Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks

  Father did not think he could accomplish this without at least one adult son beside him and had carefully explained why I was the one so designated: John was more capable than I when it came to business; Jason and his new wife were settled permanently, it seemed, in Ohio; and Fred, although twenty years old then, was a person who needed close supervision, which Jason was good at providing. As usual, the Old Man was right, and I had to comply.

  The first thing we needed to do was survey and validate their claims, he told me: to keep the Negroes from being cheated by the whites, who had been squatting up there for several generations—ever since the terrible, year-long winter of ’06 had driven most of the original settlers out—and had come to think of the whole place as theirs alone. Father’s motives were moral and idealistic, the same as had always prompted his political actions, and he described this move as essentially political—for he had visited North Elba alone the previous fall and had come away newly inspired by a vision of Negro and white farmers working peacefully together. His hope now, he explained to us, was to build a true American city on a hill that would give the lie to every skeptic in the land. There were many such Utopian schemes and projects afoot in those years, a hundred little cities on a hundred little hills, but Timbuctoo may have been the only one that aimed at setting an example of racial harmony. This would be our errand into the wilderness, he said.

  But there was more to it than that. The wild Adirondack landscape had moved the Old Man wonderfully. All that winter and spring, despite the worry and grief he bore over the sickness and long dying of the baby Ellen, whenever he spoke of settling down on the broad tableland between the mountains, his face would soften and flush, and he would sail off in reveries and fantasies more likely to have been generated by a short stay at Valhalla than by a quick visit to a tract of hardscrabble highlands with a ninety-day growing season and a grinding, six-months-long winter. “Ah, Owen,” he would exclaim, “just wait until you see the beauty of this place! It makes you think that during the Creation the good Lord Lingered there awhile. There is truly no place I have seen whose aspect has so pleased me as those Adirondack mountains.”

  On reflection, I believe, also, that there was for Father yet another deeply pleasing aspect of the North Elba project, one that he hid from us then but which I understood later. Its force was stronger than the moral point that he and Mr. Gerrit Smith wished to make and more substantive than the poetic effect of the landscape on his soul. For many years, the Old Man’s life had been cruelly divided between his anti-slavery actions and his responsibilities as a husband and father, and despite his unrelenting, sometimes wild and chaotic attempts to unite them, it was often as if he was trying to live the lives of two separate men: one an abolitionist firebrand, a public figure whose most satisfying and important acts, out of necessity, were done in secret; the other a good Christian husband and father, a private man whose most satisfying and important acts were manifested in the visible security and comfort of his family. He was a man who had pledged his life to bring about the permanent and complete liberation of the Negro slaves; and he was the head of a large household with no easy sources of income.

  Never having married, I did not experience this sort of division in my life, which is perhaps why it took me until I was practically middle-aged before I was led to these particular sympathies for Father. And I certainly had no inkling of his conflicted state back then, when I reluctantly agreed to join him in his removal of the family from Springfield to North Elba, the tenth move in nearly as many years. Now, however, I can see that, for the first time in his life, Father expected to live as what he regarded as a whole man. In the Adirondacks, amongst the Negroes, he had at last imagined a life that was capable of containing all his contraries. Or so he believed then.

  Father turned fifty that spring; Mary was thirty-seven. I am sure that, despite all, Father’s errand into the wilderness pleased her, especially after the death of the baby Ellen. It was a fresh start, and Father’s reveries and fantasies about the place had convinced her that our life would finally be calm and organized. Mary was a profound and prayerful person, more meditative and inward than the Old Man and most of the rest of us, and the idea of making a sanctuary in the mountains pleased her, especially if it met the Old Man’s standards for his and our participation in the struggle to free the slaves. And as far as she and we knew then, the removal to North Elba would accomplish that.

  I remember him reassuring her that in a year or even less he would tie up his tangled affairs with Mr. Perkins in Springfield and Ohio and have all his debts at last paid off. Then he would be free to build his racially harmonious city on the hill, raise his prize-winning cattle and sheep on the slopes of the Adirondacks, and live out his years in the comfort of his family and neighbors. He would be a preacher, a teacher, and a farmer, he said. It was all he had ever wanted in life. He did not want to be a great man.

  He told her that, told it to all of us, and we believed it, and I’m sure that, sometimes, he believed it, too. I soon learned, of course, that months before, when he had gone to North Elba alone, he had had other things in mind—the scattered, dimly formed, but powerful beginnings of ideas and plans that would develop and coalesce up there in the mountains and that would eventually prove irresistible to him. And, I confess it, ideas and plans that would prove irresistible to me and to my brothers as well.

  To get to Westport, the boys Watson and Salmon, who were but fourteen and thirteen years old that spring, and I had traveled separately from the others, for we had brought Father’s Devon cattle and his five Spanish merino sheep up along the Connecticut River from Litchfield, Connecticut, where Father had been boarding them, crossed overland to Rutland, Vermont, and passed around the bottom of Lake Champlain to the New York side by the Fort Ticonderoga route. The Old Man, Mary, sister Ruth, and the younger children, Oliver, Annie, and little Sarah, at three years old the second to bear that name, had come north from Springfield in the wagon with all our tools and domestic goods, a pig, some fowl, and our dogs. They had crossed the lake on the ferry from Vermont, arrived in Westport, New York, and set up camp a few days before we got there.

