Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Father rode at the front on his fine sorrel mare, which later carried him all through the Kansas wars with great strength and courage. He loved that animal as he had no other and trusted no one not a family member to care for her and trusted not even us to ride her. I drove the wagon, with Mary and Ruth beside me, the younger children all crammed in with our cargo, and the boys came along behind with Father’s little herd of blooded stock, helped by our black collie dogs, the type Father preferred over all others, despite their diminutive size and their uselessness for hunting.

  We arrived in mid-afternoon, in high excitement. There was a light off-shore breeze, and in the east, across the glittering waters of the lake, a towering white bank of clouds rose from the softly rounded hills of Vermont into the bright blue sky, where it broke apart and scudded off in pieces to the south, leaving us here on the western shore to bask in bright sunshine. It was the first agricultural fair ever held in the region, a visible sign that the northern wilderness of New York State had finally been settled and conquered by farmers. People came to it from all over the Adirondacks. They trekked in from their log and daub-and-wattle cabins in the furthest, most isolated valley and bog—squatters, grubstakers, miners, shag-bearded trappers and hunters dressed in the skins of their prey. Merchants and storekeepers, boatswains, blacksmiths, and coopers rode down in carriages from the prosperous shoreline towns to the north, like Port Kent and Plattsburgh, or rode up from Port Henry and Ticonderoga or sailed across from Shelburne and Charlotte in Vermont, readier to buy goods and livestock than to sell. The big dairy farmers and sheepmen rode in from their fifty-year-old farms on the broad, rolling meadows of the older villages inland, like Elizabethtown, Jay, and Keene, their wagons and carts stacked high with the fruits of the year’s labor, touting their skills and bearing evidence of the generosity of the fertile Lake Champlain and Au Sable River floodplains. From the newer outlying settlements tucked up among the mountains, North Elba, Tupper Lake, and Wilmington, came the poorer, hardscrabble farmers, folks like us and the Thompsons and the Brewsters and the Nashes, recent settlers who were still chopping small fields out of the upland forests and had not much to show for it yet, although we Browns intended to give that the lie. Many of the citizens of Timbuctoo came over also, a two-day trek on foot, bearing on their backs and in wheelbarrows—for they had no wagons at that time and no draft animals—garden produce to sell and exhibit in the halls, hams and maple syrup and candy and cheeses, packs of furs and hides, caged fowl, and a variety of crafted objects: reed baskets, woven hats, and prettily dyed cloth. There was even a small number of Indians, Abenakis and Micmacs, who had paddled down along the lake shore in canoes from their last remaining encampments, north of Plattsburgh, coming more out of curiosity, it seemed, than to exhibit wares or to buy and sell livestock and farm goods, for they had none to sell and no money with which to buy. Their abject poverty and loneliness were apparent to all, and they seemed more like refugees in the land than its original masters, a people exiled without ever having left home. It was difficult to know how to feel towards them, and so we tended to watch them in silence and from a distance and not to speak of them at all, even to one another.

  This was the largest gathering of people that Mary and the children had seen since leaving Springfield and the largest gathering of northcountry people that any of us had ever seen. Young men and women strolled hand-in-hand openly, and gangs of boys roughed each other up and organized teams for ball games and other sports, and girls walked demurely in pairs in their vicinity. Old folks and distant family members renewed connections with one another, while men compared crops, animals, and prices and talked politics, and women set their smallest children free to run and turned to one another in friendship and cheerful confidentiality.

  There was a quarter-mile race track without a hoofprint on it yet and a white, freshly painted grandstand ready to be filled that evening for the first time. Behind the grandstand were ten or twelve long, low barns for livestock, and beyond the barns was a pair of fenced circles with stone boats, where ox and horse-pulling contests were already under way. Beyond these were several large exhibition halls for showing and judging produce and crafts, and then rows of small, canvas-sided booths where shifty-eyed characters plied the crowd with games of chance and sold cheap novelties and gew-gaws. Nearby, clouds of fragrant smoke poured from pit-fires where flocks of chickens were grilled and whole hogs roasted on spits and potatoes and unshucked ears of corn cooked in the ashes.

