Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  “What?”

  “When you grab onto me like that and toss me down, you doing it because you can. Is that because I’m a whole lot smaller than you? Or is it because I’m colored?”

  I was silent for a few seconds but did not look away. “You know the answer to that.”

  “Say it, then.”

  “It’s not because you’re smaller than me.”

  “Right. It’s my skin. You’re afraid of my skin. But I ain’t afraid of yours. Which is why I didn’t fight you back. That’s what we got here. Ain’t it?”

  “I can’t lie to you.”

  “‘Appreciate that,” he said. “I’m going in now. We can discuss all those priorities and responsibilities of yours later on, if you want. But I got some of my own need tending first.” He turned, straightened, and walked towards the house and went quickly inside.

  I saw smoke curling from the chimney; Mary had set the fire, and I could see her through the window at the stove, smiling broadly at Lyman as he entered, and Susan crossing the room towards him with her arms out. The others were probably already up and about, too, and were greeting him, welcoming him home, relieved that he had gotten back from the border safe and unharmed. And I saw that I, who was going to lead them, would now have to follow.

  We remained friends, Lyman and I, but only of a sort, for there was now between us a nearly tangible distance, as if we were condemned to carry a long stick together, which connected us one to the other and at the same time kept us strictly apart. Each man was at all times painfully conscious of the other’s presence and, when it occurred, his absence as well. A difficult intimacy; but it was all we had now.

  I made no further argument against his priorities or for mine, and whenever he took the horse and wagon and was gone from the farm for two or three days at a time, I barely acknowledged to him that I had noticed. When he returned and had rested, he would come directly to me, say nothing about where he had been, and politely ask where did I want him to work that day. I assigned him to whatever task was at hand, and he pitched himself whole-heartedly into it. But then a few days or a week would pass, and word would come that he had passengers waiting over at Timbuctoo, and he’d be gone again.

  I forbade the boys to join him on these runs, causing at first some tension between me and Watson, particularly; he had grown stridently anti-slavery—as a way of asserting his new manhood, I supposed. But he was eventually mollified by my promise that, as soon as we had the place in shape for winter, he and I both would join Lyman carrying slaves to freedom. We’d go back to “the work.”

  By the time the snows were falling heavily and regularly and temperatures no longer went above zero and the winds from Canada had begun their scraping howl, there were no more escaped slaves coming our way, and we all, even Lyman, from then till spring, spent our days and nights pretty much inside. By mid-December, however, before the heavy snows and cold hit, we had managed to cut and stack close to fifty cords of firewood, most of which, to Lyman’s and the boys’ credit, came from hardwood trees that they had dropped and trimmed in the forest earlier in the autumn. We finished the cold cellar and the other outbuildings, fenced in the sheepfolds, bred the ewes, did all the fall butchering, ran a short sawdust barrier around the base of the house, and completed half-a-hundred other chores and jobs—all of it done before winter finally descended with its full strength.

  After that, Lyman withdrew and spent his days mostly in his blacksmith’s shop, manufacturing ironwork for the farm, everything from nails to fireplace dogs, and I worked alone, too, usually in the barn, where, among other useful things, I built a set of sled runners and affixed them to the wagon in place of the wheels, making a sleigh of it, which enabled us to get quickly and comfortably to church on the Sabbath and into the settlement, where we milled our grain and corn, sold fleeces, leather, and woolen cloth for a little cash money, and visited the few families we still felt comfortable with, such as the Nashes, the Brewsters, and the Thompsons; with the latter, through the connection between their son Henry and sister Ruth, we were becoming nicely linked.

  I remember that winter, despite the tense stand-off between me and Lyman, as the most peaceful of all our winters in North Elba. Perhaps it was because we were free for once of “the work” and because Father was away. It put us more at ease with our neighbors, certainly, for it made us more like them—abolitionist in principle but not in action; devoted to our farm and livestock, but not at the cost of not socializing with our neighbors; religious to the point of regularly attending services on the Sabbath and otherwise honoring the day as we always had, but not preaching to everyone and thumping people with the Bible on every possible occasion.

