Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  There were fifteen or twenty runs that spring, but I remember best the morning in mid-April when we came back to the farm from an especially arduous run to the Ontario border. We had been gone for three days and four nights, had almost lost the wagon in a muskeg south of Potsdam, had been forced to travel half a day off our route on an old lumbermen’s trail to find a place where we could safely ford the Raquette River, and at the end had narrowly escaped a pair of slave-catchers encamped outside Massena, just south of the border. Watson had performed bravely, and though he claimed to have shot both of them when they pursued us in the gray, early morning light for several miles along the bank of the broad, still-frozen St. Lawrence, he certainly hit one, which discouraged the other, and thus we were able finally to deliver our cargo safely at the crossing to Cornwall.

  The trip back to North Elba, though less risky—since now the only Negro aboard was Lyman, who always carried his old, tattered manumission papers in a wallet strapped to his leg like a knife—was not much easier, as the weather alternated between rain, sleet, and snow. We crossed marsh and muskeg, saw mists at dawn rising off the wilderness lakes where deer and moose came down to the edge to drink and look up and watch us as we passed along the opposite shore. We penetrated deep into the ancient blue spruce and balsam forests, passed through miles of beech woods and hickory, circled beaver ponds, saw the tracks of lion and heard the howl of wolves and the coughing bark of bears, were brought up short at fast-running, rock-bottomed streams choked with snowmelt and overflowing their banks and sending us back up into the woods on lumber trails in long complex loops until we could return again to the road, which was never a real road, only a lonely, wagon-wide path through the northwoods, a deer trail become an Indian trail widened by horses and sledges bringing out timber and by supply wagons going into the camps.

  As on other such difficult, demanding treks, with little or no sleep, we had gone a whole day without food, without seeing a settlement or farm or even another human being, save for an occasional trapper crossing the trail into the deep woods to check his lines, furtive and solitary as a wild animal himself. What did the enslavement of three million Negroes mean to him? Or the Fugitive Slave Law? Did he know, much less care, who was President? Had he even heard of abolitionism? Sometimes when I saw one of these pelt-covered, bearded fellows with his backpack and steel-toothed traps and long-barreled rifle disappearing into the wilderness, I almost envied him. His ignorance and single-minded pursuit of the skins of animals was a kind of innocence that I would never know again, if I had ever known it at all.

  It was dawn when we finally arrived at the farm. The overcast sky was soft as flannel and gray in the east above Tahawus and soot black in the west. It had rained most of the night, a raw, penetrating rain that had soaked straight through our cloaks and hats and made our bones feel brittle as iron. As we pulled into the yard, we saw lamplight inside the kitchen and smoke from the chimney, and Lyman remarked on it, for normally, with Father away, no one would be out of bed this early. I think that we both at the same instant realized what had wakened the family, for without saying a word to one another, as we passed the house, I handed the reins to Watson, and Lyman and I jumped down from the wagon and made for the door.

  It was indeed as we had expected—Susan’s baby had come. Susan’s baby—Lyman’s baby as well. Yet somehow I could not see it that way. Even then, long before I had come to any awareness of the true nature of my feelings for Susan, I seemed to be cutting Lyman out of his privileges and prerogatives, so that when I looked from face to face in the warm, dimly lit kitchen and saw only grief and exhaustion, saw none of the exhilaration and pride that I expected, I did not think once of Lyman’s loss. Only of Susan’s, and in some small, illegitimate way, my own.

  Mary slumped at the table with her Bible open before her, but she was not reading from it; she merely gazed out the window opposite at the slowly brightening field and woods beyond. Ruth was seated on the bed next to Susan, wiping the woman’s face with a damp cloth. Ruth’s expression was grim, tight-lipped, frightened, but accepting, as if during the night and long hours into dawn she had learned some terrible thing about her own coming fate. The other children moved about slowly in their pantaloons and union suits; half-dressed, sad-faced waifs they seemed, trying to put together a bit of breakfast for themselves. The women looked drained and exhausted; they had clearly been up all night, struggling to bring a child into the world. Susan herself, mother of the child, lay back among the pillows with her eyes closed, her hands beneath the covers, all color drained from her face so that she was nearly as white as Ruth, and for an instant I thought that she had died and felt a moan begin to rise in my throat.

