Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Father laid the paper on the low table where normally flowers for Sabbath services were placed, flattened it with his left hand, and, saying, “So sworn, John Brown” wrote his name with a visible flourish. I then stepped to the table and took the pen from him, and saying the words “So sworn, Owen Brown,” with trembling hand wrote my name below his. One by one, the rest came forward, following the procedure exactly. So sworn, Alexander Washington. So sworn, Harrison Wheeler. So sworn, Shadrach Benchforth. So sworn, Mary Benchforth. So sworn, Felicity Moone. So sworn, Ebidiah Smith. And on down the line, until all of us had sworn and signed.

Then, bearing the document in hand, Father walked from behind the table where he had stood throughout and came to stand beside us, facing the nave of the sanctuary, where a small cross was attached high on the white-washed wall, and he led us briefly in prayer, humbly beseeching the Lord to protect us in this mighty task. “Make us hard, Lord, hard, like a stone, so that we shall crush and make bleed the teeth of the slavers when they bite down upon us” he prayed.

When he had finished, we all said our amens, and the Gileadites somberly filed out to the vestry and into the night. Father and I lingered behind to put out the lamps and candles, and when everyone else was gone and we were alone in the darkness of the vestry, I said to him, “Who’ll be the treasurer and secretary pro tern? And what will his duties be?” I couldn’t see much use for there being a treasurer, as there were no dues or other monies involved with the League, and I was unsure of what a secretary would do, as it was difficult to imagine a secret society engaged in much correspondence or keeping minutes. But the night before, when composing the Agreement, I had been ordered by Father to allow for that one officer, and so, without understanding, I had written it in. Now it seemed important. Naturally, I myself wished to be that person but, because of the honor it implied, dared not hope that the job would fall to me.

“The treasurer and secretary will safeguard these documents,” he answered, and he placed the Words of Advice and the Agreement with the signatures into my hand. “He will not deliver them to the enemy, Owen, even under pain of death. And when the time comes, as it surely will, that we receive monetary support for our work from our white friends, he will record such funds as we receive and will control their expenditure.”

I said nothing, and when Father had closed the church doors behind us and we had stepped down to the dark, deserted street, I carefully rolled the documents so as not to crease them, and we began walking side by side towards the warehouse. Finally, I could stand it no longer, and I said to him, “So are you making me the sole officer for the Gileadites?”

“For now, yes. I’ll speak of it first to the others, but I’m sure they’ll agree to it. There’s no one better qualified for the task. Do you mind?” he asked.

“No. No, I don’t mind,” I answered off-handedly.

But I remember thinking, At last! It has begun! At last, the killing has begun!

The wind outside my cabin has let up, and I hear mice skittering in the darkness across the warped, dried-out floors. Their bodies against the boards — though each weighs less than an ounce of fur and twigged bone, a mere thimbleful of flesh — seem nonetheless immeasurably realer than mine, weightier, as if the bit of stale, dusty air displaced by their tiny bodies and disrupted by their rapid movements alongside the crumbling walls exceeds in volume anything my body is capable of filling or disturbing. Yet I know that my presence, despite its frail ethereality, alarms them. The animals see and hear me the way they see and hear an ominous shift in the weather long before it occurs. I am like a ghost and in the course of this relation have traveled far and wide and back and forth in time, a dark spirit growing steadily darker, transported by memory and articulation and the compulsive direction of my thought. I can no longer say, Miss Mayo, whether I am in my cabin now in Altadena or our old house in ’89 in North Elba. Darkness merges time and place.

Above me, in the bare attic room where Ruth and I and the younger children and Lyman Epps and his wife, Ellen, slept on our pallets, divided one from the other, males from females, like Shakers by a curtain on a string, I hear the dry rustle of squirrels, or perhaps it is a pair of raccoons — it’s the shuffling gait of animals that have wintered inside, and now that spring has at last come to these northern Adirondack hills, they have mated, and the female has dropped a litter of cubs in her nest of sticks and leaves in the leeward corner, where since November she slumbered protected against the arctic snows and freezing winds. My sudden, unexpected presence here after years away has frightened the poor creatures. I hear the female trying to move her cubs to some place up there in the attic where she feels they will be safe, carrying them in her mouth one by one to the corner furthest from where she senses me. She senses the presence of an alien creature, possibly human, a killer, in one of the two rooms below.

Although I am still and it is dark and she can see and hear no one, can smell no sour human body, no tobacco smoke, no lamp, no guttering candle, nonetheless she knows that something like a human being, something like a killer, has entered this long-abandoned building and stands in silence now in the middle of the room below. She knows that there must be one of the killers, a human being, down here. The disturbance in the musty air can be nothing else, where for years there has been no human — no men with their dogs, no children even, with their small deadly weapons — except occasionally during the daylight hours, when a crowd of humans, male and female, smelling foully of death and making loud grinding and barking noises with their feet and mouths, come inside and stomp around for a while, as if contemplating taking up residence here, and then leave again.

Don’t fret, little mother, I’ll not hurt or hinder you. I may remain down here for a long while, perhaps for as many years as this otherwise abandoned old structure stands; perhaps longer, or maybe I’ll stay only for this one night, I can’t know; but don’t you worry, you tiny, frightened mice and agitated raccoons and squirrels, and even you porcupines under the house gnawing on the rafters beneath my feet — all my killing is done now. The killing is finished. You needn’t fear me, even you black bears whom I hear cough and growl outside in the yard, prowling the now-deserted site for refuse, quarreling over a few chicken bones and chunks of old bread tossed aside by the humans when they left this afternoon at the end of their ceremonies. Even the wolves slinking back down the valley from the ridge behind the house and the lion alone on the mountain need not fear my presence here. Every living creature is safe from me now.

But if they understood these words, no matter; they would take no comfort from them. They know us too well, our terrible propensity for killing. Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of Him. Both. Our only virtue sometimes seems to be that we are as cruel and violent to one another as we are to the other species, whom we slay and devour, or slay for the pure pleasure of it and toss aside, or simply slay because it’s expedient and heap up their corpses. I wish to warn them and to comfort them.

A pathetic wish; it serves no purpose. Sharp as their ears may be, they cannot hear these words, let alone understand them. I can warn and comfort no one, not even the dumb animals.

It’s just as well not to try, for all I am now is a story being told for all practical purposes by a man whose only possibility for positioning himself to speak it rests with his imagining this old house, the overgrown yard that surrounds it, the huge, gray stone yonder, and the yellowing bones that lie in boxes buried in the hard ground beside it. I’m but one of the thousand stories of the mystery of being human, and all the other animals know that story already and know the nine hundred ninety-nine more; it’s why they fear us: they know our nature, and don’t require a ghost to tell it.