  Except for the fact that we had a Negro man and woman living with us in our house, we were no different from any other white family settled in that area. Like them, we holed up against the winter, did some hunting, ice-skated on Mirror Lake, repaired and built tools and furniture, spun wool and wove cloth, tanned hides and made new boots, harness, hats, and belts, and tended our flocks and cattle and horses. We ate our stores of salt pork, mutton, venison, and salt fish; we ate it roasted, boiled, baked, and in stews; with potatoes, squashes, beets, beans, pumpkins, carrots, and turnips from the cold cellar. We drank plenty of fresh milk, made cheese and butter in abundance, mashed our apples into cider, and warmed ourselves before the fire with sassafras tea. Like all good abolitionists, we eschewed sugar, but for sweets we had gallons of honey taken in the early autumn, and as we would not be able to tap our own trees till spring, we swapped hides with our neighbors for their extra maple syrup, using it to flavor meats, vegetables, and bread, and made maple sugar from it and sheets of hard maple candy. And we grew healthy and strong inside our warm house.

  We said grace over every meal, prayed together in the evening, and sang the old hymns, and sometimes we even sang new songs, which we learned from our neighbors or from Susan or that Mary remembered from her childhood. We read The Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s North Star and from Father’s collection of books, and we older folks taught the little ones their ABCs and numbers, while Ruth worked with Susan and Lyman, teaching them with the primer to read adult books and periodicals.

  And we read Father’s letters. Every few weeks, a new, long letter arrived from one of the stops in his odyssey through the courts, letters from Springfield, Troy, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Hartford. Instructional and scolding, as always, but also warm and affectionate, they were. As had been the practice for many years, we read them aloud, and then I or Watson copied the letters; we left the originals out on his desk, for further perusal and to keep track of his instructions, and placed the copies in Father’s steel box, protecting them against flood, fire, or theft. For posterity, as Father said, although up to that time preserving his letters had seemed mere vanity to me—especially after the Gileadites and our adventures in England, which had left me feeling somewhat disillusioned regarding posterity’s interest in my father and his work.

  But increasingly that winter, Father’s letters spoke in unusual detail of his meetings with famous men and women, abolitionists all, some of them well-known white ministers and teachers, like Reverends Channing and Parker and the famous Horace Mann, some of them known as well for their support of female rights, like Dr. Howe and Miss Lydia Maria Child and Miss Abby Kelley, who was one of the best orators he had ever heard, said Father. There were famous Negroes, too: he met with Bishop Loguen in Syracuse and confided his plan, which, according to Father, “Bishop Loguen thinks noble and very possibly workable.” At a meeting in Hartford, he heard Miss Harriet Tubman address a hundred white people very bravely. Personally introduced to her afterwards by Frederick Douglass, Father said he “spoke at considerable length with her and found her a great warrior.” In Boston, he frequently found himself in the company of literary people and mentioned Thomas Wentworth Higginson and a young editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Franklin Sanborn, who took him to Concord to meet personally with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom
Father now admired, and his friend Henry Thoreau, “a firebrand on the subject of slavery,” wrote Father, “but a strangely misanthropic fellow, due to his loss of religion, I believe. I know nothing of his writings, but Mr. Sanborn assures me they are very good.” There were even some businessmen, he told us, who were becoming interested in aiding the movement generally and Father in particular: a fellow in the cloth-manufacturing business named George Stearns and “several rich men who want their money to go for something more substantial than speeches and newspapers and travel expenses for public speakers. I intend to satisfy them of this,”he wrote.

  For one as close to Father as I, it was difficult to see him as others did. But it could not be denied that when he held forth on the subjects of slavery and religion in a public forum, he had a commanding presence, despite his high-pitched voice and stiff, somewhat Puritanical manner, and the more people deferred to him, the more he seemed to warrant their deference, for the attention and respect of strangers made him appear to grow literally in size and stature, as well as in lucidity and brilliance of speech. And he was never so tall and straight, never so articulate and convincing in argument, never so unquestionably honest and sincere, as when holding forth on the inextricably entwined subjects of slavery and religion.