  By the time we showed up with the cattle and sheep, Father had already purchased the supplies we would need to see us through to our first harvest, but as soon as I saw the size of the load, I knew that Father’s old horse, an animal for whom he had typically developed an intense affection, would prove too feeble to haul it on the flats, let alone over high mountains. The Old Man and I argued a bit over that one, but he relented, for he knew the difficulties of getting up from Lake Champlain to North Elba even better than I.

  With regret, then, he decided to sell his precious old horse, Dan, and use his last remaining cash money to buy a team from the shipping agent in Westport, a Mr. Thurston Clarke. As it turned out, Mr. Clarke offered Father a chance to hold on to his money, or most of it, which would have made a useful difference to him later on, but the Old Man gave it over. The red-coated Devon cattle had aroused considerable admiration among the local people there, and Father was briefly tempted by Mr. Clarke to swap a pair straight across for a team of Narragansetts. At the last minute, Father declined the offer.

  The reason was the presence of a black man from North Elba—Lyman Epps. Mister Epps, as Father always addressed him, to the frequent consternation of any white people who were present. The man wandered into our camp south of Westport the evening of the day after the boys and I had arrived from Connecticut with the cattle and the sheep, and he swiftly proved to be an intelligent, charming man, although I confess that I did not warm to him as quickly as did the others. A wiry, coal-black fellow of medium height and quick movements, he was one of Gerrit Smith’s settled freedmen, a well-spoken man in his early thirties, I guessed, who had been a blacksmith in Maryland and knew horses. Many men know horses, but only from the outside; Mr. Epps claimed to understand them from the inside, as if they were people.

  He told us that he had come down to Westport fro
m North Elba in search of work: he needed cash to buy seed, because his crops from the previous year had failed, and all his reserves were gone, and he had no more credit at the feed stores or suppliers in the area. But he had been turned away by every blacksmith and harrier in the village, due to his race. In the process, however, he had learned of Father’s presence in town—the abolitionist fool from Ohio bent on teaching Gerrit Smith’s niggers to farm in the mountains. Father, as usual, had made no secret of our intentions, and we, like the Negroes, had quickly become something of a local joke.

  On the subject of horses, the man was positively brilliant, or I should say he talked brilliantly on the subject. Such talk pleased the Old Man immensely and probably caused him to disregard the man’s occasional gaps in knowledge and experience, for soon he was inviting Mr. Epps to advise him on the purchase of a new team.

  While Father’s own knowledge of horses was not nearly as extensive and deep as with cattle and sheep, where he truly was an expert, he nonetheless, unsurprisingly, held strong and frequently voiced opinions as to the relative merits of the more popular breeds. Also, he rarely exhibited any particular reluctance to lecture folks on how to raise, train, work, and ride horses. He took advice badly but gave it without stint. Back in Ohio, when we were still living on the old Haymaker farm and Father was first slipping deeply into land speculation, he had expanded his livestock operation beyond sheep and cattle and had even raised racehorses for a few years and sold off the colts and yearlings at the nearby Warren racetrack.

  I remember his lectures to us, for we older boys were obliged to care for the colts and break them to the saddle and so on, before they could be sold off. “Remember, a colt should never be frightened,” he insisted. “Never. Horses are sensitive beings, very intelligent, easily spooked, so they must be treated with gentleness.” Later on, he explained, when you want to bring them under your control, they will trust your intentions completely and will defer to you in all things.

  This was not, of course, his philosophy with regard to raising children. Children, the Old Man believed, were innately sinful, and thus they could be broken to the saddle, as it were, only if regularly disciplined and controlled by the rod, and could be saved only by the mysterious dispensation of the Lord’s grace. For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth, he said. The blueness of a wound deanseth away evil; so do stripes the inward part of the belly. And, Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying. Horses were evidently already saved, or were at least free of sin, and who could argue with that?

  I did sometimes wish, however, that he had applied his views on raising animals to his methods of raising children. Foals, Father told us, should learn the use of a halter very early, with nothing but a gentle touch and voice, and you must break them in to reins slowly and much later, after they have grown easy with the halter. His lectures on the use of the bit and the importance of a soft mouth were impressive, and in demonstrating the process of introducing the bit, he handled the animal with such delicacy and affection that you almost wished that you yourself were the foal.

  With all livestock, Father was a gentle man who clearly loved to touch and stroke the flesh of the animal, to examine and, if the animal was healthy and well-formed, admire it and express almost motherly concern over any sign of illness or deformity. He would walk a yearling racehorse out of the barn and run his hands over the withers and back, across the barrel of the animal and its gaskins, fetlocks, and pasterns, ending with an examination of the hooves, making sure that we had been listening when he last lectured us on the proper care of a horse’s hoof.