  Then her eyes blinked open. She turned her head slowly on the pillow and, expressionless, looked at her husband and me at the door, the two of us huge and cold, noisy in our heavy boots and rain-soaked clothes, clumsy, obdurate, and male, all out of place in this silent, warm, sad company of women and children. I was thinking hard thoughts. So many babies are born dead, you dare not wish for them to be born at all.

  And so many die right after they are born, you wonder why they were allowed to live in the first place. And if they live awhile, so many soon sicken and die, you wish they had died at the start and had not let you learn to love them. The women, they weaken and grow sadder with each loss, but the men, what do they do? I thought that they must gnash their teeth and pound the walls with their fists, as I did then. I balled my right hand into a fist and banged it hard against the wall, one, two, three times, each blow stronger than the last, until I thought I would bring down the wall like blinded Samson. Then, frightened by my own fury, I went to a far corner of the room and closed my eyes and wished for words of prayer, but found none.

  In a strangely cold tone, Ruth said, “The baby was born dead. We have wrapped it for burial. You will need to dig a grave for it, Owen. Do it now” she said.

  I cleared my throat and said, “And Susan? How is she?”

  Mary spoke then. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure. Do as Ruth said, Owen. Dig the grave. Susan will be fine. The midwife from Timbuctoo was over to tend her and left only a short while ago. She knows all the old remedies, and Susan has been treated by them. The baby has no name, but we need to bury it, so we can say our prayers for it. Lyman may want to make a marker, but there’s no need. It never drew breath,” she said, and added, almost as afterthought, “It was a baby boy.”

  Throughout, Lyman had not made a sound or a move from the door. He stood there now, immobile and as silent as when he had come in. I had tears running down my cheeks, yet his eyes were dry and cool, his face impassive. My body was hot with rage, and I could barely keep it still, but Lyman stood with his hands slack at his sides. He was more a carved block of ice in the dead of winter than a man. He held himself like that and regarded his wife with strange placidity, as if he had come upon her sleeping and did not want to waken her but merely wished to watch her awhile without her knowing.

  Finally, Susan said in a voice that was almost a whisper, “I’m sorry, Lyman.”

  He twisted his lips as if to clear his mouth of an unpleasant taste, and when a few seconds of painful silence had passed, he said, “It was not meant to be.” And then abruptly he turned and departed from the house.

  I followed him out the door, still shaking with what I thought was rage and grief. Unable to say anything useful or comforting to Susan, still unable even to pray, I proceeded at once to follow my stepmother Mary’s order to dig a grave for the infant. That would be my use. Then, before I had reached the barn, Lyman came riding out on Adelphi.

  I reached up and grabbed the bridle and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Timbuctoo.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to put my cabin straight.”

  “What? Why do that now? I don’t understand.”

  He would not look at me. “I’ll be back in a few days, and I’ll be taking Susan then.”

  “What are
you talking about?”

  “I’m saying what I’m saying.”

  “But you can’t leave,” I said. “She needs to be here, and she needs to have you with her.”

  “No. She and I need to be amongst our own people. I don’t want to have to explain it to you, Owen. But it ain’t right for us to be living here anymore with you Browns. There’s too much gone wrong for us since we moved over here, so we’re going to go on back now, soon as Susan’s ready to travel that far.”

  “No,” I declared. “You can’t do that.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Don’t know that you can stop me, Owen, since that’s what I’m determined to do.”

  “This is Father’s horse you’re riding” I said, as if that would stop him. It seemed to me almost unthinkable, that he would remove Susan and himself from our house and return to their bare little cabin in Timbuctoo. Did he think that we had cursed him, had put a hex on him?