  It was as if Father saw all Americans residing inside a cosmic allegory, like characters in a story by John Bunyan, and his personal force and intelligence were such that he could make even the most materialistic of men believe it with him. People had grown more desperate now, more pessimistic as to the inescapable, gradual ending of slavery in America, and many who in the past had been content to oppose slavery merely with words were now beginning to consider more drastic action. As one of the very few who had come forward with a specific plan of action, and as perhaps the only man who seemed capable of carrying it out, Father was therefore a considerably more interesting figure now than he had been a mere six months earlier.

  Also, it was of no small matter, I’m sure, that Father was unique among white abolitionists by virtue of his having captured the trust and admiration of Negroes, given him not because of his political power or wealth or social standing, for he had none, but because of the pure force of his anger. What in Father frightened the whites pleased the blacks. Frederick Douglass, Bishop Loguen, Reverend Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman—they all vouched for him, spoke of him as one of them, and this surely must have impressed the whites sufficiently to balance their fear of him.

  He was, after all, quite unlike the rest of the better-known white abolitionists. First off, he was a physically tough man, and it showed. Although he had never fought in battle, he gave the impression of a man who had. Tanned and lean as a braided leather quirt, straight as a stick, he had the physical energy of a man half his age. His spartan regimen of little sleep, basic food, no alcohol or tobacco, was impressive. Also, he spoke knowledgeably of weapons and of the acquisition and deployment of men, horses, and supplies; he understood principles of attack and siege, strategic retreat, counter-attack, and ambush; he had studied the memoirs of great generals and the histories of famous campaigns with sufficient diligence that he could sound like a man who had been at Waterloo with Napoleon himself, who had fought alongside Garibaldi, who had ridden with Cortez against the invincible Montezuma.

  The winter in North Elba, even by our old Ohio and New England standards, was long and brutal. But our Adirondack neighbors deemed it mild, and despite our secret suspicion that it would never end, spring did eventually come trickling in, and with it came the time for the birth of Susan’s and Lyman’s baby, an imminent arrival which was regarded by all of us as a great event. We had come to know in varying degrees how Susan had lost her previous children to slavery, and though he never spoke of it, we believed that Lyman was eager to become a father. This would be his and Susan’s first child born in freedom, and its birth would be a visible emblem of their great sacrifice and triumph.

  Susan had taken to sleeping downstairs with Mary, whose own baby was not due till early June, the two pregnant women sharing Father’s and Mary’s large bed by the stove; Lyman, of course, had continued to sleep up in the loft with me and the boys on one side of the curtain, Ruth and the girls on the other. It was not an uncomfortable arrangement, however unconventional, and it was practical, contriving as it did to make the hours we spent in bed a businesslike affair difficult to corrupt with indolence or socializing, for as soon as you woke, out of politeness and modesty, there was nothing to do but rise from your cot and dress in the dark and set about to work. Our sleeping arrangements, except when Father was at home, when they provided him and Mary with a small privacy, functioned strictly to enable us to sleep, nothing else. Which was, no doubt, as Father had intended.

  The animals were restless, shedding their shaggy winter coats and eager to be let out of their pens and stalls after long confinement, and the lambing had begun in a promising way, and we were looking forward to a successful shearing. Also, we had two new calves and a large litter of pigs to add to our livestock. The mountains were still as shrouded by snow and bleak sheets of ice as in January, but down in the cleared valleys and flatlands surrounding North Elba, the snow had diminished to long, rounded peninsulas and smooth-shored islands melting into the yellowed, soppy fields and soft, two-feet-deep blankets that lingered in the woods and dales and on north-facing slopes. The Au Sable River was running freely again, and the lakes and ponds, although they had not begun yet to crack and boom and break up, were no longer safe to cross with a sleigh.