  Like most men with a developed affection for animals, Father was an excellent rider, and not surprisingly, he enjoyed instructing us boys and anyone else who would listen on the best methods of bringing your horse to jump over fences or ditches in the fields of the neighborhood and how to bring your horse quickly down a steep slope without risking injury to the animal. And although, at the time, my elder brothers and I were not especially eager to be taught yet again how to do what we thought we already knew well enough, in later years, when we were running for our lives in Kansas, leaping streams and gullies in the dark and crashing through dense copses of cottonwoods, obliging the slavers to stop, back off, muzzle around, and finally give up the chase, I remembered Father’s lectures and theories, his endless repetitions of what then seemed but practice for a steeplechase we never intended to enter, and I was glad for having endured them.

  That evening at the camp in Westport, Mr. Epps flicked his nervy attention from one of us to the next with no apparent purpose, as if he were sorting out our family’s internal relations, trying to discern which of us bore influence over the others, so as to learn whose good opinion would permit him to gain the favor of all.

  Was it the children? He first tried chatting up baby Sarah and strange little Annie, whose bluntness seemed to delight him. “You’re a very black man, aren’t you? Not all Negroes are as black as you,” she said straight out, and when no one in the family scolded her, for she had merely uttered a simple truth and had done so without racial prejudice, Mr. Epps laughed heartily at her words.

  Or was it one of the young boys in the camp, ten-year-old Oliver, or Salmon or Watson, who seemed to be in charge of the livestock, sturdy, young, high-spirited fellows eager to talk with the stranger and show him the virtues of their herd of handsome red cattle and the purebred ram and ewes? He made much of the animals, shoving his hand deep into the fleeces and exclaiming loudly over their weight and density, but the rest of us merely watched and let the boys take his compliments.

  Or maybe it was Ruth, the shy, calmly competent young woman who busied herself with the evening meal and kept her back to the man as much as possible, in spite of his pushing his animated face at her, first at one side, then the other, interrupting her work with over-elaborated questions. “Now, tell me, Miss Brown,” he said to her, “who taught you so you come to possess such a knowledge, that you can cook this here panbread and pease porridge and so on, all by yourself out here on a big, open fire for such a large family of people?”

  Without looking up, Ruth answered, “My mother,” and resumed her silence, which caused Mr. Epps to pay ornate compliments to Mary—knowing nothing, of course, of our true mother’s death eighteen years earlier, for it was she who had taught Ruth to cook, not Mary. He rattled on just the same, as if our mother were still alive.

  Or perhaps the person to ingratiate himself with was me, the redheaded young man whose left arm stayed bent as if permanently fixed that way, the tall fellow who stood slightly off from the others, guarded and watchful, which I am sure is how he viewed me that first time. But he did not seem to know how to address me, perhaps because I was closest to his age and a man and therefore would know more easily than the others when he was playing the cheerful darkie and when he was sincere, although I could not.

  There was the young woman whom the elder Mr. Brown had introduced as his wife, Mary, a pleasant, open-faced woman who looked twenty or more years younger than her husband, eager to make the visitor comfortable. He tried her, but saw in a moment that she intended to deflect his every inquiry and observation by referring him straight to her husband, the hatchet-faced man from whom the tall young fellow had evidently got his red hair and gray eyes.

  All right, then, he would chat up the Old Man himself, jabber with him awhile about horseflesh, for that was what he was concerned about this evening, and it was a subject on which Mr. Epps considered himself capable of sounding like an expert. And, at least to Father, he did so.

  He was not especially religious, I noted, for he, as did I, kept one eye open and on the food while Father prayed over it. He loudly exclaimed “A-men!” when Father finished, and ate like a man who had not sat down to a proper meal in a week, which was probably the case. The difficulties he had faced in these last few days in Westport, importuning white strangers who scorned and spurned him, came to my mind
, and I began to feel sorry for the man and somewhat regretted my earlier disapproval. I continued, however, to retain a degree of skepticism as to his character.

  By the time he left the camp that first night, Mr. Epps had arranged with Father to work as a teamster for us. “Ain’t no way to get a team pull that wagon over to North Elba without an experienced driver to discuss the subject with them;” he said. “Them mountains scares animals all the way to sick and lazy.”

  I’m sure the Old Man believed that I, or he himself, was quite capable of driving a team to North Elba, but he admired Mr. Epps’s pluck and self-confidence and agreed to exchange some seed and other supplies for his services. No doubt he wanted simply to help the man out.

  Early the next morning, Father, Mr. Epps, and I, with the horse Dan in tow, showed up at Mr. Clarke’s dockside stone warehouse, a barn-sized storage building with a large stable attached, where he kept six or eight teams of horses and as many wagons, for he hauled freight all up and down the western shore of the lake, from Port Henry to Port Kent and inland to Elizabethtown and even to North Elba.

  Father and Mr. Clarke, who was a bespectacled New Englander with a thin face and white chin-whiskers, quickly agreed on a price for old Dan. Then Mr. Clarke tried to sell Father a handsome matched pair of Narragansetts, grays that seemed to be, as he claimed, healthy seven-year-olds. The price was reasonable, but even with what he was being offered for Dan, it was more than Father had in his possession.