  We registered our livestock and installed them in the barns and pitched our camp alongside several other families from North Elba, in a grove of low pines directly behind the sheep barn, and in short order we all separated from one another, each to follow his or her particular interest. Father headed straight for the sheep barn and, of course, very soon found himself lecturing on the proper care of sheep and wool to anyone willing to listen, a sizeable number of farmers and sheepmen, in fact, who had on their own gathered around the box-stalls where he had installed his merinos, for the large, healthy, heavy-fleeced animals were an excellent advertisement of Father’s skills and knowledge. Ruth went off in search of Henry Thompson, who was not at his family’s camp; Mary and the girls, Annie and Sarah, disappeared in the direction of the exhibition halls; and the boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, raced away with a gang of young fellows from North Elba, leaving me to wander the fairgrounds alone.

  I saw her almost at once. I had lingered in the sheep barn, listening to the Old Man hold forth for a few moments, and then, when I caught myself saying his sentences silently ahead of him, had drifted away, and as I passed out of the low shed and made my way towards the booths on the midway—suddenly, there she was. She was a considerable distance away but glinting brightly in the crowd, like gold in gravel, outside one of the exhibition halls—she was the only Negro in a group of white women and girls that included my stepmother, Mary, and sisters Annie and Sarah. Susan’s pale gray bonnet hid her face from my view, but I knew instantly, from her posture and the precise tilt of her head and the easy gestures of her hands, that it was she, and my heart leapt up.

  She and Mary talked together for a few minutes longer, and then Mary embraced her and, with the other girls and women, drew away and strolled inside the hall, leaving her to stand alone outside with a characteristically bemused expression on her face. She was wearing a red and white plaid dress, which I recognized as one that Ruth had given her last winter, and carried a wicker basket, over which she had draped her shawl. For a moment, she seemed unsure of which direction to go, but finally she turned to her left and made her way towards the fairway.

  I followed at a discreet distance, until she turned into a narrow, shaded space between the second and third exhibition halls. No one else was there, and I quickened my pace and came up behind her and said her name.

  She turned abruptly, her dark eyes open wide, frightened to see a man suddenly this close to her, for I had come to within a few feet of her before speaking. Then she recognized me, and the fear left her face, replaced at once by a heaviness—a sadness, as I saw it, which produced in me a corresponding sadness and made me wish to embrace her, but I withheld myself and in a trembling voice said that I was happy to see her.

  “It’s been a long while, Mister Brown,” she answered. “I was pleased to see your mother looking so strong again. And Annie and little Sarah.”

  “Yes. We all miss you, Susan.”

  “Well. That’s nice, Mister Brown. Thank you.”

  We made light, nervous conversation for a few moments, asking after each other’s health, speaking of the weather, the surprising size of the fairgrounds, the great number of people, and so on—until I suddenly heard myself blurt, “Susan, I must tell you, Susan, that in his heart my father has replaced me. He’s replaced me with Lyman.”

  “What... what do you mean?”

  “I bear Lyman no resentment for this, but it’s hurt me, Susan.”

  She appeared shocked and said that it could not be t
rue. “You shouldn’t be envious of Lyman. He loves and admires your father over all other men,” she said. “But you, you’re your father’s son, Mister Brown. And your father, he loves you for that, I know. More than he can ever love Lyman.”

  “No! You don’t understand. You see, Lyman is more important to him than I am. And with good reason.”

  She sighed heavily. “What are you wanting me to say to you, Mister Brown?”

  I was silent for a moment. Finally, I said, “Please, just tell me why you’ve moved away from us.”

  For the first time, she shifted her eyes away from mine. “Well, I explained it to your mother and your sister back then, back when we first decided. It was due to Lyman wanting to farm his own land and to live in his own house. That’s all. We been with you all for a long time.”

