, just now?”

  “You think I’m a fool?”

  “Is it because I’m white?”

  He laughed coldly. “No, Owen, it ain’t because you’re white. I ain’t afraid of your skin. I might be afraid of what you got inside your head, though. And I treat any man twice my size with a certain caution. That’s all.”

  “Well, it’s over,” I said. I couldn’t apologize, not yet, but I said, “I swear, 111 never do that again.”

  He hesitated a moment and stared at me, and I saw that the fear had dissipated somewhat, replaced by something harder, darker. “Maybe so. Maybe not. Time will tell that.” He looked more sad than anything else. He said, “You tell me something, though.”