  He looked down at me with irritation and something like pity on his face. “Fine,” he said, and he swung down from the horse to the ground, handed me the reins, and walked away. I stood there holding the horse and watched in silence as he strode across the yard to the road, then down the road in the direction of the African settlement, until he was finally gone from sight.

  When I returned the horse to its stall in the barn, Watson was there, brushing down the other Morgan. “I thought Lyman went off on Adelphi,” he said. “What’s the matter? He was weird.”

  “Yes, well, there’s bad news” I said. “Susan’s baby, it was born dead.” His bright face suddenly went slack and pale. He said nothing, simply stood there with the brush in his hand, open-mouthed and silent, as if he had been hit in the chest and had lost his breath.

  “I need help digging the grave, Wat,” I said. “Will you come with me?” I had picked up the spade and pick and stood by the door.

  “Yes, sure. Oh, this is pretty terrible for them, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s terrible.”

  “Is Susan all right?”

  “Yes. She’ll be fine in a few days.”

  “What about Lyman?”

  “Lyman’s upset, but he’ll be all right.”

  “Where was he off to on Adelphi?”

  “Stop asking questions,” I said, handing him the pick. “Just follow me; we’ll dig the grave.”

  He shrugged his bony shoulders, grabbed up the pick, and traipsed along behind me, a pair of gravediggers on a cold, gray, drizzling dawn.

  A hundred rods or so beyond the house, in a clearing near a stand of birches, my brother Watson and I dug a deep hole in the wet, rocky soil. Afterwards, I built a small pine box and into it placed the tiny body of the infant wrapped in a plain, earth-colored scrap of wool and nailed it shut. We never saw the infant itself; only its humble shroud. Then Watson and I lowered the box into the hole and filled it and covered the opening in the ground with sod. It would remain unmarked. And by the time we came seven weeks later to bury Mary’s and Fathers unnamed infant in its unmarked grave, the grass had grown tall over the first grave, and daisies were blooming there, and you could not see where it had been. Although I knew exactly where the first grave was located and saw it clearly, as if there were a tall, engraved marble stone at its head:

  Unnamed Baby, born to Susan & Lyman Epps “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”

  I Corinthians 15:51

  It was a terrible time then, with the baby born dead and with Lyman and Susan gone off to live amongst the Negroes in Timbuctoo and with Mary’s own birthing date fast approaching—in itself not upsetting, even to me, but it meant that Father would soon be coming to North Elba, which now, more than ever before, filled me with nameless dread. Why was his coming so dreadful? He was my father. I loved him. I believed that I had done nothing wrong.

  I could only say to myself that it had to do with the disarray that I saw all around, and I knew he would see it the second he drew up before the house—the Old Man could smell disorder in the air—and in short order he would set everything right again. Humiliating me. Even so, I felt strangely paralyzed, and my anticipation of his coming only seemed to make it worse.

  Spring planting went ahead, but it was more Watson’s and Salmon’s doing than mine, and it was done in a desultory fashion; and though we continued to clear back the forest at a fairly good rate, cutting and burning and pulling stumps off nearly a half-acre of ground a week, we did it sloppily—unscientifically, Father would say—like hired laborers without a foreman. And the house was falling into steady disrepair, as we could not seem to find the time or the energy or the wit to repair the damage done to the roof and chimneys by the winter winds and ice.

  And we had no excuses this time; we could not tell ourselves, or report to Father when he arrived, that we had been too busy doing the Lord’s work to do our own. We were no longer conductors on the Underground Railroad. Father’s great Subterranean Passway, at least our small section of it, had gone dead. Without Lyman to act as liaison between us and the citizens of Timbuctoo, we were unable to carry fugitive slaves north. Without Lyman, no one came to us anymore for help, which disappointed me greatly and made me a failure, not only in my own eyes but in the eyes of Watson, and of Salmon, too, who had grown as passionate as Watson on the issue of slavery and as eager as he to oppose it.