  “No, not Lyman! I know why he left, and I know the real reason, too! I’m the cause of that. No, I want you to tell me why you left us.”

  “It’s very simple, Mister Brown. I went where my husband said. That’s the whole of it. And you’re not the cause of anything Lyman done, Mister Brown,” she declared. Then she lifted herself to her full height and said, “This is not a right conversation for us to be having.”

  “Yes, it is, because we need to talk. I need you to hear me. Even though you’ll despise me, because it’s ... it’s a sin for me to feel for you as I do, and I have no right to say anything about it to you, because—”

  She placed her hand gently on my arm and stopped me. “Mister Brown, please, sir, I know you’re a decent man. You are. But you are all mixed up” she declared, looking straight at me. “I’m saying this to you, Mister Brown, because I like you, I truly do, and I know you don’t mean me no harm. But Lyman, he told me what happened last winter between you and him, when you come back from all your travels to England and you beat on him out there in the barn that day. So I know things, Mister Brown. Maybe more even than Lyman knows, since he is a man and is a little mixed up about these same things, too. But I’ve watched you, Mister Brown, and felt sorry for you, because I can see that you are all confused and mixed up and angered. Maybe due to your father. Who is a strong, good man doing good works, and he believes that he needs your help, so he won’t send you off from him. Mainly that, I think. That, and us being coloreds and you wanting to help our people like you do. It’s the two things. They make you think about Lyman too much, which is how you come now to be thinking about me too much.”

  “No;’ I said. “It’s not that. None of it.”

  “Just stop that now! Stop. I’m not angry with you, Mister Brown, because I know you don’t mean any harm. But I’m a colored woman, and my husband is a colored man. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation, you know, not a word of it, if my husband and I was white people.”

  I stepped back from her. “Yes. You’re right. Please, then, please tell me what should I do.”

  “Do? Not for me to say, Mister Brown,” she said tenderly. “I know you want to be natural and peaceful and respectful with colored folks. But if you can’t, well, maybe you should stick to your own kind. Lots of good folks, white and colored alike, that’s what they do. Go away from your father and live amongst white people. Why not go out there to Ohio, Mister Brown, where your other brothers are, and find yourself a wife and settle down with her?”

  “A white woman.”

  “Well, yes.”

  For a long time, I said nothing. Then I whispered, “I can’t do that.” She smiled at me, but as if from a great height. “Well, Mister Brown, then I don’t know what you can do,” she said. And, abruptly, she turned her back and walked away.

  Chapter 15

  “You ain’t half the man your father is.”

  The words came without warning, and they chilled my blood. They do even now, more than a half-century later. They were true then; they are true now.

  The first time I heard them, they were uttered by Lyman; but after that, from then on, they were said to me in my own voice, the sentence dripping into my ear like slow poison. You ain’t half the man your father is. To silence them, I would, again and again, for years, be obliged to rouse myself into a fury, a literal blood-letting, making of my whole body a visible and tangible shout. For as long as my shout reverberated in the air, I would not hear them.

  You ain’t half the man your father is. And who was he? Twice the man I was, and twice the man he seemed. And yet not half himself, either. Before Kansas, the Old Man had always been larger than his reputation; after Kansas, he was smaller. Although, over time, he himself changed not a whit. I changed, certainly, and nearly everyone else changed. But not Father. Merely, his reputation caught up to the reality and then surpassed it, so that the man who, outside the family, had been known as a somewhat peculiar radical abolitionist with a violent temperament, a somber activist with a huge reservoir of religious enthusiasm, a wild fellow who, despite his vague, crack-brained plan for a slave insurrection, was nonetheless oddly trusted by influential and otherwise rational Negroes and was likewise understandably mistrusted by most whites—that man came over time to be known as a heroic guerilla leader, a courageous and brilliant military man who feared only God and had no other ambition than to bring slavery to an end. He came quickly to be known as a magnificent fighter on horseback, an inspiration and example to lesser men, which is to say, to all decent, anti-slavery white men: for none of them, no matter how thoroughly he loathed slavery and loved his Negro brethren, in his loathing and love was as pure as Captain John Brown, as clear-eyed as he, as unequivocal and uncompromised as he. So that when my father-Father, the Old Man, Mister Brown, Citizen John Brown—got himself turned into Captain John Brown, it was not merely a military rank that had been added to his name but an honorific, and the rank, as if he had been given it at birth, instantly became an integral part of his name, permanently attached to his identity, like that of Governor Bradford, Admiral Nelson, Chief Tecumseh.