  Suddenly, we were once again busy outdoors, clearing new ground, burning stumps and building fences, preparing the land for plowing as soon as it dried, tapping sugar maples and boiling down the sap in huge cauldrons. With each new day the sun rose earlier and set later, and every night we fell into bed exhausted from our work and rose in the morning eager to return to it. We had entered what our laconic neighbors called, not spring, but mud season. Where, for months, the frozen, rock-hard roads, lanes, paths, and farmyards had been buried under head-high drifts, they were now cleared of snow and ice and stood revealed as made entirely of soft, sticky mud—heavy, deep, corrugated rivers and ponds of it. The mud was everywhere, impossible to keep out of the house, off our tools and boots, wagons, animals, and machinery, and we slogged through it as if through molasses.

  I hung the sleigh runners in the barn and put onto the wagon a new set of large, wide wheels, which I had built myself during the dark winter months, six-foot wheels with iron rims that had been crafted by Lyman in his smith’s shop. It was hard going, but with the new wagon wheels and by using both horses instead of only one, we were able to travel nonetheless. And travel we did. For there was movement again on the Underground Railroad, and this time I meant to take Watson and join Lyman myself in conducting the fugitive slaves, who were beginning to emerge blinking and fearful from their wintry hiding places and make their way north once again, passed as before from hand to hand, cellar to cellar, and attic to attic, up along the route from Utica to Timbuctoo to Port Kent and on by cart or sleigh to French Canada; or sometimes, via Lyman’s favorite route now, traveling northwest from Timbuctoo over the deepest Adirondack wilderness to Massena, thence to the St. Lawrence crossing at Cornwall and into Ontario there.

  We Browns were going to be alongside him this time, armed and vigilant. I wished to make it clear to Lyman that he and I now shared the same priorities. I could not bear the thought that he might think me interested only in the farm, as had undeniably been the case in the autumn. These fluctuations in policy, I knew, were a sign of my confusion then, but it felt not so much like a moral confusion as a temporary and strictly personal conflict between loyalty to Lyman and loyalty to Father. With the autumn and winter behind us, I believed that I was able once again to be loyal to both.

  Slave-catchers and their collaborators that spring were skulking like hungry wolves in and around all the towns and cities that lay along the usual routes north, especially in western New York and in th
e Hudson and Champlain valleys from Albany to Plattsburgh, and as a result, agents of the Underground Railroad in places like Utica, Syracuse, and Schenectady were sending many more fugitives than before over the considerably more arduous Adirondack mountain and wilderness route that Lyman favored. This in spite of the harsh weather, the bad roads, the long distances between stations, and the threat of meeting wolves and other wild animals. Along about the middle of March, fugitives first began arriving late at night in Timbuctoo, and the next morning one of our few allies from the settlement, a person known to us, would arrive at the farm to apprise us of the situation. That same night, regardless of our obligations at the farm, Lyman and I and Watson would hitch up the team and drive the wagon over to Timbuctoo, where we would pick up our poor, frightened human cargo and carry it north to Canada and freedom.

  Happily, during this period Lyman and I came to be like brothers again. We renewed our old joking manner with one another and even began having serious talks on such subjects as religion and the relations between men and women. But not race. Prior to our confrontation in the fall, race had been the central subject of all our serious talks with one another, and we rarely, if ever, discussed our true beliefs regarding religion or men and women. Now, however, race was the sole unspoken subject between us. We could talk truthfully and as equals about the Lord, about His work, and about being men, like any two friends of the same color, but we could no longer talk about one of us being black and the other white. I secretly grieved over this particular loss of intimacy, for I had never shared it with a Negro man before. But at the same time I was glad of it, too. Perched up on the box alongside Lyman, with Watson crouched at the rear of the wagon with his rifle at the ready, our precious cargo huddled out of sight underneath the tarpaulin, I felt somehow freed to pretend that Lyman, like me, was a white man, or that I, like him, was black, and we were merely two American men out doing the Lord’s work together.