  They could not understand my reluctance to confront Lyman forthrightly and honestly. “Why’n’t you just go over there and make it clear that we’re ready to run folks north in our wagon as soon as they show up in Timbuctoo?” Salmon demanded. “Just put it to him, Owen. What’s the big deal between you and Lyman anyhow? So what if he wants to go back and live on his own land in Timbuctoo? Seems only natural, don’t it?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He doesn’t want anything more to do with us Browns.”

  “Why? Because of Susan’s baby? That can’t be it. We didn’t have anything to do with that. It was the Lord’s will.”

  “I don’t know, Salmon. You talk to him, if you want. You go over there, and you plead with him to provide us with passengers for our wagon and team so that we can feel better about ourselves. You tell him how much he needs us to help him help his Negro brethren, Salmon. You know what he’ll say?”

  “What?”

  “I... I don’t know. I don’t know what he’ll say. I just know that I can’t go to him. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

  “Sounds crazy to me;’ he said, disgusted. And he did, indeed, that very day of our conversation, ride out to Timbuctoo all by himself, only to return in the evening clearly disappointed and not a little confused. He came in at supper and sat down sullenly at the table without taking off his hat and coat or wiping his muddy boots.

  It was Ruth who asked him what Lyman had told him, for she, like everyone else in the family, had known why the boy had gone over there. Mary had even put up a basket of bread and preserves for Salmon to carry to them. I said nothing, and neither did Watson, who I think had guessed by then that there was something dark and personal between me and Lyman, something that could not yet be named by either of us, for neither Lyman nor I knew what it was ourselves. We merely felt its power and acted on it, as if we had no choice in the matter, as if it were a shared compulsion of some sort, the nature of which would become apparent to us and nameable only later, when it no longer controlled us.

  “I never even saw him,”Salmon said. “I tried talking to some others, Mister Grey and the other Mister Epps, the choirmaster. But they said there was no Underground Railroad in Timbuctoo. Like I was some kind of slave-catcher or something. Didn’t know what I was talking about. Lyman, they told me, was gone off”

  “They say where?” Watson asked.

  “Nope. Just gone off. You know how they can get when they don’t want you to know something. They smile and tell you something half-right and half-wrong, act like they don’t know the truth any more than you do. ‘Lyman, he gon’ off somewh
eres, Mistah Brown.’ I’m telling you, it was like I was the sheriff or a slave-catcher, the way they treated me.”

  “Did you go to his cabin?” Watson wanted to know.

  I remained silent throughout, as if none of this concerned me. “Yep. And it looked like he’d been doing some work on it. Has himself a pretty decent kitchen-garden under way, too. I even saw Susan,” he said, and I put down my knife and spoon and looked up.

  It had been just over a month since they had left, that long since I had seen her, and suddenly, upon hearing her name in my brother’s mouth, imagining him in her presence, I realized that during those thirty-odd days and nights I had thought of almost no one else. Her face, her voice, her shape and movement, had constantly been in my mind. No matter what I was doing, no matter whom I was talking to, it was Susan I was thinking of, missing, pining for, longing to speak to. And to touch. Lyman, whenever I thought of him, as indeed I frequently did, came to my mind only as an obstacle to my reaching his wife. He was a curtain blocking my view, a rock rolled into my path, a palisado surrounding the object of my desire.

  That I had not once, until this moment, stepped back from my thoughts and observed their peculiar nature shocked and alarmed me. But that’s how powerful they were, how all-consuming. Once I knew my thoughts, however, I was first appalled and then instantly repelled. Of course! I reasoned. This was the source of the pain between me and Lyman. And he had known it long before I did, surely. He had seen that I was in love with his wife, and naturally, as soon as he could, he had withdrawn her from me.

  My blood washed over me. I felt absurd, and then guilty, and wished only that I could somehow purge myself of my love for Susan and make amends to Lyman. It also occurred to me that this had been the source of my anxiety about Father’s imminent arrival in North Elba: I was afraid that he would ask after Lyman and Susan, and when I replied that we had not seen them since their return to Timbuctoo, he would look me in the eye, and he would know at once what I myself had gone months without even guessing.