  In North Elba, though, and to Lyman Epps especially, Father was known entirely for what he was—known more clearly for that to Lyman than even to me. So when Lyman told me I was not half that, he downright shriveled me. He struck my manhood away and left me standing before him a child. Worse than a child: a failed adult.

  Most men secretly know that there lies hidden inside them the boy they once were and believe they still are, and all the work a man does in his life is accompanied by various stratagems designed to keep that child hidden from view. From his own view, especially. But that night in late summer at Indian Pass, which lies yonder in the darkness seven miles to the south of our old farmhouse, when Lyman raised his lip and sneered and then declared that I was not half the man my father was, he made it impossible for me ever after to hide my true self from my false self. It was as if, that night in the cave, Lyman were the only man alive who could testify as to both my true character and the true character of my father: he was our sole shared character witness and, thus, was the only man capable of making the comparison between me and Father and making it stick.

  I don’t know why this was so. Lyman knew us both well, of course, intimately, domestically, out in the fields, and on the Railroad running slaves north; for several years, he had observed both Father and me more closely than had anyone else who was not a family member. But that was not it. The truth is, I made Lyman the authoritative witness myself; I myself validated his testimony.

  As instructed by the Old Man, Lyman and I had been three days and nights down along Indian Pass, cutting a trail wide enough for a man on horseback to get through to North Elba from the old Tahawus mining camp. Father would be away that September, once again—this time, as usual, for the last time, he hoped—settling his besieged financial affairs with Mr. Perkins, and he had charged the two of us with this task before leaving. The Underground Railroad station at Timbuctoo, with its links south to Tahawus and north to Canada, was the one segment of Father’s Subterranean Passway that he felt he could control, and he wished to make it a model and a beginning for the whole
. He intended to make it off-limits at pain of death for slave-catchers, man-stealers, and bounty-hunters, so that once he had made this small segment of the Railroad secure, with armed men posted at the passes and gorges and up on strategic ridges, with fortified resting places and storehouses along the way, and with only the most trusted radical whites living in the farmlands below the Adirondacks allowed to provide arms, provisions, and safe houses, he would begin extending the Passway southward into the Appalachians, mile by mile into the mountainous forests of eastern Pennsylvania, until he came to western Maryland, where he would commence his invasion of the enemy’s homeland itself. By this means we would bleed the South white, he declared. His fantasy for years; and then his dream; and finally his plan, too: now the three had at last coalesced, and he was beginning in this small way in our very neighborhood to put all three, fantasy, dream, and plan, into action.

  At the Tahawus mining camp, called the Upper Village, there was a new manager, a man named Seybolt Johnson from Albany, replacing the previous supervisor, the infamous Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Johnson was a genuine abolitionist, faithful and true, who had worked the Underground Railroad for years out of Albany and Troy. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, he, like so many others, had sought alternative routes north for the escaping slaves, and as he was a longtime employee of the Adirondack Mining Company’s main office, in Albany, he knew, even before he assumed the position of manager of the Tahawus mines, that he could play an important role in aiding the Underground Railroad out there in the wilderness. Which he had done, for on his arrival at the Upper Village, he at once contacted Father and quickly arranged to regularize the passage of escaped slaves from towns and cities south of Albany to the Upper Village mining camp and on through the northwoods to Timbuctoo, North Elba, Paul Smith’s famous hunting lodge, Massena, and Canada.